Literally all of vsyu's posts are submission links to either confluent or buzzsprout talking about Apache Kafka. No comments, just banal advertisement.
They've been used a lot in the past--most notably, for me, in Diablo II back in the early 2000's. I remember writing a bunch of D2JSP code back in the day and getting my account "flagged"--basically stuck forever to play against pickit users and autolockers.
Friends were able to join my game, but not I theirs, and the "available games" list was way smaller.
> However, "Like, uh, their purpose." is grammatically and semantically meaningless
How can something be grammatically meaningless? Further, because you're not able to understand the semantic meaning of a phrase does not mean it has no semantic meaning. I don't understand German--is German semantically meaningless?
> I am all for using a more casual voice
> I am against colloquial, spoken styles slipping into written word
Removing the filler "uh" the sentence becomes "Like their purpose." Which could be semantically understood as "[I/He/They] Like (or enjoy) their (whale's song) purpose." A semantically ambiguous sentence is just that, ambiguous. This sentence can have multiple meanings.
Also, conflating dialects, verbal fillers, and languages is asinine and you know that is not what my original point was. Writing casually about an expert domain is like, uh, different than writing spoken word as written, ya know?
> Removing the filler "uh" the sentence becomes "Like their purpose." Which could be semantically understood as "[I/He/They] Like (or enjoy) their (whale's song) purpose." A semantically ambiguous sentence is just that, ambiguous. This sentence can have multiple meanings.
Your argument supporting your prior assertion that "the sentence has meaningless grammar/syntax" is that... if you remove part if it, the sentence ceases to make sense?
Their sentence isn't semantically ambiguous. You may not understand the meaning of their sentence, but your experience is not everyone's experience. The word "uh" in the quoted sentence serves a particular purpose--it's an emphasis of the ridiculousness about how little we know with respect to the animals. Moreover, it's a very concise way of communicating that emphasis.
> The problem isn't that we don't know how to make more powerful batteries right now, the problem is safety.
No, this isn't the problem. The problems are weight, volume, energy density and cost, and the fact that there's no single catch-all battery solution w.r.t. dis/charge rates, capacity, and the aforementioned values. Safety, while very important and somewhat costly (engineers time--mechanical and certificates), is something the big battery companies understand very well.
> The more powerful your battery, generally the more dangerous/flammable/explosive it is when it fail
There's a concept called single-cell isolation that basically obviates this.
Honestly, I'm a little disappointed with this article. Plagiarism detectors themselves are neither a crutch nor a problem--they're simply a tool. People's use of them as the grand arbiter on plagiarism as though they were stone tablets delivered to them from Mount Sinai is the problem.
I thought that, despite the title, that's what the author was talking about for the majority of this article, but then they mention things like...
> Only if a text is somehow off, and online searching does not help, should software systems be consulted.
Sorry, what? The only reason text would sound weird is if it's been specifically mangled to defeat plagiarism software (which makes plagiarism software already useful). There's practically no way you, as a student marker, busy professor, or someone reviewing hundreds of academic proposals has the time to slowly wade through each paper you get by googling choice sentences manually--something the plagiarism checker software can do just fine. I'm more-so confused, by the pair of statements that 1) "Software cannot determine plagiarism [...] That decision must be taken by a person" but also 2) "Only if a text is somehow off, and online searching does not help, should software systems be consulted". Isn't the author's whole point that plagiarism software false flags all the time? Isn't this, then, just "hey this sentence sounds funny, time to fail this student on some plagiarism."
If their argument, however, is that you should use plagiarism software for curatable results, then this seems like the opposite order of what should be done. Why waste all your time fruitlessly finessing Google if the software will straight up just find the OG source for you? You're not going to have read every single piece of writing conceivably connected to the essay/etc. you're reviewing (unless it's a field you know much about and also so narrow that you'd never consider using plagiarism software in the first place), so you're bound to be missing actual plagiarism all the time.
I've been a member of the sub since its inception, and I've long defended Scott's analyses, but, as a longtime reader and (former) participant in the CW threads, I think he's grossly missed the mark here in the first section. I think if you read the first part of this article really closely, that should be obvious.
"I will be honest and admit I rarely read the thread myself." - Scott
"For all its awfulness..." - werttrew
"...practically ever criticism of the CW thread I have ever read is true..." - yrrosimyarin
"Very little was solved" -rwkasten
"I think the CW thread is obviously a huge lump of positive utility for a large number of people, because otherwise they wouldn’t spend so much time on it" - darwin2500
"...it does have a lot of full-time opinionated idiots squabbling, and is inarguably filled with irrationality, bad takes, contrarianism, and Boo Outgroup posturing. I agree with many of [the criticisms] of overtly racist and stupid posts in there." -c_o_r_b_a
I, too, once held a positive opinion on the thread, and so would anyone, having only the knowledge of its maxims and a bleary-eyed take on a small sample of posts. But once you dig deeper, you get what ought to be obvious from the above quotes. There are indeed many honest, well meaning, well informed people that post. They end up getting absolutely pulverized under the millstone of "power users".
The issue with the thread was never that an surveyable proportion of readers would split between left and right.
The issue was that the power users--the ones who post all the time in seemingly every thread--create an environment that drives away the the best posters.
The issue was that a single person clicking "I consider myself left-wing" on a survey (especially when they know the context of the survey is to show relatively even R/L split and the political milieu of the sub is hard R) is very different than their sheer contribution to the social "overton window" of the thread. Those "left wing" posters are the "I believe abortion should be legal, but also I will post my pro-HBD takes forever, at every opportunity". That is, it doesn't really matter what they clicked, because their contribution to the aesthetic of the thread is not accurately represented by the survey.
The issue was that actual factual experts get drowned in a sea of whataboutism and people who think they know better because they have a study to the contrary (did no one else read Beware the Man Of One Study or Epistemic Learned Helplessness!?).
The issue is that there are so few actual left wing posters that they get called out explicitly, by name to answer for "the left" when "they" do something that the forum deems necessary of an explanation (seriously, darwin2500 has the patience of a saint).
The issue is that people who harass (as above), argue in bad faith or seriously contribute to a negative environment don't catch bans except for extreme cases. To the moderators' credit, I've seen some really bad stuff get posters banned, but to speak of the general thread's failure, many of those posts are sitting on a well-into-the-positive amount of upvotes.
Personally, I'm not sad to see the thread go. It was detritus, and it impelled many quality contributors to leave. My favorite poster on the sub (who pretty much never posts there now) wrote a fantastic bit explaining the sub ~6 months ago.
"The experience can be a little jarring because you’ll have some insightful, genuinely depth hub worth comment upvoted and then another highly upvoted comments next to it will be how we should bring back eugenics and how we should limit immigration to people from high IQ countries in Europe and East Asia" - u/yodatsracist as per below
And, to be clear, none of this was explicitly Scott's fault (and, to wit, anyone who harassed him personally/professionally is an utter idiot). It was simply Moloch acting on the machinery of the sub.
I noticed three main misleading arguments in the blog post:
* That the SSC survey tells us anything about the CW thread. Since per his own survey few of the SSC readers read the CW thread why should we expect that many of the CW regulars took the survey? More than twice as many SSC readers indicated that they were aware of the CW thread and choose to not read it than indicated that they read it, which you might take as evidence that the CW regulars are unlike the survey respondents as a whole in at least some ways. Even if you did establish that the readership was broad spectrum that wouldn't tell you anything about the absence of toxic garbage there. Most people are not comfortable engaging in a forum where harmful views 3-sigma outside of their overton window are taken seriously, even if they're only 1% of the posts in much the same way that most people would be uncomfortable accepting an optional blood transfusion where only 1% of the bags were contaminated by HIV and HEP-C.
[Here is the data on the survey respondents readership of the CW thread:
3175 (42.7%) "No, I don't want to read it", 2346 (31.5%) "No, I didn't know it existed", 1425 (19.1%) "Yes, I read it", 369 (4.9%) "Yes, I comment there", 118 (1.5%) no answer.
I don't want to assume bad faith, but I think it's really suspect that this wasn't mentioned in the post. I think it would be very surprising to the people arguing about the CW thread here on HN on the basis of scott's politics graphs.]
* That complaints are from Bay Area liberals that have never interacted with conservatives. As others in this thread have noted here the racist/xenophobic/misogynistic positions that have people shocked are views that wouldn't be presented in polite company pretty much anywhere in the US. Scott is unintentionally using a "motte and bailey" where he pretends that the complaint is merely conservative views, when instead what people get worked up about is stuff like forced sterilization.
* That the incident is an example of deplatforming or otherwise obviously related to trends that suppress public discussion. At least in so far as I am aware the well known examples of deplatforming looked nothing like the harassment Scott reported. I've seen no evidence that any well known deplatforming event was related to harassment by third parties. The CW thread itself was a move from the SSC subreddit to its own subreddit, not a deplatforming and has clearly radically increased its visibility.
And based on the commentary on HN, I think presence of these three fallacious arguments has significantly undermined public discourse on the subject. There are many thoughtful and interesting comments on HN-- expressing concerns about politics in the bay area, or about deplatforming-- which are essentially disconnected from SSC/CW thread specifically because these arguments served the rhetorical purpose of substituting the issue at hand with a largely unrelated one where the readers already had preformed strong opinions.
Scott would probably have done himself and the public a favor by making his post on this subject an adversarial collaboration.
I don't think this is the case. I played on a B/C-tier Overwatch team as the main DPS (mostly Tracer) for several months and I can tell you there is a stark difference in snap-reflex between non-caffeinated and caffeinated states, regardless of sleep amount. There were many other things I did to improve my reflexes and rote mechanical skill in general, but none made as much an obvious difference as caffeine.
Caffeine is obviously s performance enhancing drug. The ncaa has limits to how much caffeine you can have in you while performing, I’m sure other entities do as well.
You need to drink a lot of caffeine (or pills I suppose) to go over the limits (unless they're a lot lower now?). We're talking like on the order of a gallon of coffee or something.
There's no gender specific wording anywhere on the open sourced website, or in the parent post, so the parent's regex works regardless of who's doing the regexing.
People who haven't encountered both in writing (or perhaps who have, and dismissed them as alternate spellings) may not realize that the homophones fiancé and fiancée are actually two separate gender-differentiated terms (where the former is both the male-specific and gender-neutral one) and not one gender-neutral term that some people, perhaps incorrectly, spell differently.
I don't know anyone who uses fiancee in a gendered way; all my engaged friends refer to their future husband/wife as their fiancee (though, granted, I'm probably not as old as many here who are already wed so I might just be out of the loop). Google's definition of fiancee seems to offer both wife-to-be and husband-to-be as synonyms as well, so I'm not really sure the parent's sneer is really valid in this case.
The word fiancé/fiancée is gendered. It is one of the few gendered words in English, as the gender was not dropped in taking it from French. Fiancé refers to the male. Fiancée refers to the female. They are pronounced exactly the same, which is why you have never heard it.
Words with semantic, but not grammatical, gender are not uncommon in English which lacks grammatical gender. Fiancé and fiancée are separate English words with different semantic gender, based on different grammatical gender forms from French (which, unlike English, does have grammatical gender.)
> Fiancé refers to the male. Fiancée refers to the female.
Actually, following French where male grammatical gender is used when the actual gender of the referent is unknown, fiancé is also the generic term.
The technicality here is that “fiancée” is historically female while “fiancé” is historically male. Same word, same pronunciation different suffix. Either way, nothing to get hung up about.
TIL there's a separate term for the male in this case.
Looking it up, it appears the distinction between fiancé (for the man) and fiancée (for the woman) has been falling out of style.
This isn't helped by the fact that the distinction in spelling is, apparently, taken directly from French and that both words are pronounced the same way.
Almost perfect, actually needs the following:
Needs to be material UI but poorly implemented so it's really slow.
Needs a "do you have time for a short usability survey?"--bonus points for stacking it on top of the cookie notification.
The "got it" button on donate/adblock needs to shame the user more.
There needs to be an on-hover action for some of the buttons that causes an alert to push the about-to-be-clicked button down so the user accidentally navigates away, then, when they navigate back, have to re-do the process.
That's both a fact and not an answer to the question he's asking. For example, unmarried people can live together and split the bills. The above poster isn't asking if it's cheaper to live together with someone--they're asking if selection bias causes it to look that way. That is, whether or not there's sufficient distinction between single folk, long-term non-married split-the-bills relationships, and marriage.
