• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 13th, 2022

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  • Well, to reference Julia Evans another time:

    head and HEAD are specifically the third meaning of ‘branch’, i.e. the newest commit on a branch, but can also refer to a commit not on a branch, when in that detached head state.

    And while I’m not enamored with these names either, I can’t think of a word that I like better for this meaning.


  • Recently, I saw a toddler ask her mom why a snowman decoration was wearing a scarf. And the mom decided to go the playful route and said that the snowman is probably cold. So, the toddler followed up asking why the snowman is out here and not inside the house, where it’s warm? To which the mom replied that it would melt, if it was inside…well, uh, not this one, as it’s a decoration made out of wood.

    And like, yeah, these are some tough questions.
    Do you just explain to a toddler that humans put up decorations, which don’t always make infinite sense?






  • They do have a history of such things happening, yes, which is why my comment exists in the first place. Normally, I would assume this to just be the result of regular shitty management practices paired with regular shitty profit motives.

    The history makes it look like they might genuinely have a higher motive here, and I’m saying I still don’t think so, because it would be far too petty and I don’t see them benefitting that much from it.





  • The thing is, I really don’t think, Google would care about Firefox. Firefox is sitting at negligible percentages of usage share. The only real competitor to Chrome is Safari and that’s because of iOS.
    I guess, they might impact Safari on macOS with this, but someone would have to try this out to actually see, and ultimately, this could still just be a dumb mistake.

    Having said that, Google holds a near-monopoly in both video content and web browsers. They have a special duty to not disadvantage competitors and even if this was an honest mistake, I do think, it deserves a slap on the wrist.


  • I don’t think, there’s currently any plans to introduce a non-JS API for accessing the DOM. It would just take an insane amount of implementation work + documentation.

    But frameworks can generate access code for you, so you don’t actually need to write any JS yourself. Rust is quite far ahead in this regard, thanks to the wasm-bindgen library.


  • I mean, so far, all of them require tons of humanly produced data.

    Discriminative AI (deep learning et al) requires humans to label data for hours on end, per use-case.
    And generative AI (LLMs et al) require just insane amounts of human works to copy from, albeit not necessarily limited to individual use-cases.

    I guess, what I’m saying is that the ratio of how much labor humans (involuntarily) invested into AIs, compared to the labor these AIs actually perform, is likely a lot higher than 70%.


  • It’s a thing here in Europe. I’m guessing, because our walls are generally concrete, we usually either throw on decorative plaster or a wallpaper, to make it feel a bit warmer and have a uniform surface which accepts paint more readily.

    It’s even quite common that if you rent an appartment, that the walls have wallpaper on them, which is painted with a fresh coat of white paint every time someone moves out and the next folks move in.
    And then some people, after they move in, will just paint (some of) the walls in a different color, if they feel like not living in pure white…







  • Ah, true. Thanks.

    Theoretically, it was supposed to be pseudo-code, secretly inspired by Rust, but I did get that one mixed up.

    And I am actually even a fan of the word unwrap there, because it follows a schema and you can have your IDE auto-complete all the things you can do with an Option.
    In many of these other languages, you just get weird collections of symbols which you basically have to memorize and which only cover rather specific uses.