bawolff

19 ms·

421.
by bawolff 5mo ago
> Being a U.S. ally is no guarantee of protection even if you literally host American bases like the gulf countries are seeing. In fact, it’s only made them a target and the U.S. prioritized protecting Israel entirely over protecting any
422.
by bawolff 5mo ago
I don't think that is really relavent. Ukraine was essentially invaded because they became too friendly with NATO (and hence america). Even without a formal promise, other countries are going to notice america hanging ukraine out to dr
423.
by bawolff 5mo ago
I imagine a big difference is at most jobs the worst that will happen is you get fired, at the CIA you go to jail for the rest of your life.
424.
by bawolff 5mo ago
There are trade offs in all things. Trying to do everything yourself does also have a cost. It is not neccesarily better.
425.
by bawolff 5mo ago
> For a long time, traditional encyclopedias had a much better track record on topics related to politics and society, simply because their editor selection process largely eliminated single-issue crusading That's a bit debatable. T
426.
by bawolff 5mo ago
A lot of what people do at Wikimedia is try and thread a compromise path through various factions of stakeholders. I could see how career diplomat would have some transferable skills.
427.
by bawolff 5mo ago
If you want to help Wikipedia, the best thing you can do is contribute to articles. Time and expertise is always going to be a more valuable donation than anything monentary.
428.
by bawolff 5mo ago
Maybe not, but they need more than zero. Regardless, even if you think its not a neccesary expenditure (obviously there is a big gap between bare minimum and healthy), its still an expenditure on hosting the site. The person i was respondin
429.
by bawolff 5mo ago
> I'm skeptical. How much do they actually spend on necessary legal work? A non-zero amount. This isn't like a huge part of their budget, but people sue wikipedia constantly. Someone has to deal with that. We're also seein
430.
by bawolff 5mo ago
FWIW, he mostly only has symbolic influence at this point.
431.
by bawolff 5mo ago
> The actual physical cost of hosting Wikipedia is < $5 million per year. This is always a silly point. What do you plan to do with the servers if you don't hire people to plug them in or software engineers to maintain the softwa
432.
by bawolff 5mo ago
> The cost of running the website (including staff) is actually a very small piece of their budget. This is a lie. The only way to make this true is if you don't count programmers, and managers of those programmers as part of runnin
433.
by bawolff 5mo ago
Abstract wikipedia is taking a symbolic AI approach instead of an LLM or other statistical approach. The hope is (as i understand it) that this will provide reliability, predictability and better extend to languages that don't have a l
434.
by bawolff 5mo ago
I think a lot of the objections come from the proposed replacement which does not sound very promising. A friend of mine is fond of the quote "Change happens at the speed of trust". There is not an overwhelming amount of trust bet
435.
by bawolff 5mo ago
> There's a battle to control what information gets recorded and distributed, an effort to silence anything that contradicts US foreign policy, basically. The Wikimedia foundation does not exercise editorial control over Wikipedia.
436.
by bawolff 5mo ago
I wasn't actually aware of that, but key point here is that she quit that job in 2004. I'm not sure i'd describe someone who worked in wall street 20 years ago as a "wall street guy"
437.
by bawolff 5mo ago
> As a result, WMF prioritizes investing in emerging markets over enwiki. This means outreach to indigenous languages in the Global South and developing supporting infrastructure. e.g. "Abstract Wikipedia" which aims to use a l
438.
by bawolff 5mo ago
To give context, it seems like what happened is WMF did two separate things: - Fired one of the original developers of MediaWiki (the open source project that powers wikipedia) - Brooke. This person was at one point in contention to basical
439.
by bawolff 5mo ago
In what world is Bernadette Meehan a "wall street finance guy"?
440.
by bawolff 5mo ago
> The only thing server, platform, website, service providers should be doing is setting an RTA header if the content could possibly be adult or user-contributed content that could dynamically become adult, moderation aside....If a site
441.
by bawolff 5mo ago
Sure, but people do download movies & tv. Maybe not as much as in the heyday, but that usecase is still alive.
442.
by bawolff 5mo ago
> Gnutella has gone mostly forgotten. Some of that is because it was a component technology hidden beneath more visible projects like LimeWire. The other half of this is that the walled garden model of modern platforms means most interne
443.
by bawolff 5mo ago
- better simultion of quantum systems (this is the actual important one despite nobody seeming to care) - breaking a lot of traditional public key crypto (this gets a lot of attention, but its not that big a deal because there are alternati
444.
by bawolff 5mo ago
If they could in any meaningful way, i'm pretty sure the press release would have lead with that.
445.
by bawolff 5mo ago
I mean, we are no where near the scale [qubit count] & quality where the applications apply. Not just this foundry but in general. I suppose the point is to eventually get there, but we are not close yet. You should still view anything
446.
by bawolff 5mo ago
There is high agreement on what the real applications of Quantum computing are. Unfortunately these projects are basically useless when it comes to them.
447.
by bawolff 5mo ago
Yeah, but those dont end up in the final product afaik, which i think is the distiction being made.
448.
by bawolff 5mo ago
Honestly, all this you must 100% do x is tiresome. Just use moderation and you'll be fine.
449.
by bawolff 5mo ago
> Is that even possible with the current food supply chain though? Given that vegans exist, i'm going to say yes, its entirely possible if you feel like it.
450.
by bawolff 5mo ago
However the numbers dont tell the whole story. A lot of alberta's wealth is tied to oil. That presents three problems. A) having too much of your economy be tied to oil generally causes dysfunction in the country. See all of the middle

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