VyseofArcadia

I feel like the actual big difference between social media when we were in high school (hello age cohort pal) and social media now is the algorithmic feed. There was a time when you'd have a couple dozen friends on Facebook, who were people you actually know in real life, and you'd check Facebook, read you feed in chronological order, and then reach the end. Like with email.

The algorithmic feed, in addition to time spent on social media, has also intensified online discourse in a way that I believe to be harmful to society. What people see now is not the most recent things their friends were posting, no matter how banal, but whatever it is that the algorithm judges most engaging. Truth doesn't matter. Now the conspiracy theories and weird new age shit that your one hippy friend posted constantly have an audience. That kind of thing is engaging, so it floats to the top.

I'd be perfectly fine with just banning social media altogether. Never before in history has the value of a barrier to entry to publishing something been more apparent. But as a compromise, I would accept banning the algorithmic feed.

I've been wondering for the past couple of years, why did Vine fail but TikTok succeed? Based on my increasingly fuzzy memories of Vine and my rough understanding of TikTok as a non-user, they appear to be pretty much the same app.

The underlying tech is a little different, but Livescribe has been doing this for almost 20 years.

Assuming you can in fact buy it DRM-free. Otherwise it is just an indefinite-term rental.

A single (very large) sheet of (unusually thick) paper.

For some reason there is this pervasive attitude that it's ok to not be good with computers, the same way it's ok to be bad at math. It is a socially acceptable thing to be bad at, even if you use computers for work every single day. This is paired with the weirdly pervasive attitude that any tool with a learning curve is bad. Throw in the siren song of "good enough", and you have swathes of people who are completely uninterested in choosing the best tool for the job and instead choose the easiest tool for the job.

> asking them to perform actions they don't understand is a terrible idea both in terms of usability (because the process is difficult, intimidating and error prone) and security (because you're training them to follow instructions that can easily put their system in risk when requested by a malicious actor).

I think you greatly overestimate the understanding of nontechnical users. Why is

1) double click icon -> click here -> click there -> type in box -> click ok

usable and secure but

2) open powershell -> type command -> hit enter

not? My suspicion is a surprisingly large fraction of nontechnical users have limited understanding of what they're doing and just blindly follow instructions. What does it matter if they are doing that with a mouse or with a keyboard?

> If the actions to follow are really that simple, they should be automated in full; there's no reason why you would show the users anything more complex that a start button to trigger a script, and a confirmation dialog explaining the risks (and maybe requesting elevated permissions).

I completely agree.

> But if the process is not so simple that it can be automated behind a single button, then why on heaven would you expose them to an interface that requires a complex interaction (copy/paste various large texts from a web page), shows cryptic messages as feedback, and gives no clue on what to do next if any step has errors?

What, like this doesn't happen with GUI applications? Those problems have absolutely nothing to do whether an interface is graphical or not and have everything to do with bad usability in general.

I will admit I forgot that Python is not installed by default on Windows.

> However, since MarkItDown is a Python program, it might be challenging for non-technical users to use.

Am I alone in thinking it is perfectly acceptable to ask a non-technical user to open a command line and type something? It's not rocket science. You just follow simple directions. Click start, search for powershell, type this into the Window that pops up, hit enter. [0] If you can make boxed mac and cheese, you can type a command into a command prompt.

It was not that long ago that even for Windows software you were expected to occasionally visit the DOS prompt (type d:\, type setup.exe was a pretty common pattern in instruction manuals).

[0] Of course, the directions currently on the MarkItDown github page are pretty inadequate, but I'm talking about the general case.

How would that work? Valve implements a bunch of kernel modules for each of the different KAC libraries an arbitrary game might use?

Both Valve and MS have been making moves to steer game publishers away from KAC. I think the problem will solve itself when the platforms just say, "you can't do that anymore".

I was a console gamer for a long, long time just because I refuse to use Microsoft products, and Linux gaming was fraught except for Battle for Wesnoth and Nethack. Many hours just messing with Wine vs I turn on the machine and the game just starts, no fuss.

I've owned a Steam Deck not quite since day 1, I'm beyond delighted now that I can just buy and play Steam games. I think I've thrown maybe one game at Proton that I just couldn't get working. And things like the Heroic launcher have made GoG games (most of which already ran on Linux since they just run via DOSBox) easier than ever.

Anyone on the fence about keeping Windows around just for games: unless you play online multiplayer that uses kernel anti-cheat, just make the jump. I promise you, almost every game in your library will just work, and almost all of the rest will work after you set them to run with a specific Proton version.

I ended up working mostly on features that architects could use to present projects. Stuff like renders and walkthrough animations of the building.

I've moved from CAD to computer-aided engineering. I work on the backend of a compiler for a DSL for control system engineering. My niche is definitely professional tools programming. I'm quite happy where I am right now, but if something ever happened with this job, my preference would be to pivot to another professional tool. I've always thought something like a DAW or 3D modeling software would be fun to work on.

Never quite understood the hate for Bing. I despise Microsoft, but Bing is fine. It's one of the least shit Microsoft products there is. It definitely wasn't competitive on release, but it's fine now.

To be fair I think this is a function of both Bing having gotten better and Google having gotten worse.

I reproduced in both Firefox on Windows 11 and Firefox on Debian.

I think it's Finland where if the punishment for a crime is a fine, the fine scales with the income of the perpetrator.

I like that system.

I quite enjoyed my experience at VW! It was (and probably still is) a wonderful place to work. I have frankly never been more productive in my career. My team (and I got the impression that this was also the case for most teams) was very hands-off, just let people work. The employees are grown ups, so if they need to collaborate they can do so in an ad-hoc fashion instead of forcing them to do agile rituals. For most of my time there, I had exactly one scheduled meeting a week, you could call it weekly stand-up, and a lot of ad-hoc collaboration with my teammates.

For people like me, who don't need and frankly chafe against the added structure of most agile methodologies, VW was amazing. I could just put on my headphones and code, and that's pretty much all I ever wanted. I ended up leaving because as much as I loved the workplace, I have pretty much 0 interest in the actual product. CAD is cool, and I like working on professional tools, but I have no interest whatsoever in architecture and design. I still wonder, though, if leaving VW was a mistake. If I ever find myself living in the DC metro, I will certainly reapply.

My prediction is that at some point in the next 50 years the problems of SO2 will be considered an acceptable tradeoff for the cooling. At least one major world government (or perhaps sufficiently wealthy oligarchs) will begin intentionally pumping SO2 into the atmosphere.

I was suprised parent had not heard of them as someone who used Revit for 5 years.

> With that said, Revit does a lot of things well and there are no realistic alternatives.

Vectorworks? Archicad? I'm really only familiar with the former, full disclosure I used to work at Vectorworks, and we certainly considered ourselves a competitor to Revit.

I'll take the money. I've got a bajillion things I want to work on and not enough time because I have to spend 40 hours a week at my day job. Give me enough money to live on passive income, and I will just work on self-directed interesting things.

I mean I will also probably spend about the first three months just catching up on video games, but after that I have a couple of mpd plugins I've been meaning to write, and that's just for starters.

Wake up, brush various things, get dressed, make thermos of tea, pack gym bag, go to gym, breakfast at work cafeteria, work.

It works for me, but it'll be nice when I reach my goals and I can drop down to maintenance mode and go to the gym a little less frequently.

I think I see the disconnect. "Practical application" here does not mean "doing a scan". Don't let the word "bit" lure you into thinking we want to do something on a computer. This is using bits purely as a unit of measurement of information quantity. It applies practically in reality the same way any other unit of measurement applies. The same way we can ask how much something weighs or how fast it's going, we can ask how much information it has.

6 trillion * number of configurations of each cell * number of configurations of interactions between cells = (very very large) finite number. The thing about numbers is that they go on forever. There's not a cutoff for "ok, this number is too big for bits".

Take whatever that mind-bogglingly huge number is, take the logarithm base 2, there you go, that's how many bits you need.

"Compression" here is nontechnical, and I was using it by analogy as an aid to intuition. I didn't want to throw out the E word (entropy) unnecessarily.

A bit is the fundamental unit of information theory, and has nothing to do with digital logic in this context. No one is saying "ok use one bit to encode male or female". No one is saying "ok 101 means serotonin, and 110 is dopamine". What they are saying is that the information content produced by a human being can be compressed down to about 10 bits per second, but this is a statistical description.

I believe the domain name is a reference to this anecdote https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

...you think tenured professors are bringing home six figures? Maybe at Harvard.

Academic papers aren't for mass consumption. You can't replace the depth of consideration and knowledge needed to write an academic paper with hosting a podcast or self-publishing a book. Writing for an audience of leading experts is inherently different from writing for consumption by non-experts.

And you can't just equate societal value with "how many people consume it". An academic paper is often as valuable as a tool for crystalizing thoughts in the mind of the author as it is a tool for communicating to the reader.

I kind of feel like you are missing the point of academia.

How much money do you think the Lord of the Rings, as the modern multimedia francise it is, makes? Do you think Tolkien, the first time he cracked open an Old English tome of Beowulf thought to himself, "someday, being a Beowulf scholar will lead to me creating a vast amount of money for Warner Bros."?

Academic outcomes are nonlinear. Outside of the job-training-ified fields like engineering, there is seldom a direct "I studied X and then made a ton of money doing exactly that". The success stories, like Tolkien, are more like, "I studied X, then I lost a finger in the great war, then I typed up a manuscript of a children's fairy tale, fast forward 100 years and it's worth untold millions." It is a winding road. All that is gold does not glitter, not all who wander are lost.

There's this meme about how sci-fi cautionary tales fly over people's heads,

> At long last, we have finally created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel "Don't Create the Torment Nexus".