> Social Media platforms cannot grow without engaging and original content, made by people. This is the basis for any user to join. Creators have – in large part – not been privy to the rewards that these platforms have generated over the years even though they are the reason for platform growth.
Disagree. People use social media for plenty of other reasons than to consume artists' content. Sharing news with family and friends, arguing with strangers on the Internet -- HN itself is the obvious counterexample.
Ok, but the author referred specifically to "Creators", which usually means the minority of users who post things other than text.
If you read more of the author's post:
> We are a webcomic duo that has been creating original comics since 2011 and sharing them on various platforms on the web
> Any business model that does not acknowledge this and does not seek proper compensation for artists is not of interest to us.
My point is, while I agree with their sentiment, I believe they are mistaken that artists are the core driver of social media growth. (And by their assertion, the reason people use social media.)
I think you’re connecting two separate facts that need not necessarily be linked.
Regardless, users posting only life update-style text posts are also uncompensated for their contributions to the network (and their works too are feeding AI.)
Sure, maybe my definition was imprecise. Good catch.
But my point remains. I don't feel like I should be compensated for my HN posts. My great aunt doesn't expect compensation for posting her cat pictures. To be honest, I don't care about consuming artists' content. I'm sure it's great. But I go to the local art museum for that. When I go on social media, it's to hear from my great aunt.
And if YC wants to train a model that will eventually replace me, sure. I don't want to be paid for it. The whole thing is inevitable. You can't stop technology, only delay.
People just want to enjoy using computers (in the time humans have left).
How is it flawed logcally? Seems perfectly correct to me. Although I'd agree it's a bit over-literal. As if the emotional workings of the human mind can be precisely reasoned about (i.e. precisely enough to say "always").
Regardless, I've experienced this effect a lot when writing design docs. Iteration and objective criticism on a tangible thing (a doc) is an extremely effective way to see the problem from all sides.
Taking the statement completely out of context, it states : if A implies B, then not A implies not B. This is a logical flaw.
The correct statement from a logical point of view is: if A implies B, then not B implies not A.
In this case, even if writing down your ideas makes them more precise, there might be other methods that make your ideas more precise. Again this is just the logical point of view, out of context.
> Taking the statement completely out of context, it states : if A implies B, then not A implies not B. This is a logical flaw.
The statement in TFA is not that though. Instead, it is "if A implies B, then not A implies not C."
A: writing about thoughts
B: thoughts become more complete
C: thoughts are most complete
If "A implies B" is true, then it also doesn't matter if other methods also make your ideas more complete, because "A implies B" means that writing would make them even more complete, therefore "not C."
+1, pg is using a pretty typical argument you see in analysis/topology.
If you want to get to real analysis/topology the typical sequence is
1. Logic and Set theory (recommendation: How to Prove It, Velleman)
2. Linear Algebra (don't have a good recommendation)
3a. Real analysis (recommendation: PMA, Rudin)
3b. Topology (recommendation: Topology, Munkres)
I'm not sure I'd recommend learning math. It's an extremely expensive skill -- though pretty valuable in the software industry. People who go learn math are generally just drawn to it; you can't stop them even if you wanted to.
But be aware, (1) you'll have no one to talk about math with. And (2) you'll be joining a club of all the outcasts in society, including the Unabomber.
Disclaimer: I'm not OP and I haven't read the full post yet.
But the quote above says "If..." and then makes a statement that isn't true and then having a conclusion based on that false premise. I can tell you it isn't true because I can recall countless times in the last few months alone where writing down my ideas has resulted in a muddier thought; lost ideas while writing them down; confusing me and missing some parts; it does not "always make them more precise and more complete". So the rest of the statement is just silly.
Sure, sometimes writing down ideas helps clear things up. Most times even. But always?! Definitely not.
The deduction is flawed because the success of one method (thinking with writing) does not necessarily disprove the success of other methods (such as thinking without writing).
You're objecting to the premise, not the conclusion*. The deduction is valid for the premise (the part in the 'if'). Well, assuming you accept that an idea that can be "more complete" isn't "fully formed", but I'd say that's definitional.
* Although it's not really right to use this kind of language here (premise, conclusion, deduction). It's a casual statement, so I suppose people can somewhat reasonably argue about it, but the assertion is tautological ('if something is incomplete, it isn't fully formed').
Or with writing about it. But there's an implicit "if you haven't already written about it". We might wonder what other implicit preconditions there are.
Similarly, if walking North always brings you closer to the North Pole, then you can never reach the North Pole without walking North, or at all. But look out for oceans.
To be specific, the objective of state statutes is to block direct manufacturer auto sales. The objective is achieved in a roundabout way: the statutes written prevent the establishment of physical dealership locations owned by the manufacturers. They are not broad enough to restrict direct sales. This means that some creative sales techniques can be used, if you:
(a) don't need to have cars in a lot,
(b) can sell online,
(c) tolerate some uncertainty while interpretation of status is fought in court.
Then, you can (in many states), sell cars directly.
Tesla does all 3 as they usually don't have (a) inventory and in some cases, the law doesnt prohibit showrooms (b) seem perfectly comfortable selling you the car online (and critically, customers are ok with this too) and (c) have money to fight for settlement of the issues.
Theres even more creative sales now - tesla is actively setting up sales ops in Indian reservations - which have their own sets of the laws outside of specific states.
Edit: added (c) which is certainly an important factor in many states
Yep. Basically, in no election we can practically foresee, is this going to be a politically salient issue. The voters aren't motivated enough about it, and the interest groups involved are mostly aligned on keeping the status quo. Elections put people and parties into power, not individual ideas.
Direct democracy (https://klissarov.eu/en/books/platform-of-the-pp-direct-demo...) can change the status quo - if enough people get up from the couch and do vote for it. It just needs to reach a critical mass - but at the moment people are too lazy and wait for someone else to do the job.
I think that's true for tech savvy nerds, but my mom loves her dealership. Part of it might be the experience of leasing vs owning, where the dealership often does maintenance for free during the lease.
It depends. Most jurisdictions allow for a ballot referendum to put measures to a popular vote. This has gotten more difficult with signatory requirements that have gotten larger in most states, mostly orchestrated to keep the dominant parties in power and limit grass roots efforts in general.
Going through existing congressional process means getting at least a champion on board and overcoming dis/misinformation from many insider corporations, often large local donors.
edit: From my understanding,successful campaigns via referendum tend to cost anywhere from $2-20 million usd. Often involving paid signature gathering and local advertising.
The "problem" with referenda is they often forcibly enact policies that the elected politicians, judges, bureaucrats, and other organized political actors don't want. Since these people decide what the government actually does, they often find ways to ignore, work around, or in some cases outright overturn, "settled" referendum results. Making it more difficult to get questions on the ballot outside of the ordinary political process is just streamlining things from their perspective.
“Republic” (any system in which top-level government offices aren't personal property of the officeholder) and “Democracy” (any system in which government serves and is accountable to the general population—usually through voting on candidates and/or specific policies—rather than vice versa) are not mutually exclusive.
It’s pretty common for modern Western governments to be both of (Democratic, often also Federal) Republic and (Representative, sometimes with minor areas of Direct) Democracy.
To put a finer point on it: actual experts in the study of government routinely refer to the US as a democracy. It’s absolutely not a sign of better familiarity with the topic to “correct” that usage—it’s a sign of low side of middling familiarity, specifically.
Debate whatever you want, we do not have a direct democracy, which is what most people hear when they hear "Democracy". It's Representative Democracy. Supposedly.
That isn’t what most people think of when they hear “democracy” in the context of describing countries like the US as a democracy. Lay-usage and expert usage are in accord here. It means more-or-less liberal and with voting that significantly affects how the state runs and/or who runs it. That’s all, and that usage doesn’t confuse anyone. If we didn’t use “democracy” for that we’d just have to come up with something else, because it’s a very useful term to have. But everyone just uses “democracy” and that works great.
It's a federated representative democracy with some issues, some of the components of which have some level of direct democracy.
It is also a republic. It could be a republic even if it was a pure direct democracy somehow without "issues" - in fact I struggle to see how a direct democracy without issues could be something other than a republic.
Car dealerships exist in what is probably the most favorable regulatory environment of any business. It's a side effect of owners of car dealerships often being the wealthiest people in a locale, and being politically active. If you look up donations to your local and state politicians, you'll probably find several of the largest donors have last names that happen to match that of the local Ford or Chevy dealership network.
They have rules that protect them from competition from manufactures, rules that protect them from them from competition from other dealerships (i.e., Ford can't allow a dealership to open across the street from one they don't like), in many states, there are special rules for inheriting a dealership.
They'd originally existed because manufacturers didn't have enough resources to sell directly to customers, and they'd probably still exist (in a smaller capacity) today even if manufacturers could sell direct. Because there still are some manufacturers that sell low enough volumes in the US that it would probably still financially make sense for them to lean on a dealer network.
But for sure, Ford, GM, Toyota, Stellantis, etc would probably love to sell direct.
Mitigating the risk of downloading a script from the internet and executing it
-- even from a "trusted" website or package manager -- is absolutely a good reason not to use it.
Any decent distro has it. So you don't need to execute any random scripts, just install it or prepare the image with it for your OS install. That's it.
I don't really get this whole defaults being a blocker for tools choice.
Basically, it's just a lookup table for isSpace, rather than whatever logic is in the original function (which probably has conditional branches).
There's a little bit of a complication in the fact that a state machine can implicitly share parts of the computation for utf-8 encoded codepoints with shared prefixes, so instead of a 2^32-element lookup table, you only need 4 2^8-element lookup tables (and instead of 1 state, parsing codepoint, you have 4, parsing first byte, parsing second byte, etc.).
UTF-8 encoded codepoints can have an odd number of bytes, so processing a file 2 bytes at a time would be a little more complicated. Processing the file one codepoint at a time works because you can decode the UTF-8 stream into a stream of 32-bit codepoints before passing the codepoints to the lookup table. I suppose you could also transform from UTF-8 to UTF-16 before passing values to the lookup table.
Processing byte by byte isn't necessarily faster than processing codepoint by codepoint, or any other size. You'd need to measure performance empirically, and it probably depends on caches sizes and other factors. In theory, you could also process bit by bit — then you'd only need 32 2-element lookup tables — but that's unlikely to be efficient, since you'd need to do a lot of bit manipulation.
Edit: Upon inspection, the method I described doesn't appear to be the method used by the featured program. It still basically uses a lookup table for detecting space characters, byte by byte, but the states are not how I described. Instead of the states representing which byte of a UTF-8 encoded codepoint is being processed, and the word count being incremented upon certain transitions — a Mealy machine — the state represent the class of the codepoint last fully processed, and the count is always increased based on the current state (often by zero) — a Moore machine.
It's funny that you call that the standard algorithm, because, although it intuitively makes sense, this is the first time I've seen that word-counting algorithm.
The first implementation of wc I ever saw was the one from The C Programming Language, which has this written at the beginning of the book (except instead of "(isspace(c))" they wrote "(c == ' ' || c == '\n' || c == '\t')"):
state = OUT;
nl = nw = nc = 0;
while ((c = getchar()) != EOF) {
++nc;
if (c == '\n')
++nl;
if (isspace(c))
state = OUT;
else if (state == OUT) {
state = IN;
++nw;
}
}
You have answered your question yourself: your algorithm looks at each byte twice, not once
It's even more obvious in the UTF case where the classic implementation first looks at 1-4 byte to parse a character and only then checks if it's a space
Disagree. People use social media for plenty of other reasons than to consume artists' content. Sharing news with family and friends, arguing with strangers on the Internet -- HN itself is the obvious counterexample.