jayjader's comments

I'm not who you're responding to, but:

> that’s why I used the term western liberalism not “neoliberal hegemony of wealthy Western nations.”

the latter often cloaks itself as the former when asserting itself.

For example, in France (one of the "birthplaces" for, and current bastions of, western liberalism) there is a phrase often used as a blanket push back against almost any criticism of Israel's actions: "Israel is the only democratic state in the Middle East!". It's so prevalent that academia has written an entire book around it: https://www.cairn.info/moyen-orient--9791031803364-page-113....

Depending on how often and how recently they have been encountering things like this (given current events) in their daily life, I can understand the other commenter mistaking your position as such.

For my part, I am unsure of exactly what would happen if we lift the oppressors' thumbs (starting with Israel, Hamas, and wealthy "western" neoliberal hegemony, namely, but the list doesn't stop there). I don't think that anyone knows, for that matter, as it's never happened in any historical circumstances that remotely resemble our own. I do think that if you want western liberalism as the concept, and avoid some of its historical failure modes like boom&bust cycles and exacerbated economic inequality paving the way for populist anti-democratic revolts, you need to aim for much higher than its current outcomes in terms of dignity and self-determination for all groups of peoples. To your point, I've read some reports that Rojava has deteriorated, especially post-US-withdrawal, to very much not be either "western liberalism" or a society I would want to live in.

There was (still is?) a French law that mandates the maximum sales price for soft-cover/paperback books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lang_Law (if you can read it, the French version of that wikipedia article is much more detailed). The intent behind the law being to attempt to keep "culture" accessible to all incomes, notably by preventing resellers from price-gouging books at the expense of the publisher(s).

This has resulted in many larger tomes being split up when translated to French - for example, the first 5 (English/Original) volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire are sold as 15 (translated to French) books in total : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Tr%C3%B4ne_de_fer#Publicati...

I am also very disappointed at how often French publishers seem to decide that they can chop up these stories willy-nilly without it degrading the quality of the art (re-)productions that they are selling us.

I think I agree with the author's sentiment and final conclusions, but I very much disagree with some of the language used.

The author never defines "criminal". I can only hope they don't literally mean "someone who breaks a law". From jaywalking in Singapore to being gay in Iran, plenty of people meet that criteria, for reasons that don't necessarily mean any software they produce cannot (or should not) be trusted.

Whether or not you are a criminal is often political. To write off "criminals" in this way without even acknowledging any of this seems very counterproductive to the larger fight for rights the author is clamoring for. I am sure a simple "in the context of this article, I mean [this and that] when I use the term criminal" would be enough to clarify.

> Would you deem Mark an upstanding citizen or report his insidious behavior? His actions mirror a stalker’s obsession, yet he commands a virtual kingdom. Now, transpose this image onto the face of Big Tech, those companies that liken themselves to friendly community builders. Is it any less sinister?

It may not be any less sinister, but there is a qualitative difference between having a single person stalk you, and having an apparatus in place that automatically reacts to what it observes of your behavior. Stalkers often set up such apparatus, and that should be/remain illegal in that context. Yet I don't think taking shots at Sentry or haphazardly reducing them to privacy violations is useful. Nor is is useful to treat a system (largely digital) the same way you would treat a person.

> So why does the situation change when you’re talking about billion-dollar conglomerates in the tech industry? Why do we laugh it off or shrug when it’s technology that’s tracking us?

Technology on its own doesn't want anything, whereas stalkers do. Again, I suspect the author's intent here is to highlight that there is someone on the "other end" of this tech that is actually viewing and using the tracking data.

I just can't understand what this is being written for, in the end, unless it's mostly for the emotional release or catharsis. If it is the latter, then I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong here. If this is intended to reach an audience and maybe push for change, however, it fails pretty flatly to me. It's a call-out of the unconvinced that ends up preaching to the choir more than anything else. As I would consider myself part of that choir, I don't find it that upsetting to read. At the same time, I don't get much from reading it, either.

<progress> requires some vendor-specific prefixes last time I tried theming it using CSS (unless you're using "theme" to mean host system/window mananger/browser - wide theme). There is no common subset (that I am aware of) of CSS properties shared amongst browsers that can be leveraged to even decently change the <progress> element's appearance. So I'm not sure that it is the best example.

I agree that many of the list _are_ themable enough to warrant investing the effort to wrangle their particular interfaces over reinventing them entirely with <div>s.

Agreed; it's very serendipitous that you can basically light up a room with the gravitational energy that the sun/earth pair radiate out into space.

Light up 1 room with an incandescent bulb, or your entire flat with LED bulbs nowadays. I would be very interested in seeing some napkin math, based on power efficiency progress and "rate of technological innovation", that attempted to project when we could feasibly run the equivalent of our present-day human civilization purely off of gravitational waves/radiation.

I don't know of any programming language that does that as a language-first primitive. But this is basically slapping a `#pragma openmp parallel for` before your C for loop. In Rust there is the crate `rayon` that takes advantage of the language-level trait system to "augment" any (existing) iterable with a `par_iter()` method that effectively does what you describe: when included in the same module you can simply `for foo in bar.par_iter()` in place of `for foo in bar.iter()` to parallelize your iterations.

I suspect any language wanting to offer this as the default behavior for `for` loops will end up being a language like Java, Erlang, or SmallTalk - the language spec includes a "virtual" runtime that allows it to assume such flexibility in behavior, and capacity to "create/run threads/processes" that otherwise requires an OS (as in, you start leaving the perimeter of a programming language).

Very interesting! I'm especially curious on how the live-coding experience plays out.

I wish there was an example of a moderately-complex scrapbook, so that I could see what the code looks like when you start mixing several scraps and need a minimum of scaffolding.

I would temper your message with the caveat that the data is still accessible to the user; one click to open devtools, and another to switch to the "Storage" tab, and you have all your persisted data visible to the user.

You can copy and/or edit said data from that view as well!

Albeit the convention is clearly to not presume your browser app user will be interacting with their data at _all_ through the devtools, which I find regrettable but unavoidable with the current state of "computer literacy" and the state of "devtools-as-an-interface" (obviously the ergonomics aren't great for the average user today).

Good to see public sharing not only of such a problem, but also how to fix it in your own code.

I am a bit disconcerted that something that apparently is warned against in the docs, is done across several "big" packages that use Hyper. Maybe with a more appropriate name exposed by the library, for example `to_bytes_unchecked`, such "bad" uses would be less wide-spread.

An interesting read. Near the end I started to feel like what the author is describing is very similar to the general approach I've coalesced on, over the years.

I've always deleted the snippet(s) in question after implementing the full behavior, however - or, more accurately, absorbed them into the final implementation piece-by-piece.

More recently, my team at work has started committing a logbook into our project repo for similar reasons of recording technical musings for posterity. Also similar to what the author describes, only in our case we are effectively _starting_ from the readme files and introducing code snippets where we feel the need. We're also maintaining the log as a single file - the plan is to archive 3- or 6-month chunks at a time as separate files once they reach a certain age.

This logbook experience makes me very curious as to how the author manages their snippets in practice. I wish they had gone into more detail than

> if you're able to keep on top of things [...] it mandates discipline

The baked-in chronological component of the logbook makes it straightforward to look topcis up by roughly _when_ they were deliberated on, but it's not great at guaranteeing a valid code snippet exists that encapsulates any given deliberation. Conversely, snippets that

> should not even be conceptually aware of another snippet's existence

and be treated

> as a fully self-sufficient standalone program

seem to force me to incur a substantial obscuring of how any given musing or deliberation builds on what came before. At the least, many snippets will start with 10-20 boilerplate setup lines and class definitions.

Perhaps I am just wishing the author had explicitly mentioned if they import existing modules, functions, classes, etc as needed to keep the snippets short. If that is indeed an implicit assumption, then overall I don't have much to critique. If not, I am very curious as to what snippet-driven development for "framework-heavy" frontend code (eg React apps) looks like.

> but they're hard to visualise and reason about because they don't fit a circle in whole numbers.

I think, unfortunately, that you can't avoid encountering irrational numbers in trig. You would need to constrain yourself to working only with right angles, but in those cases sin and cos are trivial[0] so there would be no need to use trig in the first place.

[0]: 1 or 0, you're either on the right axis or you're not. No circles involved.

I see that /u/metaphor has given you some formal references.

I'd like to chime in with a more intuition-based explanation of what transfer functions are, from my recollections of college control theory classes in both electrical signals and a more general "systems engineering" application:

Basically, the transfer function is a different perspective on modelling/representing a system's output as a function of its input. Classically, when modelling and/or reasoning about a system in physics, the perspective we adopt is that of "input" being the forward advance of time (and sometimes initial conditions) and "output" being the amplitude of the physical quantity(ies) or dimension(s) of the system that interest(s) us. The transfer function, then, is when we switch perspectives to consider the "input" to be a sinusoidal signal (characterized by amplitude and phase over time), and the "output" is the new amplitude and phase of that signal [after "traversing" the system]. Of course, you're actually working with a closed-loop, but most input/output systems can be modeled as a closed-loop if you sufficiently broaden the system's boundaries.

This turns out to be useful for/in several reasons/contexts:

- many physical phenomena are sine waves (or, thanks to Fourier, a sum of sometimes many different sine waves), and often times a system's purpose (to us humans) is to control such a phenomena precisely along the lines of "do this to the amplitude, and/or adjust the phase like so" - dampening, feedback loops, more sophisticated processes like hysteresis, maintaining a steady state given incoming perturbations, etc. In these cases the transfer function ends up being the mathematical expression of that system's function in the "domain language" of that problem, so to speak.

- It turns out that often, when working with systems whose "classical" representation involve components like exponentials or sine and cosine of time (which are "just" complex exponentials of those quantities), the corresponding transfer functions are "simple" fractions of polynomials. More precisely, passing into the Langrange domain allows transforming a differential equation problem into a complex polynomial fractions problem - often much easier to crunch/solve. Furthermore, in the Lagrange domain, de-phasing a signal by pi/2 is equivalent to simply adding 1/(j * signal's frequency) to that signal (if I recall correctly). This makes much of the math more accessible to human intuition, and especially on more complex systems that have several "moving parts" the linear quality of polynomials becomes invaluable.

Personally, I remember quickly adopting, once I'd grokked it, the transfer function perspective when trying to reason about the effect of introducing a capacitor into an existing circuit - analog or DC[0] - as well as things like how the material properties of a door contribute to its behavior as a low-pass filter on sound waves. Sitting down and doing the math, the formulas that I would arrive at spoke much more clearly to me. Also, you are sort of adopting a "time-agnostic" (or perhaps time-invariant) perspective, where the system itself does not change over time. Instead, its' input is characterized by how it behaves over time, and the transfer function (especially when plotted) gives you a clear, direct sense of what the output's "behavior over time" will accordingly be. Notably, it's here that the zeroes of the OP become so meaningful.

[0]: part of what initially started making things "tick" for me was when a professor explained that an impulse on an input signal (i.e. a quasi-instant variation, then back to the preceding "steady state" value of it - i.e. a DC current "turning on"), to a transfer function, "looks like" a sine wave signal with a constant amplitude but monotonously increasing phase offset - again I forget if the rate is constant, polynomial, exponential or what.

> I grew up in central europe, and i find the putting-people-into-categories thinking that seems to be common in the US very off-putting.

Do you realize in this very sentence, you've exhibited 2 instances of "putting-people-into-categories"?

> There is no "we", nor do i see the need to create one. There is always a "we" as soon as there is more than 1 individual. Pretending otherwise is extremely dangerous.

Hmm. I agree that the problem is larger than capitalism and is closer to human nature, but saying

> The very problem is that humans are form of life and restraining ourselves or worsening quality of life "for next generation" goes against basic instincts and behaviours built by evolution in mammals.

seems a bit pseudo-scientific to me. Life dies out if it over-consumes from its environment, so "by evolution" the life that survives _does_ "restrain itself for the next generation" in a sense.

Sure, if you're making a text adventure in the command line, then the REPL is basically your default game engine. That's where your i/o, computation, control flow, asset management, etc is implemented/centralized.

"Game engine" outside of the context of making a game is just a runtime (and/or environment), and I agree it becomes a bit meaningless (as a prescriptive thing).

It's like saying a CPU needs to have vectorized operations, or even a hardware multiply, to be called a CPU. It's true that in many, if not most, cases those are essential components. However, I find it more useful to define "game engine" as "whatever takes care of the game, physics, and display logic implementation for a particular game".

> Many a better approach would be to ask whether every game needs a game engine? So, by my definition every game _has_ a game engine. I think a more interesting question would be, "when does a game engine need to be considered as its own logical layer or compartment?"

> As a young man, who survived Covid, why would I risk heart complications to save some old people?

First of all, because if enough of us don't take the vaccine, we're all at risk from the virus continuing to spread and mutate.

Secondly, surviving Covid once doesn't mean you're immune from catching it (or a variant) again later on. That link you shared states a 1 in 50 000 chance of developing myocarditis from a COVID-19 vaccine. This recent study [0] finds a rate of reinfection among the surveyed population of 121 in 34 500 males and 148 in 31 697 adults aged 18-39. Either of those is more than 2 orders of magnitude higher than the risk of that heart complication. And catching Covid a second time can also leave you with further health complications.

Finally, I just want to point out that the article you linked literally has this citation from the study author: > He says the new studies clearly show that the benefits of vaccination against COVID-19 outweigh the risks of people aged 16 and older developing myocarditis. Previous research co-authored by Balicer found that in this age group, becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 made a person 18 times more likely to develop myocarditis — a much more significant risk than is observed following vaccination.

So if you're evaluating risk for potential heart complications, I'd think you still want to get the vaccine at the end of the day (barring any other, as of yet un-mentioned, health complications). [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8373524/

> It was only by rethinking every layer of our infrastructure that we were able to pull Spotify off, to create that magic moment of double-clicking on a new song and having it instantly play. And speaking of magic …

This reminds me of a conference that John Carmack gave (in 2019?) where he goes over how [the occulus team] got input latency down to a manageable amount on modern hardware.

It's an interesting data point that both these efforts to produce "magic" required an in-depth "rethinking" of many of the underlying stack layers.

obviously, just like I'm talking about what you _do_ with the increase. Are you really just saying to leave the increase in value alone? Then why pursue it?

I'm under the impression that an increase in company value is not an end to itself, it's a means to an end (more investment, more dividends, higher sell-off/buy-off price, increased stock price, etc - all are more probable when company valuation increases).

So why are you looking to increase your company's value?

> Right so instead we should take one of those 100 people and give them the power of violence to take all the coconuts and distribute as they see fit.

No one is saying that.

We take all the coconuts, gather all the people, and work to come to a decision.

Or are you saying you need someone to tell you what to do, and you'd rather it be the guy that got rich off everyone else than someone randomly chosen? I can understand that at least, although I still disagree.

> For example, Elon Musk would be forced to sell all but a minuscule sliver of his shares in Tesla, SpaceX, etc and give the proceeds to the tax man. He'd be out on his arse and replaced by an executive hired by whoever bought the shares. It would be the death of Tesla and SpaceX as we know them.

The point is that Musk would/should never have gotten to such an oversized amount of control in the first place, and thus these businesses wouldn't be in any danger at all from such a move because they'd already be staffed by competent people who wouldn't need his approval or "executive powers" to run things. And if Tesla and/or SpaceX can't stay afloat without Musk, then I'd argue they're failures, or at the very least shouldn't have gotten this big while still being dependent on him.

Besides, so what if companies fail? They're not people, they should never be more important than people. As long as the people are taken care of we should be fine with businesses failing. It leaves room for others, and stops tying up human output for unproductive endeavors.

> This would take the ownership of huge swathes of the companies in the world out of the hands of the people who created them and operate them and into the hands of random executives with little or no track record.

Who's giving you this idea? The whole point is to give more power/control back to the people running those companies, i.e. the workers making stuff, serving people, maintaining, etc. No-one is arguing to blindly dilute ownership of companies among the populace _just_ to keep from having billionaires. This is scare-mongering at its finest.

> Finally, if everyone who's currently an investor in these companies, but has more than $20m also get taxed down to $20m, who is going to buy all the shares?

The wealth being taxed doesn't just vanish into thin air. If so many currently wealthy investors are being taxed down, it stands to reason that the redistribution of said wealth would mean that _more_ investors appear. Also, from an ideological point of view, it seems more democratic to have many smaller investors, than allow a few to accrete such wealth that they can do such things as bully or starve projects of investment for personal reasons.

> It's nonsense like this that is why Marxist experiments the world over have caused such havoc and misery on unimaginably vast scales

Funny how someone who immediately thinks to reference "Marxist experiments" in response to an argument for better wealth redistribution, can't envision an economy without a top-level executive being vital for a company to survive, or investments being impossible if 1 person can't do it all by themselves. Seems like a really fragile model to me. Meanwhile, these Marxist experiments aren't broiling the planet for an extra 50 years to milk profit off of fossil fuels, nor expecting people to sacrifice their health and time to themselves to work 50-,60-,70- hour workweeks without getting an ounce of recognition whether they do a good job or just adequate. Or how about leaving people to die of poverty because there's no direct profit to be had in them?