praptak

13 ms·

271.
by praptak 2y ago
A complex three dimensional organism self-assembling from a single cell is 100% magic, especially given how resilient it is to disruption. You can kill one of the two cells produced by the first division and still get a fully formed organis
272.
by praptak 2y ago
I do agree that narratives and morals matter. That said is hard for me to reconcile this statement with the late pope's stance on the Ukraine war. His narrative about this was that it is a regrettable conflict between brother nations a
273.
by praptak 2y ago
Yeah, a lawsuit would be a strong chess move. Too bad it doesn't work on the opponent who already flipped the table with the board and is drawing a knife on you.
274.
by praptak 2y ago
That doesn't enable anything new, the charities would still get donations if bitcoin didn't exist. Failed states are a more interesting use case but does Bitcoin really help there? Can you buy bread with Bitcoin in Zimbabwe?
275.
by praptak 2y ago
So, has anything good come out of Bitcoin? Most usage seems to be people wanting to get rich off it, the rest is drugs, there's some ransomware and an occasional hack where North Korea gains funds to prop up their regime.
276.
by praptak 2y ago
My position is balance between the family and the state for the maximal benefit of the child. Also the balance should be towards access to information. There is no symmetry between exposure to harmful ideas and restricting good ones. With y
277.
by praptak 2y ago
I meant abusive in the general sense, including overt restrictions in access to information. My hypothetical parents behind Rawls' Veil should not be able to prevent me from learning about evolution to give a concrete example.
278.
by praptak 2y ago
Under Rawls' Veil of Ignorance I actually want the state to protect me as a child born into a random family that could happen to be abusive.
279.
by praptak 2y ago
It got hard to compete with home gaming setups.
280.
by praptak 2y ago
I can imagine a system which assures one ID per actual verified meat human. The ID can be banned from communities, blocked by individuals or kicked out of the platform. I think this would limit the supply of IDs, so a big improvement over t
281.
by praptak 2y ago
I don't think Facebook satisfies the demand for interaction with actual human beings.
282.
by praptak 2y ago
I'm afraid it's one of those things where everyone thinks it would be nice if it existed but the real demand is not strong enough to support an implementation. But who knows, maybe it will change someday.
283.
by praptak 2y ago
"Good times" is a property of the political system as a whole and has little to do with "strength of men" unless you bend backwards to redefine strength.
284.
by praptak 2y ago
4chan was never known for high security, early versions were pretty close to pasting raw user input into HTML, which was eagerly used by griefers, for example by pasting right-to-left unicode overrides in their comments which was enough to
285.
by praptak 2y ago
Related: the YAML exponent problem[0] TLDR: unquoted hex hash in YAML is fine until it happens to match \d+E\d+ when it gets interpreted as a float in scientific notation. [0] https://www.brautaset.org/posts/yaml-exponen
286.
by praptak 2y ago
The good thing about proof of work is that it doesn't specifically gate bots. It may have some other downsides - for example I don't think that Google is possible in a world where everyone requires proof of work (some may argue it
287.
by praptak 2y ago
If there's money to be made, there will always be someone with a shovel or a truckload of sparklers who is willing to take the risk (especially if the risk can be externalized to the public) and reap the reward.
288.
by praptak 2y ago
That was known already, with "antisemitism" covering any kind of protest against the genocide committed by Israel in Gaza.
289.
by praptak 2y ago
Non-punitive my ass. The German tourist was put for eight days in solitary confinement: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/03/ice-german-t...
290.
by praptak 2y ago
I have this optimistic belief that there exists this platonic ideal of a configuration language which isn't a programming language but is still expressible enough. I think of it as an algebra of configurations and there are at least tw
291.
by praptak 2y ago
This is outdated. These days billionaires openly and publicly tell the owned media what to write. Bezos, in his own words: "I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning: I’m writing to let you know about a change comin
292.
by praptak 2y ago
> To some extent the FAANGs export tech. Speaking of FAANG - EU has been considering proper taxes on the digital economy for some time already[0]. I guess this will speed up the works on this. [0] https://www.consilium.europa.e
293.
by praptak 2y ago
Unless the customer already wants to ditch Oracle.
294.
by praptak 2y ago
That too, but my disagreement is more fundamental: even if you can create good new things, there are probably[0] better things to do with your resources than creating them. [0] This is a small escape hatch for "what if one can only cre
295.
by praptak 2y ago
I disagree that creating new things should be prioritised[0]. There's too many things already and the most pressing problems have solutions which are not new, just hard to apply for political reasons. [0] Saying "prioritised"
296.
by praptak 2y ago
Being from there only means they can't deport you or deny entry indefinitely , right?
297.
by praptak 2y ago
You are bringing up chess rules while the opponent flips the table and draws a knife.
298.
by praptak 2y ago
Even a small amount of data literacy makes you aware that visualizations can deceive. Pie charts make humans overestimate large percentages, nonzero axis is borderline fraud, choice of colors can totally warp color scales. I think that in t
299.
by praptak 2y ago
I call this kind of argument "ignited gas burner cools the water". The water boils, so evaporation increases, so evaporative cooling increases, which cools the water. Edit: I mean: most of the bad stuff creates secondary effects w
300.
by praptak 2y ago
This security antipattern is also called "enumerating badness", with antivirus databases being the most popular example. Obviously once you have created a list of the bad stuff, you have to keep it up to date.

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