moritzwarhier

Withholding security-critical open source contributions to collect subscriptions is really low.

Bye Ubuntu

or just "music-like audio"?

Have you listened to "music" created by non-specialized models that use WebAudio to create?

It seems like a good descriptor to me! ;)

> Do you understand that millions of normal people send these GIFs to each other in WhatsApp groups and private messages?

Of course, it could be organic. I shortened my text a bit so it's not explicitly mentioned anymore, but I still wrote about "engagement algorithms".

It doesn't need to be a political influence dial at Meta's HQ.

Regardless of whether there is intentional influence by the platform, or the platform intransparently favors other actors who in turn use the platform, it's a problem. Even when the platforms just do it for simple financial reasons or political opportunism.

On HN, people are usually quick to lament to damaging effects of engagement optimization on public discourse.

I thought mentioning that I cannot judge whether Lula is a corrupt president (I assume that's what's meant by "criminal") is enough to make clear that I am not arguing for silencing opinions.

What I would like to see is addressing Social Media's role in weaponizing outrage advertisement using slander, and also, platforms getting away with not making transparent how they weight political advertisement in elections.

In my opinion, electoral advertisement should be regulated, and it is regulated, in many countries. This does not prevent you from sending memes on WhatsApp, it might prevent a platform from suggesting political memes to you when you did not explicitly seek out partisan content.

Regarding the rest:

Lula has been imprisoned because of corruption, Bolsonaro has been imprisoned because of his coup attempt.

Seems hard to argue about that in one-sided way, and I'm not gonna make any explicit stance here, I am not from Brazil.

It seems impossible to assess whether one of the two is in fact not guilty of the crimes they were charged for. What I did notice though were the election fraud claims, and consensus seemed to be that they are false. The coup attempt also seems to be undisputed.

The EU has sought out trade deals with Brazil, which was more easily possible with Lula, AFAIK.

I'm not gonna defend everything (sry, not "anything") the EU does here either.

My point was how the public deals with election fraud claims and coups.

And it does seem strange to normalize those openly, even 5 years after the capitol storm.

---

But, to be clear: I am not interested in advocating for Lula in Brazil, that's a Brazil problem and I don't know enough to have an opinion on this. Maybe a gut feeling, but it's easy to get rid of that by reading from the other side (e.g. about corruption, crime rates etc).

That was hopefully not something I said in my initial comment either, because viewing politics as a football match is not healthy, and Germany has its own problems which are more relevant to me - and yet, German politics would still not be something I want to comment about extensively here.

I only wanted to comment on the role of Social Media in political elections. The fact that coup attempts are now so openly normalized in many countries considered democratic (US, Turkey, Brazil)... might seem odd to me, but that's more of an "illusion of stability" thing I guess.

Look at this thread and you could think that the quoted example was the first, or main one, in the article.

When in fact, it comes after

> The petition describes a GIF search on WhatsApp for the word “brasil.” The first result was an image of Flávio Bolsonaro. It showed his ticket number and identified his running mate.

> According to the records sent to the court, the same result appeared on three separate accounts. The groups use this to ask whether its top position comes from systematic ranking criteria.

> A similar check on Instagram also showed images of the senator among the first results. Users who searched for “brasil” found three images of Flávio Bolsonaro in the top positions

> On WhatsApp, a GIF search for the word “ladrão” (thief) returned a caricature of the president in a striped uniform, a reference to prison dress. Another result carried the message “Supporting the Workers’ Party is a mental illness.”

> On Instagram, a search for the same word showed a GIF reading “Vote 13.” That is the Workers’ Party election number, tied to Lula’s candidacy.

And you could also think that the authors would be for censorship and completely crazy, when in fact:

> They are not claiming that they have proven bias in Meta, choosing instead to posit the question to the Superior Electoral Court.

That's all ignoring the fact that Trump and the US openly support Bolsonora, who is in jail for attempting a coup after losing the election.

And Brazil, AFAIK, was a military dictatorship until, what, 40 years ago? To my knowledge, without a "hard cut" that would have investigated this part of the country's history.

I am not Brazilian, who knows, I can't tell whether Lula is corrupt, or anything, what I have not seen is proof of the election fraud claims put forward by Bolsonaro sr.?

Not irrelevant since his son of course rehabilitates him and wants to "correct the public record".

And also, imprisoning him of course was a strong move that also needs justification.

But it would be cool to limit political content on platforms with non-audited, non-public and intransparent engagement algorithms.

Just as it would be good to stop intransparent flow of big money into politics.

The latter is a sentiment that Trump catered to when he became president for the first time. Of course, only in a twisted, cynical way: "the system is broken, so I alone can fix it".

Regardless of anyone's political affiliation: Meta has a long history of not giving a shit whether their engagement algorithms at best... "damage" democratic processes, so I don't see any reason to be smug about it.

Git doesn't have a concept of "fork".

GitHub uses this metaphor, and, as another commenter already aptly described, it could be nothing more than a fancy name for namespaced branches, on the server side.

On the client side, "forks" are usually different repository clones with different remotes and a "coincidentally" shared history.

But you can also map forked repos to multiple remotes of the same repository for example, instead of folders.

Assuming that forks would live in separate clones/blobs on the server is not really based on anything, so I think the warning is a good middle ground between explaining what forks are and how they handle them, and giving actionable advice.

It's also better suited for PR:

"Fork me on GitHub"

vs

"Branch and push your own clone on GitHub, using our shared blob optimizations".

I think the warning is clear and there's nothing misleading about it, but others have already pointed this out and git can be tricky.

It's so good at providing the right level of abstraction to everyone though, it seems!

Similarly, GitHub invented the term "Pull Request" (aka PR, lol).

Not a git-owned term.

But "merge request" isn't a Git primitive either!

And, with Forks and Pull Requesrs, GitHub made a particular workflow in Git approachable to anyone!

I love GitLab, but people get confused by Merges, myself included, so the GH-enabled workflow of favoring ff-only merges, without merge commits, with quadi-linear history, became the norm and helped Git succceed!

But I also appreciate being able to do all kinds of different workflows.

So PRs were positive-sum PR at the time, I'd say. When they became popular, I was still taught Subversion and CVS at uni, alongside Git as "the new thing". Ar that time, many people considered the older systems simpler, and pondered SVN as the most reasonable middle ground between CVS and the decentralized concept of Git!

Thank you!

But you're focusing on humans and the human languages, and I'm honestly curious about the "step change" hypothesis!

I think I've heard about it before, but my stint at university in linguistics is > 15 yrs ago, so I don't know much about it.

I remember recognozing Chomsky when later studying CS and formal language basics came up, bringing the Chomsky hierarchy.

Do you have some favorite links to share about the "step change" hypothesis? I remember reading some odd info-news article comparing brains among different species of homo; and and maybe also this particular hypothesis, but I'm not really informed.

That aside, I don't understand why this "onomatopoeia" couldn't be shared among different animals and humans:

> I think objects with these shapes make similar sounds in the real world. Sharp shapes make percussive sounds. Round shapes make softer sounds.

Claiming that animals had no language at all would obviously be false. But we still have reason to think (?) that the human languages are intertwined with the intelligence gap we observe between humans and other mammals.

Composition vs inheritance maybe makes a difference here? :thinking_grimace:

What I mean is parent companies and contracts that might obfuscate who's owed the debt.

However, I don't know anything about debt markets let alone homeownership.

Ah, thanks, my bad not looking it up, I was feeling so sure I'd know that!

But doesn't roux/rouge just mean "red"?

"Ginger" doesn't mean "red", except for hair color. And that's the interesting part.

It's because they have no soul!

Reminds me of my recent vibe coding project of porting Winamp AVS to web using Emscripten. It worked so well that it was simply.. done after a few sessions, and I was amazed and also feeling fuzzy in the head.

One turn involved ChatGPT explicitly fixing C++ source code to fix beat detection for the available audio sources after I complained that it was broken.

Hands down, sure, the most respectable work, apart from the original AVS code, was done by the Emscripten contributors. Anyway, it readjusted my expectations, even after my day job switched to agentic coding as the primary development tool.

Better don't read the records for the SSRIs or OTC pain medications

In the context of free will (disregarding the full context here for a moment), this is where it actually gets interesting.

Theologists and philosophers alike have been thinking about the problem what "free will" even means exactly because of this, when there are no preconditions informing my decision, what does "free will" even mean?

In German, I have heard this being framed as "bedingt freier" versus "unbedingt freier Wille".

As a thought experiment, it makes a very good argument for a deterministic world view, quantum woo aside.

When there are no reasons for what I decide, what are my decisions based on? A whim? Chance? My personal taste? Well, my personal taste is a reason. And all reasons come from somewhere, right?

On the other hand, thinking of my decisions as without preconditions: what does that give me?

Decisions without rationale?

Sure, one can make everything more fuzzy by introducing probablities, even real chance if you like.

But also then, total determinism with hidden information is an immune theory that cannot be refuted, so it explains nothing.

But was does true randomness help with? I'd say, from a philosophical perspective, it doesn't bring any interesting argument to the table.

So this leaves us with free will as the only useful way of understanding ourselves and our role in the world, but on the other hand, it seems like a sneaky device for ourselves to ignore the infinitely confusing thought of considering ourselves determined by our circumstances (which, as a thought, already has real side-effects, too).

When the runtime is completely different, I'd also argue it's emulation more than translation? Anyway. Lost in translation I guess.

[ x ] Auto-scale to my level of abilities

  Understood. Are you very smart?
  Just say the word.

> | Yes! Also rich!

Same, console says something about missing or "unsuitable" audio resources.

Sad, I wanted the international broken Zoom call

OK, I meant "auto-scaling", which is what most of these dev-aimed services we are talking about offer, right?

Anyway, reliability is already enough of a criterion when you set up a site that does some expensive thing in an infinite loop, gets (D-)DoSed, etc.

When you're trying to develop a product to sell, these are all things to look out yourself and that's fine I guess.

Just find it sad that the providers of these services apparently often don't make clear to their customers the billing responsibilities that they enter, although technically, sure, it's all written in the terms / pricing.

I agree, up until the question is how transparent the risks are.

For example, I think that OpenAI's system of incentivizing automated credit purchases borders on being predatory. Not because it would be hidden info. Just because the product is clearly aimed at consumers who do things that they might not fully understand.

For me, I don't habe any issues with their current design.

But for John Doe vibe-coding their nutrition analysis app, I feel it's wrong to advertise automatic payments and long-running tasks without providing a clear fee cap option.

It's similar to gambling.

Yes, and it's valuable to share. I'll edit out the "Weird article" part if still possible.

> Vibe Coding failed me

Hm, edited out snark. I think that's an easy trap to fall into, and it's good to warn against.

What I agree on (top comment): there should be laws against providing cloud services without a fee cap. Another edit: businesses and hobbyists are different beasts of course. You can't demand scaling and reliability and a hard fee cap. For traditional shared hosting, this is mostly a solved problem AFAIK.

That's what prevented me from using Firebase for a hobby project in 2023.

The only available killswitch was some weird workaround with a Google Sheets monitoring the bill and triggering an action (give or take latency) when it exceeded some amount...

ehm, no thanks.

That picture is so blurry. Perfect demonstration of everything that's wrong with AI and the internet. Probably uploaded by Claude.

Google's AI translations really have come a long way...

"memory-unsafe languages like C++"

is translated as

"speichersicheren Sprachen wie C++"

(flipping the adjective's meaning)

I'm not sure whether my guesswork was helpful, but I think the whole "probabilities" thing is not helpful here.

The teacups-floating-around-Saturn example was loosely copied from Bertrand Russell.

What my guesswork was aiming at was that my only meaningful interpretation of the example, taken as a riddle, with "free variables", was that the conclusion is wrong as in "not derivable from the given facts".

I agree in that I'd prefer to encode this as "I don't know".

But depending on how you interpret "false" and "true", the conclusion is false, and stating something as true that cannot be proven is false.

It's not very intuitive until applied to abstract terms instead of concrete ones, and I'm sure there's a fancy name for this higher-level logic.

[delayed]

Cool post, but I'm wondering what would a realistic way to avoid this?

It's not really possible to ban steganography, is it?

> That future lies halfway between now and 1984. So let’s stay off that timeline, shall we?

> Call a spymark what it is. A spy tool used to spy on you and everyone you interact with.

this is not ASCII, it looks like Unicode, but it's not even that, it's scripting and canvas rendering.

Text art itself is s prevalent because it borrows the appearance of careful crafting while it's generated by a program. Also, CLIs and text are more popular than GUIs these days, with many people.

Chat interfaces are almost like CLI! Markdown is getting more popular than binary Office text files!

Vibe coding with AI now commodifies the remaining manual steps: obtaining nice raster images, and feeding them into a text-art generator.

Or creating a script that renders them as dots on a canvas (what's done here).

Another difference is that Swartz didn't intend to generate revenue from the works whose license and copyright he violated.

While another difference is that AI companies violate copyright in a less obvious way, it's different for them, they do want to make money from the copyrighted works they train on.

That they usually don't strive for exact reproductions of works is another difference.