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barsoap ,

Anglos like to talk about things like "Number 5", "Westminster", "Whitehall", "The White House", etc, maybe it's from there.

And while in Germany we wouldn't ever refer to the President or their office as anything but "The President", the residence is definitely Bellevue Palace. As in "The President received guest at <location>" will never be filled in with "their office". If you said "the office" people might think it's the boring building in the front with all their staff.

Taiwan's presidential office not having a proper name (that I know of) Algo journalists then feel a strong urge to describe it, I'd say. And it's indeed notable.

barsoap ,

Nausea isn't overdose but that's a technicality, what I wanted to say is that it's quite hard to get to nausea off a single puff no matter the nic strength because it tastes, for lack of better term, sharp, very noticeably so. Coming off low-concentration juice you'd notice before the vapour goes past your tongue.

barsoap ,

Not random substances, just like diluting vodka with water is not mixing in a random substance.

barsoap ,

Pure water will work for a couple of percentage points but above that will not work properly because atomisers expect a certain range of viscosity or they won't wick properly. It's generally a mix of propylene glycol, glycerine, and water. More glycerine means more clouds, natural sweetness, and annoying hygroscopy (i.e. you'll get a dry mouth), while PG is an aroma carrier, less sweet, quite a bit less hygroscopic. It's also the standard solvent for nicotine and aroma, not just vape aromas most food aromas are PG-based, too. Water is there to make the liquid less viscous and/or reduce hygroscopy of the overall mixture.

barsoap ,

Would you be saying the same thing if it was about diluting vodka with water?

...because that's what mixing vape juice with juice base is.

barsoap ,

If I was making a cocktail for a friend, and, eyeballing the ratios, ended up putting too little vodka in it, would that still be tampering?

barsoap ,

If I were to hand everyone shots of pure tap water when they're expecting vodka, would that be tampering?

Note if you say "no" then you're literally no fun at parties. Zero. Nilch. Less actually, you're negative fun.

barsoap ,

Pirates.

barsoap ,

Americans found lots of values in Starbucks coffee because Americans have no concept of coffee that's simultaneously black, not bitter, not acidic, and sweet. It would be wrong to blame Starbucks for that, they're a symptom, not the cause, but yes their coffee sucks. As it does everywhere else in the US, the country that thought that percolators were a mighty fine idea.

(And yes I know you guys invented the Aeropress. Good thing, good job, good coffee (with proper beans), now also use it).

barsoap ,

You can, in fact, go to Starbucks and order an Espresso. Let's just say that it tastes as if the barrista had never drank one straight.

barsoap ,

Starbucks can provide value to Americans and their coffee can suck, those two things are not mutually exclusive.

barsoap ,

IEEE 754

I mean it's an algebra, isn't it? And it definitely was mathematicians who came up with the thing. In the same way that artists didn't come up with the CGI colour palette.

barsoap ,

It's a wonderful world where 1 / 0 is ∞ and 1 / -0 is -∞, making a lot of high school teachers very very mad. OTOH it's also a very strange world where x = y does not imply 1 / x = 1 / y. But it is, very emphatically, an algebra.

Mostly it's pure numerology, at least from the POV of most of the people using it.

barsoap ,

You probably are familiar with the thing, just not under that name, and not as a subject of mathematical study. I am aware that there are, at least in theory, mathematicians never expanding beyond pen+paper (and that's fine) but TBH they're getting kinda rare. The last time you fired up Julia you probably used them, R, possibly, Coq, it'd actually be a surprise.

They're most widely known to trip up newbie programmers, causing excessive bug hunts and then a proud bug report stating "0.1 + 0.2 /= 0.3, that's wrong", to which the reply will be "nope, that's exactly as the spec says". The solution, to people who aren't numerologists, is to sprinkle gratuitous amounts of epsilons everywhere.

barsoap ,

Depends, I'd say. Is your set theory incomplete or inconsistent?

barsoap ,

Different kinds of sugar are all sugar when they get to your gut.

Nope fruits are high in fructose while sucrose, aka table sugar, is 50:50 glucose and fructose. Fruit has the same or even worse makeup sugar-wise as HFCS, glucose can be used pretty much directly by the body while fructose needs to be processed by the liver, into fat. Evolutionary speaking that makes a lot of sense as when there's a lot of fruit around it's summer and you need to fatten up.

Real fruit vs. juice is a matter of fibre and satisfaction from chewing, it's way easier to overdrink than to overeat fruit.

barsoap , (edited )

We get it you're vegan.

Also most people are actually lactose-intolerant, the capability to retain production of lactase into adulthood is a mutation won through a lot of hardship and diarrhoea.

Side note Italy being blue explains why they have strange rules such as "no cappuccino after noon", it's not that it's bad or anything it's that many Italians can only stomach one, maybe two a day.

barsoap ,

And this is exactly why I always humour tech support when they're asking me which lights exactly are on, which colour, and their blinking patterns. I've already made the diagnosis yes the problem is on their end but it's not like they have a way to know I'm not full of shit.

barsoap , (edited )

Oldie but goodie:

< > ! * ' ' #
^ " ` $ $ -
! * = @ $ _
% * < > ~ # 4
& [ ] . . /
| { , , SYSTEM HALTED

Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH!

"waka" didn't gain popularity among people, at least not among any I ever heard about, usually it's angle bracket. I'm quite partial to 'tic' and 'tac'. The rest is standard or at least common, IMO | is pipe and {} braces. * is often called asterisk or star but splat is just better. And # is most definitely not "hashtag". Here's an overview of what's out in the wild.

barsoap ,

And everyone just uses "log" in CS because noone cares about the base.

...if you specifically want the natural one it's ln. ld for binary, base 10 is pretty much unheard of. Such an uneven number.

barsoap ,

That paper is yet to be peer reviewed or released.

Never doing either (release as in submit to journal) isn't uncommon in maths, physics, and CS. Not to say that it won't be released but it's not a proper standard to measure papers by.

I think you are jumping into conclusion with that statement. How much can you dilute the data until it breaks again?

Quoth:

If each linear model is instead fit to the generate targets of all the preceding linear models i.e. data
accumulate, then the test squared error has a finite upper bound, independent of the number
of iterations. This suggests that data accumulation might be a robust solution for mitigating
model collapse.

Emphasis on "finite upper bound, independent of the number of iterations" by doing nothing more than keeping the non-synthetic data around each time you ingest new synthetic data. This is an empirical study so of course it's not proof you'll have to wait for theorists to have their turn for that one, but it's darn convincing and should henceforth be the null hypothesis.

Btw did you know that noone ever proved (or at least hadn't last I checked) that reversing, determinising, reversing, and determinising again a DFA minimises it? Not proven yet widely accepted as true, crazy, isn't it? But, wait, no, people actually proved it on a napkin. It's not interesting enough to do a paper about.

barsoap ,

It was someone different who said that. There's a chance the authors might've gotten some claim wrong because their maths and/or methodology is shoddy but it's a large and diverse set of authors so that's unlikely. Fraud in CS empirics is generally unheard of, I mean what are you going to do when challenged, claim that the dog ate the program you ran to generate the data? There's shenanigans about the equivalent of p-hacking especially from papers from commercial actors trying to sell stuff but that's not the case here, either.

CS academics generally submit papers to journals more because of publish or perish than the additional value formal peer review offers. It's on the internet, after all. By all means, if you spot something in the paper that's wrong then be right on the internet.

barsoap ,

small module nuclear reactors.

Hmm let's see what changed since I last looked. This study seems recent, just looking at the publicly available sections:

SMRs do not represent dramatic improvements in economics compared to large reactors.

Translation: They're way more expensive than renewables. SMRs have some advantage which are mentioned (less land usage, non-intermittency), then we have

The advanced SMRs are compared to conventional large reactors and natural gas plants,

...but not renewables+storage, which would be a good comparison point. If it looked any good they definitely would've included it.


Now that doesn't mean that these things don't make sense for Microsoft. It might e.g. simplify power distribution within datacentres to a degree that other sources just can't, also reduce or eliminate the need for backup power, etc. But generally speaking I'm still smelling techbro BS.

barsoap ,

Would've been more productive to keep it at "male depression and anxiety is underdiagnosed", maybe also say "because therapists only learn about female-pattern symptoms", YMMV on that being pushing a bit too far.

I will not comment on comments talking about men's mental health getting downvoted in a post about men's mental health and, should a definite pattern emerge, let that speak for itself.

barsoap ,

amd they are in the past seen as weird, abnormal, or hysterical for having interests.

I don't think it's ever been considered more weird, abnormal, or hysterical to crotchet as a gal than it has been to build bottle ships for guys. That is, sure, there's been lots of BS around the type of hobby, it not being "gender-adequate", but women not allowed to have hobbies? At all? What? Being too poor to have hobbies, sure, but that again is not a gendered thing.

barsoap , (edited )

Someone else here linked to knowyourmeme.

Most of them are glaringly obvious, some are meta. This one though can easily come across as "stuff closeted misandrists say to get a pat on the back" if you don't know the format. Flanked by a good dose of nerd shaming.

I mean it's true, men will literally comment on the internet before going to therapy. We will also literally tie our shoelaces before going to therapy.


You know what, this is a good thing. This time actually reading the knowyourmeme article, they're a parody reaction thing. Some 20, 30 years ago a new pattern of insult cropped up here in Germany, things like Warmduscher and Schattenparker, "someone who takes warm showers", "someone who parks in the shadow". They were never meant literally-literally, but they did come up with a definite air of "you should be toughing it out", "being a bit sensitive about things aren't we". They were quickly balanced out by things like Drahtseilbungeespringer, roughly "steel cable bungee jumper".

Humour is serious business and usually the best weapon against shittiness we have, and if occasionally we have things that can be misinterpreted, like here, overall it's still worth it.

barsoap ,

Nope. Good bread basically never comes in slices, and definitely not in the country that invented pre-sliced bread. You can get passable sliced bread in Germany but the good stuff definitely stays loaves at least until you buy it. I mean it's fine to slice it then and there if you have enough mouths to feed to have it finished by tomorrow.

barsoap , (edited )

Coal is going to stick around for certain applications for pretty much forever. What'd be interesting to see is charcoal refined to anthracite-levels of performance so applications needing that kind of grade can become carbon-neutral.

And it's not even always railway enthusiasts operating the remaining steam locomotives btw in Poland they're still in regular service. They phased out steam very late because of various economic reasons and once they did steam was already a nostalgic thing so they kept a depot and associated lines open. Contrast e.g. Germany where you don't see steam in regular service but on various isolated narrow gauge sections.

barsoap ,

That’s pretty much the definition of the job of parent. To control everything around the child and how they interact with things.

The fuck. You'll breed a country of people with zero social skills, zero independence, and a lot of ressentiment for their parents for boxing them in and helicoptering leading to an authority neurosis.

In short, you'll have American conditions.

It takes a village and all that.

For one thing, don’t give kids a smartphone until they’re at least 13, they have no need for one before then.

No, give them 30 pence so they can find a telephone booth and call you if something is up. Make sure to isolate them from their peers because they can't use the same chat app as everyone else. The more isolation the more you control them which will make nurturing that neurosis even easier.

After 13 or there abouts, they are given more freedom and more responsibility to go along with it, and hopefully have been raised well enough to respect that.

If, at the age of 13/14 thereabouts they haven't learned to evaluate things for themselves, have had the opportunity to make wrong choices that they then learned from, they'll be rolled over by puberty hormones driving their frontal cortex to mindless exploration. You cannot substitute your own judgement for theirs, your judgement isn't stopping them, their capacity and ability to say "wait a minute I should think before I act" is the only thing that can.

From there, limitations and guide rails will remain in place, be it a traditional curfew in the evening, or a limitation of “screen time”, and if course of what the children interact with online.

At the age of 16 they should be mature enough to live on their own, with parental backup being present, but not imposing on them. They'll call you when they need help because they came to value your guidance. Not control. One of the two begets rebellion, the other doesn't.

Eventually you have to let go, let them be adults and make their own decisions,

I'm sure you'll be able to after helicoptering them for 18 fucking years and them going zero contact for their own sanity.

but all you can do as a parent is try to prepare them

Then fucking do that!

barsoap ,

Timely? Hardly.

Depends on whether you count from the time facebook etc. became a problem and was recognised or such, or the passing of the Digital Services Act. The commission can't just impose fines randomly they have to have a legislative basis to do it.

EU fines are generally not a thing you can just blink at they're measured in percent of world-wide turnover. Historically they don't really dissuade companies from trying shit but they definitely are sufficient to make them stop shit. Also actually way more importantly they probably have tiktok in the pipeline but the paperwork still needs the one or other t crossed.

barsoap ,

If they're found to be tanking a continuous fine of 5% revenue because they're too darn profitable it won't take long for the parliament to change the regulation. With sufficient harm to the consumers it's also possible to simply shut down facebook, or at least their ability to do business in the EU which would make the market completely unprofitable as they're relying on EU advertisers. They definitely can unplug each and every server facebook has in the EU. The EP is way less captured by lobby interest than the US legislature is, doubly so by an uppity US company trying to skirt EU law.

What's more likely to happen though is the shareholders firing management because picking a fight with a bully the size of the EU isn't exactly good for the share price.

barsoap ,

Meh. Today is September 11216, 1993. It's been a while since the internet last went uphill.

barsoap ,

I respect that chaotic neutral energy but occasionally it's worth the time figuring out how to throw the dice so your craps shoot doesn't land snake eyes.

barsoap , (edited )

GNU tar, at least a modern one, that is the one that happens to come with my system, won't try to read from /dev but stdin and then complain that it's a terminal and refuse.

Quoth POSIX on the f flag:

Use the first file operand [...] as the name of the archive instead of the system-dependent default.

That is GNU is compliant, here, the default is system-dependent. f - is required to be stdin, though, so you can bunzip2 foo.tar.bz2 | tar xf - or such in a portable manner, don't have to rely on tar having a z option (which is nonstandard) or it auto-detecting compression (even more nonstandard). What is not standard either is tar -x: Tar doesn't take leading hyphens. Tar is one of those programs so old its command line syntax got standardised before command line syntax standards were established. OTOH it's not nearly as bad as dd, you can interpret how tar does things in the same way as git pull: It's a subcommand, not a flag.

barsoap ,

POSIX. POSIX didn't get designed but documented behaviour that was portable between different UNIX flavours and was then declared a standard.

If you're annoyed by it just consider the xvf in tar xvf to be a subcommand as pull is in git pull. Tar simply has a fancy subcommand syntax. At least it's not dd.

barsoap ,

Nope, tar spec doesn't say anything about a help message. The man spec OTOH requires at least syntax documentation for all standard utilities to be present on the system.

barsoap ,

You know what? They're technically correct. There's historically plenty of computer systems which came in multiple different cases, sometimes that's still the case but the most obvious examples are historical, where you would get something like the CPU (yes) in one case and then a huge-ass card reader in another case and drum memory in yet another. Those drums were used as RAM. Each case was standing on the floor, at least chest-high.

Simply integrating various peripherals into the CPU doesn't make the CPU any less of the CPU. Even ignoring the case thing and just looking at the CPU package (or even die): Modern CPUs contain a lot of things that would've been external to it, or even in a different case, in the past. You'll hear the term "SoC", system on a chip, thrown around but that's misleading most CPUs nowadays are SoCs: You have your CPU cores, yes, but you also have a memory controller, you have storage interfaces and general IO (PCIe is a storage interface), as well as a GPU. It's been a long time since mainboards came with northbridges. Newer CPUs may have enough memory on package to reasonably run without external memory (and not just "use the cache as ram during early boot" kind of stuff).

barsoap ,

The only way my box is blinged up is with tastefully beige-brown fans. I actually felt slightly betrayed by Noctua when they started making black fans.

barsoap ,

Information theory aside: In practice all because you can't write bit-by-bit and if you leave full bytes untouched there still might be enough information for an attacker to get information, especially if it's of the "did this computer once store this file" kind of information, not the actual file contents.

If I'm not completely mistaken overwriting the file once will be enough to prevent recovering with logical means, that is, reading the bits the way the manufacturer intended you to, physical forensics can go further by being able to discern "this bit, before it got overwritten, was a 1 or 0" by looking very closely at the physical medium, details on how much flipping you need to defeat that will depend on the physical details.

And I wouldn't be too terribly sure about that electro magnet you built into your case to erase your HDD with a panic button: It's in a fixed place, will have a fixed magnetic field, it's going to scramble everything sure but the way it scrambles is highly uniform so the bits can probably be recovered. If you want to be really sure buy a crucible and melt the thing.

Also, may I interest you in this stylish tin-foil hat, special offer.

barsoap ,

and the next time something writes to that area the data that was there before is disregarded.

A single overwrite might not be enough to defeat physical forensics because shadows of the old data persist in how the new data is stored. Also when it comes to SSDs you might be waiting a long time for the data to get overwritten as the drive will wear-level its erm sectors (what are those things called with SSDs?).

barsoap ,

Altavista. Back when keywords still meant something.

barsoap , (edited )

Corruption, that's why. Similar to how the Italian mafia would half-build highway bridges with taxpayer money and then mysteriously have some shell company go bankrupt. OLAF is on it because of course they are when stuff makes the press. If they have a case EPPO will take over at which point that Hungarian mayor will have the questionable honour of being up against the gal who cleaned up Romania... before Hungarian courts. If those turn out to be corrupt then that's going to buy the mayor time but ultimately the ECJ would overrule them. Still no mechanism to actually set boots on member state grounds but Hungary is already on thin ice when it comes to getting suspended from the EU for various reasons, they're going to tread lightly.

See if you want to be corrupt in the EU you have to do it like the big boys: Implement some policy, then get a cushy job at a company. Or receive tons of money for boring private speeches. Something like that, directly grabbing into state coffers is so uncivilised.

EDIT: Oh, Hungary didn't join EPPO, figures. They can still freeze assets, though. Also if I understand things correctly our mayor would turn into a fugitive in the rest of the EU.

barsoap ,

It's also lazy and they're used to not getting investigated or even called out. But even if prosecution is high and you're not lazy you get corrupt politicians doing blatantly obvious stuff like the mask scandal in Germany, making a fortune of selling FFP2 masks at ludicrous markups to the state: Their behaviour was not technically illegal (laws got adjusted since then), the only one who got prosecuted got prosecuted for tax evasion, not corruption.

barsoap ,

Death of the Author doesn’t really work when the author is still alive, profiting off the work,

Actually, it makes it more striking. What you're doing there is conflating art and art reception with economics and economical relations. In purely artistic terms yes she's deader than dead because anything she says about anything about her work will be disregarded if fans don't vibe with it. Usually, while still alive, artists at least have some influence on the interpretation of their works, she doesn't. Not because she's physically dead, but because fans have declared her dead to them.

barsoap ,

I don’t know why single character email addresses would fail that test, though.

Could be that they get a huge amounts of bounces from those kinds of addresses. I'm sure at least half of Germany is using [email protected] as the go-to "I don't wanna give out my email" address.

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