aaplok

I agree with everything else, but I didn't interpret the HN title as you did. My reading of it was that the Linux community responded by developing a privacy-friendly alternative to MS invasive software.

So not only is the title clickbaity and not reflective of the actual content, it's also misleading enough that two completely opposite interpretations can be made.

> Many magicians had excellent reputations [...] She maintains that this could only be the result of a consistent record of success.

For a modern version of this phenomenon, check out any discussion about chatGPT here on HN. Things haven't changed all that much.

I feel the same way about reading beautiful language that I feel about reading a beautiful mathematical proof. It's not that it doesn't have substance, it's that the substance is put together in such such an elegant way that you don't just marvel at the content but also at its presentation.

It is very different, indeed possibly the opposite of a show off of cleverness. It is beautiful because it feels that it's just the right way to do it.

My experience has been that performance has gone down significantly since students have access to genAI. I probably get a fifth of the number of high performers that I was getting before. So I'm not worried about the hypothetical tiny minority who can write good prompts. I am worried about the larger group who could have done good work but ended relying on chatGPT too much.

I never really understood why whataboutism is meant to be a universally rejected objection.

In this particular case GGP hints that Israel gets favour treatment to gets away with anything. GP then retorts that others get away with as much, which is a valid objection to that claim, since it is invalidates the supposed Israeli exception. Neither GP nor GGP claimed that anybody should get away with crimes.

Neither the claim nor the objection are backed by any argument so the whole thread isn't very illuminating, but it has become in fashion to bring up whataboutism against any attempt at contextualising the discussion and I find this a curious trend.

It's not too late for you to decide to spend more time with your daughter and less time working. You both could go part-time. If you are afraid that your career won't wait, remember that neither will your children. You might need to discuss with your wife about this, but it is a decision that you should make together, not her or you alone.

My wife and I have taken about equal share in raising our kids and honestly I am prouder to have managed to spend time with my children growing up and to be married to a woman who doesn't have to rely on me to survive than of anything I could have done in a slightly more successful career.

> Why not just use unicode bold and italics instead of hacks?

To be able to search and grep?

Treating prisoners like animals isn't showing compassion for anyone, neither the criminals nor their victims. Refuting the claim that even criminals should be treated humanely by saying we should also show compassion for victims is not logical.

The victims of crimes absolutely should receive much empathy and compassion. They should receive free and unencumbered medical (including mental health), legal, and financial support to help them reconstruct themselves. Paid for by the community. They should be guaranteed safety, even more than the rest of the population.

That is compassion. Harvesting their aggressor's heart and brain for teaching purpose, on the other hand, is not.

In principle every notebook is a DAG, since the cells are evaluated in a certain order. You could even infer the DAG from Jupyter notebooks, at least when the execution number is stored (the In[...] part).

There is a lot of value in imposing restrictions on the cells (like no reallocation of global variables) to be able to infer the DAG more directly like they do here (or Pluto.jl does). It is simpler, it can serve a dual purpose by being a normal runnable python/Julia/whatever program. Another advantage that I didn't see mentioned in TFA is parallelism. There is some interesting potential there I think.

There are many nonconvex functions where every local minimum is global, and even many nonconvex functions with a unique local minimum (which is de facto global). Convex methods can fail on those.

The reason why GD and friends are a good choice in deep learning is that computing the gradient is cheap (and approximating it even more so). Every descent method relies on solving a subproblem of sorts, typically projecting the current iterate on a sublevel set of an approximation of the function, for some definition of projection. With GD, it's as cheap as it gets, just subtract a shrinked version of the gradient. Subproblems in other algorithms are a lot more expensive computationally, particularly at high dimensions. So more efficient as in requiring fewer function evaluations, yes, but at the cost of doing a lot more work at each step.

I recommend you to read the book, I think that the film doesn't (can't?) do it justice. The book being written from the point of view of the narrator is crucial: the reader is put in the mind of a pedophile (we are told that he is in jail). I also suggest imagining the girl as a child, before puberty at the start of the story.

The case study of Lolita is interesting because there are two competing readings. The fact that the character is often associated to seduction and jailbait in popular culture is arguably symptomatic of a culture of blaming the victims of this kind of crimes. Obviously not all men are perverts but I sometimes wonder if those of us who aren't don't underestimate the number of those who are.

Actually in the book she is really not. She is a 12 year old child being sexualised in the mind of the narrator. She doesn't act seductively, the narrator sees whatever she does in a perverted way.

There is a famous interview on French TV where Nabokov says as much (in French) [0]

[0] https://www.ina.fr/actualites-ina/mon-archive-preferee/mon-a...

> there is a complete disconnect between wealthy liberals trying to virtue-signal, and the communities they pretend to want to help.

There is a disconnect between wealthy people and poor people regardless of political views. It's convenient to call out the hypocrisy of the rich liberals, but that doesn't make the conservatives a better alternative for the disadvantaged.

That's all the more deplorable that the guy from TFA denounces community activists. These people may have an agenda as he says (though not more than any other people publicly involved in politics), but most of them are presumably from the community they defend. Who else would represent the poor communities otherwise?

I wasn't implying anything. Because your use of the word "people" left the context very vague, I was just cautiously trying to not speak in your name when discussing the people who are pushing me to teach students how to use chatgpt.

With respect to deterring teaching I totally agree that we should go for it. There are ways to mitigate the value of cheating and ways to promote the value of learning, both of which are deterrents. Personally I like having lots of small tasks that build and follow on one another. If the student is working and trying to learn it makes sense and we get to reinforce the high level skills that matter. If the student is cheating it should become increasingly harder to keep a consistent story.

However if we turn this into a cop and robbers game that's what we're going to get.

As for the focus on GPA I think that the tide is turning. Employers need to find an alternative that doesn't eat their time.

And yes universities are rackets and aren't good value employers. They don't even offer job security anymore.

> What bothers me is that people have told me that I should just allow AI for literally everything because it's the future and you should be teaching them the future or something,

I wonder what "people" told you that. My personal experience is that such advice usually comes from people who understand neither AI nor what I teach. Most of them are university administrators of sorts, and AI is a problem for them more than for me.

Introductory classes teach skills that can be performed reasonably well by AI. Those skills are the foundation you need to build higher level skills. Just like kids need to know how to read to be functional in society and in their later classes, despite screen readers doing an excellent job.

When I teach a foundations class this is my focus, and I don't fool myself or my students into thinking that they will be using those skills directly, but I try to convey the idea that the skills pervade through much of what they will later learn and do.

However that means that I cannot force students to learn. They can cheat, and it's easy, and I prefer spending my efforts on helping the learners than catching the cheaters.

The university administrators, however, are in the business of selling diplomas, which are only worth what the lowest common deminator is worth. So cheaters are a big problem for them. Typically for such people, they just bury their heads in the sand and prefer to claim that teaching students to use chatGPT (that lowest common denominator) is where the value is.

Nice article, and nicely written.

> My code from attempt #3 was effectively using base-255, with each byte acting as a single "digit".

I think the author means base-256, not base-255.

Yes I did. Thanks.

I see. Thanks for the explanation, it makes sense how the law on playgrounds would backfire.

It's still confusing to me that to prevent being accused of targeting homeless addicts they'd make homeless drug use illegal so to speak.

As a complete outsider, it's an interesting situation to try to understand. I appreciate the patience of people in this thread replying to my naive questions.

Right. So creating a new law won't change anything then? They should rather work on making sure the existing laws are being enforced.

> Rather, mostly folks who had terrible home lives and were basically screwed up from the beginning.

> Folks in far shittier situations than them play their hands far better.

Aren't you contradicting yourself here? If these folks were screwed up from the beginning doesn't this mean they had no hand to play from the start?

There are many, many folks in third world countries that don't make it through life too well either. Life is pretty doomed for you if you're just born in Sudan right now for example. Yet some, very few, of them will succeed in extirpating themselves from the situation.

Statistically there will always be people who fare better than others, through a combination of sweat, blood, and luck. I don't know if it's fair to have "almost no sympathy" for the ones who were too stupid and unlucky to be winners.

But then why not make the problematic behaviour itself what is illegal? Aggressive panhandling should be illegal, regardless of whether the perpetrators were on drugs. It makes people, particularly those that are vulnerable to violent crime, unsafe. Make being raving mad in the streets illegal too. I am surprised that there isn't already a law in BC that does. With regards to being a zombie on public benches, it's hard for me to assess why that is problematic. On the other hand making drug use on children playground illegal seems like an elementary rule to me.

What I mean is that none of these issues seem to be really well addressed by the broad sweep of a "don't be problematic" law.

As someone who doesn't live in an area with a similar liberal law regarding drug use the article was very confusing to me. Perhaps you can help me understand.

The article keeps talking about "problematic" drug use, but I don't understand what that means. When is drug use problematic and when is it unproblematic? They claim that from now on they'll be able to arrest people who disturb the peace, but then aren't there laws already that already make it illegal to disturb the peace, irrespective of drug use? Is there a special kind of problematic behaviour that is not OK when consuming drugs, but is OK otherwise?? Having no experience with the situation, this all feels quite strange.

Same thing with hospitals: can't they just restrict the unmonitored use of drugs within medical facilities rather than some ambiguous notion of problematic use?

Overall, reading the article makes me feel that some people don't like seeing crackheads consume in public (which I understand), and since these people vote, a law is passed that had no head nor tail. I don't see how the law addresses the root of any issue.

But this is not what I asked though.

GP, and you in turn, both contend that the employees are not under a democratic regime within the corporation. I understood that point the first time it was made, and I don't disagree with it, so I didn't really need you to explain it again to me.

Democracy is a form of political organisation, and since GP brought it up to describe the relationship of the employee to the corporation, I infer that they assimilate the corporation to a polis. So what I am asking is what you would call the type of political organisation that describes the relationship of the employee to this "polis" ( the corporation). Feudalism? Monarchy? Theocracy? It's likely none of these three either, but then what describes it best?

Edit: For what it's worth, your description of the corporation as a democracy, where the employees provide labour but are not consulted on decisions sounds like Athenian democracy where the employees play the role of the slaves. I think that this is in tune with the conventional Marxist view of salaried work in capitalist societies. So I guess that's one answer to my question.

> Your corporate job isn't a democracy.

If corporate jobs aren't democratic, what kind of political organisation are they under?

Your response confuses me. The discussion in the thread includes comments about people keeping 1000 tabs, and other people saying that tabs, bookmarks and history are the same thing. I was responding that it doesn't feel very practical for my own usage. Can you explain what you mean in your response?

If they serve the same purpose, doesn't that open the possibility to use one of them for something else?

I'm also in the group that never keeps more than 10 tabs open, much fewer usually. The idea of having all my bookmarks displayed in a long sequence of tabs sounds horrific to me personally. It would just be an overwhelming amount of information.

I would love it if bookmarks and history were easier to search and retrieve. Having them displayed in a thousand tabs on my screen constantly not so much.

To count the length of the segment, we count the number of unit segments that compose it. Start with 1 (the first segment) and count up to 4 (the fourth segment), yielding a length of 4. We're consistent with the units: we are adding up lengths to get a length (metres, yards, or whatever).

Counting (ie, adding up) points gives a number of points, which isn't a unit for lengths. Starting the enumeration from zero is a hack to recover the previous process of adding up unit lengths.

This hack only works in this specific context of conversion. If you want to count points (say, the number of corners in the triangle) you'd need to start from 1.

What about history? Don't people perceive it as even more unnecessary than maths? Shouldn't we expect to see all sorts of theories on how history should be taught in more practical ways if your explanation is correct?

I'm only picking on history or languages as examples. I could have picked literature, or almost anything, really. A lot of what is taught at school isn't necessarily a bunch of super applied skills

There are lots of bad teachers in every discipline, and I'm sure that everything could be taught a lot better. I'm still not getting why maths is singled out.

I'm always very confused by this. Why are maths lessons more traumatic than, say, history or biology or foreign language lessons? I mean learning lists of irregular verbs is not precisely most people's idea of fun. And yet only about maths do people speak with such dramatic language.

There must be something beyond what's happening in schools themselves that makes people react this way. I just can't work out what it is.

In fairness, zsh is only newer than bash by a year. Both are about 34 years old.