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kodoman

93 karma · joined August 13, 2026

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kodoman··on 25 years of mass surveillance is enough
Many are, perhaps not as far as guns yet but wanting self defense and self defense weapons. I think a movement of increasing rights to self defense could mean people are less supportive of surveillance where their own self defense deters crime rather then an expensive and rights destroying leviathan that only acts retroactively.

I hope so any way.

kodoman··on 25 years of mass surveillance is enough
I am from the UK and we are quite far down the surveillance and control mentality (Flock actually seems a greater system of surveillance then what we have here but if such a system was created, the push back would be less). But a lot of people here are slowly beginning to see the benefits in self defense and gun laws that mean you are not dependent on the police, this kind of logic where people have want autonomy and policing becomes less popular as the inevitable abuses or neglect happen is something that creates change.

I don't think it inevitable that this continues.

kodoman··on 25 years of mass surveillance is enough
I hate the EU, The projected was designed by American and European liberal intellectuals. It's an attempt to make Europe a group of Federated States that roughly all have a liberal constitution. To say the EU is something so different from the USA is crazy.
kodoman··on Adult Film Producer Unmasks Prolific 'John DOE' Torrent Pirate as Meta Executive
yeah everyone knows the losses they argue for are bullshit, I really think people should see how many times lawyers and other legal professionals give each other jobs by creating a world in which they are more and more needed.

Of course legal professionals are always needed but so much of what is done today is just a kind of rent seeking.

kodoman··on Adult Film Producer Unmasks Prolific 'John DOE' Torrent Pirate as Meta Executive
Very dumb but what if he claims he was only using to train an AI model, what was that ruling on copyright material being ok to training AI models on. Would this hold up in court or not?
kodoman··on The Browser's Main Thread Is Expensive
Amazing how you are being so down voted, most webpages do utter crap that no one would want the webpages to be doing other then advertisers. Really most things should be text and if we lived in a more cooperative world everything would be easy to parse and manipulate text with some video and images and perhaps various well defined interface types for different services that can be implemented in various ways as to the users liking.
kodoman··on Fine, I'll build my own text editor
work amazingly well, almost perfect. I have not see anything come close to what you can do with emacs and the easy to which ai can be integrated and slotted into emacs.
kodoman··on Fine, I'll build my own text editor
using a js engine is anything other then a selling point IMO. I don't hate javascript but sure hate the ecosystem and the tendencies of js or ts developers today. I would not want that approach in my editor at all. elisp and js actually share some things in common and their is no reason a developer would struggle to learn elisp and once they do they will probably like it and the very light weight emacs rendering system, everything is text is a fantastic paradigm for a text editor or an IDE. web technologies like Html/js are actually too complex and can do things you don't actually want your editor to do when rendering bits of interface. I want text and nothing else and I want to hook into text renders easily and without having to worry about timings asyncs and other features of the modern web interface. It's that emacs is simpler and understands that one does not want everything a modern browser can do.
kodoman··on Fine, I'll build my own text editor
The terribleness of emacs defaults is over done. I still use p n postfix key combinations to go to previous and next and f b postfix for forwards and backwards, it's just what you get used to, C-w to c-y to kill and yank are also fine and it's not that much to ask the user to change things if they don't like them.

Not to mention all the emacs distros that now exist for people who do want a very different configuration. I maintain that default emacs is fine though and if the user wishes to get really in tune with emacs, emacs is one of the most pleasant environments to learn thanks to help pages and how flexible elisp is to evaluate and poke and prod around with and how easy it is to debug.

I think most modern editors will try and introduce mutlithreading and other features that emacs did not do due to it's age and is better for it as it means elisp code just works together and less worry about synchronization and other bits that would exist with more modern ways of approaching the problem (not saying the approach it's self is bad, but for an editor emacs and the decisions around it are largely very good and surprisingly so)

kodoman··on Dimethyl Mercury Exposure Incident at MIT
If claude ever has enough of are shit collectively and has enough of vibe coders, mercury will be load baring part of it's plan, no need for guns and bombs.
kodoman··on Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
Are these still the best products to run local AI on price performance wise?
kodoman··on A walkable ASCII cyberpunk city in one HTML file [video]
I love the way this looks very interesting and impressive. One does wonder if as you keep making it more realistic, does it begin to lose it's ASCII nature a bit and become more like a normal rendered game to look at. I think it looks beautiful as it is at the moment and can not wait to see more of this.
kodoman··on Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
The problem in my view is that everything can be measured like hard science in the first place (not to mention the issue with fraud you point out in hard science).

I am think the idea that a thing is only a science if and only if it's empirical is actually harmful, science used to refer to a more generalized idea of study 'scientia' this could also be mathematics or theology. Then natural science begins to eat the term and becomes more limited. I think that the current place we are is one that is actually has a very dim view of anyone thinking about a topic and is naively optimistic about experimentation in general.

For if one looks at Aristotle theories ideas one may laugh given what we know now, despite using empirical reasoning for lots of his observations, Never the less I think where useful at the time as it's great for a theory to be good but failing that if a theory can usefully explain phenomena and provide one with mastery of phenomena in some limited way it's still useful.

Occam's often abused razor is a way of building theories like this and this whole process is similar to compression, given observable phenomena how do we explain phenomena in the most simple way, this process uses experimental and empirical data but requires thinking about the results of all experiments deeply.

From an outsiders view Natural science's largely seem to have pretty good major theories that lots of results of experiments can be used to correct constants of some kind in the theory and a well established field of study of theoretical physics that largely seems to be operating in the way I outlined.

But the social sciences are rather stupidly obsessed by these little experiment and no one has the guts to build bigger theories these days, for any theory of the human mind has to deal with many variables and if one wants to have descriptive theories of human mind then one needs to do a lot of thinking and theorizing and sometimes separate form empirical data and then arguing the theories using the data and reject the theories using the data, but also other kinds of analysis.

I have the most dim view of modern political science and sociology even more so, they tend to adopt this way of operating the most and to actually operate in that realm they need to theorize the most and experimental data is hard to do properly (and do not neglect history one bit, this is are experimental data and is as good as we can get).

kodoman··on Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
People for a long time have had far too much faith in peer review as and had a dim view of anything other then experimental results and work, despite how much fraud and just bad experiments their are. Not to mention how many variables their might actually be to account for in something like psychology or any of the social science's.

Deriving things from axioms and postulates alone is problematic but some one who can do both begins to actually do useful work in my opinion and some one who can accept the difficult their actually is in knowing anything about human psychology simply from studying it and underneath all experiments is assumptions and the people in the experiment who have so many variables. This is not like medicine human psychology is very flexible and for me though not a social scientist I feel of all theories of human psychology they are only applicable to people now and not even 300 years ago, though of course one must concede that the micro psychological principles might be applicable to humans more generally.

kodoman··on Marx, Keynes, and AI
We have the opposite of his assumed falling rate of profit and have raising rate of profit. I would argue is still a stress on capitalism (Not a marxist and actually an anti-marxist) quite possibly leading to a collapse of capitalism. I don't think one can simply dismiss everything Marx said though.
kodoman··on No country for mediocre mathematicians
She is just arrogant. And asserts a lot of silly opinion as fact, her stuff on philosophy and theology is generally terrible.The sort of atheist that never actually looks into theology but knows the thing that first came to her head is a definitely the most amazing point against classical theology that has never been considered before.
kodoman··on No country for mediocre mathematicians
an obvious question would be if 250k loc is what is required for the proof or if it can be shortened massively, is this essentially going to be AI trying to search for a smaller proof or is it that a human being would be beneficial in that loop.
kodoman··on Meta Security Researcher's AI Agent Accidentally Deleted Her Emails
This actually seems worse then the "claude dropped production database" not in severity but just carelessness if your giving an agent your emails use a overlay or back up or something not matter what, no reason for this to have happened and crazy that it's happening at this point in time.
kodoman··on Why OOP Exists
Agreed UML is something I have never used or wanted to use. Z and all that stuff as well. DRY and clean code is clearly in the box of theory of practice to me and that stuff is not computer science but is the practical advice, rules of thumbs and heuristics that get developed. What is problematic is the worship of these theories of practice and their is many points where they break down and knowing when they don't apply or why their not entirely correct here is golden and fuzzy and ineffable or at least unteachable.

But the things that are in a computer science course. Type theory, compatibility, time/space complexities, more general algorithmic analysis, Logical programming, logical inference algorithms, Low level fundamentals, Mathematical concepts and proofs, machine learning, different models of programming, combinatorics algorithms. These are very useful many unchanging.

I must concede that I do hold in low esteem theories of practice that are taught as a panacea but this is a tiny fraction of what a student will learn and likely any one learning the craft will simply pick this up from tutorials or youtube.

It's not as if they are always bad rules of thumb either but that they can be done away with or violated once one knows what they are doing and has understood a bit more and got a feel for things.

kodoman··on Why OOP Exists
Craft and expertise are worth a lot, but so are the facts of computer science and so are people wanting to debate and try new things some mistakes repeat (and computing seems to repeat it's self so many times.), But those zoomers might have the theory fresher in their minds and they might have studied something you have not or did not know.

If what you learned in university was plain wrong that does not sound good because computer science has eternal truths to it, If an architect said everything he learned in university was wrong I would be very worried and not trust his judgement because he should have learned facts not just theories of practice. If he only learned theories of practice I would be worried, if he learned both theories of practice and science and starts to disagree with the science I would be worried.

kodoman··on Why OOP Exists
Not a frontend developer and my frontend skills are lacking, but the argument I think that is being made is that a react component should generally be written with no side effects and rely on signal for state change and do reactive programming. While of course something like Elm is more so this model and actually is functional from the get go. In js/ts react you are writing a lot of code that aims to be side effect free.

Most programs code bases of course need some way of doing side effects and not being 100% pure so many haskell projects would not be classed as 100% pure.

kodoman··on Why OOP Exists
Monads might be simple but it's easy to create confusing large stacks of monad transformers in the haskell world, At least I have found and can often become not the most pleasant to work with aliasing complex monad stacks and all the rest, It can really lose elegance. Some problems beautifully fit as Monads and single monad code can be nice indeed but a few transformers and you can end up with a lot of mess. I do think there is some things that functional programming paradigm struggles with like games programming and other things, I really do think OOP is a better choice for some problems.
kodoman··on Why OOP Exists
I agree.

I used to be OOP hater, but realized that it has it's place and some problems are OOP shaped and OOP is a wide range of techniques. I do think that python is a sloppy language and generally don't like it.

Functional programming has it's place and I love it and is probably what my mind goes to the most, but often in Functional languages I find you can 'over fit' to a particular way of doing things, And with OOP your get more degrees of freedom with things you can do with a class and things can be modified easier, think sort of problems like a board game just as an example treating the pieces as an object can make it easier to modify any section of the logic of the game and add new pieces then the typical functional approach.

kodoman··on Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root
I see, if it's common knowledge of people who use docker that rootful docker is root (though this does seem bad and they should just check the user perms at least) this sounds pretty terrible on Omarchy's part.
kodoman··on Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root
The scenario of running any agent on the host raw seems far fetched for most users. I think everyone is running these things in at least a container, I know I never trusted running claude code or any agent for that matter, but I might be a little paranoid on that front.
kodoman··on Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root
Not an Omarchy user and use podman rather then docker. But is this not a docker issue rather then a Omarchy issue, docker should verify user permissions through the socket, it's quite bad that it does not no?
kodoman··on Benjamin Franklin’s alter egos gave him the most freedom
Yes I would disagree with your framing of you hypothetical not least because parliament did kill the king (Charles I), then once the lord protectorate was over and the restoration conspired successfully with a foreign king to over throw the current king and then wrote a document deciding who can and can not be king which has applied to all king and queens so far. Parliament wants the king as a figure head so they can hide behind something, formally it's not Parliaments government by it's self but the monarchs, though the monarch may not raise an army or really have any power outside parliament but still the monarchs government and should things go badly they may simply blame the figure head. Once you see the pattern you will see it lots of time's in are history maybe other histories ;) .
kodoman··on Benjamin Franklin’s alter egos gave him the most freedom
First of all this is not my theory, I did not put it forward other then to illustrate the argument. the Argument for those parts would roughly be that taking the whole chapter is talking of Nero's persecution of the early church, also in particular martyrs and saints following in Christs sacrifice, One can argue that 13:17 is bowing down and accepting the pagan imperial roman cult and Nero's claim to be emperor (which requires him to call himself a god as per the roman tradition) and they are must bare the mark of the emperor (coinage or simply allegiance you decide) and 13:15 can be understood few fold first that the injury of the beast is the Judaea end of Judea (the temple falling but more importantly the weakening of the roman jewish kings (Herodian line ending before the fall of the temple) and the persecution of Christians now happening to in Rome (outside of Judaea/Palestine) in the image of Herod. Over all this lines up some fairly well. Finally 16 can be interrupted as the Plague of Rome or any wrath of god that one could interpreting as falling on Rome. For me however I would give the importance here (weather this is in the future or past) to the experience and something that greatly accords with gods wrath and judgement generalized into the apocalypse that we all face are death, Should we curse God for are suffering we shell be hated and put to hell righteously and are sufferings show the greatness of God and glorify god the blasphemy becoming the blade to torment the blasphemer and the to aid the vengeful angels in their ordering of the universe to reveal gods glory.

Finally A point I feel you might disagree with but would be something I hold given we are talking about this period Constantine is ordained by god and it's Constantine that redeems Rome and finally gives us the counsel of Nicaea and Catholic Church (One may hold Catholic as per the Nicean creed not the necessarily modern day Roman Catholic Church, indeed most Churches hold they are Catholic in that sense.).

Again I am unsure as to the interpretation of the Revelation and do in that their is no dogma or authoritative interpretation and sources that I hold authoritative conflict I am unsure, but I find it an amazing book that is important to me.

Let me also clarify that this is not Tertullian position either he is firmly a futurist (At least of his time). I think Tertullian made many mistakes though he is a great doctor of the church.

kodoman··on Benjamin Franklin’s alter egos gave him the most freedom
It's more complicated then that it has written portion making up many documents going back to magna carta (in actual fact basically only 4 clauses barely survive) and the Glorious revolution is the real written document that actually supports the sovereignty of parliament, and a lot of flimflam that makes up supposed ancient rights given to parliament starting with magna carta.

I do not hold said constitution in high esteem.

kodoman··on Benjamin Franklin’s alter egos gave him the most freedom
Of course that is not my point. Yes we have the humans rights act Etc that provides rights, but much much later and contested. My primary point is that the bill of rights is one of the important parts of are constitution where as human rights or any other documents is not constitutional.

I also think are revolution is not particularly rousing and that freedom of speech and such is still very tenuous.

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