rodw

Mathematics is by far the most accessible "science" in academia. Anyone can, in theory, produce novel results with nothing more than a pencil and paper. And while the existing literature may not always be readily "accessible" (in the easy-to-understand sense) it is pretty widely available (often online and certainly via any decent academic library).

But "frontier" mathematics is still a highly advanced, highly specialized field. It can take years of study to be prepared to understand the established theory and results for a given subtopic.

These two observations, taken together, lead to the predictable outcome of a lot of math "enthusiasts" with an incomplete understanding of the field loudly asserting that they have discovered a radical new result. Often they lack the foundation to even understand what they are doing wrong.

The reluctance of mathematicians to engage with amateurs that come off as cranks is a symptom of how accessible the field is.

Page load time can impact index coverage (depth of crawl), freshness (revisit rate), and ranking.

Looking like a "touch button" is still looking like a button. Some indication that an element is tappable is still useful.

Technically (in the US at least) purely AI-generated content has no copyright, hence any copyright associated with the commit can only assigned to the human authors (or the entity they are working for). As I understand it neither Copilot nor Microsoft should have any actual claim of authorship (from a copyright/IP perspective).

It's still quite problematic IMO

> Isn't the fact that they're able to restore deleted comments from that far back itself an indication of malice, or at least irresponsibility?

Meh. You're not exactly wrong but I think it's pretty common for user-generated content sites to follow a logical delete strategy. It holds open the door to being able to restore data deleted by end-user error, and within the bounds of their data retention policy keeps data around that may be useful for internal analysis.

Actually come to think of it seems plausible that they only have ~3 years of logically deleted data, having purged deleted records older than that.

It's also plausible they had all the is-logically-deleted information in some redis datastore that wasn't being reliably persisted to disk and the process had to be restarted for the first time 3 years.

I'm actually leaving my restored comments untouched for now out of curiosity about what they'll do about it now that the issue is known. I think that will probably answer the question about whether this was accidental or intentional.

This was more or less my working theory. It's not _all_ of my comments that have been restored, it's only my comments going back to 2020 (and I can't be sure that _all_ of the comments in that time range were restored either, but it looks pretty thorough).

I wouldn't put it past Reddit to restore old comments given sufficient motivation, I just have a hard time imaging how the cost/benefit analysis would say that this is a good idea at this specific point in time.

It seems plausible that with all the other churn going on at Reddit - and as others have noted a large number of people deleting comments and accounts and maybe subs - that they accidentally restored some data-store to the wrong snapshot or something.

I just don't understand how the difference between "we HAVE N million comments" and "N million comments HAVE BEEN posted" in some investment deck could be worth the risk to reputation and good will, not to mention potential GDPR violations or bad press from doxing stalking victims or whatever.

Someone else mentioned SEO as a possible motivation. I might buy that. If Reddit is losing PV and DAU and restoring a bunch of old content would offset some of that with organic search traffic, that seems like something they might do.

I've got a decade old account on which I've made a habit of manually deleting comments older than 6 - 9 months, since they get so little visibility and there's no value in leaving a breadcrumb trail.

Checking just now I see that comments up to 3 - 4 years old have been restored.

I'm not going to speculate as to why (beyond agreeing it's more likely to be incompetence than malice) but in my case at least there are definitely long deleted comments that have been restored.

IANAL and this may be minor nit, but I think when the WARN act is applicable, the laid-off employees are still _technically_ employed for 90 days (the pre-notice duration) and any additional severance benefits happen after that.

In other words, when the WARN act applies I don't think it's sufficient to give 90 days of severance. Those employees must remain on the payroll during the notice period.

I think it's common to tell these laid-off employees "you're on the payroll but not expected to report to work during the next 90 days", so it's kinda a distinction without a difference, but it does or at least could have an impact on things like benefits, bonus payouts and vesting.

Do it or don't, man. I don't care.

But I stand by the statement that most able-bodied Americans could find some way to incorporate more human-powered transport into their routine if they really wanted to. And in many cases they could do it without any adding any superfluous travel. I.e., it may be slower or even less convenient in some way, but it was a trip you were going to make anyway. You're just changing the mode of transit.

(Incidentally if it's truly too dangerous or inconvenient to walk across the Costco parking lot with a loaded shopping cart I think we're well on our way to the people from Wall-E.)

A "buy in bulk" warehouse store is of course one of the least reasonable examples you could have selected, but per the Bureau of Transportation Statistics 52% of car trips in the US are less than 3 miles, and 28% are less than 1 mile. Those are both very walk-able and bike-able distances.

Surely somewhere in that more-than-half-of-all-car-trips there are a few examples of car errands that could be easily replaced by bike, scooter or foot.

EDIT: incidentally even in the most car-centric dystopian suburb there are ways to incorporate more walking into your routine. The next time you go to a strip-mall or big box store you could park on the far side of the lot and walk to the door. A minor inconvenience in both time and effort, but you could probably add 1/2 mile or more of walking to your Saturday afternoon errands that way.

I think it's likely that there is a higher concentration of tech (esp. software engineering) jobs in some of the further flung suburbs than in DC proper, which yields some more affordable options (sometimes at the cost of some urban amenities).

This is not a lot cheaper than what you quoted, but for ~$2k/mo you can rent a 1 BR apartment in one of those relatively new, relatively fancy condominium-style medium-rise buildings at Reston Town Center (essentially the "downtown" area, or at least one of them) which puts you in very short walking distance of a bunch of tech offices and even a good number of nightlife and entertainment options. You could easily live the "15-minute city" life there. It would be a little bit like living in a large outdoor mall, but it's a very walkable "neighborhood". (EDIT: the DC metro system is also within walking distance.)

There are a handful of other "tech hubs" like that scattered around the DMV.

Or alternatively, high pay and old tech working for military contractors in roles that require security clearance. In some cases tech employers must pay a premium to get someone to perform extraordinarily tedious work.

The "simple" part could be up for debate, but in what way is "replace some of your car/bus/train travel with walking or cycling" not a solution to the problem of staying in shape when you hate going to the gym?

It may not be feasible in all cases, but it's definitely feasible in some cases, and it absolutely works.

In particular, bike commuting is an excellent way to integrate exercise into your daily routine without going to the gym or the tedious exercise-for-it's-own-sake activity. It's not practical for everyone, but between power-assisted e-bikes and the observation that you don't need to do it _every_ day, it's a lot more achievable than many think.

Similarly, if you take public transport to work (or elsewhere) you could get off a stop or two early and walk the rest of the way to get some of the benefits even if lacking the time or stamina to do the whole trip on foot.

Integrating exercise into some task or activity you were going to do anyway (e.g., commuting or running nearby errands, if applicable) is much easier than trying to maintain discipline and motivation to exercise as a dedicated, stand-alone activity.