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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beka_valentine_at_kolektiva.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsg4qck2v44wfy2eqkm0krx5v4q0k03fyqw473l0sa573nzcz0hn2gpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dspsrlh6

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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Last Notes

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

2025-09-20 05:42:12 UTC

PSL true believers are so funny lol

2025-08-04 22:10:44 UTC

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

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?

2025-05-06 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 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

2025-04-01 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 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

2025-03-27 17:21:25 UTC

the very idea of The Dark Ages is itself responsible for more intellectual stultification than the medieval period itself ever was

2025-03-27 17:07:05 UTC

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and yet at the same time, famous logicians such as W. V. O. Quine were critiquing the very _idea_ of modal logic as late as the late 50s and early 60s, calling it nonsensical, which was summarily demolished by Kripe and Joyal, and which seems utterly absurd in hindsight

2025-03-27 17:04:12 UTC

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i mean, look, I'm a functional programmer and type theory enthusiast, intuitionistic logic is my jam, and I think these things can certainly make you a better programmer
but its super weird to me to imagine that Aristotelian logic is some mental shackle

2025-03-27 17:01:36 UTC

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basically, "non-Aristotelian logic" means just "non-classical logic"
its such a quaint way of thinking to suppose that mastering any of these forms of logic is some kind of magical cognitive advantage

2025-03-27 16:59:57 UTC

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this was written in the 1940s, so formal logic hadn't reeeaaally gotten very far yet, but what constitutes "non-Aristotelian logic" today?
here are some instances from wikipedia:
- computability logic
- dynamic semantics
- many-valued logic
- intuitionistic logic
- linear logic

2025-03-27 16:58:26 UTC

it's funny to me how calcified some early 20th century thought is
like, A. E. van Vogt's science fiction series The World of Null A has as a major premise that people who can master non-Aristotelian logic are somehow mystically more cognitively capable

2025-03-26 16:55:16 UTC

why does all store bought oat milk have a weird sharpness to it, but home made oat milk doesnt?

2025-03-25 18:06:39 UTC

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don't i know it!
he also lived here, up in the TL/polk gulch, and also there's a street named after him a little south of china town :)
also he worked as a pinkerton in the flood building, which has a maltese falcon prop from the 1941 movie in the lobby, and his favorite steakshop is on the back side of the building!

2025-03-25 18:00:13 UTC

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i'll have to check out his stuff. i've only seen some film versions, and maybe heard one short story, if that?

2025-03-25 17:57:33 UTC

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i swear, this author is so weird. he'll write stuff like "After nearly getting shot and thrown off a fire escape, I felt terrible. The only cure was a Floozy Flip, which consists of a shot of rum, a shot of vermouth, three maraschino cherries, and pickle juice. So anyway, I went down to the dames apartment-.."

2025-03-24 19:19:18 UTC

listening to this hardboiled detective short story Murder is Bad Luck, and hoo boy what a story. it describes in detail no less than 5 mixed drinks
why? who knows! the author just liked his mixed drinks i guess lol

2025-03-19 01:36:27 UTC

hot take: lenses were a net negative for haskell

2025-03-04 05:31:39 UTC

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tbh i quite like wagner's work

2025-02-25 04:06:39 UTC

watching a noir film from 1946 called Lady in the Lake, which is a first person film. very strange thing to see in such an old film

2025-02-24 04:57:35 UTC

something really lovely about the 1992 Batman cartoon is how retro it is
the setting, despite being high tech, is aesthetically pure 1930s, and the art style is also very 1930s, with elements of WPA graphics and the 1941 Superman cartoon

2025-02-22 00:53:01 UTC

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i dont think they're ready yet to replace manual labor

2025-02-22 00:52:38 UTC

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i have seen them

2025-02-22 00:21:44 UTC

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i basically can't see any outcome in the next 5 years that doesn't involve a significant negative social consequence from this. every option seems bad, and every blend of options seems bad

2025-02-21 21:50:38 UTC

what if they rebooted Lain except this time she's obsessed with breakfast and they called it Cereal Experiments Lain, ever thought about that, huh?

2025-02-21 10:43:30 UTC

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so if @Peter_Turchin@twitter.com is right about Elite Overproduction being a major driving force in societal upheavals, then we may be facing a sudden cans of tumult where the current elites in tech are locked into a downward spiral and refuse to accept it

2025-02-21 10:41:14 UTC

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the ones who remain are now more precarious and vulnerable to wage cuts etc because the labor pool has doubled overnight

2025-02-21 10:40:28 UTC

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if you can replace coders, you can replace most knowledge workers, managers, etc etc
which means that some of the most privileged people, who have had only upward expectations, are now suddenly cut off from that life path with no alternatives

2025-02-21 10:39:04 UTC

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but if they can reduce software dev staffing by even 50%, that's going to be a PERMANENT reduction. the code might be terrible but that's fine for corporations
and that's going to have major societal impacts

2025-02-21 10:37:32 UTC

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like maybe it doesn't work out, and we only end up making a huge mess of brittle janky fucked up code that we can't deal with and that needs to be scrapped entirely and replaced. that's plausible. ok sure

2025-02-21 10:35:44 UTC

the current trends in AI are worrying tbh. i've been a skeptic toward this stuff for a while but recent performance on coding tasks, especially from deepseek r1, is REALLY good, and when folx say they'll be making devs dramatically less necessary in <5 years, i take it seriously

2025-02-16 09:58:40 UTC

i think it's good that telekinesis isn't real and that i don't have that skill because oh boy

2025-02-04 03:23:11 UTC

the last few days of governmental deconstruction only go to prove my point about the vulnerabilities inherent in relying on the state for things that you should be doing as mutual aid via ad hoc working groups

2025-02-03 22:37:07 UTC

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for SOME things, full automation is certainly. like, anything that's purely information retrieval, thats fine. automating some work or whatever, we do that plenty as it is
but for a lot of the "canonical" examples of these things, you don't want an agent program to do it ever

2025-02-03 22:35:12 UTC

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theres also the other problem here, which is that you probably don't want a computer to actually act autonomously in any real capacity. like, only a fool would give their debit card to a machine and then trust it to go around making purchases, for instance

2025-02-03 22:33:30 UTC

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but now, you see, theres the problem, because these projects CYC and SUMO are monumental efforts by people. i mean, for corporations, the money investment is actually probably not that large actually, but there's no obvious profit in making them

2025-02-03 22:30:39 UTC

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modern versions of CYC and SUMO might have these features, actually, i dunno, i haven't checked recently
if you have that kind of ability, tho, then you can express the meaning of what that transfer form does, in a way that a computer can "understand"

2025-02-03 22:28:13 UTC

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or, well, not an operational theory per se but rather the static logical components of such a theory, things like "having a value" etc. and probably also some core actions that aren't really decomposable like "transfer" is

2025-02-03 22:25:40 UTC

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but this is also perfectly machine interpretable
but to make this kind of thing work, we want a fairly robust ontology of some sort (maybe CYC, more likely SUMO, more likely still nothing is quite right), and we'd need not just ontology but operational theory

2025-02-03 22:23:53 UTC

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except, you know, in a formal logic of some sort
this would be some kind of bare minimum for what the spec of a bank account transfer does, completely separate from all other considerations of implementation

2025-02-03 22:22:30 UTC

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if <USER> is authorized for "WITHDRAW" on <ACCT1> and "DEPOSIT" on <ACCT2>, and <AMT> is not greater than <ACCT1>'s balance, then <ACCT1>'s balance will decrease by <AMT>, and <ACCT2>'s balance will increase by <AMT>

2025-02-03 22:20:46 UTC

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but a very high level spec
for the bank account example, for instance, the spec for the transfer form would probably talk abstractly about things like permissions, account balance changes, etc.
something like...

2025-02-03 22:19:24 UTC

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so how do we tell machines? well, the closest we can really come is with various kinds of logic. but we don't want to like .. reveal the implementation details of things, even tho that would "suffice" in some perverse sense
instead what we want is to provide some kind of spec

2025-02-03 22:14:25 UTC

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computers, on the other hand, can't really do this. i mean, maybe with LLMs there's something we can do these days, that's an interesting question to ask, but barring AI magic, computers can't just "read" and understand things or make educated guesses. they have to be told

2025-02-03 22:13:06 UTC

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now, how do you know what these links will do? mostly you don't. i mean, not really. but you can make some pretty educated guesses by exploratory clicking, reading, etc. so when you come across the text that says "Transfer money between accounts", etc. you can make a good guess

2025-02-03 22:08:04 UTC

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if you DONT have access to an account, you won't get that first set of links, and so you won't be able to click "transfers", and you won't get that second form
your _capabilities_ at any moment are conveyed to you by links and forms _in the hypertext itself_

2025-02-03 22:06:46 UTC

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for instance, you might get a "transfer" link, and if you click this, youll get a page with a form letting you specify the parameters to the transfer (source and destination accounts, amount, date) and a "submit" button you can click

2025-02-03 22:05:40 UTC

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lets take a classic example of REST/HATEOAS: a bank account. the HATEOAS article linked above has this example if you want to read that, but the TLDR is: if you have permission to access to a bank account, then when you view the url, you get back some links to other capabilities

2025-02-03 22:04:03 UTC

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but the standard web APIs as they exist right now are pretty limited in what they can convey to machines. w3c specs for HTML are pretty limited in what kinds of meanings are representable using the standard alone

2025-02-03 22:01:15 UTC

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in fact, machine-interpretability of true REST+HATEOAS applications has been a key component of both its spread -- because hypermedia browsers need SOME machine interpretability to function -- and also its extension
search engines, for instance, rely on machine interpretability

2025-02-03 21:59:55 UTC

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pretty much any time someone talks about true REST applications, using HATEOAS, its basically exclusively oriented towards human users. which isn't to say that it can't be machine interpreted, but it's overwhelmingly not machine _oriented_