jcahill · HackerTrans

jcahill

no profile record

comments

4 yıl öncediscuss

the typical romanization of arabic كافر is "kafir". the typical spelling of the slur associated with apartheid-era south africa is "kaffir".

> one of the languages I speak

why would i care which languages you speak

you are not me

i am not you

neither of us are everyone else

>try it

perhaps instead of me doing any of that, you could simply stop arrogating reflexively in your internet comments and presuming to know the inner contents of others' minds (you do not)

>semicolons

the purpose of your original reply was to condescend in typical nerdsplaining fashion. the reason my reply to you, in turn, was written like it was, including the side mention of semicolons, was to escalate abruptly and unambiguously, such that there was no ambiguity as to what i thought of the situation. i was expressing contempt. it's merely a circumstantial convenience that semicolons do happen to be dogshit punctuation used as epistemic crutch notation in prose

4 yıl öncediscuss

bumping the author's chain and bluntly suggesting that others (like myself) without much/any stake in openBSD's C compilers should stfu with the name flaming now, because the fact that it's still continuing in replies at this point is more a matter of narcissism and disrespect for the submission than anything else.

4 yıl öncediscuss

epistemic crutch token

4 yıl öncediscuss

I didn't downvote you. There are only so many phonologically near-optimal patterns to recycle into things that sound kinda-sorta like words, so you're bound to run into these things. You just pick your poison and hope that you don't end up being shipwrecked by a gale-force meme like "fedora" as a pejorative with time.

fwiw, the concern you're thinking of tends to be sidestepped either by a pseudo-initialism or a vowel shift in actual practice. In this case, the first options / paths of least resistance in an arabic-speaking community would seemingly be:

- to raise the first vowel to more of an [ɪə]¹ or

- to pronounce the /kəf/ - /kɑf/ then "IR" as single letters.

¹ which afaik would turn it into a long vowel that might act like a geminate? dunno

4 yıl öncediscuss

4 yıl öncediscuss

it's a CVCVC word that most people can pronounce and the primary author likes for whatever reason. it's completely fine.

4 yıl öncediscuss

not for the joke it isn't; i am not, in fact, thinking of the racial slur; we all have google (but not all of us will idly assume to know the etymology of a project's name based on this); semicolons are awful punctuation

4 yıl öncediscuss

for prod you'll want mushrik or neocon

6 yıl öncediscuss

A screenshot of a tweet is already a low fidelity capture (cf. a web archive). Why would I want to alter it further?

If I needed a tweet to look better than it actually does irl, I would screenshot something from Mastodon or Pleroma instead.

If I need to screenshot a tweet at a high resolution, I'm going to do this in any Gecko-based browser with <my own enhanced system font rendering preferences>.

If the screenshot needs to be larger-than-life, I'm going to use any of the puppeteer-based tools for this.

If I'm one of those godawful aggregators that needs square images with colorful patterned wallpapers behind the tweets, I have to use my library of cursed wallpapers and whatever shitware macro has already been written for the job.

6 yıl öncediscuss

As an archivist with work in Svalbard, I'm broadly in support of the notion here.

But the 100 Classics approach to media that seems to be showcased in this provisional reamde fundamentally dooms the collection to irrelevance.

6 yıl öncediscuss

Fountain codes are seeing use in DNA storage encoding schemes. That's how I use them, at any rate.

6 yıl öncediscuss

HN comments are locked to further replies after 2 weeks. That doesn't exactly help.

Sometimes, figuring out what considered discourse looks like in a certain area is an unbounded process.

Sometimes it hinges on drive-by enlightenment by someone who happens to have exactly the right resource and a willingness to necropost it.

6 yıl öncediscuss

> A giant saltation from most first world computer users being aware of Linux, to hardly anyone knowing what BSD is.

You seem to have misread my first sentence.

> Schade's few paragraphs here come across as equally gentle and humorous-he's not really aggrieved that FreeBSD is treated like a Linux distro; he would like avoid the confusion that might cause to users who end up liking it.

My commentary was in agreement with the blogpost.

Me:

>> It should go without saying that proponents of the latter have good reason to be grateful for any reason that new outsiders might even remember it exists.

But it doesn't go without saying, thus the need for Schade's blogpost. The elitism and intra nix resentment of BSD culture give rise to this problem. My comment aimed to address that.

> What, exactly, BSD users ever did to you remains a mystery;

They did nothing in particular to me. It's just a descriptive consensus that BSD culture has outsized hostility toward all things linux and toward being mistaken for linux. It's narcissism of small differences[1] and nerd blindness in action.

> alas, I haven't the spare lifespan to want to figure that out.

My comment contained a stringent critique of a community's corrosive norms, emphasizing how counterproductive those norms are for getting on with building useful things.

Your comment just aims to repackage the phrasing as a personal attack.

If you have time to work 'saltation' into a sentence, you have time to reply in good faith on HN. Flubbing a quip by trying to spit your interlocutor's words back at them in a sideswipe is not the way to go about that, especially when you've misunderstood the upthrust of the comment to which you're replying.

I'm perfectly willing to explain my position, so you achieve nothing by this odd posturing. [I even made a point to get around to it when I realized I was near the reply expiration time.]

I'll explain my position now:

    1. BSD community hostility toward linux: unreasonable
    2. BSD community hostility toward being mistaken for linux: unreasonable
    3. BSD community illusion of transparency: also unreasonable!

Some basic reasoning about the distribution of computer skills and world knowledge shows that two hostilities I mentioned above, especially the latter — hostility toward being mistaken for linux — are empirically unreasonable.

90% of computer users couldn't find text in a document as of 2011. There haven't been precipitous shifts in digital skills research results since then. Linux dominates server market share, but is only a blip in desktop market share. BSD doesn't even register.

It follows from any realistic assessment of computer users as a demographic that expecting a nontrivial proportion of people to know what the hell BSD is, let alone understand how it differs from linux in anything beyond branding, is indefensible.

Getting huffy about the matter on top of that, rather than opportunistically using that distinction-without-a-difference perception among novices as the submission suggests, requires a reality distortion field of monumental proportions.

Even within *nix, there's this intermittent HN/forum nonsense time and again that always goes the same way:

    [BSD DISCOURSE ENTERS THE AETHER SOMEHOW]
    
    Alice, linux user: What's BSD about? What does it do?
    Bob, BSD user:     It's like linux, but better ;)
    Alice:             Oh? What makes it better?
    Bob:               <list of things that linux does too>
    Alice:             But linux has <equivalents of the BSD things>
    Bob:               Better license?
    Alice:             I don't really care about that
    Bob:               No bloat! Also, it's an OS, not just a kernel.
    Alice:             what
    Bob:               No breaking changes! Your old scripts will still work.
    Alice:             I've never really noticed problems with that.
    Bob:               Look, ever heard of macOS?
    Alice:             yup, can't stand it
    Bob:               ...

In other words, even most linux people don't really know what BSD is in exact terms, and BSD proponents typically either can't or won't convincingly state the case for BSD among people more familiar with linux. In some ways, this is natural for a few obvious reasons:

1. Few people have strong working knowledge of BSD and linux kernel development. Kernel and distro development circles are fairly distinct, so even fewer will be able to speak to holistic comparisons from top-down and bottom-up views.

2. BSD development is regimented and conservative, resulting in relative predictability and lack of change over time. These things are commonly cited motivations for BSD adoption. We can assume people who desire this in their OS aren't doing a ton of gratuitous exploration on the side. So lack of knowledge about the state of the art in linux world on the part of BSD fans is probably to be expected.

3. Long-satisfied BSD users have exited the conversation. There are no grand, holy war-level stakes for BSD vs. other OSes anymore, so there's not a lot to stick around for.

4. BSD proponents tacitly reject worse-is-better in their arguments, but fail to explicate this or present compelling counter-narratives. This might seem like a small point, but it's tantamount to something like "I reject the tech equivalent of Whig history of the past 20+ years. Anyway, here's why you should switch to a new system. It actively works against advantages gained by your system under the assumptions of that historiographic model I've rejected."

5. BSD proponents spend countless hours overdeveloping criticisms of the most-disliked aspects of linux, like systemd. This is useless in any conversation with most prospective linux-to-bsd converts — preaching to the choir.

Example of 2 in action: "Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux"[2] is currently the best single-page case for FreeBSD easily found from obvious search queries. If you didn't know much about the last decade or so of linux development, it would be far more convincing. But as it stands, it's just met with a lot of confusion[3] on HN.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...

[2]: https://unixsheikh.com/articles/technical-reasons-to-choose-...

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22852316

6 yıl öncediscuss

Certain groups have been serious the replication crisis for 10-15y, but academic culture at large is simply not cut out to discuss fraud in a 'street epistemology' sort of way, such as the way security researchers might discuss cybercrime.

There's a wild amount of pushback to any amount of meta-criticism. But once you get past that point, many roadblocks remain.

In particular, there's extreme bias for meta-statistical methodologies that infer QRPs over other methods of investigation. Often, these methods aren't strictly necessary in context, and afford the opportunity to turn the metasci discourse into endless bikeshedding about the meta-framework rather than the object of dispute.

Many interested parties will participate/perform in this discourse, but few will sit down and really look at things as simple as the logical structure of the paper's claims, or even simpler problems with its content.

In the case of social psych, for instance, many problems lie with (a) stimuli and (b) unexamined assumptions on the part of the researchers that a certain manipulation holds, so these are important to assess. But extending critique to these things is seen as "reviewer 2" behavior — uncollegial, unfair, sniping, waaah etc.

Since "researcher x produces bad research, but evidence of fraud is only circumstantial" isn't sufficient grounds for doing much of anything, little comes of these efforts. When an investigation does nail a fraudster to the wall, well, so? The papers remain, the poisoned citation tree remains, the culture remains.

More than anything, the pushback in the form of tone-policing is what gets me. "Methodological terrorism" this, "reviewer 2" that. It shows how far from consequences the gatekeepers are. If you're a young person, whole branches of the academy have been pre-bankrupted for you. There's no hope there, short of a research path that manages to avoid citing any prior literature. But don't get tetchy with the grantlords!

Meanwhile, all around the US, real effects of this dogshit excuse for scientific inquiry can be seen every single day. Police departments are adopting new policies around known-bad implicit bias papers. These won't work. We know they won't work. We've known this for years.

What would make it stop? Every time cops kill an unarmed person, academics who still haven't retracted their implicit bias papers get fined?

There's the rub. You can't do much to force the point. Effective, timely measures would be fairly brutal ones, and academics aren't ready to admit this to themselves. In some ways, COVID-19 may end up being one of those measures, though it will disproportionately affect younger researchers.

6 yıl öncediscuss

End of April reporting, for comparison:

> All but about 5 to 7 percent of the world’s museums are currently shuttered because of the coronavirus pandemic, said Peter Keller, the general director of the International Council of Museums. According to the council’s research, one in 10 may not reopen, he added.

More than 30 respondents to a 41-country survey, by the Network of European Museum Organizations, said they feared they would have to close permanently, among them the Museo de La Rioja and Museum of the Americas in Spain; Kornberg Castle in Austria, the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center in Hungary, and the National Historical Museum of Albania.

The gravity of the situation varies by country, depending on how much museums rely on ticket sales and tourism, and how much government funding they receive. Museums in the United States which survive from earned income and philanthropy are more vulnerable than government-subsidized European institutions. The American Alliance of Museums reported to Congress in March that as many as 30 percent of museums could fail in the crisis, if there was no immediate intervention.

6 yıl öncediscuss

Sure, what do you want to know?

I currently work on synbio × web archival.

Some of us are cooking up futuretech aimed at storing all of IA (archive.org) in a shoebox. Others are working on putting archival tools in more normal web users' hands, and making those tools do things that people tend to value more in the short-term, like help them understand what they're researching, rather than merely stash pages.

My ambitions for web archives are outsized compared to other archivists, but I'm fine with that. I'm looking beyond web archives as we currently understand them toward web archives as something else that doesn't quite exist yet: everyday artefacts, colocated and integrated with other web technology to an extent that they serve in essential sensemaking, workflow, and maybe security roles.

Right now, some obvious, pressing priorities are (a) preserving vastly more content and (b) doing more with the archives themselves.

A: The overwhelming majority of born-digital content is lost within a far narrower time-slice than would admit preservation at current rates, and data growth is accelerating beyond the reach of conventional storage media. So, for me, the world's current largest x is never the true object of my desire. I'm after a way to hold the world that is and the world to come.

Ideally, that world to come is one where lifelong data stewardship of everything from your own genome to your digital footprint is ubiquitously available and loss of information has been largely rendered optional.

This, of course, requires magic storage density that simply defies fundamental limitations of conventional storage media. I'm strongly confident that we're getting early glimpses of the first real Magic contenders. All lie outside, or on the far periphery of, the evolutionary tree that got us the storage media we have today. For instance, I'm running an art exhibition that involves encoding all the works on DNA.

B: Distributed archival that comes almost as naturally as browsing is well within reach, and with that comes some very new potential for distributed computation on archives. One hand washes the other.

One important thing to realize here is that, in many cases, you can name a very small handful of individuals as the reason why current archival resources exist. GPT-3 is cracking the surface by training on data produced by one guy named Sebastian, for instance.

…i'm sorta tired and have to respond to something about every twitter snapshot since June being broken, though, so I'll pick this back up later.

6 yıl öncediscuss

I'm running the Coronavirus Archive. Largest thematic archive on the pandemic, since January. I'm also teaching community biolab techniques to people in parts of the world without ready access to commercial COVID-19 test kits, on all but zero resources at this point.

I could use… what's the word? I think it's more funding.

6 yıl öncediscuss

GPT-3 is a neat party trick. But the things that'll be done with web archives* in the next 20y will make it look like the PDP-8. ~love, a web archivist

* GPT-3 is trained on one

6 yıl öncediscuss

Is this an EFTA loophole?

> It's also not apparent if such a setup is legal in the regions in which Icelandair flies, including the US and the European Union.

6 yıl öncediscuss

Well, almost anyone. If the Progenitors had been startup devs we'd probably be approximately spherical meeple in a webgl tarski's world with "facty" and "fucky" truth values.