Mastodawn

octopus Nov 20, 2022

went to grandparents' mini pre-thanksgiving lunch, got to see all the (young) local cousins.

grandparents had given 6th grade cousin a book of riddles, one of them was something about a ring that was square. that put me in mind of mathematical rings (as in group, ring, field) so I showed him a permutation group based on rotating, flipping, etc a square with labeled corners & he was super interested so we were the last to the lunch table.

afterwards he came over and "can you give me some math please?" so gave him a very shotgun crash course on complex numbers as vectors, what vectors are, and how multiplying complex numbers rotates them. he drank it all up.

octopus Nov 19, 2022

was going through my old twitter account. I've made multiple attempts to request an archive, starting when I closed in in 2016, and so far none of them have worked. I scrolled back to, uh, earlier 2016 and copy-pasted a bunch of tweets manually into a text file today, but that was as far back as they'd go.

octopus Nov 18, 2022

> The entirety of the payroll department and the US tax department resigned today

https://twitterisgoinggreat.com/

I was expecting twitter to be a long smouldering heap of garbage but… at this point it looks like it won't exist this time next week.

Twitter is Going Great!

Twitter is Going Great is a project inspired by Web3 is Going Just Great to track the latest examples of how Twitter is actively falling to pieces thanks to its current owner Elon Musk (with special guests Jack Dorsey and the Saudi Arabian royal family).

octopus Nov 16, 2022

it's kind of weird seeing all the posts about how the big difference between twitter and mastodon is the lack of an algorithmic timeline, because I think when I joined m.s in 2016 twitter hadn't implemented their algorithm yet? or maybe they did but I turned it off already

octopus Nov 15, 2022

two job interviews tomorrow (one is 2nd round after the initial phone screen + one's just a phone screen I think)

either could be good but it's just so hard to tell

octopus Nov 13, 2022

my theory is that even discussing a negative event in a job interview — even one logically out of your control, and regardless of how you handled it — puts an association between "this person" and "bad things happening" in the mind of the interviewer & that's enough to sink a job application.

octopus Nov 13, 2022

capitalism can just fucking ghost you if you've been exposed to too many layoffs / negative work environments / a work history that maybe looks "unreliable" and that's more than a little messed up?

Show thread

octopus Nov 11, 2022

different people have different thresholds/criteria for "should I boost this post?" and that's okay.

I suggest that "does this make a good point?" is insufficient as a criterion because the obvious result — a timeline of many many good points in an ongoing argument — is still a timeline dominated by argument.

which is a) kinda exhausting and b) probably not all that useful, since you're probably repeating variations on the same arguments to people who probably already agree with you.

octopus Nov 11, 2022

my takeaway is
- be very thoughtful about
* what you boost
* who your audience is

your followers are different from the original author's, potentially very different as chains of boosts carry posts from far away.

it's not *their* problem if *your* followers have different needs & expectations for CW usage.

octopus Nov 7, 2022

keep seeing welcome to the fediverse / mastodon posts like

"email is much more fulfilling when you use it for conversations with people than for brand management"