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ohbtvz

263 karma · joined September 29, 2022

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ohbtvz··on MIT faculty adopts “Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom”
Supporting free speech doesn't mean that you support absolute free speech without any limitation. We all have a lot of rights, and exercising those rights can impinge on the rights of others. Why would freedom of speech be somehow special and trump every single other right?

I don't know in English, but in French we have a saying: the freedom of some begins where the freedom of others ends.

ohbtvz··on MIT faculty adopts “Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom”
Tell that to Iranians...
ohbtvz··on Introduction to Homotopy Type Theory
> I do not understand why homotopy type theory posts are so popular on this website.

It's easy. When you don't know a lot of math beyond college, but you see a post like this one, voting it up lets you pretend that you're in-the-know. "Oh yeah, I'm competent enough to upvote this. I know math." You may even end up fooling yourself into believing it. Same thing happens with physics, chemistry, linguistics... posts.

ohbtvz··on A simple guide on words to avoid in government
Modern IQ tests are normalized with mean 100 and standard deviation 15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
ohbtvz··on A simple guide on words to avoid in government
I don't think anyone is saying otherwise. It's clear that the discussion is about general public-facing government websites. Something for which the intended audience is a large portion of the population.
ohbtvz··on A simple guide on words to avoid in government
The sentence "seems ... to me" already carries that meaning.
ohbtvz··on A simple guide on words to avoid in government
If I understand you correctly, the issue is that the Swedish government used jargon masquerading as a common word, and as a result people didn't understand the meaning. That's another example of jargon being a problem!
ohbtvz··on A simple guide on words to avoid in government
I don't have the book at hand. Do you have a more precise quote?
ohbtvz··on A simple guide on words to avoid in government
Your examples are not jargon, they're metaphors.

Jargon exists because specialists in a subject want to communicate quickly among themselves, instead of paraphrasing all the time. I'm a mathematician, if I had to use plain-English words instead of jargon in my papers, I would go insane. But my papers aren't meant for the general public (although they're welcome to read them), they're meant for a specialist audience. This is not the case of government websites.

ohbtvz··on A simple guide on words to avoid in government
Well, what's the difference between a "strong non-legal mandate" and a "helpful tip"? Either it's mandatory or not.
ohbtvz··on A simple guide on words to avoid in government
Using fewer words introduces less cognitive load and drives your point better.

For example, you wrote "The advice [...] seems somewhat pointless to me." Well, are you saying that it is pointless, or not? I don't know you, so I don't know what your scale of pointlessness is. I don't know what "somewhat pointless" corresponds to. Is it a tiny bit pointless, is it a medium amount of pointlessness, something else? I don't know, but I have to think about it because you wrote a meaningless word in your sentence. And even once I have understood the sentence, I am left thinking: "well, if it's only somewhat pointless, maybe it's not pointless after all!"

The same thing happens with "key stakeholders": now I have to think about a hierarchy of stakeholders. What scale is being used? Who's key, who's non-key? Does the sentence apply to all stakeholders, only some of them?

Multiply this by a hundred occurrences in a long document, and you obtain something that will be more difficult to read. But government documents have to be readable by everyone: people whose native tongue is not English, uneducated people who have trouble reading simple texts, etc. And for what? Sugarcoating your text so that it's less assertive? Showing literary prowess?

ohbtvz··on A simple guide on words to avoid in government
Please don't link to that website. Would you link to stormfront to make any kind of point here?
ohbtvz··on A simple guide on words to avoid in government
This is not the reason jargon exists. What made you say that?

> It's the reason that the speaker used all of the tech jargon (launching a website). If they didn't do that then we would think they didn't know about websites.

To "launch" something is jargon?

ohbtvz··on UnifiedPush: A decentralized, open-source push notification protocol
> However, the main cost is developer-effort involved in keeping track of keys and implementing encryption.

As soon as you need encryption in at least one place in your software, it's going to happen.

ohbtvz··on Welcome to Comprehensive Rust
You can't check the hash of something you immediately piping to your shell, for example.
ohbtvz··on Welcome to Comprehensive Rust
Are you sure you're replying to the correct comment?
ohbtvz··on Welcome to Comprehensive Rust
I'm tired of installation instructions that consist of "curl | sh". Especially since this one just tries to detect the platform and downloads the correct installer for me. I know what platform I'm running, and I don't want to pipe the internet to my shell. In the end this is unpacking a tarball in ~/.rustup, I don't need the risk of running some bespoke script for that.
ohbtvz··on January 1, 2023 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1927 are open to all
> Imagine that you are not that popular author whose works are his life savings. Pennies dripping from works you published are your life line that lets you buy food or sustain you in a way.

Why should we all pay to make that a viable way of life?

ohbtvz··on January 1, 2023 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1927 are open to all
I don't think anyone has ever asserted copyright on the bible. I'm not quite sure what you're talking about? As for pamphlets, copyright can never prevent you from printing something that you created.
ohbtvz··on Threeuk is blocking Tutanota
This is especially infuriating as a European visiting the US, where a bunch of services are geo-fenced to American IPs. In several towns, I couldn't pay for parking or buy a bus ticket because the online service is geo-fenced and there's no brick-and-mortar alternative anymore. They also restrict apps in the play store or whatever to US accounts. I had to buy a cheap SIM card to get around all that. It's insane.
ohbtvz··on Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
I guess you can install it in WSL?
ohbtvz··on I almost failed to search a 37 GB text file in under 1 millisecond
Let me get this straight. OP searched for an entry in a sorted list using dichotomic search. Okay... Any CS undergrad can do that. Is there something that I'm missing?
ohbtvz··on Tailnet Lock
Why is there a post by tailscale on the front page every single day?
ohbtvz··on Who invented the thumb drive?
> Every time I need to print something to feed some troglodite's requirement, I put a pdf in a pincho and go down the street to the call shop.

They don't accept emails? All the ones I've been to, do.

ohbtvz··on Twitter Office Supply Auction
That's a nice saying, but it does not really hold true. Sure, banks aren't going to repossess Musk's house or anything like that. But they will recover what they're owed, in some form or the other. That's pretty much all that they do, all day, every day.
ohbtvz··on Twitter Office Supply Auction
What does this have to do with the topic at hand?
ohbtvz··on I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you
Is he asking for nothing? Half of the post is about how Mojang got millions then billions and he got nothing. If he's not asking for what he considers to be his share of the pie, then I don't know what the whole post is about.
ohbtvz··on Platform certificates used to sign malware
If a state wants something from you, they'll send armed agents at your door.
ohbtvz··on Platform certificates used to sign malware
> Send out fake Windows updates, approved by Microsoft, to do whatever you want.

Send them... How? You're planning on setting up a MITM attack on everyone's internet access?

ohbtvz··on Using a date-modified header to detect unique visitors without using cookies
No need for this kind of hyperbole. I wouldn't ask this question if the OP's post didn't contain grandiose claims such as "No cookies, no consent banners, no ad networks, 100% GDPR & CCPA compliant, low footprint web analytics." OP made a claim about their compliance with EU law. I'm asking for proof or at least an explanation.
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