Peter Drake, he/him, LFHCfS 🔥

CS professor, game designer, and fire dancer ordinaire.

Public Key

npub14fytha4r0m7uka0h5m6de5wetwye354f25vq94025xn28ndy5m7qhtzkkf

NIP-05 Address

peterdrake_at_qoto.org@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs25j9m763halwtwhm6daxu68v4hzvc62542xqz6h42rf4rekj2dlqprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wdmksetjv5hxxmmds9x3qy

Publishing to

relay.noswhere.com

Author Public Key

npub14fytha4r0m7uka0h5m6de5wetwye354f25vq94025xn28ndy5m7qhtzkkf

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Last Notes

2024-07-25 20:21:58

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@npub1gnx…d5kh Did you see Mr. & Mrs. Smith?

2024-07-18 15:10:50

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@npub1gnx…d5kh ... and didn't Lucas trademark the word "droid"?

2024-07-16 00:38:35

Nifty #LEGO model of Multnomah Falls, at the Multnomah Building in Portland, OR. #Multnomah #pdx #portland #waterfall #sculpture
https://media.social.qoto.org/media_attachments/files/112/793/370/701/143/790/original/d65c77a294820bbd.jpg
https://media.social.qoto.org/media_attachments/files/112/793/370/704/633/007/original/72e5b26ac5df660d.jpg

2024-07-03 00:39:42

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@npub1qjr…kgt0 I've always interpreted "mutuals" the first way.

2024-06-13 03:50:32

MASTODON, YOU ARE NEEDED
I'm the faculty advisor for our campus fire dancing club. We're doing a show for alumni weekend, and the students have chosen Y2K as the theme.
It'll be easy for them to choose songs from that time, as well as the obvious "1999", but are there any danceable songs *about the Y2K bug*?
If anyone knows, you would!
#music #asktodon #y2k

2024-06-06 04:26:53

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@npub1trd…ussx Torches. My cascade is fairly reliable, but worse when they're on fire at night. Also working on turning in a circle while doing the cascade as well as double tosses

2024-06-05 05:35:29

Put in a full day's work building video games and found time in the evening to engage in THREE hobbies (juggling, drawing, and Go).

2024-05-19 21:08:41

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@npub1kpw…xzz4 Where is this gitlab?

2024-05-18 22:24:03

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@npub1kpw…xzz4 ... and now?

2024-03-16 00:54:28

Ahem. #monsterdon https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/03/15/giant-marco-polo-sheep-created-montana-rancher/72990349007/

2024-03-13 04:29:29

For years, I've struggled with cutting the kevlar wick we use in our fire dancing props. At tonight's prop making party, a student came up with a solution: trauma shears!
#crafting #FireArts #FlowArts #juggling #SivaAfi #fireknife

2024-03-06 02:25:49

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@npub1kpw…xzz4 I'm afraid you're already well beyond my vague knowledge of physics.

2024-03-06 00:58:17

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@npub1kpw…xzz4 I once wrote a space combat game where the weapons included electrino beams and poton torpedoes.

2024-01-18 00:25:49

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@npub16ws…sl6a I haven't looked into the details of the implementation. How many do we get to rank in each race?

2024-01-17 21:34:47

Portland, Oregon city council district 4: who do you like?
I'll open the bidding with Chad Lykins, who says things like:
"The best way to reduce the carbon impact of transportation is by making it safer to walk, bike and take public transit."
"I will advocate for the construction of shelters that are safe, sanitary, and respect the dignity of the people they serve. This means making reasonable accommodations for pets, cohabitation, and freedom of movement."
https://www.lykinsforportland.com/
Since this will be a ranked choice ("instant runoff") election, we get to rank the candidates.
#pdxpol #pdx #portland

2023-12-14 00:41:48

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@npub16ws…sl6a What's your favorite system?

2023-12-13 22:12:17

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@npub16ws…sl6a Interesting stuff!
I'm aware of Arrow's Theorem, and that the only thing voting reform advocates can agree on is that plurality is the worst choice.
Most of the arguments come down to:
1) This weird thing can happen with the system I don't like.
2) This weird thing happened in these specific elections using this system.
3) Modeling a distribution of possible sets of voter preferences, my preferred system is less likely to do something weird.
I'd love to see analyses that measure what tends to happen across many actual elections -- in how many does each system reach the "wrong" result? (Of course, it's hard to gather data for elections that were run under plurality, because we don't know about second choices, approval thresholds, etc.)
All that said, I still think RCV is an improvement over plurality, and I'll support it for now, because:
1) It finally gives third parties a chance to find out if they're losing because (a) people are afraid to "waste" their vote or (b) their views are just not held by very many people,
2) Any crack in the nut of plurality is a win. Once we've tried one alternative, it will be easier to sell others. RCV is the thing with momentum now, but if STAR, approval, etc. take the lead later, I'm open to those as well.
On a related note, I strongly support abolishing the Electoral College.

2023-12-13 20:58:36

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@npub16ws…sl6a The article you linked to says RCV is prone to vote-splitting, but doesn't explain why. It simply says that "The most well known example of a spoiled election in a Ranked Choice election was the 2009 mayoral race in Burlington, Vermont." Do you have an explanation of the problem?
(In the cartoon example, RCV would transfer the Leia voters to Luke, defeating Vader.)

2023-12-13 20:13:18

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@npub16ws…sl6a How do you figure it doesn't fix vote splitting? Gore would've won Florida in 2000 under ranked choice.

2023-12-13 16:53:33

Ranked choice is 'the hot reform' in democracy. Here's what you should know about it
https://text.npr.org/1214199019
#politics #voting #uspol #orpol #RankedChoice

2023-11-24 15:28:09

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@npub1jma…0as2 @npub1kpw…xzz4 @npub1adt…vhqy Freemo is correct that, over the long term, things are getting better for everyone:
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$chart-type=bubbles
(Be sure to press the “play” button at lower left to see it progress over time. The Gapminder site in general will make one much less cynical about human progress.)
I don’t think it’s inconsistent with what I cited. It may very well be that at some point in the past 70% of people were in poverty, and of those the majority no longer are, but the poorest still are.
(I believe the elephant curve is per capita, BTW. Also note that it is a percentage increase. If someone making $10 a day and someone making $1000000 a day both double their income, they did not both get the same benefit.)
My mental model is that technology (artificial fertilizers, automation, etc.) has greatly increased humanity’s access to resources. The poor have benefited somewhat from this, the rich have benefited hugely, and (because much technology entails resource extraction and pollution) future people will suffer greatly.
I also agree with Freemo’s original point that population is a problem. (I don’t, of course, agree with the big historical names in the population movement who somehow concluded that poor, brown people are the problem.) I find the IPAT equation compelling:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%3D_PAT
As to whether the poor have benefited because of the wealthy or despite them … we might need a control planet to test that. I certainly see people who are absurdly wealthy while others still struggle, and a demand for perpetual growth manifested in consumerism.
Capitalism in the small – private businesses producing goods and services, with competition driving them to improve – is one thing. Runaway, unchecked, predatory capitalism is another.

2023-11-24 06:51:38

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@npub1kpw…xzz4 @npub1adt…vhqy Better for everyone except for the extremely poor and, interestingly, the upper middle class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_Curve
Productivity has also increased greatly in that time, with the benefits going almost entirely to the very wealthy:
https://www.cbpp.org/income-gains-at-the-top-dwarf-those-of-low-and-middle-income-households-1
Yes, something trickles down, but not much.

2023-10-04 16:55:16

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@npub1kpw…xzz4 Marriage?

2023-08-18 22:43:12

Data 13: Advanced-Level Houses. The second one, a tracing exercise, is rather sloppy because frankly the paper was too thick to see what I was tracing. #MastoArt #drawing
https://storage.gra.cloud.ovh.net/v1/AUTH_011f6e315d3744d498d93f6fa0d9b5ee/qotoorg/media_attachments/files/110/913/027/674/073/643/original/ab9bb1e938c80719.jpg
https://storage.gra.cloud.ovh.net/v1/AUTH_011f6e315d3744d498d93f6fa0d9b5ee/qotoorg/media_attachments/files/110/913/027/908/439/606/original/8887ed7545ed345d.jpg

2023-08-17 19:30:33

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@npub1g07…sh3v My Linux skills are ... extremely rusty. I've probably got some reading to do.
I don't have a lot of files yet, if that's what you mean by "data".
I do know that I'm using gnome.
Nothing jumps out as egregious when I run top or iotop.

2023-08-17 17:58:48

#Ubuntu is surprisingly unresponsive compared to Windows. Launching programs can take 5-10 seconds (with no indication that anything is happening). Resizing a window sometimes resizes the frame and then takes a second to fill in the contents. Even the internet seems slow to respond.
Some of this might be due to the fact that Ubuntu is running off a physical hard drive while Windows was running off an SSD, but that doesn't seem sufficient to explain it.
I would have expected to get *more* performance without Microsoft constantly uploading data. Does this match anyone else's experience? Any ideas?
#linux

2023-08-13 00:16:52

I set up my Python code to make sure that (a) we're in a clean git state and (b) we haven't already run an experiment with the same ID number.
This has saved my bacon more than once, preventing either wasting days of computation or overwriting hard-won data.
#python #DefensiveProgramming #git

2023-07-27 16:22:50

#Violet is a throw pillow of a dog. #DogsOfMastodon #EsperantoEelhound
https://storage.gra.cloud.ovh.net/v1/AUTH_011f6e315d3744d498d93f6fa0d9b5ee/qotoorg/media_attachments/files/110/786/964/839/129/477/original/2c40c6c823fff2ff.jpg