mo_ztt ✅ @ mo_ztt @lemmy.world

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Joined

2 yr. ago

It's pointless to look for meaning honestly. Trump has this innate ability to tap into a totally fact-free way of thinking, which is pretty hard to get your head around if you're not familiar with it. He'll say things happened because they provoke a feeling of injustice, or not being heard, and the system being rigged against him. The system is, in actual fact, rigged against most of his followers, and they know that (even though they blame the wrong people), and so that resonates with them. Because that's how they process information, they are for the most part 100% convinced that Trump is telling the truth about the election being bald-facedly stolen. That's why him saying this is a sensible thing to do, from the point of view of him and the people who take his speeches seriously.

There's a really good example of this when he talks about the water main break:

Where they got—number one they said very clearly and it's been reported that they said there was a major water main break," Trump said. "Everybody fled the area. And then they came back, [name bleeped out] and her daughter and a few people. There were no Republican poll watchers. Actually, there were no Democrat poll watchers, I guess they were them. But there were no Democrats, either, and there was no law enforcement.

"It was late in the evening, late in the, early in the morning, and there was nobody else in the room. Where were the poll watchers, and why did they say a water main broke, which they did and which was reported in the newspapers? They said they left. They ran out because of a water main break, and there was no water main. There was nothing. There was no break. There was no water main break. But where, if you take out everything, where were the Republican poll watchers, even where were the Democrat poll watchers? Because there were none."

If you take it factually, it makes no sense that he's claiming this. There's video of the time period in question, there are records of when water mains break and don't break, there's honestly not a lot of point in trying to break down the reasons why this is bullshit from start to finish, although you could do that if you were interested.

But to Trump's followers, the point is not analyzing it to see if it's true or false on a factual level. It gets processed on an emotional level.

number one they said very clearly and it's been reported

"It's very solid, it's factual. You can believe my side."

Everybody fled the area

"Well that definitely sounds bad."

And then they came back, [name bleeped out] and her daughter and a few people

"Well those people are the enemy. Now we know who is the enemy."

It was late in the evening, late in the, early in the morning, and there was nobody else in the room.

Just read this sentence. All by itself, doesn't it make you a little bit nervous? It just sounds really bad.

Etc etc, I don't think I need to go on. But Trump is some sort of savant at this stuff. It's why the GOP rank and file loves him so much; they can tell Mitch McConnell is just a big decrepit pile of bullshit and money, they can tell Dick Cheney was a very evil man, and so on. But, Trump makes them feel things that they want to feel, good things about themselves and bad things about the "enemies" and what happened, and he honestly does it very well. It's 100% pointless, from the point of view of his followers, to judge or argue Trump's statements on their truth or falsehood. They're just not interested in that.

Short answer: In theory, pretty much anything you're doing on the modern internet can be traced back to you. It's just a question of how much effort, sophistication, and time someone's willing to invest in the tracing. Tor is a pretty high bar for them to clear, so it'll protect you against a pretty high bar of attempting to track you down -- but that's only true as long as you're not doing anything careless to compromise your own security, and it's pretty easy to do something careless (especially in the long term).

This DEFCON talk goes into a lot of the nitty-gritty details and reality. The speaker sold drugs on the dark web for quite a while, but eventually got caught and went to federal prison, so he knows both sides of it.

Yeah, agreed. Fortunately Willis is also working on putting actual physical people in actual physical prison, in addition to writing maybe-inconsequential letters to respond to other inconsequential letters.

You want the optimization post not the C language post, I think

For each object of such a composed type, there was already a way to mention the underlying object: index the array, call the function, use the indirection operator on the pointer. Analogical reasoning led to a declaration syntax for names mirroring that of the expression syntax in which the names typically appear. Thus,

int i, *pi, **ppi;

declare an integer, a pointer to an integer, a pointer to a pointer to an integer. The syntax of these declarations reflects the observation that i, *pi, and **ppi all yield an int type when used in an expression. Similarly,

int f(), *f(), (*f)();

declare a function returning an integer, a function returning a pointer to an integer, a pointer to a function returning an integer;

After almost 30 years, I think I just understood function pointer declaration syntax for the first time.

Disclaimer, haven't used Windows in years, but back in the day when I did, I swore by cygwin to give me a sane environment to interact in. That and Firefox + GIMP + Libreoffice usually gave me a pretty happy day to day interaction.

I thought I was the only one... to me unless it's a super-simplistic comprehension, it has a similar effect as when C programmers write if (xx = !(1 == (a ? !c : 34 ^ blit_target))) {. Congratulations, you fit it all on one line! At the expense of totally destroying my train of thought when I'm trying to scan down the code and figure out what the hell's going on. Well done.

Hmmm

I worked on one project only which used what I guess is an ORM-like pattern, and I have to say it was actually really nice. The code was Javascript, and there was a mapping:

• Class <-> DB table
• Field <-> DB column
• Row <-> Object

For each class, there was a big mapping table which indicated which database-backed fields needed to exist in that class, and then there was automated code that (1) could create or update the database to match the specified schema (2) would create helper methods in each class for basic data functions -- the options being "Create me a new non-database-backed object X" "I've set up the new object, insert it into the DB" "give me an iterator of all database-backed objects matching this arbitrary query", "update the appropriate row with the changes I've made to this object", "delete this object from the DB," and "I'm doing something unusual, just run this SQL query".

I honestly really liked it, it made things smooth. Maybe it was the lack of hesitation about dropping back to SQL for stuff where you needed SQL, but I never had issues with it and it seemed to me like it made life pretty straightforward.

To reduce everyone who lives on one giant continent to the name of a conquering nation that tried to take them over is, yeah, a little offensive.

Yeah, I get that. Point taken.

Well, but you do know that there's a slang term "spanish" with the little s, which means Hispanic, right? It's the same as "black" people aren't colored 000000, "you up?" doesn't mean anything about your verticality, etc. The decision that certain slang terms are incorrect because you've frozen what the language means at a certain point and no one's permitted to apply something in a way that's different than that to accomplish the purpose of communication, is not to me a sensible endeavor.

Urban Dictionary seems to take issue with using "spanish" in this way, and like I say in my experience people of this ethnicity tend to identify with their particular country of origin, so maybe I am the wrong one. It honestly just never crossed my mind. I don't agree in general with "you're not allowed to use word X because we've decided that it's not allowed," and I definitely don't agree with avoiding slang simply because it's slang and slang's not allowed.

Last thoughts on the offensiveness front; I think "Latinx" is a perfect example of people coming up with weird rules and trying to get other people to follow them even though there's no productive purpose to it and all it does is irritate people (including the ethnic grouping that's supposedly being protected). I do think this happens, hence why I also bring up "female." I honestly don't know whether "spanish" falls into that category, or is not at all offensive and I'm just creating this whole issue from nothing, or is genuinely mildly offensive.

It was always able to do some genuinely amazing things, but it was always limited when you took it beyond its wheelhouse. It helps to think of it not as an "AI" as people keep saying, but as a "text completer" with a huge amount of power within that domain.

Or, another way to think of it is as a super-powerful search engine. If the answers and knowledge you're asking of it were fed into it as input data at some point in its training, it'll probably be able to find it and reformat it back to you with a scary amount of smoothness and precision. If you're asking it to figure out something new, it may be able to fake it in some short-term fashion or another based on what it's seen, but not with any genuine understanding behind it. That's just not what it does. I actually have a little private theory that if it was given something like the bar exam in scale and complexity, but an exam was genuinely a whole new novel invention that hadn't been extensively discussed and represented in its input corpus, it would fail pretty badly. A lot of what humans can do that makes them capable is adapt to new domains -- we can teach ourselves to play chess, or do math, or fly airplanes, or play Celeste. GPT is hugely impressive but it's still only one domain.

I actually don't believe that it's gotten substantively less capable. I think there are little ticks up and down in its capability sometimes in particular areas, and people seize on those to conclude that it's now becoming dumber, but in my experience, the raw API was always quite capable (more so than the somewhat nerfed chat interface), and it was always super-capable with some tasks and not at all capable with others. I think journalists are just now figuring out that, after having studied the issue in their professional capacity for the better part of a year, and reporting on it as if it's a new thing.

Is this like the "female" thing?

So this is honestly the first time I've heard that using "spanish" for Hispanic people (as opposed to "Spanish" i.e. people from Spain) is in any way offensive. I can't remember hearing Hispanic people use it themselves, so maybe you're right on this and I am the wrong one.

By way of comparison, what's your stance on the offensiveness level of "Latinx"?

Yah, 100% agree. So in my case, Typescript is actually a better fit niche-wise... but I finally reached the point where I didn't want to cope anymore with flawed things it was inheriting from Javascript, so it was especially ironic to me when I saw this and thought maybe I'm not the only one, only to discover that the message was "SIIIKE we love the flawed things! It's the improvements we're getting rid of."

I mean every project is different and they've got a right to do what they want. It was just a hilarious surprise for me.

I clicked, sorta interested in the topic because as it happens I just abandoned Typescript in favor of learning Go for a little nascent project I'm working on. (We do these things not because they are easy, but because they eventually will be good which Typescript+Node apparently never will for my particular project.) Then I saw it was Fireship and clicked back away.

Now it sounds like you're saying that what they're claiming is the issue is the one good thing that happened with Javascript in the last however-many years. Yes, it's a little tedious to have to straighten out all your types. You know what's more tedious than that? Having to straighten out all your types, but not getting any feedback about it at compile time and having to figure it out based on mysterious failures, or if you're lucky explicit exceptions, at runtime.

Having worked for a while in Javascript, and now for a pretty short time in Typescript, I cannot imagine trying to make a decent-complexity project in pure Javascript. That I believe is why they tend to not really be all that object-oriented and pass strings around for lots of things and be sorta flaky.

The first rule of pursuing abhorrent policies for performative reasons is, they need to stay performative. The GOP used to understand this, and carefully pursue anti-abortion policies while carefully not achieving them. But now there's too high a proportion of people who are such nutcases that they genuinely don't understand or don't care that this will lose them elections, and the strategic Republicans are struggling more and more to keep control of their party.

It used to be the same with "anti-immigration" policies that were surgically careful to preserve the vulnerable workforce while making the right type of performative gestures, until DeSantis came in being enough of a true believer that he's willing to damage Florida's economy pretty significantly as long as it lets him be cruel to spanish people.

The safeties are getting disabled, basically.

“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.” -Barry Goldwater

Inviting all the Nazis back, and explicitly chasing away the advertisers and all the people who ran the servers and mailed the rent checks, wasn't the solution either...

THAT IS IF YOU'RE SOME SORT OF PUSSY

Yah man. First is a reply on a legal basis, then she explicitly says "I was well within my legal rights to just throw this thing in the trash, but I feel it's useful to reply, so I did. Now that we've got the legal business squared away, this part is addressed to you on a more personal level." Then it gets un-legal, and ends by referring him to exhibits F through O.

I mean, in the grand scheme I do feel like actions are more important than letters. But she's also taking some incredibly ballsy and wonderful actions, and this letter in addition is a fucking masterpiece.

Well I meant about Twitter hemorrhaging money and staff on a pretty-much-un-heard-of scale even for the tech industry since Musk took over. That was definitely a problem, and I 100% feel that something definitely needed to be done to right the ship.

1. Something must be done! (true)
2. This is something! (also true)
3. Therefore, this must be done!