Xandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

Sometimes I write intimate eschatologies or words about technology and math. Sometimes I make things by burning them with light or squeezing them through a small, hot tube. Sometimes I push water with a stick while sitting in a tiny boat.

If you're looking for my business account, go check out https://social.dual-space.solutions/@cgranade!

Pronouns: she/they
Joined Fediverse On: June 15, 2017
Website: https://www.xgranade.com/
Newsletter: https://newsletter.xgranade.com/

Public Key

npub1hzvzdrx8mnxqy9m4xupkce4krf564qac2yfpupw9w80r88z8zkxsw5lzy3

NIP-05 Address

xgranade_at_wandering.shop@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqst3xpx3nraenqzza6nwqmvv6mp56d2swu9zys7qhzhrh3nn3r3trgjsnqf2

Author Public Key

npub1hzvzdrx8mnxqy9m4xupkce4krf564qac2yfpupw9w80r88z8zkxsw5lzy3

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Last Notes

2024-10-22 10:57:15

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Kind of, yeah, but I do think there's an important difference between a filter and a netsplit.

2024-10-22 10:34:23

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It is what it is. There's plenty of individual reasons to use Bluesky, but collectively, I can't see that as a success. Having everything go through a single point of failure that sees value in a "less Nazis / more Nazis" radio button seems suboptimal to me.
Maybe I'm wrong, though, and this time it'll really be different.

2024-08-29 22:42:51

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"Comments are turned off" is environmental storytelling.

2024-08-28 22:57:57

Sign on the door: no-cost COVID vaccine.
Cashier at the pharmacy: That'll be a $13 copay.
Even having amazingly good health insurance doesn't always help navigate the US healthcare system.
Anyway, if you're able, please don't let that stop you --- getting the vaccine is great for reducing the risk of catching COVID, and for helping mitigate symptoms.

2024-08-28 19:19:49

Here's the thing about the genAI playing DOOM bullshit going around on a media tour today: the whole fucking point of running DOOM on everything is to show how pervasive computing power is, and that because DOOM is so incredibly light in processing needs, it can be run anywhere with enough creativity and hacking.
Throwing a proverbial megawatt worth of computing power at DOOM misses the point so incredibly badly it's almost its own satire.

2024-08-27 22:08:51

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It does bother me, though, that it's Danish krona and not Danish krona per [time]? I guess it makes sense for buying capacity instead of buying energy.

2024-08-27 20:59:59

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Absolutely, I have disagreements about specific fsf-brained pseudo-legalistic approaches to it. More what I like and find valuable is the idea that antifeatures should be called out at all — that's somewhat unusual, but it can also be valuable information.

2024-08-27 19:25:45

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- Accidentally `cat`ed a binary file to stdout, and now everything's screwed up.
- Oops, forgot the trailing & so now I need to ^Z and bg it.

2024-08-27 05:45:08

It's awesome that F-Droid labels AI shitware as antifeatures.

2024-08-24 19:51:05

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Also, to and by agreement with @npub1y6d…d9nx's point elsewhere, any "security update" from a well-resourced institution is really at *best* a "security bugfix" and reflects a culture where security is not valued enough to make it part of the software development process.

2024-08-24 19:47:30

"Your password has expired" is a failure of culture to include any actual fucking security expertise.

2024-08-23 17:37:07

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It's very weird, my testosterone was really high with no dosage changes, no real explanation other than, huh I wonder if covid did that. It's wild.

2024-08-23 17:32:51

If you have long COVID, it turns out that the effects on transfeminine HRT aren't understood basically at all. Go get your levels checked if you haven't recently; just did mine and they were way the fuck off for no apparent reason.

2024-08-22 00:08:35

DoorDash AI told me *without my consent* that an item I was looking at to help accommodate my allergy and eating disorder is "tailored for kids."
Fuck you into the sun.

2024-08-21 00:51:17

I'm glad I don't work in Bayesian stats any more. The jokes today would be insufferable, good fucking grief.

2024-08-17 01:04:36

Got a bit of an odd request, but does anyone have any Gemini links they especially like? Trying to get more into it, but one of the catch-22s of giving up engagement optimization loops is that it can sometimes be a bit tricky to find where to start (the empty feed issue, for instance).
Much obliged! ♥

2024-08-17 00:01:49

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FWIW, my laser hair reduction (sadly not 100% removal, but it helped quite a bit) took a bit more than half a year. It was painful, but there were numbing options available for the worst of it.
Basically, there's growth cycles each six or so weeks, and they need to catch all of those cycles.

2024-08-16 15:52:47

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Perhaps most complicated of all, though, is the question of secure for whom? In a software development world where users are as often seen as the threat as they are the beneficiary of security, having more secure software doesn't necessarily mean that *I* personally am more secure.
Taking stuff like bypassing DRM, jailbreaking, and other pro-user stuff, a lot of that depends on software being "insecure."

2024-08-16 15:50:42

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Here, too, though, it's complex and nuanced. You can write bad code in any language, especially if shipping your org chart means shipping a toxic culture. Rust may make a category of bugs difficult to incur in the first place, but if you're creative enough, you can absolutely fuck up the memory safety by playing FFI games and winning FFI prizes.

2024-08-16 15:49:26

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To wit, even Consumer Reports has called for product safety regulations to incentivize Rust or other memory-safe development, in part because the kinds of bugs seen in C/C++ development *in practice* can really get people hurt. Yes, it's possible to not do that, and there's plenty of examples of large-scale C/C++ projects that are, for the most part, pretty safe.
That's not the predominance, though, and that matters from a product safety standpoint.

2024-08-16 15:47:41

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This is a personal thread, though, and so there's a huge degree to which I normally let this kind of discourse roll by and not engage. Software dev isn't my life any more, so who fucking cares about gatekeeping in C/C++, whether RIIR is toxic, or any other such discourse?
As a user, though, I approach that in terms of product safety.

2024-08-16 15:46:07

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I would be remiss at this point, though, to not mention the immense failings of the Rust community around racism, weapons/arms contracting, cryptocurrency, and more. Some of that is endemic to all software development and something that Rust fails to challenge, and some of it is unique to the Rust community to its immense discredit.
Like I said, shit's complicated.

2024-08-16 15:44:34

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As a trans person in tech, the focus on inclusivity in the Rust community was also a godsend. I almost got gatekept out of software entirely by the "git gud" culture of C/C++. That's a story for another day, but suffice to say, having access to an intensely queer-friendly community was a very good thing as I was transitioning and also working as a highly skilled software developer.

2024-08-16 15:43:00

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(Don't get me started on Cargo vs CMake, either.)

2024-08-16 15:42:25

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First and foremost, when I was doing software dev, Rust was an absolute godsend. While you can write C/C++ code that is safe and relatively bug-free, and while that's been done for decades, it's also fucking hard. Writing C/C++ well takes way more expertise, significantly more testing and additional tooling; all stuff that adds more overhead and development time.

2024-08-16 15:40:19

Seeing more discourse about Rust again, I want to chime in with some of my personal experiences and feelings to help illustrate how complex some of this shit is, and why the C/C++ "git gud" approach to software dev can be so grating to read both as a software developer and as someone who has left that part of my life largely behind.

2024-08-15 03:41:23

What in the fuck is Trump on about bacon lately? It's like the new windmill somehow.

2024-08-14 15:27:46

It is possible to highlight the absurdity of transphobes going after Imane Khelif without also implying that the abuse directed at her would be justified if she was actually trans.
It is possible, but exceedingly few commentators seem to be interested in doing so. Sigh.

2024-08-09 00:11:40

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If you wouldn't post it to Truth Social and Gab, don't post it to X.

2024-08-09 00:11:05

WHY ARE WE DOING THIS? WHY ARE MAJOR CAMPAIGN LOGISTICS BEING WORKED OUT ON X. YOU KNOW, THE SOCIAL MEDIA SITE RUN BY AND FOR THE RIGHT WING. NO NOT THAT ONE, THE OTHER ONE.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-08-08/2024-election-trump-news-conference-harris-september-debate
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/112/929/161/073/695/708/original/c524bbab4d2e83d4.png

2024-08-06 20:52:52

I've said it before, but I am both very eager to see the AI bubble finally burst and for this absolute clusterfuck to come to the ignoble end that it deserves, *and* I am deeply worried for the harm that will be done to people who weren't at all involved in hyping AI.
When bubbles burst, it's rarely the people who caused them who are left holding the bag.

2024-08-01 22:57:53

EB Garamond is so delightfully extra. What in the hell is going on with this ampersand? I have no fucking clue, but I love it.
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/112/889/236/718/629/400/original/2b742542b349a725.png

2024-07-31 16:34:16

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Want to protect kids? Do something about climate change, so that they have a world they can grow up in.
Want to protect kids? Make public transit a priority, so that there's less cars that can hit and kill them.
Want to protect kids? Ban gas stoves and retrofit existing stoves.
Want to protect kids? Mandate *and fund* robust HVAC and UVC scrubbing in schools, daycares, and anywhere else kids are expected to be.
Want to protect kids? Let them grow up who they are.

2024-07-31 16:28:16

The idea that US lawmakers as a collective body have any interest whatsoever in the safety of children should have come to an immediate end after Sandy Hook.
Every legislative initiative that claims to be on behalf of children must be understood in that lens.
There is simply no way that "protecting" children from accidentally viewing porn online is a legitimate good-faith concern that legislators are trying but failing to address with KOSA. They have not earned that benefit of the doubt.

2024-07-05 22:02:24

I swear, every pro-AI post and article I read spends more time talking about what AI "could" do, with zero justification as to why we should expect that to be true, let alone the most likely outcome of deploying LLMs.

2024-06-18 02:58:37

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(And yes, I do set my music playing devices to read out their volume controls in dB gain and loss. I'm currently listening to NieR:Replicant music at -40 dB, as referenced to the maximum output my amplifier can produce.)

2024-06-18 02:57:12

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Anyway, to summarize:
dB are a way to communicate "multiply or divide some number by this amount," which is really useful for measuring gain and loss of some signal.
dBm is a way of writing power in terms of how much larger or smaller than a milliwatt it is.
dBI (often just written dB, confusingly) is a way of talking about how loud or quiet a sound is by reference to a particular intensity.

2024-06-18 02:55:34

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Anyway, using decibels for sound works really nicely in another way as well: humans largely perceive sound on a logarithmic scale. A sound that's 60 dBI loud feels twice as loud as a 30 dBI sound, even though it's 1,000 times as intense.
If you double the gain of your amp in logarithm space, you're squaring the intensity, but it feels right to think of that as "twice as loud."

2024-06-18 02:53:25

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When we talk about sound being loud or quiet in terms of decibels, that's another example of referencing off some fixed quantity; there, a measurement of the quietest sound most people can hear. A sound that's 90 dB loud is then 10^(90 / 10) = 10⁹ = a billion times as loud as that reference sound.
Strictly speaking, we might should write dBI to indicate that there's an intensity reference, but in practice no one does that — confusingly, the reference is just left off for sound intensity.

2024-06-18 02:51:14

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For example, one watt is 1,000 times bigger than a milliwatt. That means that I can tell you to start with a milliwatt, and make it bigger by 30 dB (since 10³ = 1,000).
That convention is handy enough it often just gets written as "dBm" meaning decibels referenced to milliwatts. You may have even seen dBm listed on your phone as a kind of signal strength.

2024-06-18 02:49:42

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So given all the above, what in the everloving fuck does it mean to say that a sound is 80 dB loud? That doesn't seem like multiplying or dividing by a number, but measuring some physical quantity!
It turns out that it's often convenient to express some quantity (that is, a number with units attached; 3 is a number, but 3 miles is a quantity) as some number of decibels greater or smaller than some *reference*.

2024-06-18 02:47:52

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In practice, decibels (dB), or tenths of a bel, are often used instead out of sheer convenience.
If you amplify a signal by a factor of 100, then you can write that as 20 dB of gain since 100 = 10².
In the resistor example earlier, the two resistors cause you to lose 12.5 dB and 30 dB of power each, for a total loss of 42.5 dB.

2024-06-18 02:47:10

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What I've just described is the unit known as the "bel." Basically, a bel is an instruction to use logarithms to multiply or divide a number by something.
For example, -1 bel tells you to divide some number by 10. Similarly, -0.125 bel approximately tells you to multiply a number by ¾.
(Wikipedia claims that the name is in honor of Bell, of telephone fame.)

2024-06-18 02:43:31

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It might not seem like you've gained a lot, but effectively you've pushed most of the calculations to the beginning of the problem, when the logarithms are taken, or to the end of the problem, when you go back by doing 10^𝑥.
Those logarithms can be done once, and often even before you know what problem you're trying to solve. A manufacturer can tell you what power is lost through a component in the datasheet; it's easy for them to write down the logarithm there.

2024-06-18 02:41:44

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Using a calculator, or something like Python's log function*, you can check that log(1 - ¼) ≈ -0.125, and log(1 - ½) ≈ -0.30, so to find out how much power you've lost through both, you can just add -0.125 to -0.3 to get -0.425. To go back to multiplication at the end, 10^-0.425 ≈ 37.6%. Not bad for keeping only two decimal places.
(*Python's log function assumes base 𝑒 by default; make sure to use `math.log(x, 10)` to represent log₁₀.)

2024-06-18 02:36:36

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It's that last bit that makes logarithms really useful for talking about a wide range of different kinds of signals, ranging from acoustic to electrical.
If a given resistor causes you to lose quarter of the power flowing through it, and another causes you to half, you can multiply the two together as (1 - ½)(1 - ¼) = ⅜ = (1 - ⅝) to get that you're losing ⅝ = 62.5% of your power.
On the other hand, you can use logarithms to make that calculation a bit easier to do.

2024-06-18 02:30:33

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The other piece of math we'll need is the *logarithm function*, which very roughly maps their input numbers to powers.
In particular, if 𝑎 = log_𝑏(𝑐), then 𝑐 = 𝑏^𝑎. For example, log₁₀(100) = 2, since 10² = 100. Similarly, log₂(32) = 5 since 2⁵ = 32.
(Sometimes I'll just write "log" as shorthand for "log₁₀".)
The logarithm function has some pretty nice properties, including that log(𝑥𝑦) = log(𝑥) + log(𝑦); that is, logarithms turn multiplication into addition.

2024-06-18 02:25:35

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I'll try to avoid as much math as I can, but we'll need just a little bit to understand what it "decibels" mean.
First, the 𝑛-th root of a number 𝑥 is a number 𝑦 such that 𝑦^𝑛 (𝑦 to the 𝑛-th power) is 𝑥. For instance, the square root of 100 is 10, as is the cube root (third root) of 1,000. Similarly, the fifth root of 32 is 2, because 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 = 32.

2024-06-18 02:22:40

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OK, let me give this a try. Caveat: I'm writing as I go, as I don't have time to do the justice of a full blog post atm, but all the same, this stuff is neat.

2024-06-17 11:07:31

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(It's also really cool... in their research, my partner regularly referred to atmospheric density in terms of dB of light lost. It's just a really neat way to think about stuff.)

2024-06-17 11:04:48

One of these days I should write a quick thread about the difference between dB, dBI, and dBm. It's way more simple than it sounds, but I've not often seen good and accessible explanations.

2024-06-04 17:55:17

Two things can be true at once:
• It's a dick move to reply to complaints with Windows / macOS with "just use Linux."
• The OS duopoly is bad, and causes real harm that is only getting worse; individual action is necessary but not sufficient to mitigate that harm.

2024-04-06 02:41:30

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The extension to Coq Au Vin is... confusing.

2024-04-04 21:33:07

Fuck me, fuck everything, fuck this whole climate-burning labor-killing fraud. I just want to touch computers, not constantly guard against rogue scams taking over evey aspect of my online life.
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/112/215/088/351/238/019/original/3107ea9556654254.jpg

2024-03-26 17:16:26

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Supply chain.
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/112/163/115/464/551/190/original/b775c1b75795a581.jpg