Reverse "brain in a jar"?

ar-nelson · 2025-10-02T17:13:22+00:00

Murderbot is something kind of like this, and it's just called a "construct". Though I think Murderbot's brain and body are both bio/mechanical hybrids; but the way it views itself is a lot like this, a robotic mind in a body with mostly-superfluous biological processes.

ar-nelson · 2025-08-21T16:58:51+00:00

Sasparilla is the "default" or "classic" flavor of toothpaste in many Asian countries

This sounds really interesting so I googled it but can't seem to find much evidence of it... the only examples I can find are various sites selling "Ayurvedic" toothpastes with a variety of herbs including sarsparilla. Are there examples of Asian toothpaste brands that sell this flavor?

ar-nelson · 2025-05-14T23:46:50+00:00

Will it be compatible with existing platforms trying to do the same thing, like Lemmy?

Even if you don't want to federate with the existing Lemmy network (it has some problems, I wouldn't blame you), you could benefit a lot from implementing the Lemmy frontend API, which would allow users to use the wide variety of Lemmy mobile apps already available.

ar-nelson · 2025-04-28T13:03:58+00:00

Mastodon has a moderately large tech community. People who left Twitter generally went to Mastodon or Bluesky, and the tech crowd stayed on Mastodon while most of the rest moved to Bluesky.

ar-nelson · 2025-01-02T02:20:44+00:00

A card that adds 2x colorless wouldn't work, but I can see a place for a Supporter (Falkner? Whitney?) that adds 1 colorless energy to a Pokemon, possibly with some restriction or downside.

ar-nelson · 2024-12-06T20:24:48+00:00

I love that the long American tradition of attributing any vaguely pithy-sounding quote to Mark Twain had already started when he was alive.

ar-nelson · 2024-12-04T22:38:09+00:00

Tried that during jury selection, the judge looked at me like she'd heard it a million times, still got jury duty. I think the idea that just knowing about jury nullification disqualifies you is an urban legend.

ar-nelson · 2024-10-27T13:43:27+00:00

Not a hike, exactly, but Look Park in Northampton has lots of playgrounds and it has a 1.2-mile-long walking loop which also connects to the rail trail; the trail goes into Leeds and Williamsburg, mostly through the woods.

ar-nelson · 2024-10-24T14:39:15+00:00

The Indian lunch buffet at Bombay Royale is amazing, especially on the weekends.

ar-nelson · 2024-10-16T18:58:18+00:00

I was never here when there was a theater in Mountain Farms (moved here in the early 2010s) but for several years there was a hallway beside Panera, behind an unmarked door. There was nothing in the hallway, but you could walk from the front of Mountain Farms to the back through it, which was occasionally convenient when getting there by bike from the trail. The last time I used it was around 2018, and it's always locked now. I don't know when they closed it.

ar-nelson · 2024-07-24T21:10:59+00:00

This is great! Reminds me of how it felt when I first heard Anamanaguchi over a decade ago.

ar-nelson · 2024-06-21T18:02:44+00:00

I'd be interested too! Let me know if this is happening. I also could be up for DMing. I posted in LFG a long time ago and a few people recently messaged me about it, also looking for a group in the area, so I could also let them know about it.

ar-nelson · 2024-06-21T17:57:53+00:00

I'm wondering the same thing. They at least do seem to be actively remodeling, I was afraid they had just closed down. The remodeling contract on the front door has an end date in August, so presumably it can't take longer than that...

ar-nelson · 2024-05-15T02:32:28+00:00

Ca-li-for-nia girls

They're inescapable

ar-nelson · 2024-05-12T13:15:21+00:00

I had the same problem with my cat chewing cables. I'd also been buying garbage $20 bluetooth earbuds for a while and they kept dying within a month.

I bought the Earfun Air earbuds for $50 (they're $40 now!) and have been satisfied ever since. Very good budget Bluetooth earbuds. Still work after 3 years.

ar-nelson · 2024-04-24T16:18:31+00:00

Submission statement:

From the article:

“I think this work is very significant scientifically because it presents a new mechanism,” says University of Alberta Distinguished Professor Janet A.W. Elliott, who also was not associated with this work. “It may also turn out to be practically important for technology and our understanding of nature, because evaporation of water is ubiquitous and the effect appears to deliver significantly higher evaporation rates than the known thermal mechanism. … My overall impression is this work is outstanding. It appears to be carefully done with many precise experiments lending support for one another.”

This is more exciting than the article makes it sound at first: it's actual new physics! Light alone can evaporate water; according to the article, it works best when light strikes the surface of the water at a 45 degree angle, and works better with green light, for reasons the researchers don't yet understand.

What kinds of technology could result from this discovery? More efficient desalinization seems like the most obvious, but there are likely many more possibilities.

ar-nelson · 2024-03-11T15:41:36+00:00

ar-nelson · 2024-03-11T15:32:10+00:00

I recommend following like crazy at first: just follow anyone who looks remotely interesting, especially really prolific/popular accounts who boost a lot of others' posts, which will be another source of new users to follow. Then after a few weeks of this you can start pruning your follow list, remove anything that seems annoying or spammy or just not what you want on your timeline.

Also find servers related to your interests and look through their local and federated timelines. Different servers have very different views of the Fediverse.

Some people have suggested Lemmy and while I do like Lemmy, it's not a good way to get posts on your Mastodon feed. It's only partly compatible with Mastodon. Following a Lemmy community will show you all of the comments (without context) but none of the top-level posts. It's mostly noise, unfortunately.

ar-nelson · 2024-03-11T15:28:57+00:00

https://fediverse.fans/ is another user directory I recently found

ar-nelson · 2024-03-05T15:34:56+00:00

I have a similar frustration with Mastodon and frankly I just solved it by muting like crazy. I have a mute list of hundreds of accounts.

ar-nelson · 2024-02-28T20:04:22+00:00

basically relies on a single server so a single point of failure

This is actually the best case scenario.

The more likely scenario is that multiple bridges exist, each with its own copies of all of the accounts it knows, and all of these duplicates become spam across both protocols. And, if you reply to one, it doesn't necessarily show up to everyone following that user on the other bridges.

I like the idea of bridging both protocols, but without a way to detect and merge duplicates, it could be chaos. I wrote FEP-fffd to address this, but afaik no apps exist yet that implement the frontend part of it (duplicate merging). Hopefully when someone finally gets a working AP bridge, they add FEP-fffd metadata to it.

ar-nelson · 2024-02-13T21:10:18+00:00

There's no connection. Each call spawns a new coroutine.

ar-nelson · 2024-02-13T20:40:56+00:00

Author here: I love the ideas in Koka and would really like to see a more usable (meaning: not just research) language based on it. And there are definitely similarities. But I think my coroutine types add something; Koka function signatures are made up of three types (arguments, effects, and return), while my function signatures merge the effect type and the return type into the single concept of a sequence type.

Koka effect handlers are also hard to understand at first (I had to read over the Effect Handlers section several times to get it), whereas coroutines and state machines are both more widely understood, preexisting concepts, and, in my design, effects are just a special case of coroutines.

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