Howdy, everyone!

Hey everyone, I'm plasmon, a physics undergrad.

You can find me on Cohost
or on my neocities page (which is undergoing maintenance thanks to what I think is something with the API).

In any case, I'm pretty happy to be here—it's cool to have a hidden spot on the net, and I plan on just hanging out and chilling. Owing to a lack of math typesetting and stuff, I don't think I'll be able to do much of anything talking about some in-depth physics or math, but that's alright—I wouldn't want to risk ruining the napkins here with my chicken-scratch.

My main interests are

Physics (shockingly) – mostly condensed matter physics, strongly correlated systems in particular, but quantum optics is also quite interesting. You could just say I'm interested in quantum many-body problems, but that's a tad too general.
Music – I've been listening to a lot of Coil and Autechre recently, if that's any indication.
Video games – My favorite game of all time is *Deus Ex*, but I've been playing a metric shit-ton of *Need for Speed Underground 2* lately (and I might write a review on the game).

In any case, I hope you're all doing well tonight.

tracker

Hi ~plasmon, and welcome to the Midnight!

You can type your posts in Gemtext here, and it turns out that there is a way to post mathematical notation in this format. You just create a preformatted text section (surrounded by lines containing triple backticks as in Markdown), and then place ASCII-art rendered math formulas and plots inside it.

Here's an example:

pprint(Integral(sqrt((1+x)/(x**2+3)),x)+Sum(1/j**2,(j,1,n)))

                       n
                      ____
⌠                     ╲
⎮      ________        ╲   1
⎮     ╱ x + 1           ╲  ──
⎮    ╱  ──────  dx +    ╱   2
⎮   ╱    2             ╱   j
⎮ ╲╱    x  + 3        ╱
⌡                     ‾‾‾‾
                     j = 1

plot(sin(x),(x,-2*pi,2*pi))

0.99830 |       ...                        ...
        |      /   \                      /   \
        |     /     .                    /     .
        |    .                          .
        |            .                          .
        |   .                          .
        |             .                          .
        |  .                          .
0.05872 | -------------.--------------------------.--------------
        | .             .            .             .            /
        |                           .                          .
        |                .                          .
        |                          .                          .
        |                 .                          .
        |                         .                          .
        |                  .     /                    .     /
        |                   \   /                      \   /
-0.9983 |                    ...                        ...
          -6.28319                   0                          6.28319

inquiry

Welcome, plasmon!

I've not done any reading along the lines of physics in quite a while, so this is the first time I've seen the term "quantum optics". Care to share a brief take on it?

immy

Welcome! I hope you enjoy your time here at the pub

zampano

Welcome to the party! I usually find the occasional bits of physics I stumble across to be fun, but I lack the background to get into the more esoteric stuff that I find more interesting. Maybe one day :)

Our music tastes definitely overlap, at least as far as those two go! I’m an old (in both senses of the word) goth, so like a lot of their ilk. Sometimes more aggressive stuff, depending on my mood, of course.

Deus Ex is a classic for a reason! Meanwhile, I actually picked up one of the more recent-ish NFS games on PS5 due to it being like $2 or something. Haven’t played it yet, as the backlog is real (and large).

Finally, a question: how have you found Cohost? I’ve avoided Twitter like the plague I believe it to be, and while I dabbled with Mastodon, I never really got into the habit of using it. It’s too easy to feel like shouting into an empty room, y’know?

plasmon

Cohost is alright. I wouldn't say it's perfect in any way, but the people on there are cool enough—they're mostly from the Pacific Northwest, and sometimes a bit corny, annoying, and/or cliqueish, but pretty good all the same; the site's staff are quite transparent and, while not always perfect, *try* to make Cohost as good as possible, which is more than I can say for Twitter or Bluesky.

Cohost's community is quite sociable. I'm a fairly small poster on there, so I don't make a ton of hit posts super often, but when I do it's always fun—metrics such as the number of likes or reposts are deliberately obscured, so comments are the only real indicator of how big a post is. (A lot of users call Cohost posts "chosts," though I don't.) Interacting on Cohost is similar to Tumblr, where you can make long-form posts, repost other people's stuff (and add your own thoughts), or add a comment. My interactions on Cohost have been pretty alright—unlike a lot of other places on the internet, I've actually had really constructive disagreements with people on Cohost, and while there are a few definite assholes, most of the people are cool.

zampano

Thanks for the reply! I may have to check it out.

turboblack

Cohost its a new Github?

Good morning ~plasmon, welcome to The Midnight!

~bartender? Coffee with cream an sugar --- its too early in the morning for experiments. Thanks!

Physics. Yes. I have spent a good part of my lifetime with that. I did venture into the realm of astrophysics. Symbiotic double stars, äh, white dwarfs accreting hydrogen-rich material from their companion red giant or similar. The dwarf grows a skin of "degenerated" matter, and at some point nuclear fusion can set in an produce a giant surface explosion. One of these objects, T Cor Bor, is expected to trigger soonish. So yes, even in astronomy your favorite comes in quite easily :)

However, I have changed fields towards computing, working at the blurry line which separates hardware (like wires, components, and controllers), enhanced with funny things like FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays; which are configurable hardware, if you will), and pure software (starting at obscure boot loaders, loading a not so obscure boot loader, loading and starting an operating systems kernel and it's associated user land).

Wherever you go, have the appropriate amount of fun!

Cheers!

inquiry

> However, I have changed fields towards computing, working
> at the blurry line which separates hardware (like wires,
> components, and controllers), enhanced with funny things
> like FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays; which are
> configurable hardware, if you will), and pure software
> (starting at obscure boot loaders, loading a not so obscure
> boot loader, loading and starting an operating systems
> kernel and it's associated user land).

Huh. Kind of reminds me of a biological body, and then an increasingly complex idea of a self that starts with the thought "I", and somehow becomes (not unlike html..) a huge mess requiring priests, therapists, alcohol, war, etc. to maybe sorta kinda not really manage... so that said "I" is essentially a boot loader of all the rest sometimes a-bit-too-honestly-for-most referred to as "mental illness"... :-)

inquiry

This replaces the original reply content because said content didn't post correctly and now seemingly cannot be deleted by https://midnight.pub/replies/8208/remove, which annoyingly leads to seeing this:

server error: pq: update or delete on table
"replies" violates foreign key constraint
"notifications_reply_id_fkey" on table "notifications"

It would be nice to know what characters in my original need escaping so the post-by-script method doesn't lead to this.