logimame · HackerTrans

logimame

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5 年前議論

I think the problem with this debate isn't about how much people have worked in the past, but more about what actually is work.

For example, in today's society we do not think of basic chores like laundry as work, but in the past laundry was far more labor-intensive due to the lack of washing machines. Is repairing your broken furniture or clothes work? Is preparing your own food work? Those things are trivialized in today's advanced capitalist societies, but might have been a substantial part of life for people in the past. Nowadays most people seem to just buy new furniture and clothes, and even food preparing has been substantially trivialized by resteraunts, orders, takeouts, and readymade meals, so we're probably much more prilvileged than they were. But did the medieval people saw all of this extra work as "work" in today's sense? (Graeber's famous book ("Bullshit Jobs") kinda touches on this aspect in the end chapter, but I wish he've delved a bit more on it. There's a whole anthropology of work that's left unexplored...)

I just think that even the conception of work itself might have been too different to compare medieval society's work hours to today's. We in modern societies are too accustomed with wage labor, to even imagine that these people might not have even thought about tracking the hours they were "working".

5 年前議論

I would disagree with the “No ads, no bullshit” part though…

5 年前議論

I don’t know that you could really call the 1619 project leftist/progressive though. A good portion of the criticism came from Marxists, such as the series of articles and books that came from the World Socialist Web Site.

https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/event/1619

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/04/intr-d04.html

5 年前議論

Also note that you can install the automatic tiling extension in other GNOME-based distros, you necessarily don't need PopOS to use it (though I had some weird bugs with it in Manjaro, it's probably going to be more unstable than PopOS's integration)

https://github.com/pop-os/shell

5 年前議論

> This right here is your indicator that this comment is an entirely made up story about hypothetical friends, with the sole intention of ragging on “liberals.”

Nah, I’ve been inside some of the fandoms on the Internet before and I know exactly what the commenter’s talking about (and whenever a similar thing happens I do another facepalm.) /r/HobbyDrama has a fuckton of similar stories as this, you don’t need to adhere to a specific ideology to admit that these things happen. (And even the left has criticized idpol for a long time, don’t just assume the commenter is conservative because of this)

As to why people participate in these tribal fights in the Internet… well one of the problems I see in modern society is a severe lack of agency among the people. Fighting on the Internet for a cause (whether stupid or not) gives one a sense of agency that they are alive in this world and changing things. The problem is that most of the agency that the Internet provides is inconsequential for actually changing the real world and is detrimental to one’s mental health in the long term.

5 年前議論

Position based dynamics is far more than just Verlet integration though. The meat of the algorithm has to do with dealing with various constraints (which is done by sequentially projecting positions related to each constraint while adhering to both the constraint and Newton’s laws (momentum conservation). PBD’s main strength is that it can incorporate various types of constraints at once with relatively simple code and good performance.

5 年前議論

One of the gripes that I have with Julia is that if you write linear algebra code naively, you will have tons of unnecessary temporary allocations, while in Eigen (a C++ library) you can avoid most of these without sacrificing too much readability. (It even optimizes how to run matrix kernels on the fly!) Sure, you can rewrite your Julia code in C-style to remove those temporary allocations, but then the code becomes even less readable than what you can achieve in C++.

Here's an example: https://ronanarraes.com/tutorials/julia/my-julia-workflow-re...

The naive Julia version has unnecessary allocations and therefore is 23% slower than the optimized version:

    @inbounds for k = 2:60000
        Pp   .= Fk_1 * Pu * Fk_1' .+ Q
        K    .= Pp * Hk' * pinv(R .+ Hk * Pp * Hk')
        aux1 .= I18 .- K * Hk
        Pu   .= aux1 * Pp * aux1' .+ K * R * K'

        result[k] = tr(Pu)
    end

In order for this loop to match the C++ version you need to use C-style functions:

    for k = 2:60000
        # Pp = Fk_1 * Pu * Fk_1' + Q
        mul!(aux2, mul!(aux1, Fk_1, Pu), Fk_1')
        @. Pp = aux2 + Q

        # K = Pp * Hk' * pinv(R + Hk * Pp * Hk')
        mul!(aux4, Hk, mul!(aux3, Pp, Hk'))
        mul!(K, aux3, pinv(R + aux4))

        # Pu = (I - K * Hk) * Pp * (I - K * Hk)' + K * R * K'
        mul!(aux1, K, Hk)
        @. aux2 = I18 - aux1
        mul!(aux6, mul!(aux5, aux2, Pp), aux2')
        mul!(aux5, mul!(aux3, K, R), K')
        @. Pu = aux6 + aux5

        result[k] = tr(Pu)
    end

... which is quite dirty. But you can write the same thing in C++ like this (and even be a bit faster than Julia!):

    for(int k = 2; k <= 60000; k++) {
        Pp   = Fk_1*Pu*Fk_1.transpose() + Q;
        aux1 = R + Hk*Pp*Hk.transpose();
        pinv = aux1.completeOrthogonalDecomposition().pseudoInverse();
        K    = Pp*Hk.transpose()*pinv;
        aux2 = I18 - K*Hk;
        Pu   = aux2*Pp*aux2.transpose() + K*R*K.transpose();

        result[k-1] = Pu.trace();
    }

which is much more readable than Julia's optimized version.

If Julia had a linear-algebra-aware optimizing compiler (without the sheer madness of C++ template meta-programming that Eigen uses), then Julia's standing in HPC would be much, much better. I admit that it's a hard goal to achieve, since I haven't seen any language trying this (the closest I've seen is LLVM's matrix intrinsics (https://clang.llvm.org/docs/MatrixTypes.html), but it's only a proposal)

5 年前議論

It's not from a single book, I've personally come to the conclusion after reading about various topics on both science and philosophy, as well as thinking about some current trends in science and engineering. I can't really give you a simple answer, I'm still studying and trying to figure this out.

But to give you a bunch of unorganized links if you want to follow a similar line of thought:

- Cybernetics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics)

- Systems theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory)

- Seeing how theoretical physics has been left behind in progress for many decades in favor of fields like chemistry, biology, and earth sciences - which all seem to use those discovered laws of physics, and is increasingly trying to arrive at conclusions through computer simulation of those physical laws.

- Thinking about the relationship between computer graphics (which brings the virtual to the real) and computer vision (which brings the real to the virtual) - and its interplay between the two.

- Continental philosophy (I'm currently reading Batallie's The Accursed Share and it's giving lots of good insights about 'societal' systems and the general economy. Deleuze & Guattari also talks a lot about cybernetics, although their books are notoriously hard to decipher and I've only read second-hand explanations of it. And a few writings from Nick Land (preferably something before his breakdown) seems quite illuminating. Marx also seems to have some surprising proto-insights about the cybernetics of capitalism - it's an area of research I might delve into it later.)

5 年前議論

Energy prices aren't really distributed equally around the world:

https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/

5 年前議論

The knowledge of making and maintaining these tools is still incredibly important and should be handed out through generations (while also inventing innovations to make more efficient and powerful tools).

But what many older generations in tech who constantly lament about the “new generation of tech-illiterates” ignore is that there are actually quite some people (both old and young) who understand this and are actually dedicating towards learning, teaching, and creating low-level mechanisms and systems (such as the people in the Handmade Hero Network, the young new Linux hackers contributing to the kernel, and hobbyists creating their own game engines). And it’s a grave disrespect against them to say that nobody actually cares about anything. If you really are worried about this, don’t just complain and cry about it, be the change you want to see in the world.

5 年前議論

I've read both of them (actually, I've read the former before this was posted).

The problem with the second article is the belief that conservative patriarchy was and is still the only way to sustain/grow population levels. This can problematic in an anthropological angle (there are still debates among anthropologists over how some prominent ancient societies were more matriarchial than we've realized), but more importantly I find this belief limiting our imagination as to the various ways in how humanity can manage to have and nurture kids. Familial values aren't only compatible with patriarchy, it can also mesh well with matriarchy (The fertility of women becoming important can also lead to women having more power over men, vice-versa). And is family the only way we can have childcare? Maybe we might have a society where everyone collectively cares each other's kids? What would happen if we have artificial wombs, wouldn't it significantly lower the barrier to having offspring? Obviously the hyper-individualism induced in our current configuration of capitalism is a huge cause for the fertility crisis, but I don't think old rehashed conservative values are the only solution for this individualism.

Now the first article (written by Nick Land), is much more nuanced, and doesn't strictly limit itself to patriarchy being an 'ultimate' evolutionary destiny. It's trying to dissecting the historical dynamics of population inside cities and between other cities (as a global phenomenon), and plotting the future trajectory of political theory from there. It states a fundamental problem of modernity which I can maybe agree with (although I have other problems with the author in general, mainly him also frequently spouting out right-wing reactionary politics)

5 年前議論

To be fair, I thought the dev’s response was adequate here. Just posting on the issue section that the “colors are wrong” while comparing with uxrvt, without any explanation or self-investigation as to why this could be a problem, has ample potential to be regarded as rude to the devs (I’m using this another terminal app and have better colors, why aren’t you fixing this?)

And please note that Mac OS is NOTORIOUS for having bad/buggy/outdated support for OpenGL (which alacritty extensively uses), and this is a legitimate frustration that many developers in the low-level graphics domain have. It’s already really maddening for the devs, the contributors shouldn’t nag too much about it (I understand people outside the domain might genuinely not know this - but it’s always good to read some of the previous Github issues before filing your own, to learn the general “vive” among the core contributors)

5 年前議論

> Was the point small business owners at establishments like Dales are facing troubles because they're fat-cat capitalist Trumpian Covid deniers whose problems aren't valid as such?

You still have to understand the workers are also the one who's getting fucked here. The owner of the grill in the article is deliberately worsening working conditions because of his beliefs on Covid, and it's perfectly reasonable that the workers will leave you to get a new job where your boss doesn't spread Covid on you by not wearing masks. I understand businesses are hard right now, but business owners should care a bit about hygiene, it's not something that would cost you a lot.

> This city is amid a dire housing shortage, expedited by lack of new construction and a migration of buyers from more lucrative economies. The median home price increased by 57% in the last 10 years, 8.6% in the last year alone to $315k. In the meantime the median family income remains only $46k.

But I think you've correctly diagnosed the real issue here - skyrocketing housing costs. Everyone suffers from this, both the workers and the small businesses. And it's a shame that the Dems and Reps are making this an "us vs. them" issue. (There's a similar dynamic in my country too, where liberals try to raise the minimum wage a bit, and then the conservatives fiercely oppose it and latch onto small business owners for support. Of course both the establishment liberals and conservatives are totally incompetent at solving skyrocketing housing costs and general economic inequality, yada yada.)

I think the real issue here is not about workers or small businesses, but just plain-old economic inequality - in the sense that the minority rich at the top can invest on housing at their heart's content (numbers seem to always go UP!) but the majority can't afford those prices. So even though the majority at the bottom knows that the price is bullshit, the bubble will not burst unless the rich realizes that those prices are bullshit (And do they really have to realize? They can still afford those investments though! They can stay being delusional and still enjoy all the luxuries they have!) Market price is now not an objective measure of value, but instead becomes a power that real estate investors can collectively impose onto the poor. Ah, communism for the rich, capitalism for the poor...

5 年前議論

Ok, but the reason he (kind of) knows a bit about Marxism it is because he's a right-wing accelerationist (more specifically, a neoreactionary), and this needs to be properly said in context before just naively moving on with "he's a billionaire who has actually read Marx and has the caliber able to critique him".

Accelerationists are people who view that capitalism can be a liberating force for humanity, whether it can contradict and end itself to achieve a communisty society (left-wing), or its capitalist systems will supersede humanity itself towards a technological singularity (right-wing). There are also some other kinds such as U/acc (Unconditional accelerationism) and G/acc (Gender accelerationism). But regardless of political position they all acknowledge their influences from Marx (since he's one of the first scholars who have articulated the revolutionary aspect of non-linear capitalist growth, and often hailed as a proto-accelerationist). Though Deleuze/Guattari is perhaps the more important figure here, as (in their book Anti-Oedipus) they map out how capitalism is a deterritorializing force that scrambles away previous territories of tribe, nation, religion, family, and ideology.

To be honest, Thiel's perhaps far more dangerous than any previous right-wing populist such as Trump, since he actually has some capital and connections (and the will) in order to actually achieve his techno-feudalist dream. His dreams of an America as a monarchist society run by a CEO might be really good for the current rich elites in tech, but clearly the most of us are not them, and we would still be getting fucked anyway (previously by a corrupt neoliberal government, now by a fascist-libertarian one!). Even though some of his assessment of the pitfalls of liberal democracy in the US might be agreeable, we really should be able to think a better future society for the majority than anything of Thiel's vision.

5 年前議論

Things had to change after the Great Depression though, the Roosevelt government had to actually make amends with and negotiate with labor unions, since the alternative was widespread economically-induced unrest which might possibly lead to communist or fascist uprisings. I think the parent comment was talking about that particular era, and commenting on how Reagan dismantled that whole deal.

5 年前議論

Although the author isn't clear about his thesis in his writing (which makes people think the whole thing is a conspiratorial attack on the FSF and RMS), there is some good discussion to be had here. I think the verdict is: the author has fundamental disagreements with the anarcho-libertarian roots of Free Software.

I ultimately disagree with most of the article, but I'll just be a devil's advocate here. One of the important points the article makes is about *trust* in software: Do we not trust our fellow developers to adhere to the goodwill ethics of creating technology ("don't do harm"), and if that is the case, do we not trust the government for creating laws and regulations for software to not cause harm? He talks about the need for absolute right of source code as an irrational fear rooting from the fact that "nefarious actors" might sneak malicious things into your computer that can't be audited. Some passionate developers would swear for this right at all costs, but the reality is that most people (both non-technical end users AND corporations) do not really care this at all. Non-technical people, who do not have the ability to really audit source code, would probably want governmental regulation to do the job for them, and corporations always had access to source code when they needed it (often paying huge sums of money for it, to the benefit of the developer of the original code). Many devs will say that the end user ("the commoner") is ignorant about the inner workings of the software and therefore their desires aren't really that important. But isn't software just a tool towards creating a better world, and shouldn't non-devs have a say in this matter when they are the end user (and often the receiver) of that tool? What do "they" really want?

My take on this is: there's actually enough reasons to NOT trust the current state of government at all, regardless if you're a dev or not, and because of this free software still has some value. Both Western/Eastern governments like US, China, etc have routinely showed that they do not really lead software for the common good, when they have been caught eavesdropping on citizens too many times. They are also prone to be lobbied by corporations, and many parties (including the "liberal" ones) have failed to act against those corporations when they have also been spying on users. (Well, the EU is bit of an edge case, but even so these corporations always find a way to go around those regulations). But there's the problem with FSF: they have largely succeeded in creating an ideology among developers for the absolute right of source code, but they have failed to persuade the average end-user for needing to have those same rights. RMS actually relates a bit to this problem: having a controversial programmer of cult-like status as a leader might be welcomed here in HN, but also casts an incredibly poor image on the org which would lead ordinary people lose faith in this whole movement. And it's reasonable to think that even ignoring the glaring RMS controversy, free software organizations have largely interacted only among technical people and haven't gained much interest among the general populace, and haven't been able to produce a significant voice in the parliament.

For further though, there are two additional problems of free software to think about which are not fully touched upon in the article:

- One is that free software is now mostly maintained entirely by the goodwill of unpaid volunteer developers, with the exception of a few prominent projects with substantial corporate backing. A lot of previous free (and open-source) devs have been burnt out by growing maintenance costs with not enough compensation (even sometimes derided for not doing their free work.) Is the current state of unpaid developer labor really sustainable, or should we start to think about alternative models of free-software development when developers might actually be able to pay for food and rent for the goodwill they contribute towards software?

- The second is that free software licenses like GPL ultimately depend upon the law for its enforcement, and therefore depends on the government for it to really have effect. Once the government becomes corrupt enough for GPL to not be enforced (ex. the military starts using Linux for their military drones but refuses to enforce its license), we might seriously need to reconsider alternatives. But then we're asking more weird questions like "what would free software mean and could be enforced in an anarchist society?", which is quite fun to think about.

5 年前議論

The Sokal hoax (and the sequel linked by the commenter below) exposes the negligence of mostly America-centric journals centered in sexuality/race/identity. But that really doesn’t represent the entirety of continental philosophy, and that shouldn’t be an excuse to ditch your education on humanities as a whole.

There’s a lot of bullshit papers in every field (including computer science) now, due to the corporatization of universities and its chase for numerical metrics. It’s our job as independent thinkers to wade through the bullshit, find the hidden gems, and arrive at our own conclusions. My current take is that if you’re actually trying to find some serious philosophy, don’t look at journal papers but actual full books by philosophers (which is becoming rarer and rarer due to the incentives to pump out high-metric papers).

5 年前議論

Yeah, it's still dissapointing how much system resources it takes to get a plot running (even with all the improvements in 1.6, benchmark taken from https://www.oxinabox.net/2021/02/13/Julia-1.6-what-has-chang...).

    julia> @time (using Plots; display(plot(1:0.1:10, sin.(1:0.1:10))))
      9.694037 seconds (18.29 M allocations: 1.164 GiB, 4.17% gc time, 0.40% compilation time)

To be honest, this isn't really something the devs should be proud about. 10 seconds, 18.29 M allocations and 1.164 GiB of memory just to render a simple static image is just unacceptable. In order for Julia to be a good-enough language for general scientific usage the current slow LLVM-based JIT compiler sadly isn't enough. I really want Julia to succeed, but this one problem is triumphing over every good language feature.

In an ideal world Julia would have two backends:

- A fast, hand-made JIT backend (something like LuaJIT) which is mostly interpreted and only JIT-compiled in frequently run code paths.

- The current slow, almost-AOT-like LLVM backend which is only used for precompilation of packages

It's just like Debug/Release bulids in C++, except that the Debug builds are lightning fast to compile (but slower at runtime) and Release builds are slower to compile (but hyper-optimized for runtime speed). I guess there's going to be an immense engineering effort if something like this happens, given that Julia today is immensely coupled with the LLVM compiler/runtime. But that's just my pipe dream.

5 年前議論

Mainly economics, although it has some relation to what the parent post is talking about. Unfortunately the sexual revolution happened in the US about the same time when labor unions got fucked, labor power got diminished due to globalization/deindustrialization/automation, and people started be compensated less dollars per productivity. In an ideal world where Keyne's prediction was right, we (both genders) would work only 15 hours a week due to technological advancement and spend the rest on taking care of famliy and community (including special considerations for women on pregnancy), but it seems that these lower-working-hour dreams haven't come true. But then there's an even more insidious cultural part of neoliberalism: for an increasing number of people you're not just supposed to just do your job, you have to indulge in it to prove your self-worth to the boss, you need to advance and maintain your "career", and have to race to the bottom to get a clutch on getting a chance of moving up the social ladder (or else you're going to work at a call center or increasingly precarious part-time gig jobs). Kids are just a liability in this hyper-competitive world; no wonder why women aren't going to have kids, when every aspect of society is telling you (in indirect ways) not to.

Agree that the artificial womb is an undererstimated milestone technology that will radically change the world. But such a technological solution isn't a perfect solution for low birth rates if you take care of the fact that you still need to take care of the kids born out of these artificial wombs (even though it could radically improve women's lives).

5 年前議論

D, Nim, and Haxe had it for quite some time (Along with Jai, which is yet unreleased to the public), although you can argue that Zig’s implementation is conceptually the simplest (it has merged compile time semantics with generic types in a unified way).