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Re:Reviving the Pakon film scanner on Sunday September 04, 2022 @02:03PM (#32715805)
Fun fact: People born in 2004 are all turning 18 this year :)

And still, 2004 feels "a few years ago" to me. I don't know if I'll ever get used to it.

Re:Show HN: Wavvy – web-based audio editor (Audacity port) on Friday September 02, 2022 @09:21PM (#32697603)
This is so awesome :)
Re:Psychedelic drugs take on depression on Friday September 02, 2022 @08:01AM (#32689575)
That's a hard question, like any other question concerning human freedom. I suppose a good rule of thumb is "if you're not forced to subject yourself to it, you don't get a say in it".
Re:Psychedelic drugs take on depression on Thursday September 01, 2022 @01:35PM (#32679993)
> Yes.

That's were we disagree. I believe there are some human freedoms that nobody has the right to deny. I suppose I'm just an idealist.

> The current form of government in the United States is a representative republic that has a constitution that defines processes for dramatic change including a constitutional convention that allows for open-ended changes to the constitution itself.

I'm sure the goal of such openness of constitution was to protect the liberty of people, not to open doors for authoritarianism.

Re:Psychedelic drugs take on depression on Thursday September 01, 2022 @10:40AM (#32676951)
> I don't think it's productive to continue this conversation. Sadly, you've decided to take the position that Christians should have their right to vote curtailed

If that's all you took away from this conversation, then I agree - it's for the best to end it now. But I'll try to elaborate anyway.

I am not taking the position that Christians should have their right to vote curtailed, I'm taking the position that nobody, not even Christians, should have the right to impose their own standards upon others, unless they made sense outside of the Christian worldview. Abortion laws only make sense in the Christian worldview (and maybe a few other, equally intolerant, worldviews). The fact that Christians are the majority in the US only makes it de-facto a Christian state, while still pretending to be a secular democracy.

Here's a thought experiment:

If Talibans somehow became a majority in the US, would you still consider it "their right" to vote away the democracy and establish Sharia Law?

Re:Cognitive loads in programming on Thursday September 01, 2022 @03:28AM (#32673153)
I think the point of that statement was that we should assume the worst case, for the sake of making code easier to deal with for everyone. If the code is easy to deal with for the meeting-ridden hypothetical person, it will definitely be easy to deal with for a non-meeting-ridden hypothetical person.

I understand and agree with your frustration, but I don't agree that the statement undermines the parent comment at all.

Would you care to elaborate?

I always thought npm was open-source-centric. If npm somehow ran opaque binaries, I'd really like to know about that.

Re:Film: Frame Interpolation for Large Motion on Wednesday August 31, 2022 @10:48AM (#32662742)
This seems like a good tool to turn <60fps videos into 60fps videos.
Please go full Richard Stallman.

Control of computing is an all-or-nothing business - even a single compromised component can lead to compromise of the complete system.

Don't trust opaque binaries.

> How do you deal with this situation, do you use a virtual machine, or is there any other ideas I am missing here?

If you really want to run that opaque binary, a virtual machine will give you a decent amount of security. With GPU passthrough, you can even get near-native speed, too.

Re:Stable Diffusion Textual Inversion on Wednesday August 31, 2022 @04:58AM (#32659920)
Linux also used to be a "hobby" OS. Now it powers the internet. Things change.
Re:Stable Diffusion Textual Inversion on Tuesday August 30, 2022 @05:46AM (#32648469)
I'm not saying they can't try, and succeed for a while. But eventually, we will always break free.

Pixel exists (but apparently doesn't count because it's not perfect yet).

Librem exists.

PinePhone exists.

More will exist in the future.

Re:How to Nationalize the Internet in Canada on Tuesday August 30, 2022 @03:48AM (#32647744)
Regulation is like violence. If it isn't working, you aren't using enough of it!
Functional programming languages often work that way. E.g., in Erlang, if you've already bound a variable X to a value, and want to compute another value of X, you cannot use the same variable name - you have to use X2 or something else.
Regret serves a purpose - it makes things memorable and makes them affect your decision-making. If you regret wasting time on pointless things, hold onto that regret and use it as a driving force to work now and in the future. That's the proper way to cope with regret.

In an alternative universe where you don't feel that regret, you could probably keep wasting time for the rest of your life without ever noticing.

Re:Psychedelic drugs take on depression on Saturday August 27, 2022 @01:11AM (#32615934)
I figure it's easier when your main goal is raising your child as a life-loving person, instead of a good Catholic.
Re:Creativity requires solitude on Friday August 26, 2022 @06:01AM (#32605318)
> We see that as soon as people get some money and autonomy, what do they do? They isolate. People spend a huge premium, such as business or first class plane tickets, stadium box seating, vacation retreats, man caves, etc. to isolate from other people.

The low quality/safety of public infrastructure could be to blame. Why would anyone use unpleasantly hot and smelly public transportation, full of loud and potentially shady individuals, without any security around in case someone creates a commotion - when they could just pay a little bit more and not even worry about any of those things?

Why would anyone go to a public gym with a tiny shared space, number of subscriptions that far exceeds the capacity of the place, and deal with unpredictability of whether or not there will be room to train - when they can build a private gym and train whenever they feel like it?

Why would anyone stand around in the crowded "fan pit", having problems even moving because vendors sold more tickets then there is capacity, wait in the line for public bathroom, wait in the line for drinks, make yourself a target for pickpocketing, etc. - when they could just buy a VIP seat, enjoy their time, and go home?

People will stop isolating themselves when not isolating stops being so unpleasant.

Hopefully this will successfully separate learning from certification, which will prevent learners from being punished because of cheaters.
Re:Build Android apps without an Android SDK using PicoLisp on Thursday August 25, 2022 @10:54AM (#32594459)
Ah, I see.

I didn't think it was possible to run native binaries on Android. Cool to see it happen :)

Re:How to Exit Vim on Thursday August 25, 2022 @09:55AM (#32593770)
How to exit vim, brutal version:

    Ctrl+Z
    kill -9 %%
Re:Build Android apps without an Android SDK using PicoLisp on Thursday August 25, 2022 @09:18AM (#32593324)
So we have a Java Virtual Machine that runs a PicoLisp Virtual Machine which runs PicoLisp programs.

The circle of life?

Perhaps the next step would be to implement a Java Virtual Machine in PicoLisp.

Re:Design the next iPhone on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @04:53AM (#32576639)
Living in the pupil of one thousand eyes
Re:PicoLisp on Monday August 22, 2022 @04:26PM (#32556755)
Compile time/runtime dependencies often increase maintainence needs and resource usage.

In the context of programming languages, dependencies are a property of a programming language implementation. LLVM is not a small system, yet PicoLisp is a small language, which is why it might be considered a heavy dependency. There are scenarios like embedded where having a tiny implementation with little dependency pays off.

Ordinary programs can be very easily maintained by using only the language's standard library, as standard library is often maintained substantially longer than many third-party libraries.

Re:A DAW made in Excel (2020) [video] on Monday August 22, 2022 @07:23AM (#32549936)
Wait, Reddit is a DAW now?
Re:PicoLisp on Monday August 22, 2022 @07:13AM (#32549857)
I don't think it's a strange critique point - dependencies are a necessary evil, but still an evil. Minimizing dependencies is always a good thing, and I can't think of a scenario where maximizing dependencies would be desirable, given the same amount of features.
Re:PicoLisp on Monday August 22, 2022 @07:11AM (#32549842)
> If your dependency set is massive, you should probably have an extensive feature set.

Assuming that having a huge feature set is a desirable quality. Sometimes minimalism is a useful goal in itself - languages with few features usually make those features composable, leading to a combinatorial explosion of the ways those features can be used.

That being said, a small independent compiler/interpreter for PicoLisp would still be nice, though.

> These mistakes are relatively easy to prevent.

Assuming one knows about them. How would one learn about them, without making the same mistakes themselves?

> I once interviewed a candidate[1] who had printed off a whole list like this and insisted on grinding through the whole thing. It was weirdly offputting, but he was such a monster programmer that he was already a clear hire. It gave an insight into the thoroughness of his nature though and showed that he was absolutely perfect for the (critical) role we were hiring him for where mistakes were extremely costly.

Would you share some more information on what kind of role it was? And what kind of qualities would you look for when hiring someone for that kind of position?

I aspire to work in such role (where pedantry is appreciated, instead of tolerated) one day, and I'd be grateful for any such information or hints.

Re:Happiness Is Two Scales on Friday August 19, 2022 @04:54AM (#32518807)
Interesting take, but still boils down to the same: satisfaction = happiness - unhappiness.

What's more interesting to me is how it seems that "satisfaction" is equal to the first derivative of life quality - if your life quality sucks, and gets a little better, you feel satisfied; if your life quality rocks, and gets a little worse, you feel dissatisfied.

Re:TSMC to begin 3nm chip production next month on Thursday August 18, 2022 @10:17AM (#32509951)
> Who needs phones this fast?

Programmers who cut corners while writing phone software.

Re:Email Is Async on Thursday August 18, 2022 @02:15AM (#32505928)
Using an email client with notification support circumferes this issue.

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