Expert developer, Buddhist

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I’m kinda annoyed that this whole thing was pretty much a pitch for Tauri, and that’s a pretty lame looking webapp thing with typescript and whatever browser engine you happen to have lying around

    Tauri is tryna be all like “hey look at our install size, it’s smaller than electron!!” … like anyone cares about install size much. The problem is the memory/cpu use of web apps, which tends to 5x a decent native app. Maybe one day, with webassembly…



  • You can collect the data and figure out how to use it later. Just look at the Google leaks lately and what they collect, it’s literally everything down to the length of clicks and full walks through the site

    Collecting data about user interests is in itself valuable, and it’s plausible to use various metrics to analyze it, something as simple as sentiment analysis, which has been broadly done. Sentiment analysis has predated modern ML by a long margin, but you can read the wiki page on that

    But yeah just think about stuff like Google trends, tracking interest in topics, as an example of what such data could be used for. And deanonymizing the inputs is probably possible to some degree, aside from the obvious trust we place in DDG as a centralized failure point





  • Ok well that’s a paywall but I went and read the official guidelines on the website, which is a boring PDF report. My understanding: they talked to other athletes and “stakeholders” and agreed that they will handle it on a case by case / sport by sport basis. Anybody can compete in any gender Olympic sport until clear evidence is presented that shows that they have an unfair advantage. And I do mean anyone, they explain that gender is in the mind, and that a natural man who identifies as a woman can apply for a women’s competition

    I think that’s a good result, better than mine, in the sense that various sports have more of less of a problem, and we don’t really have all the data to know what’s fair. But I still expect that many sports will disallow it if it becomes problematic. It seems like you’d want to track testosterone, but the q&a explains that it doesn’t really work. They also do call out that cisgender men have such a “disproportionate advantage” compared to cisgender women, and so categories are required…

    They’ve managed to tow a really careful balance here, between affirming trans ppl and also being ready to lay down bans in situations that arise


  • Nah, I’m not with you. Gender also comes with cultural background, and physical characteristics, very much like race. And yes, if you feel deeply aligned with black culture as a white born person, fuckin go for it. Besides, we are all listening to blues and rock n hip hop — all “black music” — so what’s the problem? Am I only allowed to listen to Tchaikovsky if I’m Russian? The whole set of mental gymnastics can go fuck itself, all cultures and races influenced each other for all of history. Is anybody mad about Thai people opening cannabis dispensaries and wearing Cookies merch & baseball hats? No, go ahead and “appropriate” whatever you want from me

    identify with what you do line up with

    Or don’t, I don’t give a fuck, this doesn’t really affect my life. Wanna get surgery to look like a goat with some neat horns? Sweet, good luck

    Ok let’s do the honest hard questions. Should mtf ppl be allowed to do all female sports? No, probably not, it’s generally not fair. Should ftm be allowed to do all male sports? Sure. Should bathrooms just be all gender bathrooms? Yeah, probably fine, maybe add some panic buttons. Should people under 18 be allowed to get a sex change? Only if they parents sign off on it, they are the legal guardians. Maybe it’ll feel like a mistake later, maybe not, but the family is in the best position to decide. Are microplasics fucking up hormones in pretty much all living things? EPA says yes, and that’s a concern





  • Nice ramble, seems about right, though there’s always a new investing trend & VCs only slowed down a little, which happens in cycles

    We have yet to see AI really transform too much of the economy, largely because of factors like price & being too primitive. I am expecting we will get the price down and various models like video and audio perfected, hospital tools, various analysis devices based on pattern recognition. So we can expect steady gdp gains as people become more efficient at their jobs using faster tools. However this doesn’t necessarily mean jobs lost, as productive efficiency is gained every year regardless. Companies can sell more product for lower prices, to new customers enabled by that price point, for example







  • Well, not really, because you could use android, and it commands 70% of the global market share

    Also, the way the law is, you have to have both a monopoly & also be causing substantial harm to the public. I.e. you can have a monopoly if it’s really nice and more like a public utility. So after the Microsoft antitrust case (for basically same thing), it’s been very hard to justify breaking up tech companies or banks

    If a company acquires its monopoly by using business acumen, innovation and superior products, it is regarded to be legal; if a firm achieves monopoly through predatory or exclusionary acts, then it leads to anti-trust concern

    For example, business can defense that its business conducts bring merits for consumers

    (Wikipedia)

    What happened with Microsoft browser tie ins antitrust?

    Ultimately, the Circuit Court overturned Jackson’s holding that Microsoft should be broken up as an illegal monopoly. However, the Circuit Court did not overturn Jackson’s findings of fact, and held that traditional antitrust analysis was not equipped to consider software-related practices like browser tie-ins

    So in short, Apple’s legal / business strategy here is totally solid. Arguably helps users, defended by precedent, and doesn’t dominate market share. Of course they have to debate all this


  • My opinion is that it’s super legit, basically the only lasting icon of creativity and freedom of speech. Feels like what the whole internet used to be like, during the golden age before everything was captured by corps that fear brand damage and legal repercussions. People still repost 4chan content to all other media obsessively. Anyway 4chan is where it belongs, in the background. If it was more popular it would get totaled


  • I’m a digital ~anarchist. All this regulation doesn’t help, it just makes the Internet more ridiculous, and raises the barriers to entry - fuck em. Rather than regulating some sane browser features, we left it to every site to implement a cookies popup, and they are unique enough that they aren’t easily filtered. So now every site has cringe popups that nobody reads or understands, thanks regulators!! Really solved that shit. I don’t trust these assholes, it’s all gonna get lobbied weird and big money pretty much always wins

    Real open source is the answer. Common goods for common people, not led by capitalism, but led by shared infrastructure needs that benefit all. Protect the rights to anonymity/privacy online, instead of helping big tech deanonymize everyone. Uphold the values of the constitution of the USA, but in the digital space. And otherwise fuck off, govt