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makomk

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makomk
·4 年前·議論
It's not exactly true that Truss "rejected any windfall taxes on energy companies" even though the opposition Labour party keep on claiming that: https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-labour-kee...

Basically, the Tories had already placed a windfall tax on UK oil and gas before Truss even became PM that's almost identical to the one that Labour have called for, and no-one has proposed removing it. (To some extent, it looks like Labour copied the existing Tory tax.) The main reason why Truss' original proposal required so much more taxpayer funding was that her price cap lasted for two years rather than six months - Labour were relying on windfall tax revenue from well before the start of the price subsidy to make their numbers add up and still couldn't quite do it, so there's no way to extend it for longer without massive government borrowing.

Most of the media coverage didn't explain this at all, they just repeated Labour's claims that all that government borrowing was because the Tories were in the pockets of energy companies and rejected a windfall tax. Nor did they explain the practical consequences of the price cap ending in April. All of the numbers thrown around for the cost of Truss' longer price cap assumed energy prices would still be unaffordably high by then, but no-one pointed this out and what it would mean for households. Of course, the moment the government annouced their energy support would end in April there were headlines everywhere about the huge bills this could cause for households.
makomk
·4 年前·議論
Now that the rise in corporation tax to 25% is back, the UK press are of course pushing claims by economists that it will make the oncoming recession deeper and longer. That narrative was nowhere to be found prior to the u-turn though, with the media consensus being that of course lower corporation tax wouldn't help grow the economy and only ideologically-driven right wingers who ignored the evidence believed otherwise. It's another one of those scenarios where whatever the government is doing at the time is the wrong choice.
makomk
·4 年前·議論
More than half the population, probably. Also, for the last few years the UK media have been doing something obnoxious where they take decisions where all options have some downside and present only the downsides of whatever the government has chosen, making it sound like the obvious wrong choice and something only a complete incompetent would pick - which is particularly obvious when the government does a u-turn and suddenly everyone discovers the problems with whatever they'd been presenting as the obvious right choice. The BBC is a particularly consistent offender. This of course makes it seem to everyone who follows the news like they could easily do better than the idiots in power.

One example HN might be familiar with is the smartphone-based Covid contact tracing app in this country. When the government was going with an app that didn't use Google and Apple's contact tracing framework, the BBC focused hard on the inherent problems with not using it and made it sound like no-one other than the government thought that decision had any advantages at all. Then the government U-turned and literally they day the new app launched, all of that was forgotten and the BBC suddenly discovered the fundamental, well-documented disadvantages of that framework they'd ignored before and found some experts who made it sound like that was worse than the original app. They've been doing it with almost everything though.
makomk
·5 年前·議論
In this case, the bug fixing is probably the lion's share of the work though - there's a huge amount of subtle edge cases involved in rendering text, and the Microsoft employees almost certainly know this. And the example that broke it isn't even something particularly obscure. We're literally talking about the output of the dir command, one of the first things someone is likely to do with a terminal window, not displaying correctly. He basically did the easy part of the work and lambasted some Microsoft employees as idiots because they thought it was more complex than that.
makomk
·5 年前·議論
Whether the font is monospace or not isn't really the problem - that causes some aesthetically ugly spacing, but that's to be expected and it's still readable. The big issue is that the code has completely failed to find a glyph for one of the characters used in something as commonplace as a directory listing from the dir command and people expect better than this from font rendering in modern applications.
makomk
·5 年前·議論
The fact that Casey Muratori's proposed approach requires the terminal to reimplement the process of correctly mapping characters to glyphs - including stuff like fallbacks to other fonts - is a huge part of the argument for why it's much harder to implement and more complicated than he claims. If it really doesn't do that right for something as simple as a decimal seperator for the font some random HN commenter happened to use, that does tend to suggest the Microsoft employees are in the right here.
makomk
·5 年前·議論
It's more subtle than that. What the Microsoft engineers are saying is that the console's current approach to drawing text is inherently slow in this particular case, due to the way the text drawing library it's based on uses the GPU. The proposed solution requires the terminal to have its own text drawing code specific to the task of rendering a terminal, including handling all the nasty subtlties and edge-cases of Unicode, which must be maintained forever. This is not trivial at all; every piece of code ever written to handle this seems to end up having endless subtle bugs involving weird edge-cases (remember all those stories about character strings that crash iPhones and other devices - and the open source equivalents are no better). It's relatively easy to write one that seems to work for the cases that happen to be tested by the developer, but that's only a tiny part of the work.
makomk
·5 年前·議論
You can access the current posts from any good NNTP server, but Usenet isn't used that much these days anyway. What's more interesting is the historic posts from its heyday and I think Google might own the only good archive of them by virtue of purchasing it.
makomk
·6 年前·議論
Where this gets interesting is when governments decide that if LED energy efficiency is good, more LED energy efficiency is better. There's a push for minimum energy efficiency standards to be really close to the cross-over point where consumers just barely save money compared to less efficient bulbs if they meet the nominal lifetime specs, on the pretense that it's helping out consumers who are too stupid to realise that the higher upfront cost saves them money - at least in the EU and the US pre-Trump. Given the combination of more complex designs and more incentive for cost-cutting, I can't see those bulbs meeting the lifetime specs, and I do wonder if it'd actually save energy.
makomk
·7 年前·議論
"Orthogonal to being right" might actually be too optimistic here. For whatever reason, people who want to resolve disagreements this way often hold positions which rely on their own supposed lack of power as justification. So to some extent, winning the power struggle is actually correlated with being wrong.
makomk
·7 年前·議論
The whole reason that blog post exists is that a lot of terrible RICO suits are filed for things which do not in any way meet the legal definition, and the press often fail to question their merits - especially ones fitting narratives they like.
makomk
·7 年前·議論
Didn't that story about a mysterious rise in lung disease tied to vaping a couple of weeks ago implicate marijuana as the cause?
makomk
·7 年前·議論
Superficially, it does sound quite reasonable. The problem is that the quote itself is a call for people to abandon rational debate and use violence, not just against targets who have themselves eschewed debate for violence but against "any movement preaching intolerance". Whilst his justification is that those movements might themselves eschew debate for violence, he very specifically does not restrict this to movements which have done so or even threatened to do so.

So for instance, Poppler's paradox is easily used to justify violent intolerance of anyone who opposes unchecked immigration. Not only are they preaching intolerance, but people with very similar-sounding views are actually violently attacking immigrants so it's easy to justify the claim that those ones might as well.
makomk
·7 年前·議論
Perhaps, but I do wonder if it actually mattered all that much whether 8chan encouraged this. There's evidence of contagion in mass shootings, that shooters seem to see the headlines about a shooting and become inspired to imitate it. Maybe there'd always be mass shootings tied to 8chan so long as there were news headlines tying the previous mass shootings to the site and leading future shooters towards it. Those certainly have a much broader reach than anything on the site itself.
makomk
·7 年前·議論
In the current media climate, the risks of recommending small channels probably aren't worth it. The moment something dodgy gets recommended and journalists get ahold of it, the loss of advertiser income site-wide costs both YouTube and other creators far more than they could ever get from better recommendations. The incentives are intentionally stacked against you.
makomk
·8 年前·議論
Having seen many discussions about whether some group is a brigade of sock puppets or not, the signature of like-minded people acting independently is that they hold views that the person judging them agrees with, whereas anyone who holds views they dislike is clearly a brigade of sock puppets. This seems to hold across the board, and judging based on how "correlated" they are doesn't change this because everyone is biased towards thinking of people who're like them as more diverse in viewpoint and outsiders as all alike.
makomk
·10 年前·議論
Memory-mapped device registers are generally mapped in such a way that accesses bypass cache and go straight to memory. This has a fairly large performance penalty, of course.
makomk
·10 年前·議論
This is part of the reason I just buy the cheapest Arduino-compatible clones possible and laugh at the idea that we should all buy genuine Arduino to support the people who put in the hard work - it's been fairly obvious for a long time that it was a Wiring rip-off through and through. Probably also why the official Arduino ports to non-AVR architectures are so incompetent compared to third-party ones; the AVR port was taken from Wiring and just modified slightly, so no-one there had the skills to write one from scratch.
makomk
·10 年前·議論
In some ways it was probably easier to write a game solo than it is now, because expectations were lower and there were such tight limits on what was technically possible. These days people expect high-quality graphics, music and sound effects as well as good gameplay, and they expect much bigger games too. I'm not sure anyone's managed to develop a commercially-successful game solo, and even developing most of one solo requires years of work and a wide set of skills.