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mantap

2,875 karma · joined May 9, 2019

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mantap··on Canada Proposes New Regime to Block and Deindex Pirate Sites
What is Google if not a website that openly flouts copyright law? I don't remember Google getting license to store my website in their index or to show my images in Google Images.

I don't mind, of course, but it goes to show that the whole thing is bogus and a different set of laws apply depending on how much money you have.

mantap··on 55% of all Tether, $25B, were created in 2021
74% backing sounds pretty good for a cryptocurrency. I wouldn't touch tether myself as USDC is better in every way, but I don't think there's going to be the fireworks that people predict if the peg falls only to 74 cents.
mantap··on Denmark to permanently cease using AstraZeneca vaccine
Theoretically Pfizer has higher efficacy, especially with variants. Giving Pfizer to the old and AZ to the young probably saves more lives than the other way around. If you decide that you don't want to give AZ to the young any more, it doesn't follow that it's then a good idea to give it to the old, especially if you have enough supplies of Pfizer to vaccinate the old.
mantap··on Is WebAssembly magic performance pixie dust?
You can bridge through JavaScript. It's not a big deal in practice. WASM is still very immature. You do not want to build your whole app in WASM if you want to keep a full head of hair.
mantap··on US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine
This is what worries me. I have had the AZ vaccine. Will I be at risk of this syndrome every time I am exposed to coronavirus? In other words, is the risk cumulative?
mantap··on US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine
It is relevant to the discussion because the AZ and JJ vaccines are for the "rest of the world", so comparative differences in the cost of IG between US and other healthcare systems is relevant.
mantap··on NHS Covid-19 app update blocked for breaking Apple and Google's rules
It seems crazy that they are using JSON in a QR code. There are much more compact encodings they could have chosen.
mantap··on CPU-based algorithm trains deep neural nets up to 15 times faster than top GPU
GPU have high latency. For a chess engine like stockfish which is designed to search as many positions as possible, the latency of a GPU is a big problem.

Engines like LC0 that do use the GPU work by searching fewer positions but with a heavier eval function. This makes the latency less relevant because it is a smaller percentage of the GPU time.

mantap··on The antidote to civilisational collapse – An interview with Adam Curtis (2018)
Every culture has certain principles that are taken as axiomatic. The prioritisation of those principles is also axiomatic.

For example, where I live, nearly all people wear clothes, and they generally think that wearing clothes is important - even if the weather is mild enough that you won't get cold or sunburn if you dispensed with them. Moreover, they will get upset if other people dispense with theirs.

What I find funny is that people will ridicule organised religions for prescribing certain clothing (such as Mormonism, Sikhism, Islam), blissfully unaware of their own quasi-religious attitudes towards clothing.

And sometimes these attitudes can be quite extreme. There is a man in the UK who has been in prison for years for indecent exposure. Every time he is released from prison, he strips off outside, and they call the police to re-arrest him.

mantap··on Facebook Analytics will no longer be available
There's a difference between wanting to ban something because it is a threat to your autocracy and wanting to dissolve something because it is too powerful and abusive. Punching down vs punching up.

I think most people of that persuasion just want to break up large tech companies though, not ban them outright.

mantap··on Contaminated surface has under 1 in 10k chance of causing an infection
If you took all the money spent on sanitising things and instead spent it on buying higher quality masks you'd see a much bigger effect. And this works from the individual, private enterprise or public health perspective.
mantap··on Google’s copying of the Java SE API was fair use [pdf]
Arguably API design is the most creative aspect of programming. The space of possible interfaces is infinite, whereas function implementations are heavily constrained by the interface and often there is only a handful of ways to write an implementation for a given interface.

Two equally good programmers may come up with radically different interfaces. Whereas if given an interface and instructed to implement it, they are likely to converge to a similar implementation.

mantap··on Google’s copying of the Java SE API was fair use [pdf]
When you get down to it, copyright is a whole bunch of contradictory rules. Courts decide every time there is a new kind of work, whether it is copyrightable or not. Trying to divine whether something is copyrightable by analogy to other kinds of works is a hopeless endeavour.
mantap··on Not Growing a Language
Haskell has the worst operator overloading of any language I've used. There's tons of niche operators, only some of which have names, it's so hard to Google them.

Haskell should have enforced that every operator must have a `name`.

mantap··on Piano Practice Software Progress
There's a huge difference between reading music and sight reading music.

Being able to read music is important because it is how musical ideas are communicated with precision.

Sight reading is a skill that is only useful in certain professional contexts and adds nothing to one's musical ability. You can safely dispense with sight reading as a skill if you will not be using it.

mantap··on Over twenty subreddits have gone private
Graham Linehan is one of the most doctrinaire anti-transgender individuals, anything he writes on the subject should be taken with a very large pinch of salt.
mantap··on Google Removed ClearURLs Extension from Chrome Web Store
You can use !s instead of !g and you get the google results through startpage without going to google directly.
mantap··on Ask HN: Why there are so many ads on YouTube?
I'm sure you can find one on Google :)
mantap··on Israel's autonomous 'robo-snipers' and suicide drones raise ethical dilemma
That is just an ad hominem. If you have an argument, state it.
mantap··on Israel's autonomous 'robo-snipers' and suicide drones raise ethical dilemma
I'm sure that if the Palestinians were granted either citizenship in a Palestinian state or equal citizenship in Israel, there would be many fewer ideologues in the region.
mantap··on Snobbery Helped Take the Spice Out of European Cooking (2015)
It works in reverse too. For people who habitually eat spicy food, when eating something non-spicy you can end up only tasting the "blandness" and not appreciating the flavours. Exactly like how cold food just doesn't taste as good as warm food (if it's meant to be warm), even though it's the exact same food.
mantap··on Japan to stage Tokyo Olympics without overseas spectators
Things would be a lot clearer if positivity rate was the reportable number, not absolute number of positive tests. This would also encourage countries to test more rather than less.
mantap··on Half of curl’s vulnerabilities are C mistakes
That strikes me as a bad thing. A bug that is easy to fix is a bug that could have been fixed sooner. That's exactly the kind of bug that causes the worst issues. Bugs that are hard to fix but readily identified are at least possible to work around.
mantap··on FAA safety engineer goes public to slam agency’s oversight of Boeing’s 737 Max
Aircraft software is different. Pilots are supposed to know this kind of thing when they get a type rating. The chief engineer absolutely should do. Knowing which sensors the autopilots are using is not even arcane, it's basic knowledge.
mantap··on M1 MacBook Air hits 900 GFlops in the browser with Safari's experimental WebGPU
Why not both? A little DRAM on SoC and the rest of the DRAM on the motherboard. Kernel in charge of "swapping". Maintains expandability while keeping most of the performance benefit.
mantap··on What’s Wrong with “Multiplication Is Repeated Addition”? (2008)
The mathematical term is "product". It's a product.
mantap··on How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan
Around the world millions of people learn Java as their first programming language. It is not hard to learn how to use types or generics.

What appears to be difficult is to go from an untyped language to a statically typed one. Which is why everybody should start with a statically typed language so that the psychological barrier never develops.

mantap··on Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'
The world isn't split into liberals and the far-right.

It's split into tolerant people and intolerant people.

Some people wear a thin veneer of tolerance to cover their intolerance. These are the people doing the canceling. These are the people you don't want to associate with anyway.

But there's still plenty of tolerant people around in society.

mantap··on Chrome does not respect autocomplete=off (2018)
You've got to consider the 2nd order effects. Remove autocomplete=off? Developers will be forced to make their own DIY crappy text inputs just to get rid of it. And break everything but English input in the process.
mantap··on Len Sassaman and Satoshi
Actually this is a common misconception. BrE allows either -ise or -ize, whereas AmE only permits -ize. The -ize spelling in BrE is called "oxford spelling" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling
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