Hachyderm @hachyderm

**Laurent Cheylus** @lcheylus@bsd.network · 11h

14h

**Chris Webb** @codedrome@mastodon.social · 18h

Chris Webb @codedrome@mastodon.social

The Soundex Algorithm in Python

This algorithm assigns identical codes to words or names which it thinks are pronounced the same. It's not brilliant but coding it in Python is an interesting project.

https://codedrome.substack.com/p/soundex-algorithm-python

CodeDrome · 1dThe Soundex Algorithm in PythonBy Chris Webb

#python #pythonprogramming #programming

**Toni Aittoniemi** @gimulnautti@mastodon.green · 1d *

1d *

Toni Aittoniemi @gimulnautti@mastodon.green

Apparently Reid Hoffmann in his new book Superagency (probably with ChatGPT) writes that: ”Personalisation increases freedom”

No. Freedom is the abundance of choices. Algorithmic personalisation is the withering of choices, a removal of agency. Freedom from thinking, if anything!

This is Orwellian doublethink, and from a big US Democratic Party donor, too.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6wXDbcUCPUPZYXeGclecSv
#AI #algorithms #neoliberalism #superagency #bookstodon

SpotifyThe Anti-Bookclub Tackles 'Superagency', 2025.03.03Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 · Episode

**C++Now** @cppnow@mastodon.social · 1d

**Civio** @civio@mastodon.social · 1d

**steve mookie kong** @mookie@chow.fan · 1d

**Frontend Dogma** @frontenddogma@mas.to · 1d

Frontend Dogma @frontenddogma@mas.to

UI Algorithms: A Tiny Undo Stack, by @julik:

https://blog.julik.nl/2025/03/a-tiny-undo-stack

Julik Tarkhanov · Mar 22UI Algorithms: A Tiny Undo StackI’ve needed this before - a couple of times. Third time I figured I needed something small, nimble - yet complete. And - at the same time - wondering about how to do it in a very simple manner. I think it worked out great, so let’s dig in. Most UIs will have some form of undo functionality. Now, there are generally two forms of it: undo stacks and version histories. A “version history” is what Photoshop history gives you - the ability to “paint through” to a previous state of the system. You can add five paint strokes, and then reveal a stroke you have made 4 steps back. But most apps won’t need that. What you will need is an undo stack, which can be specced out as follows: An undoable action gets performed and gets pushed onto the stack. If undo is requested, the stack is popped and the rollback action gets applied for the popped action. If an action was undone, you can redo that action. If you have undone 2 actions, you can redo 2 actions. If you push an undoable action onto the stack in presence of actions that can be redone, they get discarded - there is no branching, remember? If you are curious how “the big guys” used to do it - check out the NSUndoManager documentation So, as I usually like to do, I want to understand the API that would be optimal. For this use case - drawing - I had the following workflow: When you draw a stroke the input points get added to currentStroke When you release the pen the currentStroke gets appended to strokes and reset for the next stroke. I wanted something like this: let addStroke = () => strokes.push(currentPaintStroke); let removeStroke = () => strokes.pop(); undoThing.push(addStroke, removeStroke); // then, on user action undoThing.undo(); // calls removeStroke() undoThing.redo(); // calls strokes.push(...) again The perils of stack pointers Simplest thing in the world. Now, if you look at most recommended (and some existing!) implementations of an undo stack, you will find they usually make use of a stack with a pointer. Like here and here - you would have a stack, usually represented as a JS array, and some kind of pointer or an index that you would use to index into it. And while it is workable and standard, it just didn’t jive with me well. See, using an index into an array usually makes JS code susceptible to two things, which bite me every single time: Indexing into a nonexistent index - hello undefined checks Mistakes in offsets when calling Array.slice and Array.splice. Oh, and confusing slice and splice, of course. The fact that Ruby and JS have different semantics for slice - one uses the index bounds, the other uses two offsets - doesn’t help things. And what happens if an API uses offsets into a vector? Exactly: confusion whether those offsets are inclusive or exclusive. Oh, and the offsets change after you mutate the array, which makes it even more painful. Could we not index? So what came to mind was this: we effectively have two stacks, not one. We have an undoStack (things that can be rolled back) and a redoStack - things that can be rolled forward. All the things we do with our undo-redo actions actually do not change the pointer - they move things from one stack to another. And rules change between these two stacks! We erase the redoable actions when we add a new undoable action, remember? So while an undoable stack will rarely get “nullified”, the redoable stack likely will be nullified frequently. Once this became clear, the implementation practically wrote itself: function createUndoStack() { let past = []; let future = []; return { push(doFn, undoFn) { doFn(); past.push({doFn, undoFn}); // Adding a new action wipes the redoable steps future.length = 0; }, undo() { let action = past.pop(); if (action) { action.undoFn(); future.unshift(action); } }, redo() { let action = future.shift(); if (action) { action.doFn(); past.push(action); } } }; } So instead of trying to save resources by having just one array (and miserably failing with off-by-one index errors), we can embrace dynamically sized arrays and just forget indices altogether. Neat! Let’s add a couple more methods to display our UI: get canUndo() { return past.length > 0; }, get canRedo() { return future.length > 0; } The call-by-sharing problem There is a catch with our implementation though. JS has rather interesting lexical scoping rules: what is defined in the scope of the definition of the function will be referenced from within the function. This means that when we start pulling a new currentStroke our undoFn closure will not use a copy of the currentStroke it was created with, but our current one. And our doFn and undoFn must satisfy an important guarantee: they must be idempotent. No matter what the state of the surrounding system is, appending the currentStroke should always append the stroke the redoFn was created for. If we do not take care of this, the following doFn: let doFn = () => strokes.push(currentStroke) is going to grab the currentStroke from the surrounding scope (whatever its value is) and append it to the strokes array. The currentStroke at that time may be just empty. To avoid this behavior, we want our doFn to use a cloned copy of the currentStroke - current at time of definition of doFn, and we want it to do so always. If your undoable action is some kind of delete (“pop”) you want the reverse for your undoFn - the undo function must push the deleted object back into the array, and not mutate it in any way. To create a deep copy of our currentStroke, modern JS offers us a feature called structuredClone(). We can use the ... rest parameters to package any arguments into one array, which we will then clone: push(doFn, undoFn, ...withArgumentsToClone) { const clonedArgs = structuredClone(withArgumentsToClone); const action = { doWithData() { doFn(...clonedArgs); }, undoWithData() { undoFn(...clonedArgs); }, }; action.doWithData(); // Adding a new action wipes the redoable steps past.push(action); future.length = 0; } and we’ll amend our functions accordingly. Instead of closuring over currentStroke we’ll make it an argument: let appendStroke = strokes.push.bind(strokes); undoStack.push(appendStroke, () => strokes.pop(), currentStroke); with the push() of our undoStack taking care of making a deep clone for us. Nice! The complete definition then becomes: function createUndoStack() { const past = []; const future = []; return { push(doFn, undoFn, ...withArgumentsToClone) { const clonedArgs = structuredClone(withArgumentsToClone); const action = { doWithData() { doFn(...clonedArgs); }, undoWithData() { undoFn(...clonedArgs); }, }; action.doWithData(); // Adding a new action wipes the redoable steps past.push(action); future.length = 0; }, undo() { let action = past.pop(); if (action) { action.undoWithData(); future.unshift(action); } }, redo() { let action = future.shift(); if (action) { action.doWithData(); past.push(action); } }, get undoAvailable() { return past.length > 0; }, get redoAvailable() { return future.length > 0; }, clear() { past.length = 0; future.length = 0; return true; } } } export {createUndoStack}; Robust, small, and no indexing errors. My jam.

#javascript #algorithms #functionality

**InfoQ** @infoq@techhub.social · 1d

InfoQ @infoq@techhub.social

Ever wondered how to compute a function across multiple parties without revealing their inputs?

This technique can be used to split secrets among parties, perform logical operations, or count votes in a way that ensures data privacy is preserved.

Read the #InfoQ article to learn more: https://bit.ly/4cx8sAV

#BigData #Database #DataPrivacy

**Carmen Torrecillas** @carmen_tm@vis.social · 1d

Carmen Torrecillas @carmen_tm@vis.social

In case you missed it, we recently published our 2nd piece about #algorithms used in Spanish administrations.

Now it’s the turn of Veripol, once upon a time the star ️ AI for detecting false reports.

Don’t miss the "truth machine" interactive game we designed for it... According to Veripol, if you find the word “helmet” on a testimony, it is probably true or false?

#dataviz

https://civio.es/transparencia/2025/03/25/national-police-stop-using-veripol-its-star-ai-for-detecting-false-reports/

GIF

**ResearchBuzz: Firehose** @researchbuzz_firehose@rbfirehose.com · 1d

ResearchBuzz: Firehose @researchbuzz_firehose@rbfirehose.com

Stateline: Cities lead bans on algorithmic rent hikes as states lag behind. “Minneapolis on Thursday has become the fourth U.S. city to ban algorithmic rental price-fixing software, joining San Francisco, Philadelphia and Berkeley, California, in a growing wave of legislation aimed to protect renters from rental price-gouging. While momentum builds at the city level — with Portland, Oregon; […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/04/01/stateline-cities-lead-bans-on-algorithmic-rent-hikes-as-states-lag-behind/

#ai #algorithmicpricing #algorithms

**linkdrop** @linkdrop@troet.cafe · 2d

**onemanband** @onemanband@mastodon.uno · 2d *

**Susan Ville** @villebooks@mastodon.social · 3d *

**Toni Aittoniemi** @gimulnautti@mastodon.green · 4d

Toni Aittoniemi @gimulnautti@mastodon.green

My post about signing the papers for selling my tesler now has over 14000 views on TikTok.

Why? Because so many dumb people keep posting insults and the algorithm keeps sending that thing forward..

#algorithms #tiktok #tesla

**linkdrop** @linkdrop@troet.cafe · 5d

**Graham Dunning** @grahamdunning@post.lurk.org · 5d *

5d *

Graham Dunning @grahamdunning@post.lurk.org

Infinite Music Machine is a project by Michael Forrest, a generative composition which arranges human-played loops algorithmically. Originally an iOS app, its output is now available online as a kind of endless radio station.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nEegj2hD-w

YouTubeInfinite Music MachineBy Michael Forrest

#music #generative #algorithms

Continued thread

**Sebastian Büttrich @ ITU** @sebastian@social.itu.dk · 6d

Sebastian Büttrich @ ITU @sebastian@social.itu.dk

From #LeavingMeta meeting above, an interesting realization, reflection the #migration process and its difficulties:

(some) users actually like #algorithms.

to give them #content.

coming into an "empty" #network and having to choose yourself can be a turn off.
we d like to see what s "already there."

how to address this?
#starterpacks can go some of the way.
#migration in groups can help.
#social process of moving needs more attention.

it is not a #tech issue.

#fediverse #mastodon

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