mantap (u/mantap) - Readit News

mantap commented on Canada Proposes New Regime to Block and Deindex Pirate Sites torrentfreak.com/canada-p... · Posted by u/curmudgeon22

ArkanExplorer · 4 years ago

Deindexing/blocking these sites is a reasonable step. Australia did so in 2018, resulting in a 5% increase to visits to legal sites:

https://www.mpa-apac.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Australi...

It seems unreasonable to have websites openly flouting copyright law. Additionally, for software like games, the files are usually full of malware.

mantap · 4 years ago

What is Google if not a website that openly flouts copyright law? I don't remember Google getting license to store my website in their index or to show my images in Google Images.

I don't mind, of course, but it goes to show that the whole thing is bogus and a different set of laws apply depending on how much money you have.

mantap commented on 55% of all Tether, $25B, were created in 2021 tradingview.com/symbols/C... · Posted by u/daolf

tsujp · 4 years ago

1 USDT is meant to represent 1 USD in the bank in the custody of Tether.

In 2019 Tether was proven to be only 74% backed by fiat and fiat-equivalent assets: https://www.coindesk.com/tether-lawyer-confirms-stablecoin-7... This means it's not 74 literal cents per USDT but some proportion of a liquid asset and fiat.

Tether has long since refused to release any concrete of proof of reserve and even when they were heavily pressured to only admitted to a lack thereof (74% in 2019 and that 74% isn't even fiat-only).

Tether is nothing but bad for the crypto-space as when it eventually DOES collapse a lot of people are going to find themselves holding something, USDT, which isn't as backed as they thought it was. Would you give me a dollar right now if I gave you back 74 cents?

The only sensible stable crypto asset is DAI from the MakerDAO which has been battle tested and proven under the worst possible scenarios (2017/2018 bullmarket crash) where it still held it's peg.

I don't know how this extends to USDC etc but for USDT I wouldn't touch it with a 20 foot pole.

mantap · 4 years ago

74% backing sounds pretty good for a cryptocurrency. I wouldn't touch tether myself as USDC is better in every way, but I don't think there's going to be the fireworks that people predict if the peg falls only to 74 cents.

mantap commented on Denmark to permanently cease using AstraZeneca vaccine reuters.com/article/idUSK... · Posted by u/reddotX

fighterpilot · 4 years ago

Why not allocate most of the Pfizer to the young and give the AZ exclusively to the older people?

mantap · 4 years ago

Theoretically Pfizer has higher efficacy, especially with variants. Giving Pfizer to the old and AZ to the young probably saves more lives than the other way around. If you decide that you don't want to give AZ to the young any more, it doesn't follow that it's then a good idea to give it to the old, especially if you have enough supplies of Pfizer to vaccinate the old.

mantap commented on Is WebAssembly magic performance pixie dust? surma.dev/things/js-to-as... · Posted by u/pimterry

als0 · 4 years ago

Can someone explain to me why WebAssembly is restricted from accessing the DOM or the Web APIs? I haven't been able to find a reason.

mantap · 4 years ago

You can bridge through JavaScript. It's not a big deal in practice. WASM is still very immature. You do not want to build your whole app in WASM if you want to keep a full head of hair.

mantap commented on US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-c... · Posted by u/basisword

tacitusarc · 4 years ago

6 obvious deaths that we're aware of. The risk of the vaccines is in their novelty and morbidity. An abundance of caution is required in this instance. It would be very bad to discover that there's a vanishingly small chance of blood clots within the first 3 months but a significant chance when paired with other events over the following decade.

mantap · 4 years ago

This is what worries me. I have had the AZ vaccine. Will I be at risk of this syndrome every time I am exposed to coronavirus? In other words, is the risk cumulative?

mantap commented on US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-c... · Posted by u/basisword

disabled · 4 years ago

Sorry, but this is not relevant to this discussion. I refuse to flood this extremely long thread with details that are not relevant to the readers clicking on this thread. Please see my profile and email me instead, for specific answers.

mantap · 4 years ago

It is relevant to the discussion because the AZ and JJ vaccines are for the "rest of the world", so comparative differences in the cost of IG between US and other healthcare systems is relevant.

mantap commented on NHS Covid-19 app update blocked for breaking Apple and Google's rules bbc.co.uk/news/technology... · Posted by u/mbalyuzi

dkarp · 4 years ago

I was curious what it was sending so scanned it:

UKC19TRACING:1:eyJhbGciOiJFUzI1NiIsImtpZCI6ImlSNHdIVEIxdkF2a 2RjbEdCQWVwUlpxSzZSb29GbVNxcEpDQVd4alFvUFEifQ.eyJpZCI6IlA1Mkt XUFIzIiwidHlwIjoiZW50cnkiLCJvcG4iOiJFbncgTGxlb2xpYWQgeSBQcmF3 ZiIsImFkciI6IldlbHNoIEdvdmVybm1lbnRcbkNyb3duIEJ1aWxkaW5nXG5DY XRoYXlzIFBhcmtcbkNBUkRJRkYsIENGMTAgM05RIiwicHQiOiJDQVJESUZGIi wicGMiOiJDRjEwM05RIiwidnQiOiIwMDEifQ.3USKQlzdD4_RlH-wWvPPyQig 3tGbS8XUIFlTryqVzCmeWzc32YyKLjYpnzNOpUu0555-ym1kfvdDNAqnqyAWRw

The first part "UKC19TRACING" obviously tells you it's for UK Covid 19 tracing. The second part "1" is maybe a version number. The rest is a json web token with the following payload:

{"id":"P52KWPR3","typ":"entry","opn":"Enw Lleoliad y Prawf","adr":"Welsh Government\nCrown Building\nCathays Park\nCARDIFF, CF10 3NQ","pt":"CARDIFF","pc":"CF103NQ","vt":"001"}

Honestly, this seems to me to be overly complicated but I don't really know how the apps work.

mantap · 4 years ago

It seems crazy that they are using JSON in a QR code. There are much more compact encodings they could have chosen.

mantap commented on CPU-based algorithm trains deep neural nets up to 15 times faster than top GPU techxplore.com/news/2021-... · Posted by u/gumby

nl · 4 years ago

NNUE is weird. No one outside the chess/shogi community talks about it because they seem to have a very case of strong not-invented-here syndrome. It's hand-optimised CPU code that doesn't (yet) run on the GPU (which is why it is "faster").

To be fair, they do want to embed it into a consumer friendly application, and the integration for embedding TF or something that can run pytorch models on a GPU without python is non-trivial.

If someone ported it to a GPU, it almost certainly would be faster. See http://www.talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=76986

There is a PyTorch port available, but no benchmarks unfortunatly. It does seem to be fairly widely used for training though, which is indicative of the speed gains available.

mantap · 4 years ago

GPU have high latency. For a chess engine like stockfish which is designed to search as many positions as possible, the latency of a GPU is a big problem.

Engines like LC0 that do use the GPU work by searching fewer positions but with a heavier eval function. This makes the latency less relevant because it is a smaller percentage of the GPU time.

mantap commented on The antidote to civilisational collapse – An interview with Adam Curtis (2018) economist.com/open-future... · Posted by u/marton78

heresie-dabord · 4 years ago

I tried to test this hypothesis but quickly encountered the problem that what I believe to be a good life is based on facts and knowledge about the world.

I propose an alternative: any arrant nonsense that people insist on believing despite facts and knowledge is likely to be willful ignorance, which people may seek to protect by calling it religion.

The arrant nonsense no one believes anymore is called "mythology".

mantap · 4 years ago

Every culture has certain principles that are taken as axiomatic. The prioritisation of those principles is also axiomatic.

For example, where I live, nearly all people wear clothes, and they generally think that wearing clothes is important - even if the weather is mild enough that you won't get cold or sunburn if you dispensed with them. Moreover, they will get upset if other people dispense with theirs.

What I find funny is that people will ridicule organised religions for prescribing certain clothing (such as Mormonism, Sikhism, Islam), blissfully unaware of their own quasi-religious attitudes towards clothing.

And sometimes these attitudes can be quite extreme. There is a man in the UK who has been in prison for years for indecent exposure. Every time he is released from prison, he strips off outside, and they call the police to re-arrest him.

mantap commented on Facebook Analytics will no longer be available facebook.com/business/hel... · Posted by u/oblib

spurgu · 4 years ago

Interestingly the same people arguing for removing/regulating/moderating FB also heavily criticize China's censoring politics.

mantap · 4 years ago

There's a difference between wanting to ban something because it is a threat to your autocracy and wanting to dissolve something because it is too powerful and abusive. Punching down vs punching up.

I think most people of that persuasion just want to break up large tech companies though, not ban them outright.