beka valentine

https://kolektiva.social/@beka_valentine

trans dyke hacking on @QueeriousLabs@twitter.com . she/her (xey/xem or ey/em if you're bored with binaries); no child zone, 18+ only 

current twitter handle: @defnotbeka@twitter.com 

former twitter handles: [@beka_valentine](https://kolektiva.social/@beka_valentine ) @illegally_beka

location: SF, CA

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npub132p3v5et2ujg4jpdklvxdge2qlvlzjgqatar7lpmfarx9syl0x5skgwsev

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beka_valentine_at_kolektiva.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsg4qck2v44wfy2eqkm0krx5v4q0k03fyqw473l0sa573nzcz0hn2gpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dspsrlh6

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nos.lol

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Last Notes

2026-07-27 17:23:38 UTC

in Dune, the Butlerian Jihad was so severe that they don't even use basic computers anymore. they got rid of AI, yes, but they also got rid of absolutely every computer period
given the way some anti-AI people talk, this is practically their goal as well

2026-07-06 18:19:13 UTC

age verification laws being written in a way that impacts social media websites specifically, including federated ones, and basically has no impact on peer to peer systems, is pretty fantastic, assuming people pick up the slack and build p2p alternatives

2026-07-01 19:13:14 UTC

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i don't. i'm not sure there are any, even. everything is lore or practically implemented things, and that's about it

2026-07-01 17:54:56 UTC

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but instead of making languages more useful, there's a non-stop stream of trash
i mean, consider Go, a language that came out in 2009, and which ignores around 41 years of language design progress and research, to create a thin reimplementation of Algol 68

2026-07-01 17:52:50 UTC

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but, well.. people have been talking about Boilerplate Code since at LEAST 1981, with a popularization happening in 1990
the programming world has known about boilerplate for a while, and had ample opportunity to try to address it. there are even some great ideas!

2026-07-01 17:49:41 UTC

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lets consider a common explanation for what professional coders use LLMs for: boiler plate
i often hear coders say "oh yeah, LLMs suck overall, but they're REALLY GOOD for boilerplate"
and this is pretty true!

2026-07-01 17:48:01 UTC

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what about more professional uses of LLMs tho? is this ALSO true in the context of professional programmers?
i think so!

2026-07-01 17:29:33 UTC

personally i'm ok with AI techniques being less well known but there's a deeper thing going on here which is far more important IMO, because it's also partially why LLMs have taken over
== this thread is in response to this tweet: ==
https://x.com/krismicinski/status/2072303376629444764

2026-05-26 17:02:58 UTC

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2026-05-26 16:54:10 UTC

sure, you complain about the AI cliche of "Not X, but Y"
but do you complain about "No X, just Y"?

2026-05-24 03:22:48 UTC

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you know, i had a dream like 4 days ago that you came out as trans and that motivated me to start listening the computer-is-a-feeling episode, so now im wondering if im fucking prophetic or what

2026-05-12 21:13:54 UTC

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a string-with-insertion-cursor, such as
fo|o
corresponds to the tree zipper
"o" @ "fo_"
where the LHS of @ is the thing in focus, the RHS is the one-hold context (with an _ representing the hole)

2026-05-12 21:12:18 UTC

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the observation to make is that if we view a text insertion zipper as a normal tree overtype zipper on a string, rather than a true insertion zipper, we can analyze insertion and overtype as follows:

2026-05-08 21:19:47 UTC

there are exactly 2 things in my experience as a programmer that make it feel really true to say that programming is mathematical
the first is program calculation/squiggol
but the other is shader programming

2026-05-04 16:36:23 UTC

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personally, I love the dry brushed/sponged look, and have spent the last few days making shaders to replicate it, but YMMV on what you like and want out of a scifi environment

2026-05-04 16:35:27 UTC

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dry brushed and sponged marbling is a very common thing in B5 for wall in general, and certainly breaks things up visually, but on its own it doesn't necessarily have a scifi feel to it
if anything, it's more 80s/90s DIY home decor, which is MY scifi jam but maybe not yours

2026-05-04 16:34:08 UTC

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in the case of B5's MedLab, they're checker boarded with bare painted wall behind them, which increases visual complexity by breaking up the higher-order monotony of the tiled Contour Spectrums
they're also marbled with what is like to be dry brushing or sponging

2026-05-04 15:48:42 UTC

here's another thing that turns your room into an instantly cool science fiction set: the fuckin Sonex Contour wall panel
https://kolektiva.social/@beka_valentine/114600567753999701
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/517/089/789/125/563/original/861b3610674234da.jpg

2026-01-31 03:37:29 UTC

i think it's outrageous that we live in a world where the secret cabal of powerful men is fucking children instead of plotting to becoming immortal by merging with a super-intelligent AI named Icarus

2025-12-22 19:50:32 UTC

I love it when leftists make an argument that ends up with them saying "well if capitalists didn't ruin it, they would've won!"
like, buddy, capitalists exist and the whole point is to defeat them. of COURSE they'll try to ruin your revolutionary project!

2025-12-15 07:34:16 UTC

water, in the form of high pressure piping, was once a major way to transmit power around london. at 700 psi, it was used to power all sorts of things from factory equipment to elevators
someone should make a game based on this. not steam punk, but hydropunk

2025-11-12 01:33:45 UTC

I have a strong suspicion that the biggest problems with math education is not merely that the presentation is hard or confusing and kids don't get it, leading to the need for New Math, Common Core, etc.
but rather than any design will ultimately need per-student assistance

2025-10-22 20:42:48 UTC

i'm reading this book The Design of Switching Circuits by Keister, Ritchie, and Washburn, and it's VERY apparent why graph theory because such a hot topic in the world of computer science/informatics back in the 40s and 50s

2025-10-16 06:18:29 UTC

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we're not teaching kids to understand computers, to control them, to create their own computer experiences and bend the machine to their will
we're teaching them to ask corporations to give them what they need or want
that's no education, that's a trap

2025-10-16 06:09:58 UTC

you wanna know how impoverished the world of computer education has been since about 2000?
in 1980, there were elementary schools teaching 10 year old kids how to program BASIC on Apple II's, Commodore PET's and other computers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oFh1gFJVe4

2025-10-01 06:05:24 UTC

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except you cant because federal taxes are not collected by the states

2025-10-01 05:52:12 UTC

masturbatory liberals talking about soft secession with taxes don't know what the fuck they're talking about

2025-09-20 05:42:12 UTC

PSL true believers are so funny lol

2025-09-06 20:20:13 UTC

if you have trillionaires in a country where the entire GDP is 30tn, the tax revenue is 5tn, and the budget is 7tn, you have no ability to govern these people. these trillionaires are effectively aristocracy and you need to deal with them

2025-08-31 22:25:30 UTC

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the thing thats really frustrating to me about the historical resistance to Monsanto in places like Europe is that it's centered around the paranoia about GMOs, which are not even remotely dangerous as far as anyone can tell

2025-08-11 16:46:34 UTC

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there's nothing in those posts that prove anything is faked

2025-08-04 22:10:44 UTC

vim and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race

2025-07-30 20:50:51 UTC

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you're telling me that you're not interested in Beenz or Flooz?

2025-06-16 06:14:03 UTC

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in this version of zip i'm assuming it takes a pair of lists, like the authors did :p
but i changed the names of other things to make them consistent with haskell

2025-06-16 04:27:13 UTC

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given these definitions:
filter p = concat . map (select p singleton null)
select p f g x = if p x then f x else g x
pair f g x = (f x, g x)
the lemma is:
filter p ~ map fst . filter snd . zip . pair id (map p)

2025-06-16 04:21:52 UTC

hot take: point-free program calculation was in fact bad for the world of functional programming and program calculation, as it encouraged inscrutable proofs in place of easy to follow proofs, and large numbers of auxiliary lemmas in place of beta reduction

2025-05-28 19:03:09 UTC

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i never said you shouldn't use fluoride lmfao did you even read the posts you're replying to?

2025-05-21 17:38:30 UTC

it probably sounds a bit silly, but i think that Asimov's psychohistory is probably plausible to some degree, as a large scale long term variation of a formal theory of memetics

2025-05-06 05:47:01 UTC

ah man, jill sobule died :(
in memory of sobule, here's the original I Kissed a Girl
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUi11Cz4ZUg

2025-04-29 19:01:47 UTC

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some programming languages even have a default sort that switches algorithms based on the length of the list so that you're always using the best one for the task and don't get whacked by constant factors

2025-04-29 18:56:47 UTC

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conversely, on arbitrary data, many of the asymptotically great sorting algorithms are very inefficient on small lists compared to asymptotically worse algorithms, because they have high constant factors

2025-04-29 18:52:27 UTC

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for instance, if you're sorting arrays of distinct ints (not integers), then all relevant sorting algorithms are in fact constant time O(1), because the size of the list has an upper bound
if i give you just that condition and asymptotic, you might feel cheated

2025-04-29 18:48:06 UTC

a lot of computery who are passingly familiar with big O notation will talk about the differences between things like different sorting algorithms and their efficiencies, but then they ignore the details that make or break things

2025-04-14 20:32:18 UTC

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i mean come on, this is cheesy 50s scifi but without the benefit of being cheesy nor from the 50s
this is Independence Day but without the benefit of Will Smith
this is just utterly absurd on the face of it

2025-04-02 16:27:54 UTC

came across this incredible song in a documentary on youtube. it's really good, and is the only song like it that this band seems to have made
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rombccQFpTg

2025-04-01 17:54:10 UTC

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this is clearly a HUGELY important fact about exoplanet history, impacting decades and decades of science and culture and popular understanding of the universe
and it's just GONE
not a single word in passing on the various high level overviews you come across

2025-04-01 17:52:35 UTC

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hundreds of books, some aimed at kids and put in libraries and read for years or decades after the 70s in school libraries, said this was a settled fact
Gen X and Millenials could very well have grown up reading those books in school and believed that science found exoplanets

2025-04-01 17:51:14 UTC

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at least 3 generations of people, possibly 4, KNEW that exoplanets existed in great numbers
the entire golden age of scifi was written with this FACT as backdrop
all of Star Trek: The Original Series

2025-04-01 17:49:28 UTC

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would YOU consider that of vital importance to understanding that history, and also understanding the field of astronomy, and of understanding how people of the past viewed the universe?

2025-04-01 17:47:54 UTC

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now you tell me
if YOU were looking for information on the history of the search for exoplanets, would YOU consider it of vital importance to know that in the 1930s, astronomers thought they had discovered MULTIPLE exoplanets, and that these findings were believed until the 70s?

2025-04-01 17:46:56 UTC

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just nothing at all
entire decades of astronomical history are utterly absent from the easily accessible high level overviews of exoplanet history
and if you go through the google results, you get nothing beyond that one PDF, as far as I can tell. that's it.

2025-04-01 17:44:32 UTC

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NASA and ESA, Wikipedia and Astronomy .com, none of them even mention the LITERAL DECADES that astronomers thought we had discovered exoplanets
none of them mention AT ALL that there was a flurry of reports in the late 1930s, not even to point out that they were erroneous!

2025-04-01 17:42:48 UTC

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and how can I trust what I find on the internet? It was hard enough finding even these scraps. I had to find the names the names of the stars first, before I could look specifically at them and get more information
the high level overviews of exoplanet history were useless

2025-04-01 17:42:29 UTC

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so then, this now makes me wonder: what ELSE was being published in the 1930s and 1940s? Campbell clearly thought there was a bunch of research, not just two hints, so how much was there? I don't know

2025-04-01 17:42:18 UTC

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back to wikipedia, and lo: the page on Barnard's Star mentions that since 1938, similar analyses showed two Jovians around Barnard's Star, and this was believed by other astronomers, until 1973, and it seems to have fallen out of vogue by the mid 70s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnard%27s_Star#Astrometric_planetary_claims

2025-04-01 17:35:06 UTC

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[...] One famous case is Barnard’s star, for which two
planetary-mass bodies of 0.7 and 0.5 Jupiter masses with periods of 12 and 20 years were proposed, and discussed many times for about 30 years."
and thats it. no citations. but it has a name: Barnard's Star

2025-04-01 17:32:52 UTC

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tucked away in a paragraph on astrometry is this:
"Historically, many retracted discovery were announced starting at the end of the 1930s, when photographic plates became of good enough quality. [...]

2025-04-01 17:31:20 UTC

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my hunches confirmed, I search some more. I google for "1930s exoplanet discovery". the top results are trash, the front page is full of stuff about the 1992 discovery, or Kepler 1930b, or the 1930 discovery of Pluto
but right in the middle is this paper http://www.bourbaphy.fr/Cassan.pdf

2025-04-01 17:29:11 UTC

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the findings were so widely known that at least one scifi novel, Hal Clement's 1953 novel Mission of Gravity, was inspired by them
well now, that's interesting, this was clearly not some insignificant little thing in the corner of an academic journal

2025-04-01 17:27:09 UTC

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it seems to be the case that there WAS a detection, now known to have been erroneous, and it was believed to be valid as late as 1978!
for 36 YEARS astronomers at multiple observatories and in multiple countries confidently believed that they had evidence of exoplanets!

2025-04-01 17:24:55 UTC

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so then I remember that the article in Astounding mentions 61 Cygni C, so I figure, you know what, let me go look at the Wikipedia page for that. well there is none. but the page for the 61 Cygni star system DOES mention claims of a planet in 1942: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/61_Cygni#Claims_of_a_planetary_system
BINGO!

2025-04-01 17:23:29 UTC

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so I'm looking at these and I'm thinking to myself, what the fuck was John Campbell talking about? he clearly thought there was a lot of reports now of exoplanets being discovered in the 1930s, and yet Wikipedia, NASA, ESA, and Astronomy. com have no mention of this at all

2025-04-01 17:21:21 UTC

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and Astronomy.com's other page on the History of Exoplanets also mentions the 1992 as the first discovery with no mention of anything earlier
https://www.astronomy.com/science/a-brief-history-of-exoplanets/

2025-04-01 17:20:05 UTC

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Astronomy.com has a page about how the first exoplanets were discovered, and it only talkes about the 1992 discovery as the earliest, but it mentions that the hunt for exoplanets had been on since the 1980s
https://www.astronomy.com/science/how-the-first-exoplanets-were-discovered/

2025-04-01 17:18:41 UTC

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ESA has a page that pinpoints 1995 as the first detection date of an exoplanet around a sunlike star, and thats the earliest date they give (which is consistent with the 1992 date from earlier, since that was around a pulsar)
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Exoplanets/Exoplanets_in_the_spotlight

2025-04-01 17:17:14 UTC

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another NASA page mentions that in 1917, van Maanen's star had evidence of a planet that wasn't yet known to be evidence until 2014 (also mentioned on the wikipedia page): https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/facts/

2025-04-01 17:16:02 UTC

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NASA has a page that's a "timeline" of exoplanets. it makes no mention of anything before 1984, when the first planetary disk was observed: https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/alien-worlds/historic-timeline/#first-planetary-disk-observed

2025-04-01 17:14:05 UTC

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now I saw this and I said "ok well I can't trust wikipedia, I remember what happened with the Unitype and Rogers Typograph, I should google this"
so I do, and here's what I find

2025-04-01 17:09:27 UTC

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I thought exoplanets were a recent discovery. so I went to wikipedia to see, and of course that's what wikipedia says. the page on exoplanets mentions 1992 as the first detection, with a possible detection in 1988 that was only confirmed in 2003
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet

2025-04-01 17:07:48 UTC

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in the second paragraph, he says "We haven't any idea how planets come about, but //every star which we have been able to observed minutely enough to make the detection of a planet possible has shown planets.//"
this struck me as unusual

2025-04-01 17:05:42 UTC

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last night I was reading the November 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, in particular, editor John Campbell's opening essay/call-for-stories titled Arithmetic and Empire where he discusses the problem of governing a galaxy-spanning empire
https://archive.org/details/sim_astounding-science-fiction_1943-11_32_3/page/2/mode/2up

2025-04-01 17:03:32 UTC

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because this isn't an issue with Wikipedia but rather with seemingly authoritative high-level overviews
let's look at another example, which I ran into last night

2025-04-01 17:03:21 UTC

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its got the Ludlow Typograph and Paige Compositor tho, so there's that I guess!
now, you may say, "Beka, it's Wikipedia, you can edit this, why don't you fix this problem?"
and that's true, and I should, but that's not the point

2025-04-01 17:03:02 UTC

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if you thought you could rely on Wikipedia to at least aggregate a reasonable overview of the various things to look at, you'd be woefully wrong
indeed, Wikipedia is so bad at this that it's Typesetting category doesn't even include linotype!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Typesetting

2025-04-01 16:58:08 UTC

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now, the information IS out there if you know to look, but if you were relying on Wikipedia to give you some guidance about what to look for, using Wikipedia as a High Level overview of a complex subject, you'd be up the creek. Wikipedia is of no use

2025-04-01 16:56:59 UTC

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here is the International Printing Museum's page on Unitype: https://www.printmuseum.org/1890-unitype
and the Rogers Typograph: https://www.printmuseum.org/1895-rogers-typograph
and here is the video that gives a nice explanation of these machines and also a linotype machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n5JQrN8qx4

2025-04-01 16:54:48 UTC

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as far as Wikipedia is concerned, these machines basically do not exist. the Rogers Typograph gets a mention in a single article, and Unitype is just completely absent
but these machines most definitely did exist, and there is information out there about them if you know to look

2025-04-01 16:53:00 UTC

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the Ludlow Typograph as mentioned was really more of a manual line casting tool that functioned like a very large version of Gutenberg's single-letter-casting molds
the Intertype machine was just a knockoff Linotype machine that came out when Linotype's patents expired

2025-04-01 16:52:51 UTC

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now, you might think, "Oh, well, maybe this is just trying to capture functionally distinct tools, or something, and maybe the Unitype and Rogers Typograph machines were just variations on those"
but you'd be wrong. in fact, it's the opposite

2025-04-01 16:52:41 UTC

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you will note the conspicuous lack of Unitype and the Rogers Typograph
if you click through to Hot Metal Typesetting (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_met...)
you find that there are no mentions on that page of either of Unitype or the Rogers Typograph
similarly on the Typesetting page

2025-04-01 16:52:31 UTC

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if you look at the Letterpress Printing infobox that wikipedia has, you find that under "hot metal typesetting", you have the following 5 systems:
Linotype Machine, Monotype System, Ludlow Typograph, Intertype Machine, and Paige Compositor
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/263/742/338/482/682/original/07076a561afb9aac.png

2025-04-01 16:41:40 UTC

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the Unitype search has nothing of any relevance as far as I can see, and the Rogers Typograph search has only a page about John R. Rogers, the guy who invented it, which mentions the typograph

2025-04-01 16:40:13 UTC

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and so I wanted more information on these machines, and so naturally I went over to Wikipedia and what did I find but nothin'.
here's the results for "unitype": https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?go=Go&search=unitype&title=Special%3ASearch&ns0=1&ns4=1&ns6=1&ns8=1&ns11=1
and here's the results for "rogers typograph": https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=rogers+typograph&title=Special%3ASearch&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&ns0=1&ns4=1&ns6=1&ns8=1&ns11=1

2025-04-01 16:38:26 UTC

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in the course of watching videos from the International Printing Museum where the executive director gives a tour of the equipment they have, he shows two machines, a Unitype machine, and a Rogers Typograph, both are type setting machines like linotype machines are

2025-04-01 16:35:45 UTC

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I first noticed this recently when watching videos about printing presses. i forget what got me on the subject, probably I ran into an old video of linotype machines on youtube or something

2025-04-01 16:33:00 UTC

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and due to the authoritative nature of the source that has this gap, people hoping to learn about the subject end up with an incomplete and inadequate understanding, because they presume that the source is reliable, and therefore that this is more or less what there is to know

2025-04-01 16:31:45 UTC

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High Level Amnesia is the phenomenon where a high level overview of a subject, spanning decades of development, has large gaps, which give a completely erroneous view of the subject

2025-04-01 16:29:31 UTC

there's a phenomenon that I wish I had a term for, I'll call it High Level Amnesia for convenience, which I've run into twice now in the last week or so, that I think is kind of concerning, at least to some degree

2025-03-31 20:02:46 UTC

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but i can't comment on how profound lakoff takes the specific metaphors to be. i think nunberg has a response to lakoff, especially where politics is concerned. from what i know of both sides of that argument, i think that they both have valid points but neither are really the right perspective

2025-03-31 20:01:20 UTC

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i havent read Lakoff's work on metaphor, but ironically, I had it in mind when talking about time-space metaphors because afaict whorf thinks that metaphor like this is unusual and lakoff's whole point is that its common and essential

2025-03-31 19:45:56 UTC

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there are SO MANY INTERESTING THINGS in native american languages, and the proportion of these papers that discusses them is way too small
and instead, there's vast quantities of text wasted on making these languages, and their speakers, into a mystical alien thing

2025-03-31 19:43:37 UTC

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but Whorf was too busy trying to make profound statements about the exotic ways of speaking and thinking that you find in native americans to actually see that there are profound similarities underneath the surface variation

2025-03-31 19:42:11 UTC

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all of that work is deeply dependent on not exoticizing native american languages, and instead simply investigating the languages that are available to the researcher, to actually try to understand it and capture its phenomena

2025-03-31 19:40:54 UTC

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our best theories for the implicit ontologies involve a conflation of thing and event (such as with situation semantics), and its not because people tried to capture Nootka, it's because English, and other very widely spoken languages, are chock full of these conflations

2025-03-31 19:39:29 UTC

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the end result is that our best theories for how sentences mean things -- in English and Nootka alike -- are identical, and it doesn't look like either language, it looks like formal logic

2025-03-31 19:37:21 UTC

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and these developments in formal semantics didn't occur because people looked at his work and said "wow we have to account for that huh"
they happened because people looked at English and said "ok, let's try to give precise rules for these sentences have meaning"

2025-03-31 19:36:02 UTC

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the entire thing requires that Whorf is actually unfamiliar with logic of the 1930s except in the most basic sense, in a kind of grade school English class way
and today, after the development of formal semantics, it's even harder to take his work seriously

2025-03-31 19:32:10 UTC

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and that raises a further point which is that in the Aristotelian syllogism, a sentence has THREE parts, not two
the subject, the predicate, and the quantifying frame AROUND BOTH
which means that the very premise of Whorf's claims are also bogus

2025-03-31 19:30:51 UTC

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in an Aristotelian syllogism, the subject is actually clearly just a predicating nominal
the subject in "All men are mortal" is "men", but grammatically the subject is "all men"

2025-03-31 19:29:43 UTC

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in fact, you'd be hard pressed to even find that in Aristotle. anyone passingly familiar with Aristotle's syllogistic logic knows full well that his syllogisms do have "subjects" and "predicates" but that those hardly correspond to actors and actions