pitay

I absolutely agree with not passing a judgment on a class of people because of variability of how they respond to help. I've never heard of any reason that all 'schizophrenic meth addicts' as in GP's example will not respond well to help. If hypothetically they all show no positive outcome from the help they have received, then it is indeed fine to say helping them this way is a waste of time and resources, until a new method of helping is devised.

The part 'vs another solely because of the circumstances they were born into' from the parent post does not reflect what the GP post actually says. The GP was solely arguing on the practicality and the costs and benefits of doing it; solutions to problems have trade-offs, it is no good wishing them away.

That said, how the homeless are treated in a lot of rich nations today are a complete disgrace. Increasing a well off persons well being is worth far less than increasing a not so well off persons well being IMO.

If you just want a DNSCrypt and DoH proxy for Windows you can use Simple DNSCrypt. It also has over 60 DNS providers included and has data on which ones use filters to block requests, which ones log requests, and which ones support DNSSEC. How much you trust this data is up to you.

https://www.simplednscrypt.org/

Simply making my elders accounts non-administrator worked really well for me.

There are many times the number of people that can sustainably live on earth at the moment (something like an order of magnitude). You can see consequences of this by looking at much more overpopulated areas in the middle east, Africa, or India where starvation is much more a part of life. This is a huge problem in more developed areas as well, with environmental degradation, pollution, and the land made poorer by only a small fraction being wilderness.

A naive idea is, have a baby penalty. A baby penalty would make would be parents think twice about having children, and more about family planning and contraception. It would suck to be a child in a family that cannot afford to raise children (this really needs to be emphasized). To offset this people can be paid to bring up a child that their parents cannot afford, this works great as the people who raise the other parents children are less likely to have children themselves. Now this is naive, is not fleshed out, and has all sorts of things that can go wrong, but conversations about these things has to start. Take China, without their 'Family Planning Policy", the place would be a much worse place to live in than today. What was described is something much softer than the Family Planning Policy, but countries may have to move to something like China's policies to have any hope.

"We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now." - David Attenborough

Terry Pratchett paragraph:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-r...

Yeah there is a saying that goes something like:

"If you think some organizations are bad, wait until you see some of the customers."

I'd avoid introducing Eucalypts to places they aren't already prevalent. Fires don't kill them, but do kill a lot of their competition, they drop very flammable leaf and branch litter, have oily explosive sap, so naturally they spread with fires. With more fires the more eucalypts spread, with more eucalypts there are more uncontrollable fires.

A country where Eucalypts are completely dominant is Australia. In the US California is full of them. Both Australia and California have uncontrollable fire problems.

There are plantations of eucalyptus trees in Brazil, either they don't know what introducing them will do to their country or they just don't care.

Before using eucalypts, consider what introducing a very invasive tree that transforms the countryside into something much more flammable than it originally was will do.

Strangely after Quantum, Firefox worked worse for me. It is still the case, with Firefox regularly pausing all network activity for a few seconds or even a minute, so I am stuck with websites stuck loading or video stuck loading for a decent amount of time. The UI and everything functions, it is just the network communicating that is stuffed, so anything that requests something has to wait until Firefox's network part decides to respond. I am used to it now, but this happened when Quantum came out and has remained the same for me since.

This is probably too late for anybody to notice but I got FF memory usage down significantly by:

1) Not using the recommended performance settings. Setting 'Content Process Limit' to 2 removed more than half the memory usage IIRC. There are other settings that you will need to go to about:config to change like what size images are cached to memory etc.

2) Use the 'Auto Tab Discard' extension. You will have to configure this to not discard tabs on certain sites or you may lose info you have typed into a webpage. Fortunately this is easily configured by right clicking a tab.

At the moment Firefox is using 700MB to display 5 tabs. 4 HN and on Reddit tab. Given that these sites are close to just text I find 700MB absurd, but that is just the web these days.

Doesn't a UBI get rid of actually prevent a government from dictating who gets what?

With current social support programs the government does get to choose who gets what. But with a UBI, every adult would get the same amount, effectively removing the government's ability to choose who gets benefits.

Maybe I'm just misunderstanding what you are saying, I don't know.

I didn't mention anything specific, so I am not sure what you are replying to. Your example can be dealt with better in other ways, such as putting a prominent statement with a brief description of why something is untrue and a link to further information. For YouTube something like a popup that appears on the video which has to be manually closed, and also the information appearing under the video.

Censorship in general is terrible, and abused very regularly. Even on the really small scale I see little mafias pop up all the time, such as on forums, where anyone a bit critical of the select group gets banned and their posts deleted. On a larger scale is Putin announcing that criticism of the state is to be censored, citing other European laws do just that and punish people for what they say. If someone is censoring someone it is just extremely suspicious, and I don't blame anyone for going 'it is censored, therefor it is likely true', because the censor has removed the information that could be used as evidence for whatever it is.

"When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say." - George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

Same here. That's why I changed a couple of subscribed channels to send me notifications, it puts updates of these channels in the notifications area and sends me an email for every update. The June 2019 change of algorithm was that big and hostile that I had to turn on notifications.

Have the recommendation system mix it up, put niches that are somewhat similar in the recommendations not quite as often, put things a bit further away less often, etc. This should have the algorithm recommend counterpoints which are clearly visible to the user.

This is assuming things that are partisan one way are similar to things that are partisan in the other way and counter partisan content.

Avoid censorship, censorship is too easily abused.

Yeah, completely agree.

This year, for a site I knew existed, I had to use a very obscure search engine to find content on that site, for the other search engines it was omitted from the results. This only happened a couple of months ago, before then they listed that site. The site did not violate copyright.

YouTube has drastically increased its censorship this year, with both soft and hard censorship. Things that users found relevant that turned up first in search results are now replaced with MSM videos and people have to put very specific search terms in to get the video to show up in the lists, effectively removing it from most peoples results even if it is the most relevant thing they are looking for. There is altering recommendations. There is the hard censorship where a video doesn't even have to violate TOS or guidelines any more. YT now uses an AI from a very powerful lobby to decide which videos to censor.

This all happened very near to something that was called VoxAdpocalypse. Censorship was increasing the years before that but the sudden increase this year (2019) caught a lot of people by surprise, I think that was quite intentional, ram it through so fast that people didn't have time to react. This was all supported by MSM and the unity among the mainstream media organisations was very noticeable.

Where I live this year the largest ISPs have blocked a lot of sites on the flimsiest of pretense, sites like archive.is , zerohedge.com , and a variety of social sites that say they support free speech.

With the way things are heading, if you have something unorthodox to say, woe be unto you. Just look at what happened to Julian Assange, and CNN calling people don't support him being imprisoned as 'free speech activists', I would almost expect CNN to call them 'free speech extremists' if they could get away with it.

You can easily add a button to do that with something like Greasemonkey. I added a script that adds a button to GitHub that shows the file sizes in an extra column when clicked. Adding a button that adds !g to the front of a DDG query and then sends the search request is easier.

Haven't played it myself but Viscera Cleanup Detail seems like good game to just goof around in and not worry about being competitive.

Here's a thought: What if there is a one or two categories missing from attributing or not attributing?

For a piece of work you could have:

1) Attributes the sources of works that comprise it. Honest, cannot think of a situation that it is inappropriate for people not bound by national security considerations and the like.

2) Does not attribute but explicitly states that they did not write it. Honest, but better to attribute. Not appropriate for anywhere the author needs to demonstrate their skill, such as academia. Not appropriate for things that explicitly or implicitly require attribution.

3) Does not attribute but it is implicit they didn't create it themselves. Limited applicability to things that the original author doesn't mind people spreading. Sharing jokes, memes and political slogans are obvious uses of this.

4) Doesn't attribute author and implicitly or explicitly gives the impression they were the original author. Traditional plagiarism. Utterly dishonest.

The usefulness of having these two extra categories (2 and 3) are that they differentiate between honest and dishonest people and that authors may want to release their works under a license that says they cannot claim they wrote the work themselves, thereby reducing the burden of future distributors of altered works having to include an ever-growing list of attributions as derived works move from person to person.

Thanks for making me realise the most obvious thing, that it doesn't stop click fraud if it is on the ADTech customers network as they can connect to the device and pretend to be any device on the internet.

This may be tremendously ignorant but...

What is to stop ad tech companies creating a cryptographically secured reverse proxy device[1] that clients can install in their network between the web server and requests from the internet?

The ad tech company only has to trust that their device is secure and the company that sells their website doesn't have to give up control of their domain or anything else.

They would have to isolate the ad tech device from the rest of the network and only allow it to communicate to the web server inside the network and the ad tech server outside their network. If something goes wrong with the device then it is trivial for the web serving company to bypass it.

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As is mentioned in the grandparent comment, this allows anything to be done to the content being served from the website and not only domains cannot be trusted, individual URLS cannot either. Ad blockers will have to rely on examining the content directly even more than they already do. This would make it much less scalable for the ad blockers to deal with, they have to identify ad content individually, by their signatures or page structure in the best case, or examining arbitrary code behaviour in a worse case. Ad blockers may then have to deal with identifying ad content which changes as fast or faster than new ads appear, which is a lot worse than the relatively few(and relatively static) domains, URLS, bits of HTML and Javascript that are there now. Ad blockers may lose eventually due to incomputability, but who knows.

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[1] Using a TPM is one possibility

Another benefit that needs to be mentioned is it provides an unconditional safety blanket for anyone who has a job. People who now feel they are stuck in a job for fear of being broke wouldn't feel as stuck under a UBI. This is a huge benefit for the majority of people. Many workplaces would improve, especially the worst ones, as people wouldn't feel as stuck in them, this severely limits the degree that employers can treat their employees badly. For the self employed it gives them freedom to leave their occupation and do something else when things get bad for whatever reason. Even people who are financially secure and have their own wealth as a safety net are likely to benefit from workplace improvements, even if the money from a UBI itself is a lot less important to them.

In short, the benefits to the already employed should not be left out.

Don't even need VR to feel that. I distinctly remember playing Tribes or Tribes 2 and using the jetpack until the juice ran out; free falling from a large height gave me butterfies in my stomach, if that's the correct phrase for it.

Nothing stopping those smaller companies coming to arrangements to keep those economies of scale.

That statement just excuses any authority to do what they want. A despotic dictatorship would be absolutely fine for people to repeat 'accepting the consequences of your actions' so that if anything horrible happens to someone it is not okay to criticise the authority on what they did because they are not 'accepting the consequences of their actions'. This simply excuses anyone in power doing anything to any dissenter.

Holy shit, that guys a psychopath. That really gives you a picture, he was acquitted as well. Tells you everything really, it is undoubtable that the legal system is utterly corrupt, at least in this instance.

It reminds me of another incident recently where someone was swatted. As far as I remember the person was sitting on his balcony smoking a cigarette when when police decided to shoot him from across the road. Here is the video, it contains the call itself to keep context https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0l6kwbglA4 . You could say they had a little more justification in this one, but is well, horrible.

Kind of amusing that it is named after Alan Turing when one of its major features is not being Turing complete by default.

This effort for very high level code for building applications reminds me of Eve[1] as a non-traditional programming language (now not actively developed AFAIK, so more suitable for study than actual use). Both languages are designed to be accessible to people who aren't developers and making it simpler for people solving problems.

Love how Alan is trying to close the gap between requirements and actual code. At least for me, one of the things that has bugged me about writing in a language such as Java is tracing code to requirements. For Java the first thing to think of to solve this is discipline and complete documentation. I mean there are things like using a traceability matrix[2], but are there better ways to find or represent the relationship between requirements and code. There have been things commonly proposed to programmers such as Test Driven Design, but they are for making sure that the requirements are met by at least some of the code, not for tracing code back to requirements. Are there better ways to manually checking? Perhaps formal methods for tying requirements to every bit of code in a project, or anything else. Maybe languages and platforms like Alan are the way forward on this issue for a lot of things. Counterpoint, I don't know of any real effort from me or anyone I have worked near to trace code to requirements, the effort has been only to make sure requirements are satisfied, it doesn't seem to have caused any issues, so maybe it is only worth it for safety critical code.

[1] Eve: http://witheve.com/ [2] Traceability matrix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traceability_matrix

From memory help for the MS Office products was actually really good. You had sections that showed their object model in a very nice hierarchical manner and you could easily drill down to the individual methods of the objects mentioned. They also had a solid base object library across the Office applications. Things seemed to get more difficult with Office 2007 though, as compared to Office 2003 and earlier. With 2007 and later I believe you were supposed to use Visual Studio to extend it rather than using the inbuilt VBA. Also there was a lot of individual web pages describing how things were done and stackexchange questions answered for Excel and other Office products so it was pretty easy to get decent information to help you. The exception being when searching the internet the only answer to a question was that it was 'impossible to do' when actually it really wasn't, with the effect that most people reading the answer will do it the long and more error prone way.

Warning: This is from memory quite a while ago and it was a very minor part of stuff I did at my job then.

Text files or Excel for the game data?

Pardon my ignorance, but why aren't they using some sort of database for the data? Or at least storing the data in some sort of master database and exporting it to text files for the game to read? It would be lovely to hear the techniques and reasons from anyone in the know.

DDG has been working well enough for me that I haven't had a good reason to compare on technical or other topics. However, DDG is worse looking for local information for things like store opening hours, Google knowing your location is an advantage there.

Being a reasonable person, I don't see any reason I would care if someone has nude photos of myself, even if I was a child at the time the photos was taken. The photos are not harming me, nor will they be harmful to me in any sense other than random chance. I know there is a photo of me pissing into the sea when I was young, it doesn't bother me a bit.

Thanks very much for the info that Excel may offer least friction in a lot of circumstances, especially when ad-hoc things need to be done with data.