jdpage

Reminds me of a (perhaps) more fanciful risk of fictional encyclopaedias: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...

A few years ago I had a Windows box where I pointed XDG_CONFIG_HOME et al to the corresponding-ish Windows paths (AppData subdirectories, mostly) so that the many Linux-derived CLI programs I was using wouldn't clutter up my userdir, and it worked pretty well, though there were a few programs that didn't get the memo. Unfortunately I don't remember which ones they were. Most programs get it right, though!

I don't know what the official policy is, but glibc uses versioned symbols and certainly provides enough ABI backward-compatibility that the Python package ecosystem is able to define a "manylinux" target for prebuilt binaries (against an older version of glibc, natch) that continues to work even as glibc is updated.

The canonical Boolean values in FORTH are 0 and -1 (that is, all bits set). IIRC the point of that is to unify the bitwise and logical operators, though, not detect bitflips.

Also, at the machine code level, a Boolean controlling a branch or a while loop often doesn't ever make it out of the flags register, where it'll only be a single bit anyway because that's how the hardware works. Not really changeable in software.

There's a new, professionally-published book version of "There Is No Antimemetics Division" out as well[1], if you want to support Sam's work that way. I have print copies of both the self-published V1 and the new V2. I'm very excited about the latter, though I haven't finished it yet.

[1] https://qntm.org/antimemetics

I don't think it's that the lawyers are undifferentiated; some are better than others, in the same way some real estate agents are better than others (source: people complaining bitterly about theirs).

The problem is that there's currently no effective way to comparison shop. Needing a real estate agent or lawyer is a rare event for most people, so they don't have grounds to make a comparison. And you can't really tell how good they are until you've hired them.

Compare to, say, an auto mechanic. In the US, 90+% of households own a car, and after a few years of car ownership, unless you're a much luckier person than I am, you've probably been to a few mechanics and had some good and bad experiences. On top of that, most of your friends have done the same, so it's much easier to get enough data to figure out who to take your car to next. And, of course, the stakes are a bit lower: a lot would have to go wrong for you to end up in jail because you picked a bad mechanic, and cars are usually cheaper than houses.

Good to know! At previous jobs, that information wasn't available to me (and it didn't matter because the customer bases were small enough that every customer was top priority), so I assumed it was considered more sensitive than it perhaps is.

Tangential, but I wonder if the given example might be straying a step too far? Normally we want to keep sensitive data out of logs, but the example includes a user.lifetime_value_cents field. I'd want to have a chat with the rest of the business before sticking something like that in logs.

I have had many people use it when I try to either push for a private option ("please message me on Signal") or explain why I won't use a service.

Yes, the understanding is that trans people were always trans. It may have taken time for them to understand that and perhaps more to decide to adopt that identity publicly, but they're not "not trans" before that. Other queer identities are generally thought of the same way in queer communities: many people have early experiences (e.g. fixating on same-sex characters in fiction the way peers might opposite-sex characters) that they later realise were early expressions of their orientation.

Bear in mind, the terminal goal doesn't actually require unbiased numbers; the way most TTRPGs work is that you're trying to roll over or under a target number to get a weighted, unpredictable outcome. The idea is that while players (usually) want any given action to succeed, they some of their actions to fail in order to preserve narrative interest, while having their character be better at some things than others.

As such, while randomness is best, the given method is quite sufficient for having fun, and both players can agree that it's fair: they each have equal influence over the result.

No, it's trained into the model weights themselves.

This strikes me as a rather uncharitable view. I think it's okay for people to be proud of their work on a difficult project, and want to have their names on it.

Fedora makes it pretty approachable, and some distros (e.g. Nobara, Bazzite) just straight-up ship the driver.

IMHO, stuff is moving fast enough in the Linux gaming world that any distro built around taking its time to update things (i.e. Debian, Ubuntu, Mint) is liable to be a bad time. Anecdotally, I've found that redirecting new users interested in gaming away from those distros has dramatically improved their satisfaction.

A better measure, assuming that pennies facilitate value exchange[1], would be whether the cost to mint a penny exceeded the marginal increase in GDP[2] due to having that additional penny available.

[1]: This assumption may not be true; if they're worth so little that people lose track of them, they could actually make it harder to exchange value.

[2]: Making the GDP higher is also a very debatable measure, but I think this generalizes to other dollar-denominated measures of prosperity.

... argument withdrawn.

I suppose if I want to use the word to mean the original sense, I need to include clarification that that's what I'm doing. I'll have to think of how best to do that without coming across as judgy or condescending, since that's sort of police-y (and also just unpleasant).

Hmm. I am tentatively holding to my position, because I think it's useful to have a separate word, but I'll go track down the episode and see if he elaborates on that further. Thanks!

Point of order: "enshittification" does not mean what the author's using it to mean. It does not just mean "the product got worse". It means "the product was purposefully made worse in order to capture additional value from the customer," i.e. a rug pull.

Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I'd hate to see such a useful term for corporate malfeasance diluted.

Each company is a system, though. And they exhibit certain behaviors common to their type.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

I'm not a croissant expert, but I do like the Costco ones. I just need to convince 2-3 friends to split them with me, and then eat multiple per day, in order for them to make sense as a purchase.

Oh, for sure, being a minister of any religion is a tough job that involves a lot more work than many people might assume. That's the role GP was clearly referring to, there, though.

More usefully, GPs point, or something adjacent to it, might be stated like this: in our modern age, certain roles that were previously fulfilled by religious groups are now either being commercialised, taken on by the government, or left to fall by the wayside. As we navigate modernity it's important to understand the larger context so we can make better decisions about how we handle the resulting changes in our social support structure, and what we might need to intentionally add back in.

But yeah, don't become a priest if you're looking for an easy job. I didn't mean to imply that.

Seminary, then becoming ordained as a priest, at the very least.

A reminder, RSA (the cryptosystem) is not a product of RSA (the security company); the cryptosystem predates the company by a decade and was also independently invented by a GCHQ researcher a few years before, but it remained classified there.

The only thing they really have in common is that the founders of RSA (the company) were the public inventors of RSA (the cryptosystem). The company didn't get into bed with the NSA until the turn of the century.

The Ocaml 5 effect system is based on delimited continuations, and its new effect-based IO library, Eio, seems to be getting more and more popular all the time.

One thing that's very cool about 1Password is that they expose a lot of their more enterprisey features even on regular subs. I'm able to use 1Password for secret storage on my at-home k8s cluster without any kind of special business account.

I might be wrong here, but based on the context, I read the "I don't want to know about your names or your company" as CYA for both parties: "I can't be legally obligated to disclose things I don't know, so please don't tell me anything you don't want Apple to know. I can't say that outright, though, so instead I'm going to say something that could be reasonably read as 'I'm busy and don't want to hear your pitch'".

I, also, would like a Star Trek tricorder.

I was going to come in with a set of reasons why these wouldn't sell, but... I think they could! Air quality fits neatly into Apple's health push, though I could see them making that a Watch feature rather than a phone feature (since your phone lives in your pocket, and quality sensors need time for the readings to stabilize). 3D imaging and synthetic refocusing both have a wow factor that would be easy to get people excited about. The only one I'm unsure of is multi-spectrum imaging; while I suspect pretty much anyone on this forum would jump at that, I don't have a good idea of whether the general population would get excited about temperature data. At the very least, it'd be handy for some kitchen tasks where you need a surface temperature.

You're right, it's not a great flow! And while many podcast/feed reader applications support pasting the URL of the page containing the <link /> element, that still leaves the problem of advertising that one can even do that, or that there's a feed available in the first place.

One thing that I think this discussion is highlighting to me is that there's very little support in the web standard (as implemented by browsers) for surfacing resources to users that aren't displayable by the browser.

Consider, for example, RSS/Atom feeds. Certainly there are <link /> tags you can add, but since none of the major browsers do anything with those anymore, we're left dropping clickable links to the feeds where users can see them. If someone doesn't know about RSS/Atom, what's their reward for clicking on those links? A screenful of robot barf.

These resources in TFA are another example of that. The government or regulatory bodies in question want to provide structured data. They want people to be able to find the structured data. The only real way of doing that right now is a clickable link.

XSLT provides a stopgap solution, at least for XML-formatted data, because it allows you to provide that clickable, discoverable link, without risking dropping unsuspecting folks straight into the soup. In fact, it's even better than that, because the output of the XSLT can include an explainer that educates people on what they can do with the resource.

If browsers still respected the <link /> tag for RSS/Atom feeds, people probably wouldn't be pushing back on this as hard. But what's being overlooked in this conversation is that there is a real discoverability need here, and for a long time XSLT has been the best way to patch over it.