n9

I have been using an iPad Pro as my primary computing device for more than a year now. It works pretty wonderfully for my use case. I just finished writing my dissertation on it last week, actually. I have an old MacBook that I use for specific tasks once or twice a week, but otherwise my iPad, pencil, and keyboard/mouse/5k monitor on my desk works really, really well — better than a laptop by far for my workflow: Zotero/Markdown/MSWord/Logseq/Obsidian.

I’m very happy to not use a general purpose computer anymore, to be honest.

You know that RAM in these machines is more different than the same as "RAM" in a standard PC? Apple's SoC RAM is more or less part of the CPU/GPU and is super fast. And for obvious reasons cannot be added to.

Anyway, I manage a few M1 and M3 machines with 256/8 configs and they all run just as fast as 16 and 32 machines EXCEPT for workloads that need more than 8GB for a process (virtualization) or workloads that need lots of video memory (Lightroom can KILL an 8GB machine that isn't doing anything else...)

The 8GB is stupid discussion isn't "wrong" in the general case, but it is wrong for maybe 80% of users.

Your comment is literally more subjective, dismissive, and full of FUD than any other on on this thread. Check yourself.

... I think that the more correct assertion would be that Apple is a sector leader in privacy. If only because their competitors make no bones about violating the privacy of their customers as it is the basis of thier business model. So it's not that Apple is A+ so much as the other students are getting Ds and Fs.

The first major piece of code that I ever wrote was a publishing workflow management system for a major newspaper. It routed page images to presses and generated pdfs of each page in each edition of the newspaper and made pdfs of each day's newspaper editions and published them to a static website where they were archived.

I was only allowed to use perl 4 to write this software and I wasn't allowed to use a database, even though the datastructure for a day's publishing batch had tens of thousands of keys and values and required RDBMs style queries. It also features a configurable postscript parser that extracts all kinds of data from completed newspaper pages that informs the publishing system. When I wrote it I was told that it would run for a few months only while we figured out how to get a $5M commercial product to handle the work.

The whole thing was written in perl 4 style OO Perl and came in at about 16k lines of code in the end -- most of the code was for the postscript processor and tons of cruft that I had to write to made a relational DBMS in memory because I wasn't allowed to use mysql. It took me four months to write it. I launched it in January of 2002 and it runs to this day. I know this because I got a call about it last month where my replacement's replacement's replacement asked me a few questions about what OO Perl is because he wanted to make a few changes. Good luck! It still runs and is responsbile for about 80% of what it was originally built to do. It is used by hundreds of people daily, who by all reports absolutely hate it. There are people working at the newspaper today that use it regularly that were not born when I wrote it. I am twice as old as I was when I wrote it.

They have apparently tried to replace it several times over the last 22 years and have failed to do so... this is likely due to the blockheadedness of my old boss (who is still there) as much as the radically insane obscurity of my code, which is exactly how you'd expect 16k lines of 22 year old OO Perl 4 would be.

wow. just so, so many things that I didn't say and do not believe. Amazon fixed their DRM issues to a great extent and the gap is narrowing, Apple's Book DRM is currently unbroken, Overdrive's DRM bypass is only available via legacy versions of the app last I checked, etc.

You are the one that is asserting that 1. All DRM is inherently bypassable, which is simply not at all true. and 2. That anyone pushing for improvement is against lending, which is not true. This is what YOU are saying, not me. I am simply saying that if the IA wants to keep going (and I would like them to) they might close an unused http route. That is LITERALLY all I am asserting. Good lord, why even bother?

the logical conclusion here is that generation of reproducible content for profit or even for sustenance is innately impossible. this is neither true not desirable. enjoy pedantism on the internet!

This is not simply a legal issue. As an author of books myself I have very little problem with libraries and online lending and I feel there is mutual benefit. I do not feel the same way about the way that IA is hosting commercial titles, which hews very close to ZLibrary, which I do not think is beneficial for all of us in the long term as it disincentivizes the production of books even if it makes things available to more people in the near term. We might disagree about that but my belief is pretty set.

Regarding legality, the media company battle re: DVD-CSS is quite different in quite a number of ways such that it doesn't simply apply here. That said, I'm not making a legal argument -- I am advocating for a system that makes sense to authors (whom we rely on to write the things that we value) and the greater good.

It is basically the same with the books. The IA's book hosting system has DRM, yes, but it is Adobe's ADE which has been well and truly cracked. If you have a bit of patience and tech knowledge you can pull a full PDF of any book on IA in about 20 second's time. They could do a better job restricting access and I figure they wouldn't be in this much trouble.

Specifically of issue in this case -- there is a wide-open hole in the IA's book hosting system that allows anyone to easily download an Adobe Digital Edition of any book in the archive -- ADE's DRM has been broken for a long time. It takes 2 minutes to go from IA to a full OCR'd PDF. The result is that there are a LOT of decrypted PDFs in the wild that carry the Internet Archive logo on the very first page.

I am for DRM because it could enable something like the IA to host and lend books without violating author's privledge. The IA's implementation is foolish and, I think, carries the intent to allow exploitation.

Moderation is expensive and difficult and failing to do it well will kill your community dead. The evidence of this is pretty obvious today... only niche communities have active and positive engagement so far as I can see.

Cost: the demand was made to let the human moderators and the community team go after one of several aquisitions. The SEO advantage of having these threads had evaporated by that time so there wasn't a good argument against going with the free service provided by Facebook.

I worked at Huffpost through all three of these phases in a technical capacity adjacent to comments and moderation, as director of technical operations and eventually as head of engineering. This study has significant questions to answer about their methods and assumptions that is summed up here:

"Second, we know that HuffPo used both manual and algorithmic moderation in all three phases, but we do not know how the policies changed under the different identificatory regimes."

Given whay I know about Huffpo's moderation system and their statement that they don't have understanding of them I'd say that nothing reported in this study should be considered valid for a few reasons.

One is that Huffpost used many different systems of moderations following many changing standards throughout their days as a big news site (#3 in the US at one point) and the biggest news-based community, which they were for several years.

They started with no moderation, then human moderation with evolving standards and practices that were overseen by a brilliant community team. Then they bought Julia in 2010(? ish) which was a very early machine learning moderation system that was trained on millions of human made moderation decisions before launch and whose training and internals were constantly updated and improved for years. Julia was dropped for Facebook comments later on, at which point Facebook did most of the basica moderation but was still assited by human moderators.

My first critique of this analysis is that the authors have no data or understanding of the moderation actions that resulted in suppression of comments or users. How can an analysis make any claims without this data? So far as they know the comment-flow was more hostile during the periods they observe as more civil, but there were just far more comments suppressed. Just one of dozens of other internal details of the operation that would invalidate their conclusions would be that Huffpost quiet-deleted comments for a significant period of time -- meaning that you could post, and you would see your posts in context when you were logged in but no one else would see them. They also silent-banned users. This and other details of implementation create a great deal of complexity and secondary effects.

I can attest that moderation was very, very active and that lots and lots of comments were moderated down and out of the comment threads... again indicating significantly less civility than any retrospective analysis would be able to discern without all the data.

I also find it interesting that this study chose Huffpost for the analysis. At the site's hights of success and profit the comment threads were the reason for their SEO dominance and were considered to be the most important secret sauce. Huffpost moderation was the best in the business by a long measure. With the methodology presented it would make sense to me to say that Huffpost would appear to be the most civil of the big sites of the time. So it is interesting that this study focuses singly on Huffpost and reports that their theories indicate this differential.

While the authors do cover some of this in their section on Limitations, they don't cover near enough to justify their results... instead this reads as another cherry-picking study where authors had a theory and found a dataset that confirmed it while being unaware of fundamental reasons why that dataset was an outlier, making it impossible for them to build in the needed controls in their methods.