Conlectus

The thing that everyone always misses in these conversations is that screens over buttons is a cost cutting measure, not a first-principles design decision.

It means the UI can be designed and developed mostly independently of the physical controls, which helps reduce rework. I also expect it reduces costs for manufacture and assembly.

I’m in favour of more physical controls, but it surprises me that this rarely comes up. I suppose “people are idiots” is a more appealing explanation.

The idea that Builder.ai was Indian workers being sold as AI wasn’t true, by the way. That was made up by a crypto influencer on twitter and copied by sloppy news sites. They were a consulting firm that also sold an AI product, with the two clearly separated.

I’m not sure if this is the point you mean to make, but Michio Kanu is one of the bigger cranks in physics communication. He said ion an (maybe the Joe Rigan interview?) that quantum computers would be able to act as a truth detector for AI. He wrote a whole book on quantum computing in fact despite clearly not understanding it at all[0].

[0] https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7321

There are dozens of us. Dozens!

DCOs only document that the contributor has the right to contribute the code, not the license under which they contribute it. CLAs do both.

Good catch on the license in that file. I went by separate documents in the repo that said the source is available “under the licenses documented in the repository”, and took that to mean at-choice use of the license files that were included.

I think the caveat to the claim that CLAs are only useful for rug pulls still important, but this is a case where it is indeed a relevant thing to consider.

I’m not sure where this belief came from, or why the people who believe it feel so strongly about it, but this is not generally true.

With the exception of GPL derivatives, most popular licenses such as MIT already include provisions allowing you to relicense or create derivative works as desired. So even if you follow the supposed norm that without an explicit license agreement all open source contributions should be understood to be licensed by contributors under the same terms as the license of the project, this would still allow the project owners to “rug pull” (create a fork under another license) using those contributions.

But given that Zed appears to make their source available under the Apache 2.0 license, the GPL exception wouldn’t apply.

Don’t make tools for cheating at games against real people. It’s antisocial.

—-

Cheating at games is antisocial. This means it is a behaviour that leads to a worse experience for a community of people to the benefit of those breaking the norms. For example, theft is antisocial.

I consider tools that make are dedicated to making antisocial behaviour easier to carry the same moral weight as the antisocial activity itself. Therefore I consider this tool to be antisocial, as is its creation.

Do you have an intent for this that doesn’t involve that antisocial behaviour, such as research or debugging? Or was that your intent?

Edit: Added elaboration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_behaviour

Lobste.rs

At first I was a bit confused why this was a big deal given that Cosmogenic Radionuclide Dating[1] (which is based on cosmic rays) has been a thing for a while. But it turns out this uses an entirely different cosmogenic method based on atmospheric carbon (combined with Dendochronology from the tree rings). Very cool!

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_exposure_dating

Isn’t ReLU an element of neuroscience that was incorporated into machine learning to great success?

Raw HTML: potentially. Big blocks of undifferentiated ASCII art: no.

In my experience Wasmer is generally disliked by the rest of the WASM community. There’s a long list of reasons for this, including attempting to copyright the term WASM and pushing their own proprietary specs and calling them “standards” while not implementing existing standards.

Their main benefit, from what I can tell, is their “retargetable” compiler architecture, but Wasmtime is improving here as well. Wasmtime is also generally faster at implementing standards.

As of a few hours ago, ModHeader started injecting a script into every page that tracks browsing activity. It also injects ads into Google Search and may be capable of remote tab capture and JS execution.

Scaleable Vector Extension. A class of SIMD instructions.

From what I can tell the issue here is that the author has produced a WASM module with minified dynamic dependencies. This is not an issue with the runtimes but with the earlier compilation toolchain.

In another thread it was suggested that Emscripten was used, but its runtime wasn’t provided.

Perhaps because they include metrics for compression time, which could easily be gamed by doing significant precomputation in the compressor?

If you’ve read any of the code you’ll also know that early Unix was full of security vulnerabilities. Eg. Statically allocating fixed buffers and not checking input sizes.

I’m all for appreciating simplicity, but let’s not pretend we haven’t progressed since then.

Those are separate questions. Is Google forced on people by the US Govt?

I note that with a vocabulary of 1,000 words it is roughly 10x the size of Toki Pona, a conlang which also aims for minimalism.

That said, Toki Pona's goal is to help clarify thought, whereas this seems to intend to prioritize communication more highly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona

For what its worth, I used to say the same thing. Now I have glasses for astigmatism.

Algebraic data types (more technically sum types) are very much not “PhD level concepts”, despite the name. They’re just what C developers would call “tagged unions”.

Among others:

"Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they tell me to take you up to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't."

What happens when the ASCII character for space is embedded within a multibyte UTF-8 codepoint?

This is irresponsible reporting. The authors themselves have clarified that this is an _association_ study, whereas the above article claims that isolation is _causal_ to increased dementia risk.

From the authors:

We agree with Dr. Kawada that no casual conclusion should be made in the present study, as it is an association study. We avoided using terms that imply causal inferences in the paper.

Yep, I'm aware ("ahead of its replacement"), but in the mean time it really helps to have something that just solves the "take these two modules and merge their functions" problem.

Given my experience, I would not recommend using Wasmer over an alternative like Wasmtime for several reasons.

1. Lack of support for `externref`, AKA opaque references to host data. Sure, the Wasmer 2.0 blog post _claims_ they added support for it, but that amounts to allowing you to read the type signature in an existing module, but not actually use the feature yourself. With some digging, my educated guess is they wanted this to be their headlining 2.0 feature but weren't able to get it working, so they just pretended in their blog post and left the incomplete version behind a development flag.

2. An awkward context API for host calls. All host data associated with an instance must be `Send` + `Sync`. In practice I've found this leads to wrapping your entire context object in a `Arc<RefCell<T>>`, even if your data could otherwise live on the stack. Wasmtime does not have this limitation, so it's not a hard technical requirement.

3. It took me about 2 weeks of development to run into a use-after-free bug bubbling up into Rust.

4. The performance, at least for my use case, was not meaningfully better than Wasmtime. This may not be true if you're doing a lot of intense number crunching.

5. Lack of support for instance resource allocation pools. Wasmtime allows you to pre-allocate / reuse the resources associated with an instance, whereas you would have to roll this on your own with Wasmer.

6. Lack of support for the module linking proposal. This proposal may be incomplete, but it is still helpful ahead of its replacement.

This is on top of, as others have mentioned, their questionable business practices[1][2].

All of this may improve, but as things currently exist, Wasmtime should give you everything you would want from Wasmer in a more stable, more complete and more ergonomic package.

[1] https://mnt.io/2021/10/04/i-leave-wasmer/

[2] https://wasmer.io/posts/wasmer-and-trademarks

Adding on: Though there is no consensus, I believe that is now the less-popular theory for the origin of spiciness. It seems instead to be a form of pesticide and fungicide.

Evidence for this is that pepper varieties tend to be spicier in wetter environments, where the biological resources spent on producing capsaicin to fight fungus are more valuable than preserving them in case of drought.

Source: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2012/issue131b/

The term is "Höschen fur ficken"

Höschen means panties, and ficken means, well…

Hint: Dutch is a close cousin to English. Try just pronouncing it.

This is a bit out out of date. Interpolation colorspace can be specified as of CSS Color Module Level 4. See https://drafts.csswg.org/css-color-4/#interpolation-space

I don't believe it is yet implemented in browsers, but I know Chrome at least is working on it.