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bsznjyewgd | 5 years ago | on: Microsoft duplicates data from Firefox without asking

The title is misleading.

The Edge popup asks you if you want to import data from other browsers and set the default browser (like what happens when any browser is installed). If you just press cancel a bunch of times nothing gets imported or defaults changed and only some icons get added. That dude just killed it in the task manager so it used the popup's default settings.

Complain about getting the chromified Edge popup as part of a regular update, not about it copying data.

bsznjyewgd | 6 years ago | on: Debian 10.2

As a long time, on and off Debian user, I've actually never had debian-installer install firmware properly. For the longest time, using the minimal install image, putting the firmware debs (or loose files) in the correct directory just plain didn't work. I think at some point, it started working and I could use wifi instead of ethernet to install, but even now the installer still doesn't install AMD firmware, so some kernel modesetting funny business doesn't work and I just get a black screen on first boot (but the system is otherwise functional). The same applies to the firmware-included non-free image.

I mean, I can (and do) manually apt-get the right firmware packages at some point, either popping a shell during install or after first boot, but it is definitely a maze of some kind, especially if you don't know what package contains the firmware you need.

bsznjyewgd | 6 years ago | on: The Life of NHL Dentists

Not only that, but the NHL BANS full face protection unless you're recovering from an injury. (Ex-all star Dany Heatley spent most of his career wearing a comically big half-visor after suffering a serious eye injury, I wonder if he would've opted for a full visor if given the choice.)

Some players already dislike the currently mandated half-visors (visors can distort vision, or fog up, etc.) and do weird shenanigans like having small or tipped-up visors.

There's also a fighting culture in North American professional hockey which would be destroyed by mandatory full face protection.

bsznjyewgd | 6 years ago | on: Mu: A Human Scale Computer

What happened to the previous Mu that was a funny looking procedural language and why did you decide to switch directions?

bsznjyewgd | 6 years ago | on: Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?

I feel really out of the loop here. I went through a pretty standard curriculum in the 2000s and have never owned or used a graphing calculator (aside from the few times the teacher demonstrated our school's TI-83s in class in high school). What are they used for?

[And while I used a bog standard scientific calculator regularly in science/stats classes, I'm pretty sure my calculus classes disallowed calculators and only stuck to magic numbers that were easy to manually calculate with. It might even be plausible to go through a whole math curriculum without a calculator apart from whatever stats/applied classes you're required to take.]

bsznjyewgd | 6 years ago | on: Why I Prefer Functional Programming

Fibonacci is usually introduced as "the next term is the sum of the two previous terms" (sometimes with the story about rabbits or whatever). There's two obvious ways to implement this:

  1. Direct recursion
  2. Keep track of the two previous terms
If you start with (1), you run it and it takes exponential time, and so you should instead remember the two previous terms, leading you to (2). When you go with (2), you either use 2 mutable variables and a loop in the imperative version, or you have 2 accumulators and tail recursion in the functional version... which is the same thing, since a tail recursive function is just a named loop.

There's nothing about laziness or self-referencing an incomplete structure here, which is just a Haskell thing. Taking the tail of an incomplete structure, in particular, is indirect and hard to understand.

If you want to demonstrate laziness, you can still do it directly by doing something like:

  fibs a b = a : fibs b (a + b)
  fib n = fibs 0 1 !! n

bsznjyewgd | 6 years ago | on: Hong Kong tries and fails to hire PR firms to rebuild image

> A Chinese character is more or less equivalent to a word in English/French.

Most Chinese characters are monosyllabic, and most Chinese words are polysyllabic consisting of multiple characters. A Chinese character is a morpheme, and it also happens that many common words are also single character morphemes.

> Someone who speaks only Cantonese can read and understand text written by Mandarin speakers without any issue.

Because we've all been taught to read and write in Mandarin from the very beginning of our education. Again, Hong Kong is a diglossic society.

> They use largely the same grammar and vocabulary. Because Cantonese is ancient Chinese, over the years they have lost track of what semantic characters to use for some of the Cantonese words.

They share a lot of grammar and vocabulary (...but not all of it) because they share a language ancestor. Cantonese is not ancient Chinese, but it's a descendant that conserved a lot more consonants than Mandarin (and a lot of sound merger is actually happening right now in Hong Kong over the last 100 years, but it's commonly derided as "lazy sound").

> Once the mapping is done, you will be able to write down Cantonese and have it understood all over China. Since the work hasn't been done, you can only write down Cantonese with the help of some phonetic characters, which denote only pronunciation but not meaning. It's not gibberish, but neither is it proper written Cantonese.

See [https://books.google.ca/books?id=pFnP_FXf-lAC&pg=PA51] for a description of common strategies for writing Cantonese. Phonetic borrowing is one strategy, and the most common one, yes, but that's no different than characters in standard Chinese, the vast majority of which are a radical with a semantic category (but not a complete meaning) + a phonetic component.

A Mandarin-only speaker can decide for themselves how intelligible that colloquial Cantonese exchange on page 52 is, what with the difference in vocabulary and grammar.

bsznjyewgd | 6 years ago | on: Hong Kong tries and fails to hire PR firms to rebuild image

Mandarin and Cantonese share the same writing system in the sense that English and French share the same writing system: mostly the same characters, innumerous cognates, and I can read the back of my cereal box.

Spoken Cantonese is a different language from spoken Mandarin, with different grammar and vocabulary, and when you write them down you get correspondingly different written languages. That written Cantonese hasn't undergone a formal standardization the way Mandarin did in the early 20th century doesn't make written Cantonese gibberish, just not fully standardized. And written Cantonese isn't only used for memeing on forums or text-speak, it's also widely used for casual writing in newspaper columns or in advertisement, or to authentically transcribe spoken Cantonese (rather than paraphrasing in Mandarin). See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=written+ca...

[Edit: That kids were (and perhaps are) taught to read and write in Mandarin at school using Cantonese sound values, rather than writing in Cantonese, also doesn't say all that much about Cantonese as a written language. Rather, it demonstrates that Hong Kong is a diglossic (well, polyglossic) society.]

bsznjyewgd | 6 years ago | on: Hong Kong tries and fails to hire PR firms to rebuild image

You don't think teaching Chinese in Mandarin (5% first language) rather than Cantonese (90% first language) or trying to introduce national education into the curriculum is assimilation? Responding to criticism that it's brainwashing propaganda, here's what the chairman of a pro-Beijing education lobbying group had to say:

"A brain needs washing if there is a problem, just as clothes need washing if they're dirty and a kidney needs washing if it's sick," said Jiang Yudui, chairman of the Beijing-friendly China Civic Education Promotion Association of Hong Kong, according to news reports. Jiang's comments in July came at the same time that tens of thousands, including many parents pushing their children in strollers, took to the streets to protest against the plan.

bsznjyewgd | 7 years ago | on: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

I have purchased products/services off of ads, but only because I was directly searching to buy those things and they came up as sponsored results. I'm not sure if that counts.

I have never bought off of ads otherwise and find that most of the time they are not relevant to my interests. I also started using an adblocker because of other reasons (mal-ads/autoplay) even though I previously did not do so because I felt text/banner ads were quite acceptable in order to help keep the lights on.

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