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- Comment on What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good? 4 days ago:
www.visidata.org is way, way, way, way better than excel and it’s FOSS.
As for the rest:
- I don’t really miss Word because WYSIWYG editing is just kinda bad across the board. Much better to write with markup rather than fighting an auto-formatter all the time.
- I thankfully have not needed to make much of any PowerPoints, but I think I would probably feel similarly about them and want them in some kind of markup language as well.
- Teams just sucks ass compared to many other alternatives, though I’m admittedly not familiar with good FOSS ones
- Outlook is basically just a dinosaur and there’s a million ways to do email better. Frankly, FOSS has it beat by a huge margin
The rest of Office isn’t really even worth talking about tbh.
- Comment on What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good? 4 days ago:
For excel stuff, www.visidata.org is way, way better than excel assuming the data is tabular (which, frankly, it should be anyway). Like it’s not even close.
- Comment on Unlike in movies, most smart people aren't good in chess. 5 days ago:
Completely agree. Just a bunch of people who clearly don’t play the game and know nothing about it talking out of their asses.
IMO you can’t have a serious opinion about the game without having actually played it competitively. If you’re just somebody that’s casually played a couple games with friends and family, your opinion about the game isn’t really relevant.
- Comment on Unlike in movies, most smart people aren't good in chess. 5 days ago:
This couldn’t be further from the truth, and it’s pretty clear you don’t actually play the game. I had no idea this misconception was so common.
Chess is ALL ABOUT creativity and figuring out how to outplay your opponent and secure a win. It’s a game of strategy and tactics, of timing and technique. The way “memorization” works is that players tend to have some number of moves in their opening(s) memorized (typically 5-10, though top players can go to greater depth), at which point they are “out of book” and into the middlegame, which is where the game is actually played using some combination of positional ideas, tactics, and calculation. Many players opt to play less theoretically viable openings (that is, variations that are not quite as good with best play), because it gets their opponent out of book faster. “Novelties” (a move in a variation not previously played by a master/grandmaster in a tournament) are played all of the time, even by grandmasters.
- Comment on Unlike in movies, most smart people aren't good in chess. 5 days ago:
Based on the number of comments in this thread, apparently this is a common misconception. Memorization is not the primary skill of chess. Knowledge of chess principles and common ideas, strategies, and tactics and the ability to synthesize those ideas with elements of the current position are the primary skill of chess. In fact, novel problem solving is very fundamental to the game.
Opening theory prep ultimately makes up a pretty small part of the game (though it is more pronounced at top levels of play). The primary purpose of studying openings is not to just memorize a bunch of lines (though having lines prepped is helpful), but to understand the common thematic elements that arise from said openings and common middlegame positions and ideas.
- Comment on Unlike in movies, most smart people aren't good in chess. 5 days ago:
Do you know their rating? Tbh most people’s idea of being “pretty good at chess” is actually not very good at all (I don’t mean that as an insult, more lack of familiarity with the game).
That’s not to say that it’s impossible for someone to think those things and be a strong chess player, but it’s probably not super common. I’ve actually ran into a couple people at a local chess club with “interesting” ideas about vaccines and uh… let’s just say they were not hard to beat (I think I mated one guy in like 12 moves). And btw, I’m not even a super strong chess player myself (~1134 USCF). But like, they probably would seem really strong to someone that just occasionally plays chess at family gatherings or whatnot. Chess is a game with a low skill floor and very high skill ceiling, so you have a huge range in ability.
- Comment on Unlike in movies, most smart people aren't good in chess. 5 days ago:
This is not at all what chess is. This reads to me like you don’t really play chess?
Like sure, good chess players have studied opening theory for the openings they play (and top players know at least some theory about most competitive openings), but there’s so much more to the game than simple memorization. Memorizing a bunch of lines and doing nothing else will get you nowhere with the game. Chess is about principles, concepts, ideas, strategies. It’s about tactics and positional ideas and how the two intersect. It’s about tempo and conducting the initiative. There’s a reason it’s the game with the most number of books written about it by a large margin. It’s an incredibly deep game that rewards investment and fine-tuning your own learning process (and, in fact, a great deal of unlearning bad ideas you learned earlier).
It is decidedly not a game about memorization, even if there is some amount of it involved. At high level of play, memorization (or what we simply call “prep”) is table stakes for playing the actual game. At lower levels, many players don’t know a lot of opening theory and simply rely on some combination of positional ideas, tactics, and calculation.
Do you know what rating your friend was at? In my experience, the super strong players I’ve met (including a Senior Master that occasionally visits our chess club who’s 2450 USCF or so) are incredibly intelligent and sharp. Anecdotally in my own chess career (only ~1134 USCF atm, though I think I’m a bit underrated due to my last tournament being in 2023), I’ve definitely noticed a difference in my own thinking since I started studying chess. Progressing in chess involves a lot of meta-cognitive thinking, and that kind of thing translates to all kinds of things in life.
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 6 days ago:
Way, way better than excel for working with tabular data. Excel is child’s play in comparison.
- Comment on LG TVs’ integrated ads get more personal with tech that analyzes viewer emotions 1 week ago:
I just… don’t connect the TV to the internet. Never had an issue with anything like that.
- Comment on The unfortunate thing about twins is that they might fight over which one was not planned. 1 week ago:
Who gives a fuck about whether or not you were planned? It literally makes no difference whatsoever.
- Comment on Infinite Hotel Paradox 2 months ago:
It has to do with countably infinite sets.
The analysis on Wikipedia does a better job of explaining the concept: …wikipedia.org/…/Hilbert's_paradox_of_the_Grand_H…
The whole point is that it’s something we can prove mathematically that is highly unintuitive.
- Comment on New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code. 2 months ago:
Forced to use copilot? Wtf?
I would quit, immediately.
- Comment on Palmer Luckey says he wants to 'turn warfighters into technomancers' as Anduril takes over production of the US Army's IVAS AR headset from Microsoft 2 months ago:
Yep, senior Haskell developer here and I have had their recruiters hounding me many times, even though I have told them to fuck off again and again.
I always find it so funny that they chose Haskell. They are desperate to hire, but no one in the Haskell community actually wants to work for them. I’m in a discord server with a bunch of veteran Haskellers and everyone there won’t touch them with a 100ft pole.
- Comment on A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster than previously deemed possible. 2 months ago:
You can read the full paper yourself here: arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02305.
I haven’t had time to fully read it yet, but glancing through, it looks pretty legit.
This is a graduate computer science student working with accomplished CS faculty at Rutgers and Carnegie Mellon, we aren’t talking about some rando making outlandish claims.
The thing about computer science is that, like math, it isn’t subject to the pitfalls of empirical science. It isn’t dependent on reproduction. The proof is provided in the paper, so either it indeed proves what it claims to, or the proof is erroneous, which can readily be refuted.
- Comment on A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster than previously deemed possible. 2 months ago:
Did you read the article? The claim is that they have invented a new kind of hash table that has vastly improved algorithmic complexity compared to standard hash tables.
I haven’t read the paper yet, but if what the article claims is true, it could be revolutionary in computer science and open up a ton of doors.
- Comment on Why do the majority of women still take their partner's last name? 5 months ago:
My wife and I think it is. I took her last name since it meant more to her.
- Comment on Wednesday it is, my dudes. 5 months ago:
How is that pronounced? wow-wow-rohn?
- Comment on Jack Black is what happens when the class clown doesn't become depressed and instead becomes even more of a clown 5 months ago:
Robin Williams killed himself due to early onset dementia from brain disease: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Williams#Death.