darby_nine

> Reacting fast is the least the vendor could do.

And yet, so few do. Let's remind ourselves the bar sank into the floor a long time ago.

Right! Imagine how big they'd be if they hadn't given up on microtransactions in the 90s. I'd guess not trying to be broken up by the DOJ.

This is truly interesting from a dialectical perspective. The current narrative is that data is simultaneously infinitely valuable and presents zero liability. This contradiction can't hold forever (though it can hold longer than any of us are alive, of course)

I suspect it will break in the direction of the narrative that "data wasn't that valuable anyway", regardless of how disingenuous this sentiment is. Nothing else preserves the economic machine while simultaneously dismissing the concerns of consumers. Perhaps we'll get special protection for stuff like SSNs to make it seem like politicians are acting on the behalf of their constituents (even though a competent manager of a rational society would simply ban use of ssn as a form of identification as this is basically public information.

It's only ambiguous if you let it be. The rest is just implementation details.

I'm struggling to think of definitions of these terms where this sentiment might seem coherent

> It also supports the conclusion that it is not actively transmissible between humans, yet.

Sorry, I'm not following. How does a high level of prevalence show a lack of virality?

Google basically destroyed itself when it decided to become an ad network rather than a dumb pipe you pay to access. You have to pick a base to sell to. Selling to two different bases at once (advertisers/seo and actual users) means both resent you and neither respect you.

When google gets split up the whole world will cheer.

> This is a virtue. We can do whatever we want with the computer we own and use.

You certainly don't need to do it with a single line of powershell though. At least, not without intentionally opting into it. For the most part on a daily basis I just want to use my computer, not modify it.

Anyway, at the very least most functionality should be sandboxed so that if someone does something without your consent, it can't do much damage. Though this wasn't the original intention, leveraging user privileges and sandboxing applications by user is an effective way to do this.

Besides what kind of moron would choose proprietary software if they wanted control of their machine? It's inherently a contradictory impulse.

> It is meant to be a good tool for progressive enhancement text markup, such as stylizing hypertext or math equations.

Well, at least hypertext. I've seen the disaster that is MathML.

> No-one forced you to use all the complex bits in XML.

Just parsing XML alone is hugely painful, let alone implementing the rest of the stuff like XSLT, namespaces, validation, xpath, etc etc. Plus, once you've done this, you still need a natural way to map this into domain types, or you need to force people into a visitor pattern or some other awkward deserialization technique. JSON just requires a single JSONValue sum type.

XML has its place, but it'd have to be a pretty extreme case of needing rigor or a tree where I need to be able to peg arbitrary attributes onto the nodes in order to see it as attractive. Most APIs won't benefit from all of XML's features.

For instance I maintain a podcasting/rss feed library and XML (And more importantly, the way people publish invalid xml) makes me really wish they had gone with a different format in the day that was harder to fuck up.

Oddly I associate `chile` with the pepper and `chili` with the stew. Curiously chili pepper seems to be the common spelling around where I live so I have no clue where I picked this up.

> But I can't help noticing that Json is gaining more and more XML-like functionality through things like schemas and JsonPath, as people slowly realise why XML had those functions they're now having to replace.

I think there's an analogy here to static typing and gradual typing. XML is a massive pain in the ass to implement and JSON is often good enough. Only having to implement the features you plan on using is quite nice.

> have nothing to do with markup

Yes, it's a badly named language. It has nothing to do with markup. As always, intentions don't matter at all, and it's the best tool we have for certain types of structures.

> In my experience, anything XML-related seems to be the product of simplicity-hating architecture astronauts with zero consideration for efficiency, possibly as a way of justifying their existence and continued employment.

I am very confused by people who have emotional reactions to technologies. XML has a number of capabilities that are very difficult to represent in other documents without creating an unreadable mess. XML is more than just the worst SOAP api you've used.

Sure, this is the natural reaction of people living in the imperial core, but this isn't true for the majority of people in the world, especially as global warming accelerates.

World-systems theory is typically the alternative to the theory that pax americana (i.e. peace for me but not for thee) is universally desirable.

Yes, but "safety" or "peace" is not always desirable. MLK himself said it best: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/whe...

A short snippet:

> The next day after Autherine was dismissed the paper came out with this headline: 'Things are quiet in Tuscaloosa today. There is peace on the campus of the university of Alabama.' Yes things were quiet in Tuscaloosa. yes there was peace on the campus, but it was peace at a great price. It was peace that had been purchased at the exorbitant price of an inept trustee board succoming to the whims and carprices of a vicious mob. It was peace that had been purchased at the price of allowing mobocracy to reign supreme over democracy. It was peace that had been purchased at the price of the capitulating to the forces of darkness. This is the type of peace that all men of goodwill hate. It is the type of peace that is obnoxious. It is the type of peace that stinks in the nostrils of the almighty God.

Of course, you could either view this sentiment as trivially applying to international politics or so different as to be a category error. But it's enough of an opening to suggest that these loaded terms are not as easily transferrable to ethical context as invested parties might want you to believe. It is difficult for folks to place their values firmly before external pressures when a country is much less empathizable with than an obviously abused person, but I think americans would be surprised at how giving a little might invite a larger revelation about their role in the world stage than desired by the powers that be.

In fact, you should assume they are. This doesn't imply the network doesn't have utility for a given actor.

> The fact that we can't pin down a strong effect on human health outcomes after decades of exposure should be a relief.

I can't say this means much to me when exposure to plastic has been accelerating that entire time.

Still, I do sincerely appreciate skepticism as a useful part of any dialogue about hypothesized health impacts.

Personally, I don't see an issue with avoiding consumer-grade plastic except when necessary.

I'm sure they already are.

> Well, we've been exposed to microplastics for decades, but what does the evidence say? Afaict, not much.

The revelation that you are likely to have microplastics suffused throughout your body seems far more meaningful than "not much".

The effects of this are unknown, but it seems reasonable to be concerned about potential harm until it's effects are studied in vivo and it's statistically not more harmful than the utility we get out of it. That alone seems like decades of research. You don't need to throw up your hands and act like you can't hypothesize even if the answers are out of your reach.

This is very cool and I could have seriously used this when recovering from RSI! However, it's not exactly a great argument that this is better than a keyboard and mouse for those who are abled enough to use them fully.

> Easier async.

I was on board until this one. Async is a rough spot for rust, but I find the async strategy swift went with absolutely baffling and difficult to reason about.

...compared to what? Growth is just one way of representing market health, and it's one that is typically pushed by capital for obvious reasons.

If you're talking about efficiency or productivity, you don't need markets for either of these, you just need any kind of economy to work with. Industrialization only intersects with markets (or capitalism for that matter), they aren't the same thing.

Ok, but what i said is true regardless of SEO, and that SEO has also fed back into english before LLMs were a thing. If you only train on those subsets you'll also end up with a chatbot that doesn't speak in a way we'll identify as natural english.

> LLMs are not crazy good because they can generate stories, they are crazy good because they are a very very good interface to humans.

Do you have an example of a tool that uses an LLM as an interface? Seems like that'd be the fastest way to show people this is a superior interface.

We're obviously a long ways away from star-trek style natural interaction with computers, so I'm curious what you're doing that can work today. Aside from straightforward content generation, of course.

Aunt may's brownie recipe (or at least her thoughts on it) are likely something you'd want if you want to reflect how humans use language. Both news-style and encyclopedia-style writing represent a pretty narrow slice.

"Our" it ain't ours, that's the whole point of not being communist. So who cares where the products come from

Too much interaction with falun gong.

Regardless, I'm talking about competency. I don't endorse any particular state, culture, or ideology.

> Feels like the main thing holding this company back is the CEO

Use has also dropped, no? There's serious questions about long term revenue generation. Ancestry.com doesn't require selling your genetic code to collaborate on geneology.

Man the term must have changed since I was in school; i thought garbage collection was a much more general concept than a specific tactic to achieve this end of automatic memory collection. Pity, it was a useful term.

It's worth noting many others also consider automatic reference counting to be a form of gc, albeit one with different strengths and weaknesses than stack- and heap-scanning varieties