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organian commented on "Firefox added [ad tracking] and has already turned it on without asking you"   mastodon.social/@mcc/1127... · Posted by u/notamy
Beldin · a year ago
> The idea that critical communication infrastructure must be (directly or indirectly) supported by advertising interests is certainly not obvious

I think the problem is more that the trend over the last 5-7 decades has been to privatise things. The EU (for instance) has rules forcing (e.g.,) privatisation of train companies and postal services. This has caused previously government-owned services to be privatised.

In this day and age, I'd be surprised to hear of any successful case where a non-public good was made public in a Western country. (I'll restrict my surprise to there because of insufficient familiarity with other countries to make such sweeping statements.) Whether it'd be web browsers, water treatment facilities, energy-related, healthcare-related, infrastructure-related, etc.: if it's currently privatised, it will emphatically not revert to public; if it's currently public, it might be forced to be privatised.

You might think about "privatised-but-with-strings-attached" variants, like in California with "carrier-of-last-resort", or in EU with public transport concessions requiring also services that operate at a loss to service small population centers / unpopular hours. Typically, these impose restrictions on the market parties on what they must deliver in order to be granted the concession. That seems like a way to guarantee the kind of service a government would deliver, but by market parties. And it is! But once you encode rules, you can start eroding them. Every new concession tender going out, you can try to dilute such conditions. A bit is enough - every step gained can be relied upon in future negotiations ("you're asking for more than last term"). And, of course, every small step can be argued by increasing costs - because cost will always increase anyway.

The TL;DRR (didn't read the rant): the public commons has a tendency to erode in favour of privatisation. There is pressure to do so, and no real counterpressure to reverse, only to not go too fast.

organian · a year ago
> I'd be surprised to hear of any successful case where a non-public good was made public in a Western country.

The UK is renationalising railways now.

organian commented on No dogs were harmed in the making of this app   shmck.substack.com/p/no-d... · Posted by u/ShMcK
smt88 · 2 years ago
It's mostly just a joke about how these roles do their jobs.

But I think it's also partly illuminating the fact that hardware engineers are true engineers, while software engineers mostly aren't.

organian · 2 years ago
I think "software engineers aren't really engineers" is putting "real engineering" on a pedestal that is borne of ignorance. Hillel Wayne's engineer interviews were eye-opening on this: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/
organian commented on Rust is for Professionals   gregoryszorc.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/indygreg2
ahelwer · 5 years ago
Since it's so trivial, I would be quite happy for you to implement the feature for me! https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter/issues/982

Just lol at the idea that you won't run into borrow checker issues when dealing with strings though.

organian · 5 years ago
I'm not the person you replied to, but here's some Playground code I just wrote that might be helpful for you, based on the issue you linked:

https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

organian commented on Mundane: Rust cryptography library that is difficult to misuse   github.com/google/mundane... · Posted by u/MrXOR
TheNorthman · 5 years ago
Probably the Google-sponsored cryptography library you want to use depends on the language you're using... Not much point in using Tink if they don't expose a C-api or any other ergonomic form to make Rust bindings.
organian · 5 years ago
Project Oak (at Google) are working on Tink Rust: https://github.com/project-oak/tink-rust, although with this caveat:

This is not an official port of Tink, and is not supported by Google's cryptography teams.

organian commented on Reddit Is Down    · Posted by u/tpmx
organian · 5 years ago
Interestingly, their status page shows mostly green and "Operational" (albeit along with telltale spikes in backlogs and a drop in requests):

https://www.redditstatus.com/

organian commented on You might not need machine learning   nullprogram.com/blog/2020... · Posted by u/chmaynard
ZephyrBlu · 5 years ago
Can someone who knows C help me understand the source code?

https://gist.github.com/skeeto/da7b2ac95730aa767c8faf8ec3098...

The concepts and equations he has are pretty simple but I'm really not seeing how they translate into code.

The code also isn't the easiest to try and understand for me. Multiple 1-3 letter or otherwise (Seemingly) poorly named variables, some C jargon I'm not familiar with (Mostly the -> operator) and the fact it's a relatively large chunk of code.

It seems like the core logic loop is here: https://gist.github.com/skeeto/da7b2ac95730aa767c8faf8ec3098...

And the position and acceleration of the car is altered each iteration through randomization?

It's hard to piece together.

organian · 5 years ago
The arrow operator is a field access through a pointer. That is, if you have a pointer to a struct, it's the same as dereferencing the pointer and accessing the field: "(*foo).bar" corresponds to "foo->bar".

I think the main driving logic is on line 228. It could definitely do with some more descriptive variable names, though - "a" for angle, and "s" for sense inputs seems a bit too short.

organian commented on Buy on Google is now open and commission-free   blog.google/products/shop... · Posted by u/hhua_
heavyset_go · 5 years ago
It's ironic how my least favorite genre of posts are posts that complain about other posts.
organian · 5 years ago
It's ironic how my least favorite genre of comments are about people discussing the correct usage of the word "ironic".

u/organian

KarmaCake day194October 2, 2015View Original