Ha, that reminds me of Donald Knuth offering 0x$1.00 to anyone that finds a mistake in TAOCP, like this guy:

https://nickdrozd.github.io/2019/05/17/knuth-check.html

Does anyone here actually use awk for more than trivial operations? If I ever have to have to consider writing anything substantial with bash/awk/sed/etc, I just start writing a Python script. No hate to the classic tools, but Python is just really nice.

Sorry, mixed up the videos. It’s actually this one, from 2014:

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript

Edited link above

Gary Bernhardt called it in 2012

Definitely not. There’s a whole genre of music that’s created for riding the coattails of popular songs. They wait for a song title by artists like Taylor Swift to be announced and then release their own songs with the same title. Sometimes they’re actually good, like this dude:

https://genius.com/artists/Only-fire

The latter, but I also don’t really mind paywalls in the form of “get early access” like SMBC comics or “get exclusive special content” like a lot of bands do.

You can just straight paywall with those too, but you don’t have too. A band I like crowdfunded a music video and you can watch it free on youtube, but if you didn’t crowdfund it you missed out on perks that go all the way up to being in the music video

The trilogy would’ve been much better if either director had done all 3. Either J.J. Abrams with a fun nostalgic return to form, or Rian Johnson with a fresh new take. The whiplash from them fighting with each other over the direction of the plot just ended up being a huge mess. I’m pretty surprised they weren’t just told what the plot was going to be, kind of seems like a screwup by whoever handled that.

False dichotomy, I’d rather see other funding models like Patreon/Kickstarter. Paying gets you early access/bonus stuff/whatever, and you don’t need intrusive technologies like ads/paywalls.

How are you defining “far extreme liberal”?

Not sure how ollama integration works in general, but these are two good libraries for RAG:

https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss

https://pypi.org/project/chromadb/

Meshuggah:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9LpMZuBEMk

Listened to them before I got into metal, came back to them later and now love them. That’s from probably one of their more accessible records, they also have more experimental stuff like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3SdOFmubU

Canonical lives and dies by the BDFL model. It allowed them to do some great work early on in popularizing Linux with lots of polish. Canonical still does good work when forced to externally, like contributing upstream. The model falters when they have their own sandbox to play in, because the BDFL model means that any internal feedback like “actually this kind of sucks” just gets brushed aside. It doesn’t help that the BDFL in this case is the CEO, founder, and funder of the company and paying everyone working there. People generally don’t like to risk their job to say the emperor has no clothes and all that, it’s easier to just shrug your shoulders and let the internet do that for you.

Here are good examples of when the internal feedback failed and the whole internet had to chime in and say that the hiring process did indeed suck:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31426558

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37059857

“markshuttle” in those threads is the owner/founder/CEO.

On a related note, I think libraries do need a bit of a facelift, and not just be “the place where books live”. It’s important to keep that function, but also expand to “a place where learning happens”. I know lots of libraries are doing this sort of thing, but your average person is probably still stuck in the “place where books live” mindset, as you allude. I’m talking stuff like 3D printers, makerspaces, diybio, classes about detecting internet bullshit, etc.

Threads like this, with highly upvoted comments like

americans are more propagandized than they think citizens of the DPRK are

They also use sarcasm try to push the narrative that North Korea is actually just fine, OK?

Guys you don’t understand; the West has spoken; we MUST hate North Korea, our governments have already decreed it so.

Many of them are also seemingly physically incapable of communicating without hexbear’s custom reaction images, which is a weird behavior common to many cults. Makes it harder to communicate with the outgroup.

I think LW is defederated from them (or vice versa) so you can’t post over there, but for further examples, try making an account over there and saying that maybe, just maybe, Putin did a bad thing by invading Ukraine, and they’re defending an imperialist.

I’d be careful of pushing the narrative about computers not being a good choice for regular users. I’m going to channel a bit of Stallman and say that that’s how we end up without The Right To Read

For your bullet points:

• Yeah, GNOME can be flakey with extensions. Almost no regular users will install extensions though. Windows also has tons of bugs and issues that users just ignore because it’s the “default”
• Regular users won’t care about desktop scaling. I’ve seen people using the blurriest, weirdest aspect ratios on Windows because they liked it that way
• Bluetooth sucks on all hardware and with all software, to various degrees.
• Syncing files is trivial with Syncthing
• MacOS keeps breaking my coworker’s setups with every update.

GPU issues can be hard, but that’s not really Linux’s fault. There’s a reason this image exists of Linus giving nvidia the middle finger:

That being said, it’s getting better. As of this year, nvidia has started putting some real effort into making things work with wayland.

EDIT: I’ve found nirvana with NixOS, speaking of GPU drivers. I just add a few lines to /etc/nixos/configuration.nix and it goes off and ensures that the nvidia drivers are present. I also run lots of CUDA stuff on top of that and it all works about as seamlessly as possible.

https://hexbear.net/

From here:

On occasion, a writer will coin a fine neologism that spreads quickly but then changes meaning. “Factoid” was a term created by Norman Mailer in 1973 for a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it’s not actually true, or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print. Mailer wrote in Marilyn, “Factoids…that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.” Of late, factoid has come to mean a small or trivial fact that makes it a contronym (also called a Janus word) in that it means both one thing and its opposite, such as “cleve” (to cling or to split), “sanction” (to permit or to punish) or “citation” (commendation or a summons to appear in court). So factoid has become a victim of novelist C.S. Lewis’s term “verbicide,” the willful distortion or deprecation of a word’s original meaning.

I think !shortstories@literature.cafe would be a good place for it. The community sidebar says your own stories are welcome. You might want to add that you’re specifically looking for feedback

Use Tor for everything. Search for “disposable email”, find a service that you can use in Tor. Sign up through Tor using that disposable email address for any service that you want to post to. Be aware that some services try to deny access to Tor and/or disposable email addresses. Try a different service or a different disposable email provider if you encounter that.

You should define your threat model. Longer essays can probably be deanonymized with stylometry. The above will probably work fine up to maybe the NSA taking an interest in the origins of the essay. You can probably post something to the Fediverse and reputation-wash it to a larger audience by saying “look at this link that i have no affiliation with”, but it’s more likely that someone would figure out that it’s you. You can use the Tor method to post on Reddit, but many subreddits will have automods that delete posts from new/low karma users.