lambda

lambda wrote

Reply to by !deleted1665

Hey, now that's not such a bad idea. While using the word "libre" instead of "free" has helped some people understand the concept better, it doesn't work so well for English-only speakers (at least those who aren't good at recognising root words). When I try to explain the concept, I try to emphasise that the software itself is freed from being enslaved to any particular person or group.

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lambda wrote

Software consulting. I'm a rather large advocate of free software and contributing back, so I tend to focus on projects or firms that align with those goals.

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lambda wrote

Do you mean cryonics? I wouldn't consider that a pseudoscience, but it still seems to be more hopeful than proven at this point (still need to demonstrate that vitrifications is actually reversible).

Cryogenics has to deal with freezing while cryonics has to do with vitrification which replaces water with a different substance (avoids the issue where water expands when frozen which kills cells).

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lambda wrote

He has a public Facebook account for one where he occasionally talks about economics. The Sequences on lesswrong.com, while rather interesting, also cover it a little bit. Also, some of Harry's ideas are very clearly libertarian (e.g., being a market maker trading galleons with muggles for profit), though the theme behind Harry is that he's supposed to be somewhat idealistic despite having a lot of knowledge.

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lambda wrote

When going the route of mathematical formatting, it'd be nicer to just support some form of LaTeX. For example, MathJax looks useful here. With that syntax, you could group a longer superscript by doing something like foo^{one two three}.

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lambda wrote

I love how they call him out as a "controversialist". Similar in idea to a "shock jock", it certainly gets the point across that he's a professional shitposter. What's even better is that he's so bad at it, he can't really continue to make a living at it while people wise up to his bullshit.

Reading through the notes gives me the impression that this book had a very specific audience in mind that doesn't really require any editorial input. The poor quality in exposition reminds me of how a lot of phishing emails have terrible spelling and grammar: it helps filter out the people who will realise it's a scam before wasting time on them.

Dangerous was eventually self-published in July 2017.

Oh, of fucking course it was.

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lambda wrote

The very first I ever heard of youtube-dl was due to mpv, the free software video player. By default, it pulls in youtube-dl as a dependency so you can stream videos from sites straight from mpv rather than needing to download them if unnecessary (e.g., watching a video without all the BS javascript and malware).

The frequent updates are great for sites other than youtube, too. This also helps for circumventing draconian copy protection or shitty Flash players that still exist.

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lambda wrote

Reply to by !deleted1665

Even if there isn't a normal GUI way to do it on their site, I'm sure there's a REST API which you can interact with using free software. I'd imagine the CLI tools around this already do that, so not too many worries there.

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lambda wrote

He brings up type safety being something useful in Go, but without generics or some sort of parametric polymorphism, I still find it to be a flawed language. At least Rust already has that baked in.

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