tubalcain
1yr ago
tubalcain
2yr ago
How did you find Flowers for Algernon? I remember it being very sad, particularly towards the end where Charlie goes to a lesson just like at the beginning of the book and his teacher runs out crying after realizing he had reverted to his old self. I also thought the author exaggerated or maybe found it hard to portray Charlie as being smart in a convincing way at his peak, especially implying he had learnt several languages during the experiment (which took less than a year iirc). This felt silly and the book would have been stronger without it.
tubalcain
2yr ago
Probably Effective Altruism, a kind of meta-charity that seeks to find the most bang for your charity buck. The posts were about a recent scandal surrounding one of its backers, Sam Bankman-Fried and his company FTX.
tubalcain
2yr ago
It feels like there's a watershed threshold, where the system realizes that there's a big split between blue and red tribe videos/creates and their fans. The system defaults to blue but if you manage to convince it you swing the other way, it will push red stuff hard and stop showing you blue stuff. I'm sure there this is not the only axis though.
tubalcain
2yr ago
The better we became at compiling such a dataset, the more restricted we became in how honest we can be about what we actually seek for in a mate, both with a dispassionate survey taker and even with ourselves. Social desirability bias towards not appearing shallow is so great as to make this sort of survey a non-starter in my view.
tubalcain
2yr ago
I think the suicide one is from Sarah Perry's old blog "the view from hell" and rescue one is something I heard an acquaintance say.
tubalcain
2yr ago
Is there a name for referring to a person or other living being as a noun referring to a situation that it was involved in? The two examples that come to mind are:
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"a suicide" as opposed to "a person who committed suicide".
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"my dog was a rescue" as opposed to "my dog was rescued".
tubalcain
2yr ago
That does look like what the presentation I had in mind was talking about. Thank you very much!
tubalcain
2yr ago
This is probably a long shot but about a decade ago I came across some kind of paper that I failed to find it again, which described the cochlea as a constant time, linear space (frquency domain) discrete fourier transform device, and contrasted it with the Fast Fourier Transform. It also talked about how this inspired a design for an electronic spectrum analyser. The device had the same spiral layout as a cochlea but worked at radio frequencies. I don't recall anything else about besides it probably being a PDF and probably being lecture notes, but I found it fascinating and if it rings a bell to anyone here I would really appreciate a link. I would also be interested in any similar works for other organs too. Thanks
tubalcain
2yr ago
I struggle to remember a third racist, maybe I didn't take note of him. Is the truck driver who says something like "welcome to Revachol" (and your partner takes offence to it) the first or the third in your list?
tubalcain
2yr ago
Python removes pointers (which are a pain-point for many programmers)
Just to nitpick this sentence and say nothing about the rest of your essay, Python hardly removes pointers. It just removes the ability to do pointer arithmetic, just like Javascript, go, c# and many other newer languages do. The essence of pointer, having a cheap way to refer to a load of data elsewhere, is still there. If anything Python removes the ability to refer to data in any other way. You pass a class instance by value and you can't inline a struct inside another like you can in C.
And Python even gives you a new way to subtly shoot yourself in the foot over pointers, which is the is operator. 5 is 5 and True is True but 5**55 is not 5**55 (on my system). In fairness the only real use case for this is to check for thing is not None when dealing with optional arguments, or perhaps more niche a is b checks when you're absolutely sure a and b come from the same finite pool of objects, as a way to optimize away a more expensive deep a == b check.
tubalcain
2yr ago
The oauth angle cannot be overstated. Even CTOs can fall for it. PageFair was hacked this way a few years ago.
My employer has a whole bunch of intranet tooling all tied to my corporate gmail account. Every now and then I get randomly signed out so I have to click the right account and proceed, sighing and paying little attention. If you presented me with a doctored link that duplicated the google account login popup, I would probably fall for it.
tubalcain
2yr ago
In addition to directly injection malware as the other commenters have stated, clicking on a link will also reveal certain information about the person and their device:
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The IP address, which can be mapped to a physical location with at least city scale accuracy.
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The browser's user agent, which typically contains the OS, browser and its version. This may then be used to find exploits that are likely to work in a follow up attack.
tubalcain
2yr ago
Is it hypocritical to hold this view while also making a comfortable living writing proprietary software :)
I wish there was a way to thread the needle and have decent open source software in more domains. Like you say there's no technical reason why proprietary software couldn't be made more open but I think realistically the users like yourself who could actually do something productive with it are a tiny minority, and most people will just try to get the software to do what they want, give up if it's not important or fork over cash if they absolutely need to. Presenting them with an SDK or source tree will yield anything useful. So there's probably no economic advantage to be found in opening up, and keeping all possible control over software is probably the safest position to be in. The ethical get outcompeted by the cutthroat.
tubalcain
2yr ago
I think so too. Calling it "manly" feels like sarcasm to me - that the standard for counting as a trans boy is so low, no one cares if the hypothetical girl shows interest in any manly interest.
tubalcain
2yr ago
Fining people relative to their net worth also means the rich are held to a higher moral (or at least legal) standard. For a marginal case, what lawyer will bother making a decent case against a poor transgressor, if there's no payout. It's like a contemporary incarnation of noblesse oblige.
tubalcain
2yr ago
I thought China already had Loongson as a homegrown CPU. It already shipped as part of the Lemote PCs, for over a decade now. Not remotely competitive with Western/Taiwanese offerings but able to maybe browse the web and host a service or two. Are(/were?) these not built in China?
tubalcain
2yr ago
I agree. A parallel can be drawn between the invention of AI generated art and that of of optimizing compilers. They effectively replaced hand generated assembly code and I don't want to go back to a world where every programmer has to write their own assembly. It's much more productive to use higher level languages and reason about data structures and control flow, not registers and jumps. And just like AI art generators can make better art than the average person, a compiler can generate better code than even a competent programmer used to high level languages.
This doesn't make an understanding of assembly and the intricacies of the various families of processors any less useful in the narrower domain of compiler design. So maybe a keen understanding of art will be no less useful in a world filled with AI generated art, where the true connoisseur will appreciate the hand crafted art, while the masses will happily stare at machine created images.
Another comparison is procedural generated. I'm perpetually disappointed by it in games like Dwarf Fortress or the randomly generated side quests that games like Borderlands use - not because a human didn't put effort into each individual character name and backstory or quest goal, but because they're bland and boring for the most part, and it soon becomes obvious that even though there is infinite variety on the surface level, it all operates under a rigid structure.
a soldier should long for a world that doesn't need soldiers
Rather ironic given your flair!
tubalcain
2yr ago
Does the coaxial cable run to the outhouse? You can get a copper ethernet to 75 ohm coaxial adapter on either end. This one claims a 2.4 km range and 1gbps throughput but is not cheap. Another option would be ethernet over copper cable (VDSL) or even a two port switch halfway acting as a range extender, so you get two ~90m cables, which is within the cat5/6 spec. Perle makes the latter two, though I can't say how true their claims are.
How would you pull the fiber through the electrical conduit? If I understand correctly it runs the full 600 feet. I struggled a bit pushing cables under 2 or 3 m of floor. Is there some special technique to minimize friction?
Have you looked at TCC? It claims to support GAS assembly (as input and intermediate code for C compiling) and compiles for windows (and other platforms). I didn't read all the code but it looks reasonably structured. It's small enough you can incorporate it into a larger project, or use it as a library.
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