cthor

Yeah. I think a lot of people are ignoring that the output target, MIDI, is pretty limited. A skilled producer could pretty easily take these exact notes and make a track that sounds great. Sound design makes a huge difference.

Tab width arguments are amusing, because it's always between 2 and 4.

There’s actually a number between 2 and 4. For some reason it's never considered.

I've got a summary of all the indentation arguments here: https://cthor.me/Indentation

I don't get this. Just read the tweets like they're paragraphs.

Well why the hell are all our major service providers not trustworthy? In absolutely any other context this would be unacceptable. Coca-Cola can't just slip sawdust into their product without getting reamed by the law. Why do tech companies get to do whatever they want? Why is the closest thing we get to collective action retweeted blog posts?

> How is that not manipulating the market?

Nobody said it isn't. In fact, that's the whole point: manipulate people to chill out, take a few minutes to think, and then get back to it.

If society thinks blowing up a house is worth catching the perp then they at least oughta pay for the damn house.

You don't need humans to moderate the "500 hours of video uploaded to Youtube every minute". Most of those videos get little to no views and are irrelevant, and then most cases of infringement are clear cut enough that automation can deal with them. Most people don't bother to appeal.

The number of cases that actually need manual moderation would be many orders of magnitude smaller.

Imagine a system that works something like the following:

- Users get access to manual dispute resolution by proving their real identity

- Persons with enough obvious violations (i.e. outright piracy with no possible argument of fair use) are barred from the dispute process

- All disputes get sent to human moderators and handled within 24 hours

- There are multiple levels of appeals, starting at appeals to unskilled laborers and ending at appeals to experienced copyright attorneys

- Going to higher levels of appeals requires paying in a nominal fee that is returned if the claim is overturned

- The final level of appeals can decide the case is too unclear and should be handled by the courts as per the DMCA

- Claimants are penalized some nominal fee for overturned claims

How many moderators would that need? It'd be 1,000 at most. Majority of them would be outsourced laborers costing around $20-30k, with a few experienced attorneys costing $200-300k for the final stage of appeals. Total cost $20-30M. That's a lot of money, but still only 0.5% of their actual revenue. Such a system would surely create far more value both to the company and to the world.

Mostly yes. But a lot of these companies are operating at big losses funded by VC money.

I keep seeing this defence of Walker that amounts to, "Yeah, so what he's bloviating. What's the harm in recommending more sleep?"

But there is a lot of harm in recommending more sleep. If someone only needs 6-7 hours but keeps trying to force 8-9, they're going to have all sorts of trouble.

I personally have an issue with a drifting circadian rhythm that makes it impossible to go to sleep at the same time every day if I sleep a full 8-9 hours a night. The cumulative effects of this gives me very poor quality sleep and negatively affects my social life. Changing to sleeping only 7-8 hours addresses this, and I've been testing the cognitive effects of this change to see there aren't any.

I think Walker's overall message is important, but the numerous fabrications and massaging of data he's committed to convey that message is bad science. If you tell a lie (2/3 of people are sleep deprived, if you sleep less than 8 hours you're killing yourself) to dispel another lie (you don't need more than 6 hours sleep, keep hustling and chugging 5 coffees a day), you aren't actually making things better. You're just replacing one problem with another.

Ignore it.

If it were a credible threat of physical harm (it rarely is), then I'd make a police report and be more vigilant with my self-defence preparation and tell my loved ones to be accordingly.

Attempting to censor the information would be pointless at best, and could easily make it worse.

I don't think this is that important because there are far more people reading than posting. Even if the person you're responding to isn't arguing in good faith, there are people reading the discussion with an inquisitive mind.

or, see this comic: https://imgur.com/T8egYQl

As soon as you open the barn door for having ads at all, the floodgates will open. Also a pointless concession given Wikipedia has far more money than they need.

If Wikipedia ever puts ads up because of the bureaucratic WMF cancer exceeding donations, that's the day Wikipedia dies.

> If not, what happens if someone else releases a superior product in the interim?

They'll get your business.

> Or my business needs change?

I didn't waste my time building you a feature you won't pay for.

Bigger leap when it comes to finger wagging over word choice, smaller leap when it comes to things that actually matter.

It's formatted as a code block, saying don't wrap these lines. But that's not a good idea when it's a long piece of English text.

Is the platform supposed to run some ML algorithm on every code block to decide if it's actually code, and override the explicit don't wrap these lines syntax if it decides it's not actually code?

I'd say they're delusional.

Everyone made this assumption in the '90s, that prosperity necessarily lead to freedom. 20 years later that assumption doesn't look so good.

Just as well, you get to start acting like you own the house from day 1.

Wikipedia is the single greatest website on the Internet. That's what it takes for donations to keep you afloat. $100MM revenue? Google makes that in a day.

That aside, it's not entirely clear that Wikipedia can live off donations forever.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

JavaScript got popular because it was the only option for scripting in browser. Newbs constantly trip over its hazardous wires lying all over the floor. It's absurdly daunting, especially once you bring in all the modern libraries full of their own baggage.

What you say is true for Python though.

The complaint here is just that these articles are written with an anecdotal lead style, rather than inverted pyramid style.

The solution is writers changing their writing style, and probably not a browser/tool that can display 4 different versions of a text.

Author's criticism that Flesch-Kincaid isn't suitable for non-English text is on point, but history hasn't been kind to critics of readability scores in general: http://www.impact-information.com/impactinfo/newsletter/smar...

The given counter-arguments against their use in general ("but what about context!", "they're clearly too simple!") have been tread over for years. Readability formulas are surprisingly robust, although obviously weak to adversarial input.

If there were a credible case of criminal misconduct against him, you can be sure you'd hear the witch hunters cry it from the fucking rooftops.

In the hours I've spent reading this story, all I've seen is hearsay about women feeling uncomfortable about him having a mattress in his office; criminally stupid misreadings of his writings regarding Minsky; and of course various accounts him being a terribly unpleasant person, which we already knew.

It's obvious what ways the winds are blowing. There's no place for misfits like RMS in today's world. (But I guess there never really was.) That doesn't mean I have to like it.

Can you clarify? That's like the whole point of the AGPL. It not doing that would be quite surprising.

AGPL closes the SAAS loophole. Outside of that, what "private extraction of the commons" is left to cover?

Parity license looks like a super aggressive and untested version of AGPL. I can't see what benefit using it over AGPL would be.

Prosperity license is at odds with the point of free software and almost certainly untenable.

That's why we have GPL.

> If you sell games for $60 upfront then your marketing will be perceived as a scam in the face of any failures or shortcomings in your game. You're trying to hype people up and sell them something bad.

Between Steam's refund policy and review system this is basically a solved problem.

The "language can control thought" idea is called linguistic determinism, and has been considered bogus by linguists for a while now, at least the strong form of it.

It looks like this is built on top of Postgres, so they're already doing this.

It's pretty sad people excuse this. Every single press release OpenAI have made in the history of this project has been actively misleading.

What they've achieved is actually impressive, too, so the deception is doubly annoying.

The correct response to defectbot is defecting back