"But security!" has been the "won't somebody please think of the children" of the technology world for a long time. The end goal, intentional or not, is the same: restricting freedoms (or, on a shorter term, ignore valid criticism).
Unfortunately, at least in the tech world it seems to be a great success. We now have walled gardens and unskippable updates. The next step, "trusted computing" (which is ultimately using a whitelist to forbid the usage of certain software), is already halfway here.
Yes, for a few years we had what was popularly called "Sun tax" in order to disincentivise people from installing solar panels in their homes. It was removed in 2018, though.
Although corruption was probably present, I would say that this kind of politics is precisely what we would expect from pro-business parties (in this case, the People's Party). They do have a long history of eschewing environmental policies as soon as any big company has money to lose because of them.
This is something I really like about Finnish. Being a native Spanish speaker, I am accustomed to knowing how a word is spelled just by hearing it, although there are some cases where there might be doubt (like the homophones b and v, or the always silent h). But the letters are not always pronounced the same. For example, c and g are pronounced differently, depending on what the following vowel is. Even worse, u is silent after a q, or when between a g and an e or i. I mean, I don't have any problem with all of this, since I've been dealing with it for all my life :) . But I can understand how annoying it can be for a foreign learner, even if it's not as infuriating as English.
Now, Finnish? It's way, way more regular. Each letter is pronounced always the same, no matter the context or the letters surrounding it (there aren't even consonant groups like ch). The grammar might be more complex, and the vocabulary might be difficult because it lacks the indo-european roots from all the other languages I know. But phonetics? Yeah, it's one of the simplest languages out there, in this sense. I love Finnish because of that, and I actually listen to a lot of Finnish music (despite not understanding almost anything), just because I love the way it sounds.
Still, I with I had fewer issues with a and ä... I can pronounce both separately, but when I hear someone speaking, I still have trouble when I need to differentiate between these two.
> Being a native Spanish speaker, I am accustomed to knowing how a word is spelled just by hearing it, although there are some cases where there might be doubt (like the homophones b and v, or the always silent h) […]
And then there is the double l, «ll», which is pronounced as «y» in nearly all varieties of Spanish. But, yes, the Spanish spelling is far more regular and straightforward compared to many other languages.
> Now, Finnish? It's way, way more regular.
… at this given point in time and history. The relationship between the spelling and the pronunciation is a notoriously complicated affair due languages being living things that keep on evolving with the spelling and pronunciation inevitably diverging over extended periods of time. There is not guarantee that, for example, either Spannish or Finnish will be pronounced the same way in, say, 200-300 years time as they are spelled today.
Different languages with their respective writing systems have resorted to different ways of dealing with the problem. English and Icelandic, for instance, have retained most of the historical spelling representing the no longer accurate historical pronunciation (with some complications), whilst, for example, Tibetan (being one of the more extreme examples) and Burmese languages have retained the archaic spelling in its entirety – both are spelled today using the pronunciation that existed hundreds of years ago. Other languages have resorted to regular historical revisions of spelling rule to purge obsolete spellings or even purge the disappeared sounds, e.g. Russian.
On the opposite side of the spectrum we have Chinese characters that have remained [mostly] unchanged over a very extended period of time, however, the pronunciation has changed several times, i.e. 越 as /*ɢʷaːd/ in Old Chinese -> as /ɦuɑt̚/ in Middle Chinese -> as /yuè/, /yuht/, /yad6/, /oat/, /uêg8/, /hhyq/ in modern Chinese languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, Teochew and Wu, respectively).
However, the languages evolved much faster historically than they do today. On one hand, the states are now effectively enforcing standard forms of language on populations via universal primary education, and then mass culture and media further reinforce that, often aided by social conventions (where the enforced standard often becomes socially proper "educated speech" that people strive to emulate to present themselves better and/or to not be discriminated against). And at the same time, modern borders significantly reduce migration rates, making it harder for language innovations to spread.
I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, of course. But a phonemic spelling created today is still likely to have a much longer useful lifetime than one created 300 years ago, say.
I stand corrected! I have visited Catalonia quite a few times and never noticed they being homophones. In Argentina, or at least in Buenos Aires, they even teach you in primary school to pronounce the v using your upper teeth and lower lips (it makes it sound closer to f), and the b only with both lips. I'm very surprised to learn this, can't imagine pronouncing vacaciones as bacaciones hahah that's amazing, I wonder where this difference comes from.
This is already deployed. My current employer (at least, my local branch) has some not-mandatory-but-actually-yes-mandatory "training" followed by tests where they do track your eyeball and you are penalised if you look away (they also disallow alt-tabbing, screenshots and many other basic operations). They are losing a lot of people (including me, very soon) and this is one of the main reasons, but I don't think they have any intention to stop, since this shit has probably been decided several levels above the line managers, who are the ones seeing the mess but don't have much decision power about it.
I'd like to think that this insanity will be stopped relatively soon, since tech workers are still in high demand, so people mostly don't put up with this shit. For the vast majority of workers, who don't have that luxury, I don't think they will be able to get rid of this kind of software.
> I fully support anyone doing whatever they like with their body, but we should be able to at least acknowledge that any alcohol in any amount is self destructive.
Yes. There is a related issue, which is that a lot of people just can't accept that something they like is actually detrimental. Since I've never drank, I never experienced this specific kind of cognitive dissonance (if you can even call it that), but I've seen in so many people, it's depressing. There are some things that I love despite knowing that they are bad for your health (like certain unhealhty foods), but I would hate to deceive myself about it (knowing that they are bad allows me to manage the risks, like being aware that I should reduce consumption if I'm indulging too much). But a lot of people have the exact opposite attitude. Which is curious, because the damages are some times very obvious.
Induction is also a very good way to prove these formulas. In fact, these are just perfect textbook exercises for someone learning induction: try to find formulas for the sum of the first k-th powers (for some not so big integer k), then prove the formulas using induction. As someone else mentions, the formulas themselves are related to the Bernoulli numbers and have some surprising properties, like how formulas for odd values of k can be expressed in terms of k·(k+1)/2.
The thing about RSS is that big tech companies are not very fond of it because it gives too much control to the user and it's not so easy to flood you with ads when you use it. So, many of those companies either don't offer RSS, or they have it but they don't advertise it much and maybe they just do the bare minimum.
Unfortunately, since social media has replaced blogs as the go-to place for discussions and user-generated content in general, this means that a lot of the platforms that people use most frequently don't have an RSS feed, or have it but it's not very useful for whatever reason.
However: many, many other webpages out there do offer RSS, and I'm guessing that plenty of people use it, at least on technical circles. I use it mostly for comics and, to a lesser extent, for a few personal blogs and even news. A lot of people use it for podcasts. It has also been used to automatically download new episodes of TV shows in torrent downloaders (I'm guessing that you could mark this particular application as controversial; I won't comment on that. But it is useful at the very least). Also, if used properly, it allows for a lot of user control. You could, for example, pipe a youtube RSS into yt-dlp so that videos from a particular creator are automatically downloaded into a folder in your computer, or use any alert of new content to trigger whatever you want to do (like custom alerts when someone comments in a blog of yours, or whatever). RSS has a lot of potential, and because of that I don't think it's going away soon.
Now, you are also worried about the problem of content discovery. There is a problem here, because whenever we as users want a source of curated content, advertisers are going to do whatever they can in order to squeeze their shit into our pipes. So I personally prefer a "dumb" protocol like RSS where I just say "give me new updates from just THIS site", and leave discovery to more organic, less automated (therefore less gameable by advertisers) means. The closest I can think of to solve your problem is the usage of blog rings/networks (they used to exist, ten years ago... I don't know the state of the art right now), but this still means that there is someone doing the aggregation.
I recently collected a couple of hundred feeds from various sources and about different subjects, and I was (positively) surprised by the amount of blogs with daily/weekly comics.
> the problem of content discovery
I agree here. But 'discovery' is something one does, it requires effort. Definitely when compared with a Twitter feed or FB timeline that only requires mindless scrolling. I also think curation and aggregation by humans can help here, by presenting some interesting and honest feeds of different subjects to start with.
And thanks for mentioning some more potential applications of RSS!
It's weird seeing Pell's equation discussed as something intractable or unsolved. We have deterministic ways of solving them (you can use convergents, which can be calculated using continuous fractions [0]). But then again, Diophantine equations sometimes show surprising patterns, and in this case the problem is not so much about solving the equation, but about finding cases where it doesn't have a solution. Which can be determined reasonably quickly for any given equation (at least, one with smallish coefficients), but apparently it's difficult to pinpoint an exact pattern of cases where this happens.
Right, this is about the negative Pell's equation, x^2 - dy^2 = -1 (rather than +1). The question is for which d this has a solution. (For the usual +1 case, which is what you're talking about, there are solutions for every d, and indeed continued fractions can be used.)
There are no solutions when d has any factor that is 3 mod 4, and the result mentioned in the article (Stevenhagen's conjecture, now proved by Koymans and Pagano) is that there are solutions for about 58% of the rest, specifically
1 - product_{j odd}(1 - 1/2^j) ≈ 0.580577558…. The first couple of pages of the paper (linked from the article) are actually very readable without much background: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.13424.pdf
I'm a very, very firm believer on not paying for "subscription" to software. New content, I can understand (I spend about 40€ monthly on several Patreons, mostly comic artists; and I have a couple news subscriptions as well), although I still hate music/tv subscriptions and I don't want Netflix, Spotify or whatever. But for software, no matter how useful it is, I just refuse to choose between an unbounded price and the possibility of losing it because I don't want to keep paying. For the record, I don't have any problems paying, say, 400€ for Mathematica and things like that (in fact, I haven't pirated anything in a very long time). But I paid once and I can use the software as much as I want without paying again.
For me, it's not about the amount of money, but the peace of mind (no additional bills, no additional shit to renew when I my debit card expires, and most important, I don't need to engage in any bullshit cancellation process). In the rare cases where both a subscription and a single payment is offered, I've done the math and from time to time I actually estimate that I'll spend less money on the subscription (although normally it's the other way around, of course), but even in these cases, I prefer paying upfront. I hate that this is becoming less and less available.
Yea, i also refuse subscriptions for the same reasons, and always buy one-time purchases when possible.
I’ve been spending less money on software the past years because of this, simply because i don’t buy the software at all anymore (example: Tweetbot);
By the way, I really like this subscription model by Due:
"When you purchase Due, you unlock every feature today, including any new features that will be introduced in the next one year [.....] The Upgrade Pass is an optional subscription that unlocks features permanently, even after the subscription lapses. Any feature unlocked remains available to you forever."
I like Jetbrains. And this is one of the nice things about their license. I subscribe and feel that it’s a worthwhile cost as they constantly add new features and improve features/address bugs frequently. But having the option to stop my subscription and still having continued access is a nice bonus.
20x? No. But I paid way more than the annual subscription cost ($40/yr) for a perpetual license of plex pass ($120 for life), so in general, yes.
This was also the case for everybody who had bought a perpetual license for Adobe products and then did not subscribe to them when they switched to a subscription model.
I think a more reasonable multiple would be 5x. The problem you'll run into is that people who complain want the cheap subscription price and perpetual access.
I'm not sure that twenty times the yearly price would look like a reasonable price, but if it's software I actually want, I might agree. I would weigh that price against the functionality of the software, ignoring whether there is a subscription model. As I said, I'm not beyond paying a three-digit sum for software I like (and Mathematica is the first example that came to mind, but not the only one).
Only the provider of that service can provide that, and not even completely.
Third parties promising it would still be at the whim of the original provider. If they shut down the service, what would that third party do to fulfill their promise to you?
What we need is open, documented protocols for internet-connected hardware and escrow for pure internet services, with a guarantee to open source if the original provider shuts down their servers.
The latter will be difficult to enforce. The service provider could, instead of shutting down the service, just raise prices to something above absurd, and then shut down once all customers are gone.
I doubt many would actually use it because complainers on HN aren’t average users, and the number of months you’d have to prepay would likely be quite high to actually make it make sense for the businesses involved.
But still, if you could make a business reselling monthly subs as 1-off purchases, it would be pretty dang cool!
What do you think of the pricing model that I'm using[0] - one-time payment with optional paid subscription for updates and support? I tried one-time only, but it's simply not sustainable or leads to the product not being updated anymore.
Interesting, thanks, I didn't know that they call it "perpetual fallback license". I guess this makes it sound more like a benefit than "paid updates".
As a simple example, one can look at f(x)=1/x in R+. The derivative is f'(x)=-1/x^2 and the second derivative is f''(x)=2/x^3. In general, every function of the form f(x)=1/x^n with odd n will have this behaviour, and if n is even the behaviour is the opposite. And yes, many more examples can be found.
More generally, this is why I'm wary of indirect indicators. They never tell the whole story, and because of that they're used disingenuously in order to muddy the waters. You see this a lot in big scale PR campaings, such as climate change denialism, and pro-sugar and pro-alcohol disinformation (we had a lot of pro-tobacco as well, but it has subsided in the last two decades or so, at least in the West).
For those who find the existence of such analytic functions intuitively "wrong", note that it is essential to this example that though the second derivative is positive, it is positive and decreasing towards 0. If the second derivative is bounded from below by some positive value, then eventually the first derivative will become positive and it will diverge towards positive infinity and thus the function itself will diverge towards positive infinity.
More precisely suppose that f is twice continuously differentiable and f'(x) < 0 and f''(x) ≥ 0 for all x greater than some K (for example K=0 in the examples given) then λ( (f'')^-1((a, ∞)) ∩ (K, ∞) ) < ∞ for all a > 0 where λ is the Lebesque measure.
Yes exactly. There are folks who would ride that positive second derivative all the way down to f(x) = 0 and believe every step of the way that the indirect indicator is telling them that we're going to turn around any second now.
A good example for pundit disproving is f(t) = exp(-t), the solution to the differential equation dx/dt = -x. So the continuous limit of something like "every year, 1% of the ice caps melt." Look, the volume of ice cap lost is decreasing year over year!
Unfortunately, at least in the tech world it seems to be a great success. We now have walled gardens and unskippable updates. The next step, "trusted computing" (which is ultimately using a whitelist to forbid the usage of certain software), is already halfway here.