foerbert

Same issue here. It's one of the reasons I've become so enamored with Ada.

With Ada, it's not only easy, but encouraged, to encode so much information in about how things are modeled into the program itself. Not only does it function somewhat like documentation, it also lets the compiler helpfully yell at me when I still manage to forget how things actually work. It's saved me so much stress and debugging time.

Now if only any of these 'safer' languages would add even just strong typedefs. Even if they don't particularly encourage their use, it'd be something.

Neither apply to game mechanics.

Even if all the WotC IP ends up with the most determined patent troll ever, the game itself could still be implemented.

As for the card art... who knows what the legal situation would end up being. But even if it's totally legally off limits, the ability to load custom art would render it practically moot anyway.

I don't get the hostility, nor why you keep trying to shove words in my mouth.

I never said anything about new customers, nor even old customers.

I've also been very explicit that I'm just talking about seeing a plausible possibility, and not made any claims about it's probability. Nor said I think any person or entity - WotC included - should actually do anything or not.

And I've absolutely not made any particular judgements on the intrinsic value of NFTs.

I get you don't like the whole crypto thing, but this reaction is way beyond the point of reason.

I'm really not much of a fan either, honestly. That doesn't mean we should demonize our own thoughts if they point towards a hypothetical possibility that some other people might find value in it.

WotC doesn't care if a potential consumer trusts their long-term business model, but they sure do care if the potential consumer trusts their purchase won't poof out of existence one day.

By throwing it on the blockchain, WotC could market it as the digital card being basically as safe from vanishing as a physical card. "Even if we go bust in 50 years, your digital cards will all still be yours! You'll still be able to prove ownership of all your cards, and will still be free as ever to trade coughsell for incredible profitcough them!"

I have no idea if the market as a whole would bite, or how deeply. But there is a not-insignificant number of people who count on Magic cards gaining significant amounts of value over time. Some use it as a way to justify the purchases, while others have turned it into an outright investment strategy.

I can only imagine that digital cards reliant on WotC's active involvement to exist would suffer significant discounts.

But maybe being digital is such a huge hit in the first place that it doesn't ultimately matter. I have no idea. Hence, why I said it seems possible.

I don't think that's the case. It's also a tabletop game so the rules are all out there in public and not even inhumanely complex.

Even if WotC's servers go down, you could use the blockchain to prove ownership of a card for use in a live tournament. It's also possible for a third party to create their own server to implement the game, and then refer back to the blockchain for ownership.

As for non-official cards, I mean, yeah? That's the case with physical Magic cards too. Not even actual counterfeits have held the MTG secondary market back from astounding prices. Meanwhile non-NFT cards would be the equivalent of proxy cards - cards that aren't X, but both players agree to treat as X - which haven't been any more successful than counterfeits in holding Magic prices down.

I'm not claiming there would be greater faith in a blockchain than WotC, I'm just saying I see it as possible.

I think it's possible they might see some benefit. It would basically hinge on people's faith in WotC vs a blockchain to administer that data. If the blockchain was more trusted - say because of concerns WotC might go out of business one day, etc - then using it might entice people to put more money in.

There are other options out there. Ada, for example, has extended return statements and - more directly - expression functions.

I'd probably agree with that characterization. It's not that people are out there specifically claiming memory safety solves everything, but rather that the 'public consciousness' seems to have utterly forgotten that any other kind of safety exists.

As a result, you get languages like (and mainly) Rust being held up as the paragons of program correctness and safety in general. Any discussions of program safety end up being entirely about memory safety.

It's just an endless hoard of comments/blogs/posts/etc of people conflating memory safety with correctness and not even acknowledging - or possibly even knowing - there are other kinds of safety out there.

So the rhetoric being referenced there is largely implicit. Anybody who actually mentions memory safety in specific terms is already ahead of the curve.

It's a hard line to walk. And I'm sure not everybody draws the same line.

The part I think LTT and many other folks with a similar philosophy ignore is that even engaging with their title/thumbnail isn't free. Clickbait forcefully grabs attention which requires every potential viewer to spend time and energy evaluating that option. A less forceful title/thumbnail makes it much easier to quickly and easily find the things you actually want to spend your time and energy on.

To make matters worse, most/all clickbait does it's damnedest to make it as hard as possible to decide a video isn't worth the time. Even when you know it's not worth it, the clickbait can make it extremely hard to actually skip.

So yeah, it has a real cost, even when the video itself is good. It's not equally good for everybody, and figuring that out has a cost too.

(And LTT in particular really pushes the boundaries, far more than most that actually try to not be dicks. LTT will sometimes draw the line at 'merely' technically not saying a lie, and blame you for hearing one anyway.)

> There's a lot more than a few paragraphs on the wiki

You're right, I wasn't very fair to the wiki. I would have failed out way quicker without it. It wasn't intentional, it's just been a bit since I was looking at all this. My memory had dropped the details and left me with just my overall impressions.

That said, the wiki still was a bit short on some of the deeper details. I remember a fair number of places I'd feel like the wiki had just enough to tantalize the possibilities but not provide some of the important pieces to put it together into something useful.

And being community driven, I was a little wary of taking it as gospel. Even popular and stable software often has some niggling issues with community documentation.

> I think you should try asking questions on this particular Slack before you write it off

I'm not writing it off. I have no doubt it - and you - would be very helpful. I just don't consider it documentation, in the same way I don't consider a knowledgeable friend documentation.

Part of the reason I didn't pop in was that I was stuck doing a slow one-finger hunt-and-peck on a blank keyboard at the time. Searching the web was more than frustrating enough to make it real tempting to ignoring the cost of typing, never mind Slack. And partly I admit I just don't like asking questions in that format unless it seems like a reasonably complex/detailed/weird question.

> point VSCode at Talon's Python interpreter

Yeah, that probably would have helped. My setup at the time didn't have much for Python, so I was mostly using the REPL and basic searching.

I think I looked at that briefly at one point. I passed by it quickly because it lacked support for both my usual editor and language.

But I've recently revisted VS Code and found it improved enough to be usable for me. My hands have also improved enough that I can do a reasonable amount of typing now too, so perhaps adding language support would be an option. Hm...

Thanks for the suggestion!

Well, I am a programmer, I just wasn't able to do much programming due to physical limitations. Admittedly I'm not much of a Python programmer, and I wouldn't be surprised if a deeper understanding of not-just-a-shell-script Python idioms helped me get a little more out of the REPL poking. But uh, still.

As for Slack, I don't really consider that documentation. It's not really usable in the same way. It's more akin to IRC. It's potentially very helpful, even when the documentation isn't helping, but it's not the same thing. Maybe I'm just old, even though I'm not that old... I think...

Anyway, I hope this doesn't come off too negatively overall. I really like the idea of Talon and I'm comforted by it's existence, in case my hands start acting up again. From my attempts to investigate it I got a few glimpses into just how deep you've gone, even down into the speech model itself, to make it what it is. And I know any interface to something as complex as this is itself a large series of extremely ambiguous trade-offs that's just painful to make. And of course documentation itself takes time to create, and then needs to be kept up to date, and all that. I get it.

If it didn't seem to hold much promise, I wouldn't be so sour about failing to figure out how to use it effectively.

One thing that might be worth considering is moving to a source-available model, if full on Open Source doesn't suit your goals. Having the option to try to figure things out by looking at the code could be very helpful.

I have some very mixed feelings about talon. I looked into it a decent bit when I started having hand issues as well, and never got anywhere useful with it.

For one, it needs to be programmed to do anything. This gets you all the options, which is wonderful, but also is a bit of a problem when you're looking into because you can't, ya know, program. And it's not a simple thing to interact with. Lots of moving parts and various behind-the-scenes interactions.

For another, there's virtually zero documentation. Like, officially none, and unofficially not much more than a few paragraphs.

And to put the cherry on top, it's a closed source mess of a program. It's not easy to get much in the way of useful information out of it. You can poke around some in a Python REPL, but that'll basically just get you the interface. And somehow, it's one of the most useful sources of information, as at least you've got something to go on. And as mentioned, Python, so you don't have much in the way of language-level guarantees to try to rely on to figure stuff out either.

Yes, there is the popular user config. To be clear, I'm not trying to be unkind to it. It managed to overcome a lot, and is very useful to lots of people for many of the reasons I stated above. But. It's also clearly got it's roots as one person's personal config that got popular. There is so much in there. It's basically it's whole own thing to learn on top of talon.

In terms of learning from it, well, it doesn't seem trivial. It's basically it's whole own thing, but also how it all interacts is all talon. You're basically learning two separate yet intertwined systems at once and have to figure out what bits belong to what. It's also got various bits from multiple iterations of talon's interface, so the same thing may be accomplished multiple ways. It's actually quite well commented in some places about this fact, which is really nice. But it does make you wonder what isn't well commented...

Ultimately I just gave up. It seems like a potentially hugely useful thing, but actually trying to use it required learning a bunch of stuff I wasn't otherwise interested in, figuring out the minutia of a complex unstable interface the hardest ways possible, and then spending a ton of time writing my own program/config.

Aside from the time involved, the amount of typing required was prohibitive.

So yeah. My feelings on talon... mixed, to say the least. Or most, judging by the above.

Only if you expect China to forgo their own development of these sorts of products if they are given access to them.

It is true.

The only way to preclude jury nullification is to infringe on the rights of the jury as the sole determiners of fact, as you put it.

Without adding another non-jury body that can overrule the jury on what actually happened, how can you ever get rid of the possibility of jury nullification?

I recently had to dive into the world of linux GUI file managers and their various accessories after living for years pretty much exclusively with just i3wm and the terminal for that sort of basic stuff.

I uh, can't say 'polish' is a world I ever associated with the likes of Dolphin and co., or any of the alternatives if I'm being honest. I suppose there's a bit of a decent veneer there if you only judge them by screenshots and aren't terribly critical of the standard 'modern' sort of design in general.

But that falls apart real quick if you dare to think taboo words like 'configuration' or 'option.' Though I suppose at least on linux you're just in for pain as you try to figure out what to configure, and how, and disappointment when you accept that you can't actually get everything the way you want, and that whatever subset of features you want isn't actually available together. But you can make choices. You won't be that happy with it, but, at least you aren't stuck with the worst option.

To be fair, I couldn't even tell you if I ever used KDE 4 or not. So, I'm utterly useless as a point of reference. I'm just still bitter.

That's predicated on their ability to help catch murderers as well as their inability to allow police to enforce other kinds of crime.

It's also possible for good-faith efforts to play into a feedback system that ends up resulting in racial injustices. They can even do that while doing other good things too.

Then you have the uncomfortable and terrifically subjective question on your hands of weighing the costs and the benefits - both now and into the future.

I don't think you can dismiss this as being largely about race, nor dismiss it as irrelevant to race.

In some ways, it'd be easiest if it doesn't work. That way the questions get real simple.

Sure. Here's a video critiquing one of Veritasium's videos I had issues with. Check this[1] thread for further details about it from me and some good rebuttals from another commenter.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=foerbert#32223515

> After watching the full video and reading the comments exchanged, I don't believe Veritasium there is guilty of anything more than believing studies with questionable funding sources and buying into autonomous cars too soon.

Perhaps. But even if that was the case, the circumstances around it was enough to destroy my trust for Veritasium.

The way in which Waymo was interacting with him and other YouTubers should have set off all kinds of alarm bells. I couldn't come up with a more perfect hypothetical situation in which I'd expect him to be fully engaged in skepticism and critical analysis.

I normally wouldn't blame people too much for any specific instance of getting caught up in something cool. But if there was ever a time to do so, it was this.

A big company in the most recent field joining the list of perpetually-just-around-the-corner technology, and one aimed directly at consumers at that, grabs a bunch of YouTubers together to make a bunch of videos for simultaneous(-ish?) release and gives them some group presentations and special access to the company. If you aren't going to be maximally critical of the companies claims in this circumstance, when are you?

So even if he just got caught up in the coolness despite the best intentions, I don't think he deserves a pass. I can't just go back to assuming he's actually properly evaluating his sources in all his other videos.

And it wasn't even like we just got a video devoid of heavy review. We got a video with outright non-cited nor disclaimed statements straight off the presser being presented as if they were his own original thoughts/analysis.

The real problem for me here was mostly one of ethics and trust. I didn't feel like the way he went about making the video was particularly ethical - especially without a much stronger level of disclaimer. And I lost my trust in his ability to actually critically review the information he presented.

If I'm going to have to watch his videos with full alertness and skepticism, his videos aren't useful to me. I don't watch Veritasium or other such channels for information that is all that important to me, but rather as a mildly intellectual way to pass time and be exposed to new ideas - often while eating, doing something menial, or winding down for the day. It's still important to me that that information is reasonably accurate, as it still tends to join the hoard of random things in my head that 'I've heard somewhere...'.

If I don't trust the presenter to both have a good head on their shoulders, and to have actually used it in good faith when creating the video, their videos are useless to me.

> I would hope the flaw in this concept is obvious to anyone here but there are OPEN SOURCE high-quality sources of mapping information, let alone maps that could be built by someone with funding.

I honestly don't remember much about this specific point by now, but the use of the word 'scans' in the quote makes me suspect we're talking not about just about something like OSM but rather something more like a curated and processed point-cloud.

If so, that does seem like something beyond the capabilities of the open-source mapping movement without crazy amounts of funding just to generate the raw point clouds. And even then, how many volunteers do you need to validate a map/scan as correct and accurate enough for a self-driving car to use it as a primary data source?

But maybe I'm just getting thrown off by the word 'scan' and this is a non-issue.

As for the rest... honestly I'd have to dive in to even begin to address any of it. I don't doubt Tom Nicholas made some errors, at least. But as I said earlier, this stuff wasn't really my main concern to begin with.

> This is a good example of why I'd recommend the channel though. Veritasium actually responded to the criticism video with their own points

Conversely, this was one of the major strikes for me. Of course responding is good in general, but I found his response extremely poor. Based on memory, I felt like he avoided the larger issues and instead quibbled about specific details that weren't even related to the major issues I had. I was left thinking that he was clearly more interested in PR than in a good-faith discussion about the various issues.

To be fair, at the point I read the response, I was already disinclined to cut Veritasium a whole lot of slack. But his response was about as bad as it got for me, and cut off any desire I had to continue giving him some slack.

> Tom Nicholas' set of arguments are in general good fodder for discussion but the premise is ultimately undermined by the video clickbait title and thumbnail calling several different creators' works abject propaganda.

I won't disagree with you there. I'd honestly forgotten about that aspect of his video by now. Though if you're willing to cut Veritasium some slack on his titles and thumbnails, I'd say Tom Nicholas deserves some too. But really I'd prefer nobody did it in the first place.

I'm guessing his presentation has similar issues even though you didn't mention it. And I agree with you again. I've actually just stopped watching some otherwise interesting videos partway through recently because that sort of thing started bugging me so much. I can't fault you there.

Already posted in an earlier response to you.

But no, nothing like that. These were relatively recent videos about newish but well-established industries. In particular Waymo's self-driving cars and, to a lesser extent, some company doing consumer DNA testing.

These were pretty blatant immediately, no hind-sight or digging required. And full videos too, not ancillary comments like on Twitter.

> I don't know what to tell you if you believe Thunderf00t's "debunking" is more valuable than your own viewing of any given channel.

I wasn't very inclined to view Matt Ferrel's videos much in the first place. I was too leery of the way they were presented to consider it worth my time to investigate further. I was wondering if I was missing out, but never decided to really try to find out first-hand as it just wasn't worth it to me.

It was at that point that I saw Thunderf00t's video, and I decided to see what his take was. As you note, I'm a bit wary of Thunderf00t as well. I don't watch his videos often and when I do I ensure to remain a little more actively critical. Based on what I saw there, I didn't feel inclined to further wonder if I was missing anything by avoiding Ferel's videos.

I'm sure that video, and the follow up, were probably some of the weakest from Ferel. However, it was less the actual content and rather the approach that didn't fit what I'd want to watch. Uncritical readings of pie-in-the-sky press releases isn't my thing, and the follow-up in particular made it clear that that was not where Ferel thought the problem was.

> Regarding Veritasium, that is an even weaker argument IMO. If we're going to try to pillory everyone trying to make a living off communicating STEM topics I'm not sure who we'll have left in the space.

Making a living is one thing. But that isn't my problem. I wouldn't recommend avoiding his channel if it was just a matter of him running ads and/or doing some ad-reads.

> I'd love to see examples of him outright lying or misleading his audience if you have it, because that would certainly change my mind on recommending his channel to people.

The largest straw for me was probably the one on self-driving cars with Waymo. For an in-depth look, Tom Nicholas did a pretty good job[1] covering it from what I recall. In particular the comments on that video from Veritasium really shook my trust, IIRC.

Around the same time I also took issue with several of his other videos. The one that I recall now was about some kind of DNA testing company. It was another one where the company both sponsored the video and provided exclusive access. There my issue was largely with how he soft-balled the interviews and even outside of them didn't bring up what I felt were the most pertinent - and well-known - arguments against such companies in general, as well as (again, IIRC) that specific companies actions. These ones weren't, as far as I know, as extreme as the Waymo one. But they - and the lack of any sort of response from Veritasium when many people brought the issue up - were enough to already have me teetering on the edge when the Waymo one nailed the coffin shut.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM0aohBfUTc

> Disliking Veritasium because of some ads is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I don't think we're talking about the same things here. I'm talking about wholesale videos that are effectively a big, undisclosed ad. I don't mean I don't like how he does ad reads. I mean I don't like how he's created entire videos that are basically ads and then passed them off as his own original good-faith attempt to inform.

It's not so much actively annoying as is it actively deceitful.

Is it? Maybe (probably) I'm unusual as far as US folk go, but I think it's pretty squarely in the realm of smartassery.

I mean, if you want to consider "selling ads" to include selling undisclosed ads as organic, original, and good-faith reporting of accurate information, then yeah, sure? I sure wouldn't, though.

Familiar to a greater or lesser degree with most, but not all of those. I'd take exception to a couple inclusions.

- Undecided w/Matt Ferrel

This one is probably the most questionable. I was always a bit leery due to the titles being a bit too accepting of anything you might find on r/Futurology, and then happened on a Thunderf00t Busted (not a regular viewer there either) about some of his videos and yeah. I think it's safe to say he's not doing much of a critical evaluation of anything as he is just reading whatever cool sounding press releases he finds. I'm usually fairly allergic to more absolute statements (part of the reason I'm not such a regular viewer of Thunderf00t's), but even with the limited amount I've seen I'm pretty confident in writing off Undecided w/Matt Ferrel. At the very least, it deserves the same kind of credibility as anything you might find on r/Futurology.

- Veritasium

Yeah, I know. But his repeated issues with basically doing ad-spots as videos, and his lack of acknowledging the issue, really soured me on him. If I'm learning about something through somebody like Veritasium, it's not a topic I'm well versed in to begin with and it's unlikely that I'm going to pursue it all that much further independently. That sort of format is also particularly prone to causing me to drop my more rigorous filters. All of that means credibility is particularly important there, and Veritasium completely lost my trust that he wouldn't try to slip advertising by me while pretending it's relatively unbiased information that's been checked in good faith.

Even before that, he seemed to me to tend a little too far towards fully selling high school style explanations, without making it clear that that's what he's doing. By high school style explanations, I mean those that are nearly outright lies, serve to help students work their way to the point that they can make use of the next more nuanced and complex explanation which is closer to the truth.

There's nothing inherently wrong with using those sorts of explanations, but when addressing such a wide audience with no expectation that they will be looking deeper later, I think it's very important to be clear about the limitations of the information provided. With Derek, you get exactly as much nuance as he thinks makes for a good story, and he does his best to leave you with the impression that's all there is.

Unions also fight to have everybody paid more. The company dropping everybody to the lowest bar instead of increasing benefits for the worst off is absolutely not something the union demanded.

As for outliers in general, sure. The whole union thing is based on collective bargaining after all. If Bob is making more than everybody else in the same position, that means there's more room for everybody else doing that job to make more.

If something like this did originate from a union complaint, it sucks now for the best-off, but it's also going to be a real strong point for all the workers to use when the contract is renegotiated.

Which extension did you use for this?

I basically use YouTube only without logging in, and rely a lot on the front page for my current interests (channels I want to remember long-term go in my RSS reader). It seems like YouTube always has a channel or two it insists on pushing repeatedly no matter how often I ignore their videos.

I disagree. It's a useful clarification. The OP didn't say "most" but neither did they say "some" or use any language to that effect. A naive reading could even take it as an implicit "all."

I don't quite agree. It's not so much the meaning as the ease of use that's the problem. You don't need to have any worries about pronouncing, nor spelling, OpenOffice correctly. You can tell somebody about it without going through the whole "Huh? That's how you say it? Are you sure that's right? How do you spell it again?" routine.

I'm not saying it's the whole story, or even the biggest part of it. But it adds a bit of friction to getting the word around about the new name. See uBlock Origin for a more successful example, where the mere mention of uBlock had, and still does to an extent, "you mean Origin, right?" as a default, low-effort response.

I don't think they are contradictory at all. Aside from the basic "it has value, just less than $10/month" option, they may also just be interested in the tech and are evaluating it in actual use, etc.