neuromanser (u/neuromanser)

neuromanser commented on Playboy image from 1972 gets ban from IEEE computer journals arstechnica.com/informati... · Posted by u/thunderbong

low_tech_love · a year ago

In the spectrum of postmodern quasi-meaningless decisions made to give some appearance of action to appease people who are more likely to complain than do something useful, this is on the harmless side. What really bothers me is the underlying idea that a picture of a beautiful woman is offensive. It seems like we’re on a path of “regression to the mean” where only mediocrity is acceptable, and anything remarkable is offensive. If I felt offended every time I saw a picture of a man more beautiful (and attractive) than me I might as well disconnect and go live in the woods.

neuromanser · a year ago

I too think we're growing hypersensitive, but that's not the only argument for switching to a different picture: the the model has requested the image not be used, long ago IIRC.

neuromanser commented on Difftastic, a structural diff tool that understands syntax difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/... · Posted by u/frankjr

hrdwdmrbl · a year ago

It seems like a major lapse in product innovation that Github has not come out with something like this. They don't even have something to help you when the indentation changes, they usually just show it as a giant add & remove. Their diff viewer can and should be smarter.

neuromanser · a year ago

Github can't even recognize syntax, let alone provide semantic diffs! In fact, Github can't even tell that foo.cpp.in is different from foo.mk.in! Any foo.t is declared to be Perl, with no way to fix it…There are a decade-old tickets!

neuromanser commented on Difftastic, a structural diff tool that understands syntax difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/... · Posted by u/frankjr

pmayrgundter · a year ago

"Do you know how to read @@ -5,6 +5,7 @@ syntax? Difftastic shows the actual line numbers from your files, both before and after."

Preach!

Just dropped it in and did a git diff.. works like a charm!

neuromanser · a year ago

> Do you know how to read @@ -5,6 +5,7 @@ syntax?

Do you not?

neuromanser commented on Microsoft again bothers Chrome users with Bing popup ads in Windows bleepingcomputer.com/news... · Posted by u/cebert

Lio · a year ago

Linux desktops definitely are usable but there are still rough edges.

e.g. in Gnome when I open a media file with VLC the focus remains on Files app even if the video opened fullscreen over the top. So when I press space to pause I instead open a second preview of the same file in the background.

Or I use the Gnome media player and it turns sub-tittles back on every time I use it, despite me previously turning them off.

Or the sleep system doesn't suspend to disk after an hour of RAM usage so that my battery is flat when I return latter.

Little stuff like that is an unnecessary pain, just for a lack of polish. I persevere with Linux because of all the little things it does better but it's a hard sell to friends and family.

neuromanser · a year ago

Windows has focus issues too. Eg. when I launch Windows Terminal, whether from the Start menu or the pinned icon in Taskbar, it renders the window focussed at first, but as soon as the shell finishes initialization the window loses focus.

neuromanser commented on The Good Soldier Švejk (2018) blogs.loc.gov/internation... · Posted by u/palmfacehn

The_Colonel · a year ago

I would dispute at least "The Name of the Rose", I'd say it's just a multi layered story.

A good portion of the book are philosophical discussions, which would be IMHO very boring and not understandable for small children.

The magic of novels like Svejk or Little Prince is that those extra layers are mostly implied, emergent, they're not written out explicitly and thus don't bore out the young readers.

neuromanser · a year ago

This one is a little difficult: the book is laden with multilingual dialogue and notes apparatus; it's not for everybody. That said, I first read The Name of the Rose when I was 11 or 12, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

neuromanser commented on The Good Soldier Švejk (2018) blogs.loc.gov/internation... · Posted by u/palmfacehn

lukan · a year ago

More examples of "scalable" books please?

neuromanser · a year ago

Catch-22. I was maybe 11 on my first reading, and read it once a year until I was 19 or so. The book grew darker and darker on each reading, without changing a word. (I've read it a bunch of times since, just not every year. )

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. My mother read it to me before I could read. I thought it was a great adventure book!

neuromanser commented on The Good Soldier Švejk (2018) blogs.loc.gov/internation... · Posted by u/palmfacehn

mcepl · a year ago

“The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Whatever age I read it, I am always surprised how much it deals with the actual problems I have.

neuromanser · a year ago

I don't know anyone who liked The Little Prince when they were kids, regardless of their appreciation of the book as adults.

I disliked it as a kid for the same reasons I've loved it (and Exupéry's other aviator stories) as adult: it's abstract and impressionist.

neuromanser commented on Two-thirds of young Dutch say influencers affect their financial decisions nltimes.nl/2024/03/12/two... · Posted by u/belter

neuromanser · a year ago

The article is specifically about "finfluencers", which I can't help but read as "active participants in shitcoin pump-and-dump schemes", and find the self-reported numbers of "saved money" and "made money" suspect.

Alternatively, the finfluencers in question could be coffeezilla, that would check out. ;-)

neuromanser commented on Cloning a Laptop over NVMe TCP copyninja.in/blog/clone_l... · Posted by u/pabs3

jasomill · a year ago

No — the kernel buffers non-O_DIRECT writes to block devices to ensure correctness.

Larger writes will be more efficient, however, if only due to reduced system call overhead.

While not necessary when writing an image with the correct block size for the target device, even partial block overwrites work fine:

  # yes | head -c 512 > foo
  # losetup /dev/loop0 foo
  # echo 'Ham and jam and Spam a lot.' | dd bs=5 of=/dev/loop0
  5+1 records in
  5+1 records out
  28 bytes copied, 0.000481667 s, 58.1 kB/s
  # hexdump -C /dev/loop0
  00000000  48 61 6d 20 61 6e 64 20  6a 61 6d 20 61 6e 64 20  |Ham and jam and |
  00000010  53 70 61 6d 20 61 20 6c  6f 74 2e 0a 79 0a 79 0a  |Spam a lot..y.y.|
  00000020  79 0a 79 0a 79 0a 79 0a  79 0a 79 0a 79 0a 79 0a  |y.y.y.y.y.y.y.y.|
  *
  00000200

Partial block overwrites may (= will, unless the block to be overwritten is in the kernel's buffer cache) require a read/modify/write operation, but this is transparent to the application.

Finally, note that this applies to most block devices, but tape devices work differently: partial overwrites are not supported, and, in variable block mode, the size of individual write calls determines the resulting tape block sizes.

neuromanser · a year ago

> # yes | head -c 512 > foo

How about `truncate -s 512 foo`?

neuromanser commented on Bees and chimps can also pass on their skills phys.org/news/2024-03-hum... · Posted by u/wglb

RcouF1uZ4gsC · a year ago

> Then the Dutch-led team of researchers trained two demonstrator chimpanzees to show the others how it was done.

> After two months, 14 "naive" chimps had mastered it.

I am not sure the study is showing human like “cumulative culture”. It is showing that if humans train them, they can show others, which is different from humans learning a thing on their own, showing it to others, and then someone else using that as a foundation to discover something new building on that.

Basically, the study is showing that a chimp can teach other chimps something humans trained it to do.

I don’t think that is a novel or controversial finding. If you grow up around dogs, you know that one trained dog will help the other dogs learn.

neuromanser · a year ago

I, too, thought that chimps learning from each other was nothing new (Jared Diamond, etc).

Besides that: I haven't read either study, just the article, so who knows what were the actual claims, but…

The article opens with:

> chimpanzees can learn skills from their peers so complicated that they could never have mastered them on their own.

Which you object with:

> Basically, the study is showing that a chimp can teach other chimps something humans trained it to do.

and:

> I am not sure the study is showing human like “cumulative culture”.

That reads a bit like rejecting evolution because we haven't fully replicated abiogenesis (yet).

Is "humans trained it to do" in "a chimp can teach other chimps something humans trained it to do" so important?