gordaco

"But security!" has been the "won't somebody please think of the children" of the technology world for a long time. The end goal, intentional or not, is the same: restricting freedoms (or, on a shorter term, ignore valid criticism).

Unfortunately, at least in the tech world it seems to be a great success. We now have walled gardens and unskippable updates. The next step, "trusted computing" (which is ultimately using a whitelist to forbid the usage of certain software), is already halfway here.

Yes, for a few years we had what was popularly called "Sun tax" in order to disincentivise people from installing solar panels in their homes. It was removed in 2018, though.

Although corruption was probably present, I would say that this kind of politics is precisely what we would expect from pro-business parties (in this case, the People's Party). They do have a long history of eschewing environmental policies as soon as any big company has money to lose because of them.

In most of Spain they sound exactly the same. I have met a total of one single person who pronounced them differently. Maybe it depends on the region.

I'm from Málaga, by the way.

This is something I really like about Finnish. Being a native Spanish speaker, I am accustomed to knowing how a word is spelled just by hearing it, although there are some cases where there might be doubt (like the homophones b and v, or the always silent h). But the letters are not always pronounced the same. For example, c and g are pronounced differently, depending on what the following vowel is. Even worse, u is silent after a q, or when between a g and an e or i. I mean, I don't have any problem with all of this, since I've been dealing with it for all my life :) . But I can understand how annoying it can be for a foreign learner, even if it's not as infuriating as English.

Now, Finnish? It's way, way more regular. Each letter is pronounced always the same, no matter the context or the letters surrounding it (there aren't even consonant groups like ch). The grammar might be more complex, and the vocabulary might be difficult because it lacks the indo-european roots from all the other languages I know. But phonetics? Yeah, it's one of the simplest languages out there, in this sense. I love Finnish because of that, and I actually listen to a lot of Finnish music (despite not understanding almost anything), just because I love the way it sounds.

Still, I with I had fewer issues with a and ä... I can pronounce both separately, but when I hear someone speaking, I still have trouble when I need to differentiate between these two.

This is already deployed. My current employer (at least, my local branch) has some not-mandatory-but-actually-yes-mandatory "training" followed by tests where they do track your eyeball and you are penalised if you look away (they also disallow alt-tabbing, screenshots and many other basic operations). They are losing a lot of people (including me, very soon) and this is one of the main reasons, but I don't think they have any intention to stop, since this shit has probably been decided several levels above the line managers, who are the ones seeing the mess but don't have much decision power about it.

I'd like to think that this insanity will be stopped relatively soon, since tech workers are still in high demand, so people mostly don't put up with this shit. For the vast majority of workers, who don't have that luxury, I don't think they will be able to get rid of this kind of software.

Related link from two days ago: an article from Cory Doctorow describing workplace surveillance or "Bossware": https://doctorow.medium.com/workplace-surveillance-is-coming....

> I fully support anyone doing whatever they like with their body, but we should be able to at least acknowledge that any alcohol in any amount is self destructive.

Yes. There is a related issue, which is that a lot of people just can't accept that something they like is actually detrimental. Since I've never drank, I never experienced this specific kind of cognitive dissonance (if you can even call it that), but I've seen in so many people, it's depressing. There are some things that I love despite knowing that they are bad for your health (like certain unhealhty foods), but I would hate to deceive myself about it (knowing that they are bad allows me to manage the risks, like being aware that I should reduce consumption if I'm indulging too much). But a lot of people have the exact opposite attitude. Which is curious, because the damages are some times very obvious.

Induction is also a very good way to prove these formulas. In fact, these are just perfect textbook exercises for someone learning induction: try to find formulas for the sum of the first k-th powers (for some not so big integer k), then prove the formulas using induction. As someone else mentions, the formulas themselves are related to the Bernoulli numbers and have some surprising properties, like how formulas for odd values of k can be expressed in terms of k·(k+1)/2.

The thing about RSS is that big tech companies are not very fond of it because it gives too much control to the user and it's not so easy to flood you with ads when you use it. So, many of those companies either don't offer RSS, or they have it but they don't advertise it much and maybe they just do the bare minimum.

Unfortunately, since social media has replaced blogs as the go-to place for discussions and user-generated content in general, this means that a lot of the platforms that people use most frequently don't have an RSS feed, or have it but it's not very useful for whatever reason.

However: many, many other webpages out there do offer RSS, and I'm guessing that plenty of people use it, at least on technical circles. I use it mostly for comics and, to a lesser extent, for a few personal blogs and even news. A lot of people use it for podcasts. It has also been used to automatically download new episodes of TV shows in torrent downloaders (I'm guessing that you could mark this particular application as controversial; I won't comment on that. But it is useful at the very least). Also, if used properly, it allows for a lot of user control. You could, for example, pipe a youtube RSS into yt-dlp so that videos from a particular creator are automatically downloaded into a folder in your computer, or use any alert of new content to trigger whatever you want to do (like custom alerts when someone comments in a blog of yours, or whatever). RSS has a lot of potential, and because of that I don't think it's going away soon.

Now, you are also worried about the problem of content discovery. There is a problem here, because whenever we as users want a source of curated content, advertisers are going to do whatever they can in order to squeeze their shit into our pipes. So I personally prefer a "dumb" protocol like RSS where I just say "give me new updates from just THIS site", and leave discovery to more organic, less automated (therefore less gameable by advertisers) means. The closest I can think of to solve your problem is the usage of blog rings/networks (they used to exist, ten years ago... I don't know the state of the art right now), but this still means that there is someone doing the aggregation.

It's weird seeing Pell's equation discussed as something intractable or unsolved. We have deterministic ways of solving them (you can use convergents, which can be calculated using continuous fractions [0]). But then again, Diophantine equations sometimes show surprising patterns, and in this case the problem is not so much about solving the equation, but about finding cases where it doesn't have a solution. Which can be determined reasonably quickly for any given equation (at least, one with smallish coefficients), but apparently it's difficult to pinpoint an exact pattern of cases where this happens.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continued_fraction#Infinite_co...

I'm not sure that twenty times the yearly price would look like a reasonable price, but if it's software I actually want, I might agree. I would weigh that price against the functionality of the software, ignoring whether there is a subscription model. As I said, I'm not beyond paying a three-digit sum for software I like (and Mathematica is the first example that came to mind, but not the only one).

I'm a very, very firm believer on not paying for "subscription" to software. New content, I can understand (I spend about 40€ monthly on several Patreons, mostly comic artists; and I have a couple news subscriptions as well), although I still hate music/tv subscriptions and I don't want Netflix, Spotify or whatever. But for software, no matter how useful it is, I just refuse to choose between an unbounded price and the possibility of losing it because I don't want to keep paying. For the record, I don't have any problems paying, say, 400€ for Mathematica and things like that (in fact, I haven't pirated anything in a very long time). But I paid once and I can use the software as much as I want without paying again.

For me, it's not about the amount of money, but the peace of mind (no additional bills, no additional shit to renew when I my debit card expires, and most important, I don't need to engage in any bullshit cancellation process). In the rare cases where both a subscription and a single payment is offered, I've done the math and from time to time I actually estimate that I'll spend less money on the subscription (although normally it's the other way around, of course), but even in these cases, I prefer paying upfront. I hate that this is becoming less and less available.

As a simple example, one can look at f(x)=1/x in R+. The derivative is f'(x)=-1/x^2 and the second derivative is f''(x)=2/x^3. In general, every function of the form f(x)=1/x^n with odd n will have this behaviour, and if n is even the behaviour is the opposite. And yes, many more examples can be found.

More generally, this is why I'm wary of indirect indicators. They never tell the whole story, and because of that they're used disingenuously in order to muddy the waters. You see this a lot in big scale PR campaings, such as climate change denialism, and pro-sugar and pro-alcohol disinformation (we had a lot of pro-tobacco as well, but it has subsided in the last two decades or so, at least in the West).

Fenwick Trees (which, despite the name, are implemented using an array) allow counting prefix sums AND updating prefix sums in O(log n) time. Very useful when n is in the order of millions. I have used them a few times in Project Euler problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenwick_tree

I'm using 102.0.1 and I couldn't reproduce it either.

I miss GWT. Glad to see I'm not the only one. Then again I don't like web programming at all and I'd rather write a desktop UI, which explains it, I guess.

I miss the times when UI didn't necessarily mean web. I guess I'm obsolete.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2169/ .

I'm afraid that we are going to see these kinds of issues proliferate rapidly. It's a consequence of the usage of machine learning with extensive amounts of data coming from "data lakes" and similar non-curated sources.

This used to be common in parts of Europe as well. There is a book called From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee—The Dark History of the Food Cheats, from the food journalist Bee Wilson [1], which tells (among many other things) a lot of stories about arsenic poisonings in 19th century London, caused by the usage of certain red dyes in food. The saying that certain regulations are written in blood comes from these kinds of stories.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2507738.Swindled

I hate smartphones mostly because of this (although there are more reasons), and I wish I could stop using them altogether, but there are too many people out there who only communicate using text applications (WhatsApp and Telegram, mostly. Which are about the only things I've installed aside from Firefox, which I also use only rarely). So in the end it's basically a choice of eschewing your social life or eschewing your privacy, at least partially. I've managed to convince a grand total of 0 people to use other means of communication such as email. There are also some services that I use (and some that I'm forced to use as part of my job, although these go to the company phone) that just plain refuse to offer a web interface and I can only use them as a fucking app. Who knows which data might it gather.

Windows users are also suffering a similar problem because of the smartphonisation of the desktop (side note, I hate that people still use that meme about "one version of Windows is bad and the next one is good". W10 still has most of the problems of W8, and some of them are even worse. I don't think we're ever going to get a "good" Windows ever again). We need to choose between being able to run old, trusty software or being actually in control of our computer (in terms of privacy, updates and so on). Then again I suspect that I have only a few months left of personal Windows usage.

This happened to me last week as well. I assume that this shit came with any of the recent updates.

It really infuriated me, especially the usage of the word "need" and the fact that the dialog doesn't offer an option like "no, and don't bug me with this ever again". Fortunately, after hitting the "remind me in 3 days" button, I looked a bit and found an option that does make it go away forever.

My Windows is in Spanish, so I don't know the exact name of the configuration settings in English, but you can find it in the Win+I configuration dialog. Look for "notifications and actions" (or something very similar), and there, look for a checkbox whose text reads something like "suggest ways to finish device configuration to get the most out of Windows". In fact there are six checkboxes in that screen and every single one looks like an annoyance, so I disabled them all.

> the serious ones don't broadcast their intentions (simply because they don't want to be stopped from doing it).

While this might be generally true (and it's especially true in the sense you wrote the message, i.e., there's a good chance that no one could see it coming), I would add something. It's, as I said, mostly true, but far from being the case 100% of the time. Ok, that was probably obvious, but the thing is: sometimes we interpret it as the contraposition (which is, after all, equivalent to the original statement): the ones who broadcast their intentions are not serious about it. And that's a huge mistake to make, when it happens to not be true. Someone who broadcasts that kind of intentions might be overdoing that kind of millenial "everything sucks" gallows humor you see a lot in Twitter... or they might be serious.

So, pay attention to people talking about that suicidal ideation. Many times, it's more than a joke.

BTW I also agree that in many cases an intervention can only delay the decision but not prevent it completely. I know it can be a hard pill to swallow for many people (and for good reason), but I strongly believe this to be true.

I'm going to be that guy and point out that clover wasn't considered a weed until a chemical that killed clover, but not grass, was developed by Dow Chemical and the company wanted to sell it as a weed killer, so they ran a campaign about it.

https://laidbackgardener.blog/2020/11/04/clover-in-the-lawn-...

The secret was to turn clover from a friend into an enemy. Pesticide companies decided to launch an intensive advertising campaign to convince homeowners that white clover was a weed that needed to be destroyed. They spent literally millions on advertising to persuade unconvinced gardeners.

The ability to switch LookAndFeels is one of my favourite features of Swing. Lately I've found myself using the Motif one a lot for my tiny personal projects, although copy&paste doesn't seem to work on its text boxes and that's very annoying. I usually make it so I can configure it an change it on the fly. Trying all the possibilities is kind of satisfying.

Java gets a lot of hate but it's a language I really like. The only real issue I had with it is its memory consumption. As a developer, it still has some warts like the absence of actual generics (autoboxing is an ugly hack), but when I compare it with other languages' warts, they are usually uglier. Although my preferred usage of Java is mostly reduced to mathematical or algorithmic stuff, with little to no external libraries, and it certainly doesn't include Spring or any other annotation-heavy framework.

As a user I also definitely prefer Java to Electron and most modern frameworks. Then again I hate most modern design trends...

The thing is that in other occasions I believe I have bought DRM-free music from Amazon Spain. But those particular albums weren't available in Spain, and although I found them in the german Amazon, I wasn't able to purchase them. I assume that it was a matter Amazon only being license to sell it in some regions (side note, I'd rather not buy from Amazon. I was ready to bit the bullet because it was the only place I found them, after about two hours looking for alternatives, but even so, they didn't let me pay for it). Just another way in which copyright management goes directly against the user, I guess.

Yes, I know that fortunately there are many ways to pay for DRM-free music (I mentioned that I use Bandcamp pretty often). What I miss is the vast amount of content I had available 10 or 12 years ago; I have been able to buy a lot of music, but there is much more that just isn't available.

What I miss the most about this "peak warez" period (and most of the mid to late 00s, basically) is the huge amount of blogs uploading rare old music. During this sweet period I was able to get a lot of very rare music from all over the world (as a bouns, you could in practice guarantee that it was virus-free since unlike actual warez these files weren't executable. Yes, I know that dedicated attackers can still find a way, but for your average script kiddie it was much harder to include a trojan in an MP3).

There are things that to this day I haven't been able to find on Bandcamp or on streaming services, including youtube, but which I was able to download during this small gilded age. Then again I weaned myself from streaming services (and from anything "as a service") years ago, so maybe things have changed. I also remember finding a lot of rarities in Soulseek when I had lucky days, but now there is far fewer people using it. In general direct download was so much better for this kind of content, because you only needed one contributor uploading it, and it was available for everyone. In P2P sharing you need much more luck to find someone seeding what you want.

I wish finding rare music was so easy in legal ways. I just want to download DRM-free albums and I will gladly pay (nowadays I buy a lot of music from Bandcamp), but in many cases that's not a possibility any more. I have also found myself in a case where music is available but not in my country. I remember a time when the only place where I found certain albums was in the german Amazon Music, but since I'm in Spain, I wasn't allowed to buy them. Gabe Newell is 100% right when he notes that piracy is a matter of convenience and not price.

Some parts of the internet have certainly got worse with time and this is one of them. Bah, get off my lawn.

You could also do this with RAR. I always used the same command (which I could still recite up to the last character) to create compressed files of the size of a floppy, which I believed to be exactly 1423.5 kilobytes. Then again, I'm not sure where did this number come from. I think I used the first disk I could find as a sample, but maybe that disk had some faulty sectors and the amount in a healthy disk was slightly higher.

I remember, back in the day, trying all the compressors I had at hand to see which one compressed the most. Possibly one of my first truly self-researched bit of computer knowledge... not very impressive, but then again this was the mid-90s and I was like 13. I believe that the answer was something like RAR > WinRAR > ARJ > PKZip > WinZip, with the difference between RAR and WinRAR, and between PKZip and WinZip, being very small, and the other two gaps being higher. I probably botched some settings regarding compression levels, so it's likely that I didn't use the best compression level for some of the compressors.

I still use my 20 years old hotmail address (OK, I don't really use it anymore... but I still get some mail from newsletters I'm subscribed to), but I read it from thunderbird so I never need to use the ad-ridden web interface.

Then again I would not see the ads anyway. In the case of the tweet we're discussing, I would probably have opted for the "bigger ads" which seems more easily removed by uBlock origin.

Yeah. Autocomplete is about the least useful function of an IDE. The real killer features IMHO are the automatic refactoring tools (method renaming, addition of function arguments, etc) and, in languages that support it, the continuous build that points out errors and warnings as you type them. Code navigation features (go to definition, find every place where this function is called, open file by class name...) are also huge time savers. Autocomplete has its uses but ultimately it's not such a big deal. 99% of the time I use it, I already know what I want to write, and I just use it when I don't remember exactly the order of some function arguments or something like that.

EDIT: I'd like to add that the real speed comes when you have lots of keyboard commands ingrained in your muscle memory. There is a learning curve and it takes some time, but when you're comfortable with mapping certain very high level operations to a combination of 2 or 3 keys, the increase in speed is tremendous. The downside is that changing IDEs becomes a bit painful, so you built some kind of dependence. But this is not what the article is about.

It's a real pity. They are awesome beginner languages, and even when you are not a beginner any more, they go a long way. I also like their syntax a lot.

I haven't touched Ada in like 20 years and now that it seems to be having a small resurgence it looks like a good time to relearn it. It has potential to become one of my favourite languages.

Same here. I'm usually a "single task" person (I like to focus. I know well that I don't function well when trying to do many things at once), so a single maximised window is always the optimal approach for me. This is also why I've never bothered with multiple displays, which most of my workmates love.

On the rare occasion when I need to use data from a window to write something on other (like something that can't be copied and pasted, or cases where I need to extract information but not literally copying, such as using some data points from a reference file in code I'm writing) I just use win+left and win+right to spliut the screen between the two windows (I assume that OSes other than Windows have similar hotkeys).

That's funny. I have a degree in maths, which I guess qualifies me as a mathematician, although I've always worked as a software developer.

So, the thing is that I'm not a good mathematician, but I happen to be good at arithmetic. By this I mean that I'm good with mental math (of the "square a 4-digit number in ten seconds or less" type; I'm not nearly as good as the savants out there who perform operations with many more digits, and much more quickly), but also that I like playing with numbers and I've came up with a ton of silly "theorems" [1] (I'm not sure if they even deserve that name) that are mostly based on basic modular arithmetics, so any actual mathematician might find them amusing but nothing more, while a layperson is often amazed. So, mental arithmetic can be useful to make people believe that you are smarter than you actually are :) . I'm not fond of doing this, by the way. But it's a thing that happens.

[1] Here goes an example. Take a number that is a multiple of 73, that has exactly seven digits, and that has a zero somewhere in the middle. Say, 73*75391 = 5503543. Then you can exchange whatever goes before and after the zero, and the result is also a multiple of 73: 3543055/73 = 48535. For added WTF, I'd like to mention that it also works with 137: 137*8621 = 1181077, and then, 7701181/137=56213. The proof is surprisingly simple, but you need to know what to look for.