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shaki-dora

1,513 karma · joined November 26, 2016

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shaki-dora··on What the World Can Learn from Hongkong [video]
Maybe start by not conflating privacy with concerns about censorship.

Then, it'd be great if privacy-focussed platforms would show a commitment to find privacy- and freedom-preserving ways to tackle the very real problem of these platforms overflowing with actual, self-marking Nazis.

As an analogy: if the cryptocurrency community can find ways to curb problems such as scams or the waste of energy with technology, it can avoid the regulation to that effect it so much fears. But every time some cryptobro opines that people really deserve to be scammed if they did not go through each single line of source code their bitcoin wallet depended on, the idea that these communities are sticking up for some larger values and not feeling quite ok with scammers and Nazis loses a bit more of its legitimacy.

shaki-dora··on What the World Can Learn from Hongkong [video]
You seem to have trouble understanding even your own arguments. Above, you asked for "an example of a country that hasn't had to use violence to exit a communistic regime".

So, pray tell: how exactly were East Germany's political prisoners instrumental in...ending that very regime imprisoning them?

shaki-dora··on What the World Can Learn from Hongkong [video]
This sort of ham-fisted attempt to shove your specific fascination with a two-hundred year old food fight that became irrelevant thirty years ago at the latest is a good example of what's wrong.

FWIW there have been both communist and fascist/autocratic regimes that ended in violence and those that ended without. There have also been countries either self-identifying as socialist or being labelled as such by people sharing your convictions, which still manage to uphold civil liberties and economic success just as well as more market-oriented economies. etc. etc.

shaki-dora··on What the World Can Learn from Hongkong [video]
The quickest way to autocracy is pretending there's no difference between it and democracy.

This is civics 101: There is no "one ruler". There are parliaments, with multiple, opposing fractions. Then, there are administrations (te "executive branch"), which are separate. Then, also separate: the judiciary.

Of course you already knew that, yet you chose to double down on OP's cynical take declaring democracy dead and asking people to stop trying to save and/or improve it. Why vote, if law has no power? And, for the odd politician that happens not to be corrupt: why bother, when your constituents are just going to spit and yell conspiracy theories in your face, with absolutely no attention being paid to your actual work?

shaki-dora··on What the World Can Learn from Hongkong [video]
That argument is trivially true for most any civil liberty: the promise of a fair trial is protected only by the next higher court's fairness, etc.

To categorical discount the value of the rule of law, and to apparently consider that idea to be so obvious that just about half a paragraph of argumentation is given for it, strikes me as... just scary?

There are quite a few established democracies that have seen steady improvements in civil rights over their existence. There have been setbacks, such as World War Two. And the last five to ten years may well be similar. But it's still obviously true that "the long arch of history bends towards justice".

And, fwiw, technology alone is not capable to guarantee any meaningful rights when your own government is your adversary. The internet was praised as the killer tool to empower the individual against censorship. And yet there still is no technology that makes accessing Wikipedia in Shanghai as easy as it is in Billings, Montana. Bitcoin was hailed (by the conspiracy-minded) as a tool to overthrow democratically-established institutions. But, as it turned out, regulators were far less interested in shutting down Bitcoin than expected, and did not even break a sweat implementing KYC nad similar regulation across the cryptocurrency universe when needed.

shaki-dora··on The Basic Problem of Democracy (1919)
In the US, very little. That's because there really aren't many meaningful protests these days, because the US has effectively killed the public spaces protests rely on. But the Tea Party movement was arguably influential, and protests were its main tool. Occupy Wall Street was also far more successful than commonly believed: the 1%-vs-99% divide has become a central narrative of US politics, even on the right.

Outside the US? The Arab Spring was nothing but protests, and it did topple something like a dozen governments. Yes, the new ones mostly failed, but that's a different matter.

In Ukraine the protests succeeded. In Hong Kong, they certainly seem to be a major pain for the local government as well as China.

Environmental protests have succeeded almost spectacularly over the last decade or so. Germany's anti-nuclear movement relied on protests as their main method-the Green party was actually founded by a group of people who first met at a protest. Today, Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future and similar keep climate change in the news week by week. That's the sort of pressure without which the Paris accord would have never been attempted.

Compare any agenda from a G7/G8/G20 meeting a decade or two ago, and you'll notice that issues such as the environment, labor protection, or fair trade have gone from zero to dominating these meetings.

The US-EU trade agreement basically died on the day that half a million people in Berlin protested against it.

Obviously, it is often impossible to unambiguously assign causality. It's a complex system where everything affects everything.

But purely subjectively, I am actually surprised by how effective protests are. Consider Ukraine, where a single protest at a central square toppled the government. In practical terms. a Tiannanmen-style massacre was entirely possible. But the protesters won. Why? How?

shaki-dora··on Pro-Indian ‘fake’ websites aimed at influencing decision-making in Europe
I hate to break it to you, but the BBC being British and public hasn't exactly been a secret.
shaki-dora··on Pro-Indian ‘fake’ websites aimed at influencing decision-making in Europe
Do you have any examples from, say, an EU country supporting your accusations?
shaki-dora··on Turkey unveils first fully domestically-produced car in $3.7B bet on electric
Erdogan is a corrupt fascist and a war criminal (most recently: killing civilians in Syria). But I agree: the coming economic crash is the least offensive consequence of his regime.
shaki-dora··on The Basic Problem of Democracy (1919)
I really don't understand how protests became conflated with violence (mostly in the US, as far as I can tell).

Protests are a basic right in every democracy. The vast majority of protests (as in: >99%) is peaceful.

Protests are among the basic set of methods and institutions that form the public sphere where democracy actually happens. They are no better or worse than newspapers, public libraries, TED talks, Trump rallies, call-your-senator-campaigns, Twitter, Sunday sermons, bumper stickers, the NAACP, triple-A, or, yes, even the Star Wars franchise.

Each of these forums has different strengths and weaknesses, and protests are somewhat unique in being basically free and accessible to everyone (as active participants, not just consumers). Not a single protest since the Civil Rights Movement got anywhere close to being large enough to threaten the sort of overthrow-the-system violence that would be required in an outright confrontation challenging the US government.

shaki-dora··on The Ethical Failures Behind the Boeing Disasters
One person squarely at the center of this scandal is Boeing's Chief Test Pilot. Here's his bio:

> O’Donoghue’s military experience includes 12 years of active duty as a U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot and test pilot. He flew operational missions in the A-4M, AV-8A and AV-8B Harrier aircraft, and engineering flight tests on the AV-8B and F-14 Tomcat. In 1994, O’Donoghue transferred to the U.S. Air Force Reserve where he flew the C-130, C-141 and C-17. While there he commanded both the 728th Airlift Squadron and the 446 Airlift Wing, stationed at McChord Air Force Base, Wash. In 2005, he retired from the Air Force Reserve at the rank of colonel.

> O’Donoghue holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy.

(http://www.boeing.com/company/bios/dennis-odonoghue.page)

This doesn't seem to conform to your theory that it's "cheaper workers" and business majors that caused these problems: sure, they may have created even undue pressure. But it was an all-American fighter jock doing a lot of the actual lying about MCAS.

shaki-dora··on Nim vs. Crystal
That statement seems wrong in the strict sense, since the "Havlak" benchmark from your link has a more extreme difference between Crystal and Nim and was not included in the article's tests.

The word "bias" has several meanings. One of them is an accusation that those two benchmarks were chosen specifically to produce the desired outcome. Considering the above, and that Base64 and especially JSON parsing are very common, I think it would be fair to allow for the possibility that the article's author chose them accidentally and not with any intent to deceive.

FWIW I was surprised by the article's focus on interfacing with C, something I have not done in 20 years of programming, and was wondering if it was a (possibly subconcious) choice to set up Nim to win.

shaki-dora··on Nim vs. Crystal
OT: This is the first time I've seen "Energy" being measured in a benchmark.

That strikes me as a really cool idea, both because it measures CPU usage over time, a figure that has always been of interest for such comparisons, as well as highlighting the ecological and economical aspects of computing.

shaki-dora··on Nim vs. Crystal
FWIW, my experience with quite a few (usually small(ish)) tasks I implemented in Crystal is in line with the article's.

Once, a CSV-parsing and string-wrangling data batch job in python indicated it would take 27 hours to finish. I got annoyed and wrote a line-by-line translation in crystal. Writing it took about 40 minutes. It took a total of 2.5 minutes to run, that's two, almost three orders of magnitude.

As I said, this was a line-by-line translation, so whatever mistakes the python version had, the crystal version would have also had them. There are, however, a bunch of specialised python libraries (numpy et al) that weren't used, and I guess you could achieve some significant performance increases that way. Coming from ruby, I just happen to be quite productive in Crystal, to the point where I stumbled over the article's description as a "systems language".

shaki-dora··on French executives convicted in the suicides of 35 of their workers
All employees are free to leave... That does not excuse misconduct by managers or violations of law. But the specific outcome here, I. s. suicide, is fiendishly difficult link to any one cause.

The usual standard for negligence is something like “resonantly foreseeable”, but even that isn’t particular useful in this case: with enough employees, you could probably always avoid at least one suicidal by, say, doubling wages. So where’s the limit?

shaki-dora··on Neural Network
Click on “jsmol” under “Structure”: https://pdb101.rcsb.org/motm/164

(No, it’s not a complete brain simulation. But there is serious neurological science done in cool browser toys)

shaki-dora··on The Deep Sea
Note that “the oldest species of <x>” doesn’t make any sense. Both that species as well as its closest evolutionary relative have a last common ancestor, meaning they are equally “old”.

Do this a few times and you will notice all species have the same “age”, assuming life today all descendent from a common ancestor. Yes, some of them have may have changed more or less in appearance, but that correlates poorly with genetic changes.

shaki-dora··on Google forbids login with niche Linux browsers
If there’s been one positive development in politics in the last few years it’s the disappearance of the sex-scandal.

Sure, anything too extreme, funny, or illegal would still be problematic. But someone’s run-of-the-mill pornhub playlist is unlikely to make much of a difference, even on the Republican side. The reputable (and influential) media wouldn’t even report it.

shaki-dora··on Google forbids login with niche Linux browsers
A/B testing is pretty much the gold standard. It took medicine a thousand years of bloodletting to get there.

Of course its’s not always possible, which is what economists and nutritionists and a few other sciences struggle with. But measuring security incidents and correlating them with browser use seems sensible.

There is still plenty of room for theory, such as coming up with what to test.

shaki-dora··on New disclosures to our archive of state-backed information operations
Today's data concerns Saudi Arabia, somewhat contradicting your theory.
shaki-dora··on New disclosures to our archive of state-backed information operations
If there's nothing to hide, why not publish it where people would check first, i. e. on your website?

There are countries where that's required by law. And while that may be on the rather too heavy side of regulation, I have on occasion rage-quit a vendor's site because I couldn't find this most basic information.

shaki-dora··on The sad state of personal data and infrastructure
> With regards to being able to scrape your data or just get your data back from 3rd party's, I think that's a losing battle.

Both Google and Facebook have tools that allow you to export your data in both (usable) JSON and HTML.

shaki-dora··on Use GitHub actions at your own risk
That's the sort of tough-guy prepper-with-a-slide-rule speech that people (apparently) just can't get enough of. But does it mean anything?

There is no bright line delimitating what's on the "critical path" and what's not. Your servers? The electric grid? The datacenter? The backbone(s) it's connected to? The judicial system making contracts enforceable? NATO? Name any two that straddle the line, and anybody can come up with something in between them, because it's a continuum.

shaki-dora··on State of Health Report Shows Growing Despair Among American Men
I'm a man, and for the life of me I don't get how people are feeling personally attacked by feminism. Same with racism: I just don't connect these issues with me as an individual. And I've never experienced an interaction where others have done so, either. I've been to any number of feminist events with my partner, and nobody ever made a negative comment rooted in the fact that I'm a man.
shaki-dora··on State of Health Report Shows Growing Despair Among American Men
If your concept of self requires the subjugation of others, you neither deserve happiness, nor will you ever find it.
shaki-dora··on Deadspin Staffers Are Quitting
Is this reading comprehension in 2019?

The clear intent of the sentence is to state that journalists do understand the need for their publisher to function as a business, i. e. to rebut the other stereotype of journalists that they often get to hear, namely that they are unrealistic idealists.

Sad world, indeed.

shaki-dora··on Twitter for Mac is incapable of accepting certain letters in the password field
Cocoa and the Foundation framework have been around longer than MacOS / OS X, i. e. more than 20 years. How many different concepts has Microsoft called ".NET" since then?
shaki-dora··on View leaked secrets in Git live
I believe GitHub strongly discourages automatic issues and PRs.
shaki-dora··on AirPods Pro Launching on October 30
AirPods are a bit too pricey for my taste, and I actually don't care about headphone cables that much.

But from a purely technical point-of-view, I cannot deny that these are a somewhat impressive feat of technology, especially miniaturisation and power efficiency. It's the rare product where I would have guessed another decade or so of progress needs to pass to make it feasible.

shaki-dora··on Ripe NIC: 'In Five Weeks We'll Run Out of IPv4 Internet Addresses'
I recently decided on a whim to try an IPv6-only VPS which was something like 70% off at my provider. It being for internal stuff only, I thought it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

As it turns out, not even the Ubuntu repositories are reachable over IPv6.

I believe this was the PPA server, which held some package I needed for some workaround for all the other connectivity problems.

So let's hope a few important people/companies/institutions start to be slightly inconvenienced. I bet as soon as this rises to the concern of, say, some peoples' Netflix stream stuttering it's a matter of weeks to solve it.

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