Re: Lindroid

Readable version: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1802331845633212554.html

hggh, 4 days ago

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after...

There is no greater folly of contemporary human society than the purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge. Perhaps these schemes made sense in the past but with the advent of the internet and independent groups willing to fund all hosting fees, we should move to models of publishing that do not require this restriction of information. Library genesis exists but necessarily must hide and create some friction in the discovery process. A legally unencumbered free library of all books for all people would be the greatest achievement in all of human history. We prevent this achievement due to our attachment to a specific economic system that serves as the current means of financially supporting authors. We must build alternatives to for-profit publishing, and the only resilient and widely acceptable system I can imagine is one where every community owns and controls the means of production upon which they depend for their survival. In such an economic system, the need for automation would be obvious and once implemented, all people would receive the benefits of automation. This would include such a wide allowance for leisure and free time that authors would no longer need to restrict access to their books to extract profits from their value their shared knowledge creates. All people would be free to do what they will.

It would take great effort to build such a system, but open source and digital repositories of machine designs would ensure that efforts are not duplicated. The effort would still be substantial, but what hangs in the balance is the opportunity to assure the freedom of all people and the creation of the most significant repository of knowledge humanity has ever conceived of. If we succeed it will be our greatest achievement as a species.

TaylorAlexander, 2 hours ago

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for exp...

We recently started using Waymo more often:

- Quality of Lyft and Uber rides have gone down significantly.

- Consistently spacious, clean and quiet cars. You know what you'll get.

- AC always works and not up to the whim of the driver.

- No chatty driver to disturb our sleeping baby.

Negatives:

- Rides have usually 10% mark up over Lyft and Uber.

- Pick up and drop off tend to be a small walk from requested locations.

Forgot one more positive - you can choose a soothing music play list in the car and it automatically resumes in the next ride. Small but really nice detail when traveling with a baby.

tanvach, 7 hours ago

Re: Understanding SPF, DKIM, and DMARC: A Simple Guide

I manage IT at a mid-size business. At least once a month, I get asked to release some incoming email from quarantine that got sent there because the sender's SPF record is wrong or outdated and doesn't include all the email services they actually use. (What this really tells me is how many small businesses are out there running with no in-house IT expertise or support of any kind.)

I don't do whitelisting. Instead, I always reach out and offer to help the other party correct their SPF record.

It happens often enough that I wrote a script in Racket that will generate the email for me and paste it into the clipboard [1]. The email tells them exactly what they need to change, and links to docs from their current email provider (so they don't have to trust me about edits to their DNS).

[1]: https://gist.github.com/otherjoel/6b8bf02f6db6e0c47ba6bca72ecf1c3e

velcrovan, 4 days ago

Re: My Windows Computer Just Doesn't Feel Like Mine An...

I can't even remove 'Recommended' from the start menu, not even on a Pro for Workstations.

Every time I search on the start menu there is a web search, impossible to turn off. How is that acceptable?

I install Edge Beta to test something, and the I uninstall it. All of the sudden my search provider in my normal Edge is reset.

And the nagging everywhere. No I don't want 'back-up' my files (OneDrive is not backup, it's sync). And I don't want to be reminded later. I don't want to be reminded ever. All this fuzzy language makes me feel like I'm dealing with a kindergarden teacher addressing his/her pupils.

It's not my computer any more.

Oh, I update a driver. And 2 days later Windows installs an older version. Since when is 6.6.1.40 better than 6.6.1.72? Why would you do that?

OptionOfT, 4 hours ago

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after...

I believe in hundreds, maybe thousands of years, after humanity has finally evolved past our current monkey mentality, future historians will look back at this time period in awe: "They had the technology to make the sum of all human knowledge available to everyone... And they blew it! Further, they had the means to feed everyone, clothe everyone, house everyone, but they just walked away in the other direction, purely to maintain existing economic power structures." The future historians are going to wonder how strong our ideology was that we sacrificed all of what we could have at the altar of our scarcity-based religion.

If Star Trek Replicators were invented today, we're so stupid we'd outlaw them.

ryandrake, 6 hours ago

Re: Spending 3 months investigating a 7-year old bug a...

I particularly liked this part:

> Knowing very little about USB audio processing, but having cut my teeth in college on 8-bit 8051 processors, I knew what kind of functions tended to be slow. I did a Ctrl+F for “%” and found a 16-bit modulo right in the audio processing code.

That feeling of saving days of work because you remember a clue from previous experience is so good.

TehShrike, 17 hours ago

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rat...

It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that:

- People experience their thoughts very differently

- We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.

I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking).

It seems like there's a large number of people who experience their thought exclusively as language.

That sounds absolutely nuts to me, but I've heard people say the exact same in reverse. Even more fringe is that there's a sizable number of people who when thinking about words (i.e. remembering names) visualize their words as text. What!? I can't imagine that anymore than I can imagine how a jellyfish feels?

The University of Wisconsin did a cool study that comes with a fun quiz you can do to see just how much of a wierdo you truly are: https://uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3NMm9yyFsNioVhz

benrutter, 7 hours ago

Re: After my dad died, I ran and sold his company (201...

Hi - author here.

This is a big question tbh and the lack of a succession plan is a function of many things:

1. This was my dad's baby. He loved the engineering and the science of it and so the idea of retiring from it was difficult for him to conceive. Doing that also requires thinking about one's mortality which I also believe was difficult for him.

2. This was a small market business in a tier 2 city in India. Attracting talent that could take it over was challenging. And myself and my siblings having been born and brought up in the States and being utterly clueless about the engineering/science of the company made us a non-starter.

3. As others have pointed out, he was thinking about succession/exit because he knew it was required for the biz to live on and grow. But life unfortunately had other plans and he was taken away from us unexpectedly.

There are definitely lots of could haves, should haves, would haves, etc I've thought about afterwards, but this was clearly one of those "play the cards you're dealt" kind of situations.

Thanks for reading.

asanwal, 6 hours ago

Re: My Windows Computer Just Doesn't Feel Like Mine An...

About a year ago I dumped Windows from my personal PC for good. I ran a Linux desktop at work for a decade, but my Steam collection get me with at least a bit of a tether to Microsoft. But Valve finally made Linux gaming a reality. I hope more people can make the switch someday because I'm quite happy with the system (Pop!_OS is my distro of choice these days).

silverquiet, 1 day ago

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional or...

My goto example of a dysfunctional and bureaucratic organization is an example I saw in a finance company I worked for.

I was a on team that we were doing a major project. We basically ran Kanban but had to run "sprints" so we chose 4 week sprints to get it out of the way and we put everything on the board we had to get done that month to stay on track. Our pipeline was setup in such a way that you were required to have a jira ticket to push a commit. We were really crushing our timeline, doing 2x the work we were expected, a really great team honestly. But we opened up bugs and additional features in the middle of our sprints to track our work as we did it.

What this amounted to was maybe us saying we have to do 40 tickets this month, and wed be closing like 80. Everyone should have been thrilled by this development! Well we had a sprint review where some "Senior Project Manager" That wasn't really affiliated with our project but was some manager higher up was mad that us opening up new tickets mid sprint and closing them was ruining the org level burn down charts and expected delivery. They wouldn't give up on this, and said it was our fault for not estimating better (which sure, but we were beating expectations!). So we did the reasonable thing and improved our estimates! No of course not, we doubled our number of tickets and filled in "placeholder" on half of them, and used them as needed then closed everything out at the end of the sprint, where we were congratulated by everyone for our phenomonal estimation.

ecshafer, 1 day ago

Re: How does a computer/calculator compute logarithms?

This is a well done post, but please note that computers do not in fact use Taylor series for evaluating polynomials. They do use polynomials! (Or, sometimes, rational functions, but I think the recent trend has been toward polynomials only.) They also use transformations like the log(1+x) - log(1-x) one described in this article. (That one is used in fdlibm, a very influential math library, though more modern libraries seem to not use it.)

But the polynomials themselves are usually generated through some other technique, especially the Remez algorithm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remez_algorithm) and modern improvements to it like Sollya's (https://sollya.org/) LLL-based floating-point polynomial fitting. It's still an active area of research; the RLibM project (https://people.cs.rutgers.edu/~sn349/rlibm/) from Rutgers has introduced a totally new way to fit low-precision polynomials (say, up to 32 bits) using massive linear programming problems (roughly, 4 constraints on 10 variables).

Source: am researcher in this field.

pavpanchekha, 1 day ago

Re: Allan McDonald refused to approve Challenger launc...

Often.

I used to run the nuclear power plant on a US Navy submarine. Back around 2006, we were sailing somewhere and Sonar reported that the propulsion plant was much, much louder than normal. A few days later we didn't need Sonar to report it, we could hear it ourselves. The whole rear half of the ship was vibrating. We pulled into our destination port, and the topside watch reported that oil pools were appearing in the water near the rear end of the ship. The ship's Engineering Officer and Engineering Department Master Chief shrugged it off and said there was no need for it to "affect ship's schedule". I was in charge of the engineering library. I had a hunch and I went and read a manual that leadership had probably never heard of. The propeller that drives the ship is enormous. It's held in place with a giant nut, but in between the nut and the propeller is a hydraulic tire, a toroidal balloon filled with hydraulic fluid. Clearly it had ruptured. The manual said the ship was supposed to immediately sail to the nearest port and the ship was not allowed to go back out to sea until the tire was replaced. I showed it to the Engineer. Several officers called me in to explain it to them. And then, nothing. Ship's Schedule was not affected, and we continued on the next several-week trip. Before we got to the next port, we had to limit the ship's top speed to avoid major damage to the entire propulsion plant. We weren't able to conduct the mission we had planned because the ship was too loud. And the multiple times I asked what the hell was going on, management literally just talked over me. When we got to the next port, we had to stay there while the propeller was removed and remachined. Management doesn't give a shit as long as it doesn't affect their next promotion.

Don't even get me started on the nuclear safety problems.

former_navy, 1 day ago

Re: Ask HN: Why do message queue-based architectures s...

I think this: "* The technology just got mature enough that it's not exciting to write about, but it's still really widely used."

Messaging-based architecture is very popular

democracy, 4 days ago

Re: I kind of like rebasing

Ah! My people.

I, too, much prefer a rebase-heavy workflow. It allows me to both have a dirty "internal" history and clean up for publication.

As a side-effect, it also makes me comfortable having a mostly linear-history for what I publish, as opposed to a many-branched, merge-heavy one, which I dislike, and makes history confusing.

I reject the argument that a no-rebase, merge-only history "preserves the true history of how commits were created", because I believe that is irrelevant. What is relevant is what the tree looks like once the merge (or rebase) lands.

Should a merge conflict arise, in a rebase workflow the conflict resolution is folded into the rebased commit, so it looks like it was fine all along. In a merge workflow, the fix is in the separate merge commit. In both cases you still have to handle the merge conflict. And in my opinion it is not significant for the merge conflict resolution to be separate from the original commit itself because, again: what's important is the final state of the repo.

AceJohnny2, 1 day ago

Re: ChatGPT is biased against resumes with credentials...

This is expected behavior if you understand that the results from any data-based modeling process (machine learning generally) is a concactination of the cumulative input data topologies and nothing else.

So of course a model will be biased against people hinting at disabilities, because existing hiring departments are well known for discriminating and are regularly fined for such

So the only data it could possibly learn from couldn’t teach the model any other possible state space traversal graph, because there are no giant databases for ethical hiring

Why don’t those databases exist? because ethical hiring doesn’t exist in a wide enough scale to provide a larger state space than the data on biased hiring

Ethical Garbage in (all current training datasets) == ethical garbage out (all models modulo response NERFing)

It is mathematically impossible to create a “aligned” artificial intelligence towards human goals if humans do not provide demonstration data that is ethical in nature —- which we currently do not incentivize the creation of.

AndrewKemendo, 8 hours ago

Re: Why does current flow the opposite way from the el...

Because he didn't know anything about electrons, and the experiment he did involving rubbing amber and glass rods on fur and silk cloth only showed that something was transferred between the two materials, and that when the material containing the substance was brought near to the other material containing the other substance, the property conferred by the substances appeared to negate. If you read Teaching Introductory Physics the author very clearly points out that there is no way of knowing the direction of the charge. It must instead be decided by convention. And Franklin simply chose a convention that we stick with.

This is where the need to use mathematical formalism to describe physical concepts becomes clear. Numbers and numeric quantities aren't a real thing that exists in the world. They exist only in our minds. And so does the concept of negation. Calling electrons "negative" is simply a tool for us to model how the substance behaves when it interacts with an "opposing" substance using numbers. We could just as easily have called it "black" or "white" charge, except that we then need to adapt arithmetic and algebra and calculus and so on to work with the concept of "black" or "white" quantities if we are to use them to understand the substance of charge.

throwway120385, 1 day ago

Re: I am using AI to drop hats outside my window onto ...

If you watch the video, it actually falls several sidewalk tiles away and he has to go pick it up. From the text of the blog, I had assumed he was using AI to actually land it directly on a person’s head, which would’ve been crazy impressive.

OkGoDoIt, 10 hours ago

Re: Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

Those can really be called comma_nds!

Ahem. Nice idea though, I think I'll start using it...

TrianguloY, 8 hours ago

Re: I am using AI to drop hats outside my window onto ...

Not your mistake, he does his best to imply that the hats are dropping on heads.

He's got a future in marketing.

civilized, 16 hours ago

Re: Apple found in breach of EU competition rules

You can feel however you want about Apple's rules and EU regulation, but I think it's pretty indispuitable how wrong it is that Apple prevents developers from explaining these rules to their users. Apple prevents developers from saying that Apple takes a % cut of the sale. Apple prevents developers from saying its available cheaper elsewhere. If Apple feels these rules are so just and fair and indispuitably correct, why does it hide them from its consumers?

Consistently these anti-steering rules are what gets Apple in trouble all around the world. It's the one part Apple lost in the Epic case, and it's the EUs first point on their breach. Apple has done this to themselves by being so stubborn and refusing to budge an inch on how they run their platforms. The tiniest concession years ago could have avoided all this regulation on them.

madeofpalk, 1 hour ago