Notices by divVerent (divverent@social.vivaldi.net)

@ArneBab @HeliosPi @mike805 @DGI Right. The problem is how a democratic system defends itself (or not).

Several Ancient Greek, and later a bunch of French, had some really good ideas there. Which all fell apart in the US.

It is interesting you mention armed people. Don't especially Republicans believe that civilians being armed was meant to prevent tyranny?

Sounded indeed nice in theory. Too bad gun ownership became political and thereby giving one side a free pass on tyranny. I mean, who's gonna stop the Republicans now? Even if you stop them in an election, you have an armed mob - the biggest ever - to contend with.

Definitely some lessons there. Whenever some things that generate power (whether guns, demonstrations, free speech, due process, voting etc.) become controversial and end up on a party divide, things get _really_ dangerous. It is good to question whether some things really should be rights. It is good to think about constitutional amendments to fix what is wrong. It is bad to self-enforce on only one side of the political divide, handing the other side a free win, making you even lose on that very issue, thwarting your own goal.

@icedquinn Really? I would assume the ML stuff is all so ill behaved trying to Newton iterate would just fail horribly.

Kinda like Newton iterating on sin(x)^(1/3) = 0. Very chaotic...

@icedquinn It's becaue Newton optimization only works for _simple_ problems - so we make the problems unnecessarily hard.

@icedquinn Yeah; changing terms after the fact should be outright illegal, unless one allows for _seamless_ data _and_ service portability to a competitor.

For Gmail that'd mean not just Takeout but also that one can still set up forwarding when not accepting new terms.

@icedquinn Everyone's own fault for using Discard.

@icedquinn Good games do not punish bad choices a lot. Even in e.g. point and click adventures, where many choices are forced - at least let the player explore, talk, have fun anyway before finding the correct solution.

A good example of this concept is actually the Monkey Island series. Most choices are basically forced - but the order is often defined by the player, and choosing wrong usually adds content to enjoy, whereas true 100% runs are near impossible as you have no chance tracking that you really have seen all events and lines you could have seen.

Similarly, in most but not all first person shooters, no weapon is pointless just because you have all the others. For each there is a situation in which it dominates all others. Very important.

@mina Naja, die Bundeswehr brauchen wir, damit wir nicht bald alle von Putin regiert werden und uns nicht einmal mehr Wasser aus dem Hahn leisten können - wie schon heute in Russland und erst recht in übernommenem Gebiet.

Aber: der soziale Wohnungsbau wie beschrieben muss sein. Der kostet gar nicht so viel, weil dadurch dann andere Kosten wegfallen. Z.B. die Polizei hat dann deutlich weniger zu tun, wenn alle sich ein Dach über dem Kopf und was zu Essen leisten können...

@mina Genauso ist es. Wir haben auch gelernt, dass oftmals billige Waffentechnik reicht, wenn man sie in Massen produzieren kann.

Leider bisher nur in der Offensive. Ich will Billig-Iris-T sehen... bzw. billige Kamikaze-Drohnen, die in einkommende Raketen reinfliegen.

Einfach ist das nicht, aber wenn es erstmal geht, dann ist es billiger als alles andere, was wir dagegen jetzt haben.

@hj If you consider every person with faith as a lesser god (who can e.g. "move mountains"), even more so.

IMHO though, the question is not what power a religion ascribes to which tiers of entities, but how many and which entities are being worshipped. AFAIK no religion worships angels.

@icedquinn @Suiseiseki @wolf480pl @a1ba TBH diacritics are less of an issue - most operations on strings can easily work on a per-codepoint basis, such as word wrapping - you just need to handle diacritics and other combining codepoints as if they're a word character.

And for stuff like line length computation, you need to take the different per-character width of your font into account anyway.

What's really annoying is string comparing, as you now have to apply a normalization first...

@Suiseiseki @wolf480pl @a1ba "It depends". UTF-16 is definitely faster to decode because you have fewer loop iterations for the same string (8bit and 16bit RAM reads are about the same speed on the CPU).

HOWEVER, especially when all codepoints are ASCII, UTF-16 uses twice the memory bandwidth. And that hurts too.

So, ultimately depends on the character set / language used.