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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I’m skeptical that there exists any leftist mainstream place that isn’t actually a right-wing place disguised as leftist.

    I’m also skeptical that all of those loud but irrational voices are genuine. Especially given Russia’s MO for online trolling where they push both sides of any issue to extremes to sow division. Not to say that I believe everyone on the left is rational and reasonable. But why would the tone be so different between “mainstream” and “non-mainstream” left places if the position you’re talking about is as ubiquitous to the left as you claim it is?


  • This is such a weird way to look at the world. “It must be this way because there are rules that say it must be that way and if we don’t follow the rules than the rules say we must fuck the career of anyone not following them.” Completely ignoring that these are rules that were made up by people with the intent of creating a capable and fair system and if the rules are bad, they can and should be changed.

    Plus if you can’t find anyone to argue a position, maybe it’s a sign that that position doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on. It also doesn’t say anything good about Riker who was willing to risk his friend’s future and freedom to argue a position he strongly disagreed with because his career was at stake.




  • Yeah, people obsessed with car stereos are usually of the “I want everyone to know I’m playing music” variety.

    And occasionally of the “I want it to be dangerous to listen to music coming from my sound system” variety.

    Which I do kinda get, since I, too, thrive on wtf faces, though I generally don’t want to be a nuisance or damage my property in the process. Like it’s usually a wtf face from an unexpected combination that turns out to be better than one would expect, like saying I like chocolate sauce on sausages (which works because chocolate doesn’t have to be combined with tons of sugar).





  • We initially planned to give academics a week to respond, but after IT at one university noticed several staff had received emails with identical text, we ended the experiment after 24 hours.

    My thought was this would get flagged and might affect the results as soon as I saw they were using identical text. Their intentions might have been different from most fake emails, but we’ve got systems meant to catch cases like this, so there could be a bias introduced by the order in which the emails arrived, as every subsequent one was more likely to be flagged.

    While some were curious or supportive, the majority were complaints. These were primarily about our use of deception (a well-researched and supported method of studying bias).

    Just because it’s well-researched and supported doesn’t mean anyone’s going to feel any better about being deceived, especially those that did take time and care in responding, maybe even juggling things around in their schedule to fit in a meeting, only to realize it was a lie. A potential result from this study is more non-responses in general to students seeking meetings with academics.

    Not a bad idea for the study overall, but not great execution.

    I also wonder if there’s something sinister behind the slight positive bias towards women instead of it being entirely academic.



  • A compiler making assumptions like that about undefined behaviour sounds just like a bug. Maybe the bug is in the spec rather than the compiler, but I can’t think of any time it would be better to optimize that code out entirely because UB is detected rather than just throwing an error or warning and otherwise ignoring the edge cases where the behaviour might break. It sounds like the worst possible option exactly for the reasons listed in that blog.


  • I think they meant the other way around, that if you wanted to use it in C/C++, you’d have to either use assembly or some specific SSE construct otherwise the compiler wouldn’t bother.

    That probably was the case at one point, but I’d be surprised if it’s still the case. Though maybe that’s part of the reason why the Intel compiler can generate faster code. But I suspect it’s more of a case of better optimization by people who have a better understanding of how it works under the hood, and maybe better utilization of newer instruction set extensions.

    SSE has been around for a long time and is present in most (all?) x86 chips these days and I’d be very surprised if gcc and other popular compilers don’t use it effectively today. Some of the other extensions might be different though.


  • And I had to stop using vscode because of its ridiculous resource usage. I got tired of it filling up my home dir and just went back to vim.

    An intern was using it, but I saw that he had set it up to run locally and connect to the ETX we were using and figured he had found a way to avoid that. Nope, turns out it runs a server on the ETX that also likes to fill up the home dir and he also just uses vim now.




  • Lol I tried this for two breaths and already got a head rush. I’m not even trying to play an actual flute, just sustain pressure from my mouth while I inhale and then switch back to blowing from my lungs.

    I wonder if master flutists get a kind of natural high any time they play at a high level that uses this technique and that’s why they stuck with the flute long enough to master it.

    Or hell, if dopamine for non-ADHD people gives good feelings from normal stuff, is that why anyone sticks with things long enough to master them? Just flute masters might get that extra head rush on top of it.