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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • Approximation is an important tool for compressing information into useable forms. All labels are limited approximations too. Such compression is inevitably lossy, but that is a sacrifice for the sake of practicality. The important question is what level of compression is acceptable for a given context. If I describe the location of a chess piece on the board, I don’t need to specify how far off-center on its square a given piece is, so a 0-7 offset along each of the two axes is enough for game purposes.

    When it comes to gender, I think we all agree that [0, 1] is insufficient, but how do we determine what is sufficient? Do we argue that a 2-bit vector (masc, fem) is enough to describe {neither, fem, masc, both} for rough rounding, or do we need more detailed values along those axes, or perhaps a third axis too (or more)?










  • Hear me out before you rage:

    In theory? I believe that killings warrant investigation, prosecution and trial, no matter their intention, though the intention should factor into the result of the process. I want him to be prosecuted with the same intensity as any other killing would be, and if found, given a fair trial, convicted for whatever charge applies, as would be proper for a functioning judicial system. But then I’d want to see him pardoned as political expression of his popular support (and the fact that his victim was part of a deeply inhuman complex of exploitation).

    In practice? I hope they never find him. Appropriate intensity of investigation? Orderly arrest? Fair treatment as prisoner? Fair trial? Fair charges? Fair conviction? Fat chance. Pardoned? Not even a chance.

    I want him to go without punishment more than I want to hope for a fair process, and I couldn’t believe in the latter in any case.






  • I mean, the minimum you need is some authentication mechanism, a secure certificate, an authenticated endpoint to send a live data feed to, an endpoint to query a given live data feed from, maybe a website to serve the whole thing for people that don’t have their own tool for reading and playing back a live data feed…

    …and the infrastructure to distribute that data feed from ingest to content delivery. Easy.

    (Note: easy does not mean cheap. Even if a live data feed ingest and delivery was easy to implement (which I doubt it is), you’d skip buffering (to reduce memory demands) and only used a single server (to spare such stupid things as distributed networks, load balancing, redundancy or costs for scaling cloud solutions), you’d still have computational overhead of network operations and of course a massive data throughput.)


  • If you include the global south […], most of the world sides with Russia.

    I don’t know if the global south really sides with anyone so much as watching from the sidelines. Not honoring sanctions isn’t the same as actively fighting.

    It’s a proxy war the Western Imperialists via NATO but under the hegemonic control of the US in particular, is waging against the rising challengers of that hegemony.

    i.e. Eastern Imperialists - let’s call them by what they are. This isn’t some noble quest to liberate countries from US control. It’s a maneuver to secure more power in the space before the red line of nuclear deterrence.

    This isn’t freedom vs. imperialism, it’s just imperialism. The People’s Republic China has always been its own hegemony. Russia lost much of its sphere of influence during the collapse of the USSR, but it has made a solid effort to reclaim it since, e.g. with Belarus, Chechenya, Georgia and now Ukraine.

    Neither the US “interventions” in the Middle East nor Israel’s “Operation Swords of Iron” against Palestine nor Russian “special operations” nor (PR)China’s claim to Taiwan (ROC) nor all the other power grabs I won’t bother listing (or don’t even know about) are anything but imperialist ambitions. There are no saints among the leaders in this global standoff.

    But ultimately, it’s the people that pay the price in all of these conflicts. Human suffering, oppression, exploitation transcends all borders. We may have different leaders, different cultures, different experiences of life, but we’re united in the fact that we both will be the victims of this.