beka valentine
@bekavalentine.bsky.social
410 followers 250 following 2.8K posts
a dyke who hacks on things. she/xey/ey. [email protected] [email protected]
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bekavalentine.bsky.social
a thread of bookmarked threads, since bluesky doesn't yet have bookmarks
Reposted by beka valentine
nycsouthpaw.bsky.social
Everyone can set aside partisanship, psychologizing, pathologizing, whatever, and—I would hope—still see that it’s incredibly dangerous for a political leader to be this disconnected from the real conditions in the country.
atrupar.com
Trump: "I don't know what could be worse than Portland. You don't even have stores anymore. They don't even put glass up. They put plywood on their windows."
Reposted by beka valentine
coachfinstock.bsky.social
Dems can just clip the "we took the freedom of speech away" and make an ad
atrupar.com
Trump: "We took the freedom of speech away because that's been through the courts and the courts said you have freedom of speech, but what has happened is when they burn a flag it agitates and irritates crowds."
bekavalentine.bsky.social
anyway, this is bad actually. like really bad
bekavalentine.bsky.social
i think it's really funny how everyone has just embraced the post-truth approach to politics now

10 years ago folx were talking about how destroying the idea that truth mattered was itself an authoritarian tactic that Putin was using to undermine the US

but now? truth doesn't matter!
kevinmkruse.bsky.social
Democrats should go on TV to say they need to impeach Trump because of the cocaine-fueled pedophilia parties that he holds in the East Room of the White House with his friends in MS-13.

I mean, if he gets to lie shamelessly, why not them?
Reposted by beka valentine
moneyontheleft.bsky.social
Tremendous thanks to Cory Doctorow for helping us get the word out about Blue Bonds, MotL's fiscal strategy for mobilizing sub-federal debt financing to defeat authoritarian sabotage & extortion.

pluralistic.net/2025/10/04/f...
Reposted by beka valentine
matthenry.fyi
When the nazis were coming into power, there was a lag before local law enforcement was fully on board. People were able to get police protection from nazi-aligned paramilitaries. Here, today, police look at rising fascism and say “Finally. We’ve been waiting for this.” www.notus.org/democrats/me...
Democrats' New Fear: They Can’t Rely on Local Law Enforcement for Protection
“They called the local sheriff; they showed up and were going to arrest me,” said Rep. Steven Horsford.
www.notus.org
Reposted by beka valentine
jonathancohn.bsky.social
This is why "defund the police" was so important.
matthenry.fyi
When the nazis were coming into power, there was a lag before local law enforcement was fully on board. People were able to get police protection from nazi-aligned paramilitaries. Here, today, police look at rising fascism and say “Finally. We’ve been waiting for this.” www.notus.org/democrats/me...
Democrats' New Fear: They Can’t Rely on Local Law Enforcement for Protection
“They called the local sheriff; they showed up and were going to arrest me,” said Rep. Steven Horsford.
www.notus.org
Reposted by beka valentine
junlper.beer
this is an explicitely nazi administration and anyone who still supports them should be viewed as such
justinbaragona.bsky.social
Incredible.

Jack Posobiec references the earliest version of antifa -- the anti-fascists in the Weimar Republic who were opposed to the Nazi Party -- as the bad guys.
bekavalentine.bsky.social
solving the coordination problem is a big issue, arguably THE big issue!

ironically, social media, and twitter specifically, was a major leg up in doing that for a while
bekavalentine.bsky.social
it will barely matter, sadly. it just means that the small errors aren't corrected for. you've already paid the taxes
bekavalentine.bsky.social
but i can tell you that you can use these techniques to assign to each discrete object a globally unique ID, and then use that to store state information
bekavalentine.bsky.social
another thing that this methodology is difficulty to use with is actual statefulness. like, suppose you randomly generate some rocks. great. but now the player smashes one of them. how can that persist without storing information about that specific rock? i dunno!
bekavalentine.bsky.social
however, i wouldn't be surprised if there are hash-like functions that have nice invertibility properties, and nice topological properties, so that you can walk backward up the generation chain and find candidates for search, at least

i dont know what those are tho
bekavalentine.bsky.social
you could enumerate all of them but you dont need to, they're implicitly there in the math
bekavalentine.bsky.social
generate. but you generate it by defining a mathematical expression where you get points by querying
bekavalentine.bsky.social
like, if you have this random galaxy with 100 billion star systems and 500 billion planets, probably one of them has similar properties to what you specify, assuming its plausible given the system

but finding it? i don't know how you do that without just exploring
bekavalentine.bsky.social
you can just.. do it. without precomputing anything, without storing anything except the one initial seed value

the _drawback_ of this approach is that it's randomized and unpredictable. I don't know of any way to say "show me a planet with these properties"
bekavalentine.bsky.social
and you can just.. get all of this on the cheap, with some simple calculations that happen when you ask about any given point on the surface of the moon or planet

you can render it into a shader, you can count up the local crater density for fictional space probe scans, whatever
bekavalentine.bsky.social
younger craters layer over older ones, so a big old crater will have lots of smaller younger craters inside it, but a big young crater won't have old small craters inside it

bigger craters are spaced out in time less densely as well, so you can get interesting layering
bekavalentine.bsky.social
you can also incorporate things like size scales for craters -- big ones tend to be less common than small ones, and more widely spread apart as a result -- as well as different ages, which affects how craters layer on top of one another
bekavalentine.bsky.social
another one that I think is neat is that you can generate cratered moons and planets in this same way, using the random point thing to define crater positions in 3d space, and use the surface of the sphere to find nearest craters
bekavalentine.bsky.social
that also means that you can share experiences with other people easily. if you're in a particular galactic configuration and stumble across something cool, you can just tell someone what your seed # is, and then tell them "go to this coordinate" and they'll see it too
bekavalentine.bsky.social
you can answer that question without having to know the answer to the same question for a point on the opposite side of the galaxy

you can do this for the entire universe, actually. scale doesn't matter, because its all just structured pseudo-randomness