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ZoomZoomZoom

2,159 karma · joined December 24, 2014

indiscipline.github.io thirdhemisphere.studio
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ZoomZoomZoom··on AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
The illegal part is (or ideally should be) using the books in their training. The morally right action is to make it public afterwards.
ZoomZoomZoom··on AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
The main question is why aren't they leaking it to AA themselves? Trying to keep an edge with their training sets? Isn't it ridiculous, considering the sheer size of them and statistical insignificance of the set differences?
ZoomZoomZoom··on RustDesk now supports true unattended remote access on Wayland
Secure and censorship-resistant connectivity is very hard. We should compartmentalise and not expect everything to reimplement and maintain their own version of it and focus on specialised solutions that actually work.

What all user-facing software should have is a minimal-overhead connection option to improve performance inside user's tunnel of choice.

Pure QUIC gets blocked easily, SSH requires wrapping, even Tailscale mimicry is basic and they still ignore simple protocol improvements available.

ZoomZoomZoom··on LinkedIn CringeBot 3000
In my case it was interesting to note that the same prompt with different "Cringe Style" uses the exact same food analogy for a topic of tube amp superiority.

Vulnerability:

> Digital modeling amps are the Bluetooth earbuds of guitar amplification. Technically impressive. Completely missing the point. A Kemper can model a 1959 Plexi the way a photograph can model a meal.

Truth To Power:

> A modeling amp will simulate 47 vintage amplifiers and nail exactly none of them. It is a photograph of food. It looks correct. You cannot eat it.

Another anecdote supporting the opinion that gluing the words in coherent paragraphs can hide the shallowness of the conceptual grasp behind it pretty well.

PS: Had to override the JS to lift the limit a bit to paste the whole "crystal lattice" quote by Dumble.

ZoomZoomZoom··on The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
What a breath of fresh air! If only people were in control of their own selves to stick to this kind of balanced and open-minded disposition.
ZoomZoomZoom··on 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
I'm living it. Good for you if you're not.

My point was to make a joke about state-issued phones but also make sure it doesn't read as an absurd, easily dismissible claim, because it's a real possibility.

ZoomZoomZoom··on 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
Do you call any negative prognosis based on extrapolation of an observable downward trend a slippery slope?
ZoomZoomZoom··on 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
Don't worry. Sooner or later this stuff will be mandatory and you'll be obligated to get your state-issued terminal. Social credits will do, if you have no money.

For the skeptical ones: Somewhere people are already being cut off from state and financial institutions without proprietary software with bundled security certificates, applications are bound to collect data on the environment they are used in (other apps) and organizations deliberately limit access to their services or cripple them without their applications (can't do things from a generic web-browser).

ZoomZoomZoom··on There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
Lots of places still use PVC covering commonly called linoleum. And laminate that I see everywhere is not so technologically remote, with its plastic surface.
ZoomZoomZoom··on Fecal transplants for autism deliver success in clinical trials (2019)
Even if you operate only by the given definition, it directly states one is a subset of the other.

Given that you're just selectively nitpicking by now, I don't think you're really trying to engage in a meaningful conversation, so I'm done. Thanks anyway, you've prompted me to reflect upon many topics and verbalize some things that usually stay internal.

ZoomZoomZoom··on Fecal transplants for autism deliver success in clinical trials (2019)
Oh, man, taking a win when the opponent concedes ground is no fun at all, right?

> So you are in fact claiming you were joking?

Never claimed so. The first message was making fun of the title (which should be obvious even to those struggling with nuance comprehension). It's, BTW, not exactly the same thing as joking. Everything posted further was pretty serious.

> instead of arguing about English

"Arguing about English" paints my part in the discussion in an overly aggressive light. I was mostly answering direct questions and disproving points that were aimed at me or my arguments.

> For multiple messages in a row, there’s no indication you were making fun.

It wasn't the theme of the discussion, reread it and look at what we were actually talking about. If you didn't parse my original message as playful, then, surely, the the fault is mine. I'll work on my eloquence. But I'd rather make a poor attempt at humour and let it fail than keep on repeating "this wasn't serious!" in every subsequent message.

> Because transplants for autism isn’t ambiguous to native speakers

Firstly, this is overgeneralization that you can't possibly posit as a fact, unless you're a linguist that happens to have the stats on hand.

Secondly, the crowd here is rather diverse, and I bet non-natives are not a negligible minority. At least for some of them the awkwardness of the condensed form chosen for the title is pretty obvious, as it was for me.

The bottom line here is the comprehension (including native) is never deterministic, but is context-driven. Temporary alternative parses (even if it converges to a specific interpretation with later context) is an established phenomenon which, to my taste, is a great source of fun. Though I admit this wasn't nearly my best attempt.

> I didn’t mean to be condescending

Then I don't believe you've succeeded. The problem is that you're arguing against a stronger claim than I’m making, whilst being just a bit too assertive, degrading the debate to lifestyle advice, etc.

---

Regarding your multilingual examples, you're most likely not native to a Romance language, because you're missing the distinction between, for example, "por" and "para" which do not translate directly to English "for", so your examples aren't as effective as you probably hoped. "Ir al medico por dolor" translates better to "to go to the doctor because of pain", not "for pain". Same with "wegen", it's literally "because of", not "for".

> I only meant to contradict your apparent insistence that ‘transplants for autism’ is easily misunderstood, because it’s not.

Never said "easily". However, you seem to be adamant on dismissing the two main points I repeatedly tried to get across and which are the reason I made fun of the title in the first place:

1. "Transplant" is a procedure or the result of thereof, it does not lexically encode remediation to the same extent "treatment" or "medication" do. You can transplant a third arm to a human, this won't be considering a health-improving procedure. To rephrase, "transplant" is not inherently therapeutic but is always an intrusive procedure.

2. Again, not everyone conceptualizes an "Autism" of an unknown severity as a condition in need of a treatment involving body-intrusive procedures!

These two facts make the "X for Z" not reliably triggering the "ibuprofen for headache" reading. Unfortunately, this doesn't happen for you so you just dismiss this fact and keep on pushing, instead of admitting there can be ambiguity. You'll surely agree, that it's the medicalized context doing the disambiguation for the concise form, not the syntax itself!

Consider a parallel linguistic construct: "implant for mind control". Would you still argue it's unambiguously "for countering mind control"?

ZoomZoomZoom··on Fecal transplants for autism deliver success in clinical trials (2019)
Never claimed I did. My first message, however, literally says the title is hilarious or outrageous, depending on your personality, all due to the ambiguity. I tried to make fun of it, which landed obviously flat. Well, what a shame.

You're really trying a bit too hard to prove a point, being just slightly condescending in the process, giving strangers life advice all while missing to address the specific argumentative points where you happened do be factually mistaken.

Mayhaps it's your idea of fun, then happy to entertain you.

ZoomZoomZoom··on Fecal transplants for autism deliver success in clinical trials (2019)
> in English and many other languages as well - pretty much all Germanic languages

Absolutely not. In German itself it's "gegen" - "against". In French and Spanish you definitely wouldn't just omit "treatment" from "traitement de/pour"/"tratamiento de/por" and expect the meaning to not change, and both sometimes would use "contra", though less likely.

> You seem to be failing to grasp that someone who says something is “for” a problem

See above, the special-case medical reading of the construction triggers when the object is unequivocally considered a problem.

If someone's fighting anything, it's you, who fail to grasp that the title could actually read ambiguously, depending on your disposition towards Autism and conceptualization of a transplantation procedure.

Lear to embrace ambiguity as a source of humour and have fun, instead of trying to tell people they use a language wrong.

ZoomZoomZoom··on Fecal transplants for autism deliver success in clinical trials (2019)
A retina transplant is for vision, not for blindness.

And you'd lose the bet, in my case that would be a word that dual-serves as a directional preposition meaning "away"/"from" and depending on the situation it's an opposite of "for", but not exactly "against", closer to "for dealing with smth"/"for solving smth.".

If you think more about it, perhaps the stumble is understandable, if you conceptualize Autism not simply a disorder requiring treatment, but a type of neurodiversity. Then the intuition of interpreting the "for" as the "X for Y" conventional medical syntax does not trigger and the title reads awkward.

ZoomZoomZoom··on Fecal transplants for autism deliver success in clinical trials (2019)
The keyword there is "treatment". It can be "cure" or "remedy" or something like that. But the title has "transplants".

The contrast is obvious, though I'm not native, so YMMV.

ZoomZoomZoom··on Fecal transplants for autism deliver success in clinical trials (2019)
Absolutely outrageous/hilarious clickbait title. It's not for autism but totally opposite.
ZoomZoomZoom··on Explore Wikipedia Like a Windows XP Desktop
This is cute, but the UI is uncannily not there (I think there were multiple attempts of designing the XP for web already which looked more authentic).

But my biggest gripe is, why represent it as a file system with WordPad displaying HTML? I get the idea for media, but not for the articles.

It's pretty obvious that Wikipedia should be a single CHM file. That would be nice and much more immersive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help

ZoomZoomZoom··on GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay
You're saying your experience with GS is even worse than with eBay, right? How can it be?
ZoomZoomZoom··on Security through obscurity is not bad
I don't see how your argument makes sense. It's all just bits of entropy in the end, be it knowing a port to connect to or a character in your key.
ZoomZoomZoom··on Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen
Considering its ubiquitous and regular consumption in general population, doesn't alcohol shift the balance in favour of ibuprofen?

Also, possible blood clotting or stomach issues sound scary, but Aspirin has similar (opposite) issues. Pharmacists regularly push its combinations with Acetominophen (which has, of course, synergetic bonuses, but is not the reason) under multitude of brands with a hefty premium when people ask for either one. So in many situations you need to consider the added risks from Aspirin too.

Ideally, I'd like to have an optimized strategies of using all three of the aforementioned substances for common situations. Like, is rotating ibuprofen/acetominophen during the day safer than consuming just one?

ZoomZoomZoom··on Direct Win32 API, weird-shaped windows, and why they mostly disappeared
I'm all for Win32, but those odd-shapes and custom skins were the precursors and the normalizing precedent for the current default mentality of "visual identity = branding" that's been killing desktop computing experience for years and is one of the reasons we have to endure reacts, electrons and multitude of half-baked widget libraries that consist of things looking like no particular control but all feature blurry text rendering, flaky accessibility, negative information density and their own special sets of bugs.

Unless you're building a Blender or an Ardour or, I don't know, a trading platform or a game, an individualized GUI should be the last of your priorities.

ZoomZoomZoom··on Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16
> Sadly, the hang was deterministic:

Huh, someone's in it for the thrill of the hunt, I see...

ZoomZoomZoom··on Midnight Captain – A midnight commander inspired file manager
Yeah, I don't generally live in MC to the same extent I do in DC when I'm on Windows.

I rarely do anything besides the basics (F5/F6) when managing files in MC, and for advanced stuff, like using rsync/rclone for moving files, I mostly use the usermenu.

ZoomZoomZoom··on Midnight Captain – A midnight commander inspired file manager
It's perfectly valid to be second- and further-level inspired and even dislike/reject some aspects of the predecessors.
ZoomZoomZoom··on Midnight Captain – A midnight commander inspired file manager
Isn't this the point if TUI/GUI that you don't have to? Common things should be shortcutted, some accessible from menus for discoverability.

Command entering is just one if the "modes", and not necessarily the default one.

If shortcuts are limited to special keys and combos, this frees plane input for commands, but I personally prefer list filtering by default.

ZoomZoomZoom··on Music for Programming
If I could code with a piece of music playing in the background and not lose focus means it's not worth listening at all.

Very rarely I use custom-filtered (brownish) noise to help with isolation. Perhaps some kind of Ambient or New Age would work too in such situations, but things I like in those genres require attention and not paying it would be absolutely disrespectful.

I listen to all kinds of music at my dayjob but only during specific activities that do not require much contemplation and I can mostly flow with the music and do the work in the background.

Though, I'm a musician and sound engineer, so my relationships with music in general might be a bit special.

ZoomZoomZoom··on A Claude Code skill that makes Claude talk like a caveman, cutting token use
This might be not so far from the truth, if you count total loc written and rewritten during the development cycle, not just the final number.

Not everybody is Dijkstra.

ZoomZoomZoom··on Why are we still using Markdown?
This is exactly why ReStructured Text is better/worse.
ZoomZoomZoom··on Looking at Unity made me understand the point of C++ coroutines
For a layperson it's clear that it's either "Writings" and "Talks", or "Readings" and "'Listenings", but CPP profeciency is in an inverse relation with being apt in taxonomy, it looks like.

Thanks for the list.

ZoomZoomZoom··on The future of version control
The key insight in the third sentence?

> ... CRDTs for version control, which is long overdue but hasn’t happened yet

Pijul happened and it has hundreds - perhaps thousands - of hours of real expert developer's toil put in it.

Not that Bram is not one of those, but the post reads like you all know what.

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