frud (u/frud) - Readit News

frud commented on What we know about CEO shooting suspect bbc.com/news/articles/cp9... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7

Bjorkbat · 9 months ago

I'm weirdly not too surprised due to this belief I have that software developers would make effective criminals. A lot of this boils down to a belief I have that not getting caught in the first place is easy. Murders have something like a 50% solve rate and you can decrease your chances of getting caught with a little knowledge on how to evade common forensic techniques along with some planning. Those who get caught doing one crime or another either were dumb to begin or eventually got lazy and made a dumb mistake in hindsight.

Besides that though, the ethos that we have lends itself well to acquiring advanced knowledge in more-or-less all domains, crime and forensics included.

frud · 9 months ago

I think that, more generally, intelligent people don't get arrested for crimes for several reasons. First, because they are smarter, they just don't get themselves into jams where murdering someone seems like the best way to get out of the jam. Second, because they are more successful they have more to lose in terms of wealth, happiness, good living situation, so they risk more when choosing crime, so they're less likely to choose it. Only thirdly is actual proficiency in the planning and execution of the crime.

frud commented on The Race to Seal Helium HDDs (2021) blog.westerndigital.com/r... · Posted by u/Quizzical4230

amelius · a year ago

So write too many zeros to your drive, the disk becomes demagnetized, and the head will crash?

frud · a year ago

The raw words written to the drive are actually re-encoded into slightly larger codewords with nice properties like not having too many zero or one bits in a row, and error detection/correction.

Plus I think that the 0/1 bits are not encoded as "no magnetism"/"some magnetism", but instead as "north magnetism"/"south magnetism" since magnetic fields have a direction.

And I don't think the magnetic fields on the platters have any appreciable effect on the head besides the electromagnetic effects at the sensor.

frud commented on Progress Quest: The original idle game progressquest.com/play/... · Posted by u/chr15m

Aeolun · a year ago

I kind of feel like there’s little to do except press more buttons? Like, I get that it’s an idle game, but even cookie clicker at least looks entertaining.

frud · a year ago

The game goes through several phase changes as you progress.

frud commented on EPA bans asbestos, a deadly carcinogen still in use decades after partial ban apnews.com/article/epa-as... · Posted by u/anigbrowl

jijijijij · a year ago

> There are forms of asbestos that are really not all that dangerous to the general public

Source?

frud · a year ago

Any form that doesn't have loose fibrils, microparticles, or dust.

I'd compare it to wood from walnut trees, which is perfectly safe to handle and use in dining tables, etc., but dust from its' woodworking is toxic.

frud commented on Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up wired.com/story/air-canad... · Posted by u/gavman

OnionBlender · 2 years ago

If that is such a perfect way to avoid getting sued, why don't they put that on every page of their website and train all of their customer service staff to say that when they talk to customers?

frud · 2 years ago

I used to work for a company that sold factory automation technology, and had hundreds of manuals for all the products they sold. In the front matter of every manual was a disclaimer that nothing in the manual was warranted to be true. This was automation equipment running things like steel mills, factories, petroleum plants, where failures could result in many deaths and grave financial losses.

frud commented on Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up wired.com/story/air-canad... · Posted by u/gavman

frud · 2 years ago

The real story here is that Air Canada's lawyers argued, among other things, that the chatbot was a separate and independent legal entity from Air Canada and therefore Air Canada was not obligated to honor the made up policy.

In other words, this was possibly the first historical argument made in a court that AI's are sentient and not automated chattel.

frud commented on We need to talk about parentheses (2020) andreyor.st/posts/2020-12... · Posted by u/precompute

boxed · 2 years ago

> It depends… on operator precedence

I think implementing operator precedence in ANY programming language is a mistake. `1 + 1 * 2` should be a syntax error. In C, in Python, in Java.

frud · 2 years ago

For basically forever compilers and languages have been designed with a total ordering on operator precedences. The Yacc compiler generator tool maps operator precedence to integers, as do most handwritten compiler parsers.

A total ordering has a definite answer to the question "is x greater than, equal to, or less than y?" for all x and y. A partial ordering will answer "I don't know" for some x and y.

It's quite possible to implement operator precedence using a partial ordering. When the parser has to resolve precedence between two operators and their relationship is not defined, throw an "ambiguous precedence" error.

You can implement the partial ordering by putting all the operators into a DAG of sets of operators. If two operators are in the same set, they have equal precedence. If there is a path through the DAG from one operator to the other, that defines the precedence relation. Else there is no relation.

Say "*" is defined to have a higher precedence than "+", and they both have an undefined precedence relation with "&". Then "1 + 2 * 3" should compile into "1 + (2*3)", but "1 + 2 & 3" should throw an "ambiguous precedence" syntax error.

frud commented on A Partisan Solution to Partisan Gerrymandering: The Define–Combine Procedure cambridge.org/core/journa... · Posted by u/headalgorithm

frud · 2 years ago

Even if it's stable in a game theory sense, it depends on the political class being partitioned into exactly two parties. Otherwise the two biggest parties would have an incentive to smother all smaller competitors.

I think the answer has to lie in an algorithmic solution dependent on a high-resolution population density map.

frud commented on Infinite Craft neal.fun/infinite-craft/... · Posted by u/kretaceous

hinkley · 2 years ago

Forest + fire = smoke

Mud + water = swamp

Swamp + plant = Venus Flytrap

Okay, okay.

Venus Flytrap + Smoke = smoke detector

frud · 2 years ago

Fish + fire = sushi