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  Anyone who's had to deal with bullies in ANY domain--abusive parents or guardians or teachers, school bullies, aggressive Christians, techbro bullies, anywhere--knows that the bully has two chief weapons: extreme persistence and the habit of racing for the protection of the authorities at the slightest whiff of genuine trouble. The bully is counting on something very important: "polite society", the social mores that prevail throughout the United States, says that as long as someo...

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  #KDE ought to be more careful. Slop-coding the #Linux kernel is something that more people can be forced to swallow because it's such a central thing and fearfully complicated. This gets into the general issue of why non-corporate operating systems are so much less polished and so much tetchier than corporate stuff like Windows: collectively there's a bewildering variety of hardware, nobody likes to see their particular motherboard or CPU or GPU unsupported, and it's extremely diffic...

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  I love that the #Wikipedia entry for DDR SDRAM doesn't have a single solitary scrap of information about how the stuff is implemented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR_SDRAM If you go to the main SDRAM page you get more but again there's the familiar pattern: the "Construction" section of the SDRAM page says nothing about how the stuff is physically made.

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  I feel grateful to Trainspotting for being one of the most convincing depictions of being on the edge of recovery, still unused to life without daily scrounging for numbing substances but sensing for the first time that there's a better life out there if you can get clear of the nonsense and the shouting. You can choose life, it's true. I have known many decades as an addict of one thing and another. Only by degrees have I outlasted the worst cravings. I'm determined to keep using m...

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  They forget something important about all those Platonic dialogues: they're scripted. Plato isn't giving an eyewitness account and he takes care to sidestep his own presence in the conversations he's purporting to relate as the deeds of his friend Socrates. Really he's writing embellished and slightly fictionalized scenarios about idealized characters designed to be the vectors for chosen viewpoints. There's nothing wrong with this exactly, but it's susceptible (in basic...

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  One of the ironies of depending so heavily, on my #FreeBSD desktop, on source repositories rather than compiled and ready-to-go applications is that I've compiled a fair bit of #Rust code, and a lot of other weird things, without knowing the slightest thing about the actual language (yet.) A question I find myself asking: was it entirely necessary for Rust to have come up with its own versions of shared libraries and other such packaged code, with their own jargon? But Rust is scarcely the...

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  But if they're so confident that #Claude and #ChatGPT have surpassed the human brain then where are the head-to-head comparisons? These same geeklords talk about #IQ as if it were an infallible and empirically proven method of estimating not merely human intelligence but...everything, basically! They say IQ has immense predictive powers. (etc.)

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  There's been a fair amount of chatter lately on a weirdly specific phenomenon pertaining to the #HarryPotter fandom, which is the strange part played by a certain "Harry Potter" fanfic well known to those engaged with combating the pernicious influence of #effectivealtruism and other "dark intellectual" cult idols which have fed into the fascısm of the #technology sector. (more)