This article made me sad. Not because it was mean or at some level wrong but because I feel that while it touched on the core issue here, it missed the chance to directly confront it. Here is an example.
"The infrastructures of intimacy — slowness, curiosity, accountability — have been eroded by haste, convenience and a kind of sanctioned emotional retreat."
I loved her writing but I really wished she had gone on to ask "Why?" Why have men retreated as she says not with hostility but with indifference?
I'm in a decades long loving marriage and have a bunch of loving kids who all want to get married and raise their own families. I am proud as a father to have been a good role model in that manner. I married a woman who was sure she never wanted to marry or have kids. We were married just prior to what I feel was the popularization of the term "toxic masculinity" first coined in the 80s to name (and counter?) the rise of the men's metal health movement. A movement that I freely admit has hyper-toxic off-shoots today.
Here is the thing though. For a generation boys and men have been told that masculinity is toxic not that some extreme elements and fringe behaviors are toxic just as some fringe beliefs of many sub-cultures are toxic but all masculinity. We were told that women didn't need men and in fact preferred if we did not interact with them at all under almost any circumstance. Girls were better off in gender segregated classrooms, boys needed to be medicated at school just to be teachable. Women just wanted to go out in public and do their own thing without being "creeped on". Are there creeps out there? Is sexual assault a problem, sure, absolutely but again, the message from society was not that fringe inappropriate behavior was toxic, but that everything male was toxic.
So, what did men, particularly the "good" ones, do? They retreated, not with hostility but indifference. The last thing "good men" wanted was to offend or be label as a toxic problem. Since any interaction with a stranger was bad and sometimes you needed a written contract to kiss after a date, good men got the message and heeded it. I'm not saying an unwanted kiss is a good thing, but what was the larger message being sent to the "good guys" who might actually care how women feel? The message to those "good guys" was "we don't need you, we don't want you around, you're disruptive in the classroom and at work and we would all be better off if you did not exist.".
One of the more positive vestigial remnants of the men's mental health movement teaches/talks about Stoicism. The retreat of men from social places and society is not due to a desire for haste or convenience. It is a stoic reaction to being told for a generation that being a man was bad for society. The sad truth today is that men don't need women or in fact other men to find purpose or diversion. A hard lesson well taught to us by society.
My standard font package is "mathpazo", which is Palatino with maths support. I obviously like Palatino - and if it isn't available, Garamond is similar.
If ever have to do much LaTeX again though, I'll check out the alternatives because the mess of partially compatible modules and the troubles with figure placement are still bad in LaTeX.
I call this "poltergeist code". Dozens of tiny functions that together clearly does something complex correctly, but it's very hard to find where and how it's actually done.
"APL is like a diamond. It has a beautiful crystal structure; all of its parts are related in a uniform and elegant way. But if you try to extend this structure in any way - even by adding another diamond - you get an ugly kludge. LISP, on the other hand, is like a ball of mud. You can add any amount of mud to it and it still looks like a ball of mud."
-- https://wiki.c2.com/?JoelMosesOnAplAndLisp
If you are looking for alternative to kebab case to write identifier in programming language which reserve the - (U+002d) as an operator, chances are good you can use · (U+00B7 · MIDDLE DOT), that we use in middot case.
So isMorePleasantToRead, is_more_pleasant_to_read or is·more·pleasant·to·read is up to you.
Instead of each node storing the next- and previous-pointers separately, store a single pointer which is the XOR of the two. Which is obviously an invalid pointer. But when iterating, XOR the previous node's pointer with the combined pointer to get the next node's pointer, and so on. You can iterate this way in both directions. Feels illegal. :)
A better name would be Feudiverse, since it's feudalism by design — complete with instances feuding over control of how the entire thing is run.
The admins of the instance have absolute control over accounts (i.e. people) that sign up with them. The instance admins are the law of the land, and can kick accounts off the net for whatever reason, as well as draw up the bridges and prohibit passing through their lands.
Like in any feudal system, people are judged by which Lord they belong to (i.e. which instance they sign up with), and will be treated accordingly. Each instance is a clan, with collective responsibility built-in.
There is no Federation without a Federal government that ensures rights of the citizens via a constitution.
And there's no Fediverse without a central account authority that limits what instance admins can do to any individual account.
I'm genuinely surprised no one has mentioned mxroute[1]. Thier pricing normally is pretty decent, but they keep the BF deals going pretty much all year [2].
I've been using them for 6 years with no issues. I use it now with all my domains and never have any deliverability issues.
The owner (Jar - one person shop again) is passionate about their email reputation for deliverability and is active on both lowendtalk and the dedicated sub Reddit.
I ended up comparing purleymail and mxroute - tested mxroute and stayed with them.
> Doesn't it defeat the purpose to fund organizations that are clearly against free speech such as ADL and SPLC, when you are claiming to defend free speech?
They're absolving themselves of the ethical "bad feels" of hosting content they disagree with.
If you host a Nazi website full of antisemitism, they'll donate to the ADL as a counter.
If you host a white supremacist website, they'll donate to the SPLC.
They're thinking of this as a form of equivalent exchange. If you put bad energy into the universe, they'll take your money and pay the groups that oppose you as a form of balance.
The reason they host these horrible websites is that they believe free speech is more of a moral high ground than turning these customers away.
> Why even bother to piss off users you don't like? For pretending rights?
Free speech is vital. You should defend the speech of people you find abhorrent (racists, Nazis, atheists, gays, whatever), because if the political pendulum swings and the machinery, will, or precedent to censor is present, you'll be the one silenced.
Before the internet, conservatives frequently censored topics they disliked. Atheism, LGBT content, porn, certain political discourse -- pretty much anything that the religiously pious people of the 80's and 90's would detest -- were censored from the airwaves, found unsuitable to publish, and pushed out of the zeitgeist.
From around 2014 to 2024 it was the exact opposite. Questioning liberal policies you got caught by social media dragnets - content was deboosted or removed, people were banned. Questioning the origins of Covid, talking about DEI policies, etc.
And now the pendulum is swinging back again. We're in for more of the same from the other side.
We should stop building tools for censorship and instead enable individuals to control the content they consume. We should be able to individually (or as a group) opt into blocking certain people and content. We should be able to tweak our algorithms. But we should always be immune to having our speech immediately deleted from the internet for going against whatever the current power may be.
Freedom of speech for thee means freedom of speech for me.
And freedom of speech does not mean -- and has never meant -- freedom from consequences. The minute you open your mouth your peers will judge you.
Small nitpick, the domain name used for a ATProto identity is decoupled from the server that hosts that users data. A username is established on ATProto by creating a TXT record of the users DID (essentially a public key). This is not identical to ActivityPub, because the users data is hosted / managed by the server that the A/AAAA record points to. ATProto users can migrate their data from server to server while maintaining the same username. ActivityPub users cannot.
Also, Bluesky is a centralized view of the data in the decentralized ATProto network. This means you will never end up having the problem where searching for a user on one instance will not show up because they are on another instance that they have not federated with. There are obviously tradeoffs with this, but IMO they do seem sensible. The nice thing about Bluesky is not that it is decentralized (it's not), it's that the data that it let's users interface with is decentralized, and if something goes south with Bluesky, another application can be built on the same data and users can migrate without starting from square one.
Here's a geometric way of looking at it. I'll start with a summary, and then give a formal-ish description if that's more your jam.
---
The fundamental issue is physicists use the same symbol for the physical, measurable quantity, and the function relating it to other quantities. To be clear, that isn't a criticism: it's a notational necessity (there are too many quantities to assign distinct symbols for each function). But that makes the semantics muddled.
However, there is also a lack of clarity about the semantics of "quantities". I think it is best to think of quantities as functions over an underlying state space. Functional relationships _between_ the quantities can then be reconstructed from those quantities, subject to uniqueness conditions.
This gives a more natural interpretation for the derivatives. It highlights that an expression like S(U, N, V) doesn't imply S _is_ the function, just that it's associated to it, and that S as a quantity could be associated with other functions.
---
The state space S has the structure of a differential manifold, diffeomorphic to R^n [0].
A quantity -- what in thermodynamics we might call a "state variable" -- is a smooth real-valued function on S.
An diffeomorphism between S and R^n is a co-ordinate system. Its components form the co-ordinates. Intuitively, any collection of quantities X = (X_1, ..., X_n) which uniquely labels all points in S is a co-ordinate system, which is the same thing as saying that it's invertible. [1]
Given such a co-ordinate system, any quantity Y can naturally be associated with a function f_Y : R^n -> R, defined by f_Y(x_1, ..., x_n) := Y(X^-1(x_1, ..., x_n)). In other words, this is the co-ordinate representation of Y. In physics, we would usually write that, as an abuse of notation: Y = Y(X_1, ..., X_n).
This leads to the definition of the partial derivative holding some quantities constant: you map the "held constant" quantities and the quantity in the denominator to the appropriate co-ordinate system, then take the derivative of f_Y, giving you a function which can then be mapped back to a quantity.
In that process, you have to make sure that the held constant quantities and the denominator quantity form a co-ordinate system. A lot of thermodynamic functions are posited to obey monotonicity/convexity properties, and this is why. It might be also possible to find a more permissive definition that uses multi-valued functions, similar to how Riemann surfaces are used in complex analysis.
To do that we'd probably want to be a bit more general and allow for "partial co-ordinate systems", which might also be useful for cases involving composite systems. Any collection of quantities (Y, X_1, ..., X_n) can be naturally associated with a relation [2], where (y, x_1, ..., x_n) is in the relation if there exists a point s in S such that (Y(s), X_1(s), ..., X_n(s)) = (y, x_1, ..., x_n). You can promote that to a function if it satisfies a uniqueness condition.
I think it is also possible to give a metric (Riemannian) structure on the manifold in a way compatible with the Second Law. I remember skimming through some papers on the topic, but didn't look in enough detail.
---
[0] Or half of R^n, or a quadrant maybe.
[1] The "diffeomorphism" definition also adds the condition that the inverse be smooth.
[2] Incidentally, same sense of "relation" that leads to the "relational data model"!
It's worth pointing out that Python's asserts can also be "compiled" away if you use the -O flag (or PYTHONOPTIMIZE=1), which eliminates their runtime cost.
It's also worth pointing out that this is the reason you should *never* put side-effects or security-relevant checks in assert statements. For example, you should never do something like this:
assert f.read(4) == b"\x89PNG", "Not a PNG file"
# proceed to read and parse the rest of the file
so that your code doesn't suddenly break when someone decides to be clever and use -O.
Also, fun unrelated fact: Python does have something like a preprocessor, although it's rarely used. If you condition on the flag __debug__:
if __debug__:
expensive_runtime_check()
and then run Python with -O, the if statement and its body will be entirely deleted from the bytecode - even the `if` check will be deleted. It can be used for including "debug" code in hot code, where the extra flag check itself might be expensive.
I know of a even more impressive website that will transfer playlists from Spotify (or 20 other platforms, including text files) to 20 other platforms or a text file. I will share the link, but don't hug it to death y'all. :)
I have seen a large number of otherwise presenting as perfectly normal fediverse instances about normal topics, where if you scroll down in the rules, the last rule is "being racist against whites is not against the rules" or sometimes phrased "reverse racism is not real" or "reports about people expressing their pain towards groups such as whites and men will be ignored"
That's the truth of the context we're dealing with here, the pendulum has swung far enough that racist lunatics are incredibly common in positions of power on these instances.
Here is one example i found in 5 minutes, this is the first result for "academic mastodon" in search engines.
> Users of Scholar Social are expected to have the literacy to understand that "reverse discrimination" is not real, and so attempts to re-centre discussions of marginalized people around the feelings of the privileged will be taken as manipulative behaviour undertaken deliberately in bad-faith. (E.g. white people should not demand that people of colour put CW's on every discussion of race; a straight person who reports a queer person for writing "I hate straight people" may find their own account suspended.)
Like, whoever wrote this is a blatant bigot, and yet most of the high profile mastodon instances are run by people like this.
If you like typography, check out Butterick's Practical Typography: https://practicaltypography.com/ It's full of good, pragmatic advice on how to make printed and digital documents look wonderful.
I've bought two fonts from him and his font license is easily the most permissive of any paid professional font I've seen: no restrictions on the number of page views or anything, unlike most other pro fonts. Are his fonts open source? No. Are there good open source fonts? Of course. But are his fonts beautiful? You bet. I've got Valkyrie and Concourse. Concourse is particularly flexible when it comes to contextual alternatives and such.
Caveat: Google Fonts, and by extension Fontsource which mostly just mirrors Googles files, strips out nearly all of the advanced OpenType features to reduce the filesize. It's worth checking the upstream version of your font to see which features it actually offers.
e.g. Wakamai Fondue lists 11 features for Googles version of Inter (some essential ones plus fractions, tabular numbers, numerators, denominators and contextual alts), while the full fat version of Inter has a whopping 44 features (too many to list, see https://rsms.me/inter/).
> I have a vague feeling that some of my coworkers looked down on Laravel. Less dependency injection, more weird magic.
Well, you can rest easy knowing it probably wasn't just a vague feeling, because I'm pretty sure every moderately experienced programmer who has tried both and went with Symfony feels that way.
Laravel was clearly written from the ground up with one goal above all else: to make it was easy as possible for beginners to write babby's first website as fast as humanly possible. Every other essential aspect of such a framework (maintainability, modularity, code clarity, ease of debugging complex issues, etc) was thrown to the wayside in favor of that one main goal, which is why there's so much "magic" everywhere. You're expected to just blindly trust the magic and never look behind the curtain. Unfortunately, beginner programmers that have no intention of ever evolving past their beginner phase are a huge audience nowadays, so you end up with many people who have never had to write or maintain a complex codebase hailing Laravel as the next coming of Christ.
This is all heavily reflected in this article: the author picks one of the most extremely simple use cases to implement, a 99% static page with a single dynamic variable that doesn't even seem to use a database. And despite the code being extremely simple, he still has to ask AI to write 90% of it for him because he isn't interested in learning how anything works, he isn't interested in expanding it or maintaining it in the future, he just wants to pump out the minimum viable product as fast as possible.
The red herring principle[1] is unfortunately popular enough in mathematical terminology to have a name and a page about it.
Roughly, a fooish bar will frequently be something like a bar except fooish, so not actually a bar. (Algebraic integer, multivalued function, manifold with boundary, etc.) On the other hand, a nonfooish baz when baz is normally fooish often means a not necessarily fooish baz, so a particular one might be fooish but we can’t assume that. (Noncommutative ring, nonassociative algebra, the very field of noncommutative geometry, etc.)
I don't think Popper was saying what you think he was.
"[Popper] does not however want us to silence or censor them, but to fight them back with reasonable arguments. He does however say we should have the right to be intolerant (even violently!) to them if they are not ready for a debate, as they may prevent "their followers [from listening] rational argument, because [they say] it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols." [0]
The Paradox of tolerance advocates violence against those that would prevent speech, not those with intolerant views, unless those be the same group.
Using the Paradox of tolerance the idea of censoring speech you do not agree with, especially when using government authority to do so (monopoly of violence and all that), would be an intolerant view point, and as it prevents debate, should not be tolerated in a tolerant society, and in the end should be met with violence.
I do this too; have you found effective ways to tell firefox to maybe chill on eating all memory? I find if I don't restart ~1/week, it will end up reserving ~32GB of RAM for itself, which is just absurd.
/* keep the icon hidden by default */
:is(h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6) .icon {
visibility: hidden;
}
/* show the icon on focus and hover */
:is(h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6):focus .icon,
:is(h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6):hover .icon {
visibility: visible;
}
/* show the icon on devices that don't have any accessory that can hover */
@media (pointer: coarse), (any-hover: none) {
:is(h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6) .icon {
visibility: visible;
}
}
The `pointer: coarse` media query checks if you are using a device with an input mechanism of limited accuracy (such as fingers on a touchscreen). The `any-hover: none` media query checks if none of the input mechanisms on your device support hover (such as a Surface tablet not attached with a keyboard).
There are two different things people mean when they say "mathematics". (Probably lots more, but I'll focus on two.) There's mathematics that is invented, and then there's mathematics that is discovered. The "math that is discovered" was already there. It must be true. It was true before our universe existed, and would be true in every other conceivable universe. It is very difficult to believe that any of this math that we discover could possibly not be useful. It's what reality is made out of. How could a deeper understanding of reality not be useful? And I assert that it is simply not possible to know whether a given discovery would be useful before you discover it; how could you possibly evaluate a discovery's usefulness before you even know what it is?
The "math that is invented" is attempting to describe this more fundamental math. These are the terms we come up with and write down in papers, the symbols we use, etc. Sometimes we discover that The X Theorem and The Y Theorem are actually describing the same fundamental math in different ways. Clearly this descriptive math can vary in usefulness. How simply and clearly does it describe the underlying "ideal" math? Does thinking of it this way lend itself to immediate application to make human lives better? Does it help us discover even more math?
Almost everyone who criticizes math is missing this distinction: they're criticizing the writing, the models, even the institution of math. Some of those criticisms have merit; most don't. Either way, they tend to overlook the fundamental math that was already true, already there long before our universe. You simply cannot identify whether or not a given mathematician is "wasting their time", because you cannot know what underlying fundamental math they might be about to discover, and what its uses might be.
If I were in charge of giving out grants for general-purpose math research, I would not attempt to quantify "usefulness" at all. The main metric I would try to optimize for would be breadth. I'd prioritize the math that seems to be exploring areas that haven't already been thoroughly explored, or making connections between areas of "described math" that currently seem only distantly related. In our current institutions of math, there are forces that push toward increased breadth and forces that push toward conformity (decreased breadth). It might be enough to simply work against those conformity forces -- demanding "usefulness" is a conformity force.
Basically AI is the exact opposite of compression.
We take what should be a few bullet points, turn it into some overly wordy bullshit with AI, then the recipient uses AI to turn that wordy bullshit back into a few bullet points.
And it costs a ton of compute to do this.
Kind of insane. I hope society evolves to work smarter.
You would think that as the web platform is starting to pick up things like WASM and many new capabilities that there are an extremely large set of apps all of a sudden where you would be insane to think about
- writing it in a different language that only really runs on one operating system
- pay $99/yr for the privilege
- at any point and for any reason you can be cut off from reaching your audience
- you have to pay them 30% of your revenue (not profit) for any money your application makes
- you can’t make updates in a timely manner
- you have close to zero avenues of recourse if you disagree with any of this
- the deal can change at any time and you don’t get a say in it.
Why the fuck would anyone choose that option in 2024 if they didn’t have to? It’s no wonder Apple went out of their way to try and cripple the web for over a decade now, it was only legal action from the EU that forced them to staff Safari properly about two years ago.
And even now, they still take any opportunity they can to make it look unattractive such as hiding the ability to install a PWA deep in a series of unrelated menus.
That’s a hostage taking business. Get out of that ecosystem if you can
No I don't believe so. Inequality is a metric that you can apply to any system. A communist system could have high inequality if it rewarded some skills with a big imbalance. Capitalism as an economic system doesn't really say much about the political system other than that you have the freedom to invest private capital. That could be under a democracy or a dictatorship of various kinds, it's just easier with additional freedoms. Further, capitalism is only saying that all or some of your economy is free from central planning, it doesn't say that your profits from capital are free from being taxed to distribute wealth, and it doesn't say that you are free from regulation that might do various things to improve equality, including wage laws.
Some of the things in our system are specifically unequal and anti capitalist. For example, classes of investor: you need a certain level of income to make some investments.
