jhirsch (moving to fosstodon)

@[email protected]
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o hai 👋 firefox engineer @mozilla, tech stuff, math, music, occasional photos. evenings with @KatieKoolLady. most posts autodeleted after 90 days.
🚨 new mastodonhttps://fosstodon.org/@jaredhirsch
homepagehttps://jaredhirsch.com
codeberghttps://codeberg.org/jaredhirsch
contribute to firefox!https://codetribute.mozilla.org
jhirsch (moving to fosstodon)Mar 23
jared hirschMar 23

Book nerd post:

I picked up this little book, Amateur Telescope Making, at a used bookstore. Tucked inside I found a photo of the moon dated Dec 1972. It's a waxing moon (the Mare Crisium is visible), so this was likely taken on Friday 8 Dec 1972.

There's a bookplate ❤️ telling us this belonged to the library of Cole Jon Pierce, who it turns out (https://www.galesburg.com/obituaries/pils0395022) was a pilot, flight instructor, and amateur astronomer.

Somehow this nerdy ephemera makes me feel less alone in the world.

jhirsch (moving to fosstodon)Mar 21
FYI: beginning slow migration to @jaredhirsch, hopefully the last server switch for a while
jhirsch (moving to fosstodon)Mar 7

Some of the basic ideas of open source software are radically divergent from the traditional business perspective:
* that people might enjoy learning how things work,
* and care about projects in which they have no direct financial stake,
* so much, that they would DO WORK FOR FREE because the work itself is fun and interesting and intrinsically meaningful.

I guess the most worldview-congruent explanation is "building a reputation"?

Related open source motivation study: https://opensource.com/article/21/4/motivates-open-source-contributors

jhirsch (moving to fosstodon)Mar 6

In some ways, German grammar seems like a moderately simplified version of Latin grammar, and yet there is no known historical connection between the two beyond a theorized Proto-Indo-European root ancestor language. Fascinating.

In English, grammatical case is almost totally determined by word order, while in Latin, case is encoded in a suffix added to each word's root; word order indicates emphasis. German sits between the two: fewer cases / declensions, more word order flexibility than en.

Show threadjhirsch (moving to fosstodon)Feb 11

ran out of room, some links:

overview of the case: https://www.techpolicy.press/the-eu-wants-to-label-addictive-design-a-systemic-risk-under-the-dsa/

habitlab info: https://habitlab.github.io/

habitlab results in geza kovacs's dissertation: https://purl.stanford.edu/qq438qv1791

habitlab followup article: "Users Weaken Their Behavior Change Regimen Over Time, But Expect To Re-Strengthen It Imminently": https://hci.stanford.edu/publications/2021/notnow/notnowasklater.pdf

The EU Wants to Label 'Addictive Design' a Systemic Risk Under the DSA

The EU's preliminary findings represent a massive test for the Digital Services Act, with implications for all platforms, writes Chris Stokel-Walker.

Tech Policy Press
jhirsch (moving to fosstodon)Feb 11

I'm excited that the EU is taking action against software that is engineered to be addictive, starting with tiktok.

One challenge with building anti-addictive UI into the browser is that the mind quickly learns to circumvent friction (as seen in the HabitLab chrome extension, which explored various interventions).

It's a race to the bottom unless government intervenes--especially to break recommender loops, where a browser can really only hide or paginate a feed, but not easily anonymize it.

jhirsch (moving to fosstodon)Jan 25

Starting to put my tenuous German to use. Actually not sure where I'll start--Dirichlet? Eisenstein? Kummer? Kronecker?

Tools I'm using:
* my notes from German Quickly and its ~3k word dictionary
* Hyman's German-English Math Dictionary from 1960, ~8k entries
* the large Collins, still in print!

Tools I'm not using:
* Google Translate
* Online dictionaries
(Learning takes work; these shortcuts don't help in the long run)

Show threadjhirsch (moving to fosstodon)Jan 18
OK, and TIL there's an option in mastodon to autodelete posts after a fixed number of days ^_^
jhirsch (moving to fosstodon)Jan 18

Indieweb thoughts

I've lately been procrastinating revising profiles blog posts by building a POSSE archive of my photos and posts from around the web into a section on my website. Yet, coming back to it after a week away, I don't like it at all. Things innocently posted around the web can paint a creepily precise picture when aggregated together

If anything, what I really want is a 90-day autodelete tool for everything semi-personal that I make public. Must resist new procrastination urge...

jhirsch (moving to fosstodon)Jan 13

hey that's cool

https://news.indieweb.org/en

also helpful, microformat guide so submissions get processed correctly https://osteophage.neocities.org/projects/guides/h-entries

IndieNews en

IndieNews