Nothing fringe about it, it's a general feature of inflation models. Exponential expansion essentially quick-freezes the universe, until the field which drives it (the inflaton) decays. At that point, exponential expansion stops (so no more cooling) and the universe fills with a hot soup of decay products. It's called reheating, and plays the role of old-school big bang:
Free speech as an idea doesn't just apply to the government, it is just that we only enforce free speech on the government. The ideal of free speech and its merits applies just as well to private actors and we should try to live up to it whenever we can. If you think that companies should be able to use their power and influence to suppress the speech of individuals then I would say that you are more authoritarian than liberal.
I'm so baffled by this because there are plenty of places where speech is suppressed and its fine. A highschool teacher can fail a student for shouting answers in an exam. A person can kick someone out of their house for saying horrible things. A cafe can ask someone to leave for saying slurs. A professor can ask a student to leave a lecture hall for talking...
The right to speech is curtailed all the time in private... We even teach it to our kids, such as raising one's hand, or waiting their turn.
You are misunderstanding free speech, it isn't a literal statement. Free speech is about being allowed to express ideas, not disrupting classrooms or harassing others. If you are allowed to express your idea after waiting for your turn, then your speech wasn't suppressed even if people told you to be quiet for a while.
It is fine to police disruptions, but you shouldn't police ideas. If all conservatives are told to wait for their turns while it is fine for liberals to just blurt things out then it isn't free speech. However if everyone is forced to wait and a conservative gets banned for talking out of turn then it is still free speech, he got banned for disrupting and not for his message.
It is hard/impossible to create laws around it since it is hard to formally define, but often it is obvious when it is infringed in practice just that we can't litigate it.
You haven’t been to imgur have you? Some sites have a point system and if your “social score” is too low you most definitely can get banned. There’s generally more left leaning people than right leaning people on some platforms, and when someone disagrees with someone else but otherwise can’t refute their statements they hit downvote. Enough of this and you get a ban.
You took my comment too literally - of course there are people who've been banned somewhere online for having opinions another human disagreed with. My point was that no large social media platform has a policy of banning people for civilized political disagreements.
Ok so what do we do about the first part of banning people for having a different opinion when they were otherwise civilized? A social media site having a policy that directly states “if you disagree with my statements i’ll ban you” is clearly not an issue nor is even worth discussing. I can’t really see how this is taking your comment too literally.
Some site are like that, plus talking about the voting system is against the rules, and even if you get plenty of upvotes, you can still be throttled or banned by a moderator.
Or maybe we think that giving the government the power to tell private companies which speech they must allow is more authoritarian than letting the companies decide for themselves. Whenever there are tricky balancing questions like this, I always err on the side of the party that doesn't have a monopoly on violence.
Extending free speech laws to cover companies which acts as public forums is not the same as the government telling companies what they are allowed to say and do. If you think that free speech laws are fine for governments then you should also think it is fine for certain companies which grew too powerful and influential.
How do you think those laws will be enforced, if not the government telling companies "you must allow this defamatory and/or untrue content on your servers"? Facebook and Twitter can't censor me, because I am not a customer of either company, and neither has a law enforcement wing. The government, on the other hand, has unlimited firepower and I have no choice whether to "do business" with it. So yes, I will absolutely apply different standards to each.
Why is it up to the company to decide what is defamatory or untrue? If you read the rebuttal twitter posted on his tweet you’ll see it boils down to “no evidence”. This doesn’t mean his claims are not true, it means there’s no evidence they are. These are very different concepts. So now twitter is running around saying it’s untrue when legally it hasn’t been proven untrue. They should instead take a hands off approach and let people think, read and decide for themselves.
I personally feel much freer to think for myself if government officials can't force private companies to carry their personal content. Of course it's highly unlikely that Twitter fact-checking the president will make any difference - everyone who's been paying attention made up their minds about the guy years ago - but if Trump is really so triggered by it, he is of course free to post his thoughts elsewhere. It's awfully telling that he immediately decided to involve federal regulators, although I suspect this will be just as effective as the fact-checking.
Trumps EO today did not and will not force companies to carry government content. Instead it removes protections for them if the limit access to things not specifically protected in the Communications Decency Act.
The rest of it you’re welcome to your opinions and interpretation of events. There is, however, quite a bit of people that agree with him.
This is just disingenuous. The message here is unambiguously "carry our content unedited or you become legally liable for everything posted on your site." Don't pretend that the decision of whose content is "protected" isn't going to be 100% subjective and partisan depending on who appointed the federal regulators. Or do you really think Trump's FCC or FTC (or whichever agency he imagines will enforce his new EO) is going to leap to the defense of, say, an Ilhan Omar tweet?
This is absolutely not disingenuous, this is reading the EO exactly as written without putting a bias on it. It very clearly states that removing things not specifically protected in the Act do not grant you the protections provided by the act. What’s disingenuous is trying to put a personal bias on this and trying to convince others this is true.
Context is bias now? Are we supposed to pretend this document appeared out of thin air, and can only be interpreted in an ultra-literal fashion, regardless of the goals it represents and the way it will be interpreted in the real world?
Well the original law is from 1996. And read the document before making any other comments because it’s clear you haven’t yet read it. It reasserts what is allowed under an existing law from 1996
This is what is allowed under Section 230: "any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected." The EO isn't reasserting anything, it's fundamentally changing the conditions.
The fact that Trump even admitted on camera that he'd shut Twitter down entirely if he could find a legal route for it kind of gives away the game.
This text is in the original law so how is this changing anything?
His choice of words is usually unfortunate, but the problem he’s pointing out does exist.
How does it look when the Twitter execs are known to lean left, post publicly their hatred for the president then take actions within their control to force their point on others?
Nothing is being forced on anyone. If Trump is unhappy with their fact-checking, he can take his business elsewhere. Or start his own microblog service, since he supposedly has so much money.
It just blows my mind that I used to have nearly identical arguments with left-wingers.
I don’t agree with this mentality of taking it elsewhere. Essentially what you’re saying here is we should segregate social media based on political viewpoints. This, I feel, is a very dangerous precedent to set. Regardless of what side you’re on do you want to live in an echo chamber?
As for forcing, agree to disagree then. Putting the link on a tweet and then linking to essentially an opinion piece is the definition of fake news. Ignoring the link meaning potentially missing an actual valid point. Ignorance is also dangerous. Why can’t they just take Facebooks stance and stay out of it entirely?
So then what would you call an opinion piece being touted as truth? And please no personal insult or insulations that “something is wrong” with me, you people still arguing a clearly valid point have destroyed my HN reputation with all the downvotes as it is.
What if, instead of trying to bully Twitter to not post fact checking links for Trump's tweet, we instead ask them to do so fairly for both sides of the political spectrum? I'm pretty sure there are lots of factually false left-wing statements that could make use of the fact checking feature.
That is the only issue here that I could see as being partisan, it's not about adding fact checking links, it's about doing so regardless of the political affiliation of the poster. I wish there was a lot more fact checking added to most statements on Twitter.
That which has no source, takes no source to dismiss.
The "Dark money in the republican party" claim was not substantiated. I can say there is a unicorn on the moon that shoots candy out of it's butt, how would you dispute it?
Language implementation-wise, can anyone explain why/how Julia is able to get close to C-level performance? Is it doing some extra steps under the hood (JIT compilation?) that Python and R aren't doing?
Julia's JIT compilation is rather different than what is referred to as JIT compilation in other languages, such as Java or JavaScript, where the language is interpreted (which may be interpreting instructions from a virtual machine such as the JVM), and the run-time decides if some code is being hit frequently enough to warrant compilation to native code.
Julia first compiles to an AST representation (also expanding macros, etc), performs type inference, etc. When a method is called with types that haven't been used before to call that method, that's when Julia does it's magic and compiles a version of that method specialized for those types, using LLVM to generate the final machine code (just like most C and C++ implementations these days, as well as Rust and others).
That also means that it's rare for Julia to have to dynamically dispatch methods based on the type of the arguments, which is one of the things that can really slow down other languages with dynamic types.
The easiest way to think about Julia's performance is closely related to the observations that inspire tracing JIT's for many languages -- most code in dynamic languages doesn't make use of the features that make efficient compilation impossible. Julia's response to that observation was to build a dynamic language that lacked some of the most extreme features in Python or R that act as barriers to efficient compilation.
It's also worth noting that Julia's JIT isn't tracing: it does all its compilation before the code is run (unless it hits a path which hasn't been run before, or wasn't inlined, in which case it runs the compiler again). I've heard it described as "really an ahead-of-time compiler that just runs really, really late".
BTW, is there a write-up of what those blocking features are? I don't recall ever seeing a blog about that. Could be an interesting e"if you want to make a JIT-friendly language, don't do this, do this instead" type of article.
I agree that would be great. The crude answer is: make it easier for a computer to figure out what will happen when you run the code.
The example I usually use is allowing integers to overflow, instead of automatically promoting to arbitrary precision (Python), or converting to a sentinel value (R). Integers are used in a _lot_ of places, so inserting these checks (or worse, access to heap-allocated memory) makes it difficult to optimise. (throwing an error might be a reasonable alternative in some cases).
Another is that you make it easier for the compiler to figure out things about an object, such as its size (e.g. you can declare the types of the fields of a Julia struct) and whether or not it can be mutated (immutable objects are easier to optimise).
I wouldn't use that as a primary example (allowing integers to overflow), because one of the great things about Julia is that it is incredibly easy to define your own types that will simply work, that for example, do checked arithmetic on integers (SaferIntegers.jl, I think is one, or don't want a limit (BigInt, which is included in Julia).
Julia gives the programmer the choice, and not only that, allows the programmer to create their own choices.
> The example I usually use is allowing integers to overflow, instead of automatically promoting to arbitrary precision (Python), or converting to a sentinel value (R).
IIRC Julia used to automatically promote integers, is this the main reason why this was dropped?
Oh no, I'm very certain of this: I distinctly recall a github issue where people complained that addding two 32bit integers resulted in a 64bit integer, which was justified as giving more correct answers due to potential integer overflow.
You're talking about different types of promotion. `Int32 + Int32` did once upon a time give an `Int64` on 64-bit systems. However, that was true regardless of the values of those integers—it was entirely predictable from their types alone. The type of promotion that's being talked about here is promoting `Int + Int` to `BigInt` but only when the
values being added are too big to be stored in an `Int`. Julia has never done that.
One of them is being able to override `setattr` and `getattr` at runtime in Python. It can be pretty tricky to prove it can't happen, so (unless you have optimistic and pessimistic codepaths) you get into a situation where every attribute lookup makes indirect function calls and hash-table lookups.
And my (very crude) understanding is that the stronger type system makes this much easier than in Python. The compiled version of any function is specific to the types of its inputs, and thus need not contain any further checks: simple functions often end up with literally the same assembly as C would produce.
It's "extremely lazy ahead of time compiled", is one way I've described the compilation model, since you're basically never executing code in an interpreted fashion (usually jits let you do either). Also, typically jit's choice of when to but may be non-deterministic, or deterministic but difficult to understand. When Julia chooses to compile is pretty easy to understand
I believe though that there is some work being done on actually directly interpreting the AST, in cases where going through all the work of generating LLVM IR and compiling that to native code is unnecessary, particularly when it is code that is only run once when a package is compiled the first time.
Yes, it's using JIT compilation (last I checked, they are using LLVM as the backend). Combined with a language design that takes JIT compilation into account from the get-go, making the problem much easier than trying to use a JIT later on (see e.g. PyPy).
> * Restrict shallow work to 2 hours (after 2 hours, say no to everything shallow)
Except when the initial classification of a task as “shallow” is incorrect, and it actually should’ve been “deep” (although, this shouldn’t happen too often, except when it does happen).
Sometimes I lay in bed at night thinking about the deficiency I haven't had time to address or that isn't a current priority, or the obscure bug I found a while ago that is laying in wait ... then I end up taking a melatonin capsule because my brain won't stop trying to plan/reorganize my next few tasks to squeeze in enough time to solve these issues.
I'm going to guess and say he was just borrowing a current, in-the-news hashtag and applying it to this situation. In other words, he was just joking around.
