ndriscoll

7 ms·

91.
by ndriscoll 1mo ago
As with many programming languages, you can use phantom types to prevent this sort of thing, and in fact, that's exactly what's happening but they make it sound extra silly when they throw away the safety wrapper. That's why
92.
by ndriscoll 1mo ago
People absolutely do like unpaid work, so much so that the phrase "do-it-yourself" appeared as a marketing term. I do all the unpaid labor I can. It builds competence, lets you ensure quality, and is generally cheaper/more
93.
by ndriscoll 1mo ago
Except as Valve themselves points out[0], > The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy... but it is easily removed And it takes about 2 seconds to find t
94.
by ndriscoll 1mo ago
This has nothing to do with Lean, e.g. > The first coordinate of the polynomial X^2 (X^3 + X + 1 ) is equal to the prime factorization of 30 . We defined polynomials as their coefficient functions in my algebra class, and it makes sense
95.
by ndriscoll 1mo ago
You can't back up your encrypted bits on one machine and use them on another without constant permission from Sony though. Other hardware doesn't have the keys to decrypt them (actually this is it's own issue: it's o
96.
by ndriscoll 1mo ago
20 years ago Sony was including viruses on their music CDs. They have a very long history of poor behavior.
97.
by ndriscoll 1mo ago
Like the other commenter said, we don't have to normalize this. A reasonable jury can and should find that Sony pushing an update to intentionally brick Playstations is criminal destruction of property, regardless of what some EULA say
98.
by ndriscoll 1mo ago
Disabling DRM is required for basic archiving if the issue is someone else having the ability to decide the thing you bought will self-destruct. Copying doesn't matter if it doesn't produce a usable backup. If you remove the DRM,
99.
by ndriscoll 1mo ago
I've never heard of being asked by an employer to make an account associated to a non-work account (like a personal email). They should provision SSO, or at least use a company domain like apple.com or internal.apple.com for test accou
100.
by ndriscoll 1mo ago
That seems crazy to me. I've always had my employers either provide or offer to provide me with anything I'll use for work. Asking someone to use a non-corporate-managed account for work seems especially insane to me. I've ne
101.
by ndriscoll 1mo ago
How's that supposed to work? Apple requires employees to own Apple products or have a personal account in the first place? That doesn't sound believable.
102.
by ndriscoll 1mo ago
> In total, Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic So after a couple years? How is this supposed to be an argument in favor of disposable bags? My reusable one
103.
by ndriscoll 1mo ago
Or a top of the barrel choice like just using one of the many non-profit FOSS apps that are also UIs over OpenStreetMap instead of one of the scam commercial ad-wrappers.
104.
by ndriscoll 1mo ago
Shouldn't those concerns be directed at the companies? The law makes it perfectly clear that age restrictions are only needed for addictive features. They could age gate just the addictive features if a user wants to turn them on. e.g.
105.
by ndriscoll 1mo ago
One obvious solution is of course to break these companies up. Set a maximum user count that a communication network operator is allowed to have before we break them up (say, 10M). Require some kind of good-faith open federation for any com
106.
by ndriscoll 1mo ago
The above poster isn't saying Internet access; they're saying access to the ad-filled Skinner boxes that are trying to position themselves as necessary for communication through network effects. Incidentally, the bill doesn't
107.
by ndriscoll 1mo ago
What legitimate objections? Why do platforms need addictive methods for people to be able to publish their thoughts? Do blogging platforms not provide direct evidence right in front of everyone that they're not needed? I may be misinte
108.
by ndriscoll 2mo ago
Don't we still teach kids that e.g. 3/4=6/8, that they need to make a common denominator to add, and that they should cross multiply to check equality? I suppose we don't teach zero divisors, but otherwise, jargon aside,
109.
by ndriscoll 2mo ago
This is a problem with copyright in general. There's no longer any requirement to provide information about copyright status, so there's no way for the public to know whether something is copyrighted (no doubt the uncertainty is i
110.
by ndriscoll 2mo ago
I'm not sure what exactly a travel-related hobby app might even be for (other than e.g. a map and a calendar, but there are FOSS ones), but isn't this exactly demonstrating the "creator" mentality? You can make your blog
111.
by ndriscoll 2mo ago
I use NixOS, but basically anything other than Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android fits the bill.
112.
by ndriscoll 2mo ago
Don't go on sites with "creators" then. When people say this they're talking about like 5 websites. They're not "the Internet" at all.
113.
by ndriscoll 2mo ago
My OS has no walled garden and also does not randomly install drivers when I plug hardware in. It comes with generic defaults, adds drivers I tell it to, and never modifies anything without me telling it to. Crazy idea.
114.
by ndriscoll 2mo ago
A huge portion of the actual thing I write when writing a program does not exist at all in the compiled binary. Names, types, type parameters, etc. being big ones, but many types are also aliases for the empty struct, so their value doesn&#
115.
by ndriscoll 2mo ago
In a sane world, if brought before a court, the binary itself wouldn't have any protection unless hand authored. The actual creative work/human expression was the source code. The entire point of compiling is to strip that extra d
116.
by ndriscoll 2mo ago
Eh, in theoretical fields we now have good formal verification tools so that someone publishing a code repo on their personal website is more meaningful in pretty much every way than a peer reviewed journal article. The article becomes an a
117.
by ndriscoll 2mo ago
Yeah it's the notion of what is "technology" that's the issue. I'm pretty happy that I can just plug my car (and my lawnmower!) in now instead of going to the gas station every few days. Solar panels and batteries h
118.
by ndriscoll 2mo ago
I agree that it's not grey at all, but because they're both so obviously good (particularly labs releasing open weight models). It's great that there are organizations making it ~free for anyone in the world to obtain informa
119.
by ndriscoll 2mo ago
In the sense that they are not programmers and do not deeply know e.g. performance engineering, sure. But I can still give one a program and ask it to optimize it, and it will turn it into a zero allocation streaming SIMD implementation tha
120.
by ndriscoll 2mo ago
Maybe, but math also has reusable techniques and patterns. c.f. https://www.tricki.org/ The goalpost moving is really getting absurd, to the point where now the machine needs to be a world-class once-a-century genius that i

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