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jklowden

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jklowden
·12 giorni fa·discuss
Count me among those who think publishers should always know who they’re publishing. When law enforcement comes knocking, a warrant should be all they need. Meta can’t shrug and say they don’t know who Batman1964 is.

There’s nothing new in publishing anonymously, just ask George Elliot. What’s new is the notion that publishers have no liability. Social media companies do not claim to speak for themselves. They have no reporters, no sources to protect. They’re one giant “letters to the editor” section. They should know for whom they speak.

Whether or not a writer commits libel is for the courts to decide. Neither the writer nor publisher has the right to avoid responsibility by camouflage.
jklowden
·28 giorni fa·discuss
Hey, the economy is great and gas is cheap. All we had to put up with is mean tweets.

Whenever anyone complains about Trump, remind them he’s not the cause but the product. Seventy million voted for him, and Republicans in congress let him do illegally what they cannot accomplish legislatively. And all the while they’re busy selling the country for parts, whether through tax policy, or neutering the CAFE standards, or handing copyright to Disney.
jklowden
·mese scorso·discuss
Exactly. Anthropic has been losing three-comma money until recently. In Q2 2026 it earned a profit for the first time, about $500 million. If we imagine they will earn $2 billion in 2026, that’s a 0.2% return on the $1 trillion investment.

To believe the valuation, Anthropic earnings need to grow 100x. For a more likely outcome, I can recommend a bridge in Brooklyn.
jklowden
·3 mesi fa·discuss
Nonsense. See Codd’s first paper.

1NF removes repeating groups, putting for example data for each month in its own row, not an array of 12 months in 1 row.

Storage efficiency was never the point. IMS had that locked down. Succinctness of expression and accuracy of results was the point. And is: normalization prevents anomalous results.
jklowden
·4 mesi fa·discuss
> SQL Server has to convert every single value in the column to nvarchar before it can compare.

This of course is not true. It is a defect in Microsoft’s query planner. And the proof lies in the remedy.

The recommended solution is to convert the search argument type to match that of the index. The user is forced to discover the problem and adjust manually. SQL Server could just as well have done that automatically.

No information is lost converting nvarchar to varchar if the index is varchar. If the search argument is ‘’, no conversion from varchar will match it (unless the index data is UTF8, which the server should know).

This is a longstanding bug in SQLserver, and not the only one. Instead of patting ourselves on the back for avoiding what SQL Server “has to do”, we should be insisting it not do it. Anymore.
jklowden
·4 mesi fa·discuss
I’m not sure why the top-rated reply begins by presuming anything about the problem domain. Many domains have a specified language and implied if not explicit collation. Rejecting characters outside that domain is part of the job. There are no emojis listed on the NASDAQ.
jklowden
·4 mesi fa·discuss
It’s a terribly useful idea. FTFY.

The program you used to leave your comment, and the libraries it used, were loaded into memory via mmap(2) prior to execution. To use protobuf or whatever, you use mmap.

The only reason mmap isn’t more generally useful is the dearth of general-use binary on-disk formats such as ELF. We could build more memory-mapped applications if we had better library support for them. But we don’t, which I suppose was the point of TFA.
jklowden
·5 mesi fa·discuss
Not sure how viable Mezzano is. The most recent bug report was two years ago. The “beginnings of a manual” was last updated 7 years ago.

A better example might be Guix, depending how “operating system” is defined.
jklowden
·6 mesi fa·discuss
If only there was one good library. libxml2 is the leading one, and it has been beleaguered by problems internal and external. It has had ABI instability and been besieged by CVE reports.

I agree it shouldn’t be hard. On the evidence, though, it is. I suspect the root problem is lack of tools. Lex and yacc tools for Unicode are relatively scarce. At least that’s what’s set me back from rolling my own.
jklowden
·7 mesi fa·discuss
iRobot’s largest creditor isn’t its Chinese supplier. It’s the US government, in the form of unpaid tariffs, some $3.5 million. Arguably it was Trump’s stupid tariffs that drove the company out of business. Rather than bringing manufacturing to the US, it allowed the Chinese to acquire an American company, leaving production right where it is.
jklowden
·8 mesi fa·discuss
I believe that’s what we call a "view".
jklowden
·9 mesi fa·discuss
There is no pass-by-value overhead. There are only implementation decisions.

Pass by value describes the semantics of a function call, not implementation. Passing a const reference in C++ is pass-by-value. If the user opts to pass "a copy" instead, nothing requires the compiler to actually copy the data. The compiler is required only to supply the actual parameter as if it was copied.
jklowden
·9 mesi fa·discuss
Note well: the claims about TCP come with some evidence, in the form of a graph. The claims for QUIC do not.

Many of the claims are dubious. TCP has "no notion of multiple steams"? What are two sockets, then? What is poll(2)? The onus is on QUIC to explain why it’s better for the application to multiplex the socket than for the kernel to multiplex the device. AFAICT that question is assumed away in a deluge of words.

If the author thinks it’s the "end of TCP sockets", show us the research, the published papers and meticulous detail. Then tell me again why I should eschew the services of TCP and absorb its complexity into my application.
jklowden
·9 mesi fa·discuss
There was never any danger of public education, so eliminating that danger was quite easy. What we are undermining, though, is the benefit of public education. Witness the last election, where tens of millions were indifferent to democratic governance if it meant cheap gasoline and eggs.

And, yes, the assault on democracy is real. On January 20, Trump signed an order in support of free speech. Within a week he barred the AP over the Gulf of America. Within a month he illegally disbanded USAID. Within 3 months he began suing law firms and defunding university research. Today colleges are receiving letters demanding curriculum in exchange for funding. And we have four years more, at least, to endure.
jklowden
·9 mesi fa·discuss
90% of funding for K-12 public schools comes from state and local taxes. That’s hardly a one-size-fits-all national system.

Would you tell me though, please, what language and cultural differences should inflect science or math or literature or history? Are you suggesting evolution not be taught where there are parents who object, or that the civil war be taught differently in the former confederacy, so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings? Those things are happening, of course. I’m just innocent of any defense for them.
jklowden
·9 mesi fa·discuss
To be fair, the characterization is entirely accurate. Anyone who speaks of "government schools" advocates their demise. They want an entirely privatized system funded at taxpayer expense: a voucher for every child to be spent as each parent decides. If that means every public school closes, well, voila: the magic of the market.

Whoever "they" are in your assertion, they are not cutting down bureaucracy or promoting local control. The federal government has not issued new regulations to cap administrative overhead, for example. It simply abandoned its civil rights enforcement and slashed funding.

Agreed, public schools in America do a poor job. Something like 1/3 of graduating seniors are ready for college work, according to the "national report card". But that’s by design: elected school boards and administration determine salaries and standards. No principal wants to explain poor grades to a disappointed parent; no teacher wants to combat a parent’s prejudice by teaching real history or biology. So, the curriculum is mediocre and grades are high.

The situation isn’t much better at private schools by the way. Grade inflation is everywhere. Harvard just has the luxury of picking its students.

No Child Left Behind and civil-rights enforcement by the department of education did narrow the achievement gap, which has now begun to widen again. So it is clear the department directly benefits student. The complaint is not that; it is that it benefits the "wrong" students, if you get my drift.