zaat's comments

zaat | 1 year ago | on: Things you should know about Windows Input, but would rather not

I can't find any viable alternative. Keyboard is much faster than those click and release interfaces. Keyboards also have repeat keys, when you press a character for a long time you can actually press and depress the shift key and see the change in the line of characters input. This is extremely useful feature in games, graphic design software and other applications.

Generation of keystroke based on the up event, beside been incompatible with repeating keys for long strokes, will slow down typing significantly, as it requires tracking timing pressing keys for longer duration. I'm pretty sure that this isn't only effect of me being used to track keypress timing on the way down, but an unavoidable result of the duration of the action.

Waiting for up event on contemporary GUI, when the contempt UI is a sluggish fit-to-nothing dirty touchscreen in a public kiosk is sensible. When you know an interface will yield more errors than intended input it is only sensible to assume that any input is a mistake unless the user is making an effort to validate it.

zaat | 1 year ago | on: PySkyWiFi: Free stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights

While I didn't find the joke funny, it does thematically match the piece - the hacker who supposedly see the possibility to get free internet as a viable opportunity. Later in the piece the author does distance himself from that image, revealing the tone in the opening was merely a stylistic choice, a writer's device, as clearly he is not the kind of a person who will in practice exploit the airline systems.

zaat | 1 year ago | on: I got tired of hearing that YC fired Sam, so here's what actually happened

Assuming you are a man, I'm not sure you would say the same thing if the arbitrary lingual fact was opposite, and on your door it would be written in bold chairwoman, or if you were been introduced as a policewoman.

I'm not sure I'm for changing the language all over, but I don't think dismissing issues that disturb a group that you don't belong to is a manner that fits a gentleman.

zaat | 1 year ago | on: Turning psychiatric labels into identities

The characterization of the scientific method as proposing hypotheses and then putting them to test was given by a philosopher in the previous century. While the hypotheses that this is the character of the scientific method is still very common, it was refuted long ago, both by observations and by logic reasoning.

zaat | 1 year ago | on: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

> We agree here, but that isn't how religion solves the problem. Religious laws are also enforced by threats in the afterlife and violence in the present life, not merely by reason, so they do not need to solve the is-ought problem like secular laws do. Of course, religious law has other problems.

You are mixing law with moral/ethics. Secular law doesn't have is-ought problem, it is enforced by the state law enforcement forces. Pressure to abide to the laws doesn't entail or justify their morality.

> I agree completely, hence why it is impossible to derive rights that are logically justified without an appeal to God. The comment I was replying to claimed there were logically justified rights which have to follow from logically justified moral theories unless they are decreed from beyond reason, and since the latter is a category error, so is the former.

It wasn't. It was arguing for inherent rights. The claim for inherent rights can be justified. It can't be justified by logic just like it cannot be proved mathematically. But it can be justified ethically using reason.

zaat | 1 year ago | on: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

We seem to disagree on the definition of natural rights. For a right to be natural you require that it will be granted by God or that it will be based on human nature, and by human nature you mean to say that it is a direct product of the evolution biology that have created our species. While I would grant you that it's a definition that you can find in many philosophers, following Moore, but in the current context I think that the natural/artificial distinction isn't useful for defining natural rights.

I would argue that this definition is very narrow and limiting, it introduce weird dependency on our current scientific knowledge, and isn't very useful. For instance, when Hobbes proposed the social contract theory he was discussing natural rights but today we know that his natural science knowledge was incorrect and therefore he was actually describing artificial rights. To me this makes no sense. Instead, I will propose, that rights that are derived by reason, that are universal, and that do not depend on a specific state law or the social norms of a specific society are natural rights. They are natural in the sense that they are not dependent on any state or law but are inherent. Those rights are not granted by god, and they are not artificial law propositions. They are based on universal principals of reason and the reality of human existence.

This view and this definition of natural rights is not my invention. It's reflected in the language of the universal declaration of human rights - which recognizes a set of universal rights. The declaration isn't a legal document that legislate a binding law. It recognize rights that are not (let's hope, are not yet) generally accepted by all nations. Nevertheless those rights are not based on God or born by the act of composing and publishing the declaration, those are natural rights. They are natural despite being in opposition to humans natural behavior, despite their consistent violation. It is because those rights are natural that they can serve as basis and justification for international law and justice.

Rawls theory of rights is universal, it isn't about specific social norms, it discuss human society in principle. One might say that his ethics are based on theory of the human nature.

zaat | 1 year ago | on: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

> Natural rights do really require theism to be truly natural, ie, independent of morality and society. Theism avoids the is-ought problem by forgoing the ought, with theism natural law can simply be, and whether you decide you ought to abide them is no longer so important.

Hume's original text describing the is-ought problem is specifically targeting justification of ethics on god. Laws that no one is ought to abide by are no laws but nonsense.

Is murder immoral because god hate murder, or do god hate murder because it is immoral?

> At the end of the day, secular natural rights is an intuitive and appealing but ungrounded position that cannot be logically justified

Many will argue that no moral theory can be logically justified, and that the search for logical justification is category error

zaat | 1 year ago | on: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

Rights is well developed subject in modern ethics, and it doesn't require God or morality in the sense of "Doing X is bad and therefore immoral". But any discussion of rights is discussion of moral theory.

Modern ethical philosophers have developed ethic theories that propose secular basis for universal rights, moral theory that doesn't rely on God (Rawls is a famous example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theory_of_Justice)

zaat | 1 year ago | on: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

God is of very little help (here), as pointed by Plato/Socrates in the Uthyphro dilemma. The naturalistic fallacy is not limited to natural rights, as Hume's is-ought is applicable to legal rights just the same - you can't logically deduce from the fact that there are laws that mandate rights a conclusion that one ought to abide by them.

Natural or universal rights does not require theism. Robert Nozick is famous proponent of the secular based position that property is a natural right.

zaat | 1 year ago | on: Ex-OpenAI board member reveals what led to Sam Altman's brief ousting

> And no, you are wrong - your right not be attacked is based on morality, you say "attacking someone is wrong"

You are mixing morality with justice, which (in the modern world) is based on rights. "Attacking someone is wrong" is a moral statement, it puts the focus and the obligation of individuals to keep moral behavior. My right not to be attacked is not based on moral and not dependent on the morality or the beliefs of any other people, it is based on justice, a social contract that declare a set of a societal or universal rights granted to every individual.

zaat | 1 year ago | on: Should I use JWTs for authentication tokens?

That was a battle I fought with some developer consultancy not long ago. I won't tell the whole story, but I will say that if you have issue with JWT tokens that are too big due to the number of groups each user have, you probably do need to use JWTs and you are most definitely doing it wrong and should educate yourself or bring a consultant who at least get the difference between authentication and authorization.

zaat | 1 year ago | on: Frog or Toad?

Seems to offer very little help with the game

zaat | 1 year ago | on: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

You've missed Defender there

Edit: you updated defender, but you missed the depth of the rabbit hole. There's defender for office 365, there's defender for IoT, for Containers, for cloud, for cloud apps, for identity. There's one for gramma too

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