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snackbroken

647 karma · joined December 5, 2024

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snackbroken··on Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce"
That's what I'm used to as well, but in my experience a lot of programmers take fold and reduce to be synonyms. A monoidal reduce is much less "scary" than a general fold. I suspect most programmers have never[1] heard the word monoid, let alone know what it means, and having to remember the meaning of a weird new word is enough to make most people dislike something compared to the simpler more familiar operations.

[1]Or if they have, their only encounter with it is the "a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" meme.

snackbroken··on Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce"
Right. It's just one more thing you have to think about with Reduce that's not something you have to consider with Map/Filter.
snackbroken··on Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce"
The accumulator is global state. If you're folding from list<int> to int you're right that it's (usually) effectively a pairwise operation on ints. If the fold is something like list<foo> -> tree<bar> then you have to reason about each intermediate (tree<bar>, foo) -> tree<bar>, i.e. how global state should evolve over time with each update.
snackbroken··on Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce"
Map and Filter are nice because they let you reason locally about a single element in isolation. Reduce(Fold) forces you to reason globally about intermediate results. Reduce also forces you to conjure up a "zero" value of the relevant type, which isn't usually difficult but it does constitute some extra mental overhead.
snackbroken··on How Trail of Bits helps verify the integrity of Signal chats
People seem to get on with Discord invite links just fine. You don't have to do the "confirm that all these emoji are the same on both your devices" dance to stop spam.
snackbroken··on How Trail of Bits helps verify the integrity of Signal chats
One possible solution is to only be able to contact someone if you have received an invitation code from them out of band. E.g. "scan this QR code to add me on signal". Such an invitation code should default to single-use but users should be allowed to generate standing invitations so that businesses and the like can print and post one in their store or whatever. Start getting spam from one of your standing invitations? Just revoke it and make a new one. Presumably the Signal folks can come up with more alternative solutions than the half baked one I came up with after thinking about it for a minute, they're clever cookies.
snackbroken··on Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
> Finns and Norwegians only are able to bike part of the year.

They very much bike all year round, even in the north where it regularly gets to -20C(-4F) in winter. Biking in snowy sub-freezing weather is really not a big deal as long as you maintain the bike paths as well as the streets.

Source: have lived there, everyone I knew had a bike they regularly used. The only time I can recall where people I knew who usually commuted by bike didn't do so was during an unusually heavy snowstorm. They instead had to walk about half a kilometer to/from where the city had managed to plow the streets and take a taxi. That was decades ago.

snackbroken··on We have a year to fix security everywhere
Heretic[1] is not that far off, though I suppose it's more along the lines of undoing the "for your own safety" lobotomy than explicitly specializing in unsafe things.

[1]https://github.com/p-e-w/heretic

snackbroken··on You probably own this 7-Eleven (and that's why it looks so sad)
Workplace safety improved massively when labor unions became a thing and workers got a say in safety standards.
snackbroken··on You Know GDPR Is Good Based on Who Hates It
You don't need explicit consent for functional cookies, e.g. a session cookie or to store what preferences the user has selected on your settings page. It is implicitly given by the user telling you to treat them a certain way. For that you just need a notice somewhere on the page that reads along the lines of "this website uses cookies". It can be an unobtrusive note in your footer.
snackbroken··on Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
>They "trust me"

>Dumb fucks.

Is an attitude he never grew out of.

snackbroken··on App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours
Market forces are not effective at creating good outcomes when there is an oligopoly.

If there are two producers each with ~50% market share, it's not profitable for one of them to improve their product such that they capture an additional 5% of the market but reduces the profit margin of their product by 10%. If there are 50 producers each with ~2% market share, one of them would happily capture 5% of the market (more than doubling the size of their business!) by sacrificing 10% of their profit margin.

In the Google-Apple duopoly it's much more profitable to engage in tacit collusion than it is to defect.

snackbroken··on China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
First, copying information isn't wrong to begin with. It is literally the one thing that makes our species special.

Second, even if you are a copyright maximalist the output of an LLM is either

a) not subject to copyright because it is not the creative work of a human or

b) a derivative work of the original training material to which the LLM's operator has no rights.

Since the LLM's operator forcefully asserts that it is not infringing, any wrong that arises from taking their word for it and distilling one model into another rests squarely with the operator of the former.

snackbroken··on NYC may require landlords and realtors to disclose the use of AI in listings
It's not just good PR for politicians to pass "<specific instance> case of already illegal <generic> is explicitly illegal"-laws. Prosecuting a violation of <generic> tends to be a lot harder because in addition to providing evidence for <specific instance> it requires convincing a judge that <generic> even applies to <specific instance> in the first place. You get to short-circuit that ordeal by passing a law that clarifies the intent that yes, <specific instance> is in fact an instance of <generic> without having to go all the way through setting precedent in higher courts.
snackbroken··on Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors
LLM text is like an optical illusion for the language part of your brain, only instead of the payoff being "Oh, cool! The dots aren't actually moving!" it's "Oh, 'cool'. You weren't actually trying to tell me anything worth my time."
snackbroken··on Resetting Xbox
50 years ago, publicly listed companies understood that chasing short-term growth targets undermined long-term sustainability. The current failure mode is not an inherent property of being a publicly listed company, it's a consequence of incompetent leadership and bad regulatory policy.
snackbroken··on EU Commission Response to 'Stop Destroying Videogames'
It is somewhat infuriating (though not unexpected) that the EC is parroting the AAA industry talking points when said talking points were/are blatantly obvious lies about what remedies the Stop Destroying Videogames ECI is actually seeking.

Unfortunately, the charitable interpretation of the EC's behavior is that they lack reading comprehension. Less charitably, maybe if the EC had fewer shady backroom meetings with industry lobbyists and more meetings with the constituents they are meant to serve, they would act differently.

snackbroken··on Every Frame Perfect
It's jarring to see instant changes that don't make sense. Animations are primarily a way to paper over UI that sucks to begin with.

Many transitions in Android are perfectly fine at 0x animation speed. The majority of transitions that suck without animation suck because the pre-/post-transition layout sucks and the transition between the two states doesn't make sense as a result.

It's the same with several of the transitions in TFA. For example, the address bar placeholder text[1] should just be left-aligned all the time. The save dialog[2] should leave all the basic controls in their original location[3] when switching from the basic mode to the advanced mode. That means the "Where:" label should also remain in the advanced mode, and the controls[4] that pop up to replace it should either be moved to the right or below. The search bar should also be moved down.

These are some really basic details and it is my understanding Apple used to not screw them up nearly as badly.

[1]https://tonsky.me/blog/every-frame-perfect/safari@2x.mp4?t=1...

[2]https://tonsky.me/blog/every-frame-perfect/save@1x.mp4?t=178...

[3]https://imgur.com/ZpHLCsv Artist's rendition. Please excuse the minor jank and criminal amount of empty space; I couldn't be arsed to fiddle with the screenshots to get pixel-perfect positioning and shrink the advanced dialog horizontally. Bikeshedding over where exactly the new controls belong is welcomed but irrelevant to the point I'm making.

[4]Is it just me, or are their icons uselessly, impenetrably, unhelpful?

snackbroken··on IXI's autofocusing lenses are almost ready to replace multifocal glasses
Yes, It's something you'd only want to do in particular situations where you know you'd otherwise keep swapping between two pairs of glasses annoyingly often.
snackbroken··on IXI's autofocusing lenses are almost ready to replace multifocal glasses
An alternative to multifocals is glasses with one lens for near and the other for far or to use a contact lens in only one eye in addition to your normal glasses. This also obviously comes with downsides that take some getting used to but some people prefer it.
snackbroken··on IXI's autofocusing lenses are almost ready to replace multifocal glasses
There is potential danger with a lens that can suddenly change to a second prescription. For example: imagine you're driving and your whole field of vision suddenly starts flickering in and out of focus. That would be incredibly distracting and pretty dangerous. Even if they just started focusing on 1 foot away it'd be quite bad.
snackbroken··on Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels
> just so that grandma doesn't accidentally install malware

That's the stated reason. The actual reason is that they are salivating at the sight of how much money the app store and play store are making. They just don't want to move too quickly for fear of customers revolting.

snackbroken··on Why most product tours get skipped
The dislike stems from two (and a half) reasons:

1) Push vs pull. As you identified, ls doesn't stop you from doing the thing you wanted to push the man page on you when you don't need/want it. ls just does the thing you ask. man also just does the thing you ask. The product tour is a sign that the developer doesn't understand consent and is trying to get the user to do what the developer wants, not what the user wants.

2) It's infantilizing. The product tour assumes the user doesn't know what they want, and doesn't know how to RTFM to learn how to do the thing they want to do. It treats the user as having no agency.

2.5) It's a tacit admission that TFM sucks and R-ing it isn't a productive use of your time.

snackbroken··on The USB Situation
Here's a lifehack that will extend the life of the socket by ~1000x: you can buy a 3.5mm-to-3.5mm "adapter" that you keep plugged in to the female end. Now you have a wear part that is trivially replaceable.

Of course that doesn't work all that well for laptops where it would stick out and easily break when you put it in a bag, but for that one pair of headphones you like that is no longer being manufactured it's great!

snackbroken··on Online age verification is the hill to die on
Further, "porn tokens" are the pointy end of the wedge, because it's easy to misconstrue any opposition as advocating for "kids should have access to porn, actually". The broad end that is being hammered towards is "kids aren't allowed on social media because it's harmful to them" AKA "free speech tokens".
snackbroken··on Your phone is about to stop being yours
I should not have to enter into a business relationship with google just to hand my non-technical friend an APK any more than I have to enter into a business relationship with the Linux Foundation to hand my friend an AppImage.
snackbroken··on Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
D2 https://d2lang.com/ added beta support for ASCII & Unicode output last year.
snackbroken··on Brussels launched an age checking app. Hackers took 2 minutes to break it
But laws against selling/giving alcohol to minors are moderately successful at curbing teen alcohol use because they carry with them a risk of punishment that grows with the scale of the operation. If all it took was one adult who thought "kids should be allowed to drink if they want" to provide all the kids in the country with free booze and that adult had no meaningful fear of repercussions, the laws would be nothing but sternly worded advice.

If the proof of adulthood scheme is truly anonymous, one adult with some technical chops who thinks "kids should be allowed to watch porn if they want" would be able to, say, run an adult-o-matic-9000 TOR hidden service that anyone can use to pinky promise that they are an adult without fear of repercussions. If such a service comes with a meaningful risk of being identified and punished, it is by definition not anonymous.

I suppose I'm just not convinced giving up some basic liberties for a law that converts into sternly worded advice if just one adult chooses to break it is a great idea.

snackbroken··on Brussels launched an age checking app. Hackers took 2 minutes to break it
Precisely. To rate-limit attestations you either need government somewhere in the loop so that they get notified and can revoke certificates when they detect abuse (but then they can correlate requests to prove adulthood with the service provider), or you need the proof of adulthood to be tied to the certificate in some way that the service provider can tell if a certificate is being re-used. But then anyone with a copy of all the certificates (read: the government) can re-run the proof on their end and figure out who is who.
snackbroken··on Brussels launched an age checking app. Hackers took 2 minutes to break it
> The point of this is that you can use the credentials on your phone to prove that you are an adult to a website using zero-knowledge proofs to avoid disclosing your identity to anybody.

It is my understanding that this is not possible. I would be happy to be shown to be wrong, but to me it seems like you can either prevent people from lending out their credentials, or you can preserve the anonymity of the user, but not both.

You can use 0KP to prove you have a signed certificate issued by your government that says you are an adult, but then anyone with such a certificate can use it to masquerade as however many sock puppets they like and act as a proxy for people who aren't adults. You can have the issuing government in the loop signing one-time tokens to stop Adults-Georg from creating 10k 18+ attestations per day, but then the issuing government and the service providers have a timing side-channel they can use to correlate identities to service users. Is there some other scheme I'm missing that solves this dilemma?

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