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asjw

81 karma · joined September 18, 2019

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asjw··on Mark Zuckerberg Stoked Washington’s Fears About TikTok
I don't understand if this has to be considered an answer to the previous post, it sound more like a reaction

But if

> China is bad because it is a horrific human rights abuser without democratic elections.

What about US where people have SIX times the chances of being shot and killed in the streets?

(1 every 100k VS 6 every 100k)

I mean: safety is a human right, especially in democratic western supposedly civilized countries

To find another country with such bad homicide stats you have to look at undeveloped countries run by criminal cartels or warlords

asjw··on There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology (2019)
A bank is not a single entity, it's made of people converging after reaching consensus

There are a lot of banks, with different interests that usually compete with each other and work under regulations that have been discussed and approved after reaching consensus

There are several different central banks, that work together under regulations discussed and approved because they reached consensus

The "decentralised" exchange already exists

asjw··on Show HN: HN Demetricator – An extension that removes upvote and comment counts
Back in the days I was there :)

In late 80s I was actively involved in some of the BBS of my city, that also gave access to Usenet, engaging mainly in cyberpunk, science fiction and C programming

Eternal September is still going on

asjw··on Show HN: HN Demetricator – An extension that removes upvote and comment counts
That's actually a great idea! I would also abolish votes in general and only sort comments chronologically. users could vote and see the posts/comments ordered by their votes that would not be public

The "first" kind of comments are easy to detect, so I think they wouldn't be a big problem

The chances that a post written later in the game will become one of the most voted because it's really a good comment are close to none anyway

Another interesting feature would be highlight and prioritize content written by users you follow, based on some simple rule like how many votes you gave them before or how many interactions you already had in the past

But downvotes are a prize and a status, you have to reach a certain amount of karma points to be able to downvote something so I guess unfortunately they are here to stay

asjw··on The Gay Marriages of a Nineteenth-Century Prison Ship
There's a rule 34 in porn, but also a rule 34 in history: if it happened, Romans have already done it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras_(freedman)

asjw··on The Slack Social Network
Relevance. if the search results has less relevance and historical data has lower importance compared to spikes in interest at the moment of the search, it's worse

For example medical related searches right now prioritize covid related results, they are important _now_, but they are less important than general statistical data

A general purpose search engine shouldn't be about what social networks talk more about

asjw··on H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)
x265 ffmpeg
asjw··on De-escalating social media conflict
Unfortunately for you I am exactly from southern Europe, from Rome in Italy to be precise.

I think you should visit here, I would show you how much noise people from other countries make, especially Americans.

I'm sure you made it as a joke and I don't mind it, but this stereotypes must stop, for a simple reason: there is more to Europe than jokes about southerners.

We simply spend more time outside in the open because the weather is usually better, but any country has its weirdos, sometimes public is a park or an open market, sometimes it's a pub.

Swedes scream from their windows at night

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flogsta

Finns sweat a lot

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_profanity

Danish leave their kids outside in the strollers in the cold while they are inside a caffè or buying groceries

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21537988

Germans wear sandals with socks

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socks_and_sandals

English are dunk and violent

https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/88/9/10-010910/en/

French are rude and the fact that they try to hide it behind "other people don't understand us" makes it even more obvious. Ironically they think the anglofones are the loud ones and I mostly agree on this with them.

And, of course, Americans are obese

https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/11/share-of-adults-d...

asjw··on De-escalating social media conflict
Any brand wants potential customers

And social networks have hundreds of millions of them

Do you think Coca Cola cares if KKK members drink it and bottles of Coke are shown in pictures of their rallies?

Brand awareness is more important to them

Starbucks cups with name spelled wrong are the perfect example: people think they are funny and post the picture of the cup with the Starbucks logo making the brand more popular

So what seem an honest mistake is actually a well thought brand awareness campaign

asjw··on De-escalating social media conflict
There is no way that something that is not enforceable will succeed though.

Plus forgiveness works only on then forgiver side, nothing stop others to keep doing what they are doing after you forgave them.

I would argue that the main reason we get along is laws, not forgiveness.

Any society has written (laws) and unwritten (social rules) norms that regulate the interactions between members.

People don't yell in public, usually, because they've been taught it's wrong and people, generally, tend to respect what they've been taught on certain degrees, especially when it is easy to verify those teachings: nobody yells in public, those who do are reprimanded, it must really be a wrong thing to do.

If you forgive someone yelling at kids because their basketball ended up in their garden you could feel better, but are enabling bad behaviour that should be challenged instead.

asjw··on The Millennium Falcon (2016)
I've seen it, several times, and I am both an Jodorowski's huge fan and an avid reader of the books

I'm a dreamer and I really hope that Villeneuve's Dune will bring some of those what ifs to life

Knowing that Jodorowski's work gave us Alien as we know it it's a gift nonetheless

asjw··on Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in a new gigapixel image
Even though it went through different restoration processes, the original is still the original

Much like the Amphitheatre Nimes is not closer to the original Colosseum, even though it suffered much less damages over the centuries and had virtually no visible restoration (some of the Colosseum ones are quite bad honestly)

The last supper importance is not just the painting itself, but also who originally made it and the history behind it.

asjw··on The BEAM Book (2017)
They where created more or less in the same "old days"

Erlang is from 1986, BEAM from 1991-1992

asjw··on Robin Williams, an acid trip, and moral panic: “Blame Canada” at the Oscars
In Italy we work approximately 220 days a year, 5 days a week, we have 52 weekends (as everybody else) 24 days of payed holidays and another 10 days of national holidays.

six months, 6 days a week it's about 160 days.

Working an hour and half more everyday day is like working 7/7, so about 185 working days.

It's totally doable.

But admittedly not for a long time and not if you're forced to do it

asjw··on Robin Williams, an acid trip, and moral panic: “Blame Canada” at the Oscars
The documentary about South Park studios production process "6 days to air" is pretty great

I watch it regularly to not forget how to give everything you can in a short time span and still enjoy what you're doing

I learned to work 6 months/year and make a full year salary

I've been working at a more reasonable pace for the past few years, mostly because I'm not consulting anymore, but sprints have become more of a challenge that I still enjoy once or twice a year.

asjw··on DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
Because some protection is better than no protection

Why use a condom which doesn't protect you 100%?

asjw··on DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers
Yeah people burnt witches in the past ...

If they are confident that this feature has no privacy implications they are right to defend the point, despite what people say or think

People don't run DDG, the company

People can use another search engine if they want

I'll keep using DDG anyway

asjw··on Year old iPad runs x86_64 in emulation faster than the Surface natively
It's true, but for some workloads.

I wonder, and I really wish it's gonna be a game changer, how well they will behave on jobs that go on for hours or days at full CPU load.

asjw··on Apple declined to implement 16 Web APIs in Safari due to privacy concerns
A thousand dollars is 1/12 of the average Chinese annual salary

That's why they buy 99$ phones

You're comparing a few millions people living in SV with billions of people making less than 10 dollars a day and assuming that they have the same PPA and that they represent the entirety of the World's user opinions and/or will

asjw··on Apple declined to implement 16 Web APIs in Safari due to privacy concerns
> so the manufacturer protects you from these risks.

Gigabytes of pictures in an archive called "the fappening" say a different story.

asjw··on Apple declined to implement 16 Web APIs in Safari due to privacy concerns
I don't have to go full PWA to make useful apps

And don't have to go through an app store, creating an account, paying Apple, waiting for their opaque reviews and giving them 30% of whatever amount I make through my app.

Android has Firefox, thanks to Apple iOS doesn't.

asjw··on Apple declined to implement 16 Web APIs in Safari due to privacy concerns
But a billion+ users do Android on a 99$ phone
asjw··on Apple declined to implement 16 Web APIs in Safari due to privacy concerns
Vast majority of users go back home and browse on their laptops because a big screen is better than a credit card

Vast majority of users will use whatever you throw at them, especially if they're friction free (no account needed, no credit card, no updates, no space occupied, immediately available, even on slow networks, etc. etc.)

asjw··on Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development
Moderation hides content

That's the biggest limit of moderated forums, they only reflect the opinion of the most active groups who can steer the discussion helped by moderators who benefit from rewarding the largest groups instead of the best comments

If moderation was visible and moderators were forced to leave a note about why the moderation took place it would be a real discussion platform

HN is not

Slashdot is a lot better than many others in this regards, but it's not popular anymore and you can't make money on it, while a lot of people leave by posting shit on Reddit

Worse is better always wins

asjw··on Symbian Won
This really reminds me of good times

I started a company with friends to write games for phones, before they were smart

Our fist breakthrough was at E3 in LA with a game for Nokia 7650, but we worked on prototypes years before

My first mobile connection was with a Nokia 9000i communicator, I was working for an ISP at the time that gave them to us to test mobile connections, and it felt like a James Bond movie

I learned so much developing on Symbian, especially being a diligent C++ programmer on a system that wasn't really using standard C++

Fast forward 20 years, I work on backends in Erlang/Elixir and never touched mobile development again

J2ME was nice, but limited, I lost hope soon after when iPhones came out and it was clear that the mobile platform wouldn't be fun anymore

asjw··on Facebook accused of trying to decloak domain owners' personal Whois info
So Facebook should be considered a proxy for frauds delivered through Facebook.

I agree .

asjw··on Is WebP really better than JPEG?
Flash could do it
asjw··on My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
Well, both of the previous answers prove my point

US is a a dangerous country and the police is not doing a good job at all

If there are so many homicides, who should prevent them?

If after killing a hundred people a month (by shooting at them, I presented only the numbers of those killed by a police shooting) they can't even make a dent on the (horrible) numbers, it means they are doing a very bad job.

Tertium non datur

The mob kills less people here.

And we have at least two of the main five criminal organizations in the entire world.

asjw··on My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
Not to disagree with the post in general, but at a thousand/year shot and killed by the police in US, they probably are one of the most dangerous threat

For comparison in Italy in 2019 there have been 3 people killed by the police, and people have - rightfully IMO - complained every single time.

In US more than 1k (1040 to be precise) died shot by cops

If we compare the population, there should have been at least 180 victims of police gunning in Italy

That's clearly unacceptable.

Or, from another angle, it means that criminality in US is so much worse than the average EU country that it's ok to kill so many people in the name of safety.

asjw··on iOS 14 will let you change your default email and web browser apps
> I stick with Apple for the privacy.

The problema Is if you stick with Apple hardware there is no OS alternative

you're stuck with what the dictator (benevolent or not) decides

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