Notices by Klara, continued (klara@wandering.shop)

@hannah The one about Quakers sounds like Discourse from the 18th century.

Holy shit: https://www.wired.com/story/undergraduate-upends-a-40-year-old-data-science-conjecture/

For the non-programmers: hash tables are one of those things you learn about in your first year as a CS student, and very likely in your first CS class. Not something you expect to read about conjecture-breaking, complexity-bounds-changing new implementations of.

Full paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.02305

I feel like I'm usually pretty in-the-loop about the shit Amazon pulls, but I had no idea about this one: https://bsky.app/profile/jomc.bsky.social/post/3koey5rojww2b

It's a whole thread, but basically, even for traditionally published books, Amazon will often send you a very cheaply-made print-on-demand copy instead of what you actually ordered. With no indication that this is what happened unless you know what to look for, and (of course) no discount.

@epilanthanomai How did this happen in my lifetime and I-- born in Wisconsin, living in Madison from 2000 to 2004 and again from 2011 to 2013, with friends who grew up in Madison-- never even heard of it?

Like... are people who know too sensitive about its potential for easy Wisconsin jokes, so they'd rather just not mention it?

@futurebird Nope. There's just a lot of perverse incentives aligned such that a diverse group of influential tech people benefit from saying shit like this.

Some want their stock prices to go up, some want to make regulation focus on fantasy scenarios so they can get away with more mundane awful, some want to freeze their position as market leaders, and some want to direct well-intentioned charity money to their awful cults. (And some decent people have been duped into joining said cults, too.)