JohnStrangeII (u/JohnStrangeII)

JohnStrangeII commented on EU withheld a study that shows piracy doesn't hurt sales (2017) engadget.com/2017-09-22-e... · Posted by u/seesawtron

JohnStrangeII · 5 years ago

I have a bit of a stupid question related to the topic. I'm self-publishing German sci fi and fantasy novels, nothing special, just some good entertainment (if you like my writing style). Since you cannot have a readership without Amazon and do appreciate the pocket money, I sell them on Amazon. At the same time Amazon does not allow me to give them away for free.

Is there a way I can give away my novels as "pirated ebooks" to a German audience without having to seed a torrent and without making this easily traceable back to me as the author?

It would probably even boost sales and also help people with less money, I just don't know how to do it. :(

JohnStrangeII commented on Want a killer product? Become more opinionated adilaijaz.medium.com/want... · Posted by u/adilaijaz

a4isms · 5 years ago

Some where in the mythical “Business 101” course is the lesson that you can either find a customer and figure out what they need (customer-focus), or find a need and figure out which customers have that need (product-focus).

This dynamic is everywhere: Apple has customers, they look at what their customers need, and do various product extensions (like streaming games) to fill their needs.

Whereas many vendors on the Apple platform do the reverse: They fill just one need, and arrange their marketing to find the customers with that need across all ecosystems.

Things get interesting in “Business 201,” where a company with product focus builds up enough goodwill with their customers that they switch strategies and become customer-focused.

Which is also Apple’s story, going from being a microcomputer specialist to a device specialist to a services behemoth. It’s now about filling more needs for existing customers.

JohnStrangeII · 5 years ago

Some companies just create new needs out of thin air and even manage to replace better technologies with inferior ones. It's mostly a matter of marketing.

If you want, many companies sell prestige, lifestyle ideas, and grand illusions. It's perfect from a business perspective because the customers will always remain dissatisfied in the end, no matter how much they buy.

JohnStrangeII commented on Speed of Rust vs. C kornel.ski/rust-c-speed... · Posted by u/sivizius

rocqua · 5 years ago

Yesterday I upgraded an entire code-base from C to C++ just because it was faster than writing my own dynamically resizing array in C.

Writing programs in C is harder just because there are essentially no containers in the stdlib.

JohnStrangeII · 5 years ago

Aren't there good container libraries for C?

JohnStrangeII commented on Statement on New York Times Article astralcodexten.substack.c... · Posted by u/jger15

pclmulqdq · 5 years ago

Here's an alternative form of the "NYT/CNN should be canceled" argument: they should be held to the same standard as a private citizen when they behave poorly.

If you write a blog post that doxxes a prominent figure and link to it from Facebook and Twitter, you are going to get banned from those platforms. The NYT can apparently do this with impunity, and calls for canceling other people and organizations who do this.

In US law, there is a different standard for libel against "public figures" than against other people. The NYT gets to take advantage of this much looser libel law whenever they write a hit piece because they can argue that anyone who does something "newsworthy" is de-facto a public figure.

As far as I have seen, the "cancel NYT" crowd is arguing that the NYT should be held to the standards that it pushes into others and obviously doesn't follow.

JohnStrangeII · 5 years ago

In almost all cases I can think of I'm also against canceling individuals, so I agree with you. If NYT openly spread hate speech or called for murder and violence, then they should be "canceled" (boycotted).

JohnStrangeII commented on Statement on New York Times Article astralcodexten.substack.c... · Posted by u/jger15

makomk · 5 years ago

Apparently, you're so keen on attacking "this thought pattern" that the fact it bears no resemblance to what I said doesn't matter.

JohnStrangeII · 5 years ago

On the contrary your original comment exemplified the thought pattern very well. I fully understand why you claim it doesn't, though.

JohnStrangeII commented on Statement on New York Times Article astralcodexten.substack.c... · Posted by u/jger15

makomk · 5 years ago

Leading people to believe things that are wildly untrue using statements that are technically not lies does as much damage to society as doing it any other way, in my opinion. Sure, in theory smart people might be able to spot that what the article is trying to convince them of isn't backed up by the facts it uses - but in practice they almost never seem to, not even other journalists. (Here in the UK, the BBC seems to be a bit of a repeat offender - some other partisan rag publishes something designed to lead people to an untrue conclusion without technically lying, and then the BBC just outright repeats the untrue claim.)

JohnStrangeII · 5 years ago

I've noticed this thought pattern with many people who argue against freedom of speech and for tighter control of media or "canceling" them recently:

1. The arguer claims that negative consequences follow from the exercising of free speech, in this case NYT right to freely chose the topics they write about.

2. The alleged consequence is that people are made to believe wrong or false things (where "wrong" and "false" are defined by the arguer).

3. The arguer portrays himself at the same the victim of those media and the person who knows better than those media and therefore can decide between wrong and right, true and false better than the accused media.

4. The arguer presents no evidence of knowing better and when you ask them about their sources, they tend to be highly problematic, based on blogging and websites who often do not even employ journalists.

Paraphrase: "I know better than large group of people X but everybody else is mislead by X" - I don't think so.

JohnStrangeII commented on Statement on New York Times Article astralcodexten.substack.c... · Posted by u/jger15

forgingahead · 5 years ago

This seems to be contradictory. It's ok to be politically biased, but still factually accurate for things that fit their political bias? The NYT and others like it go out of their way to pretend they have no political bias, using the passive voice to give authority to slanted reporting which favours one "team" over another.

Being a partisan mouthpiece isn't itself a problem, the issue is when it pretends (and many of its supporters repeatedly and falsely claim) that items described in the paper are more objective and carries greater weight than those in your average political party's weekly newsletter.

JohnStrangeII · 5 years ago

> It's ok to be politically biased, but still factually accurate for things that fit their political bias?

Everybody is biased. You, me, and every journalist on earth. Of course, that's okay. The NYT also does not go out of their way to "...pretend they have no political bias."

What is important is to be able to understand the difference between news and editorials (including editorial decisions), but sadly more and more people seem to lose grasp of this basic distinction. This may be a sign of the negative consequences of the politization of many points.

JohnStrangeII commented on The “Nonplussed” Problem (2011) slate.com/articles/life/t... · Posted by u/Tomte

lr4444lr · 5 years ago

The etymology of "master" goes back at least to the Latin "magister" meaning "teacher", and is used in a multitude of contexts where one person is recognized as having some kind of revered knowledge or authority about some topic.

While I don't agree with the position that the word "slave" be expunged from tech for some putative role in trivializing historical slavery either, at least the argument does have a plausible premise. The anti "master" crowd though is laughably ignorant of language.

JohnStrangeII · 5 years ago

Well, if you start arguing this way, then you can also go all the way back and muse about what the word meant in Proto-Indoeuropean.

It's still obvious that the modern use of the master/slave combo comes from centuries of slavery, not from any prior meanings. As OP said, that can be shown by studying their meanings outside the technical context. The original meaning was retained in Academia but merely as jargon. Magister artium is a "master degree." There is no "slave degree", though. There is also "mastery", master/apprentice, and so on.

In other words, the offensive component of the combo is "slave", not "master." You can safely continue to use the master/apprentice combo.

JohnStrangeII commented on The “Nonplussed” Problem (2011) slate.com/articles/life/t... · Posted by u/Tomte

spodek · 5 years ago

Yes, I was being ironical.

JohnStrangeII · 5 years ago

I didn't see it immediately either, it's amazing how good my brain auto-corrected "maximalize" and "minimilize" without me even noticing.

JohnStrangeII commented on Why am I wasting time on EndBASIC? jmmv.dev/2021/01/why-endb... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

newswasboring · 5 years ago

> The right programming language is the one that lets you express yourself clearly and accurately, and solves your problem with a reasonable tradeoff between implementation overhead and execution costs.

Yeah but thats not the reason why BASIC is around is it? Its around simply as legacy or because MS insists on including it with Excel which makes it a path of least resistance choice. Lets not get too high and mighty about BASIC or VB.NET like stuff. They are bad tools, so are most other tools we use. We just make it work not because its possible, but because nobody wants to go through the requisition forms.

Edit: This comment is brought to you by my painful existence with MATLAB

JohnStrangeII · 5 years ago

It's not just for legacy purposes. I've written a few useful personal tools in Purebasic, for instance. BASIC dialects tend to provide the functionality needed and can be handy for quickly throwing something together when you don't have the time to deal with GUI frameworks and complex libraries. You can also use Python or Go, of course, but they do not have integrated IDE and do not have a rich command set in the core language. Easy deployment and compact executables are also a plus of some existing BASIC dialects. If I had the money / the investment in a license would give me a good ROI, then I'd also pay for Xojo, for example.

Whatever gets the job done without wasting time.