JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
That happens anyway - prison medics confirm the death, prison guards ensure it goes as planned, etc. I am talking about involvement of people who aren't prison personnel that deals with the technology of it.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
Which part of it is obvious hyperbole? I see maybe some exaggeration in details (like, maybe child trans surgery dept does not take entire wing but shares it with other surgical needs) but which part is supposed to be obvious here?
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
I personally am opposed to death penalty, except maybe in very exceptional circumstances like Nazi war criminals (where the process is kinda outside regular judicial system anyway) - but the situation right now is indeed ridiculous. That said, if I weren't - I would wonder why anybody needs to be able to observe the execution at all. I mean, I realize for example the victims may derive some feeling of closure from it, but I think if they want the guy (it'll be a guy, only one woman had been executed since 1953 in the US) dead, then they'd prefer that done unseen rather than not done at all. And, for better or worse, something that is not on TV (or now youtube) is something pretty much nobody cares about. I mean, horrible things may happen in prisons, but they are mostly undocumented, so people ignore it or make jokes about it (prison rape is one of the favorite targets). Not that I am endorsing any of it or am happy about it, but looking objectively it'd probably make it easier for people to accept.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
Ticketmaster is way harder of course due to heterogeneity of the underlying data.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
Making a UI clone for Twitter should be not hard. Same for reddit, though moderation and customization functions may require some more work. Making full clone - with whatever ads, analytics, system functions, metrics, etc. exist and not visible to the public may be more complicated. Making it work reliably at scale Twitter works at may be a serious project for a serious qualified team, though it's definitely nothing impossible, just needs investment. Reddit I'd say the same with more investment since there are more options, but bare bones clones of both, especially if they don't need ads/analytics and billion scale, would probably not be too hard.
Facebook is a bit tougher due to a myriad of privacy settings and modes which may require some non-trivial approaches to data retrieval, and then there's whatever filthy black magic that underlies their feed algorithm... Plus it has streaming video, which is its own big can of worms, with which I personally never worked but heard it has a lot of dark magic into it too. Instagram/Youtube are also based on that, so the same applies there.
is their hold on the market mostly a result of network effects and their established large user bases?
On the market - definitely. Even if they had some super awesome technologies, it would likely be possible to reproduce the same results maybe with slightly higher costs and slightly less awesome performance, and for social media network effects beat technology any time of the day. Don't get me wrong - you need a lot of technology to run code at the scale of Facebook, and a lot of it goes not only to the site itself but to support the organization that supports it and makes money from it, but code superiority has nothing to do with their success. In fact, I have seen very successful projects (not ones you named, but also famous names) where the code and the technology behind it are very subpar, but as long as it works and brings in the sweet dollars...
Given the apparent simplicity and minimal improvement in the basic functions (from a user perspective) of many of these sites,
You can make a toy twitter in a weekend. Taking it from a toy to billion-users business with billions of revenue is the hard part.
Aside from server reliability, what other things do they need all these bigbrains for?
- Maintenance - finding and fixing bugs (there are always bugs)
- Performance improvements - in every big and old software, there's probably something old and slow and tons of money can be saved by making it faster
- New features - you may not see them, but somebody else does
- Revenue - for all those sites that means mostly serving ads, counting ads, selling ads, analyzing data from ads and so on
- Business analytics - not the same as the above, the ad buyers get the above, this one is for the business itself
- Internal tools - any large project has build systems, docs systems, test systems, etc. and somebody has to work on those
- Moderation tools - for pretty much every site that allows user comments, if you don't want for the FBI to visit you, you need moderation tools
- Catching up with new technologies - there's always new browser, new network protocol, new API, new login method, new security feature, new OS, new mo bile platform, etc. that needs to be supported
Probably a couple of dozens of other things I forgot to mention.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
He didn't "ruin" anything. Neither he is intending to. What he is intending to is to inject this possibility as something to be discussed and by this highlight the (unfavorable) comparison between Canada and the US that you have described very well, and by this hopefully push Canada more to the right and being more open to whatever he needs the next Canadian government to do. Actually adding Canada as a state (or a number of states) would be, even if realistic (which it is not), very problematic for Republicans at the first place, and I don't even believe a serious trade war is possible since it would hurt so many people with serious money, and they speak the same language that Trump speaks and will not let that happen. However, by dangling this possibility and initiating discussion about the US-Canada relationship, Trump can advance his agenda much more than if he just said "you know, maybe sometime in the next 4 years we might initiate some discussions about US-Canada relationships".
That's classic anchoring. If you come to the jewelry store and see a ring sold for $100K, they aren't actually trying to sell you this ring. I mean, they would surely be happy to, but that's not their main point. The point is to make the ring that costs $2K to seem like a bargain - you get almost the same thing and it's 50 times cheaper!
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
As such, the inconceivable has now become conceivable in that, if we were to continue down this path for another five or so years, I can see a future world where the majority of Canadians would rather become American than suffer their continued decline of quality-of-life.
And this is what Trump is actually doing.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
The Expanse series is great (even though I didn't like the ending too much, but getiing the good ending is the hardest part, the series itself is great). The movies are not bad either IMHO but the books are so much richer.
I'm just saying the comparisons of the Soviet Union (or even the Czech puppet government) to the Nazis is not a fair comparison
Why not? Both murdered millions of people in service of their ideology which was supposed to make the world better but actually led to absolutely unprecedented horrible suffering and mass deaths. Both dehumanized large groups of people and invented mechanistic means of mass murder. Both started aggressive wars and conquered and subjugated neighboring countries. Both adopted totalitarian ideology that had no place for freedom of thought or discussion. I think there's a lot of fair comparison there. And yes, both had joyous parades on special occasion (try not to go there or not be joyous, and you'll find out what happens to you). Strangely, most people do not appreciate that joy too much.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
This seems to be something pretty common among Czech authors in particular
Weird given how Soviet Communists raped their country in 1968...
but there was little acknowledgement about the kinds of things communism did right
Ah, the good old "Hitler got trains running on time" thing (which he didn't btw)
Kundera couldn't even recognize the happiness and beauty of the socialist May Day celebrations,
Ah yes, and we do not appreciate the brilliant whiteness of KKK hoods and the beauty of Nazi torch marches. Maybe I should rewatch The Birth of a Nation and Triumph of Will to get inspired.
The whole thing just reeks of sore loserdom: like we have here in the Old Confederacy
Like that, except when the Confederacy won and he's the slave. Sore loser indeed.
I'm not denying that the Czech communist state (and the Soviets) did horrible things,
It kinda looks like you do. Or at least you are denying Kundera the right to be horrified and disgusted by those horrible things.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
Communism actually provided most people with decent lives
No. A lot of people managed to live decent lives under communism, but not because of it but despite it. A lot of people - millions of them - did not survive it though, and that was definitely without doubt because of it.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
The Good Soldier Svejk, which is good but I got bored of
One of my favoritest books, but I wonder if it survives the English translation (if that's what you read). The original is written in Czech, but not just any Czech but Czech-German jargon with ample addition of obscene vocabulary from other Slavic languages, Hungarian, etc. I read it in Russian translation though one day I hope maybe to be able to read the original.
I’m not Russian and I don’t find gross-out gore or porn interesting.
I think the point of those books (and many of Sorokin writings in general) is how well all that gross gore is mapping to what have actually happened and happening in Russia. But it's quite hard to understand without experiencing that life and culture for a long time. He's also a masterful stylist and often imitates some literary and cultural aspects of existing works, which is hard to appreciate I guess in translation and not being part of the culture.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
There's an important difference here. Religion is about Absolute Truth. Politics is about governing and getting things done (or, if libertarians prefer, not done). The amount of compromise and practicality to be expected from those differ substantially.
But it is overwhelmingly likely that such a move by Rome's Christians would have precluded the future Constantine, and the empire would never have been converted to Christianity.
Somehow I doubt supporting Oliver or Jorgensen or any of the latest LP nominees would get us even a step closer to the Libertarian Emperor of the US. Of course, LP can prove me wrong, but unless they discover immortality pretty damn soon I don't expect to see it in my lifetime. Especially not when consistently nominating woke candidates. Woke voters already have a party to vote for.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
Students are something else. I am still ashamed of some of the shenanigans I did as a student, especially after eventually finding myself on the other side (not in an university, thankfully). It's a tough job to run IT in such places.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
Yeah I think it was some kind of "smart" home solution when not everybody had routers on home network. A bit fuzzy on details now but that might be the idea at least. It had a normal "play nice" mode too, just for some reason it wasn't enabled by default... or maybe somebody switched it for some reason, impossible to know now.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
To be honest, I consider myself a libertarian, but never had any desire to support any of the LP candidates. Oliver personally checks too many woke boxes for me (no, it's not about him being gay, that part doesn't bother me at all). And in practical terms, between woke takeover and compromising on some libertarian principles to stop the woke takeover, I think it is prudent to choose the latter. When the choice is between Hamas-supporting racist trantifa totalitarian marxists and somewhat-bigger-government conservatives, I think a practical thing for a libertarian would be to vote for the lesser evil. If the woke threat ever goes away, we can go back to the discussion about making somewhat-bigger-government into smaller-government, but I personally think positioning it as "both are equally impure and there's no difference" to me is childish and silly.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
Yeah that was my question exactly when I finally discovered what happened - who even thought it was a good idea to do this? Thankfully, haven't heard about someone doing that for a long while now.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
DHCP server restarts can cause IP conflicts pretty often, especially if you're running the DHCP server on a small home/office router that doesn't persist state
More fun can be had if there's a rogue DHCP server on the network. Back in the days I did network admining work (a long time ago) I had to deal with such a case - turned out to be a new printer with helpful on-by-default DHCP server, but it took me a lot of frustration to figure it out because I never thought before a printer could do that to me.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
Ubuntu & Linux Mint are the most frequently mentioned as newbie-friendly. Hardware is important - choose hardware config that is reported to work with Linux. Otherwise there might be a lot on non-newbie-friendly dances involved to get things to work. If that's not a problem I found modern Linuxes to be pretty newbie-friendly to the point you don't really need to even touch command-line for most common tasks (I love command line, but I am speaking from a newbie perspective).
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
though it's increasingly been discredited for that purpose by Mises-Caucus types
What are "Mises-Caucus types"?
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
How does the switch/AP know it should send the request to the wired router and not to one of its other LAN ports?
There are two kinds of network switches/hubs (well, there are more, but at least two). The dumb one just essentially pretend everybody is on the same bus, and so every port gets all the traffic from other ports. This of course is only good for very simple small networks. Smarter switch would remember which IPs and MAC addresses live on which ports and forward the packets accordingly. Of course, smarter switches are more expensive than the dumb ones. For bigger networks you'd have configuration capacity in the switch to tell it which networks live on which ports.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
I'm not certain about what happens when two machines claim to have the same IP, actually
Depends on the IP. If it's so called "local" IP (starts with 10., 192.168 or 172.16.) and they are not on the same local network, then nothing bad, since these addresses specifically designed for such use. If they are on the same local network, there would be trouble, not sure about the exact nature but likely both computers sharing an IP won't be able to properly use it. Usually your OS would scream at you in some way when such thing is detected. Using DHCP server is one of the ways to ensure this thing never happens.
If you have two hosts that have same IP and those are not local IPs then weird things would happen. In general, if you have NAT (which most home users for now should and would have) then outgoing connections should work fine (then again, there's no real reason for a machine used by home user to even have a non-local IP at all) but it's better to avoid that situation completely because things get weird. There are special organizations and protocols aimed at segregating IP space so nobody steps on each other's toes there. As a home user, you probably don't need any of that as the standard setup is to use local IPs for everything inside the home network and only use non-local IP for the main router egress address.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
nearly gig level internet at home is $100- $200 a month
If you live in a relatively new house which has been hooked up to cable/fiber it's $70-90 now for gigabit. And Starlink is $120/m, which gives you less than a gig but you can have it practically anywhere.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
They are legal tender, and if anyone is insane as to pay your taxes in gold dollars by nominal value, I'm sure the IRS would be fine with that. In fact, if you want to do that, I am sure there would be thousands of people who would be willing to facilitate such transaction. I certainly would - not everyday you can make 200x+ immediate profit.
A modern US coin could become valuable and trigger the same issue, gold standard or no.
There are collector coins, for sure. And I am pretty sure if you buy one and sell it at profit, you'd owe income taxes.
Why not? When guillotine was invented, execution of the enemies of the state was a public spectacle that was explicitly designed to terrify and intimidate the population (and, to some measure, entertain it, with the idea that however bad you've got it, at least it's better than that guy). I think the government has since improved to a point where it has much more widespread and efficient methods to terrify and intimidate the population, and does not limit itself to the worst of the worst of the criminals anymore. So there's no point in spectacle, why not get rid of it and get to the end point of it with minimal amount of hassle?
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