gnull

Mastodon is "service", not "website". You can use dedicated client software.

My main takeaway from this is that the seemingly contradictory notions like "mutual help" and "competition" are just too vaguely defined, and exist on a wrong level of abstractions, to have any formal discussion about them.

I took courses with focus on theory, performance and security of blockchains. I never cared much about the practical situation, and all those things Drew criticizes blockchain for. Blockchain is a cool thing from TCS perspective — end of story for me.

I'm actually teaching a course in Cryptography right now that touches blockchain a bit. And I asked this question with a practical purpose to know if there are any warnings I should give my students about practical implications of the technology.

> elaborate on what specifically?

> plenty of academics talking about blockchain = bad

Elaborate of what is "bad" specifically, and suggest any specific trustworthy academics who made any statements like that.

Can anyone elaborate on this? Cryptography course at my university covers blockchains and we were never made aware of this. And academic community in general seems to be unaware, not a single blockchain talk I attended drew attention to this.

One of the reasons I moved from GitHub to SourceHut is the user-hostile political activism GitHub was throwing in my face. Like including the command to quietly rename any branch you're on to "main" in the instructions for uploading an existing repo.

I'm still not sure how I feel about this change. One can see it as activism, but at the same time it's still done with respect to users and I tend to trust the maintainers here to be reasonable.

My friend is using an old Mac laptop what can't display webp on webpages. A Mac laptop!

The original title says "4 twitter features", which is less confusing.

Google search result do this weird trick. When you hover on a link the line at the bottom the your browser window shows the actual URL. But if you do "copy link URL" on it, you get a Google tracker URL in your clipboard.

Couldn't one do the same thing to make users get jpegs when they try to save a wepb? How bad would it be?

Why would you use Chrome for that in 2022?

I re-read it. Yes, they're not saying it's useless, but then what are they objecting to?

"High" as in "higher than runtime speed, safety, abstractions, plugin system"? Where would you put it if you had to rank compilation speed with other criteria?

And let's admit even though Rust compilation speed could use some improvement, it's not terrible.

> Rust could have been designed for faster compilation without sacrificing runtime speed, safety, good abstractions, expressiveness

Can you back this up? I'm not a programming language expert, so if there's some common knowledge you're referring to, I'm not aware of it.

> most people on this earth are not as privileged

There's very little "privilege" you need to compile Rust. In my spare time, I develop mainly in Haskell on my ThinkPad X270 and it goes just fine. Building libraries takes time, yes, but you need to do it just once. And while it's building you can think with a piece of paper more — also privilege in a way.

You misread my comment. I didn't say it was useless, I said there are things with higher priority. And well… unlike Rust, C++ sucked at some of those things too, this I think makes them different.

Rust offers a better trade-off between compilation time and other parameters, than C++.

It's a fair remark, but your requirement is very niche. There's very few people who will value compilation time over runtime speed, safety, good abstractions, expressiveness.

All the ways of encoding Reals that you mention in your comment are limited to Rationals. It seems like you just didn't know that one can encode Reals too, which puffoflogic assumed readers to know.

Yes, they could have made their comment more accessible and mentioned the encoding (but I think then the problem may have sounded less "natural", since you'd have Turing machines mentioned). But you also could have noticed you're building a strawman argument, and instead just asked how does one encode Reals. Heuristics: if other person's argument sounds too absurd, there's a chance you're misunderstanding something.

Your example has nothing to do with geometry, it's incomputable because of encoding you use for real numbers. There isn't anything special about diagonal line that makes it incomputable.

I only skimmed the linked article very quickly, it seems to actually construct special shapes which that make it incomputable, not the encoding they chose.

Your example is fun, I'm not against it. What I'm trying to say is that there's different ways to be geometric for an incomputable problem.

And you represent real numbers as Turing machines printing continuous streams of digits?

Comparing two infinite streams produced by Turing machines is almost the definition of halting problem.

I also heard some shallow marketing people saying how great it is and how everyone should be going to medium to promote their personal brands and increase visibility.

This is an immediate red flag for me. It means that even if Medium is fine now, it's going to get populated by these types soon.

Indeed. One impressive result I remember from that area (if I'm not mistaken) is that Least Recently Used cache policy with cache size S performs at least as well as an offline algorithm with cache size S/2.

I don't remember the details now, but the proof wasn't too complicated, they gave it to us as an exercise.

Another fun fact: if instead of considering a distribution on the inputs, you consider worst case, then Queueing Theory becomes Online Algorithms. The techniques there seem very different from Queueing Theory, but I also heard some Computer Scientists calling Online Algorithms boring because the techniques used there are very similar and results aren't too suprizing (I can't say I share this sentiment).

> You can't see it because of your own condition, and supremacist beliefs

Being disrespectful to people who disagree with you, and at the same time unable to produce any sensible argument only harms the cause you're fighting for.

> how a lion cannot be taught to understand an ox's life

Limited intelligence is the defining factor here, not background. Think about it. Humans can understand lions quite well, and we understand what's good for them, what makes them happy. And we do it without having to run around savanna biting zebras!

And yes, Jews and Muslims can have a very good idea about each others life, struggles and priorities—it's just a matter of education.

> globalist companies like Microsoft are by nature required to properly represent all of the people

I could argue with this and would probably enjoy it another time. Now let's remember the context we are in. We were talking about whether D&I are good for company's performance, not about any moral obligations you may think the company has.

> People have a right to be different, and a natural tendency to be biassed towards their own individual and cultural perspectives

We also have a natural tendency to fall for logical fallacies. But somehow we managed to identify those and find ways to fight them, not worship them. Nothing stops you from fighting the cultural bias you have (maybe not completely, but just enough to get it off the way of your work duties) in the same way—later go home, take off your employee hat and be different, biased, whatever.

> Minorities are essential within companies to prevent bias in their marketing and product development that can be fatal to business success

There's a ton of different sources of bias. Look at lesswrong.com. What (other than politics) makes minority bias more significant than the other? And why it can't be fought with ordinary means and working on yourself?

You don't need to be the same thing as the object of your study to study it. Just like you can study Geology without being a rock, you can study what a minority group wants/needs/buys without belonging to it. Nothing in principle prohibits that.

> Minorities are essential within companies to prevent bias in their marketing and product development that can be fatal to business success.

This is far-fetched and based mostly on ideology rather than evidence, not much different from a Soviet socialist explaining why planned economies are essential to the country's success (100 years ago it didn't sounds as absurd as now). It's your right to believe this sort of things, I don't deny you this, but don't insist that this is an objective truth that every reasonable person should believe in. As it goes with this kind of questionable ideas, it should be ok to choose not to believe in them, as I think the parent comment does.

And I agree with the parent comment's view here. Whatever advantage the woke-culture companies may have is easily explained by their increased visibility among woke audience, not by some deep insights. It's just a marketing trick, just like putting AI/Blockchain on your ad increases your visibility among some of tech enthusiasts.

> What's next?

Slippery slope is a fallacy.

> white nationalist groups are growing in numbers […] prior US president, and public celebrities are also regularly publicly expressing race based hate

How does any of this back up the impossibility of blindness to race? (Remember that most of the world is outside of US.)

Some manage to find a workaround even when it's illegal. I was reading somewhere that Lund University in Sweden was cancelling the job opening right before the deadline if the most promising candidate wasn't a woman.

There's so much bullshit in this. Universities are not allowed to advertise positions as "women only", but at the same time they are required to reach certain percentage of female "representation" by law.

Tabs should be implemented by an external tool, like Tmux or whatever. This is how Kakoune does it.

I'm a Kakoune user. What will change in my life if I move to Helix?

Who are mastodon owners?

I wouldn't claim Twitter will shut down soon, but one could argue that mastodon is more robust because it's divirsified.

There's no single person on earth who can shut down Mastodon, so Mastodon dies only if this decision is made massively by many people (or if development stops, but then still nothing will stop the server I run on raspberry pi in my bedroom). Twitter otoh can be shut down by one person for a whole multitude of reasons without any concern for the opinion of users.

Then Desi's cause should me adjusted, not science.

But can't they still demand people to make this kind of political statements? (With no actual preferential treatment rules.)