• 14 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I blame Bavaria. If Germany had multiple price zones like other European countries instead of one giant one prices would plummet here in the north, while they’d explode in Bavaria. The state that does not want wind power, does want nuclear power, but already knows ahead of time that its geology (with lots of mountains and granite) is unsuitable for nuclear waste storage. Meanwhile, north German wind power and Scandinavian hydro dams complement each other perfectly. The Bavarians could do the same with the Austrians, they just don’t. They want to eat cake and have it, too.


  • After reading through the abstract the article is pop sci bunk: They developed a method to save additional space with constant-time overhead.

    Which is certainly novel and nice and all kinds of things but it’s just a tool in the toolbox, making things more optimal in theory says little about things being faster in practice because the theoretical cost models never match what real-world machines are actually doing. In algorithm classes we learn to analyse sorting algorithms by number of comparisons, and indeed the minimum necessary is O(n log n), in the real world, it’s numbers of cache invalidation that matters: CPUs can compare numbers basically instantly, getting the stuff you want to compare from memory to the CPU is where time is spent. It can very well be faster to make more comparisons if it means you get fewer, or more regular (so that the CPU can predict and pre-fetch), data transfers.

    Consulting my crystal ball, I see this trickling down into at least the minds of people who develop the usual KV stores, database engineers, etc, maybe it’ll help maybe it won’t those things are already incredibly optimized. Never trust a data structure optimisation you didn’t benchmark. Never trust any optimisation you didn’t benchmark, actually. Do your benchmarks, you’re not smarter than reality. In case it does help, it’s going to trickle down into standard implementations of data structures languages ship with.

    EDIT: I was looking an this paper, not this. It’s actually disproving a conjecture of Yao, who has a Turing prize, certainly a nice feather to have in your cap. It’s also way more into the theoretical weeds than I’m comfortable with. This may have applications, or this may go along the lines of the Karatsuba algorithm: Faster only if your data is astronomically large, for (most) real-world applications the constant overhead out-weighs the asymptotic speedup.


  • It’s a semi-random feed. Tiktok throws things at you and if something sticks, they’re showing more of it. Pretty much all know about the stuff, many dismiss it, for some it’s self-image fentanyl: Both incredibly addictive and destructive: At their age they’re looking for information on what girls “really want”, and what they get is “anything you do is a possible reason to dump you and you’ll never be able to predict what I consider icky the next second” instead of something even remotely sensible. They’re seeing their prospects to, at some time, enter a long-term relationship with someone they love shatter, instincts denied, instinct reconfigures and re-affirms themself (because it always does) and now you have someone vulnerable to Tateist propaganda, “grab her by the pussy and make her your bitch”. Because that kind of “solution” is way more easy than working through the whole shebang. Without guidance it’s pretty much impossible, they’re too young. They can’t tell their drive to relate and their reproductive drive apart and thus can’t see that the Tate way actually denies them one drive to assert the other, while they could have both. Heck they can barely control their limbs.

    What I’m saying is that it would be very helpful if that content didn’t exist. I could call Tate a loudly barking Chihuahua who got his “world champion” title in an amateur organisation and leave it at that instead of having to go into depth fucking psychology. I hope we can agree on that.


  • I wouldn’t say it’s a shift. Only a subset of media is relevant when it comes to boys. I didn’t pull those ick tiktoks out of my hat as a “gotcha” example, this is the type of problematic media that I have to deal with because that’s what my students are exposed to. They’re not watching linear TV so that doesn’t matter, they’re not reading newspapers so those don’t matter, the vast majority of the established news media sphere doesn’t matter and Hollywood is well-balanced by anime, not many issues there. It’s fiction in the first place which gets perceived differently, the veracity of tiktok trends can be much harder to asses for teens. Rambo is badass because it’s an action flick, they understand that it’s a fantasy. Any martial arts movie? The same, and in a martial arts class that’s a teaching moment right there, how “making it look cool” and “making it effective” are two completely different things. That ick stuff? They take it at face value, on a deep level.




  • Not having to fight an uphill battle against a small, but vocal minority of women pushing young men into the false comfort of adversarial relations (and its gurus) would help a lot. Don’t actively do damage, is all I’m asking from the female side here. Men didn’t invent, say, the ick trend. I can roll my eyes at it, thirty years younger me didn’t have that luxury, and getting young boys to ignore it is more involved than just saying “they’re stupid, self-absorbed and immature”. Shit can do psychological damage, self-image issues, that need healing. The gist is men by and large aren’t built for psychological warfare and lots of women have no idea what kind of strays they’re firing.


  • they are not born as people who will become more sexist if accused of sexism or shown sexism in broader society, inherently; they are damaged into creatures which react like that.

    You conveniently defined away a possibility there, didn’t you. There is preciously little understanding in fifth or sixth wave or whatever is it now feminist circles about how their rhetoric affects young guys, that there even needs to be a conversation about “all men” speaks volumes. Paint with a broad brush and you paint yourself as an adversary of people who, at a young age, approach the topic completely neutrally.

    “Hi I’m new here” – “You are the problem” – “Fine, I’ll go somewhere else”. That kind of thing happens all the time and it’s not something anyone gets conditioned into.