Slotos
@Slotos@feddit.nl
- Comment on At what point when learning a new language do someone become bilingual? 1 month ago:
Bilingualism is a bit overloaded nowadays, which I find kinda annoying given that word “polyglot” exists.
Anyways, if you can freely use another language in an informal exchange with a few people of different sobriety levels while failing to remember key words and recovering from that - you’re a fluent polyglot. Ability to exchange information is a key part of what language is, and that’s how you measures your proficiency.
Bilingual can also mean “natively proficient in two languages”. And if you’re older than three years old and are not native speakers of multiple languages already, the chances of you becoming one are slim.
Native proficiency is a result of a language acquisition ability that is not well understood and disappears early into child development. It results in a level of effortless mastery that seems to be impossible to achieve as an adult, i.e. a dedicated or merely attentive native speaker will be able to recognize that you are not one.
- Comment on Climate change 1 month ago:
There’s Black Sea too. I swear it exists, I saw it!
- Comment on Is there a difference in meaning between the words *people* and *persons*? 2 months ago:
It’s not “people vs persons” but “those people vs they”.
Conversationally, “those/these” distances you from the group you are talking about, which is humorously weird when it’s your family you’re talking about.
It’s not the meaning of the words, but habitual (and often fleeting) attribution around them that tripped you up.
PS: “People” are uncountable, “persons” are countable. That’s basically the whole difference between the two plurals. Although it’s rapidly disappearing, as “ten people” won’t raise a single eyebrow in a conversation.
- Comment on Is This the End of Plastic? Visa's New Technology Could Replace Physical Cards 5 months ago:
Identification != Authentication
As obvious as this sounds, I’ve learned over the years that most people don’t understand what it means exactly.
- Comment on sweet dreams 6 months ago:
I mean, Schwarzschild radius shows that for a medium of constant density (and on a large scale, Universe is fairly uniform) there is an upper limit of a radius of a ball comprised of said medium above which it will form an event horizon.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius#Calcul…
Which means that an infinite universe of non-zero density is either a bloody paradox (spend a minute deciding where exactly event horizons should form), or our understanding of gravity and spacetime breaks on ginormous scales just as it does on micro ones.
- Comment on We keep measuring everything's value with something that continuously loses value over time 6 months ago:
Problem with money is that money only have value when people are willing to exchange money for goods and services.
The moment that exchange stops, value of money plummets.
A very good analogy I saw in Charles Stross’ “Neptune’s brood” is that money is a concrete representation of an abstract debt. Exchange materializes that debt into a trade, which is where valuation happens. I’m pretty sure I just made a lot of economists justifiably angry though
- Comment on Explain yourselves, comp sci. 6 months ago:
Modern CPUs are also extremely efficient at dealing with contiguous data structures. Branch prediction and caching get to shine on them.
Avoiding memory access or helping CPU access it all upfront switches physical domain of computation.
- Comment on We Can’t Hire You. Developers’ Challenge 11 months ago:
psychometric evaluation
Ah, the “I can’t justify my existence, so I’ll point at the machine” HR starting kit.
Remember, proprietary research is not science. And proprietary research is what these psychometric tests are based on, at best.
- Comment on What do mean things so small we can't see them with the human eye? Are you crazy? 11 months ago:
That’s the scientific part. Conventional wisdom, on the other hand, is often neither.
- Comment on 1.1 History 11 months ago:
Entropy is a measure of a number of distinct possible configurations that result in an equivalent outcome.
It’s pure statistics. Given time symmetric laws of nature and a state that can be achieved by a relatively small number of configurations, in the absence of potential barriers, the system inevitably approaches a state that’s achievable by a larger number of configurations. Simply because an elementary change is more likely to fall into the latter mode. Thus, arrow of time emerges.
- Comment on EU Article 45 requires that browsers trust certificate authorities appointed by governments 1 year ago:
I described a route to spoof DNS root authority that Russia and China can use already. Single root is not an advantage, it’s merely a different kind of implementation with different attack vectors.
When it comes to security, it is better to have multiple different implementations coalesce at a point of service delivery, than have a single source of truth. If everything is delivered via DNS, there’s your tasty target for a capable adversary. If there are multiple verification mechanisms, it’s easier to tailor an attack for a specific target.
I want cryptographic infrastructure I rely on to be the last resort for anyone capable of dealing with it.
- Comment on EU Article 45 requires that browsers trust certificate authorities appointed by governments 1 year ago:
You gotta love confident statements that don’t stand to scrutiny.
DNSSEC keys are signed in the same recursive manner SSL certificates are. If I, as a government, block your access to root servers and provide you my own servers, I can spoof anything I want. It’s literally the same bloody problem.
Chain of trust doesn’t disappear just because you use a new acronym.
- Comment on EU Article 45 requires that browsers trust certificate authorities appointed by governments 1 year ago:
When it comes to regulations, intent doesn’t matter when they enable abuse of power.
I don’t give a fuck if this is not aimed at spying. It trivially allows it, and that’s what matters.
- Comment on Apple jacks prices to juice profits because $19.3B a quarter isn't enough 1 year ago:
Tissue. A cancer tissue.
Calls are expendable in pursuit of infinite growth.
- Comment on I accidentally removed the WHERE clause from my SQL query in a personal tool. Every row is now the same. I lost everything, have no backup, and I'm stupid. 1 year ago:
Depending on the database used, the data might still be there, just really hard to recover (as in, its presence is a side-effect, not the intent).
stackoverflow.com/a/12472582 takes a look at Postgres case, for example.
- Comment on The temptation is always there 1 year ago:
Everything’s a variable if you’re brave enough.
- Comment on What is your favorite programming language? 1 year ago:
It’s the language I’m most capable of making a living with. It’s familiar to the point of being boring, I know what popular tools to avoid, I know my way around making Rails get the hell out of the way, turning it into a useful and handy tool.
I do want a chance at something that’s more exciting though. Some of the features I spy in other languages would be so nice to have.
Although I’d recently finally had to solve a problem where Ruby being slow was the major factor. Haven’t had that much fun in years. Benchmarks and second degree lap burns will do that to a person.
- Comment on YouTube suspends Russell Brand from making money off his channel — The suspension comes following the publication of rape and sexual assault allegations against the British star 1 year ago:
Bullshit. If they wanted to cut ties and protect their image, they could block the channel and wash their hands.
This here is pure profiteering.
- Comment on Elon Musk Stormed Into the Tesla Office Furious That Autopilot Tried to Kill Him 1 year ago:
Every wave is affected by Doppler effect.
When a car rushes your way, it’s a tiny bit bluer, a little bit hotter, it’s drivers’ phone is operating on a slightly higher frequency and it sounds higher. According to you.
- Comment on 0.30000000000000004 1 year ago:
They are as incapable of handling one third of a dollar as binary positional notation is incapable of handling one fifth (0.2).
It’s not really a float problem. It’s a positional notation one. Some perfectly rational numbers refuse to squeeze into that mold.
- Comment on Linear code is more readable 1 year ago:
Do not solve maintenance problems that you don’t face.
- Comment on What would it take for you to move away from Github? 1 year ago:
With free time and some rest I’d move to sourcehut.
- Comment on Markdown everywhere 1 year ago:
This is pretty much all that’s needed. The language in the block is identified via a name that follows the opening triple backtick. E.g.:
```python some carefully indented code ```
- Comment on My own mail server 1 year ago:
Did you mean OpenID perchance? OAuth is not an authentication protocol.
- Comment on New acoustic attack steals data from keystrokes with 95% accuracy 1 year ago:
Thanks, I hate it.
- Comment on ramework Laptop 16 pre-orders are now open 1 year ago:
According to configurator, for 2000$ you get a Linux capable laptop with 32 Gb RAM, 2Tb SAD, and one of the top CPUs on the market. It’s definitely not price that MacBooks compete with this on, as anything comparable starts at 500$ more.
M1 versions do compete on price, but there’s a whole other set of trade offs there.