s_kilk

@dang, can you do something about the flagrant bigotry contaminating this board?

It's a classic refrain in a petty "revenge of the nerds" mindset. All the "haters" are wrong, unconditionally, and acting like an asshole is excused as being very special and brave.

It's a siege mentality designed to shore up one's sense of superiority, and ensure that one doesn't need to do very much soul-searching.

If you think that this kind of healthy education is decadent, there may well be more wrong with you than with the Danes. Worth reflecting on.

I know this is not what's happening here, but I just love the idea of a MySQL function where it spins up a new instance for every connection and promptly throws away the data after executing.

No, it just proves that Marx was right about the nature of the wage/salary. The value of labour power is the cost of reproducing/maintaining that worker at a particular standard of living, not some particular fraction of the value generated at work.

Or, as a former boss put it: "the problem with this place is that anyone with 'get up and go' has already got up and gone."

Come to think of it, he was gone too about a month later.

Lot of mental gymnastics in this thread to defend some godawful AI.

Marx - Capital

Thanks for the clarification, that makes sense.

I was taught that viruses are weird little machines, similar but unrelated to the things we recognise as alive. Interesting that there's difference of opinion on the matter.

Edit: here's a question for the room; if viruses are unrelated to the rest of "life", but are endogenous to the earth, are they alien?

Don't misgender people.

> rather than what the questions and the answers are?

The answers are utterly trivial, which is par for the course with PG.

Even DNA wouldn't work because of weird shit like chimerism. Our classic assumptions about this stuff just don't hold in reality.

I think it's dreadfully naive to assume there's a single, identifiable reward function.

Correct, if the information simply isn't present no amount of trickery will conjure it up.

It is extremely unrealistic within the next few decades.

Map is data manipulation, whereas pattern-matching is control flow.

It's from Gibsons "Virtual Light", a vastly better book than Snow Crash. Highly recommended!

I do all of the same in emacs (and vim), and because I use doom-emacs I get all this basically for free without much configuration on my end.

- Go-to-definition is `g d` (with the cursor over the function name in question)

- Project-wide file search is `SPC SPC`

- Jumping to a function is `SPC s i` and then just start typing to fuzzy-match the function name

I stick with this setup because it does pretty much everything I could want from IDEA, and does it without churning up most of the resources on my machine. And trust me, I've tried to switch to IDEA, but it's just too big and too slow, and too poor of an editor for me to actually make the switch.

An object lesson in the problems of using emoji to actually convey meaning :)

That's certainly true of the Soviet case (the fear instilled by the Stalin years left everyone lying constantly just to avoid the bullet), but Chile was very different. The whole project was to build a genuinely inclusive and worker-led democracy. And they got pretty far with it too, considering they were under economic blockade. We don't get to find out how the story would have ended because the Yanks decided to do a fascist coup and kill everyone.

His writing style is strong for sure but the concepts and observations are fairly trivial. I suspect it says something about the kind of ideas and discourse which are thought of as novel in tech culture.

I think that's a large part of it, yes, but a lot of folks saw the demented weirdness of perl and were (rightfully) turned off. And by that time there were sane alternatives available.

Right, so if I'm understanding correctly, I'd need to pin the whole nix-pkgs system to the particular git revision which contains the version I need?

> Everything is pinned to exact source revisions.

While you're here, how do you do this with nix-pkgs?

I looked into using nixos for nodejs deployments recently, and was amazed to find that the versions of node in the nix-pkgs repo are just pinned to X.Y.0 releases, with no discernable way to update to a bugfix release after .0 , so... I don't see how this could possibly be used for production deployments?

https://nixos.org/nixos/packages.html?channel=nixpkgs-unstab...

What I really want is to be able to tell nix to give me nodejs at version 10.16.3 and have it do the right thing every time.

I'm happy to be wrong on any of this.

Well, we do have a body of knowledge on those problems, as a sister-comment points out, Biology, and Cybernetics which abstracted the lessons from biology and generalized them to all machine-like systems.

It's just that this body of knowledge is not really compatible with the kind of stuff that the hyper-rationalist cult of lesswrong are into, and so tends to be ignored.

In fact, the author here is re-inventing Cybernetics from whole cloth (especially that of Ashby and Beer, in particular, Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety and Beer's Viable System Model), but without any engagement with the mass of existing knowledge.

[EDIT: I've just realized that the original author is being re-posted on lesswrong in this case, and isn't necessarily part of that milieu. I'd still encourage them (if they're reading) to check out Ross Ashby and Stafford Beer, because their intuitions align very strongly with the kind of research done by those Cyberneticians!]

Funnily enough, in old versions of Firefox (before they deprecated the old plugin system), password managers like Lastpass were able to alter the http-auth pop-up so as to add their functionality to it.

At the time I thought that was cool, and was sad when it went away with the new plugin architecture, but looking back it does indicate quite how bad the situation was with that old plugin format.

Will the work of a crank be considered mainstream? Probably not.

> If punishment has no measurable, positive effect - why do it?

But it does, the positive effect is in the mind state of the punisher, or the Type-1 people being discussed here.

Now you're right of course, the punishment does not improve the situation, but it sure gives these folks that little squirt of feel-good chemicals and that's what really matters to them.