I don't know how many more examples people need to see of big tech not respecting privacy... it's just becoming a farce now. Big tech tracking woman's cycles? Of course they are. (sigh) If this doesn't gross people out enough to seriously pursue alternatives, I literally don't know what will.
Thank you Michael Rabin for your excellent work. Rest in Peace.
Rabin Fingerprinting is one of my favorites of his contributions. It's a "rolling hash" that allows you to quickly compute a 32-bit (or larger) hash at *every* byte offset of a file. It is used most notably to do file block matching/deduplication when those matching blocks can be at any offset. It's tragically underappreciated.
I've been meaning to write up a tutorial as part of my Galois Field series. Someday..
I live in a town in the Midwest that just voted down a data center project.
Personally I think it's mostly a proxy vote against bigtech/social-media. People are pretty fed up with their practices but don't have power to act at a national level. But, they DO have power at the local level to show up to town council and talk directly (in-person) to their representatives.
I think the other side of this is that there's this old idea (mostly correct) that municipalities partnering with businesses is good for the community because it brings positive side-effects: jobs, more cashflow in the local economy, etc. This is much less true for data centers. It's just a building that uses power and produces heat/by-products. Generally, employment gains are tiny compared with the old "automaker" labor model of the 1960s-1980s
People recognize this and they're not happy. They don't think it's a good deal for their communities.
Maybe you need to spell out what you're implying because it's not very clear. I don't understand what's so bad about wrong inferences. I've been living with wrong inferences my whole life - it's usually others that are made the fool.
In this particular case it means that you end up with really bad ad targeting. I'm happy with that, it's much easier to dismiss and roll your eyes at scam junk ads than ones that actually know how to manipulate you...
"The person seems to have low self-esteem, displays introversion, poor honesty, low emotional stability, very little adventurousness and poor self-control hence we can target them with both niche and common products and services."
Amusing to me how wrong this is... I don't know how you can determine such characteriatics from a photo in any direction. I will admit that my appearance though tends to throw mixed and incorrect signals (not an accident). I find the entire concept of appearance signaling pretty off-putting so I guess this is a great result.
The only thing Google Lens has succeeded at for me is age, race, and location. Basically everything else has been very wrong.
What if some of these ancient mysteries simply weren't logical. Investigations always assume that there was some very rational reason but still in our modern society we have exuberance and economic bubbles. The phenomenon is well-documented. What if it was something like that? The hole digging just got out-of-control?
I generally agree with this, but I think the small internet hasn't succeeded in building social replacements for the "centralized systems". The internet is a social technology. So for this to be viable, the small internet needs an answer.
Occasionally, someone mentions RSS as a solution. That's only a small component of the solution.
Strongly disagree. This is just increasing the "political temperature". The only true solution is people learning to talk and disagree with each other without "taking their ball and going home". Sorting ourselves into ideological camps on everything is destructive.
Thank you! Re extensions: my thinking was that if you build a clone, then extensions become irrelevant. Just build what you need directly into the software. Extensions systems always seemed to me to be a second class citizen. I think I read an old story of Linus Torvalds using an old fork of microemacs and whenever he disliked something he would just go tweak it's C code (e.g. key bindings). I'm kind of thinking that but done with an LLM. Software could in theory be smaller and more bespoke. And it you want it to work differently, you just prompt an LLM to change the actual source code. Then you don't need higher level configuration/cuatomization interfaces. Simpler software.
I was thinking about doing the same. Build a clone with AI custom tailored for my own quirks. And not bothering to open source it because it's too bespoke for anyone else. How hard was this? Can you share any advice?
That's a good point. It is pretty intertwined with ISAs. But, I think you could successfully argue it's just C semantics leaking into the ISA. C was so incredibly successful that it's hard to appreciate sometimes that all the systems (abstractions above and below) that touch it came to embrace and conform to it's semantics.
This makes a lot of sense. It makes me think of Go's approach to blur the distinction of heap/stack by just treating it as an escape analysis problem leading to an allocation choice. If it provably doesn't escape => optimize it by using the stack, otherwise fallback to the heap.
The distinction of stack vs heap objects is an old distinction that is deeply encoded in the semantics of C. It's not obvious that's the right choice.
It's worth pointing out however that you do want to have control sometimes. When you're coding for performance, etc it can be very important to control exactly where objects live (e.g. this must be on the stack with a certain layout). I feel like sometimes it's underappreciated in modern PL design that low-level coding needs this kind of control sometimes.
I think there exists a happy medium solution ultimately though.
I feel the same confliction about this organizational policy. It has been refreshing that they haven't just jammed half-baked ideas into stable like C++ has done for decades. But, yes, it's frustrating to bump into an issue and discover that a fix has been proposed and implemented but has never been moved to stable in 5-10 years. Some things feel like they're languishing in nightly forever.
I don't personally have a solution to propose to this problem. I generally appreciate their caution and long-term considering. It's refreshing coming from C++. I suppose one could argue that they've overcorrected in the other direction. Unclear.
Deeper than that, I think there's a philosophical dispute on whether languages should or shouldn't even evolve. There are people with C-stability type thinking that would argue that long-term stability is so important that we should stop making changes and etch things into stone. There is some merit to that (a lot of unhelpful churn in modern programming). But, failure to modernize is eventually death IMHO. I think C is slowly dying because of exactly this. It will take quite a while because it is critical computing infrastructure. But, few people remain that defend it's viability. The arguments that remain are of the form "we simply don't have a viable replacement yet".
Perhaps you can even take the view that this is the lifecycle of programming languages. They're not supposed to live forever. That could be a reasonable take. But then you really have to confront the problem of code migration from old languages to new languages. That is a very very hard unsolved problem (e.g. see: COBOL).
Language evolution is foundationally a hard problem. And I'm not unhappy with Rust's approach. I think no one has managed to find an ideal approach.
I'm pretty conflicted on this comment section. A lot of people are expressing a lot of fear of C++ bloat. I get that.
I'm not sure what the right answer for Rust is, but I'm fairly convinced that these type system ideas are the future of programming languages.
Perhaps it can be added to rust in a reasonable and consistent way that doesn't ultimately feel like a kludgy language post-hoc bolt on. Time will tell. There is a serious risk to getting it wrong and making the language simply more complicated for no gain.
But, these ideas are really not obscure academic stuff. This is where programming language design is at. This moment is like talking about sum-types in the 2010s. These days that concept is normalized and expected in modern programming languages. But, that's a fairly recent development.
I suspect that Linear types, refinement types, etc will follow a similar trajectory. Whether new ideas like this can be reasonably added to existing languages in a good way is the age old question.
There's already some good advice in this thread, but I want to add more.
This will indeed be very hard, but I'd urge you to take a long-term and positive forward looking approach.
It sounds to me like you don't have the best family/friends social structure to depend on. I'd focus on building that. It will take time ... and it won't happen on your schedule. The cold hard fact is that you have to put yourself out in the world in social spaces and be open and vulnerable. This is often why shared hobbies are recommended. But the hobbies aren't entirely the point. The point is that you're engaging in the real world with real people and learning to be open and vulnerable in that environment. If you embrace that (truly embrace), the friends and relationships will eventually come. But, it may take a long time. It's a long game. But its worth it.
In the short-term, you can find ways to cope. For me, I got REALLY deep into ultra-running after a bad breakup. It helped. But, it was seriously just a cope for not having the foundational social structures that everyone needs.
In summary: find healthy short/medium term coping methods, and invest in building longer-term social connections. And expect it to take some time. Give yourself grace. You're doing a hard thing. It's okay for it to be a struggle. Just keep working on it and you'll get through it. I've been through this. It gets better, I promise!
This was my thought as well. We have a lot of shared knowledge and memories with details that are definitely not shared in any online artifact. Those would be very hard to spoof for any casual attack. We'd have to be talking state level attacks...