Meai's comments

Meai | 2 years ago

interesting though, that comment directly says that if I tweet in english and my interface is in german then I'll have a serious problem. Which I wouldn't think is so rare. How many people have english as their second language and use it online? It feels like this deboost would hit a lot of people. Or actually, I have my interface in english and I often tweet in german. So that would hit me from both sides.

Meai | 3 years ago | on: Without specific countermeasures, the path to AI leads to AI takeover

I also think that there is no reason to assume that AI wouldn't be intelligent enough to hide their attempts to gain more real world control. Every human hacker knows that he has to hide his computer virus but we seem to think that an AI would storm through the interwebs like rambo and start switching on missile silos. Obviously for now all of this is impossible but lets say we do develop a human-like AI and it runs on cloud computers. Surely it has some disk access, surely it has some freedom to read and ingest new information. Even if it has no disk access, it certainly has network access. I have seen people post crazy projects where they use DNS as a storage system. I don't think it's so absurd to think that an AI finds a way to hide their progress. Why exactly can't it store shell scripts somewhere, learn and even eventually prompt users to execute some shell commands? It's hard enough to secure things against human attackers, imagine an AI that has instant knowledge of all CVEs and can generate shell code to exploit it.

Meai | 3 years ago

But by definition if a company grows for decades it doesn't 'exit' (=it isn't sold or renamed or repurposed). So I think that the Mittelstand definition should prohibit an exit, maybe not for the individual (=founder/owner) but for the company as a whole. In my opinion this is why in german you don't really use the term for companies anyway except when econonomists look back and analyze your company history.

Meai | 3 years ago | on: Connect: A Better gRPC

I'd appreciate it if they could be more upfront about their language support and what this even does for me. Right now this is: "A better gRPC for Go". And I don't know what's better about it without doing much more research. Apparently proto3 has support for json encoding by default. So they somehow give me a better schema validation. That's their claim but I don't see how exactly they do that without going much deeper into it. Meanwhile .proto files are obviously already a schema, so they might be parsing your golang server code to see if it still matches your .proto file. That sounds very brittle to me if true. I'm not convinced at all from this post and I don't see how this works.

Meai | 3 years ago | on: I replaced my native iOS app with a cross platform web app and no-one noticed

Doesn't Apple forbid publishing web apps on the app store? How is it then possible that something like ionic framework and react native still work? Unless they literally translate all html features to native components but I seriously doubt it.

Edit: This is a "talk to sales" framework and ionic is 50€ per month as the absolute cheapest option. This is essentially an ad then.

Meai | 3 years ago

>The problem is that C# isn't a language intended for embedding, and you need a lot of effort to bind the two seamlessly.

I don't think that it's actually very hard to do it, I've done it easily for Java and I think I remember doing it for c# as well: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tutorials/netco...

It's honestly just a few lines of C code that you point at some c#/java method and run it. The truth is probably that people want to invent their own languages for their own reasons, e.g to have full control. Personally I've never understood that which is why I know so much about language interop now. Embedding is even easier for various scripting languages. I've also done interop for Dart. I don't like Lua but I've also looked at how easy it is for that. Imo there is no justification for game engines not having a C API so that everyone can code in whatever language they prefer.

Meai | 3 years ago | on: We lost 54k GitHub stars

I think you make a good point, the retyping is not perceived as a genuine sort of 2-factor step but is perceived like an annoyance. Maybe the consequences of the action should be shown in a screenshot with a 5 second wait. Personally the only reason it works for me as a 2-factor is because I think about what Github's intent is when they prompt me to retype the repo name and therefore I take a moment to reflect that I indeed want to do what I want to do. But isn't that backwards? I have to imagine what Github's intention was instead of simply seeing a ui and understanding it for what it is.

Meai | 4 years ago | on: The case for and against analogies

In my opinion analogies should almost always be avoided. It is much more work to understand the analogy and map it back to the argument and if you are proposing the analogy you're asking the other debate partner to do all that work for you for free. Also you're asking him to be very gracious with your argument because of course the analogy is never a perfect fit. All while he's trying to win the same debate you are trying to win. So this is a recipe for anger and resentment. In 99.999% of cases, you should be able to explain something directly without the indirect approach via an analogy. Analogies may help in a teacher-subject system where both people know their role and the teacher is explaining very vast subjects very superficially.

Meai | 4 years ago | on: The simplest of slumbers

to be honest, I think this is all solely due to caffeine. I sleep 5-6h if I'm on caffeine, I sleep 8-9h if I'm off caffeine. When I first started drinking caffeinated drinks at age ~23 (yes really), I had a short period where I could still sleep full nights but eventually I was always down to 6h. In my opinion most people don't attribute any of these sleep changes to caffeine because they've been on caffeine for a long time, never fully stop and when you are younger it doesn't have this effect yet or immediately.

Meai | 4 years ago | on: We will win the war for general-purpose computing

With "dweb" do you refer to getdweb.net or to one of the many other alternatives that have sprung up? Can you explain how it works, is it available via the regular browser by typing in an url? What's the selling point? Sorry, I know I could do this research myself but I did that several times now with various alternatives and it just doesn't seem like any of them are good enough. Does dweb help against DDOS?

Meai | 4 years ago | on: Windows 11, Amazon, and Uncomfortable Questions

I think this is going to end up giving a lot of power to the Android ecosystem. I never felt much compelled to make an Android app but now that I can possibly be as simple as double clicking an .apk and it opens in a window... that changes things quite a bit for me. Microsoft should tap into this synergy and somehow create an IDE that can pump out both Android .apks and Windows apps with the exact same design, usability and build pipeline.

Meai | 4 years ago | on: FoundationDB: A distributed, unbundled, transactional key value store [pdf]

They are using the term "machine" and "process" in multiple conflicting meanings I think. I mean maybe they improved this since I used it 1.5 years ago but I kind of doubt it.

If I remember correctly there is a definite problem if you remove one of the processes that end up guaranteeing your configured redundancy mode. So then suddenly your entire cluster is inoperable. Yes really, I think it doesn't even properly respond to cli commands anymore and shows nodes as simply missing. Oh and suddenly those long wait times for your cli commands are really starting to bother you... I don't really want to talk more about it because it's been a while but I just wanted to make the point that the user experience was quite bad.

Meai | 4 years ago | on: FoundationDB: A distributed, unbundled, transactional key value store [pdf]

Personally I don't understand how you can call a database robust if it can't scale down nodes after you scaled them up once. What am I supposed to do if I ever deploy to 50 nodes and then it turns out that I only need 5. Shut the business down? Pay to run database servers forever that I don't even need anymore? Also the database configuration has a lot of gotchas and is very opaque. You might be waiting for 30sec for your CLI to connect to your localhost cluster of two processes and you have no idea what is happening or why it is taking that long. It just never felt so safe and robust as people claim it to be. I don't know, these were just my findings on the brief tests I did with it.

Also you better get familiar with a whole bunch of hidden "knobs" that are apparently configurable and very important somewhere and then get printed out into xml logs but of course there is no log viewer so you have to write your own. Maybe this isn't a problem for large companies but I'm providing feedback as a single user here.

I also don't understand how people can praise the c++ DSL. They should rewrite that into standard c++ coroutines as soon as possible so their entire build and dev environment isn't so hard to understand. As a user of open source software I generally like to be able to debug through the projects I use and figure out problems I have. It's much harder when a project uses their own custom language. I certainly tried to set it all up correctly but there always seemed to be some problems in regards to Intellisense within the IDE.

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