blackhole

You should have a dedicated page for Star Citizen that's just one giant 256pt font "NOPE"

It's interesting that, every time an article comes up like this, I wonder why I never seem to experience the same kind of digital addiction or negative feelings that other people do - and then it turns out I'm already doing almost everything the article suggests for "unplugging". I've taken an hour long walk every single day for the past 15 years, and shower, and make sure I'm not getting overwhelmed with notifications. Yet, I feel no desire to interact with the physical world. I prefer being online, perhaps because I know how to handle it properly. I wonder how much of our misery is caused by poor user-experience defaults that people don't think to change (like always-on notifications). We get used to a corporate-designed hellscape and think that's the only way to experience a digital existence.

That is a... bold assumption to make. Not just for Microsoft but for any large corporation.

Please note: The entire "windows" portion of that article has largely been resolved at this point, because I fixed it myself. Some of the more egregious documentation problems have been fixed, but others remain unresolved.

Unfortunately, we have since discovered even more insane behavior: https://github.com/terralang/terra/issues/460

Given the number of corporate apologists floating around this site, I fully expect that the top voted comment here will be some form of "rent-seeking behavior isn't always bad". Someone will point at the GDP going up and say this justifies literally everything that corporations do. Someone will draw comparisons between two lines on a graph and say this is why Facebook never did anything wrong.

Is this really what we've sunk to? Is this really what everyone thinks? Are we so jaded by the failures of our economic system we can't even tell when it's falling apart?

Surely, even the most staunch supporter of the free market can admit that at a bare minimum, capitalism in this country is in desperate need of better anti-trust regulation to stop monopolies from crushing all competition. Surely we can admit that simply making a bunch of tech startups with weird website URLs is not going to fix the economy by themselves, and might even be making the problem worse.

Of course, given that we can't even agree that global warming is a problem as the arctic permafrost melts, I'm not particularly hopeful.

The inNative WebAssembly Runtime ran into this problem as well, and includes wasm_malloc.c, which can be linked against your application to provide a simple malloc() implementation without having to write one yourself or depend on WASI.

https://github.com/innative-sdk/innative/wiki/Compile-C---wi...

Of course, it'll be a lot easier to simply depend on WASI instead and re-implement standard libraries on top of it.

I think it's amazing how a lot of comments on EFF's resignation from W3C (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15278883) seemed to focus on how they were being unreasonable about EME, and that allowing companies to have DRM is necessary. Yet, both then and now, the EFF keeps making the point that none of the DRM even works! It was never ABOUT the DRM. The companies don't give a shit about "copyright laws" or people "stealing movies". As this article very clearly demonstrates, the companies are using this to crush competition. That's it. There's no other use for this.

The DRM is a legal excuse to sue competitors out of existence. The existing EME-compliant DRM implementations don't even work. This whole thing is a farce.

I appreciate the point of view this post is providing. It is always important to think about the potential limitations of AI, and the fact that once again, we may hit the ceiling of our current attempts at AI much more quickly than we realize, and no singularity will ever occur. We need to think about how to solve our problems realistically, now, without waiting for a godly super AI to come solve them for us.

However, what's bizarre is that he is painting a world that is already wrong. In particular:

"We won’t have massive, perfectly coordinated networks with optimised flow and distribution — think traffic networks (those self-driving Teslas that act as taxis when you don’t need them)"

But... we will. We're already making it. It might not work very well at first, but automated cars are a real thing, and they are going to happen. We have preliminary automated cars right now. Perhaps he is instead claiming that our autonomous cars won't scale, but this too makes no sense. Of course we can make them scale. Once we've solved the hard problem, which is actually driving the cars around and not hitting things, solving distribution and flow is almost trivial. We have all sorts of systems for solving distribution problems and finding maximal flow along a network. There's even an entire class of algorithms to solve it with[1], which we currently use, right now, to solve things like scheduling airplane flights.

And then he brings up a point that seems completely perpendicular to the entire rest of the post:

"We won’t have total surveillance (à la Reynold’s Mechanism or Brin’s Transparent Society)"

This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with cryptography. Whether or not the singularity does or doesn't happen is completely irrelevant. Indeed, it currently looks like we're headed towards having total surveillance with or without the singularity, unless we do something about our privacy laws.

While we shouldn't assume AI will fix all our problems, the examples provided in this post are bizarre, to say the least.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_flow_problem

One potentially alarming sentence in this article is "Wix will open up DeviantArt’s repository of art and creative community to the Wix platform, giving Wix’s users access to that work to use in their own site building."

Exactly what do they mean by that? Will it be opt-in? Will it only cover art that's already under Creative Commons? Will be it all Creative Commons? Does a Wix site count as commercial use? I can't imagine people would be very happy about their art suddenly being available for use elsewhere without their consent.

Hopefully, this is much ado about nothing, and Wix won't do anything terrible, but we've seen technology companies do stupid things before. At the very least, it would be nice if they elaborated on their plans regarding this.

So, from the comments here, it seems that people are under the impression that mastering engineers work off of the individual instrument tracks (the stems). This is not true. The article itself explains that a mixing engineer takes the individual tracks and mixes them. The final mixdown is then sent to the mastering engineer. It's called "mastering" because this stage of processing happens on a single track - the master track. Buying music in a pre-mastered form would still be a single lossless file, which is no different from Bandcamp allowing you to download the final lossless mastered version. The pre-mastered tracks will just sound worse and have wildly different volume levels depending on how they're normalized.

If you want the actual stems of the song, that would actually be the music in it's pre-mixed form. It wouldn't even be mixed at that point, let alone mastered.

As a washingtonian who has been strongly in support of charter schools for years without any knowledge of Gates' involvement, this story seems to be choosing a very strange case-study for criticizing billionaire philanthropists. Perhaps it has not occurred to the author that many people support charter schools because they're actually a good idea?

The fundamental problem with saying that this money should go to the public school system in order to make it better is that we don't know how to make the school system better. It doesn't matter how much money is thrown at anyone in education because everyone is doing it wrong. Throwing more money at the public educational system will simply result in schools that are exceedingly good at cranking out students that excel at taking tests and memorizing useless facts instead of actually being good at something.

Every argument against Charter schools that I heard during the debate was focused almost universally on money. It was always about money. Teachers seem convinced that in order to make our school system work, they just need more money, when in fact the entire public educational system has already driven off a cliff.

Charter schools won't be better than public schools because of money, they'll be better than public schools because they try fundamentally different ways of teaching kids. Nobody can fix the educational system until we find better ways to educate children. Until we can find a way to instill creative problem solving and encourage innovative thinking instead of violently shoving children's brains into boxes, nothing is going to change, no matter how much money is thrown at the problem.

In a world where computers are better at following instructions than any human being ever will be, creativity is the one single advantage we have, and the regulations hovering over the public school system are doing their best to utterly destroy any creative spirit our children might have had. Our society is being shaped not by the kind of intelligence that is measured by a test, but by the innovative spirit of people who think outside the box. It's time the educational system started thinking outside the box, too.

I desperately, desperately want this feature, but I am glad that the committee is determined to implement it correctly. C++ already has a convoluted, complex syntax, it doesn't need to be made any more complicated.

I only started referring to MS as M$ after I had been working there for a year. I joined them with cautious optimism, because the new CEO had finally gotten rid of that atrocious stack ranking system.

That optimism did not last long. I only stayed there as long as I did because of how much they were paying me. Referring to them as "M$" is disturbingly appropriate given that all they do is to throw huge amounts of money at problems until they go away.

After seeing what goes on inside that company, I immediately tried to move to Linux, but it just isn't practical (http://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.th...). At the very least, I won't be upgrading to Windows 10 until 2020.

Full Disclosure: I worked at M$ from 2014-2015.

MS has some very talented programmers. They're not very common, but they exist. The problem is that the entire company is completely and totally focused on developing an absurd number of new features and products, giving them completely unrealistic deadlines, and then shipping software on those deadlines no matter how half-assed or buggy it is.

The idea is that everything is serviceable over the internet now, so they can just "fix it later", except they never do. This perpetuates a duct-tape culture that refuses to actually fix problems and instead rewards teams that find ways to work around them. The talented programmers are stuck working on code that, at best, has to deal with multiple badly designed frameworks from other teams, or at worst work on code that is simply scrapped. New features are prioritized over all but the most system-critical bugs, and teams are never given any time to actually focus on improving their code. The only improvements that can happen must be snuck in while implementing new features.

As far as M$ is concerned, all code is shit, and the only thing that matters is if it works well enough to be shown at a demo and shipped. Needless to say, I don't work there anymore.

We have a justice system, it's just hopelessly corrupt and biased in favor of those in power.

I've seen cases where windows explorer will arbitrarily decide to stop updating an entire folder tree for no apparent reason, at which point being able to push F5 suddenly becomes very handy. Of course, it doesn't help when I tell explorer to create a new folder which doesn't show up, thereby making it impossible to assign it a name until you refresh and then find the "New Folder" you just created.

I can't decide if this is brilliant or terrifying.

This looks like a nice CSS framework, but I am beginning to regret my choice of username.

I love how ironic your account name is in this context :)

After reading this, I am more convinced than ever that macroeconomics has no bloody idea what the hell is going on. We have a bunch of fancy models and then argue over whose model is the least broken.

Oh great, now my desire to not cause brain damage to myself makes people think I have something to hide.

wonderful.

What disturbs me most about this is the complete lack of empathy people have for the guy. Just look at the comments on the link explaining that Flappy Bird was removed from the app store.

Our culture is so completely and utterly obsessed with money that everyone says he's an idiot for taking down an app without realizing the chaos one goes through in a situation like that. They hurl insults like "weak" and "fragile" as though someone isn't allowed to be shy ever since the internet happened. The sheer amount of greed on display in debates about this game is deeply unnerving, and it seems as though modern culture has forgotten that there are many things that are more important than money. It seems as though our entire country is hopelessly addicted to accumulating more and more pieces of green paper, only to be puzzled when having a large number in their bank account fails to actually solve any of their problems.

Half the comments on this page attack the following quote:

"For instance, once I was accused of being emotionally attached to my code"

Despite the fact that in the very next paragraph she points out that this was an irrational response provoked by her situation.

The comments here are completely and utterly missing the point of this article. It is about perception, and the subtle, agonizing torture that sexism inflicts on a subconscious level that is ingrained in the tech world on such a deep level that it is extremely difficult to properly reason about.

I do not have very much faith in your conclusions when you are pretending an entire paragraph of the article doesn't exist.

To this day, I still don't own a smartphone. This will eventually change, because I need it for more practical things, like having a map and being able to search google for things while I'm on the road.

But what completely boggles my mind is actually letting the phone buzz me for anything other than an actual phone call. Even when I'm at my desktop the only notifications I get are skype conversations, and sometimes I turn those off too.

I think the problem isn't phones, it's notifications. We have become addicted to notifications on both phones and the desktop.

Yes, but by that same logic, no music is impossible to play. Just keep adding people to help you. Eventually, you'll be able to play it. This is why the entire "impossible" argument rapidly stops making sense, because you simply have to draw an arbitrary line somewhere, and it becomes a question of impracticality, not impossibility.

As a pianist and an electronic musician, I never have any qualms about making music I can't play.

This, however, is just ridiculous.

The thing is, it's not at all hard to write a piano piece that's unplayable. Simply add a third note group far enough above or below the existing two note groups and it will be physically impossible to play (unless someone else helps you). It doesn't need to be a grotesque fountain of millions of notes to be unplayable. This is better examined not as impossible music, but as an experiment that asks the question "how many notes can you use at the same time and still make a coherent song?"

The debate between music that's playable and music that's impossible would be better served by more realistic examples, instead of a small sub-culture.

These posts have been around ever since I started to learn how to program. When I was a wee little lad, everyone told me that C++ was going the way of the dinosaur and no one would ever need to learn it.

That was 10 years ago. It still hasn't happened. Meanwhile, blog post after blog post is written about how C++ is dying when it simply isn't. Maybe it will happen sometime in the future, but as of yet no language solves the same problems that C++ does. Not D, not Rust, not Go. Every single one of these arguments is colored by the specific problems the author has spent their life solving. If none of those problems benefit from C++, then they will inevitably come to the conclusion that C++ is useless, and then yet another "C++ is dying" or "C++ considered harmful" blogpost is written. Meanwhile, reality doesn't care.

The problem with moon hoax theories is that, in the modern day, we're accustomed to extremely realistic CGI. What we don't realize is that in 1969, it would have been harder to FAKE the moon landings than to actually land on the moon.

This video explains why: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGXTF6bs1IU

Sarcasm. You're missing it.

"Not More Goddamn Cat Photos"