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Findecanor

2,878 karma · joined September 24, 2021

Fell in love with computing on the Amiga. Started programming in BASIC and assembly language, as you did in those days.

Multiple cancer survivor; Mechanical keyboard enthusiast; Prop replica collector; Technorealist; Vegetarian.

Unemployable: Recruiters are full of prejudice for unemployed people, which I was after my first cancer, which made me fall into a depression awaiting my cancer to come back. It did and I "survived". I'm looking forward to dying from the next cancer under a bridge somewhere. I just want to work in a righteous occupation, without taking part in exploiting people with gaming/phone/social media/AI addiction, or to be exploited myself. That shouldn't be too much to ask.

submissionscomments
Findecanor··on Is "colorectal cancer" rising in "young people"?
You can't tell whether a polyp is cancerous or not before you have removed it, sent it to the lab and got the results back.

Therefore, all polyps should be removed. (Sending them all to the lab might be superfluous though)

Findecanor··on Is "colorectal cancer" rising in "young people"?
Some people have turned vegetarian, vegan or gluten-free for health reasons, but substituted foods for other foods with additives that may come with their own health risks.

Methyl cellulose is in gluten-free bread and in most fake meat products.

Some emulsifiers are found in mayo, other sauces and "ice cream". Not just vegan brands, but overall.

Findecanor··on Is "colorectal cancer" rising in "young people"?
It is likely that your friend could have a genetic disposition for colon cancer. He should get a gene test once he has recovered.

I was the same age. My doctor saw signs in an early blood test, and followed it up so mine got detected relatively early. My test was positive for Lynch syndrome, and I am now a colonoscopy veteran.

Findecanor··on Is "colorectal cancer" rising in "young people"?
There are brands of "mayo" and other products that contain some emulsifying agents that have been observed to deteriorate the mucus membrane in the colon, and that effect is believed to increase the risk of colon cancer.

I haven't heard about any risk with the natural emulsifier in egg yolk though.

Findecanor··on Is "colorectal cancer" rising in "young people"?
There are slow-acting laxatives that you have to drink a lot of and tastes wile but is soft on the intestines, and then there is quick-acting laxative that is easier to get down. The former tends to be prescribed by default, obviously.

If you have no prior intestinal diseases and are in for a routine check, ask for the quick-acting one. You will have to drink the same total amount of liquid, but at least most of it will not be drinks of your choosing.

Also get anal cream, and apply it once before going to the toilet.

Findecanor··on Stockholm poised to become leading European geospatial intel player
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esrange

They have not launched anything into orbit yet though. Only high-altitude probes.

Findecanor··on Magnifica Humanitas
I would not take solace in IPCC retiring a scenario. Their predictions are based on conservative aggregates of existing science, and have always been considered by many in the climate science community to be underestimating climate change.
Findecanor··on Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It
Many Youtube-to-mp3 sites exist, though.
Findecanor··on Magnifica Humanitas
I think we should not use the word "communism". It is imbued with a lot of different values depending on who you ask, and is therefore utterly useless.

Marx and Engels had originally envisioned a liberal democratic society with lots of high ideals but they had allowed the transition to it to be tough. Every self-proclaimed "Communist" state never got through that transition: the people in charge never let it (often never intended to) and instead cemented their authoritarian dictatorships. So let's call those what they were.

Findecanor··on C constructs that still don't work in C++
A type of VLA I would like to see more of in C code however, is variable-length array parameters (void func(int n, int arr[n]);) and array pointers (int (*my_array)[n];).

Compilers can often do some static bounds-checking of such arrays. But because those features had been introduced together with variable-length array stack variables , people have lumped them all together and thus shunned these features that could otherwise have added safety.

BTW, one thing you should never do is use variable-length array declarations and alloca() in the same function. As VLA variables have scope life-time and allocas have function life-time they are not compatible — and allocations could overlap. Yet, not all compilers (/versions) that support both warn when they are used together.

Findecanor··on AI errno(2) values
It would hallucinate error codes that don't exist.
Findecanor··on Trump Mobile exposed customers' personal data
I'm surprised that the idea for the Trump Phone was even conceived. I had thought that the drug king-pin Pablo Escobar pretty much owned the market for gold smartphones, and thus tainted it for anyone else.
Findecanor··on Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
This is a classic case of: if the situation is not in the training data then the model is unequipped to handle it.

We've seen the phenomenon before. We've been warned against the phenomenon before, and we'll see it again in other contexts in the future for sure.

Findecanor··on AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
Actual researchers in neuroscience do not agree that what artificial neural networks are doing is "learning", no. When biological beings learn, the process is more complicated.
Findecanor··on AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
What a naive and simplistic view.

People want to be recognised for their contributions to society. People want to be treated fairly. Most scientific articles, as well as all text on the free web is already free information. It used to be difficult to search, categorise and summarise that information. There exist AI tools for that — and that is the good AI.

What also exists now are automated plagiarism and mash-up tools: that can take someone's article, change the words and churn out a new article that people can put their name on. There are scumbags that sell services for exactly that. And there are big tech firms that are operating in a very grey area.

Aaron Schwartz had broken a paywall. He did not anonymise the article authors.

You, and AI-bros like you remind me of one the people behind Pirate Bay when I argued with him back in the '90s, who used that same "information wants to be free" to justify software piracy.

Findecanor··on AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
What makes you say that? Which governments? What society?

The current US government is not representative for governments out there in the world, you know.

Findecanor··on Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk apparently used AI to write her latest novel
I'm not kink-shaming anyone ...
Findecanor··on Playing Atari ST Music on the Amiga with Zero CPU
As a Amiga and then Linux and Windows 95 user I remember being flabbergasted over a Mac in 1997 being completely unusable while it was formatting a floppy.
Findecanor··on Why is this site named Antipope?
I'm disappointed that it isn't to do with Zlad! <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxxhAS16vB0>
Findecanor··on The sigmoids won't save you
Sometimes the most significant contribution from an article is not the article itself but found in the comments.
Findecanor··on Googlebook
To me, everything about this seems AI-generated. What else but a LLM could have come up with these features and the name?
Findecanor··on Guy Goma's Accidental BBC Interview Lives on After 20 Years
He passed from metastasised colon cancer, apparently. That is the most common cancer and too often gets undiscovered before it has spread to other organs. I recommend everyone from age 45 to get a colonoscopy every ten years to nip any polyps before they develop.
Findecanor··on Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
I sometimes watch "Ben Heck Hacks" live-streams rebuilding game controllers for people with disabilities [1]. People like him are what these files are for.

1: https://www.youtube.com/@BenHeckHacks/streams

Findecanor··on Write some software, give it away for free
I've had quite a few constructive hobbies. I have built from metal and sold some parts, sculpt in clay or plastic and cast, and sold casts.

The point was not to sell them, but the community around the hobby. I usually asked for only a little more than the cost of materials.

And that is also how I've approached open source software: It's a community first. In my first decade of using Linux, it was a movement. I got in it to build us a better future of computing, together.

Findecanor··on New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag
Why could it not mean multiple flags at once?
Findecanor··on The USB Situation
I think Nokia's original Micro USB socket design had only two through-hole pins, which was not sturdy enough.

A standard USB-C socket has four: one in each corner like some later Micro USB sockets. There even exists USB-C sockets with all through-hole pins but there's no space for USB 3 pins so they are all USB 2.0 or charging-only.

I used to buy cables with non-standard reversible Micro USB plugs, but I think there was only one manufacturer of them and now I can't find replacements.

Findecanor··on VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage
Between Netscape Navigator and Firefox, their web browser was called simply "Mozilla". It supported GUI themes in XML with images which were officially called "Chrome". Mozilla also hosted user-contributed themes on a web site called "Chrome Zone".

The browser was considered slow and bloated however, and when Firefox came, its lack of theme support was perceived as part of it having been de-bloated.

Findecanor··on You can beat the binary search
The range is 1..4096, so 4096 bits = 512 byte bitmap would suffice.

That is, if you're only ever going to test for membership in the set. If you need metadata then ... You could store that in a packed array and use a population count of the bit-vector before the lookup bit as index into it. For each word of bits, store the accumulated population count of the words before it to speed up lookup. Modern CPU's are memory-bound so I don't think SIMD would help much over using 64-bit words. For 4096 bits / 64, that would be 64 additional bytes.

Findecanor··on Laws of UX
I sometimes use a trackball — without a "scroll wheel".

So in Google Maps on the web, I'd have to click the + and - buttons on the screen repeatedly to zoom in and out.

But those buttons don't always stay put. There is a status bar underneath it, that sometimes contains text so long that it wraps: and then that pushes the buttons up.

So sometimes, I click + + + - . Very annoying.

Findecanor··on Laws of UX
Fitt's Law does not just apply to screens but also to input devices. That is why the keys on the outskirts of a keyboard are larger than other keys.

... except for the anorectic vertical Return keys on Apple keyboards with any European layout: which is a 1×1 key with a small vertical sliver. Japanese "JIS" keyboard layout also has a vertical Return key, and Apple made that properly sized, however.

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