aspensmonster

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Similarly, I find a fair number of Rust crates (that I want to use) have virtually no doc or inline examples, and use weird metaprogramming that I can’t wrap my head around.

Is it really a true rust crate if it doesn't contain at least one inscrutable macro?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

Turns out they thought ArcGIS cost the same as like Office or Acrobat, and they didn’t budget for it for the fiscal year that started 2 weeks before I started working.

ESRI is in the position that Microsoft and Adobe want to be in, a de-facto monopoly.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Well shit I didn't expect this to be relevant again so quickly

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Once you’ve eliminated the cause for NATO, then dissolving NATO will make sense.

The cause for NATO was eliminated. NATO didn't dissolve. It grew. Spoiler alert: there are no good guys in a war between imperialists.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I'd say there are three pieces, each feeding into the next.

  1. A Culture Favouring Novelty Over Replication - There are no Nobel prizes for replicating findings. There is no Fields medal for roundly and soundly refuting the findings of a paper. There is no reputation to be built in dedicating oneself to replication efforts. All incentives push towards novel, novel, novel.
  2. Funding Follows Culture - Nobody wants to pay twice for a result (much less thrice) especially if there's a chance that you'll expose the result as Actually Wrong on the second or third go.
  3. Publish or Perish - Scientists have material needs -- both personally and for their actual work -- acquired through funding. That funding demands the publishing of novelty. If your results aren't novel, then they won't get published (not anywhere that matters, anyway). And if you don't get published (where it matters), then you don't get funded. And if you don't get funded, you perish. And so the circle of scientific life is complete.

At every step, the incentives involved in the production of science are, ironically, rewarding un-scientific behaviour and ignoring -- if not outright punishing -- actual science. Until replication is seen as an equal to novelty, this regime will persist.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS. CONFESS THAT YOU ARE A BOT.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

What kind of type signature would prove the first block of any directory in an ext4 filesystem image isn’t a hole?

I don't know if the type system proves it's not a hole, but the type system certainly seems to force consumers to contend with the possibility by surfacing the outcomes at the type system level. That's what the Either is doing in the example's return type, is it not?

fn get_or_create_inode(
    &self,
    ino: Ino
) -> Result<Either<ARef<Inode<T>>, inode::New<T>>>
[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

You get used to the syntax and borrow checker in a day or two.

As someone who spent a couple months learning rust, this was half true for me. The syntax? Yeah. No problem. The borrow-checker (and Rust's concept of ownership and lifetimes in general)? Absolutely not. That was entirely new territory for me.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Isn’t Linux still Linux even though probably a lot of the original code is gone?

The Kernel of Theseus.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

If that were the case Molly FOSS wouldn’t exist

I'm not speaking of hard dependence as in "the app can't work without it." I'm speaking to the default behavior of the Signal application:

  1. It connects to Google
  2. It does not make efforts to anonymize traffic
  3. It does makes efforts to prevent anonymous sign-ups

Molly FOSS choosing different defaults doesn't change the fact that the "Signal" client app, which accounts for the vast majority of clients within the network, is dependent on Google.

And in either case -- using Google's Firebase system, or using Signal's websocket system -- the metadata under discussion is still not protected; the NSA doesn't care if they're wired into Google's data centers or Signal's. They'll be snooping the connections either way. And in either case, the requirement of a phone number is still present.

Perhaps I should restate my claim:

Signal per se is not the mass surveillance tool. Its ~~dependence on Google~~ design choices of (1) not forcing an anonymization overlay, and (2) forcing the use of a phone number, is the mass surveillance tool.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

LOL it's actually even lower if you look at Schedule J. Her base compensation is only 115,057. It's bonus and incentive comp (76,172) that brings it up.

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