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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • Approximation is an important tool for compressing information into useable forms. All labels are limited approximations too. Such compression is inevitably lossy, but that is a sacrifice for the sake of practicality. The important question is what level of compression is acceptable for a given context. If I describe the location of a chess piece on the board, I don’t need to specify how far off-center on its square a given piece is, so a 0-7 offset along each of the two axes is enough for game purposes.

    When it comes to gender, I think we all agree that [0, 1] is insufficient, but how do we determine what is sufficient? Do we argue that a 2-bit vector (masc, fem) is enough to describe {neither, fem, masc, both} for rough rounding, or do we need more detailed values along those axes, or perhaps a third axis too (or more)?








  • I mean, the minimum you need is some authentication mechanism, a secure certificate, an authenticated endpoint to send a live data feed to, an endpoint to query a given live data feed from, maybe a website to serve the whole thing for people that don’t have their own tool for reading and playing back a live data feed…

    …and the infrastructure to distribute that data feed from ingest to content delivery. Easy.

    (Note: easy does not mean cheap. Even if a live data feed ingest and delivery was easy to implement (which I doubt it is), you’d skip buffering (to reduce memory demands) and only used a single server (to spare such stupid things as distributed networks, load balancing, redundancy or costs for scaling cloud solutions), you’d still have computational overhead of network operations and of course a massive data throughput.)




  • A lot of data throughput and buffer just for ingesting and distributing the live streams themselves, technical and business administration to keep things running, moderation to ensure compliance with content laws and data protection regulation, and then there’s still all the other fancy features major platforms offer if you want to compete for users.

    Multiple resolution options with server-side rescaling for users with slower connections? Graphics computing power.
    Store past broadcasts? Massive amounts of data storage capacity.
    Social features? Even more moderation.

    And we haven’t even touched on the monetary issue of “How do you pay for all that?” and all its attached complexity. You could be running the nicest platform in the world, but without any funding, it won’t run very long.



  • I say we let them hang with us. They’re a little confused, but they’re adorable enough.

    Also, talesfromtechsupport effectively became talesfromtech because just tech support is to small of a niche to sustain a sub with content. Likewise, if we banned all the not-strictly-programming humour, I don’t know the community will thrive still. It might drive out both content and viewers, and while it’s arguably correct, I don’t think it’s wise.

    I’d rather have it be something vaguely resembling the type of humour programmers tend to have than a little walled-off box with a big sign “NERDS ONLY”



  • I’ve heard of Kotlin in the context of Android apps, but never actually used or learned it. I did one mobile app dev project with Java in Android Studio, but never had any formal classes on it either and just learned as I went (the result was shit, but we got a decent grade for being able to evaluate the difficulties and shortcomings and point out learnings).



  • I attended two different Bachelor’s courses, one with a very technical (2016-2018) and one with a more high level focus (2018-2023). The first did have a class where we learned how to go from logic gates to a full ALU as well as some actual EE classes, but I didn’t go far enough or memorise the list of classes to remember whether Assembly would have become a thing. We learned programming with first Processing, then C and C++.

    The second had C as an elective course, and that was as technical and low-level as it ever got.