Code Notelets

Decentralization is possible without using blockchain. Some examples of this are Diaspora and Mastodon , both of which are federated decentralized networks that do not use a blockchain.  In that case, why is there a need to use blockchain for any metaverse world, especially when the environmental reputational risks are so high? In many areas of the world, the electric grid is not decarbonized yet. The amount of power drawn for blockchain computation is high. In fact, in areas where electricity is cheap enough to draw blockchain miners, this tends to be heavily based on fossil fuels. So you could say that the blockchain is currently largely powered by coal and other fossil fuels. So again, why bother using blockchain?  There are other examples of the buying and selling of digital property without using blockchain technology, for example domain name trading. If we as humans are truly to be future-conscious, blockchain technology cannot be a part of our future due to its emissio...

The good Recently, the Photos app on my Android phone automatically curated some of my photos into a "highlights" album for me. I thought this was a fantastic idea. I love this use of AI - it does something quickly and easily that would otherwise take a lot of human time.  The only downside was that the AI included a close-up pic I'd taken of a spot on the skin behind my husband's ear so he could see it. Now, if this AI had instead been for a self-driving car, then too bad, we likely would've had a terrible wreck at this point - endangering myself, any passengers, and other drivers on the road. But since this application of AI for photo selection did not have any life-threatening consequences, I was all for it. The bad I've said before, and I'll say it again, that AI as it currently stands should not be used for self-driving purposes and I have explained clearly why. Indeed, I believe that AI should not be used for any purpose that may have life-threaten...

 This is a slightly more advanced version of my previous post on creating callable variants of functions in Ruby while avoiding scope problems . In today's instance, I was creating an error reporting system for a program I was writing.  The error reporting, of necessity, had to emit a message to indicate what was going on. While some errors would be unique messages that only occurred once during the program, other errors could be grouped. For example, one group was "incorrect number of parameters supplied". There were several error messages within my program that fell into this category, so I didn't want to type out the exact same wording each time. I wanted to create a function that could report this sort of error indicating where it happened (of course I had to supply parameters to the messages to show the context). So here is a very basic sketch of the sort of thing I was doing. I'm writing this here so that I can go back to it easily later. The item I'm re...

While coding a project in Ruby, I was creating some variants of a function by currying. Initially, I simply created the curried variants as variables, but quickly ran into scope problems where I couldn't then call any of the variants from within other functions. This was because the scope of the variant was the same as the scope of a local variable of that name.  So I created a code snippet as a demo for myself of what I should have done instead, which is to define the curried variant as another function. This new function then has the same scope as any function I would create and not the (more limited) scope of a local variable. Of course, in certain situations defining it as a local variable is more desirable - for example if I was instead planning to use the variant as a variable that could be passed around. This is as opposed to using it solely as a callable function, which is what I ultimately desired. def myfun(stuff, num1, num2)   if stuff == true then   ...

Solar geoengineering is the idea of limiting the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth, with the aim of limiting global warming. Here I will show 3 reasons why it's a really bad idea: 1. Photosynthesis requires sunlight, don't limit it - it's one of the few things pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere Photosynthesis is one of the very few ways we have to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As an added bonus it's done automatically by plants, requiring no effort on our part. It requires light in order to work. To do it, plants take in sunlight, carbon dioxide and water, and they produce oxygen. These plants are literally removing carbon dioxide from our atmosphere, but they require light for it to work.  We should not do anything that could possibly limit the amount of photosynthesis occurring; limiting the amount of light hitting the planet is likely to decrease photosynthesis.  2. We should not be limiting the generation of solar power Solar electri...

I was getting my head around the reduce method (also known as inject ) in Ruby for some code I am writing. I suspected that this would be what I really wanted to use with my array instead of the more generic each which first sprang to mind. So I was eager to try out the concept with reduce and ready to code a quick separate sketch of the outline for my particular use case. However, most examples of reduce out there are mathematical in nature and this makes it harder to mentally translate to string use examples.  In my case, I'm using the string to stand in for a more complex data structure, so I didn't want to have to mentally translate from numbers to strings to higher order structures. The Ruby documentation for reduce/inject was thorough but I struggled to wrap my head around their terminology, especially the word "memo". I finally realized that "memo" simply means the changing result. That seemed to do the trick mentally.  Since most of the functio...

Above: my Linux desktop layout. Back in 2017, I switched my operating system entirely to Linux. In case anyone is wondering, here is what I experienced over the last few years. Others I interact with have no idea I'm on Linux. For example, if someone emails me an MS Word document that I need to complete, I simply open it with LibreOffice (an open-source word processing program that is pre-installed on most Linux systems), edit the document as needed - which is very easy since the same sorts of functionalities are available in LibreOffice - and then I can save it in MS Word format and email it back. Likewise, if I'm on a Zoom call, everything works just the way it does on PC and Mac. Zoom makes their application available for Linux too, I downloaded it and let it self-install, and it works exactly the same way as it does on other operating systems. I can point-and-click my way to whatever I need to do on Linux; no special knowledge required. If you want to dig deeper into script...

Disclosure: This is a thought experiment for the purposes of showing how easy it is to make up a conspiracy theory. I do not advocate the dissemination of conspiracy theories and other baseless speculations. Do some of the conspiracy theories out there seem so far-fetched that you are ROTFL when you hear of them? Yet some people actually do seem to believe them. Many conspiracy theories are made up. In other words they are fiction. At best, they are theories and not fact, otherwise that particular conspiracy theory wouldn't be a conspiracy theory, it would be fact. At worse, they are the deliberate peddling of lies. So I decided to demonstrate that creating a conspiracy theory is so easy that anyone can do it. There are no special skills, talents, or level of intelligence required. There is nothing special about making up a conspiracy theory. Let's have a go. Step 1: Identify the least believable conspiracy theory you have heard of This step is easy and should take you less th...