• 10 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 11th, 2023

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  • I think this is a difficult dilemma. My immediate instinct is that blocking illegal material is obviously an invasion of privacy. It is impossible to block one type of message without first reading all messages and classifying them.

    But on the other hand, we’re talking about other people’s servers here. They shouldn’t have to host illegal material. In fact, it is illegal for them to do so. So it is their right to know what they’re hosting and clean it out.

    Should we really have any expectation of privacy on big tech platforms? If you’re sending obviously illegal material in plain bytes to a Microsoft server, what do you think is going to happen?



  • Finally got around to watching (half), and she does explain it and gets into some real interesting technical stuff, so I judged too soon.

    I think she’s doing herself a disservice by opening with the dramatic reenactment though, because I bounced off on that, also on an earlier video. There’s not really a gradual buildup either, so someone who actually likes the drama will get a cold blast of RAM spec sheet right after and likely stop there. Better to let everyone know what they’re getting into at the start, right?


  • The title is objectively clickbait though, even if she does eventually explain the design flaw. But I think if she’s doing an hour on the history of RAM design, she could be honest about that.

    This is probably a matter of taste, but I can’t sit through 58 minutes of slow buildup just to get to “ram has to refresh, that takes 300 nanoseconds sometimes, you could eliminate that at the hardware level by making all ram twice as expensive”

    Thanks Laurie, but you don’t have to pretend all ram is fundamentally broken to make me watch an hour of maths and engineering. 3blue1brown does that all the time with titles like “What is a laplace transform?” and thumbnails of plain formulas on black backgrounds.


  • Can someone explain Laurie Wired to me? I see her in my recommendations sometimes, but I don’t click obvious clickbait.

    Take this one, is it actually a design flaw or is it just a compromise that was made for good reasons and is kept around for those same reasons?

    Maybe I’ll watch the video and report back, can always remove it from my watch history.

    Edit: It’s an hour? Not like I won’t watch hour-long videos, but that’s a lot to figure out if it was clickbait or not.











  • 2007 was Order of the Phoenix, which is the most boring and also does not make any sense at all out of context. Strangely enough, that movie was also my first experience with Harry Potter, because a friend invited me to go see it. I did read the books later, which were decent enough, but like all global phenomena, it’s not really about being the best of the best, but being in the right place at the right time.

    The fandom was fun though, the discussions on Tumblr, the theories, the fanfics, the comic cons. I never see a wizard robe these days, even though it’s such an easy costume. I think Joanne killed the fandom.






  • They may not care about the implementation details of a Python library, they do care about consistent execution and predictable results. And in some edge cases, they will care about the documentation saying exactly how those edge cases are handled.

    Writing Python is abstraction, yes, but it’s still programming. Once that Python code is written and tested and the dependencies are locked down, you can ship it and be certain it always works as designed.

    Spec-driven code generation is nothing like that. I can’t ship the specs. I could generate the code in a pipeline and ship that, maybe. But there’s no way I’m getting consistent builds from a code generator. So what do people do? They generate the code and put it in source control for review. When have you ever checked-in a compiled executable or looked at it? There’s machine code in there, shouldn’t you review that the compiler did what you asked of it?