Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 2 months ago
Sarcasm?
Comment · 3 months ago
"gypsie" cannot be substituted by "junky" or "homeless", for the simple reason that those words simply mask the ethnicity and immigration overtones, which are very much present in DHH's blog post. I haven't found your message racist, but this first sentence might give the impression that you are willing to turn a blind eye to the racism of others if their views align with yours concerning the presence of drug addicts and homeless people in public space.

And once you look at the problems you mention without taking the easy way out ("They're aliens and should just be excluded from our society"), the question is not so much whether they have the right to do this, but how we, as a society, can provide care to those people.

Also, I can't understand your presumption that "This is tolerated in the name of individualism". The situation your are describing is a public health issue, not a question of lawfulness.

Comment · 3 months ago
Comment · 3 months ago
> The clearest sign a tool is serving you is that you stop noticing it—it becomes invisible. You don’t celebrate its flaws because you’re not turning them into a hobby, rather you just get mildly annoyed and route around them.

I think this is more dependent on the user than on the tool. Surely, different tools will attract different users and we can probably measure strong correlation.

I also think this position lacks balance. Your tool is never perfect, sometimes you realize you could improve it, and you should balance implementing the change with the effect it'd have on your habits. Sure, the longer you use your tool, the smaller those changes are, but your usage evolves throughout your life, and it's only natural that your tools do so to.

Comment · 4 months ago
This is assuming that you'll be priced the fraction of computing that you consumed. But you are actually paying for their infrastructure, for the R&D (and also the computation that went into training the model) etc. It is not clear that, for your own small computations, this kind of costs are needed, but you will still pay your share in the investment the provider made so that they could serve everyone's computation needs.
Comment · 5 months ago
I agree with the feeling. But if you agree with the analysis of the article, this cat & mouse game ultimately amounts to stop disclosing our reasoning threads through commonly accepted linguistic structures. That's quite a price to pay as a society...
Comment · 6 months ago
A tautology is a sentence vacuously true. This is called a pleonasm.
Comment · 7 months ago
Are you being sarcastic? This has definitely changed with Apple Silicon. Looking at hardware value, the M-series are way more competitive than the Intel macs ever were, and if you want to run an LLM locally, they are undefeated.

However, it is quite ironic that while the value of their hardware has sharply increased, their software has become the slop that everyone is complaining about.

Comment · 11 months ago
Tails works like this, and has gained a lot of traction in the past few years — although one may argue that running from RAM is only indirectly responsible for its popularity.

I think this idea appeals to many people, also concerning remanence: keeping your system and user data separate to the point that you could virtually mount your /home on any given UNIX host, with the added bonus that if the host is not compatible with your setup, you can always reboot it on your USB stick, run a live ISO on RAM, and retrieve a decent work environment.

Comment · 1 year ago
I think there's a large cultural bias at play here. Different nations have different relationships to religion. As a french person, the decision to mark religious content as NSFW seems totally normal to me, but I also know that french people are (often too) fierce atheists.

I also understand things are different in many places, but I think the argument is too heated right now, maybe everyone needs to take a step back and think in a more "international" way?

Someone in the linked thread suggested a new tag altogether for religious content, that might be a sound decision.

Comment · 1 year ago
Valuing how others remember you is definitely a motivation in life for many. I respect that it is not your own, respect that it may be mine. It is by no means "absurd".
Comment · 1 year ago
I don't think we have such a lower bound: from a “theoretical" point of view (in the sense of the post), your processor could walk on the cube of memory and collect each bit one by one. Each move+read costs O(1) (if you move correctly), so you get O(n) to read the whole cube of n bits.

If you require the full scan to be done in a specific order however, indeed, in the worse case, you have to go from one end of the cube to the other between each reads, which incurs a O(n^{1/3}) multiplicative cost. Note that this does not constitute a theoretical lower-bound: it might be possible to detect those jumps and use the time spent in a corner to store a few values that will become useful later. This does look like a fun computational problem, I don't know it's exact worst-case complexity.

Comment · 1 year ago

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