Recent submissions

Comment · 5 days ago
Comment · 12 days ago
The real “news” is only 8 in 10 Americans oppose live-streaming execution
Comment · 3 months ago
Absence of such a claim is a commentary on its own, intended or not. Economic activity is almost always presented as a positive thing. It’s said to create jobs, generate wealth, increase production, etc. And here most of the things on the list moved massive amounts of capital without producing any of the positive effects. We get an odd WWW proposal that did actually produce those effects, but for each of those we also get a dozen of blockchain links. I’d say same goes for AI. While it has more utility than blockchain ever did it’s hard to say it was net positive overall to date.
Comment · 3 months ago
How much money? I mean, the natural answer is full price but that’s not the amount the author gets from a regular sale. There’s a whole range where it’s cheaper to freebooters and still more profitable to the author.

I’ve seen an argument that buying an album from a musician (or a physical media or merch) and pirating the rest of their library in most cases more profitable to the musician than streaming.

I suppose there’s a similar dynamic in publishing where the overhead created by all the intermediaries is significant compared to the actual work done by the author, editor, designers, and so on.

Comment · 4 months ago
By this measure tweeting “end your life” at no one in particular should be classified as a weapons of mass destruction.

There’s intent to cause harm. If people actually do, it would substitute achievement of the intent. The mechanism is novel, unlike knives and bullets. Maybe hit rate is a bit low but still, the potential number of targets makes it almost a certainty it would work.

—

We learned back in 80s—even earlier—that mixing data and executable code is not a good idea. It took some decades to move onto a different approach. Now we’re back to it with LLMs. It’s not a novel problem. The results are very much predictable.

Comment · 5 months ago
Broad appeal? You can’t do anything good aiming for broad appeal. People like too different things, they all don’t mash together well. If you add to many tings that appeal to different people you end up with incoherent mess. Instead of appealing to everyone you end up pissing off everyone in many different ways.

Look at the Ring of Power. Did it have broad appeal? Maybe, first 2 episodes brought in 25 million viewers. The whole first season was watched by 150 millions, despite season completion being ~40%. For reference, X-Files pulled in more only in 1 of its 11 seasons with most under 20 mil, and Friends lowered in 20-25 mil with only one season being about 30 mil. So the numbers are impressive but do you know anyone who loves the Rings of Power? Anywhere near to how people love SG-1?

Comment · 5 months ago
Where would you put custom elements in your list?
Comment · 5 months ago
I’m glad Matthew found an editor he likes but reading this I just couldn’t get that friendship ended meme out of my mind.
Comment · 5 months ago
I dunno, is it that special?

Take I’d for example. They released source code for genre defining extremely popular games and were fine.

And how often is code reused anyway? Every online game seem to either use mostly stock server code that comes with the engine or build anew every time.

Comment · 5 months ago
What are the insurmountable obstacles to releasing the server code for the community to run?
Comment · 5 months ago
It is allowed as long as it’s verified.

The thread specifically points out that if authors can’t be arsed to simply proofread their text the rest can not be trusted either.

It’s a simple heuristic against low quality submissions, not an anti-ai measure.

Comment · 5 months ago
I would even take any Leopard/Lion.
Comment · 5 months ago
Where do I put my mother’s maiden name and my first pet name?
Comment · 5 months ago
> 3. You don't need to use async Rust.

Technically correct, but… Want to build a web app, every more or less popular framework is async. Want to make a web request? High change of async. Database? Very likely async, too. A huge fraction of crates are async. Right now crates.io says there are "54172 reverse dependencies of tokio”. And the page that lists them struggles mightily to load. And that’s only direct dependencies of tokio, no indirect ones, no dependencies on other runtimes, no generic dependents.

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