p-e-w

29 ms·

571.
by p-e-w 3y ago
> The true magic of the early web was somebody genius but decidedly untechnical like David Bowie shitposting at his own fans. No, the magic of the early web was that people treated their online identities as a secret alternative life, ra
572.
by p-e-w 3y ago
If the value of your "variable" doesn't change, it's a constant by definition, and a const declaration is appropriate. If it does change, using const will give you an error. Therefore, it's literally impossible to m
573.
by p-e-w 3y ago
> Why such an emphasis on what language stuff is written in? Because it's by far the most important decision made during the creation of any software project, and to a large extent, it sets the boundaries of what the software will
574.
by p-e-w 3y ago
There's all the rest of open source, and then there's SQLite. A public domain software that doesn't accept contributions from outsiders, and that happens to run much of the world. And it just keeps getting better and better a
575.
by p-e-w 3y ago
> Publishing original software is protected expression. That means Jack Shit in a world where a lawsuit can ruin a person's life regardless of its legal merit, with zero consequences for the corporation that filed it even if it gets
576.
by p-e-w 3y ago
Interested in one common topic. If I like crocheting, interacting with people in a crocheting subreddit doesn't create a "filter bubble". The people in that sub are still going to have wildly different opinions and preferen
577.
by p-e-w 3y ago
Myanmar has been in a nearly continuous civil war for decades. It's a failed state and always has been. That has nothing to do with social media. And no US government in recent history, including the one before the current one, had kil
578.
by p-e-w 3y ago
> but the other side of that is that moderate users will be able to move between communities at-will Nope. Banning users for simply being members of certain other communities has been a thing for quite a while now.
579.
by p-e-w 3y ago
Social media has been around for 15+ years. That's 3-4 election cycles in most countries. And the way I see it, the same kind of people are getting voted in that have been for decades. Yes, that includes Trump, who is just Reagan with
580.
by p-e-w 3y ago
Jesus Christ the hyperbole. Name a single example of a country where a government that "wants certain people dead" has been voted in recently, other than such countries where this has been happening for decades anyway without soci
581.
by p-e-w 3y ago
The supposed "social media bubble" is a silly myth. The exact opposite is the case: On even the most algorithmically filtered social media platform, you cannot avoid encountering opinions and viewpoints that are dramatically diffe
582.
by p-e-w 3y ago
The vast majority of doctors, when presented with a patient asking such a thing, will do a 30 second "examination" (if you're lucky), then spout some platitudes about exercise being beneficial in moderation (which you could h
583.
by p-e-w 3y ago
The answer to questions of the type "Why are governments so bad/inefficient/wasteful/slow/etc.?" is always the same: Because they have no incentive to do better. When you are literally the one who makes the rul
584.
by p-e-w 3y ago
Six hundred thousand dollars for a 1m telescope? That's a crazy price tag. What's the expensive part here? That's the price of 10 upper-tier cars. Is it so insanely difficult to make that mirror, or are they just gouging be
585.
by p-e-w 3y ago
> The centrepiece of this article is basically "people's feelings are wrong, the government's numbers are right". True, but such patronizing statements are pretty much what mainstream media has consisted of since at l
586.
by p-e-w 3y ago
Indeed. The written in C part of the headline is a red flag, rather than the advertisement it is probably intended to be. It basically translates to "a piece of software that must be thoroughly audited by highly specialized security
587.
by p-e-w 3y ago
Not that it matters. OpenSSL was already 15 years old when Heartbleed was discovered, and the horrible code that caused it remained unnoticed for two years. The idea that software maturity and "enough eyes" can overcome the glarin
588.
by p-e-w 3y ago
> The us banking system is unraveling before us and I’m getting the pop corn out. People said the exact same thing in 2009, and two years later everything was back to the way it had been before.
589.
by p-e-w 3y ago
Sovereign defaults are very rare events outside of banana republics. It's not survivorship bias so much as it simply doesn't normally happen, despite the vast majority of advanced economies having been neck-deep in debt for a long
590.
by p-e-w 3y ago
Experts and laypeople (and the press) will go on and on and on about national deficits, but what exactly is it that they are afraid of? It seems to me that the past decades have convincingly demonstrated that countries really can keep run
591.
by p-e-w 3y ago
Meh. Unless something very unexpected happens, human programmers aren't going to be a thing anymore, starting in a not-too-far future. And programming AIs will neither have trouble understanding all those layers of abstraction, nor wil
592.
by p-e-w 3y ago
> iOS 17 contains 6030 binaries, up from 5403 in iOS 16. That’s 627 new binaries. That's... insane. Even worse, the graph appears to show a superlinear trend. For comparison, iOS 2 had only 278 binaries. With such out-of-control sof
593.
by p-e-w 3y ago
I'm highly skeptical concerning the claimed 'effects' of lack of sleep. I don't doubt those are correlated with lack of sleep, but for many of them, obvious confounding factors exist. As a trivial example, overworked p
594.
by p-e-w 3y ago
> supposedly he met Thales, was initiated as Egyptian priest in Hermopolis, spent time in Babylon after being captured, and was initiated into every mystery cult he could It should be noted that such claims were made about many ancient s
595.
by p-e-w 3y ago
Nobody knows how LLMs work on a high level. There's an algorithm that consumes Terabytes of raw text and produces 175 billion parameters, that when used as a statistical model magically reproduce human language. But the conceptual co
596.
by p-e-w 3y ago
> there's fundamentally no evidence our thoughts are the decisive events leading to behavior rather than, say, a rationalization of said behavior In fact, there is plenty of evidence for the latter, such as experiments where people
597.
by p-e-w 3y ago
> When we generate word sequence we usually generate those to communicate information about the world, not to try to parrot what others have said. What is the evidence supporting that claim? I grant you that it feels that way to humans
598.
by p-e-w 3y ago
> they are not like humans at all, and only resemble them superficially We have no idea how LLMs work on a high level, and we have no idea how the human mind works on a high level. Therefore, such claims are rather overconfident. The fac
599.
by p-e-w 3y ago
> but I'm guessing that I'm going to think it is too low when I hear the actual fine > [...] > I received 2 citations with each carrying a $500 fine. A $1000 fine in the absence of any actual damage is completely insane a
600.
by p-e-w 3y ago
Evidence?

More ›