Mallory's Musings & Mischief

Fledgling trans girl that likes to talk nerdy, perform tech wizardry, do mad science, post occasional anti-capitalist and climate-rage induced rants, and show off her latest Lego builds. There will be selfies.

Swears like a sailor, so you best be okay with that.

My views are my own and are likely wrong.

Pronouns: she/her
Politics: More and more socialist and anti-capitalist everyday
Alt Account: https://sapphic.ninja/@mal

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Last Notes

2024-07-26 17:33:28

It's important to have a good understanding of how technology works.
Not because getting a STEM job is valuable, or because technical knowledge is somehow more important than other types of knowledge.
It's because the powerful will use your ignorance of technology against you.
Systems are designed — out of necessity and intentionally — to constrain your choices. It's important to understand which constraints are technically necessary, and which are just there to exploit or control you.

2024-07-26 00:15:50

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The only other thing you might want to consider in addition to something like a Seestar is including a tablet (Android or iPad) if they don't already have one. A smartphone will work fine too, but a larger screen is more fun.

2024-07-26 00:12:51

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Kind of did a bit of an infodump there, so I apologize if that seems overwhelming 😅
I am happy to elaborate on anything
/end

2024-07-26 00:02:31

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Post-processing can get as sophisticated as you're willing to go, so I won't go into too much detail on that. At a minimum, you'll need to know how to do "stacking" in some form. Stacking is basically taking multiple short exposures of a target and aligning and averaging them to get the equivalent of a very long single exposure.
The ZWO ASIair Plus can do the basics of stacking without any additional hardware or software. It's actually very cool to watch it stack in real-time.
/4

2024-07-25 23:55:48

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For a more capable and upgradable setup, I would suggest building your own rig.
For reference, I started out using this setup, and still use it today (with different camera and other accessories)
- Camera: Canon Rebel T7 DSLR
- Telescope: Red Cat 51 (f4.9, 250 mm)
- Sky-tracking gear
- Uniguide 32mm guidescope
- ASI120MM camera
- Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer GTi mount
- ZWO ASIair Plus
(Including a few other bits and bobs that I can go into if necessary)
/3

2024-07-25 23:47:30

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At the bare minimum, you can get something like a ZWO Seestar, which has everything built into a self-contained gadget.
https://www.zwoastro.com/product/seestar-s50/
There are other companies that make similar things of varying capabilities and price. I'm not sure which is considered "the best" at the moment, but a guy in my astronomy club has a Seestar and it's frankly kind of astonishing the images he's been able to get with his little "robot" for how much it costs.
/2

2024-07-25 23:42:11

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It's possible to do astro with just a DSLR and tripod, but it's not exactly "easy to use" and you can only get wide-field Milky Way pics.
To do astrophotography in a fun way, you will need a few things:
- Camera
- Lens/telescope (size and type depends on what you wish to look at)
- Sky-tracking mount (with requisite supporting bits like tripod, etc)
- Post-processing software
/1

2024-07-25 22:04:50

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I'm always happy to answer astrophotography questions! :ablobwave:

2024-07-22 22:46:42

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The ability to troubleshoot is an extremely valuable skill, and almost no one evaluates that in a technical interview.
Like, if you have a technical career, when was the last time you designed, made, or programmed something that worked perfectly the first time? Probably never, am I right? Most of your time is probably spent trying to figure out why the fuck some thing doesn't work correctly, right?
Design your interviews around that, not coding on a fucking whiteboard.

2024-07-22 22:29:14

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It's just dumb because in undergrad my engineering professors constantly reinforced that the most important thing is knowing *how* to find a solution, not knowing the solution by rote memorization, and yet so many engineering roles give you a textbook-level technical problem to solve in isolation like I should perfectly remember every single thing I learned in school.
You bitches want me to solve problems or to be fucking ChatGPT? Because you're interviewing like you want the latter.

2024-07-22 22:24:20

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The best experience I've had with a technical interview was being supplied a list of technical questions a week before the interview and asked to make a simple presentation that described my solutions and process. I did the presentation and the interviewers asked probing questions to interrogate how much I actually understood about the problem. More importantly, they asked *what I did when I ran into issues*.
I don't care how much you know if you just give up the moment things go off track.

2024-07-22 22:21:22

To anyone who is involved with the hiring process for a technical position: dear god, don't ask the candidate to solve a problem on the spot. You're shooting yourself in the foot and missing out on the best people.
Simulate the actual skills you need in the role. You want people who can think carefully and solve real problems, not a chatbot that can write code as fast as possible.

2024-07-21 04:53:59

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I also got an image of Saturn last night. Quality isn't as good as I'd like, so I'll probably try again when I have an opportunity.
Planetary imaging can be a bit tricky sometimes, so I might need to play around until I find a method that works well.
#astrophotography
https://cdn.masto.host/thingysocial/media_attachments/files/112/822/207/232/022/772/original/af09f844b32774f7.jpg

2024-07-21 03:07:58

Moon from last night.
I've been wanting to get a legit full moon pic for a few months now, but the weather hasn't been cooperating. The actual full moon is tomorrow and it'll be cloudy again, so I guess I'll have to be satisfied with 97%+ full
#astrophotography
https://cdn.masto.host/thingysocial/media_attachments/files/112/821/794/108/638/895/original/26b4bd655c021e4b.jpg

2024-07-20 17:09:25

My latest #astrophotography #WIP — the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635)
Not the best time to do deep sky imaging with the moon so full, but I thought I'd try anyway a few nights ago since it was clear out and narrowband is less impacted by sky glow. Just H-alpha at the moment, but I'm planning on getting the other bands in the future as the nebula approaches opposition and the moon goes back into hiding.
https://cdn.masto.host/thingysocial/media_attachments/files/112/819/440/934/232/290/original/d67b03f40f1b255d.jpg

2024-06-21 16:14:04

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Struggling to get myself to do anything. Kinda want to blow off work and get another timelapse of the sun, but I don't really have enough motivation to get ready and go outside. I want to sleep, but brain won't let me even do that. I'm just sitting here, miserable.

2024-06-21 15:10:02

I couldn't fall asleep last night because my brain was sad, so now today is shit too

2024-06-20 18:53:17

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Oooo what would you two talk about?

2024-06-20 15:24:35

It's gotten to the point that I'm actually a little surprised to discover people that still use Twitter/X exclusively

2024-06-18 18:56:12

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I'm not even sure that compound interest is entirely bad. I just think that its ubiquity is wrong.
Like, why do student loans have compound interest? I thought the point of higher education is that all of society profits from it, not just a select few?
Why does medical debt have compound interest? Why is someone being punished annually while paying off a debt they did not anticipate or seek out? More pointedly, why should someone expect to profit exponentially from that situation?

2024-06-18 18:09:57

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And it's all based on simple ideas like compound interest that we take for granted to the point of basically being axioms of society.
These are the kind of concepts that make a world without capitalism impossible to imagine.

2024-06-18 18:03:52

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It's just really strange to me that our society is structured such that acquiring some wealth somehow entitles a person to acquire even more wealth?
Like, yeah that's how capitalism works, but when you frame it like that it feels very bizarre and kind of obvious that it's going to end poorly for everyone involved.
The rules of our society were made explicitly such that the accumulation and consolidation of wealth and power into the hands of a minority of people is all but inevitable.

2024-06-18 17:28:28

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"But that would have consequences!"
Consequences to *whom*? Bankers? Why do we care what they think or feel?
Who decided they *must* profit from every single transaction, without exception or limit?

2024-06-18 17:22:41

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This is the argument to forgiving student loans and other forms of debt.
Debt is a human construct. It's based on the moral principle of reciprocity, so it's not arbitrary, but it is imaginary.
There's debt from the principal amount and the interest. Debt from interest is even more imaginary than the principal. The idea that such a thing could subjugate a person for decades of their life is a choice.
As a society, we could just choose to ignore debt, to erase it from our memory.

2024-06-18 17:05:18

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What I mean by that is the idea that loaning money automatically implies accumulating interest is not accurate.
It's a choice someone made. It's a choice people continue to make.
Applying a moral standard to the accumulation of debt through compound interest is just another imposition of hierarchy. It's about power.
Lending money does not logically necessitate that the party doing the lending must profit indefinitely and exponentially.

2024-06-18 16:54:30

Just a reminder that compound interest is not a law of nature, it's a human construct

2024-06-12 02:30:09

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This is likely a fundamental flaw with generative AI that can never be fixed. It will always be wrong. It has no way to determine whether a string of text is "correct" because the system has no epistemological framework to evaluate such things.
A statistical model is a statistical model is a statistical model. There's no understanding. No logic. No intelligence.

2024-06-12 02:15:06

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The only reason ChatGPT does anything remotely viewable as "intelligent" is because its statistics are based upon text written by intelligent agents. It can sound intelligent without being intelligent. It's a "stochastic parrot" as a researcher described it.
It regularly outputs text with incorrect info, simply because it's a statistically likely string of text. It doesn't "hallucinate" anything. It's just wrong because it's dumber than a goldfish and incapable of understanding anything at all.

2024-06-12 02:01:35

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This is why a LLM is fundamentally a bullshitting machine. It will ALWAYS give you text back. It will return a statistically likely string of text every time you give it a string of text. It literally CANNOT function without returning *something*. People have tried. You can provide instructions to not respond and it will anyway.
That's because it's a stupid fucking machine, not an intelligent agent.

2024-06-12 01:53:00

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It's actually possible to talk about something like ChatGPT without anthropomorphizing it. It doesn't "understand" and "respond to" the text you provide as input, it parses the text into semantic chunks and provides you with a sequence of text that is likely to follow yours, based upon a statistical model of an insanely large set of text samples (hence the term Large Language Model).

2024-06-12 01:27:12

People go around claiming a statistical model is "intelligent" when NO ONE — scientists or philosophers — can even explain or agree what, *exactly*, about our brain grants *humans* intelligence or what the fuck "intelligence" even means with any sort of precision

2024-06-05 17:00:07

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It's like asking "Where did all these left-handed people suddenly come from?" after they stopped beating kids in school for being left-handed.

2024-06-02 01:26:47

I resent the term "prompt engineering" because it implies that there is a sophisticated theoretical basis to writing LLM prompts and not simply "fuck around with the wording until the dumb computer makes me happy"

2024-05-29 16:46:38

When people say "EV sales are slowing down," what they actually mean is that Tesla sales are stalling because everyone has discovered how much of a entitled, bigoted assclown Elon Musk is and rightly want nothing to do with him.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-28/the-slowdown-in-us-electric-vehicle-sales-looks-more-like-a-blip
Via @npub1f6l…k9zj https://mastodon.social/@mhoye/112521995675929287
https://cdn.masto.host/thingysocial/media_attachments/files/112/524/906/273/201/003/original/241beaec76774f85.png

2024-05-11 04:33:36

IT'S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW!!!
I had to stop and get off the interstate near the WI border because I could see the #aurora through breaks in the clouds!!!
https://cdn.masto.host/thingysocial/media_attachments/files/112/420/110/856/666/595/original/e9802c2d1f5736c0.jpeg

2023-02-18 23:39:44

Being trans is:
The joy of looking in the mirror and seeing yourself for the first time in your life.
The joy of having clothing that you genuinely enjoy wearing for the first time in your life.
The joy of having your sexuality align with your body for the first time in your life.
The joy of letting parts of yourself shine that you have hidden or minimized for your entire life.
#TransJoy

2023-02-18 23:39:20

#TransJoy
https://cdn.masto.host/thingysocial/media_attachments/files/109/888/139/757/827/549/original/6a119159392ae2d1.jpg