Coding_Cat

4 年前discuss

I think we probably agree on the core issue, I just kept things a bit too brief.

There are people who feel like I described, and there are people who disagree to varying degrees (physicists, amitrite?). But I do think we all kind-of agree that we'd prefer to find experimental results that break the standard model vs proving it right now, but it seems unlikely we're going to find that smoking gun anytime soon. The model is an attempt at fitting data and like you said it works in the regime it was designed for, but it can't be _the_ theory of everything. It would be great if it broke somehow so we could investigate _why_ and drive new avenues of research based on that which might be more promising in resolving gravity and the other forces (or the anti-matter mystery, or shed some light on what dark-matter is)*

As the OP said, it's still good science if we prove that the current theory holds up, but no one is really happy with it at this point because everyone knows it's not going to be the final unified theory that we all want to see

---- * personaly I have a gut feeling those three are going to be resolved in rapid succesion if they're ever solved

Coding_Cat

4 年前discuss

The issue for particle physics specifically, is that they _hope_ to find something that breaks the theory. But so far, only find confirmations of the current Standard Model. Succesful experiments, yeah, but doing little for pushing our understanding of the universe unfortunately.

The reason why they want to break the standard model is, simplified, two-fold:

1. While the theory is incredibly powerful in its domain, we have been unable to unify it with gravity and other theories of matter. This is a problem because it's supposed to be a theory summarizing the fundamental building blocks of the universe and it should therefore describe _everything_.

2. the theory is ugly. It's a mess with many parameters and weird interpretations all shoved together. Physicists don't like this. Not just for aesthetic reasons, but also out of experience. It reminds people of pre-relativity electrodynamics for example. Lorentz had what was essentially a working theory of relativity but it was a mess. People fear the standard model is the new lorentzian relativity, essentially correct but missing some key insight that is needed to fix it.

Finding something that breaks the standard model could go a huge way to solving both these issues. But the standard model just keeps getting confirmed at higher and higher resolution.

In software terms: it's like you know there's a 1/1000'000 bug _somewhere_ in the software but every single test you write to try and find it passes.

Coding_Cat

4 年前discuss

You can just fine. The nay-sayers are, frankly, just repeating old-wives tales for the most part.

I've been running my own mail server from a VPS (vpsdime) for somewhere around 6-7 years now and the only issues I've had were related to general sysadmining headaches.

Postfix+dovecot(+mysql) setup, SPF/DKIM/DMARC and reverse-pointer record set. Both microsoft and gmail happily accept my emails and give them all the little checkmarks. Checked just a few weeks ago as I added an new domain.

It's a bit of set-up, but email is ancient tech: once set-up it doesn't need much tending.

Coding_Cat

4 年前discuss

Unless they changed it, small scale bots (10 servers or less, large bots need approval) can see every message event in every channel they have access to using the websocket API. They can also query older messages. It's pretty straightforward once you know how to use the API.

From there it's no longer a Discord problem, as you just need to export that data somewhere. There's bots which already partialy do this. There's bots that log edits & deletes for moderators to review and bots like TicketTool (https://tickettool.xyz/) let you create special one-off channels (tickets) that you can export to html on closure too.

Coding_Cat

4 年前discuss

I use Discord a lot and I agree that it's bad to use it for anything that you can't afford to suddenly lose (though people still use Google and Paypal too).

I do think a modern chat app is a value-add for fast moving (tech) companies. It is a nice hybrid between sending an email or knocking on someones door for a chat.

And as for the 'chat commands', they're usually just thin wrappers around the UNIX style tool. It's maybe not the most reliable way, but it does have a low barrier and there's not much lock-in. I used to have my server email myself whenever something needed my attention, but now it'd probably use a Discord bot for that.

However, I still wouldn't use it professionaly. the lack of self-hosting (privacy) and archival(bots can solve this pretty easilly) and restricting DMs (see slacks previous issues) makes Discord unsuitable.

Coding_Cat

4 年前discuss

As someone who was a prolific user of both I'm going to come to the defense of Discord here.

First let me say that yes there is some valid critism to be had. Mostly around information preservation, lack of indexing by search engines, barrier to entry, those kinds of things. I agree that those can make Discord a bad platform for a random technical project to use as a support forum / bug tracker / log. (though you can always write a bot for that).

However, with respect, some comments (not all!) do feel a bit like people are simply getting older and blaming technology for what are really demographic changes.

Consider this comment by Azalea on the first page has a quite a few people agreeing with it, it says

> And without going all good-old days Internet you damn whippersnappers, I think the move towards chat-room style dialogues also signifies a cultural shift towards bite-sized content and quick, shallow, generally meaningless interactions. I have made a grand total of one friend on Discord servers after posting compulsively and replying to a lot of people. Social interactions on the Internet don't really have the same weight and permanence that they used to.

which wasn't really my experience on Discord, but then it also goes on to say

> I miss the old days of logging into my favorite Counter-Strike: Source servers and interacting with the regulars there. Everyone on VOIP playing the same game can lead to bonding experiences, and I made a fair bit of friends on those servers. Now with public matchmaking, that old-school magic has mostly disappeared.

Which to me is that quick-fire social interaction they seemingly called shallow and meaningless. This struck me as odd because having lived trough the rise of social media and matchmaking Discord feels like a return to this old 'social' internet. Especially during these last few years, It's been great for my social life. I've made new friends and reconnected with old ones. Just yesterday I visited a friend I met on Discord.

And I don't think I'm alone: plenty of people heavily use Discord for hanging out with friends, forming gaming groups, discussing and playing together. Everything that they say is lacking in the modern internet. And not just for gaming, There's plenty of LGBT+ spaces, location based spaces, or Maker spaces too.

But one thing I have noticed, is that at 28 years old I already skew old in most spaces. Because of that I'll generally avoid spaces that don't have a reasonable minimum age because I don't really care for hanging around in spaces dominated by teens. But for those teens, and once you find spaces that fit you, Discord is a great place for fostering _community_. In a way that games and IRC/forums used to provide when I was a teen, before social media and 'matchmaking' kind of scrubbed that from the mainstream for a while.

That's why I don't think the kinds of complaints given in the quotes is realy an issue of technology, but an issue of demographics and aging.

But maybe this is just me being an extrovert with ADHD liking the shiny chatterbox with cute emotes.

Coding_Cat

4 年前discuss

> This works fine, because there is still a profit motive at work and the identical evolutionary forces that will kill a particular silo if it's underperforming, and the same competitive pressure to perform.

the profit motive in a multinationally funded system is still there in the sense of 'we have a budget of X, what's the best way to spend it?'. And research avenues that fail to yield the expected results can be terminated. In my experience, disagreement between researchers or groups were also far from uncommon. But maybe that's just physicists being exceptionally knowitall^H^H^H hard to convince :)

It's not flawless, but I don't think it could be less efficient use of public money than the current system where we publically fund early research and the succesfull projects get snatched up by the industry, patented, and sold for large profits. Even if a lot of pharmaceutical research ends up going nowhere (or a competitor beats them to it), we still end up paying for it trough the profit margins of the parent companies.

Raising healthcare costs are a serious concern for many countries, and part pharmaceuticals are a non-trivial part of the cost. Researching and producing them locally might help reduce that cost and stimulate a broader healthcare industry.

I do fear that pharmaceutical research might be to politicized for a multinational approach(e.g. HIV, what disease to prioritize). And there's bound to be some backlash from certain groups over a large 'shadowy' multinational body doing human trials.

Coding_Cat

4 年前discuss

It is possible to maintain the benefits of competition without the level of duplication and profit motives that we struggle with today.

Large scale collaborative scientific endavours like CERN show us that it is possible to both publically share knowledge and still explore multiple avenues and competing designs. There's also no financial profit motive and while CERN receives a lot of public funding, it has to pump that funding back into the economies of the funding countries so it serves more like a high-tech industry stimulus and technological incubator.

I see no reason why a similar aproach for the development of (specific) therapeutics could not work.

Coding_Cat

4 年前discuss

I took a brief look at it and saw nothing to suggest that 'web3' added anything of real value.

If you believe there is, then I'd love to hear what it adds that's 1. unique and 2. actually desirable.

Coding_Cat

4 年前discuss

that's just a thread of paid picrews. What is the value-add that Web3 offers here? That your avatar comes with a digital slip of paper you can use for speculation?

In terms of ownership, so far, I haven't seen any NFT space that actually adds any value over picrews let alone comissioned artwork. There's no legal framework binding the blockchain ledger entry to the copyright of the images and even if it existed, what's the value add over traditional proof-of-purchases?

Coding_Cat

4 年前discuss

you replied to a comment saying "[t]he Ponzi hallmarks are getting more obvious by the day" by... reguritating the typical reply given by Ponzi/scam artists when called out as scams?

Coding_Cat

4 年前discuss

> Chinese courts did nothing. China does what it wants inside China.

Lots of people calling this out as 'a bad thing', but at the end of the day the Chinese government/courts handled in what it thought was in the best interest of Chinese citizens.

For other countries that might look like respecting IP clauses but for China it doesn't seem to be. I think it makes perfect sense and is perfectly moral for a country to do so.

and for 6) I think one of the fears there is that nVidia would use ARMs near de-facto monopoly to force their tech onto the market and push out competitors, like qualcom on the mobile GPU market.

Whether it be trough integrating nVidia tech more deeply into the architectural offerings essentialy forcing competitors to license both techs, or by using the ARM IP to in the future outcompete direct competitors by charging more for the IP that they can now use without any cost. Even if they're not planning any of that, I think the fear that they might in the future is what's giving many people (and regulators) pause.

ARM itself is never in direct competition with its customers _because_ it only sells IP, nVidia sells chips and is in direct competition with others who depend upon ARM for their chips.

Coding_Cat

5 年前discuss

And facebook also tracks what you browse. (And Amazon lets people die in a storm.)

Coding_Cat

11 年前discuss

For addition I can't either, but you could use it to overload multiplication of two (mathematical) vectors to a dot-product

  impl Mul for Vec2{
    type Output = double;
    fn mul(self, other: Vec2) -> Double {
      self.0*other.0+self.1*other.1)
    }
  }

Although I must admit I'm not (yet) sure why you need to explicitly state the output and define it for the function. But I have only just started with Rust.