lordpipe's recent activity

  1. Comment on "Perl 6 is Cursed! I hate it!" in ~comp

    lordpipe
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    I thought it was kind of amusing how different the response to this article on Hacker News and Proggit were. Proggit got mad, but Hacker News just dismissed the article as satire intended to...

    I thought it was kind of amusing how different the response to this article on Hacker News and Proggit were. Proggit got mad, but Hacker News just dismissed the article as satire intended to embrace Perl 6 as a silly hobbyist language intended for fun and language experimentation.

    From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6 — description of Perl 6:

    Perl 6 (also known as Raku) is a member of the Perl family of programming languages.

    [...]

    The break in compatibility was mandated from the start of the project, and immediately allowed some of the changes that Larry Wall had suggested in his initial speech. "Historical warts" such as the confusion surrounding sigil usage for containers; the ambiguity between the select functions; the syntactic impact of bareword filehandles; and many other problems that Perl programmers had discussed fixing for years were some of the first issues addressed.

    Over the years, Perl 6 has undergone several alterations in its direction. The introduction of concepts from Python and Ruby were early influences, but as the Pugs interpreter was written in the Haskell programming language, many functional programming influences were absorbed by the Perl 6 design team.

    3 votes

  3. Comment on Russia Closes its Grip on the Internet in ~news

    lordpipe
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    They don't want to. Academia in china would grind to a halt if scientists could no longer access the full uncensored western internet. China's dilemma... if you want the science to get done, you...

    VPNs can easily be blocked if a government truly wants to and (as it's slowly starting to be the case) understands how.

    They don't want to. Academia in china would grind to a halt if scientists could no longer access the full uncensored western internet.

    China's dilemma... if you want the science to get done, you either uncensor the internet, or you remain somewhat lax on VPNs. Either way, you have a portal into free speech for a certain percentage of the population. The existence of VPNs work magic on the incentives at play, in terms of enabling free speech.

    Sadly, the magic stops when china is okay with compromising on scientific advancement. China might be competitive without VPNs in academia, it's just a matter of how efficiently they're able to control the flow of information with their versions of online digital encyclopedias.

  4. Comment on International Obfuscated C Code Contest 2019 begins - official contest rules in ~comp

    lordpipe
    (edited )
    Link
    From Wikipedia - See previous year winning entries: https://www.ioccc.org/years-spoiler.html Some really impressive stuff there, including a 8086 emulator with basic graphics in a 2013 submission.

    From Wikipedia -

    The International Obfuscated C Code Contest (abbreviated IOCCC) is a computer programming contest for the most creatively obfuscated C code. Held annually in the years 1984–1996, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2004–2006, 2011–2015 and then in 2018, it is described as "celebrating [C's] syntactical opaqueness".

    See previous year winning entries: https://www.ioccc.org/years-spoiler.html

    Some really impressive stuff there, including a 8086 emulator with basic graphics in a 2013 submission.

    3 votes

  6. Comment on Down the Rabbit Hole - TempleOS (documentary about Terry Davis & TempleOS) in ~comp

    lordpipe
    Link Parent
    I actually initially thought it was only about the oddness of TempleOS and his inflammatory internet comments, but then I looked at the timestamp and noticed I was only 1/4th of the way through....

    I actually initially thought it was only about the oddness of TempleOS and his inflammatory internet comments, but then I looked at the timestamp and noticed I was only 1/4th of the way through. It covers the whole thing, and gets quite depressing near the end. But it doesn't go particularly far into technical details.

    2 votes

  8. Comment on Hey, Tildes, what's a strong opinion you hold, but which you also feel like is the minority opinion? in ~talk

    lordpipe
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Call it file-sharing, not piracy. Piracy is bad, but only Lessig's definition in Free Culture, i.e. the actual definition, not Big Media's definition: Two pages later Lessig pulls into question...

    Piracy (the digital kind) isn't stealing. It doesn't actually hurt anyone or meaningfully damage profits and is, by and large, a good thing to have in a capitalist economy.

    Call it file-sharing, not piracy. Piracy is bad, but only Lessig's definition in Free Culture, i.e. the actual definition, not Big Media's definition:

    All across the world, but especially in Asia and Eastern Europe, there are businesses that do nothing but take others people’s copyrighted content, copy it, and sell it—all without the permission of a copyright owner. The recording industry estimates that it loses about $4.6 billion every year to physical piracy (that works out to one in three CDs sold worldwide). The MPAA estimates that it loses $3 billion annually worldwide to piracy.

    This is piracy plain and simple. Nothing in the argument of this book, nor in the argument that most people make when talking about the subject of this book, should draw into doubt this simple point: This piracy is wrong.

    [..some arguments against actual piracy..]

    But as the examples from the four chapters that introduced this part suggest, even if some piracy is plainly wrong, not all “piracy” is. Or at least, not all “piracy” is wrong if that term is understood in the way it is increasingly used today. Many kinds of “piracy” are useful and productive, to produce either new content or new ways of doing business. Neither our tradition nor any tradition has ever banned all “piracy” in that sense of the term.

    This doesn’t mean that there are no questions raised by the latest piracy concern, peer-to-peer file sharing. But it does mean that we need to understand the harm in peer-to-peer sharing a bit more before we condemn it to the gallows with the charge of piracy. For (1) like the original Hollywood, p2p sharing escapes an overly controlling industry; and (2) like the original recording industry, it simply exploits a new way to distribute content; but (3) unlike cable TV, no one is selling the content that is shared on p2p services. [These differences distinguish p2p sharing from true piracy.] They should push us to find a way to protect artists while enabling this sharing to survive.

    Two pages later Lessig pulls into question the harm of file sharing. This is the argument that pulled me towards supporting the liberation of IP law, and—by extension—legalizing all non-commercial filesharing of IP.

    File sharers share different kinds of content. We can divide these different kinds into four types.

    A. There are some who use sharing networks as substitutes for purchasing content. Thus, when a new Madonna CD is released, rather than buying the CD, these users simply take it. We might quibble about whether everyone who takes it would actually have bought it if sharing didn’t make it available for free. Most probably wouldn’t have, but clearly there are some who would. The latter are the target of category A: users who download instead of purchasing.

    B. There are some who use sharing networks to sample music before purchasing it. Thus, a friend sends another friend an MP3 of an artist he’s not heard of. The other friend then buys CDs by that artist. This is a kind of targeted advertising, quite likely to succeed. If the friend recommending the album gains nothing from a bad recommendation, then one could expect that the recommendations will actually be quite good. The net effect of this sharing could increase the quantity of music purchased.

    C. There are many who use sharing networks to get access to copyrighted content that is no longer sold or that they would not have purchased because the transaction costs off the Net are too high. This use of sharing networks is among the most rewarding for many. Songs that were part of your childhood but have long vanished from the marketplace magically appear again on the network. (One friend told me that when she discovered Napster, she spent a solid weekend “recalling” old songs. She was astonished at the range and mix of content that was available.) For content not sold, this is still technically a violation of copyright, though because the copyright owner is not selling the content anymore, the economic harm is zero—the same harm that occurs when I sell my collection of 1960s 45-rpm records to a local collector.

    D. Finally, there are many who use sharing networks to get access to content that is not copyrighted or that the copyright owner wants to give away.

    How do these different types of sharing balance out?

    Let's start with some simple but important points. From the perspective of the law, only type D sharing is clearly legal. From the perspective of economics, only type A sharing is clearly harmful. Type B sharing is illegal but plainly beneficial. Type C sharing is illegal, yet good for society (since more exposure to music is good) and harmless to the artist (since the work is not otherwise available). So how sharing matters on balance is a hard question to answer--and certainly much more difficult than the current rhetoric around the issue suggests.

    Whether on balance sharing is harmful depends importantly on how harmful type A sharing is. Just as Edison complained about Hollywood, composers complained about piano rolls, recording artists complained about radio, and broadcasters complained about cable TV, the music industry complains that type A sharing is a kind of "theft" that is "devastating" the industry.

    While the numbers do suggest that sharing is harmful, how harmful is harder to reckon. It has long been the recording industry's practice to blame technology for any drop in sales. The history of cassette recording is a good example. As a study by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young put it, "Rather than exploiting this new, popular technology, the labels fought it." The labels claimed that every album taped was an album unsold, and when record sales fell by 11.4 percent in 1981, the industry claimed that its point was proved. Technology was the problem, and banning or regulating technology was the answer.

    Yet soon thereafter, and before Congress was given an opportunity to enact regulation, MTV was launched, and the industry had a record turnaround. "In the end," Cap Gemini concludes, "the 'crisis' . . . was not the fault of the tapers--who did not [stop after MTV came into being]--but had to a large extent resulted from stagnation in musical innovation at the major labels."

    7 votes

  9. Comment on Should there be a tax on red meat? in ~food

    lordpipe
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    I wonder how big a carbon/methane tax would have to be to make red meat prohibitively expensive for most people, i.e. enough for them to significantly change their diet.

    I wonder how big a carbon/methane tax would have to be to make red meat prohibitively expensive for most people, i.e. enough for them to significantly change their diet.

    4 votes

  10. Comment on Microsoft announces first paid-for $20 Linux Distro for Windows 10 October 2018 update in ~tech

    lordpipe
    Link Parent
    I'm not necessarily talking about replacing Windows, but rather to provide an alternative to windows server that is compatible with linux stuff. A separate version of windows that drop-in replaces...

    I'm hilariously unqualified to talk about this, but I just can't see that happening. Or, at least, it doesn't seem like it would be a good move. There would be a lot of users stuck with legacy WinAPI applications and drivers. Granted, they could use Wine (it's LGPL) or something, but Microsoft would still be left supporting the whole API. Not much gained, and the greater part of the code is FOSS.

    I'm not necessarily talking about replacing Windows, but rather to provide an alternative to windows server that is compatible with linux stuff. A separate version of windows that drop-in replaces the linux kernel.

    2 votes

  11. Comment on Microsoft announces first paid-for $20 Linux Distro for Windows 10 October 2018 update in ~tech

    lordpipe
    Link
    People are already largely unwilling to pay for open source software. Open source software trapped inside WSL sounds even less likely to see much attention. I'm curious what kind of distinguishing...

    People are already largely unwilling to pay for open source software. Open source software trapped inside WSL sounds even less likely to see much attention. I'm curious what kind of distinguishing features they might add to this.

    6 votes

  13. Comment on Haiku OS R1/beta1 has been released — first non-nightly release since 2012 in ~comp

    lordpipe
    Link Parent
    Arguably, in this regard Haiku is a less cohesive operating system than many of the BSDs. Haiku is somewhat of a GNU distribution, along with their homemade software.

    Arguably, in this regard Haiku is a less cohesive operating system than many of the BSDs. Haiku is somewhat of a GNU distribution, along with their homemade software.

  18. Comment on Starting to experiment a little with using data scraped from the destination of link topics in ~tildes.official

    lordpipe
    Link
    This sounds like the proper way to do it. No third party tracker infested 2 MiB embed for a 840 byte tweet.

    I've recently started scraping some data about the destination of link topics using Embedly's "Extract" API

    This sounds like the proper way to do it. No third party tracker infested 2 MiB embed for a 840 byte tweet.

    12 votes

  19. Comment on What is/are your go-to system fonts? in ~comp

    lordpipe
    Link
    Tamzen is an excellent bitmapped font. Guaranteed /r/unixporn karma if you use it.

    Tamzen is an excellent bitmapped font. Guaranteed /r/unixporn karma if you use it.

    3 votes

  20. Comment on What is/are your go-to system fonts? in ~comp