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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Look, it’s such an exhausting night, and I really do believe that you want to see a better world. I do too.

    I’m just so shattered that we’re looking at four years of chipping away at the rights of women, LGBT, and transgender people. Four years of degrading all the checks and balances against the president. Four years of political retaliations going unchecked. Four years of aggressive anti-climate policy, inhumane border policy, and pandering to a Russia (and now North Korea!) that is also slaughtering innocents in Ukraine. Four years of middle east policy that is at least as bad as Biden/Harris’s, but likely far worse. And four years of slamming our economy with tariffs to “own the Chinese” I guess.

    A vote for Harris was a vote to make things better. Not everything. Good lord she wasn’t the answer to so many major issues facing the US and the world. But it was an objectively better vote, by every metric, than a vote for Trump, or a no-vote. I just can’t argue any more on that.











  • 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.


  • 100% monitoring and control doesn’t exist. Your children will find a loophole to access unrestricted internet, it’s what they do.

    Similarly, children will play in the street sometimes despite their parents’ best efforts to keep them in. (And yes, I would penalize Ford for building the trucks that have exploded in size and are more likely to kill children, but that’s a separate discussion.)

    I get what you’re saying, I just think it’s wrong to say “parental responsibility” and dust off your hands like you solved the problem. A parent cannot exert their influence 24/7, they cannot be protecting their child 24/7. And that means that we need to rely on society to establish safer norms, safer streets, etc, so that there’s a “soft landing” when kids inevitably rebel, or when the parent is in the shower for 15 minutes.





  • 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.