Somewhat off topic rant, but am I the only one who find mathematical notation unnecessarily obtuse?
The bit that gets me is defining degree as n-1. For someone without a mathematical background, it takes a bit of pondering to figure out that you have to define n as one more than the actual degree, the opposite of what seems natrual. My mind at least just wants to think about n as the degree, and use n+1 as the last index. To me it seems aggressively unintuitive.
I guess you want to align the coefficient numbers but would it be a sin to define another index c = n-1 for that purpose?
But I'm a mathematical lightweight and maybe mathematical thinking is all about this. Perhaps some greater talent can correct my thinking.
You have to assume competence too. You may have good intent but that doesn't help if you don't really know what you are doing or are blinded by ideology or some wayward belief.
> I expect him to royally misunderstand the rules of the game
What a weird take on his behavior. His parents are law professors, he had an army of lawyers working for him at the time, yet he just didn't care and did what he felt like, knowing full well the damage it would do, because that was the whole point. There is no misunderstanding, it was just indifference.
I'm not a lawyer either but I don't see what's wrong with that argument. The tool that Beeper built isn't infringing any laws, reverse engineering in this context is perfectly legal. They're not responsible for their users' use of the tools they build and their consequent violation of the TOS.
> The SMS protocol has been around for decades and works perfectly fine with iPhones.
It's not that simple, you get discriminated against for having a different color bubble and using up people's SMS allocation.
We should whine about (communication) interoperability, it's critically important for everyone. Purposefully or negligently creating incompatibilities is anticompetitive and generally toxic.
The Liberland people are exactly claiming the land, that's the whole point of what they're doing.
Croatia, even if it claims the land is Serbia, consistent with its border claim, it still administers it as a practical matter, that includes keeping people out of where they shouldn't be.
What you're saying is repeated constantly through this discussion, but it's very misleading. There is a border dispute and that land is a part of the dispute.
Another reading of the situation is that Serbia can claim that the land is a part of Croatia because they've allowed people to inhabit it and it's contagious to Croatian land, given that 'Liberland' has no legal basis.
Given that Croatia has no good options here, they've chosen the least harmful option.
As a Croatian, I can't do whatever I want (esp. building) with various bits of land I actually own, why should these people get special treatment?
I'm all for liberalisation of land use, and think Croatian bureaucracy and petty corruption are slowly destroying the Croatian state economically, but people acting independent of the law, because they claim they're special, doesn't wash. The tourist angle is a red herring. Tolerating unlawful occupation isn't smart at all.
Instead of feeling threatened by the new tools, think about how you can use them to enable your work.
One of the ironies* of these tools is that they only work because there is so much existing material they can be trained on. Absent that they wouldn't exist. That makes me think: why not think about how to train your own models than entail your own style? Is that practical, how can you make it work and how might you deploy that in your own work?
Something that everyone is sticking their heads in their sand about is the real possibility that training models on copyrighted work is a copyright violation. I can't see how such a mechanical transformation of others' work is anything but. People accept violating one person's copyright is a thing but if you do it at scale it somehow isn't.
* ironic because they seem creative but they create nothing by themselves, they merely "repackage" other people's creativity.
Most "programmers" just can't understand relational databases and SQL. It's too hard.
I've seen things you wouldn't believe. Random deadlocks in multi-billion transaction reporting systems. Atomic transactions split into multiple commits in banking applications. Copying rows between tables instead of setting a flag on a row. All because highly paid programmers are scared of RDBs.
In the real world a relational database is the single most useful tool short of a compiler/interpreter. SQL is anachronistic but still works well even if its a pain.
My advice: avoid MySQL like the plague. PgSQL and SQLite is all you ever need and all you ever want.
Probably, but it's still inefficient in other ways. There's memory issues and the code overhead of dealing with strings. It'd be much nicer to have a binary interface, but admittedly it would be much more complex.
The real solution is to include an alternative to SQL that looks and works like Datalog including things like variables. That would make SQLite 100x more productive for programmers. But that will never happen.