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asherah

71 karma · joined April 24, 2022

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asherah··on What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
you can't not handle devanagari, tamil (or like half the scripts across the Indian subcontinent and oceania) or hangul. even the IPA, used by linguists every day, would be particularly bad to deal with if we couldn't write things like /á̤/, and some languages already don't have the precomposed diacritics for all letters (like ǿ), so the idea of a world with only precomposed letter forms is more of a exponential explosion in the character set
asherah··on Doctor GPT: A Large Language Model That Can Pass the US Medical Licensing Exam
> LLMs do have personalities and wit

im not sure how "choose the next most probable token" could be described this way

asherah··on Was Y Combinator worth it?
slap a "moderator note: despite the contents of this comment, it entirely follows terms and conditions" at the start of any comment to immediately be able to post any rules-breaking content you want
asherah··on TypeScript please give us reflection/runtime types
this wouldn't work for interfaces, or more complicated types
asherah··on TypeScript please give us reflection/runtime types
typescript enums exist and are compiled to javascript (other than const enums)
asherah··on Does AI mean we don't need the Semantic Web?
"scaling reviewers" implies the money to pay this new amount of reviewers, which I'm not sure the economics of this setup can bear
asherah··on 'Do' More with 'Run'
i'd say that it's a bit more readable:

  run(() => { return foo })
looks better than, and assuming pre-existing knowledge of what `run` does, is more understandable than

  (() => { return foo })()
but this is also a fairly contrived example
asherah··on Ask HN: How do you personally define 'AGI'?
it's probably a bit of a bad definition, but i'd say "something i can have a long conversation with and not figure out it's an AI"
asherah··on Why Object.keys doesn't return (keyof T)[]
i think it's reasonable for cases where you know the type, e.g. an internal object which a user of a library can't access
asherah··on GitHub code search is generally available
you can do one better: imagine those developers writing typescript frontends for asp.net backends!
asherah··on Banana Equivalent Dose
i think it makes sense as a way to show the safety of nuclear power plants, considering measures of amounts of radiation can sound scary to someone who's unfamiliar with them
asherah··on People who use Notion to plan their whole lives
i hadn't ever heard of this but this sounds immensely helpful. i wish this were a more common practice!
asherah··on Nibbles of Rust – Restructuring Patterns
if x is `Some`, then `y` is set to the inner value and the following block occurs. you can also use this with other enums - i don't remember off the top of my head if it works for all enums, but you can at least also use it with `Result`
asherah··on After a decade, South Dakota's Amish are moving on
respectfully, i have no intentions of listening to jordan b peterson, in the same way i have no intentions of reading a stormfront article. skimming the transcript, it looks like this person was presented with the full list of effects - is this not what i described? the ground reality is that if you go to your local planned parenthood or family doctor they will tell you all of the side effects you will experience on hrt; i have 3 different packets of information from doing this, all of which stress the ways in which my body will change on hrt i have no anecdotal proof yet for surgery but i can only assume you get told about possible complications that are reasonably expected
asherah··on After a decade, South Dakota's Amish are moving on
transition is something for which you are presented the full pros and cons, and given the freedom to choose whether or not you want the effects of it; being born into an amish family is something you have no freedom to choose, and given the things the comment you're replying to is describing as occurring, i think it makes perfect sense to say that the latter is more ethically questionable
asherah··on Why I stopped using an external monitor
to me this reads like the author was simply too frustrated with their wm's handling of large / secondary monitors and post-facto justified the switch to only one monitor
asherah··on Please help improve Magit
wouldn't this just lead to the projects that are already the most visible (and thus most likely to already receive donations) getting the bulk of the income?
asherah··on Why does everyone suddenly hate Single Page Apps?
ask any user what "hypertext" is and you'll get a confused look; similarly, give them a black-on-white, no-css page and they'll think it looks quite ugly and isn't a good experience. spas are commonly horrible to use but restricting everything to the model of the internet as it existed in the 80s is not a good thing either
asherah··on The Market for Lemons
the author recommends in the first footnote to use other frameworks like vue, svelte, lit/polymer etc., which makes this seem more like an argument against react, when the entire article is about how javascript-driven spa/ssr stacks are bad. there are a couple clarifications next to it to soften that blow but react also "start[s] with simple output" in the same way these tools do. why act like react is the only lemon merchant? i say this as an active user of vue, so maybe im simply at the most complex of them but from my perspective the other tools are about as complex
asherah··on Social contagions can cause genuine illness, and TikTok may be a superspreader
you can't act like surveying people who are ideologically against the concept of trans people can make for an unbiased basis on which to claim things about trans people
asherah··on Is the Fediverse about to get Fryed?
this seems like an architectural problem with fedi itself; considering the amount of high-follower-count (>10k) people on twitter or instagram or other places, if everyone moved to fedi, would we constantly be having an infinite ddos? it feels extremely inefficient as a system
asherah··on Golink: A private shortlink service for tailnets
this is super cute, shout-out to the tailscale team!
asherah··on Cambridge Dictionary updates definition of 'woman'
good! i'm really tired of the whole "what is a woman" shenanigan and this is a cute symbolic move against that
asherah··on Hand of Irulegi: ancient artefact could help trace origins of Basque language
context is a part of language! pragmatics is essentially context as it relates to language, and pragmatics is a part of linguistics. languages gaining case complexity largely happens by affixation of prepositions - i can't think of any examples off the top of my head but you'll have to take my word on it occurring.
asherah··on Hand of Irulegi: ancient artefact could help trace origins of Basque language
more cases doesn't necessarily make a language more complex, cases are just one way to communicate a piece of information about a noun. it isn't necessarily more complex to have a separate locative case than to say "in/on/at X"!
asherah··on Hand of Irulegi: ancient artefact could help trace origins of Basque language
essentially no grammar change is a "simplification". every language has the same complexity in it's grammar, it mostly depends where that complexity lies

you might just be confusing complexity with big words or large tables of grammatical affixes. over time, languages tend to either get more synthetic (closer to a 1=1 correspondence between words and morphemes) or agglutinative (many more morphemes per word), and it wraps around at the end - premium synthetic languages then start tacking words together, some start making other constructions, and suddenly you're on the agglutinative side!

asherah··on Celsius exposes the names of all customers and recent transactions in filing
previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33116940
asherah··on Closing a 30 pixel gap between native and web
this looks great! hopefully this can be better standardized soon
asherah··on Show HN: Hueflake – Easily build your ideal editor theme in minutes
the themes don't appear to be applying to the text for me (firefox 104.2.0 on android)
asherah··on Systems Programming and Memory Safety
why does this article spend so long talking about how memory safe languages don't solve a problem that... they never claim to solve? yes, you can still write vulnerable code in any language. i can't imagine a way to design a programming language that prevents you from writing a remote shell regardless, even with all the funding and competent programmers in the world, people still write memory bugs. i don't think it's necessary to rewrite everything in rust or whatever, but it's probably a good idea to rethink writing new things in c if you can help it
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