Readit News logoReadit News
waterheater commented on User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality   plus.flux.community/p/ban... · Posted by u/gregsadetsky
JuniperMesos · 2 months ago
> How can people laugh and make meme at someone else murder ? Like the guy, hate him, but there is something that used to be shared amongst humans, it's that you respect the dead.

This is extremely wrong. Humans do have an impulse to show respect to the dead, even in some cases dead members of some kind of enemy community. But it is also extremely common and extremely widespread for people to celebrate the deaths of their enemies, from leftists making jokes about the death of Margaret Thatcher, to British people continuing to burn Guy Fawkes in effigy for his centuries-old act of unsuccessful terrorism, to Jews continuing to disparage Haman, some 2500 years after the events that formed the basis for the Purim festival.

waterheater · 2 months ago
Just because something is common and widespread doesn't mean it should continue to be common and widespread, though it will continue to happen due to human nature. And yet, people striving to be constructive and positive won't celebrate the death of a stranger. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is a cultural lodestar found globally for a very good reason: cheering the death of others may lead to others hoping to cheer your death, and that potential is enough to significantly curtail offers of constructive and positive assistance from the victims to the perpetrators, leading to a gradual social degradation within the perpetrators. Certainly remember and even memorialize a person's death, but the exaltation of a person's death is a sure path to cultural collapse.

Now, that's assuming people are one unified group. In reality, most people are forced into an "in" group or an "out" group. The "in" group exalts the death of the "out" group member, so the "out" group members must respond in kind. That eventually leads to the degradation of both groups, leaving the "above" and "beyond" groups with the remnants. In turn, the destructive and negative conflict continues.

waterheater commented on Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account   theverge.com/news/793579/... · Posted by u/josephcsible
waterheater · 3 months ago
This is a bad idea. Now, with that established...

Microsoft has many intelligent people who work there and certainly do many risk vs. reward calculations for each modification to Windows. From Microsoft's perspective, they have much more control over the OS when everyone's linked to a cloud account. I morally disagree with that approach, but the security issues with Windows come from unpatched systems. They tried to win over software developers by creating WSL, but the privacy- and security-minded software developers never really bit.

Also, consider that Microsoft's future is obviously pivoted toward cloud infrastructure. Yes, they smartly have other ventures, but all those ventures will rely on Microsoft cloud infrastructure in some way. Server farms are a much better business model, from Microsoft's perpective, especially because it pulls Microsoft into the domains of true wealth: land acquisition, energy production, and data mining.

waterheater commented on Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself   henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/atte... · Posted by u/jger15
iamben · 4 months ago
If you're near any of the cities they run events in, I highly recommend https://pitchblackplayback.com/

There's something deeply connecting (and often very moving) about listening to a record and having your attention forced on it. So much that I usually start by thinking "I hope they turn it up," and by the end, when it has your sole focus, it's almost deafening.

waterheater · 4 months ago
Some years ago, I snagged a great deal on some Sennheiser HD600s. After also acquiring a Schiit stack (Magni + Modi) and finding high-quality audio sources, I would close my eyes, lay down on the couch, and just listen...actually, I'll call it perceive the music. No other audio experience compares, just like a huge screen which fills your vision is truly the best way to experience a movie.

Virtually all people on the planet perceive the world with their eyes but push the other four physical senses into the background. There's good reason for this reality, of course: of our five physical senses, the eyes are capable of providing the richest information. And yet, most discussion around increasing perceptual abilities are vision-centric. Learning to perceive with your ears, smell, touch, and taste in addition to eyes should also be learned.

waterheater commented on New records on Wendelstein 7-X   iter.org/node/20687/new-r... · Posted by u/greesil
brohee · 5 months ago
Does it kill the idea of a tokamak as an energy production device? As in a stellarator proving the much more promising design...
waterheater · 5 months ago
Tokamaks are conceptually elegant but contain significant inefficiencies which negatively impact potential net power output. Both tokamaks and optimized stellarators have magnetic fields possessing omnigeneity [1], but tokamaks require two magnetic fields (poloidal and toroidal) whereas stellarators employ one.

The bigger question is if magnetic confinement fusion will lead to the best energy producing devices. Competitors include inertial confinement, pinches, or some other exotic method. If a magnetic confinement fusion device produces net power, it's going to be a stellarator.

Sources:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnigeneity

waterheater commented on TSMC bets on unorthodox optical tech   spectrum.ieee.org/microle... · Posted by u/Rohitcss
qwezxcrty · 7 months ago
Not an expert in communications. Would the SerDes be the new bottleneck in the approach? I imagine there is a reason for serial interfaces dominating over the parallel ones, maybe timing skew between lanes, how can this be addressed in this massive parallel optical parallel interface?
waterheater · 7 months ago
>serial interfaces dominating over the parallel ones

Semi-accurate. For example, PCIe remains dominant in computing. PCIe is technically a serial protocol, as new versions of PCIe (7.0 is releasing soon) increase the serial transmission rate. However, PCIe is also parallel-wise scalable based on performance needs through "lanes", where one lane is a total of four wires, arranged as two differential pairs, with one pair for receiving (RX) and one for transmitting (TX).

PCIe scales up to 16 lanes, so a PCIe x16 interface will have 64 wires forming 32 differential pairs. When routing PCIe traces, the length of all differential pairs must be within <100 mils of each other (I believe; it's been about 10 years since I last read the spec). That's to address the "timing skew between lanes" you mention, and DRCs in the PCB design software will ensure the trace length skew requirement is respected.

>how can this be addressed in this massive parallel optical parallel interface?

From a hardware perspective, reserve a few "pixels" of the story's MicroLED transmitter array for link control, not for data transfer. Examples might be a clock or a data frame synchronization signal. From the software side, design a communication protocol which negotiates a stable connection between the endpoints and incorporates checksums.

Abstractly, the serial vs. parallel dynamic shifts as technology advances. Raising clock rates to shove more data down the line faster (serial improvement) works to a point, but you'll eventually hit the limits of your current technology. Still need more bandwidth? Just add more lines to meet your needs (parallel improvement). Eventually the technology improves, and the dynamic continues. A perfect example of that is PCIe.

waterheater commented on The origin of the cargo cult metaphor   righto.com/2025/01/its-ti... · Posted by u/zdw
airstrike · a year ago
The girl already cried. Making it into a meme doesn't make her cry more. People using the meme are exercising their Freedom (of speech, in this case). That freedom of speech isn't really infringing on anyone else's rights, so it's essentially zero cost. Freedom is the second most important natural right, right after Life.[1]

The only argument for not using the meme here would be if _the actual girl in the meme_ wrote an open letter asking people not to use it publicly because every time she sees it she feels those emotions again or some such. I would definitely stop using it then--not that I use that meme to begin with, but that's really besides the point.

I don't care if some rando online wants to police speech. They have no power or right to do so. They are free to have an _opinion_, just as I am, because again, Freedom is a very important right. And they have no right to limit any of my rights, unless my exercise of some right infringed on a higher right of theirs e.g. I cannot claim to have the Freedom to negatively affect their Life.

And, importantly, I think some third-party claiming they are hurt by the use of that meme on behalf of the woman in the photo is not a tenable position. They could only do so if she had expressed the desire for people to stop using the meme, in which case it would still not make a difference whether such people felt hurt or not, but rather that the actual woman was hurt.

There's your argument from first principles. QED.

---

1. I'm handwaving this hierarchy of rights and the existence of natural rights, but hopefully it isn't too controversial to claim that the Life is the paramount right and Freedom should follow closely. I've thought long and hard about this and could never find a better hierarchy. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that every other right derives from just those two rights and their hierarchy relative to each other and to all other rights, but since I have no degree in Law or Philosophy to support such a claim robustly, I can only propose it as a thought experiment left as an exercise to the reader.

waterheater · a year ago
Great argument overall. What strikes me is that I have also thought long and hard about fundamental natural rights, and my proposition is that Free Will is paramount and Privacy is the close second.

I believe such a claim can be robustly supported, and it is my hope to one day do so, ideally supported with a degree of philosophy. Your perspective is, in some ways, quite similar to my own, though it also has notable differences. I do believe it can be rigorously argued, for example, that Life is an outcome of Free Will, not the other way around. I believe it can also be shown that Privacy (not the cybernetic privacy, or cyberprivacy, articulated with privacy policies, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA) is (a) distinct from Free Will, (b) uniquely allows for the expression and development of Free Will, and (c) that maximal expression of Free Will is the global optimum for Life.

waterheater commented on Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news   english.elpais.com/techno... · Posted by u/belter
robertlagrant · 2 years ago
I tend to agree, but maybe I'm talking about something slightly different. I was meaning that when I watch a YouTube video, if the creator has monetised it then they get a tiny amount of money, which enables them to do more videos. The Web in general doesn't have anything like that.
waterheater · 2 years ago
True. You should look into Project Xanadu, which was created with seventeen original rules, one of which is the following:

>Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies ("transclusions") of all or part of the document.

waterheater commented on Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news   english.elpais.com/techno... · Posted by u/belter
jarjoura · 2 years ago
I actually think hiding behind “journalism” gives you more freedom to say what you want. In theory, you couldn’t blatantly make stuff up, because you risk getting sued. However, if the last decade has taught me anything, even then, the burden of proof is on the victim.

I think these high profile media folks volunteer that what they say is opinion, not out of freedom, but more so to frame their talking points in a more persuasive way. Humans will naturally put up their bullshit detectors if they think something is reported as fact, and expect to see evidence. Opinion on the other hand, means your guard is down and you will hear the same message, but consider it.

waterheater · 2 years ago
Historically, people trusted something reported as fact and were naturally skeptical of opinion. It seems that many people are realigning to an environment where the "facts" were presented to create a limited, specific perspective of the world (which is closer to opinion) and the majority of "opinion" producers were challenged to be, and in some cases became, more evidence-based (which is closer to fact). In effect, the system is self-correcting to reflect the natural state of the world: truth exists, and the task is on you to discover it.
waterheater commented on How photos were transmitted by wire in the 1930s   kottke.org/24/03/how-phot... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
wodenokoto · 2 years ago
A librarian friend had the same complaint.

The problem is that libraries Dewey decimals are managed by librarians who want to sort things correctly. YouTube would be managed by uploaders who wants their stuff to be managed _incorrectly_.

YouTube recommendations and search is a super interesting problem not just because of the scale but also because uploaders are an adverse opponent, trying to keyword stuff their spam.

waterheater · 2 years ago
The obvious solution is to actually have librarians correctly classify the videos. DDS focuses on the nature of the work itself, not on the keywords or spam in the content. Librarians understand how to class all kinds of works, and it should be relatively simple to build a DDS/MDS index (Melville Decimal System since it's open, see https://librarything.com/mds) for YouTube videos. Just like with books, disagreement on classification is inevitable and perfectly natural; there's no perfect classification scheme, though DDS/MDS does a generally good job.
waterheater commented on Ephemeral usernames safeguard privacy and make Signal harder to subpoena   theintercept.com/2024/03/... · Posted by u/georgecmu
andrewjl · 2 years ago
I might be missing some background on the topic but is this a real-world example of a differential privacy[1] technique?

[1]: https://privacytools.seas.harvard.edu/courses-educational-ma...

waterheater · 2 years ago
No, ephemeral usernames are not differential privacy. Differential privacy is repeatedly sampling a database through a differentially-private interface which returns data samples which are either real or fake. The mean and variance of the sampled data match the true mean and variance of the dataset according to a system-defined epsilon value. The end user isn't able to know if any given piece of data is real or fake.

I really don't like differential privacy.

u/waterheater

KarmaCake day768September 12, 2019View Original