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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Not a “hater” in terms of trying/wanting to be mean, but I do disagree. I think a lot of people downvoting are frustrated because this attitude takes an issue in one application (yay), for one distro, and says “this is why Linux sucks / can’t be used by normies”. Clearly that’s not true of this specific instance, especially given that yay is basically a developer tool. At best, “this is why yay sucks”. (yay is an AUR helper - a tool to help you compile and install software that’s completely unvetted - see the big red banner. Using the AUR is definitely one of those things that puts you well outside the realm of the “common person” already.)

    Maybe the more charitable interpretation is “these kinds of issues are what common users face”, and that’s a better argument (setting aside the fact that this specific instance isn’t really part of that group). I think most people agree that there are stumbling blocks, and they want things to be easier for new users. But doom-y language like this, without concrete steps or ideas, doesn’t feel particularly helpful. And it can be frustrating – thus the downvotes.




  • It can be both, and I’m not sure I see the distinction. It’s a coping mechanism, and that’s not actually an awful thing.

    Growing up in church, nobody was creating hypotheticals and then trying to explain it using religion. It’s just not what it was about. But I guess if you brought up babies with cancer, then yeah the “mysterious ways” argument would have been a prime cop out to avoid challenging faith too much.

    Most commonly, people just wanted to know how to handle the (typically less hyperbolic) challenges in their own lives. They believed they were good and faithful and didn’t understand why God would allow bad things to happen in their lives. Ultimately the “mysterious ways” line was just a coping mechanism, that came with advice to search for the silver linings, and think about past challenges and how they resolved, as evidence of the mysterious ways. Of course it also served to avoid challenging their faith too.

    At the end of the day, religion has its very bad elements that I won’t defend. But it’s silly to ignore that for most people, they’re looking for ways to interpret life in order to find meaning, or maybe cope with struggles. For myself, I’m not religious, but if I were trying to help a friend dealing with something difficult in life, I would still encourage them to look for silver linings and to reflect on past challenges. Not to use it as evidence for some god working in mysterious ways, but just to give them perspective to realize that they have the strength to overcome challenges.





  • It was fine. A total of maybe 8 minutes of interesting content. I enjoyed the segment with Tawny Newsome and Eugene Cordero watching silly clips. And the interviews on the street were cute.

    Jerry O’Connell did have a slight “blink twice if you need help” vibe going on, but I’m not sure how much of that is me projecting it onto him given that the strikes are going on (but I assume this content was prepared in advance?). And honestly, I couldn’t do half as well “hosting” a show with no guests in front of a green screen!

    The segment about Discovery was a bit…

    And I’m actually a discovery fan! But wow that Paramount Plus narrator was so proud of their achievements, lol



  • People aren’t misunderstanding the issue. Third party cookie support is being dropped by all browsers. Chrome is also dropping them, but replacing them with topics. Sure, topics is less invasive than third party cookies, but it is still more invasive than the obvious user friendly approach of not having an invasive tracker built into your browser. No other major browser vendor is considering supporting topics. So they’re doing an objectively user unfriendly thing here. This is the shit that happens when the world’s largest internet advertising company also controls the browser.


  • A classic use for them is spam filtering.

    Suppose you have a set of spam detection systems/rules which are somewhat expensive to execute, eg a ML model or keyword blocklist. Spam tends to come in waves, and frequently it can be as simple as reposting the same message dozens of times.

    Once your systems determine a piece of content is spam (or you manually flag content), it’s a good idea to insert the content into a bloom filter. This means that future posts of the identical content will be flagged without needing to execute the expensive checks, especially if there’s a surge of content stressing your systems.

    Since it’s probabilistic, you can’t use this unless you have some sort of manual reviewing queue or system, as it’s possible for false positives to be flagged. However, you can also run more intensive checks once you’ve flagged content, to detect false positives.

    The false positives can also be a feature, not a bug: with careful choice of hash functions, your bloom filter can actually detect slightly modified content, since most of the hashes may still be the same.

    I’ve worked at companies which use this strategy so it’s very real world.






  • I know reviews are pretty mixed, but I enjoyed listening on and off as I watched Voyager! But I will say that their episodes were pretty long winded for my tastes. In particular, while I understand why they had a section describing all the guest actors, writer, and director, they spent a bit too much time on it for my taste. Especially the actors, where they covered each actor’s first role and usually had a bit of a IMDB review. I personally only really care for the stories about the production of each episode, and also their general reception/opinion of each episode is fun since they’re deeply a part of the trek world.

    For me, a briefer version would have been a home run. As is, it’s worth a listen, but you should feel free to skip around.