w323898's comments

w323898 | 6 years ago | on: Richard M. Stallman resigns

I too am very disturbed by the historic records of Stallman's bad behavior. Was he ever forced to take sensitivity training or anything, or did everyone just ignore it?

w323898 | 6 years ago | on: Richard M. Stallman resigns

I don't know what the correct standard is for an organizational leader when it comes to this stuff, but I don't understand why they need to inflate Stallman saying "presented herself as entirely willing" to him saying she was "entirely willing".

w323898 | 7 years ago | on: The Tragedy of Systemd [video]

More or less this. Gummiboot is nearly pointless, and ntpd and resolved have both caused problems for me. As an init system, systemd is fine, but shipping these bad components while giving them the systemd "seal of approval" is dumb.

On the other hand, I've had no issues with logind and gdm. I've been interested in trying S6 but given it's quite easy to substitute out the bad parts of systemd, so I just haven't bothered.

Probably the biggest problem with systemd is that it's hurting BSD. Then again, gnome devs are having enough trouble getting things working on Linux... also binary format journals are so dumb. How have they not changed that?

w323898 | 7 years ago | on: You Don't Need to Quit Your Job to Make

It sounds like you're not that into it. Plus the assumption that people should spend their free time trying to make more money is weird despite being taken for granted around here. It's one heck of a doublethink, if you consider the combination of aspirational self-improvement talk with bald careerism.

w323898 | 7 years ago | on: Go Modules in 2019

In my opinion, the big rub for using Go in scientific computing is the lack of a REPL. The nature of Go essentially requires it to compile. On the plus side, compilation is very fast so iterating small code changes is practical. But it's still not nearly as nice as typing commands into the prompt and seeing what happens.

Beyond that, Go is easy and performant. It's great for paralellizing workflows via concurrency and compiling tools for distribution. So if you know what you want to do and need to scale up, it could be a great choice.

w323898 | 7 years ago | on: Why Are We Still So Fat?

I've gone from 255 (BMI 33) down to 185 (BMI 24), back to 205, had an illness and got up to 225, now back to 210. I resent the article acting like this long-term weight loss is somehow a freak occurrence.

I just watch what I eat and exercise. Many people with obesity just don't like to exercise, but I love it. This is a natural advantage I have. But I also go on days when I don't feel like going, skip office snacks, and so on. It's neither magical nor impractical.

Ultimately, obesity has been normalized and people don't really care. This is going to be hard to change, either hard on society in funding education and support resources, or hard on the obese in cutting them off from health care and other Draconian measures.

w323898 | 7 years ago | on: YouTube Knows How to Stop Serving Toxic Videos

>I can't help but feel it's a bit of a fishing expedition to determine political alignment.

What's frustrating is that I like to get exposed to a variety of viewpoints, but YouTube very aggressively (as far as I can tell) puts users into left/right boxes, as opposed to just serving content that is historically or politically themed.

I'd be very surprised if it turned out YouTube was NOT intentionally pushing people to anger-addictive extremist content, especially right-wing content, because it's a product that encourages the viewing habits their metrics prioritize.

w323898 | 7 years ago | on: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

Fusion was, and for the foreseeable future will be, a boondoggle. In the US it was a cold-war-era arms race program intended to scare the USSR and have them overextend, and now the Chinese are using it for propaganda and scientific Keyensianism.

The fact is, fusion generates neutron radiation that destroys the reaction vessel, making it an unviable technology. Nobody takes it seriously as a source of energy, aside from uninformed people. As cool as the idea of controlled fusion is, it is and will remain science fiction.

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