Moonchild's recent activity

  1. Comment on From Red Riding Hood to Beowulf: On the essential role of literary reimaginings in ~books

    Moonchild
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    Tennyson's Ulysses comes to mind—though now it, too, is an old story. (I'd like to read the newer Ulysses, but haven't done it yet, and it is a big commitment.) And, in keeping with the theme,...

    Tennyson's Ulysses comes to mind—though now it, too, is an old story. (I'd like to read the newer Ulysses, but haven't done it yet, and it is a big commitment.) And, in keeping with the theme, Miyazaki's Nausicaä (the comic; I've not watched the movie, though I'm sure it's good too). Like all really good modern fantasy, it really is fantasy, not just fantasy-themed (insert Le Guin 'From Elfland to Poughkeepsie' here), but it also has a deep and abiding respect for its characters and avoids losing them to their archetypes. And the art is nice—it is grounded and integrated (e.g. the framing never feels forced or artificial), and the relationship between foreground and background is superbly done.

    ...it's not really clear to me where the line is between reimagination, influence, and fan fiction. (My dad argues fan fiction is conceptually bankrupt, but I think he is just conveniently and arbitrarily defining it that way—fan fiction is defined to be that class of literary works which is bankrupt in a particular way.) The linked article talks about how reimaginations can inform our understanding of the work they are based on, but it can't be that the purpose of a reimagination is to speak for the work it's based on; a work always speaks for itself. And, even though Nausicaä is called Nausicaä, and was explicitly borne out of Miyazaki's frustration that she didn't get more air time in the Odyssey, I think it ultimately says much less about the Odyssey than Brave Story says about The Neverending Story. And, for that matter, what about mythological traditions wherein the same stories get retold over and over, potentially over the course of hundreds or thousands of years—how much distance does there need to be between two renditions for the one to be an reimagining of the other, as opposed to their both existing in the same mythological tradition? On which note, I should point at Paradise Lost, which is just exquisitely written, if you can get past the archaic moralisation.

    I know I must know better examples, but they are not coming to mind. Two more. Coraline was apparently based on a 19th-century story. I think I like the new version better, but am still not quite sure what to make of the original (this time I am comparing to the movie, as I have not read the book). And Loreena McKennitt has made a career out of (not exclusively) adapting old poems to song. Even where the text is unchanged, the interpretation feels very intentional—she owns her presentation of the work.

    4 votes
  2. Comment on There’s a crisis in male fertility. But you wouldn’t know it from the way many men behave. in ~life.men

    Moonchild
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    why did I think you were going to suggest posting topics critical of women... :)

    Be the change you want to see in the world!

    why did I think you were going to suggest posting topics critical of women... :)

    6 votes
  3. Comment on JavaScript bloat in 2024 in ~comp

    Moonchild
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    Allowing this for arbitrary resources is problematic security-wise—browsers used to allow all cached resources to be shared between websites, and stopped for this reason. Suppose resource X is...

    Allowing this for arbitrary resources is problematic security-wise—browsers used to allow all cached resources to be shared between websites, and stopped for this reason. Suppose resource X is currently used exclusively by benign website A, which you frequent (and hence X is in your cache). Then, when you visit malicious website B, it can request X, and time how long the request takes. If it completes instantly, then it must have been in your cache, so B is able to learn that you visit A.

    10 votes
  4. Comment on Reddit has a new AI training deal to sell user content in ~tech

    Moonchild
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    You can certainly do that, but it is not what people in this thread are talking about. And reddit is not a monolith.

    less about screwing over companies and more about trying to see and engage with the kinds of community you want to see

    You can certainly do that, but it is not what people in this thread are talking about. And reddit is not a monolith.

    2 votes
  5. Comment on Reddit has a new AI training deal to sell user content in ~tech

    Moonchild
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    I can all but guarantee that, if this was ever true, it is not now.

    I can all but guarantee that, if this was ever true, it is not now.

    18 votes
  6. Comment on Reddit has a new AI training deal to sell user content in ~tech

    Moonchild
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    'Meh'... I have every confidence that unscrupulous companies will scrape whatever they want, willy-nilly. Stop engaging on reddit? Sure. Stop engaging on reddit in favour of tildes? A somewhat...

    'Meh'...

    I have every confidence that unscrupulous companies will scrape whatever they want, willy-nilly. Stop engaging on reddit? Sure. Stop engaging on reddit in favour of tildes? A somewhat meaningless gesture. The social contracts of the internet, which have long been under attack, are now effectively completely dead—this is the final nail in the coffin. And there is hence an increasing tension, among the technically- and socially-conscious, with respect to the public sharing of information. I know one very talented computer programmer who has committed to not publicly sharing or releasing any of his future projects, for this reason. (Coincidentally, this happened around the same time as he shared a tip about a particular robot that was joining and surreptitiously logging discord channels on behalf of a chinese company. In case you doubted 'by hook or by crook...')

    The legal angle is interesting, but academic. Some have hoped the courts would rule that copyright can be laundered through machine learning models, and that the possibility of being able to launder all copyrights would be tantamount to repealing copyright altogether. Others have hoped they would rule that training ml models on copyrighted data is an infringing use. In point of fact, they have—very predictably (well, hindsight is 20/20, but I did call this one, and I think it's fairly obvious unless you sequester yourself in a cloister of formalism and uncoloured bits)—opted to minimise disruption and ruled that training ml models is legal, and infringing output is infringing output.

    11 votes
  7. Comment on Those free USB sticks in your drawer are somehow crappier than you thought in ~comp

    Moonchild
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    I see ... fair enough. I didn't realise this condition was so common. On reflection, this is not unlikely appreciably more secure in practice than the alternative.

    You and I run in very different circles, I guess. ;) Half the places I've done IT work for over the years have had no network, and usually no internet for most of their PCs either

    I see ... fair enough. I didn't realise this condition was so common. On reflection, this is not unlikely appreciably more secure in practice than the alternative.

    1 vote
  8. Comment on Those free USB sticks in your drawer are somehow crappier than you thought in ~comp

    Moonchild
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    If the device itself is monitored, then you don't want to be doing that with a usb stick anyway. If it is not, then your network traffic will not reveal much—the content itself will be encrypted....

    in office and school environments, network storage and traffic are also usually monitored

    If the device itself is monitored, then you don't want to be doing that with a usb stick anyway. If it is not, then your network traffic will not reveal much—the content itself will be encrypted. No network connectivity is valid, but fringe, especially as 1) I believe google docs lets you work offline in at least some limited capacity, and 2) in an office/school setting it is an institutional issue.

    1 vote
  9. Comment on Those free USB sticks in your drawer are somehow crappier than you thought in ~comp

    Moonchild
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    What do you think they are good for? I do think it is an unfortunate technological failure that we don't have a decentralised google docs (partly for privacy reasons, but also to...

    What do you think they are good for? I do think it is an unfortunate technological failure that we don't have a decentralised google docs (partly for privacy reasons, but also to decentralise/eventually-consistent the content management itself for reliable offline operation). (My dayjob is adjacent to the metaproblem.) But, under the circumstances, people should simply be using google docs (or overleaf or w/e).

    1 vote
  10. Comment on The day I put $50,000 in a shoe box and handed it to a stranger in ~finance

    Moonchild
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    Police, yes—cia? perhaps not. Government can fuck you up (e.g.). But that's not too likely to happen to most people.

    Police, yes—cia? perhaps not. Government can fuck you up (e.g.). But that's not too likely to happen to most people.

    2 votes
  11. Comment on A 2024 plea for lean software in ~comp

    Moonchild
    (edited )
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    Liveness is a global property, and systems without pervasive automatic memory reclamation either develop ad-hoc schemes for managing fragmentation and liveness generically or else don't (the...
    • Exemplary

    Liveness is a global property, and systems without pervasive automatic memory reclamation either develop ad-hoc schemes for managing fragmentation and liveness generically or else don't (the latter condition is worse!). Corrolarily, pervasive automatic memory reclamation neither absolves the programmer of their responsibility to think about how they use memory nor prevents them from reasoning about it; it simply is a qualitatively different model with different characteristics. Which characteristics are not asymptotically worse than any other approach (indeed, they may be asymptotically optimal); the constant factors, as always, are a give and take; the benefits to modularity and reasonability are not to be dismissed.

    Improving matters necessarily entails disempowering programmers in order to enable users. The responsibility of managing memory is not one that programmers should be entrusted with. You keep mentioning security, yet systems that do not have unstratified, pervasive capability safety necessarily lead to monolithic, structurally insecure code, and some form of automatic memory management is necessary to realise that. In this respect, the browser is a marked improvement over classic unix. The cultural problems are, well, cultural—not technical. (Of course the browser has scads of technical problems too, but it's still a big improvement. Tug on the arcan thread a bit for some treatment of the social problems.)

    Abstraction is not inherently slow. Contrariwise, at the meta level, designing systems to pervasively express abstract, high-level interfaces forces the development of implementation strategies for managing the performance of those interfaces, and at the object level, abstract, high-level interfaces are far more optimisable than concrete, low-level ones, because they give the implementations of those interfaces more freedom. A mediocre example is DBMSes (there are not any good examples, principally due to the perverse incentive structures underlying the development of optimising compilers). There are two salient points. First is, of course, that query planners in relational databases are capable of very sophisticated optimisations that traditional compilers tend not to do. (They are sometimes accused of having opaque and uninterpretable performance models. A reasonable complaint. It can be solved.) Second, and more interesting: some aspects of the way user-initiated optimisation works. Query plan hints and indices are non-normative in that they do not affect behaviour of the code; they are hints. The specification for the behaviour of the code is divorced from the specification of how it should be efficiently executed, and the two can be analysed independently. (Having to rewrite your query when you update your database and trying to guess how to get the fast query plan again, on the other hand, sucks. Again, mediocre example.) Having to mangle your semantics in order to get good performance is a deplorable state. The limiting case of this gets us to the utopia indicated by Fran Allen (inventor of optimising compilers), Don Knuth, Dan Bernstein, and other luminaries, in which optimisation is a collaborative process between the environment and the user.

    In particular, this is dependent upon the correct framing of optimisation: it is a state-space search. (Which framing has been neglected by extant compilers, which is why they are all overly complicated and bad at optimising.) From among a set of programs (well, 'program' framing is wrong, but leaving that aside) equivalent to some source program, where is the fastest? Then both the machine and the human can propose steps through the state space. But there is an asymmetry. A single path through the state space will not be too long, and if one is proffered as a hint, it is not difficult to follow it and see where it leads. However, the state space, taken as a whole, is impossibly large (what is contained in the space is a design choice, but it should be chosen to be as large as possible—though not with redundant states, of course—because otherwise, it is unlikely to contain what we seek!), and therefore searching it exhaustively is impossible. So we are eternally bound to search only what can fit in our resource budgets (time and space), and are eternally bound to search by imperfect heuristic. The first class representation of high levels of abstraction allows searching at the level of those abstraction layers. In other words, if you arrange to tell the optimiser via a common vocabulary what your domain concerns are, then it can optimise pursuant to those domain concerns. That common vocabulary? High-level abstractions.

    (Edit: given only low-level interfaces, a good optimiser or analyser will be forced to analyse both their implementations and their users in order to recover information about what aspects of the interface are actually necessary to express the essential behaviour of the code and which are incidental, and then strip out the latter. Whether it is a good idea to express those aspects of the interface formally or only informally—and if formally, whether semantically or not (c.f. 'intrinsic/extrinsic' or 'church/curry' types)—is a language, program, and environment design question I will not treat here; but the point is that deliberately eschewing them in the name of performance is counterproductive unless you want to be stuck in a local optimum doing piddling optimisation work, like I did on this binary search routine in assembly that extant optimising compilers are as yet structurally incapable of recreating, regardless of how the source is massaged.)

    Edit: I do agree with this:

    We need education structures which teach how to make these things in the first place, rather than conditioning people to think "That's too hard, it'll never happen".

    Absolutely, 100%. And where that starts is with the disempowerment of programmers to empower users that I mentioned above. Because everybody starts as a user. And users should have the understanding that, any code they can run, they can also change, or ask the system questions about. The browser is lovely for this—well, sort of. It got worse with minified js and autogenerated html, and worse again with wasm. But in principle, I can open an inspector window and change the content of a page, and ask all sorts of questions about it. And I can write userscripts. I can do the same for code that runs outside the browser, but it's much harder and more prohibitive. Because code that runs in the browser is constrained to interact only according to the high-level interface exposed by the latter. (The bigger structural problem with the browser from this angle is stratification—notwithstanding Gary Bernhardt, the browser doesn't run inside of the browser, so the user is not empowered to change the browser itself.)

    18 votes
  12. Comment on My marriage is non-monogamous, and I am considering approaching a friend to propose a relationship with him. I would appreciate some advice from monogamous people (and reasonable people in general.) in ~life

    Moonchild
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    (If it helps, I'm as much in the dark as you are. But I've had close friends of all genders who were in committed relationships, so felt reasonably secure in saying that.) Ah, yeah, fair enough. I...

    I don't believe I know your gender

    (If it helps, I'm as much in the dark as you are. But I've had close friends of all genders who were in committed relationships, so felt reasonably secure in saying that.)

    I guess what I should have said is more like, when I flirt with other friends, it feels purely goofy, like both of us seem to know that we're just joking around. With this friend, it feels different. I'm not really sure how, but it does.

    Ah, yeah, fair enough. I can relate to that to some extent, but also not, which I suspect is to mostly down to feeling intense romantic attraction relatively infrequently. So casual-serious and casual-joking flirting don't feel all that different. (As a kid, I read a couple of romance novels, and assumed they were intended to be about bizarre aliens, before eventually meeting people who could have walked right off the pages of those books. Though it probably also doesn't help that I was weaned on Rumiko Takahashi's awful—but impeccably executed!—soap operas before moving on to more serious fare.)

    Tildes is the exception. It's the only place I know of where you can have a very reasonable, level headed conversation about things like this

    Tildes is pretty good, by the standards of internet fora, but at the same time, I think it is prone to the same pathologies as all the others—the difference is one of degree, not kind—which is part of what I was getting at in my somewhat poorly-received comment here about 'social media': my preference is to try to use these sorts of things as jumping-off points to build more personal relationships. I've had the most success with this on irc (c.f. discord); to a lesser extent twitter/activitypub; and least of all on fora like tildes. I would probably not be willing to ask relationship questions in any irc channel I'm in, but I have met people on irc of whom I would gladly ask these sorts of questions. And some people I wouldn't ask about relationships, but would ask about other things.

    Not to say that it's perfect, but there are some interesting dynamics. In a couple of irc channels I am in, it will sometimes happen that the channel gets effectively monopolised by me and another person discussing a deep technical topic which is impenetrable to the other channel members. This is a bit antisocial, but there is a sense of give-and-take of the shared space (c.f. what I discuss in the comment I link from the linked comment), and it is also to some degree less antisocial than having the conversation via private message, because should someone join to whom the topic is not impenetrable, they are encouraged to join in the conversation.

    ...I don't really know where I was going with this, but assorted thoughts on the problem and some pushback against the 'tildes is great!' meme.

    I absolutely adore my female friends, and there is a level of comradery and understanding that I will never find with men

    Can you elaborate on this?

    2 votes
  13. Comment on My marriage is non-monogamous, and I am considering approaching a friend to propose a relationship with him. I would appreciate some advice from monogamous people (and reasonable people in general.) in ~life

    Moonchild
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    That problem, at least, has a very simple remedy: stop reading reddit :)

    I think I am in "reddit mode" sometimes

    That problem, at least, has a very simple remedy: stop reading reddit :)

    1 vote
  14. Comment on My marriage is non-monogamous, and I am considering approaching a friend to propose a relationship with him. I would appreciate some advice from monogamous people (and reasonable people in general.) in ~life

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    That it is unusual does not make it wrong. Else I were in big trouble... The shallowness comes from the specifics, the presentation, the approach. Not from having the genders flipped. I have seen...

    any purely monogamous person would probably already consider our behavior to be “emotional cheating,” if it happened to their marriage. I don't think most male/female friendships involve endless late night conversations, casual flirting, and prioritizing each other over other friends

    That it is unusual does not make it wrong. Else I were in big trouble...

    imagine the same situation, but with the genders flipped. We've all heard stories of unfortunate women who thought they had a great friendship with a man, only to eventually find out that the guy had been pining after her sexually for some time. My worst fear here is making my friend feel like our relationship was shallow, or that I was just trying to get something from him

    The shallowness comes from the specifics, the presentation, the approach. Not from having the genders flipped. I have seen this play out at least twice—the friendship persisted. You are approaching this thoughtfully, which makes a positive outcome much more likely, though of course you know your friend and I do not.

    12 votes
  15. Comment on Did the future already happen? - The paradox of time in ~science

    Moonchild
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    Why do we need the speed of light to be universal? My understanding was that our models are consistent with a bias in the speed of light, and—in the absence of instantaneous communication—this...

    Why do we need the speed of light to be universal? My understanding was that our models are consistent with a bias in the speed of light, and—in the absence of instantaneous communication—this bias is not something we can detect. If we can accept a universal clock, surely we can accept a universal reference frame :)—at any rate, it seems much more acceptable than loss of causality.

    I will take a look at that paper tomorrow—bedtime for me now.

    2 votes
  16. Comment on Did the future already happen? - The paradox of time in ~science

    Moonchild
    (edited )
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    In general, that's fine. We can still say that A, B, and C happen simultaneously in universal time. (It would only be a problem if the observers were equidistant from all three events, which...

    Observer 1 sees event A before event C, but observer 2 sees event A after event C

    In general, that's fine. We can still say that A, B, and C happen simultaneously in universal time. (It would only be a problem if the observers were equidistant from all three events, which they're not in your diagram.)

    With respect to the specific problem—I'll consider Einstein's train since it's more fully fleshed out. At the point when the observer on the train observes the first lightning flash, their position has changed, and they're no longer equidistant from where the two lightning flashes originally occurred, so we would not expect the conditions for simultaneity to be satisfied.

    The pertinent question is the position of the observer relative to the events at the point when the events are observed. Not at the point when they happened.

    Edit: one easy way to see that velocity must be irrelevant is the following. Re ascii art diagram this time. Suppose we have additional observers 1' which is stationary and equidistant from A and B and 2' which is stationary and equidistant from B and C. If the position of 1 coincides with 1' at the point when it observes A and B, then of course 1 must observe the same thing as 1'. If the positions don't coincide, then we haven't satisfied the criteria for proving simultaneity. Ditto 2 and 2'.

  17. Comment on Did the future already happen? - The paradox of time in ~science

    Moonchild
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    But that definition is transitive, isn't it?—say observer 1 is equidistant from A and B, and observes them at the same time; and observer 2 is equidistant from B and C, and observes them at the...

    But that definition is transitive, isn't it?—say observer 1 is equidistant from A and B, and observes them at the same time; and observer 2 is equidistant from B and C, and observes them at the same time; then A and C are also simultaneous.

    In any case, what do you find problematic about defining instantaneous communication in terms of this definition of simultaneity?

  18. Comment on Did the future already happen? - The paradox of time in ~science

    Moonchild
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    Again, this is about fictive mechanisms. Mechanisms that don't exist. The question is: is it possible to define them theoretically in a way that's consistent with the rest of our physics and...

    Again, this is about fictive mechanisms. Mechanisms that don't exist. The question is: is it possible to define them theoretically in a way that's consistent with the rest of our physics and doesn't make anything go wrong (like letting us communicate backwards in time)?

    Upthread, you linked a stackoverflow question that said 'suppose one event happens at t1, and another at t2'. What does that mean to you (if it's coherent)? What would it mean for t1 to equal t2?

  19. Comment on Did the future already happen? - The paradox of time in ~science

    Moonchild
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    Even if two events are observed at the same time, that doesn't mean they happened at the same universal time. I explained my point a bit more here; perhaps that clarifies?

    Even if two events are observed at the same time, that doesn't mean they happened at the same universal time. I explained my point a bit more here; perhaps that clarifies?

    1 vote
  20. Comment on Did the future already happen? - The paradox of time in ~science

    Moonchild
    (edited )
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    I never said that universally synchronised clocks exist! I only said that they would not be inconsistent. To reiterate, the point I'm actually trying to make is that instantaneous communication...

    I never said that universally synchronised clocks exist! I only said that they would not be inconsistent.

    To reiterate, the point I'm actually trying to make is that instantaneous communication would not need to violate causality or permit communication backwards in time.

    Defining instantaneous communication requires us to define a notion of universal simultaneity. It is possible to define universal simultaneity in a way that does not violate causality, and hence it is possible to define instantaneous communication in a way that does not violate causality. That's all. (As a secondary point, it is possible to reason about relativistic processes in terms of a universal clock—and that is what the stackoverflow question psi linked does in saying that one event happens at time t1 and another at time t2—though I think this is not very useful.)

    spacelike separated observers can disagree about the causal order of events

    Which is why I defined the clock in terms of observations, not events. (I originally wrote 'events', but quickly edited to 'observations', so if you saw the original version, sorry. In computer science they are called events.)

    If two observer's clocks disagree

    But they don't. The values don't. If I on monday send a letter to you saying 'it is now monday', and you receive the letter on friday, it's not that my calendar disagrees with yours; it's that the letter took four days to reach its destination. On the other hand, if I meet up with you in person then, while our positions coincide, we will be in perfect agreement about what day it is.

    That the rates can be different is literally what time dilation is.