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And there's yet more speed-ups coming in Python 3.12! It'll support Perf profiler to allow looking into Python call stacks and see python functions in perf output and have even more improved error messages.

https://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/3.12.html

I've seen folks say that they can't find a suitable Twitter alternative (Mastodon doesn't quite do it just yet). With TikTok being expected to be banned, I guess Meta really has been given a new lifeline, let's see if they can make use of it. I think they might actually pull it off. https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/13/instagram-now-supports-tex...

Carnegie never ordered deaths of striking workers nor do I think you can make a defensible case that in general steel magnates do. Mining business is difficult and laborers in that industry sure do go through a lot; ore smelting laborers report having respiratory illnesses indeed quite regularly so I agree that steel barons are not completely inculpable if analyzed through an ethics lens.

But looking over the fact that the advertising industry is fundamentally about the exploitation of cognitive biases in order to convince folks to buy things that more often than that they do not need just betrays a certain naïveté of what's going on out there.

> and just because you know 10% of the language doesn't mean you're ready to write it professionally

I don't see why not. Plenty of folks learn on the job, including new languages, and the way things work out you might end up implementing some things sort of by kitbashing, knowing relatively little of the concrete details that you end up learning completely more later on. I do this all the time.

It's not so much that he was cozying up with them as it is that they were one of them. I think the reason SBF ultimately succeeded and disarmed investors' critical eyes is two-fold: he had a pedigree of Stanford/MIT and thus isn't a complete idiot so he could spin together a temporarily believable narrative even if they were on shoddy ground; the second and more important reason is that his parents were both Stanford professors and Caroline's dad was an econ professor at MIT, both the parents had a an expanding list of contacts which helped them secure the first critical set of funding rounds and further on had them ably play the dance with political players and regulatory bodies.

Anyway, the lesson I got after seeing SBF's philanthropic forays, which were all a ruse, was to never trust a techbro no matter how inspirational outwardly they may be. Ravening wolves they are the lot of them, in sheeps' clothings.

I think it's also true that different pianos bode well for different repertoire sets. I think Chopin is played well on Steinways because Steinways have heavy keys, meaning that exercising the full freedom of dynamics works out better for when you want to make very, very soft notes and then soft notes and then roaringly loud notes. I'm no Chopin's Ballades-level pianist but playing Steinway at the piano store I do find this to be true.

> It's worth keeping in mind that despite the brave face, Musk didn't want to buy Twitter. In fact: he desperately didn't want to buy Twitter. He's been forced to do so by the Delaware courts.

I haven't had a lot of good things to say about Musk as of late but I think this might be an exception, this kind of fortitude is something we should all strive to have. When cornered, he at least didn't complain or cry too much, he actually bit the bullet and has a very convincingly brave face on indeed.

I'm pleased to see cumulative layout shift (re self-hosted fonts) advertised as a feature, this is the right kind of user-centric development, indeed the small details like these go a long way in improving user experience.

Maybe Google can by traversing the virtual DOM and other trickery but it's not as simple for other small players. Moreover, in a healthy web I should be able to easily deeplink to something I'm thinking about without jumping through hoops. The SPA web is not as easily discoverable and connected as it is very much meant to be. I think there are valid arguments to be made for SPA, like that SPA need to SPA because they are not just a series of pages and documents but complex applications which need to be that way (though I would still tread with caution: I remember java applets and javascript bits doing complex things, submerged within pages, and that was all fine).

The obvious argument, tried and cliché as it may sound, would be that SPA are anti-web. A healthy web must be indexable and searchable. It almost seems like the rulebook now for some newcomers is to start out with SSR, make use of the auspices of the open web that allow for easy and organic discovery, - and after a significant marketshare has been captured, erecting all types of of lock-in walls, including turning SPA.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ct/pr/european-nationals-and-en... specifically mentions a high-resolution jig.

I wouldn't be surprised if in some cases just the tooling bits are around $5000, leaving aside the whole machine. For high-resolution machining, e.g. for lens fabrication, there's a whole science to drill bits, where special processes allow for achieving up to sub-nanometer surface roughness in parts. If they're making holes in hard metals they might be using titanium, diamond, or carbide drill bits that have crazy physical properties and cost a pretty penny.

In some sense CNC machining is also a WWII era technology, but CNC machines from that era couldn't touch what modern-day machines can do and the repeatable precision with which they can do them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnIvhlKT7SY

While on the subject, this really is a fascinating field and it rules the world more than people might think. Consider that TSMC's core machines are made by ASML. Among the most important and specialized-IP parts in ASML machines are the huge lens which are made by Zeiss. Zeiss makes the lens with some next level machining equipment from companies around Heidelberg and Karlsruhe area. High-resolution machining isn't super known to the general public but it is so fascinating once you get to see the things they can pull off.

One reason I prefer doing React is that retrofitting existing React stuff for React Native is better/easier than embarking on React Native from scratch.

Do folks going through law school grasp how proliferation of libelous and defamatory statements happens now, without friction and at the speed of light? And the outsized impact it can have as compared to times ago? I would posit that libel and defamation should be even weightier issues than when British common law was around. We live in a time of companies dropping employees like stones seconds after they've gone viral in a poor light and loonies across the globe being galvanized into partaking in many shades of atrocities at the prodding of people who are learned in the ways of persuasive and effective oratory. The import of community (religious or merely cultural) was stronger back then, if someone was saying something shitty in earlier times they'd get a stern talking to by peers and community leaders. Things have changed, the power of those institutions has waned, tort law should thus come back stronger than ever to fill in the new gaps.

I'm encouraged in seeing the turnout of Alex Jones ordeal and am anxiously waiting to see how Dominion vs Fox News unfolds. I am hoping that the aftermath of all this is that journalists/people-pretending-to-be-journalists/anyone-with-a-sizable-platform will be more careful about their reporting and statements. Of course this is all a murky area because many times it's hard to decide what is true and even harder to decide who gets to do the deciding but for getting the obvious things wrong and when signs of bad faith are clearly there the hammer should get dropped more often, I think such an environment would reduce chaos and extremism that we are seeing more and more of.

Curious: when are you guys listening to these podcasts? While driving? While out for a run or something? Certainly not when on the computer right - cause god knows I couldn’t do that kind of multitasking. I’d love to go through the archive of past Ken White podcasts but I don’t know how to make the time for it. Are you listening to them at 2x speed?

I think if I was in law school and I was being told about these defamation laws and the potential for someone to be sued out of virtually their entire wealth, that would not have sat well with me. But here we are, and Alex Jones' antics prove to be an excellent rejoinder to those doubts.

Still however, I wish the laws were more selective about which funds are ripe for being taken from. E.g., Alex Jones should have to pay up for money that was made from the source of the problem (the podcasts in this case), if he had, say, funds attained from a side-business of roofing, those should be untouched. And if he continues with his roofing business, maybe we shouldn't be taking all of those funds. Otherwise, I fear we are really just erecting disincentives for them to be good and upstanding contributors to society. As losing defendants of these battles are likely to be a perilous group, the issue probably deserves more careful handling. What are your thoughts?

(Pedantic nitpicking) You mean anti-SLAPP laws.

For others' curiosity: A SLAPP is Strategic lawsuit against public participation, a strategy for plaintiffs to silence opponents by way of burdening them with an onslaught of lawsuits and hoping they are scared away by potential legal costs of mounting a defense thereby resulting in them just giving up. The potential for this strategy to have chilling effects gave rise to anti-SLAPP laws.

This always confused me, if someone is wiped out in this way how are they able to survive in the aftermath? Isn't this effectively sentencing them to homelessness forever, or is there a floor value in these wins that's always respected which accounts for some minimal cost amount of food+rent?

And doesn't the responsibility to pay up remain for money made after the bankruptcy event? Or does declaring bankruptcy ensure a clean slate such that income from new ventures is safe from being confiscated?

Satoshi would have been content with the current state of crypto, being a de facto vehicle for ransomware, serving as a tool for pushing society down the toilet drain?

Consider his unease when Wikileaks started soliciting funds in BTC. If he were all about uncontrollable money he would not have sounded unhappiness about his ballgame being used by Wikileaks.

Satoshi and Le Roux both coded C++ but the code they wrote is very different, stylistically and otherwise (tabs vs. spaces, commenting style, approach to things like RNG). Linguistics tics are different in writings. Satoshi has an academic streak to him, he's probably some unknown dude in Germany. La Roux sometimes made grammar/spelling mistakes, Satoshi was pretty much always perfect. It's also strange that Le Roux, being a criminal kingpin with lots of operations, never implemented BTC use in any of his enterprises... why did he choose not to?

When the Dorian saga happened, Satoshi posted on p2pfoundation to clear up that Dorian wasn't him with his original account, I think Le Roux was in prison at that time. He's still in prison, he's been cooperating with the US government. US is definitely not letting him go anywhere for the shit he's done, everything from drug cartel work, helping Iranian and North Korean governments acquire weapons, etc.

One more delicious detail: Le Roux in a letter to SDNY judge wrote that he wants to invent ways to mine BTC efficiently. Really it comes down to the fact that Le Roux was involved with a whole bunch of stuff, and when you have this much surface area to scan you'd think you could come upon with just one strong piece of evidence... but there is nil, he's just another criminal warlord, luckily now in the custody of the US government: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-ca2-20-03410/pd...

Which he obviously isn't; Le Roux was nothing more than a crime boss, thought to be more technically adept than what a sober look at things would suggest (E4M's source code was stolen from his earlier employer).

Reading Satoshi's writings and comments I often got the impression that his intentions were pure. But it is and should be painfully obvious that the only things crypto has principally enabled or made efficient are sophisticated scam work/ransomware, background sex work, and drug trade. To really top it off: it was all at the expense of a small country's carbon footprint.

So I keep having this thought that if Satoshi really is worth his salt, he would transfer his existing funds (of about 50 billion USD) to an assortment of charities because such an action would be quite the statement in declaring that the crypto experiment has been an abject failure and it's time to stop wasting our time and move on. Better he make this impactful statement, better him the person who started it all be behind the action to finish it, than to have to continue in this painful and agonizing path we are on.

Knuth is the poster child for the school of thought that just doing a _lot_ of math problems, especially calculus, is great mental weightlifting and we should make our young students do a lot of math homework. See this interview: https://ia600803.us.archive.org/29/items/conversation-with-k...

    I spent hours and hours studying the mathematics book we 
    used -- Calculus and Analytic geometry by Thomas.
    We were assigned only the even-numbered problems, but I 
    did every single one together with the extras in the back 
    of the book because I felt so scared. I thought I should 
    do all of them. I found at first that it was very slow 
    going, and I worked late at night to do it. I think the 
    only reason I did this was because I was worried about 
    passing. But then I found out that after a few months I 
    could do all of the problems in the same amount of time 
    that it took the other kids to do just the odd-numbered 
    ones. I had learned enough about problem solving by that 
    time that I could gain speed, so it turned out to be very 
    lucky that I crashed into it real hard at the beginning.

It's important to get down a lot of hours solving problems for the express purpose of improving your mental faculties, improving working memory. So for the finite amount of time you have, what problems do you choose to work on? I think maths and calculus is a great bet. Though I'd rather suggest a young person do Spivak's Calculus as opposed to Thomas' Calculus as Knuth used. You'll notice that most of geniuses we know were spending long periods of time solving problems. I'm kind of scared that we will have less people like Knuth in our people, people who can just go and deepthink and solve _difficult_ problems. If we keep up with this meme of 'no homework' we are in danger.

Yes! But a part of the Jitsi ecosystem enables recordings and whisper is a good candidate to use for these recorded sessions.

On that topic — they record sessions in an interesting way, basically an instance of chrome is started and captured... I think with OBS. That always made me raise an eye but I also can’t think of up a better way.

edit: It's actually jibri which has to do with recording. Gosh I wish the names were a liiiittle more intuitive. :)

If I have time I'll try to help you guys out. I'm a big fan of what you're doing. :)

Oh no you're absolutely right, my general frustration was ill-placed for this thread. Wasm is no doubt the right and only way to have done this.

If you have any involvement with Jigasi or might be in the know -- are there plans to use whisper, for instance, instead of Google's API for transcription? If I recall correctly jigasi is using google's API, local transcription aligns well with the rest of Jitsi's missions.

You probably have a point but I'm thinking unuglified js code (http://www.nice2predict.org/) is not as impenetrable as code from reverse engineered wasm binaries? The element of plausible deniability is more potent though for the nefarious actor on the other side in the case of wasm binaries.

Created a few years ago by Jean-Marc Valin of xiph/mozilla (who by the way is also the author of Opus codec among other things): https://gitlab.xiph.org/xiph/rnnoise/

Overview of RNNoise from the horse's mouth is here: https://jmvalin.ca/demo/rnnoise/

Used as a Wasm module! In some ways the web is becoming more opaque. Is this the future then, a hodgepodge of binaries doing things behind the scenes? Though in this case it happens to be OSS, and it may well be a moot point -- backend is already a blackbox to the enduser, now parts of frontend are blackboxes. The practical implication is probably just that some measure of customizability is gone.

At least webtech has some excuse for being a gargantuan tarantula and having its legs everywhere, PDF software is supposed to be basic document software but overreaches.

> PDF has a lot of features, but it’s not complicated.

I'm not sure about, Acrobat reader in particular is very complicated, I'll rehash a famous old reddit comment --

Acrobat doesn't just read PDFs, it's a mail server, document lifecycle management system, DRM client, full-fledged document tracking system, it can have forms, it can gather statistics for your docs when you share them, it has audio and video playback. The manual is a couple thousand pages. Adobe's proposition to businesses is "You want a complete content tracking system? Wanna be able to effortlessly conduct surveys? Get next-level telemetry data from your users? Have we got the thing for you... the best part is all of your clients already have it installed!"

So good on you for ditching Adobe and not enabling this bull, SumatraPDF/emac's pdf-tools is perfect.

Regarding native GUI toolkits, they work but they're more work than Electron to deal with. Secondly, the big thing that us nerds keep failing to recognize is that software needs to be easy to use for grandmas and grandpas, part of that means having consistency in UI for users across the board from one system to the other. See how Zoom is nearly identical when using on iPad or Windows 7 or even Linux? Couldn't pull that off with GTK. I think with Qt you can modify your widgets quite a bit but you still don't have control over the minutiae of UI like you do with Electron.

Don't get me wrong it is still the wrong choice many times; the abomination that is MS Teams and Spotify is a flagrant violation of good taste and should be set on fire and nuked out of the fucking orbit, it is a heinous crime especially for big companies with the means to arrange large teams to build and deploy apps made with non-WebView-based frameworks, but for small shops I don't see any issue with Electron's use. VSCode launches instantaneously on my M2 Macbook Air. Zoom works flawlessly, along with a host of other Electron-based apps. I don't care too much if it's using some CPU here and there if I can't discern any slowness. Anyway, apps made with Tauri are much better in terms of CPU and memory usage, 1Password moved from Electron and Tauri and I'm certain more will follow and the next wave of desktop apps will surely be speedier now that Electron's slowness has become a bit of a meme.