Thomas Dickerson @elfprince13@mumak.app

As we stated in our letter to
the DOJ yesterday, the stakes could not be higher. The Biden Admin must do everything it can to preserve access to life-saving healthcare. This includes ensuring the availability of reproductive health information online, by defending #Section230.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/22/tech-group-urges-doj-take-sides-supreme-court-section-230-bout/

One way this might manifest is unintentional homogenization and herding. Put generative models in the hands of novices, and you may find that the model does more directing than the user. This happens to me when I use diffusion models (I am a complete novice at visual art). 8/

I'd really love to be able to follow entire mastodon instances so that I can follow https://brands.town/public/local . If you're not reading it, you are missing out

@paulmelis Coverage area is the whole city (~1000km²), you must select the specific area(s) you want to download.

An account will keep track of the areas you've downloaded and allow us to notify you when we release improved versions of the models that you might want to then re-download.

Also raises the technical threshold somewhat for script kiddies using bots to run up a massive bill on our CDN.

1/ "What programming language should I teach?" is the least productive question to ask in computing. There's a good reason: it's the wrong question to ask. The reason language wars feel pointless is that they're a symptom of this problem. Here's why:

2/ Curricula are never designed in isolation. All curricula, for anything, have to consider at least two things. First: goals. These include learning objectives, but often go farther (like "students must eventually get jobs"). ↵

@elfprince13 runtime, compile-time, edit-time & horned-snake-time

In the spirit of David Patterson's "How to Have a Bad Career in Research/Academia" talk here are 10 tips I just shared with the @PLDI Program Committee for winning the Undistinguished Reviewer Award.

1. Argue to reject papers because they are not to your personal taste. If the topic is something that you are not excited about, it's unlikely that anyone in the PLDI community will appreciate the work.

2. Argue to reject papers because you would have preferred they be written differently. Better to delay publication of the technical ideas, delay a PhD student's progress toward their degree, etc. than to have the paper be written in a way you don't like.

3. Argue to reject papers because you wouldn't have used a different approach -- especially if they didn't use the approach you invented! Introducing non-standard approaches into the literature is confusing, even if they reveal connections to other areas that may inspire interesting follow-on work.

4. Argue to reject papers simply because the proofs are not mechanized or the code is not publicly available. Regardless of whether a paper makes a significant advance and provides sufficient evidence to support its claims, the field now expects full mechanization and open artifacts.

5. Argue to reject papers because you'd like to see more experiments, better theorems, etc. Even if the the technical claims are already well-supported by the evidence presented in the paper, it will be even better after the next revision.

6. Argue to reject papers because the ideas are "too simple." Even though simple approaches that work well are often the ones that have the most impact in the long run, we should be selecting papers that optimize for technical complexity.

7. Argue to reject papers based on anecdotal evidence. For example, "I heard this paper was rejected previously" or “I used tool X once and it didn’t work" are fine things to bring to the discussion of PLDI submissions.

8. Argue to reject papers because the authors forgot to cite a few tangentially-related papers. You should especially do this if the omitted paper is your own -- after all, if you've written on the topic, you are the expert!

9. Argue to reject papers because they lacks citations to or comparisons with unpublished work. PDFs on the author's website or manuscripts on arXiv are flags planted in the ground and fair game!

10. Argue to reject papers because they build on prior work that you are unfamiliar with. If you don't have the background to understand a paper, it's unlikely that anyone in the PLDI community will appreciate it.

@shriramk seems like a good thread to port over this doozy from Twitter.

“here's possibly the worst Python scoping rule I've ever seen.”

Try for yourself at https://replit.com/@elfprince13/RubberyFortunateCables#main.py

Compiler Explorer now supports some CUDA code execution on a real GPU: https://godbolt.org/z/a6rzTbKeM - let me know what issues you find :)

Anyone maintaining a Mastodon instance and losing sleep over the Great Migration should read this excellent technical discussion of the matter: https://nora.codes/post/scaling-mastodon-in-the-face-of-an-exodus/ This is also a really good description of the sort of problems we're confronting with the backend of hcommons.social (and some of the things we've tried), if you're interested. Good times are ahead, though! We have a dev instance that is a lot more powerful than the one that is running right now.

My second favorite type of reply on Twitter in response to any criticism of the bird site is "You are angry. Therefor I, a random person from the internet, have won a great victory!"

My dear sir, you may not be aware of this, but my track record in destroying things that have made me angry is pretty solid. I have done fifteen years of privacy and security activism powered almost entirely by rage and I win a lot.

As an anarchist, I have previously argued with Marxists that absent the state it would be very difficult for capitalist corporations to reestablish private states with the help of mercenary security firms. The reason is that the whole point of the capitalist state is to externalize the operating costs of capital -- including the costs of enforcing absentee land title and other artificial property rights -- on the general pubic.
The response is usually some variation on "Nuh-uh -- look at the British East India Company!"
I've been doing a lot of reading on the rise of the British Empire, as part of the research for my next book. And one of the major reasons the East India Company was able to establish control over India so easily was that it took over the shell of the Bengali state, along with its preexisting taxing apparatus and soldiers, and was able to use it as a multiplier for its own endogenous resources.
So the East India Company, far from an example of corporations being able to create private states ex nihilo, is actually just another example of the typical pattern of corporations relying on territorial states to socialize costs and privatize profit.

Do you feel like your posts on Mastodon reach more people than your tweets did on Twitter? Please reblog for larger sample size

#Mastodon #Twitter #Poll

Do we all know about Markdeep yet? I benefitted from using it on a new site I am days away from dropping. Static content + built-in markdown + mathjax + decent stylesheets out of the box makes writing content easy.

https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/

Thanks @morgan3d!

You might have seen somebody using the proverb Vox Populi, Vox Dei. What was missing was the context in which it was used:

Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.

In case you do not speak Latin, it means in English:

And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.

A guy who is using TLA+ to model the protocol I wrote about in https://decomposition.al/blog/2022/08/11/an-example-run-of-a-matrix-based-causal-unicast-protocol/ just emailed me to let me know that he model-checked it for 30 seconds and didn't get any causality violations, but he didn't want to run it longer because "electricity is $$$$$ rn". 😂

I've been migrating the Distributed Systems Explained By Cats threads over to Mastodon because they're linked from my publications page and apparently Twitter is not an archival medium...