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beeforpork

1,293 karma · joined April 6, 2015

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beeforpork··on EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages
Oh, stop it! What are you really trying to say? 'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim. Ask yourself: what is the advantage of a language over a dialect or vice versa? Why are you fighting for it (or against it)?

Linguistically, it does not matter -- there is no objective definition of the difference between a language, a dialect, or whatever -lect.

beeforpork··on PCB Edge USB C Connector Library
0.8mm is definitely out of USB 3.0 official spec and might damage the plug. The Spec requires 0.7mm with contacts and 0.6mm without, i.e., 0.05mm for the contact. See:

https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/USB%20Type-C%20Spec%...

Pages 42 and 44.

beeforpork··on FSF announces Librephone project
We bought two FP5 with e/OS/ from Murena (for spouse and myself), and would buy again. Why wouldn't you?
beeforpork··on Zürich voters ban noisy leaf blowers
> It's the classic arsehole world we have become, people have to be indignant about everything.

They always have been. But this is not a case of that. Leaf blowers are loud and disperse dog poop. It's disgusting. Use a broom instead.

beeforpork··on Ask HN: What is nowadays (opensource) way of converting HTML to PDF?
Does pandoc do JavaScript? For stuff that is rendered (I don't want animated, interactive PDFs...).
beeforpork··on F-Droid and Google’s developer registration decree
Of course.

But pesky adblockers are malware and thus will get barred.

It's about money, of course.

beeforpork··on Greenland is a beautiful nightmare
Always have. Because it's interesting stuff.
beeforpork··on The staff ate it later
Yes. Ish.

I also think that whataboutism is cheap.

I disagree that it'S 'more than enough' and that 'more than enough' is a good reason to waste resources.

beeforpork··on The staff ate it later
And also in Youtube "I ate every dish on the menu at restaurant XYZ". I really like these, but man do I feel bad afterwards. Please tell me nothing went to waste!
beeforpork··on The staff ate it later
I wish they put this on screen in Germany, too (though in German, maybe, instead of Japanese). In cooking shows, I always fear they throw the food in the gargabe. With that note on the screen, if they do throw it in the garbage, at least they would be evil liars. Which might be less likely, and so I could feel better.
beeforpork··on Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
My estimate is less optimistic: 99% of users won't ever be bothered with this news nor notice that anything changed, and of those who will, 90% will like it, because 'less malware' is the only thing they can work with.

The weirdest thing to me is that those people who actually care about this are most likely the ones capable of implementing this shit: developers. Us. Who else but developers (OK, and maybe their enlightened spouses) cares about this? We are digging our own graves, basically.

So, Google devels: refuse this. And tell your willing colleague that they are not welcome at your birthday party if they do it.

beeforpork··on Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
Same.
beeforpork··on Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
Only for all the developers on F-Droid who refuse to register with Google...
beeforpork··on Candle Flame Oscillations as a Clock
I love this. This is why we need science: a very interesting and curious fact is examined. Experiments are done and a toy is built based on the findings. It is all totally useless, excepts that human knowledge is brought forward and it is also fun. This is important. It is the reason why we are here. Life would be dull without these kind of highlights in my day. And for this, public funding is needed, because it makes people happy, and happiness is an important persuable goal of many public bodies. And because goal directed research (which is often dull and predictable) of stuff that can be financially exploited is funded anyway, non-publically.
beeforpork··on Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial
Just a quick check list for better understanding of the placement of the study: Is this the first study of its kind? The only one? Is it medically and scientifically sound and well-documented? Does it apply to people without (HIV-associated) lipohypertrophy? Is the effect temporary, i.e., what happens when drug use is terminated? Does it cure the lipohypertrophy or is this a life-long disease that needs medication? How are TruDiagnostic and Novo Nordisk related to each other either generally or concerning this study?
beeforpork··on I hacked my washing machine
Hmm, I don't see any encryption. In the first screenshot 'cyberchef.avif' in the 'input window, the data is just unencrypted hex ASCII. I can fairly easily read the hex: even judging only from the first byte 7D, it is most probably JSON:

    7D   = { 
    0D0A = CRLF
    09   = TAB
    22   = "
    73   = s
    74   = t
    61   = a
    74   = t
    75   = u
    73   = s
    4C   = L
    74   = a
    ....
So that is just the 'decoded' text. Where's the mentioned XOR encryption?

Also, the 'key' in the second screen shot is a nibble (=one hex character) out of alignment of the listed bytes. It also is not cut from the gap that is in the input text now, as suggested by the visual presentation: the 'key' is 'D0A097D0D0A7D' which is 13 hex digits, and again, a nibble out of byte alignment. It looks like a 0 must have preceeded to make it '0D0A09...' = CRLF TAB, and it total that's 'CRLF TAB { CRLF {'. But the gap was originally '24F70...', which, aligned to bytes, was '224F70...' = '"Op...'

So, the screen shots appear to be bogus or fake or edited.

Why? What's going on here?

beeforpork··on Cops say criminals use a Google Pixel with GrapheneOS – I say that's freedom
> One could say the same thing about matchboxes being used for arson and cash being used for money laundering, but no one’s calling on regulators to outlaw either.

Matchboxes -- OK. But cash is certainly a target. It is also relatively easy to push, as using a card is so much easier! Look at Sweden and presumably other countries where cash is basically gone. And no (loud) protests from privacy advocates that it is even hard to get cash today. I will just use an app to lend you 10 EUR for the beer.

Also throughout the world, using cash is only possible legally up to a given amount (a few thousand EURs ATM, but still) -- because large sums of cash are suspicious. Of course large amounts of money are suspicious because only criminals would even want to pay large amounts of money, right? Like, pay for a car or a vacation, or pay rent or taxes.

Speaking of which, in many countries, it is basically impossible to pay taxes in cash, although technically, it should be allowed. Like in Germany. Or pay for a bus ticket in cash. But some poor souls don't have a bank account. Hmm...

Some countries deanonymize cash by embedding RFID chips (e.g., Australia).

Of course it is not done for surveillance, but only for good goals.

beeforpork··on Why English doesn't use accents
Like others, I don't find that nonsense word particularly enlightening.

But maybe compare '-ough' in: cough, tough, dough, through, plough.

beeforpork··on They tried Made in the USA – it was too expensive for their customers
Since I read about bristles in food after cleaning the grill, I've always been checking for remnants after brushing. I never found any. And I wonder: how are those remnants supposed to get into your food? They are metal, so don't they just fall down into the grill, if any break off? Maybe glued into old fat and other gunk? But you want that gone, too, right? Also, don't you use a rag to clean off other dirt, and wouldn't that make sure that bristles are gone?

Is this a myth or actually a problem? Some commenters do call it fear-mongering here, so what is it?

I also think I never read anything about this except in US media, so does this not happen in other countries? Different brushes? Different cleaning habits?

beeforpork··on Linguists find proof of sweeping language pattern once deemed a 'hoax'
Italian has thousands of words for pasta. Why was this not examined?
beeforpork··on The Awful German Language (1880)
My native language is German, and I don't know whether I like it. It is the most natural to me, so no judgement -- I cannot look at it from the outside. Well, of course I like it, because I can express myself best with it.

Anyway, I absolute love Afrikaans. I also like droëwors, but that's a different topic. You should have a look at Icelandic -- it is the opposite of Afrikaans on the morphological complexity scale of Germanic languages. Quite a bit more going on with endings and such than in German. And yet it is weirdly familiar, because it is, well, also Germanic.

beeforpork··on Rogue communication devices found in Chinese inverters
Luckily, friends don't do that!
beeforpork··on The Turkish İ Problem and Why You Should Care (2012)
Yes, it's definitely weird. But it is independent of locale, so any programmer has a change to notice this regardless of language setting, instead of their app failing only once it is used by someone from Turkey or Azerbaijan.
beeforpork··on The Turkish İ Problem and Why You Should Care (2012)
I disagree with roughtly all of this.

First of all, 'ß' was a ligature -- a long time ago. It is a letter today. Disassembling it according to its original construction makes no sense today for any kind of argument about typesetting or Unicode. Further, 'ſ' is not used today in German at all, except for meta discussions like this or to stress how things used to be spelled. It makes no sense to mention it unless you are talking about font design or historic use of German (and other languages, for that matter).

Also, if you do mention it for the sake of talking about font design, in Latin fonts, 'ſs' is actually the basis for the design of 'ß', not 'ſz' -- that was mainly done in Blackletter/Fraktur when the 'z' looked different, maybe a bit like 'ʒ' (I used Unicode's'ezh' here hoping it looks right) so that old style 'ß' looks like a ligature of 'ſʒ'. This can still be seen occasionally, e.g., on Berlin street name signs. It is obsolete for most fonts today (although I quite like it).

Moreover, there is an upper case letter for 'ß': 'ẞ'. And it has existed in fine typology way before being adopted into Unicode. Actually, it's existence was probably the reason why it is now in Unicode. The official German rules are now: either use 'SS' or 'ẞ' for uppercase 'ß'. Most Germans probably do not even know that 'ẞ' exists as a choice today, although it was used on 'DER GROẞE DUDEN' even before Unicode existed.

And finally, how a glyph is designed is not necessarily decided on whether historic parts of an ancient ligature had upper case variants. So that 'ſ' has no upper case equivalent is irrelevant for both Unicode and type design.

But as a font designer or anything else, you can protest. No problem. Everyone has the right to protest. But please don't spill the Internet with wrong information, as there is enough of it already.

And I don't think 'SS'<->'ß' is similar to the Turkish 'I with/without dot' problem, because the default Unicode mapping for 'ß' is correct in all languages, while the Turkish (and also Azerbaijani) problem is correct or broken depending on language setting. This is way more problematic because an assumed universal equivalence does not hold. And you need to carefully distinguish whether a string is language specific or not, e.g., path names or IDs in data bases, etc.

beeforpork··on NSF director to resign amid grant terminations, job cuts, and controversy
OK, but isn't getting fired better than resigning? Why resign?
beeforpork··on Making a smart bike dumb so it works again
Like a sugar/fat/healthy label on food: enforce a clear sign on the package about each functionality that is too smart to be usable easily.

Needs some defining to get right (unanbiguous, useful, concise), but might be easier to realise than forbidding things.

beeforpork··on Fibonacci Hashing: The Optimization That the World Forgot
Oh -- this has a name? And it is not commonly known to be better than modulo? Forgotten? I feel old.

The reason multiply+use of high bits is better than modulo is not the golden ratio. In fact, any number using a lot of bits is good (well, not all are the same, like 0 is extremely bad, and 1 and all powers of two are quite bad, because they just shift. But OTOH, the golden ratio is not outstandingly good either -- many values are good.). This is because in the result of a multiplication, higher bits depend on all lower-bits of the operands, because the carry propagates from low bits to higher bits through the resulting value. In contrast, modulo essentially cuts off the upper bits, and so the upper bits are lost for the distribution entropy. This means that if you take the high bits of a multiplication result to distribute into a small set of integers, then you get a better distribution than using only the lower bits, because more bits of the input value are significant for the output result.

I thought this was common knowledge. The man page on rand() used to tell you that you should always multiply into the target range instead of modulo into the target range. It is surprising to see that all big hash libraries seem to miss this.

beeforpork··on UK Supreme Court rules legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex
Yes, I agree that that is a consequence. But before this judgement, the laws were ambiguous, which is arguable the worst that can happen with laws.
beeforpork··on UK Supreme Court rules legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex
Are you trolling?

Biological sex is not binary. There are (at least) three criteria to be considered:

(1) cromosomes. females are XX, males are XY. But other combinations exist: XXY, XXX, XXXY, etc. There is no universal agreement of how those combinations should be best matched to the binary system.

(2) phenotype. females have a vulva, a vagina, and ovaries, males have a scrotum, a penis, and testicles. But some people have no, or half, or a large, or small of one or another. Furthermore, the phenotype might not match with the chromosomes: one example is an XY chromosome type while the person has a vulva, vagina, and internal testicles. There is no universal agreement of how those people should best be classified to the binary system -- the best is probably to recognise that they are non-binary.

(3) hormone level. females have a typical level of hormons and males have different levels. But this is not universally clear-cut. This is one of the most frequent reasons for dispute at sport events when otherwise very obvious women have hormone levels that are 'too male'. Again, no universal agreement of what to do here: ignore the hormone levels in these cases? But why? Usually, they match. But not always.

There are also male outliers that have hormone levels that are higher than for males. These males might also be excluded from sports competitions for the same reason, despite being on the right side of the binary scale, but they are too far on that side. Again -- there is no agreement whether this is still the normal male category or maybe non-binary.

And this is just the biological sex. For gender and identification, there is more. If it wasn't so serious, it would be funny how some governments define sex as binary by reducing it to biological sex or maybe assigned sex -- it is really like making a law that pi is 3.

But note that the judges here made it clear that it is not their place to make a judgement on this complex topics.

beeforpork··on UK Supreme Court rules legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex
This is not actually that much of a sensation -- the judges have made it clear at the very beginning that it is not their place to define what is sex or gender. The only thing they do is clarify how the words "woman" and "man" are to be interpreted in existing laws that have been made to protect women (e.g., and usually, from men).

And the result is: it is the judgement that those laws are referring to the biological sex (which it itself is recognised as being subject to some debate, too, so the judgement refers to another common definition).

That's all. It is not a redefinition or anything. I cannot really understand the enthusiasm of one side or another. It just clarifies what those laws were meant to say, and I tend to agree that anything else would most likely be an unintended reinterpretation. The judges also make it clear that if law makers want more protection for other groups, e.g., trans people, they probably need to make more laws for that.

I also find that this is a very complex topic, because it was about the question whether in sex separated prisons, it is more important to protect trans women from cis men, or to protect cis women from imposter trans women cis men. I mean -- who knows a trivial solution to that? The judges clarified basically that the original law was probably just concerned about protecting cis women from cis men, because probably no-body thought about it. And for the sake of clarifying anything, they said that "woman" probably meant "biological woman". They were tasked to decide something, so they did.

And, well, at least that's I read into this... You can have a look for yourself, maybe, before taking one side.

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