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tskaiser

164 karma · joined February 21, 2016

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tskaiser··on Why Gov.uk content should be published in HTML and not PDF
A vital difference is that companies do not have a sapient capacity for emotion and empathy.
tskaiser··on Why Gov.uk content should be published in HTML and not PDF
But that is not moral, is it? The company is still not beholden to a willful idea of morality, but rather sociopathically concerned with appearance. For companies where this matters little this concern for appearance is quickly shed.
tskaiser··on Why Gov.uk content should be published in HTML and not PDF
I agree that a corporation can make what would be perceived as moral actions, exactly due to the human staff running it, but that does not erase that morals does not factor into the objective function that a corporation is meant to optimize. This is exacerbated as the morals of its actions become difficult to analyze for the individual and the moral actions of employees becomes less individually significant. The concerted effort, on which the fitness of the corporation is ultimately measured, will still amount to the optimization of the bottom line.

This is especially true when the corporation outgrows the control of its original founders who may have had a moral vision.

In the end the analogy I am making is that a corporation has reins, and as it grows it becomes increasingly unwieldy for the handlers (= staff) to direct it where it does not want to go (away from profit).

It is of course easy to have a corporation act moral when this objective overlaps with optimization of its objective function. I don't consider such a happy occurrence to qualify as truly moral, however.

tskaiser··on Why Gov.uk content should be published in HTML and not PDF
Corporations, at least the for-profit ones, are principally amoral legal constructs, which I find all the more terrifying than the notion that they could be evil.

Insomuch as they can be anthropomorphized they don't even truly care about whatever their 'customers' are or their well-being, so long as the bottom line is optimized across time.

The rank and file humans that make up the functions of a corporation might be moral and may influence the corporation to make 'irrational' choices due to human morality, but that is not the rule.

tskaiser··on A Visiting Star Jostled Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago
Okay.
tskaiser··on A Visiting Star Jostled Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago
It is an interest idea and a great starter for philosophical thinking, but no-one is treating it like literal gospel.
tskaiser··on China Seeks to Repeal Presidential Term Limit
We could do so at any time if the community decided it was for the better. Linux being open source means anyone can fork it if needed be.

China is setting the stage for an actual dictator.

tskaiser··on Introduction to WebAssembly: why should we care?
I imagine you could still update with some wench-work. An EOL date of 6.5 sounds to me like a way to say that "beyond this point we will stop testing and ensuring compliance, and to avoid fucking over your relic (in PC terms), with an update that is untested on your specific hardware, we simply disable the automatic updates. Good luck."
tskaiser··on Introduction to WebAssembly: why should we care?
"Most of the time"? Citation needed.

While I generally agree with the sentiment of "do more by coding less", and minimalist user interfaces, there are plenty of cases where you throw a whole lot of functionality out the window by outright banning JS.

tskaiser··on Introduction to WebAssembly: why should we care?
6.5 years for most devices, 5 years for some legacy cases, and it is a soft limit ie. they don't automatically enter EOL, they just stop guaranteeing the updates.

Source: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366

tskaiser··on Introduction to WebAssembly: why should we care?
While I accept that my description of JS et. al. might be contentious, I don't see that you have argued against my piece on the WWW in general.

Regarding latency and responsiveness I agree that they are issues that depend largely on your use cases and your skill at implementing solutions. In this regard I can agree that some pages simply don't need JS. It is also being misused for ads and tracking to a degree that is problematic and can in itself cause issues.

tskaiser··on Introduction to WebAssembly: why should we care?
Yet each of those steps solved a different problem.

Early computers did not have the local processing power needed to run heavy jobs.

Early PCs did not have the storage.

WWW solved an entirely different problem, namely distribution and communication.

JS et. al. solved the problem of responsiveness and interaction ie. latency.

I don't really see those as exhibiting cyclical traits, at best I see it as a correlation ie. side effects of the true problems being solved.

tskaiser··on Portugal’s radical drug policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?
Wanting not to be discriminated against / handled separately != wanting special treatment. It is quite the opposite, in fact. The only people who consider that an entitled position are those who think there is nothing wrong with relegating people to second-class citizen status, even if they refuse to consider it as such.

Heck, it is quite entitled for people to think that they inherently deserve privileges that others are denied simply because "that is how it has always been". Bullheaded traditionalism is the actual cancer.

tskaiser··on Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57M People
Store credential information where it is used. It is not used by the repository, so it is an improper location for it.

If someone gains access to a system that uses the credentials, then there is, in principle, no difference between puppeteering that system versus stealing its credentials.

tskaiser··on Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook
Thank you for the insight. It is one thing what holds in theory, and quite another what happens in reality, as you point out.
tskaiser··on Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook
I admit to be completely out of my depth, but my understanding is that it is a fiduciary duty of the directors to act in the best interest of the shareholders. Tax planning is a huge part of profit and thus shareholder value, so wouldn't such "gross negligence" represent a breach of fiduciary duty?
tskaiser··on Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook
IANAL but it is my understanding that if those tax reduction schemes are legal many companies are legally bound by their stock holders to exploit them, or else be found negligent in their duties.
tskaiser··on US telcos appear to be selling non-anonymized access to consumer telephone data
Won't help. It gets the information from the telco provider, and does not require GPS or any other fancy hardware.
tskaiser··on Duck Duck Go: Illusion of Privacy (2013)
That's a lot of maybes to support an already unlikely scenario.
tskaiser··on Sublime Text 3.0
multi-select is by no means an ST invention.
tskaiser··on Get to Know the Actor Model with JavaScript
It never did. A concurrent program has always meant a decomposition of a program into parts that can be executed out-of-order while maintaining the same output. Whether or not this is by some scheduler on a single-core cpu is irrelevant to the theory.

The words "concurrency", "multi-threaded", and "parallel" each have different meanings. You can have a program that is multi-threaded but which does not maintain concurrency ie. the output is dependent on race conditions. This is usually, but not always, a bug.

Your confusion stems from the fact that most people do not care about the distinction. You usually don't care about concurrency unless you plan to actually run things in a manner which is unordered. Thus when the theory says "concurrency" you think "parallel". Technically speaking you're wrong, practically speaking your mistake usually won't matter.

As a final example consider a single-core computer running Windows with multiple processes running a myriad of services and programs. At any one time only a single process can run on that single available core, but in practice they are running "at the same time", because the system is implementing a model of concurrency allowing it to schedule and execute the different processes out-of-order.

tskaiser··on Get to Know the Actor Model with JavaScript
To be frank most of my experience with concurrency (rather than parallelism) is from formal theory taught during my masters studies. But I was rusty, so I was unsure if I remembered incorrectly.
tskaiser··on Get to Know the Actor Model with JavaScript
Ah. I have a misunderstanding of definition then, since when I think of concurrency I think of interleaved execution irrespective of whether or not this execution is done in parallel.
tskaiser··on Get to Know the Actor Model with JavaScript
What do you mean by JavaScript not supporting concurrency? Do you mean parallelism?
tskaiser··on Offline-Friendly Forms
Any situation where a password is persisted, especially in plaintext, can present a security risk. It is one of those things where you don't just guess that it is "safe enough" unless you have thoroughly proven it to be so.
tskaiser··on China's Plan for World Domination in AI Isn't So Crazy
By commenting in the context given he would be in danger of being seen as criticizing China. It is not like it is a secret that they surveil and censor their populace, but you do not want to be perceived as being negative about it.
tskaiser··on China's Plan for World Domination in AI Isn't So Crazy
He really does say a lot by saying nothing.
tskaiser··on Girl Scouts Embraces STEM and Adds New Badges
Making a game at the very most basic level teaches logic. Making a good game, no matter how basic, involves game design, which touches upon psychology.
tskaiser··on How a VC-funded company is undermining the open-source community
This changes their power dynamic. One could argue they ought to find another job once the shady stuff started, but I still think you should focus on the actual instigators rather than the pawns.
tskaiser··on How a VC-funded company is undermining the open-source community
Isn't that a bit too witch-huntery? It is Kite who is actively doing the shady stuff.
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