litchralee

TUI users have much less tolerance for "lag"

In a lot of ways, I think software that harkens back to an older era understood the assignment exceptional well: when you're working on a glass TTY attached to a 9600 baud modem via a microwave network to the university computer in the next state over, the latency from the connection itself was pretty bad. So to then have inefficient software that "lags" would be intolerable.

Fast forward to the present day, with broadband and 1 ms latency, it's less of a concern, sure. But good software remains good software, even if the environment has improved. And for some, my work often travels with me aboard the train, where the congested 4G backhaul really makes me appreciate the miserly bandwidth of vim and SSH.

I also find myself reconfiguring systems that only have no editor installed except VI (and sed, lol) due to disk constraints. So while the command set is grossly reduced from vim, they have similar commands and workflows that I can maintain proficiency even in these sparse environments.

"Lowest common denominator" software definitely has its use-cases.

Without knowing which medication, there can only be speculation as to why it requires a specific quantity of water. And even then, the best source of authority would be to ask the doctor for the reason.

Is that something you're looking for? As a practical matter, the effort to maintain multiple release branches and backports -- compared to the norm of just maintaining a single main branch -- is an outsized effort, available to only well-funded FOSS projects, usually by having an industry sponsor that makes it a priority.

I posit that the grand majority of selfhosted FOSS software, by project count, do not have back ported branches. And so production environments will want to set up an offline validation setup to evaluate update, prior to making the switch. Not convenient, sure, but not exactly insurmountable either.

At some point, some amount of responsibility for use of FOSS software must fall upon the users, or else the project is less about creating value by building up the commons for software, and more on the exploitation/abuse of the volunteers.

Downside: breaking changes are fairly common AFAIK.

By my extremely cursory reading, this stopped being a problem after the v2.0.0 release, when they adopted semantic versioning. According, breaking changes would only occur when the major version number is rolled. And version v3.0.0 was just released 5 days ago, whereas v2.0.0 was released in October 2025.

It may be down to taste, but I view 9 months as being acceptable, given the breadth of features offered and the folks willing to put effort into the project.

There are indeed places where large amounts of human activity takes place underground, often being metro systems and their associated retail spaces; Tokyo Station in Japan comes to mind as having an underground mall attached to it.

But the same caveats for underground construction of transportation systems also apply to all other underground structures that humans would like to build. Consider the differences between ground conditions in: the San Francisco Bay Area, Denver, and New York City.

The Bay Area is the outlet for major rivers in northern California, bounded by mountain ranges on virtually all sides. The surface is either a thin covering of soil atop this mountain rock, or is a layer of looser soil or mud, made from the sediments carried in by those rivers. This makes for fantastic agricultural conditions but presents a real risk of liquifaction when there's an earthquake. While an underground structure wouldn't fall over -- because it's within the ground -- it could certainly lose its supports unless it has piles all the way down to the rock. And that's only buildable on the narrow shoreline region where there's sufficient depth before hitting the rock layer.

With Denver, it's basically all rock, so to build within the rock would require blasting it away and building within the hole, or to build normally then bury the structure in fill, so that it's below grade.

With NYC, it's a different story because the ground conditions make it fairly easy to dig tunnels and drive piles, and the bedrock layer beneath Manhattan is strong enough to support the weight of supertall-class skyscrapers. On this point, the New York Fed's Gold Vault is in the basement in Manhattan, precisely because the volume of gold inside would be a serious strain on any foundation and the geology beneath.

All that said, the surface conditions in some extreme climates may warrant building underground, or avoiding the underground outright. Burying a dwelling in New Mexico would make a lot of sense, due to the hot and dry Southwestern climate. But in Alaska, an underground dwelling would cause melting of the permafrost layer below, resulting in a similar situation to liquefaction. I suppose this can be mitigated, but it would be a monumental effort, akin to Camp Century in Greenland. That project was abandoned due to changing ice geology.

I generally shy away from downvoting even things I dislike. I don't want to fall into an echo chamber where all I see are only the things I agree with.

This is not how Lemmy works. If you don't ever up or down vote anything, and if you have your client hide the up/down votes on all comments and posts, you will still see the same content as someone who prodigiously votes. Votes here are, in the truest possible way, optional.

But for people who do utilize up/down votes, they are a signal. Sometimes they're a weak signal, sometimes a bad signal, and yet other times might be a strong signal from the community. How to evaluate the signal is a matter of continued debate.

Now, as an aside, a major difference in the Fediverse compared to commercial social media networks is that the block functionality here is used for more than just dodging abusers. Precisely because there is no algorithm, blocks and mutes are how users curate what they don't want to see. This alone does not create a so-called online echo chamber, the same way that most people don't want to see a steaming pile of poo on their morning walk. People reasonably deserve to have a pleasant experience online. And depending on their life circumstances, this might be a lot better than their IRL situation.

You can, of course, engineer reliable things from unreliable components.

I think the only way this statement can hold true in all circumstances is if we select an arbitrary boundary for what constitutes "reliable". And that's no small matter, because the threshold of reliability in a consumer IoT device would be inappropriate in a commercial or automotive setting, would be deeply wrong for industrial personnel safety, would be manifestly unlawful for a military or aerospace application, and potentially fatal for medical use.

Engineering is all about balancing a set of objectives, be it cost, time to market, efficiency, size, weight, or competitive advantage, and more. Doubling up as a way to improve reliability necessarily implicates size, complexity, and efficiency, but that's tolerable for large data centers where the customer counts servers by the number of floors, not the number of Rack Units (RU). But no one would accept installing two pacemakers because one of them might fail early; that's an intolerable solution to the product's base objective.

As it happens, most USA jurisdictions only require a single brake on a bicycle, and it doesn't even have to be on the more-effective front wheel. But the idea in law is to enforce the absolute minimum of requirements: having no brakes at all is where the line has been drawn, for a mode of transport that rarely gets above 50 kph (~30 MPH). But even then, all commercial bicycles for sale must have two brakes, so the law implicitly allows for some lost redundancy, because even one brake should be enough.

Could a bicycle brake be developed such that it is inherently always able to stop? Likely yes. Would it appreciably improve macro safety objectives such as by reducing collisions with stationary objects? No, not really.

And that's the rub: just because engineers can double up things to get more redundancy, is this any better than the alternative? If an LLM is used as a search engine, is that appreciably better than using "grep", a battle tested, secure, locally-ran application with a lineage harkening back to the 70s?

The drawback with inherent unreliability is that it can only be statistically reduced, but never eliminated. NASA understands this risk better than most, because cost pressures mean they can't be using military-grade hardware for everything. Perhaps then, it can be better said that engineers also have to balance risk in their decisions, and as it stands right now, the risk/uncertainty for LLM output is unquantifiable by any existing approach.

Academics have long been researching ways to make LLMs "safe", so that their outputs are constrainted in concrete ways. But I believe they've long concluded that the current approach of generative transformers simply cannot have safety "bolted on" after the fact. New constructions for machine learning will have to be invented with safety from day zero. The academics continue to work on that, while the commercial AI vendors are barreling ahead with LLMs, in spite of their risks and in the pursuit of a return.

I've not seen anything that would suggest the academics are wrong, nor that industry has managed to produce large safety or reliability improvements, so at this point, I only see a plateau and dead end for the industry. Maybe if the industry would put more into R&D and theoretical work, this would be a lot more graceful as they run up against the buffer stops.

If a Nintendo Wii counts as retro, there's at least one person hosting a website using one: https://infosec.exchange/@alexhaydock/114377262481451962

But that was (incredibly!) able to run a prebuilt version of NetBSD, which had drivers for the official Wii USB LAN adapter. If instead there's a piece of hardware that can boot an OS but doesn't have a network interface device, then SLIP could be useful. Here's a vape hosting a website: https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/

And if still, said retro device has no concept of IP or networking, can it at least speak serial over a 300 baud modem?

Then there is the modern usage of the terms which seem to vary based on who invokes the[m]

I think the thing to keep in mind is: 1) words evolve over time, and 2) the people using those words might be abbreviating what they actually mean, because they don't know that there's another related concept that is named similarly. The best example of the first is how "truck" in the 1910s meant what we now call a "hand truck", and "car" from that era meant traincar. Whereas in the 2020s, "truck" and "car" both refer to automobiles, and we had to create the backronyns of "hand truck" and "rail car" to avoid confusion.

I don't think your theoretical understanding of Marxism is wrong -- though I've not read enough to confirm -- but I would hazard against using other people's wrong definitions and usage guide your own understanding. If you understand the ideology, then it's a matter of rendering it using the right words; that is, it becomes a communications problem.

For example, Republican politicians will use the term socialism to mean communism and vice versa

I would especially not suggest relying on right-wingers to properly use -- let alone understand -- left-wing ideology, since their objective is to denigrate leftists through FUD and infantile repetition. Basically, the maxim of "if enough people are 'talking' about something, it must be controversial" or "I'm just asking questions bro", neither of which are anywhere approaching a good-faith discussion on the merits.

Some politicians like Mamdani or Bernie will describe socialism to mean a more humane type of capitalism that has other priorities other than pure profit seeking

How the two use the word "socialism" is almost always understood as a shorthand for what Europeans would call "social democracy". So it's definitely on the list of valid implementations of socialism, but is specifically about reforming an openly capitalist system into something more egalitarian. That said, "social democracy" still leaves out a lot of details which need clarification: do Mamdani or Bernie support (re)building the social safety net? Does the state need to also own railroads the same way that they own highways? For the former, there's the standalone word "welfare state", but I'm not aware of a compound phrase that means "social democratic welfare state", if that even describes Bernie or Mamdani at all. I'd certainly love a word that means "social democratic welfare railway state" but nothing has caught on.

I think that should underscore my point: even after resolving exactly which word they might be abbreviating, there aren't enough short words to succinctly describe any particular ideology. Rather, the words are useful to get a rough idea of a person's views, but ultimately, every one and every candidate is going to have a slightly different take on certain questions.

Some people use communism to describe an authoritarian system that has no regard for human agency

I personally refer to this definition as "Stalinist communism", because it does accurately describe how the USSR was operating under Stalin. Essentially, it wrapped a cult-of-personality in the trappings of communist thought, though people like Trotsky pointed out how communism could be done much differently. Obviously, history is quite clear that the Stalinist approach was not adopted as-is by any other country, nor retained in the USSR after Stalin's death. Indeed, I've never come across anyone who genuinely refers to themselves as a Stalinist or who seriously proposes to the adoption of Stalin-style, top-down authoritarian communism. Maybe some right-wing Russians do, but idk. My point is that, like the Republican examples above, Stalin and authoritarian communism is usually only brought up as a "thought terminating answer" rather than to seriously debate the merits of communism, either theoretically or practically.

multiple people will have multiple definitions that most often don't align with how Marxists describe communism and socialism

Yes, because they're usually talking past each other about different things. Being able to detect which definition someone means to use, that's a skill that you can develop for yourself, to have a clearer picture than they do.

I'm primarily writing this comment because I abhor the idea that an idea -- it could be anything, from rocket science to theorrtical mathematics -- is perceived as being an arena where everyone is just making up stuff, and if that should lead to people becoming turned off the idea of studying it for themselves, that's a net-negative. No doubt, some countries, politicians, and agencies want to denigrate or prop up their own definitions, but that just makes it easier to identify fake socialists and "communists in name only".

The merits and failures of socialism and communism deserve to be comprehensively hashed out in the public mind, and it only serves the status quo that this not happen. And the longer the conversation is delayed, the more that the indisputable ails of the status quo will take more victims.

There is definitely a difference, and they are not interchangeable. I'll let other people chime in with a rigorous definition for communism, but at a minimum, it must have abolished the state and social classes entirely. So one could say that communism is at the very end of the road, and the various flavors of socialism are the routes to get there.

Various flavors of socialism? Yes, I've written an earlier comment about that, and another one here. In brief, there are many ways to move beyond capitalism.

but electricity will always run the path of least resistance, which will invariably be the metal gazebo if they're close enough.

Not according to the USA National Weather Service:

The presence of metal makes absolutely no difference on where lightning strikes. Natural objects that are tall and isolated, but are made of little to no metal, like trees and mountains get struck by lightning many times a year.

Despite the USA being somewhat of a political pariah at the moment, it has long been the case that American universities are desirable from an educational perspective and for "clout". Not to say that TU Delft or anywhere else doesn't have name recognition, but being a fully English instruction on a continent with few neighbors, it is a very "exotic" destination to go study at.

With Hollywood and media hyping up the American collegiate experience (eg red Solo cups, fraternity/sorority life, binge drinking, road tripping for spring break, etc), even some non-research public college systems like the California State University (CSU) system will receive international students, while the research-focused University of California (UC) systems remains in the top tier of public American universities, making it extra exclusive, akin to the East Coast's Ivy League schools.

From the university's perspective, they have a commodity they can market to an international audience, so why not charge more? As for why these colleges are behaving like capitalists -- especially the public universities -- it is because of chronic state underfunding: the USA federal government does not pitch in very much to the universities, except as research grants. And when push comes to shove, state legislators will cut university funding, meaning more has to be paid for by students. Some states even slash school funding and then try to replace it with state lottery proceeds, which means schools are only well-funded when there's a gambling epidemic...

Now in your case, it should be noted that the University of Southern California (USC) is a private university, that regularly jostles with UCLA (a UC campus) for the highest ranking as a college in southern California. Accordingly, they are priced similarly for international students but not for domestic students: the UC system first-and-foremost must serve its constituent citizens, so to keep tuition low for in-state students, they will raise the price of out-of-state or international students. USC and other private colleges would follow suit, because free extra money.

We haven't privatized the public universities in the USA, but they're almost operating as though they already have been, charging as much as the market can bear.