“I wanted to talk to you mano a mano.”
That is… not what that means. #SlowHorses
Question:
nonbinary form of fiance /fiancee:
@julesh - Yes, I've been taking a perhaps overly keyboard-centric approach in this talk. (It makes sense because you can't do everything in an hour, and I play the keyboard, as do a lot of theorists.) Violinists live in another universe. A good violinist will apparently use equal-tempered, Pythagorean tuning or just intonation depending on context!
I saw a good video about this yesterday. I find it a bit mind-boggling and can't help but wonder if they're faking it. But there are actually lots of videos about this, so if they're faking it they do so en masse.
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz @julesh@mathstodon.xyz see also guitarists who play fretless guitars and adjust tuning on the fly. Humans do some pretty amazing things in occasion.
What SPECIFICALLY to do about Mozilla? Idk. I don't know the people or personalities or org structures involved. But "hey everyone, switch to aquaferret" or whatever the fork of the day is isn't a sustainable solution.
@JessTheUnstill i have the same feelings! a fork being the solution to this problem is very ingrained in the culture but at the scale of browser development it all feels impossible. even these soft forks that just tweak one feature seem to have trouble keeping up with upstream. on the flipside it doesn't help us that the ladybird browser project is fascist aligned, not that i think they have much chance of reaching parity with ff/chrome anyways
@johncarlosbaez doesn't step 7 and 8 have the same kind of semitone next to each other?
@semnosao - If you mean the steps 7-8 and 8-1, yes you're right! The second one takes us above the scale I was considering. So yeah. I wasn't thinking about going past the 8. I was just looking at the picture here.
I don't really think this business of never having two notes of the same size next to each other is musically important. I was just trying to find some properties that pick out the most popular of the 16 just intonation scales. Maybe there's a better way to do it.
My favorite photos are the ones where I feel someone can see what I see.
@Jgbird Same! Those are the best photos.
Question:
nonbinary form of fiance /fiancee:
@dalias @doctormo @daniel_bohrer The problem with Mozilla is that their customers aren't their users, it's Google
@0xabad1dea I’m assuming it’s probably Dutch with Limburgish leanings. Angsj kies se mesjeen zoeëget wie dit hej. Wie da óch, ice hóp das se ’t wall begrieëpe kins. 😉 (Or else you’ll maybe get something like this here. Anyway, I hope you can understand it).
@cassana yes, the way they type is more “Dutch with Limburg characteristics” than the way they speak aloud to each other
This is the most commonly used form of just intonation, I think. It's the only choice that has all of these features:
1) It has up-down symmetry except right next to the tritone in the middle, where this symmetry is impossible.
2) It uses 9/8 for the second rather than 10/9, which is a bit nicer - a simpler fraction.
3) It completely avoids the large diatonic semitone, which is the largest possible semitone.
4) It never has two of the same kind of semitone next to each other.
Features 3) and 4) determine what we do near the tritone. I don't think those are convincingly "good" features of a scale. So, we should think about this more. But let's see what this scale looks like on the keyboard!
(27/n)
@johncarlosbaez doesn't step 7 and 8 have the same kind of semitone next to each other?
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Spicy Take:
Fuck the FOSS bro mindset of "We can overlook bad behavior of maintainers because if it gets TOO bad we can just fork it."
And "It's okay to use 'open core' products even though the whole project couldn't survive without its corporate overlords who refuse PRs and public maintainer communities.
I can count on one hand the number of major FOSS projects not from Sun/Oracle who successfully forked and became larger than the original.
Forking a project results in one of two outcomes:
the fork dies because most of the contributors, maintainers, and users don't leave because they just can't be bothered to give a shit
Many people do schism, and the entire original AND fork decline in popularity as many people just go elsewhere rather than mess with it all
Fight bad behavior, corporate ownership, toxic bullshit, bigotry, wrong project direction, etc. where you find it. Not by saying a fork is the release valve.
Among many others, this is a subtoot about Firefox
Fine, I'm on a rant here, so here we go.
"We'll just fork it" is privileged mindset. It means you think you can gather enough clout and like minded people to put up a bunch of unplanned work and time and passion to make a whole new project despite the old one still working "well enough".
Now you can take the same logic to electoral politics. "If you don't like it, move, or win elections".
Minorities know they're going to get clobbered in most of those situations if it's only done half-assed. So you pick your battles and go into it with a plan more concrete than hitting the fork button on GitHub and making a logo.
Dear Britain: things are bad, but America will recover from Donald Trump. Just give us three years | Jimmy Kimmel
▶ When the president targeted me and my TV show, millions said no. So don’t give up on us – we’re not all like him.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/25/jimmy-kimmel-christmas-message-trump
@shoq It’s not even ‘Trump is the problem, and the US will recover politically’ per se. But the enormous commodity grab by his #bigtech oligarch buddies that is the real reason the US (and the world) will not recover swiftly.
The only remedy for all of this would be if consumers would stop consuming immediately and leave bigtech with large unsettled debts…
Chances of that happening: very remote. But at least I am doing my bit 👌
Exactly!
@ChrisMayLA6 @elrohir
i think there is so much worse in labour's inequality plan that just the points you have both raised.
#WritersCoffeeClub Dec 26 Who or what serves as your "rubber duck"?
Friends. I get all my best flashes of insight when telling friends about my current work in progress over a coffee or a beer.
(I suspect the act of explaining forces me to linearize my chain of reasoning, which exposes weak links: and the audience asks questions or cues me by indicating what they're paying attention to, which uncovers other stuff.)
NB: I have the ASD thing of missing conversational pass-the-parcel cues.
@cstross I think there are quite distinct stages in this process. My father, who was a writer, always said ‘Don’t talk it out’, meaning that at the very birth of an idea, you need to let it marinate internally to build up a head of creative steam to follow through with it, which can be dissipated by talking about it too early. But once you have the premise set, having to verbalise a coherent outline really does help to identify flawas.
hard mode: getting texts in Dutch
very hard mode: getting texts not in textbook Dutch but Limburgs
iron man 1HP hard mode: as typed by a great grampa who never quite got the hang of these new phone thingies
@0xabad1dea I’m assuming it’s probably Dutch with Limburgish leanings. Angsj kies se mesjeen zoeëget wie dit hej. Wie da óch, ice hóp das se ’t wall begrieëpe kins. 😉 (Or else you’ll maybe get something like this here. Anyway, I hope you can understand it).
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Question:
nonbinary form of fiance /fiancee:
Hello and a good meowing everyone! 
Have a most wonderful day and stay safe 
♥️😸
@stux Good morning Washy, George, and the rest of the family! Pax sends hugs.😺💕
@daniel_bohrer @JessTheUnstill
The situation has to be understood as a forking of resources, not of users. Users that contribute nothing (money, time, etc) don't really matter at all (which is it's own radioactive problem I'm going to put over *here*)
If the fork contains most of the resources, or a better economic situation then it can supplant the original. Inkscape's 5 hobbiests replaced Sodipodi's 1. But replacing $100m with 5 part timers isn't really forking the resources. Just sporking.
@doctormo @daniel_bohrer @JessTheUnstill Mozilla doesn't have $100m to spend on Firefox dev. They have $100m to spend on executive pay, marketing, making Firefox worse, etc. Only a very small portion actually goes into maintaining Firefox, poorly.
Now up on #PhanpySocialDev https://dev.phanpy.social/ - give it a try 🙇♂️
- Link hidden inside Settings, not the nav menu
- Not localized yet, still experimental, things might change or break later
- The 3D grid background was fun 🙈
@cheeaun Looks AWESOME!!!
Pic. 1. Human Interface Guidelines, Apple, 1992
Pic. 2. macOS Tahoe, Apple, 2025
macOS Tahoe menu with icon next to each menu item
A quote from HIG: two menus, one with icon next to each item labeled “Ugly” and one “Good” with just two simple icons for 7 items
The icons in the 2nd image are not arbitrary so you can still argue that they're adhering to the interface guidelines.
Also, computer displays have evolved somewhat in the intervening decades so it's reasonable to revisit those principles as necessary.