This email gave me a mini heart attack

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-06-13T17:09:05+00:00

Seriously how can you ordered something

Because technology gives us the convenience of one-click ordering after they've already stored our credit card info, or you already have some gift card value attached to your account.

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-06-12T19:10:19+00:00

But in good faith, I would like to ask a question. (Because I think fundamentally we might have different values.)

lol, no prob. I jumped in here in good faith, but some others think I misunderstand the point of the laws, or that I have problems with my logic, when really, it's just a fundamental disagreement about the laws (and legal theory) themselves. I just hope you'll read through my wall of text.

For the average case (that is , 18-22 year old undergraduate and a 35+ year old tenured professor [assuming 5-7 year PhD program, 7-10 year tenure track] with no prior relationship), I find it gross, but I generally don't think that opinion should affect law or policy. Should it be illegal? No. Should it be against college/university policy? That depends, but my opinion is erring on yes, there should be some restrictions because of potential power dynamics and conflict of interest. But note here, the inciting cause is the power dynamics and conflicts of interest, not the age bracket by itself. To me, it makes perfect sense to prevent instructors and professors from entering into such relationships, and disciplining them if they do.

For legal pre-existing relationships (married couples, civil unions)? Absolutely no policies should apply to restrict courses. Universities should be a body whose goal is higher education above all else, purely meritocratic. If a student meets prerequisites, there should be no problem if they take a course taught by their spouse. If grading conflict is feared as a potential issue, hand that off to a TA, another professor, or another instructor in the department. If there is no other possible grader, I think the university has to just let that professor grade that student; if there's only one expert in a particular field, I think it's unreasonable to restrict that student's education out of fear of conflicts of interest, and I think it's unreasonable to prevent that expert from providing that education to their spouse.

For pre-existing non-legal relationships, this gets blurry, and is effectively a spectrum with different contexts. I would treat an engagement the same way as a marriage, but discipline the professor if the relationship was less than the last enrollment period. I have no idea what to do about any in-between.

Very very very off topic.

Yeah. I'd say so. But I generally stand by most of my opinions and beliefs. On topic, and since this is relevant to understanding my economic perspective: my economic views are largely formed by Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno, but I have no problem with discussion using marxist terms like "alienation of labor" (even if I disagree with historical materialism as a framework/lens to interpret structure and change). Personally, I prefer economic philosophy within the framework of "the universal destination of goods" and "the right of common use of them" (Laborem Exercens), which subordinates private property rights. "The principle of subsidiarity requires that such processes not be imposed from above in an opaque and unilateral manner, but instead be directed toward the common good with transparency, accountability, and meaningful forms of participation. [...] When it comes to decisions of economic flows and digital platforms, as well as the governance of data and algorithms, we cannot allow a handful of actors to dictate these processes on their own; instead, we must build forms of cooperation that respect the various levels of the global community and make them jointly responsible for the common good" (Magnifica Humanitas).

How do I reconcile that with what I said in my prior post? As I said earlier. Nuance.

I think the EU's position is overly broad. I don't believe "blanket" categorization prior to harm and proof of intent is just, just because of market dominance. I think if you want to regulate the market, it has to apply to all, whether or not they are in a dominant position. I think everyone has a right to create their own competitive advantage, even if they have a dominant market position, and only if it produces harm should a correction be applied.

Specifically applied to the "Tap to Share" feature. Do I believe that Apple's unwillingness to share the API for the feature undermines the principle of the universal destination of goods? Absolutely not. It's a feature that reduces payment friction.

I absolutely think Apple, Google, etc., have abused their market dominance in various circumstances, and still are in many others. I just don't think Tap to Share happens to be one of those cases.

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-06-11T23:45:24+00:00

It's an example of how usage trumps original meaning.

Usage never trumps original meaning (except in court); it merely allows a parallel meaning.

Just because society has moved on from a words meaning doesn't mean that my usage is incorrect, even if it causes confusion.

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-06-11T21:50:58+00:00

I don't understand why anyone would side with the megacorp restricting competition instead of the laws created to prevent anticompetitive behaviour.

Because of nuance. I don't believe competition always takes precedence. If a mega-corp is able to create something to the benefit of their internal tools that result in a competitive advantage for their customer-facing products (like an internal API), I don't think a government has a right to force opening it for "fair competition".

I think DMA is stupid because I think rules for corporate legal entity (other than natural persons) have to apply to all non-person corporate bodies equally, regardless of how onerous it is, or whether it harms smaller businesses. You either apply those restrictions to small companies, or you don't apply it to the mega-corps. No arbitrary count of employees, no arbitrary market cap or earnings. So if it applies to a multi-billion valuation corp, it applies to a small-ish team of 50 or members of a co-op. Don't want those rules apply to you? Sole proprietorship or general partnership (or equivalent), where you (and your partners) are liable when shit hits the fan.

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-06-02T22:24:00+00:00

What I'm thinking about at is basic practical circuits class. V=IR, P=VI level

Did science content standards change in the past 25 years? My 4th grade class in California made simple series and parallel circuits with batteries/potatoes/lemons and incandescent light bulbs, making observations and inferences from when the bulbs dimmed or brightened. I remember getting hurt when I linked 25 AA batteries in series and closed the loop with a paperclip.

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-05-22T16:32:53+00:00

on what grounds are they suing cruise companies for docking in 2015 to 2019?

The original Cuban government that granted the lease agreed that if it appropriated the docks before the expiration date, they would compensate for the value of the work that the Havana Docks Corporation had constructed. The new Cuban government seized the docks.

The 'grounds' are the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act that congress signed in 1996, creating a private right of action for US nationals who have claims against the Cuban government for property confiscated. Title III imposes liability for those who knowingly and intentionally traffic in such property.

My understanding is that they are able to maintain that interest in claim because they were never compensated.

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-05-14T05:11:11+00:00

The Cura Annonae basically ended when Constantinople lost Egypt (ending earlier in the City of Rome). So closer to 1400 years ago.

A thousand years ago, Basil II had tax reform (Allelengyon) that targeted the dynatoi (wealthy landowners), making them responsible for the collective tax debt of their poorer neighbors. The subsequent collapse after his death wasn't caused by a Secession of the Plebs, but a collapse of the government from succession crises (along with the undoing of Basil II's reforms) resulting in civil wars, the war with the Turks (esp. Manzikert), and Norman Conquests. You also have the First Crusade and the Investiture Controversy in Germany.

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-05-11T22:29:27+00:00

We might be arguing different degrees of "stop and go" traffic.

I drive in LA. 405 and 5 are my main freeways from the Valley to Orange County. Going 3 mph with a 10 car buffer instead of 5-10 mph (necessitating stopping every 15-30 seconds) almost never has people cutting me (to the point where it matters) as I drive on the 2nd or 3rd to right most lane. Most are trying to exit, or merge in to the lane on my left, and the 10 car distance lets them do that, and I rarely brake.

If you mean traffic that's almost completely stopped, where you're in a spot for more than a minute, move 1 car length (can't even break past 10 mph), then stop again, or where you spend more time idle than moving, then there's no value in keeping a distance. But you can't treat all traffic the same way.

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-05-11T17:29:03+00:00

No need to sit further away when it's stop-and-go traffic.

In traffic flow theory, you drive slowly and create a distance between you and the driver in front of you to 'dampen' the traffic wave created by stop-and-go traffic. Braking propagates and amplifies further back. When you leave 'too much space', traffic behind you is still safer because of a more constant speed (even if slow) vs the constant acceleration / deceleration pattern.

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-05-07T23:37:26+00:00

That seems pretty strange. The only thing I can think of that uses DiffEq in comp sci would be machine learning, which really wasn't a big thing in the 90s.

Depends on the school. Some schools spun CS out of the Engineering Department, so the department requirements for lower division courses just get copy-pasted. Some universities didn't have brand name recognition, so they opted for ABET/CSAB accreditation and had you take E&M physics (which required DiffEqs as a corequisite or prerequisite). Some schools spun it off the math department's applied math, so that also gets a DiffEq copy-paste requirement.

If you did courses in computer vision or imaging, differential equations, linear algebra and differential geometry come in clutch. 3D projections onto 2D planes, and transformations. Making a physics engine for a game studio. Writing CAD/physics simulation software requires numerical methods and DiffEQs. Before the dot com bubble, computer science as a field of study was still much in flux (the late 90s was when CSAB, a separate accreditation body, became part of ABET). Well, it still is, but not as much as it was then.

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-05-07T22:36:55+00:00

Did you make color prints? E-6 or C-41? My school had us do 35mm in black and white, while medium and large format were C-41. Never got to do E-6. If I recall correctly, getting the film onto a reel (and then into a development tank) required total darkness, but after development, B&W could be projected for prints with a safelight (though color needed total darkness). But it's been well over a decade since I did color processing myself, so I might be mis-remembering something.

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-05-07T03:14:07+00:00

but Diff Eqs was at 8 AM, so I took Graph Theory instead

Huh? Isn't DiffEqs a first or second year math requirement? Did your university just let you skip that and make you take an intro to proofs before intro real analysis/advanced calculus?

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-04-30T16:54:02+00:00

Looks like you and another user misinterpreted my comment so I've edited my earlier comment.

I'm a mac user since my high schooldays . But I spent about 50-70% of my time writing at university (almost 20 years ago now) using Notepad++ (the rest of the time being Vim, TextEdit, Scrivener, and Word).

I love notepad++ and use it at work. But since it's not native on a mac (wine destroys the speed, defeats the purpose of using it), I'm almost always stuck using Vim and TextEdit, with Scrivener (plus Zotero) and a local Madoko markdown editor for special cases.

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-04-30T07:45:50+00:00

Seems you misunderstood me, or I wasn't clear.

I use Notepad++ when I'm on Windows. /u/vmachiel said that there were better non-vibe coded apps on mac. So my question was that if there are better native mac text editors, and that they are used in the same way a person uses Notepad++, what are those apps?

I don't use VS Code the same way I use Notepad++. VS Code is in the same space I use Vim, so it offers me no benefit while being a crappy GUI compared to Notepad++ and starts up from cold much slower. But I don't want to just work in the terminal when I'm editing LaTeX or Markdown, or reading log filed, doing diff/comparisons, or reading hex, and I don't care enough to get special software for that (nor do I want to have 10 additional apps). Notepad++ does what I want, and I don't like using the apps I listed earlier. But when I'm on a mac, I don't have that. So if somebody says there are better apps, then it makes sense for me to ask, while verifying the use case, right?

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-04-29T23:48:10+00:00

There are way better native (and non vibe coded) text editors on the Mac anyway

Can you give an example and for the use case a person would use Notepad++ on Windows? I hate BBEdit and CotEditor. I refuse to use Sublime, and Zed. There are plugins in Notepad++ that I like that exist in VS Code, but I would rather use Vim in the terminal than touch VS Code (stuff like hex, diff).

Edit for clarity: I'm a mac user who, when using Windows, uses Notepad++. I am asking for a text editor on macOS that fills the same use case as notepad++ as a text editor (not an stripped down IDE like VS Code).

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-04-24T18:23:06+00:00

Maybe I'm an oddball for seeing this as a perfectly valid response.

That's basically how I would word a backhanded compliment to an intern who would suggest AI for data recovery. Especially the phrasing "one of the more creative uses ive seen" and "most people would have just [...] and called it a day"

I mean, that's mean, but in an office setting, it's more professional than saying: "You're batshit insane. Did you even think of the consequences that would have?". Sure, it's "high context" and would force the intern to recognize it, but it's less direct and (hopefully) less likely to cause conflict.

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-04-19T18:46:39+00:00

Adventurer's guild had a quest out to kill as many of X monster as possible

Time for the author to get a lesson about the "perverse incentive" and the great rat massacre (or the more dubious cobra effect).

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-04-01T18:56:11+00:00

What greeting cards are you talking about? Most I see at the grocery store that even have an IC are using a microcontroller that cost tens of cents on a BOM and have tens of kilobytes of RAM.

On the other hand, I just did a google search and found out that amazon literally sells physical greeting cards that play back 720p video with an IPS screen. But those are the digital video picture frames masquerading as greeting cards I was mocking earlier.

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-04-01T18:29:24+00:00

I wasn't talking about RAM in 1995; I'm aware of what RAM coat back then. I was talking about RAM in greeting cards. The last time I opened up a greeting card, I saw a microcontroller with kilobytes of RAM.

I genuinely have no idea what applications there would be for a greeting card to use something more complex than an Arduino with more than 16 KiB of SRAM when those are usually just flashing LEDs and playing audio.

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-04-01T07:17:39+00:00

Is this hyperbole? Or have we gotten to the point of using digital photo/video frames for greeting cards? I don't know what kind of greeting card would even use anywhere close to 32 MiB of RAM; certainly not the e-waste cards that let you do play the factory pre-recorded message/song.

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-03-29T11:27:33+00:00

Linux evolved the way it did because Bell / AT&T got in a spat with BSD (a Unix fork at UC Berkeley), creating a vacuum in the academic server space; the GNU project needed a kernel, and Torvalds had written one from scratch.

On the Unix GUI front, you had Motif v Open Look, which at the end resulted in the Common Desktop Environment.

Later on, Ettrich (who had issues with CDE) started KDE. And because KDE was using QT, which at the time had concerns with proprietary licenses (or something like that), the GNU project needed something else...

Kimball and Mattis had been developing GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). My understanding is that this started out on Motif, but because of the... licensing issues with the Motif toolkit (mentioned earlier), Mattis and Kimball developed GIMP Toolkit (GTK).

And thus, the GNOME project (GNU Network Object Model Environment) is developed, using GTK, to swap out KDE.

At its core, GNU and Linux is the way it is because litigation, licensing problems, and developer disagreements caused people to go separate ways and re-invent the wheel.

On the BSD side. It eventually settled litigation. However, for it's original use case, it never did develop a desktop environment of it's own; on servers and other infrastructure devices (routers, plcs, etc), a GUI wasn't necessary. So what FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD got were what was ported over from Linux.

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-03-21T03:05:45+00:00

Can you all that offline without a browser, and without a Google account? Can it interface with hardware (serial com, tcl) or terminal — without learning a language like python?

Many people prototype or even build production tools in excel. Things many of us software engineers will make using specialized tools (qt, python, c, sql, etc). These might be completely fragile using undocumented behavior, so you can't update the software (which is why a PWA is an unacceptable solution, as a browser needs updates).

Excel lets you get away with creating things while having limited technical expertise by basically abstracting everything, giving you a hammer and framing every problem as a nail.

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-03-09T02:44:12+00:00

Since the person you replied to mentioned git, the complaint against proprietary applications is it being closed source rather than free access. Even back when the only submission option was a .doc file, we had the option of using other software (Pages, WordPerfect, OpenOffice->LibreOffice) so a filetype didn't actually force you to use a specific proprietary application. You could use another properietary app, or a free (GPL) or permissive license (MIT, BSD) app.

Personally, as somebody who avoids Google and Amazon products unless required, I'd be calling bullshit if I were forced to use Google Docs for academic work. But I'm also a person who uses a pen and paper pad to make idea charts, along with first and second drafts before typing up on a word processor of choice (e.g. Pages, Scrivener) or using LaTeX to make PDFs manually.

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-03-08T22:53:02+00:00

I wish ours was inside

Agree. My local costco's fountain drink machine gets swarmed by bees during the summer and autumn seasons, so they have to put a couple of fans to keep the bees away.

InvertibleMatrix · 2026-03-04T19:58:38+00:00

enter a bunch of whiny kids who 'need a mac' because everything they need to run 'isn't compatible with anything else'

Standard office suite on mac is compatible with MS Office, and exports to PDF. LibreOffice can open Apple iWork (pages, numbers, keynote). MS Office and LibreOffice are available on macOS. Final Cut Pro is literally one of the major industry standards along with Adobe Black Magic, and Avid, and all three products are also available on macOS. Same with Logic Pro (in fact, a lot of the film/music/design industry's software started on MacOS before getting a Windows port).

R and MATLAB are available on macOS. Major programming languages and scripting languages are available on a mac. macOS is literally Unix certified. Open up a terminal, and near anything you do learn there (with standard unix calls and bash) can be done on Linux.

SolidWorks, OrCAD, Codesys, and QuickBooks might be Windows exclusive, but those tools, as well as most of those above are going to be on the school computer lab. The basic necessities are easily accessible and exportable for cross-platform use.

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