- I always find it ironic when people complain about social media on social media, drawing some arbitrary line on what is social media (implied to be bad) and what is not (implied to be good).
I would also add GitHub and StackOverflow to the list of social media, they have user-to-user interaction and a visible reputation system with gamification. Stretch things a bit and you could even include email. IRC and USENET too of course.
The only time I have seen something sensible was is I think a proposal in a US state, where the social media the ruling is about is clearly defined. I think it has to have user interaction, a personalized algorithmic feed, and a number of specific patterns, such as infinite scroll, essentially Facebook, TikTok, Instagram,... but not Reddit or Hacker News. The good think about that is that the social media in question could "work around" the ruling by stripping off some dark patterns, I would consider it a win should it happen.
- As a non-American, I think that Americans are special in that they have the right combination of hard work and personal initiative and efficiency. To oversimplify, Europeans are efficient workers, but unlike Americans, they use their efficiency not to produce more but to work less and enjoy life. East Asians are hard workers but they tend to favor group cohesion over maximizing individual potential, which is not as efficient.
I am not saying that one culture is better than another, but I think the American way is particularly productive, particularly stressful too.
- Counterexample.
Even when eggs are clearly labeled "caged" and "free range", many people will buy the "caged" eggs despite the clear implications in terms of animal welfare.
Also, while I consider organic food to be mostly (but not completely) a scam, most people don't buy organic. Which can be interpreted as "if it is cheaper with pesticides than without, I will go for pesticides".
In cars, emission control devices have to me made mandatory and almost no one would pay for them. And even with that, people sometimes break the law to remove them (ex: catalytic converter). It is common for all environmental laws.
Of course, if you talk to people face to face, most will tell you that they don't want value and convenience at the cost of evil, but in private, if can turn a blind eye, they will.
And most of these company evil practices are often not very well hidden. Sometimes, they are genuinely criminal, highly secret operations, but they are often not, as criminal lawsuits are costly, and secrets like that don't last long in big companies. But if it is legal and it brings value convenience to people, people usually don't want to look too much, even when some NGOs try to bring awareness.
- I don't think the timestamped UUIDs are "carrying data", it is just a heuristic to improve lookup performance. If the timestamp is wrong, it will just run as slow as the non-timestamped UUID.
If you take the gender example, for 99% of people, it is male/female and it won't change, and you can use that for load balancing. But if later, you found out that the gender is not the one you expect for that bucket, no big deal, it will cause a branch misprediction, but instead of happening 50% of the times when you use a random value, it will only happen 1% of the times, significant speedup with no loss in functionality.
- We need some more nuance here.
Companies are not evil, they are profit driven, and they make profit by responding to demand. If people demand evil, they will make evil, if people demand good, they will make good. I think it is too easy to blame them when ultimately, we are the one who support them.
In the case of farming, we want cheap food, and the way to make cheap food is intensive farming, with pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. So, companies make pesticides, farmers use them, and we eat the cheap food. Because we recognize that some checks need to be put in place, we elect governments to regulate all that, and or vote goes to whoever makes the best balance between cheap food, taxes and subsidies, and general health and precautions. This is crucial because cheap food is a matter of survival to some.
So in the end, there are no "baddies", just a system that's not perfect. Also keep in mind that big corporation are made of a lot of people, you may be one of them. I am. Does it make us evil? Maybe a little, but I don't think any more than average, as middle-class, I even tend to think we define the average.
- To me, a learning needs some kind of gamification and engagement tricks. There is nothing calm about learning, you need the dopamine! Among other things, dopamine is the learning hormone, it is a problem when it makes you learn the wrong things, like "fentanyl is really great", or "I need to buy more stuff I don't need", but it is also what helps you learn useful skills and life lessons.
I remember my father, a teacher, who told me he viewed his job in the classroom as a performance art. His knowledge was secondary, if that's knowledge you want, just read a book, go to the internet, whatever, you don't need a teacher. But it is not very engaging, and a teacher's job is to make it more engaging.
So without engagement, you probably won't make a good learning app, but you can make the engagement entirely targeted towards learning and not monetization, which would be a very good thing.
- What do you mean by "worry a lot about privacy"?
If it is a practical view of privacy, like the "I don't want others to know I have foot fetish" kind, or even typical operational security like not letting others know you own something valuable, then the concern is most likely minor. In fact, it may be a good thing that the data goes to China instead of in your own country, because there is a border somewhat protecting you.
If you take a more general approach of just making less data available about you on the internet, for things like targeted ads, AI, etc... Then US or China shouldn't change much and you should avoid connecting your robot to the internet in the first place, most work without it for the simple "clean" function.
Now if you are a US citizen and a patriot, then yeah, it matters.
- To be fair, yes, it is a bit fragile and cumbersome, though it works for me.
However, it doesn't makes "git -p" less useful when the idea is to separate what you want to publish and what you want to keep in your work zone, be is your working copy or a dev branch.
As always with git, it is not very opinionated, it lets users have their own opinions, and they do! Monorepos vs many repos, rebase vs merge, clean vs honest history,... it can do it all, and I don't think the debates will ever settle on what is an "antipattern" as I don't think there is a single "right" answer.
- For me the point of splitting commit is not for documentation (though it can be an added benefit). It is so that you can easily rollback a feature, or cherry pick, it also makes the use of blame and bisect more natural. Anyways, that's git, it gives you a lot of options, do what you want with them. If a big end-of-day commit is fine for you, great, but some people prefer to work differently.
But that's not actually the reason I use "git add -p" the most. The way I use it is to exclude temporary code like traces and overrides from my commits while still keeping them in my working copy.
- From the looks of it, Rust is usable un a tiny embedded system but it is not "great". I think that out of the recent, trendy languages, Zig is the best suited for this task, but in practice C is still king.
The big thing is memory allocation, sometimes, on tiny systems, you can't malloc() at all, you also have to be careful about your stack, which is often no more than a few kB. Rust, like modern C++ tend to abstract away these things, which is perfectly fine on Linux and a good thing when you have a lot of dynamic structures, but one a tiny system, you usually want full control. Rust can do that, I think, like C++, it is just not what it does best. C works well because it does nothing unless you explicitly ask for it, and Zig took that philosophy and ran away with it, making memory allocation even more explicit.
- I hate the "rewrite it in Rust" mentality, however, I think that in this particular case, Rust is the right tool for the job.
The Rust specialty is memory safety and performance in an relatively unconstrained environment (usually a PC), with multithreading. Unsurprisingly, because that's how it started, that's what a web browser is.
But Tor is also this. Security is extremely important as Tor will be under attack by the most resourceful hackers (state actors, ...), and the typical platform for Tor is a linux multicore PC, not some tiny embedded system or some weird platform, and because it may involve a lot of data and it is latency-sensitive, performance matters.
I don't know enough of these projects but I think it could also take another approach and use Zig in the same way Tigerbeetle uses it. But Zig may lack maturity, and it would be a big change. I think it is relevant because Tigerbeetle is all about determinism: do the same thing twice and the memory image should be exactly the same. I think it has value when it comes to security but also fingerprinting resistance, plus, it could open the way for dedicated Tor machines, maybe running some RTOS for even more determinism.
- While the "required piece of technology" aspect is debatable, there is certainly enough demand for it that it is going to happen in one way or another.
So I agree that instead of fighting some change that I think is inevitable, they should make it so that it works in the most privacy-conscious way possible. And I mean with real technical solutions, like an open-source app or browser extension you can download, a proof-of-concept server for age verification, etc... using the best crypto has to offer.
- Hacker News is almost indistinguishable in spirit from a well-run subreddit. Reddit is not centered on user profiles and followers and yet, Reddit is included in the Australia's social media ban.
It is clear from the ruling that by including YouTube, Reddit and Facebook, they take a broad definition of what social media is, essentially anything with user interaction and Hacker News definitely fits the bill.
And if your criteria includes "social aspects like user profiles and followers", then GitHub would fit too: it has user profiles, followers / stars, and allows for discussion. It is even included in the "social media" list for ESTA and visa applications for the US. We could even include StackOverflow, I mean, it used to be common practice to build a profile, chasing a reputation score so that you could show off to recruiters.
- > How are you supposed to deal with recalcitrant users?
Keep the servers running, but make the recalcitrant users pay for the costs and a then some more. It is actually a common strategy. Big, slow companies often have trouble with deprecation, but they also have deep pockets, and they will gladly pay a premium so that they can keep the API stable at least for some time.
If you ask for money, you will probably get more reactions too.
- It is something I noticed when talking to LLMs, if they don't get it right the first time, they probably never will, and if you really insist, the quality starts to degrade.
It is not unlike people, the difference being that if you ask someone the same thing 200 times, he will probably going to tell you to go fuck yourself, or, if unable to, turn to malicious compliance. These AIs will always be diligent. Or, a human may use the opportunity to educate himself, but again, LLMs don't learn by doing, they have a distinct training phase that involves ingesting pretty much everything humanity has produced, your little conversation will not have a significant effect, if at all.
- You have the point of view that having publicly available queer content and abortion information is a good thing, something I generally agree with.
But not everyone think that way, some think that by limiting access to abortion information, they are actually saving (unborn) lives. Some people think that "sex positive" movements are morally questionable and help spread infection. For them, they are the good guys and they think that Meta is finally doing the right thing.
These are divisive political subjects and political parties with these ideas get elected for a reason. In a democracy, parties will not promote ideas that no one agree with, they need the votes, so if they are promoting them, it means that for a large part of the population, it is the right thing to do. HN is a bubble with mostly liberal ideas, we have to understand it for what it is.
That's in addition to the idea that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". But it applies more to activities that are almost universally recognized as bad rather than partisan ideas, things like scamming.
- There is "early exit after the first swap", which actually makes his algorithm closer to insertion sort than bubble sort. If the list couldn't change between each pass, it would be a very inefficient insertion sort in O(n^3) as you are constantly scanning the part of the list that is already sorted.
But this is a case where theory doesn't count as much as having an acceptable result. It is typical in video games, if it plays well and looks fine, who cares if it is incorrect. Here I guess that sometimes a sprite appears on top of another sprite when it should have been behind it, because of the early exit, but while playing, it turned out not to be noticeable enough to change the algorithm.
- I believe the popularity of diesel car in Europe is actually a tax-related hack.
The idea is that diesel is the "work" fuel, for shipping, construction, etc... While gasoline is the "consumer" fuel, for personal use, motorsports, etc... Make the former expensive and it will affect the entire economy, everything will become more expensive and less competitive. Making gasoline more expensive will not have the same impact.
So, put high taxes on gasoline. The result was an increase in popularity of diesel cars, that cost less to run because of taxes.
Now, the situation is changing. Diesel, at least the one that is legal to use on the road is taxed at a level closer to gasoline. Diesel cars are also becoming less and less welcome with regards to low emission zones and green taxes, so many people are going back to gasoline.
- Linus Torvalds greenlit Rust in the kernel, and as a BDFL, he is the one to decide. He has no reason to be upset with any decision because ultimately, all decisions are his own.
If he didn't want Rust in the kernel, he would have said it, and there would have been no Rust in the kernel. It is also the reason why there is no C++ in the kernel, Linus doesn't like C++. It is that simple.
And I respect that, Linux is hugely successful under Linus direction, so I trust his decisions, whatever opinion I have about them.
But sometimes the extra power or extra data transfer is not an option. For charging a laptop for instance, you typically need 20V, if your charger doesn't support that, you can't charge at all. And then there is Thunderbolt, DisplayPort, Oculink, where the devices that use these features won't work at all in an incompatible port. And I am not aware of device that strictly requires one of the many flavors of USB 3 or 4, but I can imagine a video capture card needing that. Raw video requires a lot of bandwidth.