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kakarot

1,527 karma · joined June 22, 2016

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kakarot··on Why we’re switching to calendar versioning
I think IntelliJ's 20XX.X model works great. Sequester big changes for annual upgrades and introduce minor features throughout the year.
kakarot··on Fucking Color Picker
I was really excited until I saw Electron at the bottom.

A color picker is a tantamount example of an application that does not belong on the Electron platform.

kakarot··on Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image
You are arguing against a strawman. I never made any such claim that "her existence is a distraction from the science".

I never made any comment as to her gender being a distraction, either?

Your post is very mean-spirited, ignorant of the views I just expressed, and honestly I don't like your implication that I am not familiar with the accomplishments of women in the past, especially in my field. Or that I have a problem with their gender. Ada Lovelace and Joan of Arc are two of my greatest inspirations! Cut the obvious virtue signalling.

My entire point is that gender has no bearing on this discussion. It's a discussion about misattributing a massive group effort to one individual. The point is that gender should not play a role in either direction, because that would be sexist. Everything you've extrapolated upon you just pulled out of the aether and not my mouth.

kakarot··on Julian Assange arrested in London
> So, in the initial phase, he gets to decide that charges against him are bogus, and that he doesn't need to submit?

Are you supposed to let your accuser have 100% say in whether you are guilty, even if you believe the system is rigged against you and you are acting in good faith?

Such an attitude is subservient and enables totalitarian governments to operate under the guise of justice.

You have to understand that nothing gives any body of government legitimacy just because other governments recognize it. The only thing that gives your government power is your permission as a citizen. My country was founded on this sentiment.

When Martin Luther King said:[0] "I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law,"

he was not thinking of whistleblowers and the fact that their greatest impact on society comes from maintaining their sovereignty in spite of globally coordinated efforts to censor and imprison them.

Assange was operating in good faith that his life's work might end the moment he stepped foot back in Sweden. He chose not to recognize the authority of a State he was actively politically engaged with. Countries do this every day.

Just because he doesn't have an army behind him to legitimize his claim to sovereignty, doesn't mean he doesn't have the right to that claim and the right to achieve his sovereignty by any means that can be ethically justified.

To claim that he does not get the right to decide for himself, as all men do, whether to recognize what a particular group of people with guns and land command of him, is to claim that he is not human, because that is a natural human right.

I have personally been the victim of an illegal charge despite overwhelming evidence in my favor, and received the maximum possible fines and jail sentence. Going to jail made sense because I wanted to just get my life back on track after my government destroyed it, as soon as possible. But it was not the morally responsible thing to do. I didn't even commit the crime I was convicted for. The morally responsible thing to do would have been to not submit myself to the illegitimate city government which prosecuted me.

> I'd love to know what civil freedoms of yours you believe are going to be impinged by virtue of this post.

Any number of things.

My country asks for social media accounts when applying for a passport, sure it's optional now, but give it time.

Automation and machine analysis will ensure my Hacker News account factors into my Social Credit score.

If you get out from under your rock you would see similar things happening in many countries across the globe.

[0] https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....

kakarot··on Julian Assange arrested in London
As someone who has gotten the maximum end of that upper range for the most bogus (and illegal) charge possible after trying to fight it in court instead of tucking my tail between my legs... Yes. You are correct. An overwhelming majority of judges take their jobs very personally and imagine themselves to be infallible embodiments of the law.
kakarot··on Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image
Thanks for mentioning the Ted talk, I'm about to check it out now.

The first headline on Google for me when searching "black hole image" is this very BBC article.

It was clearly written to grab the reader's attention, and it grabs it away from the actual phenomenon as well as all of the other brilliant minds who came together to make this happen.

She led the CS team. But very-long-baseline interferometry has been around for half a century. Heino Falcke proposed the experiment. Shep Doeleman led the entire EHT initiative. Scientists around the world brought techniques to the table.

I imagine even Bouman takes issue with being labeled "the scientist behind the first image of the black hole". She is surely aware and appreciative of the massive international effort involved.

kakarot··on Julian Assange arrested in London
In Assange's situation, I would have made the same gamble.

It's only logical to hedge a potentially decade-long sentence with a likely inescapable two year sentence.

When the charges are bogus and you know that they are being used to censor your work, which positively impacts the lives of millions of people, you may also consider it your civil duty to evade a wrongful arrest.

I'm incapable of providing a good reason why Assange should have just submitted to the bogus rape charges.

And the fact that sympathizing with him in this regard in an open forum has a high chance of impacting my civil freedoms at some point in the future just magnifies the impact of the work he was trying to achieve when all of this started.

kakarot··on Reasons to turn down the transmit power of your Wi-Fi (2017)
Sure, and if you stare into a focused microwave emitter you'll cook your brains.

That's like saying light is harmful because looking directly at the sun or a high-powered laser will blind you.

Focused beams are outside the scope of this question because we're dealing with cell transmitters.

kakarot··on Julian Assange arrested in London
I don't particularly classify that as a heinous crime.
kakarot··on Julian Assange arrested in London
Of course, he was arrested on completely unrelated bogus charges, so that we never have to have the conversation about whether or not he deserves prison for whistle-blowing.
kakarot··on Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image
Hacker News isn't some monolithic community. Each time, you're seeing different people express their opinions. There's no hypocrisy there.

I think it's friggin awesome to see women in science. But even if Bouman was male I would still be cautious of attributing so much of an international collaboration to one person in the form of "Meet the _____ behind the first black hole image". That phrasing disregards too much hard work. I see no reason to offer Bouman special treatment in this regard at the expense of others solely because of her gender. That isn't equality.

kakarot··on Reasons to turn down the transmit power of your Wi-Fi (2017)
It's kind of a pointless question. If you believe RF can hurt you, it has no bearing on the fact that it can't and doesn't.
kakarot··on VPN – Very Precarious Narrative
I didn't get any money when my cell provider was caught multiple times selling my location history to anyone with a buck, including dangerous vigilantes.
kakarot··on Facebook Team Lands at Delhi Man's House for ID Verification over Political Post
If Facebook accounts for the overwhelming majority of the entire internet experience for some demographics, where am I supposed to fight for change?
kakarot··on Study: Two Monitors or One Ultrawide
Some of us will change our entire lifestyle just to find reasons to donate screen space to live data streams for no reason other than that it looks cool and satisfies our deep-seated nerd fantasies.
kakarot··on Facebook Team Lands at Delhi Man's House for ID Verification over Political Post
> Facebooks clearly states that if you want to run any kind of sponsored posts relating to political content you have to get verified.

I can see a problem with this methodology in that most things can be seen as "political", specifically regarding human rights, and in some oppressive communities revealing your identity while promoting human rights is, if not a death sentence, then at least an invitation to harassment from local authorities.

kakarot··on I’m only making business card sized games now
I couldn't put it down. I think they unnecessarily skimped on things like animation frames, the amount of badges, maybe one more level... but it still came across as an earnest effort by 7 people working remotely on a budget.

It had a fraction of the budget and development man hours of Yooka-Laylee and yet came out better in pretty much every conceivable way. The controls may not be as tight as Celeste's but it's the best 3D platformer I've played in years.

kakarot··on Australia Passes Law to Punish Social Media Companies for Violent Posts
Cool, guess I won't be starting my independently-owned Australian social network SMB anytime soon thanks to this anti-SMB, pro-monopoly legislation.

Glad we continue to support the competitive free market with forward-thinking legislation such as this. If Facebook wants to shut down my independent Australian social network by secretly paying people to spread violent propaganda on my platform until the government shuts me down in a war of attrition, that's their God-given right.

kakarot··on Australia Passes Law to Punish Social Media Companies for Violent Posts
If you have to migrate as a result of your government's tyrannical attack on freedom, you will be punishing them even more by assisting in the country's brain drain.

A tough sacrifice, but sometimes we must make sacrifices for our freedoms.

kakarot··on 540M Facebook Records Exposed
Who stands to gain for freely releasing this data?
kakarot··on I’m only making business card sized games now
A great artist makes things that are exceptionally unique and thought-provoking. A successful artist makes things that have wide enough appeal to generate sustainable income. Whether the piece is fun is irrelevant to the caliber of an artist, I think. Some artists toil night and day for finished products that mean nothing to anyone but them.
kakarot··on I’m only making business card sized games now
Celeste was incredible. Can't wait for the free DLC! Have you played A Hat in Time yet?
kakarot··on Texting Means Never Having to Say Goodbye
It just depends on the nature of the message. If one side is just amassing a list of things or a complete idea to digest on the recepient's own time, with the mutual understanding that people lead busy lives, it's a bit different than say, someone repeatedly ignoring a particular request or general attempts to start a live conversation.
kakarot··on Texting Means Never Having to Say Goodbye
That seems more extreme than just becoming less than friends. Why tarnish a good rolodex? A contact list isn't a friend list.
kakarot··on Texting Means Never Having to Say Goodbye
The lack of multiple responses over an extended period of time seems like as big a hint as you can get.

If you're standing next to someone and they ignore your attempts at getting their attention, how long should you continue before finding something better to do?

kakarot··on Texting Means Never Having to Say Goodbye
Coming from IRC and ICQ and AIM and all that, most of my conversations were asynchronous in one sense.

But in another sense, they weren't, as I would often elect to set my status across my services as Away in order to curb the expectations of some people who were particularly in need of attention.

I guess that part hasn't changed, though. Just today I had to explicitly set boundaries with someone about how often they can realistically expect to command my attention away from my task at hand and toward my phone.

kakarot··on Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)
If I'd hazard a guess before reading the article, it's because of the transpilation phase to regular Javascript. That doesn't come for free.
kakarot··on Homosexuality in giraffes and other non-human animals
I guess I define sexuality in the proper literal sense as "Who you have sex with" vs "Who you find attractive. Because when framed that way, attractive becomes subjectively defined.

Sexually attractive? Well yes, if you're humping it you find it sexually attractive.

Psychologically attractive? Only if you have some kind of complex against being labeled 'homosexual' or 'bisexual' while still engaging in coutius with other people of the same sex.

Emotionally/Intellectually attractive? Well, personally I don't find myself sexually attracted to people (and in effect, things) whom I can't satisfactorily engage with on an intellectual and emotional level. I know some people are different and will fuck anything that moves. I've had people tell me so themselves. But I don't think the "Men Who Have Sex With Men" label discusses intellectual stimulation as a stipulation.

kakarot··on Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness
Your entire premise of lacking sympathy for an oversimplified group of people that only exists in your head was a bit condescending.
kakarot··on Homosexuality in giraffes and other non-human animals
The article you linked mentioned the term was coined during the rise of the AIDS/HIV epidemic when we needed to statistically account for men who had sex with other men but whom did not feel comfortable identifying with the words "gay" or "bisexual".

I'm personally in the camp that if you have sex with genders outside the opposite of your own, then you're either gay or bisexual. I don't differentiate between whether you're attracted to the same sex or just seriously, uncontrollably horny and desperate to shag anything with an orifice.

I guess I still don't see the relevance of a distinction beyond that of psycho-semantics.

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