gorgolo · HackerTrans

2개월 전discuss

Banks don’t do this because of profit. They do it because of decades of laws pushing in this direction. Anti-money laundering, know your customer, digitalised currency, abandoning cash, preventing tax evasion etc… it’s been getting more extensive over time.

gorgolo

2개월 전discuss

Not trying to be a cynic, but I think you’ve got a bit of a rosy view of what happened and what is happening.

Concerning past wars: yes there were enormous protests. Just like today, many people disagreed with what was happening. But the same was true in the US; many Americans also disagreed with the Iraq war. There was an entire Bush vs Kerry election on that theme. In the end though, there’s a difference between what normal citizens are saying, and what the country actually does. This applies to both the US and Europe. With Iraq, despite all these protests, the majority of European states actually joined the war, with a few standout exceptions like the neutral states and France/Germany. And then they joined the US in several more regime change operations over the following two decades (and with these somehow the IS didn’t even seem like the main cheerleader).

With Iran now, there’s what normal people say and what politicians say and do. I haven’t seen any of the major leaders actually condemn the war apart from Spain. Most tweets are along the lines if “we are watching with concern but we agree something had to be done”. Macron only piped up against it like a month in, and that seemed as much related to Trump insulting his wife as it was to the war itself.

EU is the third largest economy and has 450m people. If they genuinely wanted to do something about this, about their oil being cut off and all the rest of it, they would have.

On Gaza too. Despite the large protests, and there are a few small nations plus Spain being vocal about it, but what concrete actions has the EU and European nations taken on Gaza? And have you actually seen the UK and German government responses to the protests?

gorgolo

2개월 전discuss

I’m not from the US and not trying to defend the US actions, but on Iraq and Gaza, much of Europe takes the same position and goes along with it (and even directly joined the wars and sent troops).

I find the online opinion on Europe / US relations interesting. Online you’d think Europe and US are about to split. But in real life, Europe is more dependent on the US than ever. In terms of energy (Russian fossil fuels basically replaced by US fossil fuels), defense, economy (European economy relatively smaller now than 20 yrs ago), and they just finished signing very one sided deals where they guarantee energy purchases and investment after the tariff war. I think there’s a disconnect between European commenters and European politicians.

gorgolo

4개월 전discuss

> Germany is the reason why the whole mess exists in the first place.

I think this is the most unfair thing about it; Germany might be the reason, but it’s not Germans paying the consequences. It’s not 70k dead Germans, but 70k dead Palestinians (a Semitic people).

I can understand thefeeling of wanting to make amends for their crimes, but they are making amends by now allowing a whole new genocide to occur, against a completely unrelated people.

gorgolo

5개월 전discuss

If someone is willing to fund you with a 100y bond, and it gives you extra cash to move even a bit faster, it sounds like a pretty good deal.

One thing I don’t get though, if superintelligence is really 5 years away, what’s going to be the point of a fixed-interest 100y bond.

gorgolo

5개월 전discuss

Do people really hate JavaScript, or do they just hate the design choices and results that it seems to be correlated with?

At the end of the day I’m using SaaS tools that are apparently written in React and I get astounded but how slow and heavy they are. If you are editing a page on our companies cloud-based wiki, I’ve seen my chrome RAM balloon from 3GB to 16G. A mistake was made somewhere, that I know.

gorgolo

5개월 전discuss

When I show my ID at the cash register I assume the person working there doesn’t instantaneously memorize all my details and then write down when exactly I was at the shop, along with other details, to use this info later for their own reasons.

Whereas if I upload my ID to a tech company (that potentially answers to both my own government and foreign governments, as well as having its own ad-related agenda) I am a bit less certain about what will happen to this data.

gorgolo

6개월 전discuss

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Bactrian_Kingdom

But the main point isn’t whether afghanistan is Greek; it’s not of course. The main point is that it’s funny to hear an American argue that the US has more of a claim on Greek architecture than Afghanistan.

gorgolo

6개월 전discuss

I don’t mind the overall point of your argument, but it’s funny to see a claim that Americans have more reason to use Greco-Roman architecture than a Middle Eastern country. Classical Greek art actually took a lot of influence from the Middle East, and I believe Alexander actually reached te area around Afghanistan (and a Hellenistic kingdom existed there for a while), unlike America.

gorgolo

6개월 전discuss

Python can work from the shell, if you don’t have external dependencies. But once you have external dependencies, with incompatible potential versions, I just don’t see how you could do this with “one environment”.

gorgolo

6개월 전discuss

The “raw” and unedited photo can be just as or even more unrealistic than the edited one though.

Photographs can drop a lot of the perspective, feeling and colour you experience when you’re there. When you take a picture of a slope on a mountain for example (on a ski piste for example), it always looks much less impressive and steep on a phone camera. Same with colours. You can be watching an amazing scene in the mountains, but when you take a photo with most cameras, the colours are more dull, and it just looks flatter. If a filter enhances it and makes it feel as vibrant as the real life view, I’d argue you are making it more realistic.

The main message I get from OP’s post is precisely that there is no “real unfiltered / unedited image”, you’re always imperfectly capturing something your eyes see, but with a different balance of colours, different detector sensitivity to a real eye etc… and some degree of postprocessing is always required make it match what you see in real life.

gorgolo

6개월 전discuss

I noticed this a lot when taking pictures in the mountains.

I used to have a high resolution phone camera from a cheaper phone and then later switched to an iPhone. The latter produced much nicer pictures, my old phone just produces very flat-looking pictures.

People say that the iPhone camera automatically edits the images to look better. And in a way I notice that too. But that’s the wrong way of looking at it; the more-edited picture from the iPhone actually corrresponds more to my perception when I’m actually looking at the scene. The white of the snow and glaciers and the deep blue sky really does look amazing in real life, and when my old phone captured it into a flat and disappointing looking photo with less postprocessing than an iPhone, it genuinely failed to capture what I can see with my eyes. And the more vibrant post processed colours of an iPhone really do look more like what I think I’m looking at.

gorgolo

8개월 전discuss

I didn’t really understand the writer’s comments with exceptions and I don’t code in C++.

Their main complaint about exceptions seems to be that you can’t handle all of them and that you don’t know which you’ll get? If we compare this to python, what’s the difference here? It looks like it works the same here as in python; you catch and handle some exceptions, and others that you miss will crash your program (unless you catch the base class). Is there something special about C++ that makes it work differently, or would the author have similar problems with python?