jcranmer

51 ms·

691.
by jcranmer 1y ago
The systemic white genocide isn't really a thing. Sure, there is political violence against whites in Africa, but South Africa ain't anywhere near the worst offender there, and the rate of violence there is comparable to the rate
692.
by jcranmer 1y ago
There have been a few recent instances where Grok has been tuned to spew out white supremacist dreck that should be political anathema--most notably the "but let's talk about white genocide" phase a few months ago and more re
693.
by jcranmer 1y ago
Take anything Linus says about compilers with a grain of salt--he writes OS kernels, not compilers, and those are pretty different domains. Alias analysis is extremely important for getting good performance these days--but it should also
694.
by jcranmer 1y ago
The people I've seen who have talked about their engagement numbers--as measured by something like "how many visitors do we get to a story based on a Bluesky/Facebook/ex-Twitter/etc. link", so independent of th
695.
by jcranmer 1y ago
"the points already made" is what is known as the "bare passive", and yes, it is the passive voice. You can see e.g. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 for a more thorough description of
696.
by jcranmer 1y ago
There's nothing wrong with the passive voice. The problem is that many people have only a poor ability to recognize the passive voice in the first place. This results in the examples being clunky, wordy messes that are bad because they
697.
by jcranmer 1y ago
> The difficulty in coming up with a test for AGI is coming up with something that people will accept a passing grade as AGI. The difficulty with intelligence is we don't even know what it is in the first place (in a psychology sens
698.
by jcranmer 1y ago
This often gets trotted out, but it's not really true. English is a solidly Germanic language, which merely happened to lose the core attribute of Indo-European languages (extensive verb inflection), and in more recent centuries, there
699.
by jcranmer 1y ago
The best 'defense' of English spelling I'm aware of is https://www.zompist.com/spell.html , which at the end admits: > I doubt that this page will convince anyone that English spelling is a good system. The
700.
by jcranmer 1y ago
A few plausible answers to that: In general, it's not transliteration into English characters, it's transliteration into the Latin alphabet. That means that transliteration tends to be shared across the various European languages
701.
by jcranmer 1y ago
I have a LD_PRELOAD library that hooks SIGSEGV into spawning gdb on the process using the best guess for the process's terminal (which currently isn't very smart because I haven't yet needed to debug processes that do a lot o
702.
by jcranmer 1y ago
That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules [1], and trying to make 'fish' come out of ghoti requires breaking them. 'gh' only occurs as an /f/ sound when it oc
703.
by jcranmer 1y ago
All C compilers have some notion of pointer provenance embedded in them, and this is true going back decades. The problem is that the documented definitions of pointer provenance (which generally amount to "you must somehow have a data
704.
by jcranmer 1y ago
> I can easily tell code written by a novice programmer naively 'vibe coding' an app from code written by an experienced developer using AI to help him. Can a history professor tell the difference between a purely AI essay from
705.
by jcranmer 1y ago
Students cheat when they think grades are more valuable than knowledge. We already have a real-world scourge of tech bros who view learning about other subjects as beneath them and who rate their ignorance as more valuable than experts in
706.
by jcranmer 1y ago
> I just needed encryption... Which a self-signed would be fine. But the internet powers that be deem self-signed as 'evil'. Self-signed certificates don't actually provide useful encryption, since they are trivially MITM-
707.
by jcranmer 1y ago
Floats [if you ignore -0.0, infinities, and NaNs] are a subset of the rationals, themselves a subset of the real numbers. It's generally accurate to consider floats an acceptable approximation of the [extended] reals, since it's p
708.
by jcranmer 1y ago
A graph whose data ends in 2018 isn't strong evidence for "they aren't plummeting." That said, doing some searches for newer information (e.g., https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics&#x
709.
by jcranmer 1y ago
Spoken by the Athenians and resulting in a war that, as Thucydides's audience knew quite well, Athens lost big-time. Which actually holds up quite well for everybody who loves to bring up that quote: realism aka "we shouldn't
710.
by jcranmer 1y ago
Rust is interesting because it's the first language to really try to compete in the same space as C and C++ in quite a long time. Part of being a newer language is that it doesn't have to work around the baggage of horribly bad pa
711.
by jcranmer 1y ago
The majority opinion in Google v Oracle did an involved fair use analysis for the reimplementation of the API that really makes it clear that it's hard for anybody to violate the copyright of an API by doing a clean-room implementation
712.
by jcranmer 1y ago
cppreference isn't the standard, and while the text they write looks like it's the same verbiage that would be authoritative, it's not. (And there's some criticism of it from standards committee members in that regard).
713.
by jcranmer 1y ago
> What's the history of human timekeeping? Particularly before the Gregorian calendar, what historical records do we have for who was tracking/tallying the days elapsed over time? How did people coordinate on the current date g
714.
by jcranmer 1y ago
The success of Linux over BSD has more to do with a lawsuit in the early 90's over whether or BSD infringed on Unix's source code, which made Linux the only viable open source Unix-like operating systems if you had to ask a legal
715.
by jcranmer 1y ago
The Economist has long been pretty outspoken over their preference for a carbon tax over cap-and-trade (see any article they write about carbon emissions).
716.
by jcranmer 1y ago
The biggest improvement are for the very poor, who rely more heavily than other socioeconomic classes on bus transportation, which has seen the greatest efficiency improvements from congestion pricing. The merely poor or middle class, in NY
717.
by jcranmer 1y ago
Ask people how many different vowels there are in this set of words: trap, bath, palm, lot, cloth, thought. Most English speakers will make out two-four vowels from those 6 words. But they won't agree on which words share the same vowe
718.
by jcranmer 1y ago
I'm sorry, this is just such an incredibly fine-tuned threat model for me to take it seriously. You start with a BGP hijack, which lets you impersonate anybody , but assume that the hijacker is only so powerful as being able to impers
719.
by jcranmer 1y ago
It's not just some weak relation. The Behind the Bastards podcast works by having the podcaster invite a guest on the show and tell the story of an individual (or movement, like the Zizians) to provide a live reaction. And in the dis
720.
by jcranmer 1y ago
The podcast Behind the Bastards described Rationalism not as a cult but as the fertile soil which is perfect for growing cults, leading to the development of cults like the Zizians (who both the Rationalists and Zizians are at pains to em

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