modulus

Translation sets a certain distance between you and the work, that is inevitable. But so does time, for example. Should you not read anything from earlier than the 1950s because language has changed?

My understanding is that Firefox can’t generate and store them by itself, it needs some other mechanism.

I’m not very convinced by this article. A lot of the “realities” are not, they’re policy choices. Just as an example, the notion of the non-driving elderly adult having to be taken by their child to some office to get an ID is just a consequence of the US choosing not to have compulsory and free or nominal charge ID for all residents. Most of the other objections are equally dependent on specific policy choices, which may apply in some places and not others.

Oddly, I have a friend who’s not much into SF but absolutely loved Quicksilver (and the whole Baroque Cycle). She also enjoyed Anathem. But Cryptonomicon or other Stephenson’s books left her uninterested.

I suppose it’s a matter of taste then. I don’t really mind the expository style. Incidentally, Greg Egan is also one of my favourites, and I’d say he does use some amount of exposition, for example in Diaspora, or the Orthogonal Series (amazing work).

I liked Anathem a lot. I think I enjoyed all of Neal Stephenson’s books up to (but excluding) Seveneves, whereupon I gave up on him. Anathem is one of my favourite books.

The whole notion of monks in space seems absurd because of how people see monks. But this is both ahistorical and contrary to the way they work in the book. Copernicus and Mendel were monks. And these particular ones were all about learning maths and theorics (physics). They didn’t optimise for technology, because they weren’t allowed, but they optimised for learning, for extracting information out of tiny details. I think they’d do alright in a scientific(ish) mission.

I get why people say this, but I like his digressions. It’s not just a matter of learning something new (though occasionally one does) but of how he uses language to express it.

Interesting article, and I definitely agree I prefer clear instructions when those are possible.

I only have an objection. When it’s said that no matter how well chatbots behave, it’s bad design, and that they’re being used to substitute expensive people; well, expensive people’s interface is chatting too. So in that regard I’m not sure there’s a meaningful difference. Obviously there is if the chatbot is badly behaved, but the article says that it’s a problem even setting that aside.

Get your DeepSeek3 and r1 weights before it’s illegal!

Advertising, cryptocoin shit, pay to play… This is an awful idea.

I see some people are having issues with the scenario, but it’s not as impossible as it seems. The key is that Newtonian mechanics are in principle time-reversible. If a system got to a state one way, it can get back to the state it was by running it backwards, so to speak. A ball going down an inclined plain with a given kinetic energy could be going up that inclined plain up to the top with that same amount of energy.

The problem with these systems is, it’s possible to impel the right amount of force on a mobile so that it goes through a path and then stops. But since there is time reversibility, it should be possible for the mobile to spontaneously start moving from that stopping point and draw the same path.

Other weird similar cases are the so-called space invader (particle going to infinity, and therefore spontaneously appearing in reverse) and some strange n-body problem cases.

I liked poppy wars but it was a bit too relentlessly nihilist for me. I thought Babel was, if anything, better balanced in terms of presenting empire as a system where people who are not inherently out to harm others end up doing so anyway.

I read it, and I really enjoyed it. I will give a few reasons.

There are tons of spoilers here, by the way, you were warned.

So in short, it was one of my favourite books in the last few years. It also illuminates the opium wars in a way that hasn’t often been done before.

I kept giving Mozilla the benefit of the doubt and telling myself things weren’t so bad.

I was wrong.

I’ll continue using Firefox because it’s the least bad option, but I can’t advocate for it in good faith anymore, and I don’t expect it to last long with this orientation.

So it goes.

I do not think it is a very good analogy. I do not see how this would turn into a broadcast medium. Though I do agree it can feel less accessible and there is a risk of building echo chambers.

Not so concerned on that–people being able to establish their tolerances for whom they want to talk to is fine with me. But if the system goes towards allowlists, it becomes more cliquish and finding a way in is more difficult. It would tend towards centralisation just because of the popularity of certain posters/instances and how scale-free networks behave when they’re not handled another way.

It’s most likely a death sentence for one-persone instances. Which is not ideal. On the other hand, I’ve seen people managing their own instance give up on the idea when they realized how little control they have over what gets replicated on their instance and how much work is required to moderate replies and such. In short, the tooling is not quite there.

I run my instance and that’s definitely not my experience. Which is of course not to say it can’t be someone else’s. But something, in my opinion not unimportant, is lost when it becomes harder to find a way in.

I’m concerned that people are already eager to bury the fediverse and unwilling to consider what would be lost. The solutions I keep hearing in this space all seem to hinge on making the place less equal, more of a broadcast medium, and less accessible to unconnected individuals and small groups.

How does an instance get into one of these archipelagos if they use allowlists?

Same thing with reply policies. I can see the reason why people want them, but a major advantage on the fedi is the sense that there is little difference between posters. I think a lot of this would just recreate structures of power and influence, just without doing so formally–after all the nature of scale-free networks is large inequality.

It’s possible FF wouldn’t get away with something like integrating ad blocking by default, but in no reasonable universe were they required to do the PPA stuff and turn it on by default. Nor is it clear that it will lead to websites caring about FF compatibility–unfortunately many already don’t.

The usual pro-advertising take. “It’s ok that we’re going to experiment without your consent on how to manipulate you, because we only use aggregated data so it’s not personal, it’s business.”

So it would still help optimising persuasion at scale (also known as lying to people to best et them to act against their interest). Why is this a good thing again?

what do I think the history is? A record of the sites I visited.

What do I think the history isn’t? A correlated record of which advertisements I’ve been exposed to, and which conversions I’ve made, that gets sent to people who are not me.

Pretty relevant distinction. One thing is me tracking myself, another thing is this tracking being sent to others, no matter how purportedly trustworthy.