For the "SWAB" techniques discussed in the previous piece (https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/python-swar.html), using 5 bits per cell might be just fine anyway. In fact, because of how CPython implements bigints (with 15- or 30- bit "limbs", so that there's space for carries when doing addition) it lines up better with the memory layout (none of the cell values straddles a machine word boundary).
Regardless of not having any commercial intent, the difficulty with these things is always going to be the potential legal liability and the maintenance of servers, not the actual software. (Oh, and I guess building trust with users.) Cool that you made it, though.
The system for managing chat rooms was buggy, but the entire point of the chat rooms was to keep things out of the way long term. If the invitation comment didn't also get deleted, that was a system bug. As someone who comes by "in the present", you are not supposed to go through a chat room to figure out whether "something useful was shared". The way you answer "did the question get an answer?" is by observing whether there is an answer post underneath the question. If you didn't see one and you're trying to parse the comments, then the answer to that is no.
Those discussions are not about figuring out the answer to the question. Anyone who used them that way, for example to try to provide individualized debugging assistance, was abusing the system. The point was to iron out issues with the question, so that it can be answered. Publicly.
It was extremely by-design that comments got removed. The comment section is, per the template moderator explanation of large-scale cleanups, not for extended discussion.
What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure?
What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts? ... People read those kinds of emails? I always curse myself for finding a way to get them sent to myself, and file them away somewhere until I can figure out how to turn them off.
My blog used to be RSS only, because I thought email subscriptions were a plot of "content creators" and not something readers actually wanted... until one of my readers told me he really recommended adding email as an option. I did, and a surprising number of people subscribed since then.
For a decade or~so I subscribe to newsletters and had skip inbox rules that archived them in a folder about the subject. Eventually I never really looked at the folders but it never bothered me as I don't really see them. Not sure if that means it works or not.
> Eventually I never really looked at the folders but it never bothered me as I don't really see them
Most people don't read most newsletters. Some people read some.
This Saturday I sent an email. It has since been opened by 26% of my subscribers, that's 4,600 people. 780 people clicked on a link.
I tweeted the same email as a link and got pretty good engagement! 20 likes, 2 retweets – that's decent for me these days. It was seen 1400 times. 78 people clicked on a link.
I have roughly the same number of followers as I do email subscribers.
Hahaha it could well be that people are merely hoarding newsletter emails. I hope readers derive _some_ value from the emails, but since I'm not doing it to drive up "engagement metrics" I don't really mind.
There was a time when google toolbar had a search gmail button. I would use it to open gmail using whatever query was inthere. It happened quite often that it found newsletters matching the query. It takes quite a bit of hoarding to accomplish.
Perhaps it is even a better solution than website that vanish eventually. I might one day make a newsletter with links like:
example.com?re=you@yourwebsite.com&article=1234
Then mail you the requested article. With RE: and the same title they will even be threaded.
> What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure?
Medium is where you can post and get a bit of what substack offers while giving you the ability to make your post freely available via the web.
> What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts?
On substack, you get the whole newsletter in the email. you dont need to go to a website. I use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to put them in my rss though.
Sure, but my comment was being given directly to a user who asked for a platform that allowed X, Y and Z. I was providing them with an answer that met their stated criteria. I don’t see how other people’s configuration is of any concern.
...I use email notifications. I follow very few people (fewer than 10), so I'm always happy when an email pops up letting me know they've written something.
I don't pay attention to my RSS reader, and barely use social media. For whatever reason, email works for me.
FWIW, I'm on desktop but I do have JS disabled (more precisely, I use NoScript).
This results in the top and left-side bars staying decorative and unobtrusive, but the concurrent visitor counter thingy is floating well above the bottom-right of the page. But then, as I shrink in the page width, the left-side bar and the concurrent visitor counter swap sides, and also a bunch of the content from the top is added to a new bar at the bottom. Eventually, the horizontal space between the side components becomes irrelevant such that they function as an additional bottom bar. At which point, maybe 40% of the vertical space is used for navigation and other shiny toys. This is really annoying, and the overall experience is inconsistent across widths.
(Also, at all widths, the top-bar has a transparent background, so main page text interferes with top-bar text as it scrolls.)
All of this is done in CSS, so presumably it can be fixed that way too.
If you want to eliminate any friction, I recommend enabling JavaScript.
Otherwise, you can read it in terminal mode with: curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" [URL]
> You don't want to embed the entire email in JSON. Too many parsers past, present, and future tend to want to decode the entire JSON document into memory before doing anything else, and so you'd be forcing entire email documents to be held in memory at scale
Why? Even if your system loads emails into memory a whole email at a time, that doesn't imply that it will load large numbers of emails simultaneously. The kind of processing that can be done by stream-processing large numbers of emails in parallel seems rather limited to me.
> I'd recommend something more like either a JSON header that defines what parts are in the email, followed by a normal MIME document, which is perfectly normal in HTTP with other things that use the format as well, or having the top level continue to be a MIME document and specify that the first part must be a JSON document containing the headers. JSON replacing the headers is generally something that would be a good idea, though.
If we're specifically talking about being able to short-circuit after headers, then why not a JSON header followed by JSON representation of the body?
> Imagine randomized control trials where we measure how watching a specific movie impacts its viewer’s empathy, altruism, or motivation.
The problem is that as soon as you choose those categories, you encode the assumption that "elevating" art should impact the viewer in those specific ways (and, almost certainly, you have in mind a direction in which they should be impacted).
If we say that we want to promote specific pieces of art because we expect them to instill the right values in the general population, well, history has a lot of lessons to teach us about how that could end up.
What is with this snark? Why do we assume that everyone who says anything even slightly challenging to the narrative directly blaming climate change, is aligned with pro-fossil fuel interests?
Instead, why not, for example, show the model of what would have happened to the fire if the current weather in the region had been a couple of degrees cooler? (I mean, it's not as if we can even do a ceteris paribus comparison to the stats on wildfires from pre-industrial times; there is way too much ceteris to paribize.)
I am not capable to assess the direct effect of CC on the probability of this disaster.
I question what is the value or helpfulness of continuing to doubt scientifically proven facts. The summer heatwaves and other natural disasters have increased enough in my lifetime to witness it, but even if that wasn't the case,
I consider dismissing widely accepted scientific results using words like "simple-minded" as pretty much the definition of snark.
As a reflection on my original comment (I depend on fossil fuels myself, like we all do):
Of course, shortening the reasoning enough, attributing any weather event to climate change, or even the climate alone, is impossible. I don't like beligerent simplifications myself. But that's why the quoted sentence in the original comment is about frequency, not just this particular wildfire season. At least that's what I thought.
The mechanisms of the short-term disruption of the Earth's climate due to greenhouse gas emissions and habitat destruction are more and more well-understood, as far as I know, though.
All reports that I read have phrasing that states the problems of climate attribution carefully, often including a paragraph about the importance of wildfires for the natural cycle.
In my opinion, claiming that not dedicating the problems of climate attribution at least 3 paragraphs in every report on a natural disaster that mentions climate change, is short-sighted (to use a different word).
In statistics, you can always play devil's advocate.
If Europe would be covered in ice in 50 years, there would probably still be someone claiming "see, there's no such thing as global warming!"
I explicitly mentioned arson as relevant to balance my point, but my patience ran out at some point. It is important.
And climate change is at least as important.
I don't read attempts at attributing natural disasters to climate change as "direct" or "simple-minded". I think the science has surpassed this point about 50 yrs ago.
Have a nice day. I tried to edit out snark and hate it every time I get into such a discussion at all. But I also am at least irritated by climate-denialism (or feel a tendency towards it).
It's a terrible word, there should be a better one, but I don't think "climate science skeptics" cuts it...
I get into such discussions too often because I see us depending on fossil fuels, for the foreseeable future. As well as on water, housing, food, etc.
Related: Dust Bowl, a good, recent enough example of man-made large changes causing (albeit local) climate change. If I'm not mistaken. Fascinating topic.
> I question what is the value or helpfulness of continuing to doubt scientifically proven facts.
And I question why you believe that anyone here did doubt them.
> I consider dismissing widely accepted scientific results using words like "simple-minded" as pretty much the definition of snark.... In what world is calling climate attribution "simple-minded" not snark?
That is not what happened. The term "simple-minded" was not used to describe "scientific results" of any kind, nor the underlying scientific theory, nor any scientist involved. It was used to describe someone who carelessly started the fire.
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