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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • For one thing it will run a lot of existing and proven Matlab code.

    Another is that Octave and Matlab syntax is ambiguous about functions vs indexes (has pros and cons).

    And don’t get me wrong (I use jupyter and python a lot and really do like it) but numpy can get fundamentally weird in the way indexing maps to memory in ways that I don’t remember happening back when I mostly used Octave.

    And for the record Octave’s version of the language is vastly superior to Matlab’s. (Octave has chained indexing, broadcasting, etc. It could be that Matlab has finally copied those features but dunno. Every time I have to work in actual Matlab I want to rip my hair and teeth out due to lack of these basic trivial syntax features)

    For me the major advantage of python is having access to other non-numerical things. It’s so difficult to do anything not-numerics in Octave and Matlab or to use even basic data structures like lists and trees. Python is sort of a basic dynamic object language that with some functional programming idioms mixed in that makes some of the things that would otherwise make you scream for Lisp possible. That’s worth the numpy annoyances. Otherwise I would probably be using julia.





  • Frankly, I don’t think the privacy model of the fediverse is workable at all and it doesn’t seem to be developed and maintained by people who understand or care about safety. The centralized systems are much safer for users because you only have to trust the admins of the centralized servers.

    Fediverse’s Achilles heel is trust and all the convo and discussion about it is extremely dismissive and superficial about the realities of how the centralized systems became they way they are–much safer against stalking and mobs. Fediverse mostly gets away with this by being small and fringe.

    The fundamental flaw is laid bare every time a site defederates another about because of safety issues. It’s a tacit concession that the federation model and implementation is not safe. If you have to defederate everyone to ensure user safety, then why bother with the fediverse in the first place? This is the core problem with the fediverse as it exists today.







  • Just about everything is modifiable in matplotlib… It may not be easy, but all plotting libraries are designed to make some things easy at the expense of making other tasks more difficult. For matplotlib you just have to think about things the way matlab thinks about things… which is more computer graphics based. It can get ugly until you understand it. But if you understand how any plotting library actually works it’s not that bad. All plotting libraries ultimately are built on graphical primitives like lines and fonts and triangles and patches computing where things belong by transforming coordinates and feeding them to a layout engine. It’s not as magical as the APIs make them seem. So if you’re willing to dig into their bowels (as OP mentions) there really aren’t any many limits. Sometimes it’s actually easiest to just declare a canvas in memory and draw it all by hand. Ultimately, things are either vector or raster formats (or some abstraction that supports both) and fed into some computer graphics engine (like postscript or some OS’s or GPU canvas).

    Anyway, sometimes the easiest answer is you export and edit the labels in the final figure. One really nasty way if you don’t have PS or PDF tools is to sidetrack through Windows EMF and mess with fonts and positioning of text in PowerPoint.


  • For the types of visualizations you’re describing, the choice probably won’t matter. I view matplotlib as “matlab flavor” and ggplot2 as “R flavor”. For R-type work (a certain type of table-based stats) I just use R.

    For matlab type work (image processing, simulations, etc) I now use matplotlib. This is mostly numpy/scipy things rather than… pandas things. Python is interesting because it has things that are beyond matplotlib (VTK, etc) and beyond matlab. Typically when you’re prototyping in matlab you’re assuming you will have to rewrite in a different system eventually, but with python you can move the prototype further down to more polished prototype easily.

    I do a lot of image processing and am too familiar with matlab, so matplotlib generally came naturally for translating that prior knowledge. So really it depends on what sorts of things you are familiar with, languages you use, and would want to do in the future. I think with either choice you will eventually hit some wall of difficulty.

    There are also more visualization and plot focused things (TeX family or PostScript and PDF) as well as the “processing” language.

    I use R for… not-image-type analysis stats and generate plots in R using R’s plotting. I mostly use python for matlab-type things and matplotlib seems more natural for that.

    Julia is on my todo-list and I have heard good things about their plotting ecosystem but I have not looked into it.

    Incidentally VTK is extremely well designed for the type of language it’s based on and the problems its solving… but that’s not really 2D plotting.


  • Are you certain it is the exact same comment or post? I think people are deleting everything (via scripts or whatever–some scripts are known to not work/only appear to be working–particularly ones that make use of pushshift which reddit destroyed a few months prior to this incident), but everything isn’t actually everything because of the way reddit hides content in certain situations. When people have posted screenshots it has been content from subreddits that had be set private during protests and reopened. Reddit annoyingly hides your own content from yourself in many circumstances.

    I’m not saying these undeletes definitely do not happen, but people have needed to delete content on Reddit for reasons the pre-date the protests. The legal risks to reddit for them to be caught restoring content that a user deliberately deleted is significant. So unless a whistleblower or compelling evidence emerges Occam’s razor will go with reddit bugs and “features”. Everyone knows reddit is bug-ridden.


  • Leverage for what purpose? To fix reddit? Let reddit die or not die.

    Reddit has always come after mirrors and they will easily get courts to take down the instances. Don’t forget that prior to the API change they came after pushshift.

    Additionally, anyone mirroring reddit on the moral basis that the content is owned by the creators and reddit is an exploitative rentseeker, has an obligation to not become a rentseeker themselves. This means things like ensuring that content that users voluntarily delete is also deleted in the mirrors. Reddit in fact had a large battle with pushshift about this years ago such that pushshift supposedly now only keeps history of moderator and admin edits. I agree with that ethically.

    And in many cases you may be legally required to do this. To be clear Reddit made pushshift change to respecting user delete requests because of legal exposure and compliance risks.

    Not to mention that you don’t really know that anyone intends their content to be mirrored on sites they do not use. Particularly now that Reddit seems to be forcing private subreddits to be open. There’s no moral high ground for doing this.


  • I don’t like the idea. It seems like those fake websites that scrape stackoverflow and SEO to ruin Google search. Avoiding those sites are among the reasons people type “reddit” into searches. People want authentic interactions and I think mirroring reddit into Fediverse lacks authenticity and undermines its authenticity. Content here should be from people who are here.

    If someone wants to assimilate content from reddit into something new and post it here that’s good. That means the person is here and can be interacted with.

    If someone wants to repost their own content here, that’s also fine. They are here to interact with.

    I just really think it’s a bad idea to deliberately build a ghost town and think people will move in.