lmkg · HackerTrans

Godot's recent announcement spelled something out clearly: when a mid-tier rando contributes, you can provide feedback to that person and possibly help them grow into being a senior contributor or even a maintainer. That possibility of helping the human behind the code is part of the motivation for doing open-source. Mentoring shitty devs is itself giving back to the community, in a different form than the code itself is. And that is qualitatively different than giving feedback to an LLM.

lmkg

2 か月前議論

I mean that's still basically what they tried to do at the time. They were trying to get them through web standards committees and everything.

IIRC a big reason it didn't end up working was because NaCl was such a "big" technology and asm.js such a "small" one that asm.js was able to reach production-ready first despite starting work several years later.

lmkg

2 か月前議論

This is why we're clear-cutting forests to build new data centers? Not even for "real" productivity gains, but just for the sake of using the tokens.

lmkg

2 か月前議論

The difference is that early-bird pricing is transparent and predictable. There is a written, known policy of $X discount during specific hours. You can plan for it. It's never a surprise.

Dynamic pricing means sometimes you go there, and Wendy's decides on the fly whether you get a lower price and how much. It gives Wendy's the option to pinch pennies how they see fit for their own benefit, rather than offering a deal which you can choose to accept.

lmkg

3 か月前議論

> which seems to directly oppose the CCPA.

I have some background in data privacy compliance.

It sounds like they are claiming to be a Service Provider under CCPA, which is similar to a Processor under GDPR. Long story short, a Controller is the one legally responsible for ensuring the rights of the data subject, and a service provider/processor is a "dumb pipe" for a Controller that does what they're told. So IF they are actually a Service Provider, they're correct that the legal responsibility for CCPA belongs to their customers and not them.

That's a big IF, though.

Being a Processor/Service Providor means trade-offs. The data you collect isn't yours, you're not allowed to benefit from it. If Flock aggregates data from one customer and sells that aggregate to a different customer, they're no longer just a service provider. They're using data for their own purposes, and cannot claim to be "just" a service provider.

lmkg

3 か月前議論

My personal conspiracy theory is that in some cases, the "loser" is in on the graft to. It's a way to launder bribes.

lmkg

4 か月前議論

That still begs the question though: There are existing tools and solutions that do this. Why not, and would this being AI make a difference?

"My boss would be more likely to approve it" is a cynical but valid answer.

lmkg

4 か月前議論

That type of experimental set-up is forbidden due to ethical concerns. It goes against medical ethics to give patients treatment that you think might be worse.

lmkg

5 か月前議論

The Gaussian integers usually aren't considered interesting enough to have disagreements about. They're in a weird spot because the integer restriction is almost contradictory with considering complex numbers: complex numbers are usually considered as how to express solutions to more types of polynomials, which is the opposite direction of excluding fractions from consideration. They're things that can solve (a restricted subset of) square-roots but not division.

This is really a disagreement about how to construct the complex numbers from more-fundamental objects. And the question is whether those constructions are equivalent. The author argues that two of those constructions are equivalent to each other, but others are not. A big crux of the issue, which is approachable to non-mathematicians, is whether it i and -i are fundamentally different, because arithmetically you can swap i with -i in all your equations and get the same result.

lmkg

10 か月前議論

They weren't "just" raw dumps of internal C structures. It takes careful design work to dump raw memory in a usable fashion. Consider: You can't just write a pointer to disk and then read it back next week.

Binary MS Office format is a phenomenal piece of engineering to achieve a goal that's no longer relevant: fast save/load on late-80's hard drives. Other programs took minutes to save a spreadsheet, Excel took seconds. It did this by making sure it's in-memory data structures for a document could be dumped straight to disk without transformation.

But yes, this approach carries a shitton of baggage. And that achievement is no longer relevant in a world where consumer hardware can parse XML documents on the fly.

I have heard it argued, though, that the "baggage" isn't the file format. It's actually the full historical featureset of Excel. Being backwards-compatible means being able to faithfully represent the features of old Excel, and the essential complexity of that far outweighs the incidental complexity of how those features were encoded.

lmkg

3 年前議論

> Unless they had a better reason for restricting the maximum city size.

They did! EA wanted you to play the game online. They encouraged you to connect your city with other players by making it difficult for cities to be self-sufficient.

I.e., user-hostile design.

lmkg

6 年前議論

> Do you understand what licensing is?

Nope, no one understands licensing. Which means that arguments grounded on "The user accepted the terms!" has a shaky ethical foundation. Not necessarily a shaky legal foundation, although that wheel seems to be turning.

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