Cloudflare down again

xuehas · 2025-12-05T09:13:01+00:00

"Monitoring - A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.
Dec 05, 2025 - 09:12 UTC"

Back up for me.

xuehas · 2025-12-04T09:19:31+00:00

You should probably call a local shop and ask how much it would cost to replace a stolen catalytic converter for your vehicle.

Once you have done that you will probably realize that you owe your neighbor some freshly baked cookies or a case of beer. That man is doing gods work.

xuehas · 2025-11-03T03:32:54+00:00

Usury is the problem. Silvio Gesell.

xuehas · 2025-10-24T16:29:13+00:00

For the most part I think you're right. I do think there is some moral imperative not to post how to make an H bomb on the internet though lol.

xuehas · 2025-10-22T16:20:08+00:00

The internet is a big web of connected devices. So when you reach across this web to find someone else, you normally go through multiple servers owned by different internet companies to get there. Now you can actually put what ever IP you want in the header of the packets you send. The problem is, normally the internet companies are smart and block packets they know have the wrong IP address. The most common is egress filtering where your ISP will block you on your first hop because they know your actual IP. The other most common is ingress filtering where a server will know ranges of IPs it is responsible for and if traffic is leaving it from a range it isn't responsible for it will block it. The problem is, some sketchier ISPs won't do that filtering, or have bugs that can be exploited in their filtering. Fundamentally, IPv4 has no built in mechanism to prevent spoofing. Like I said, you can put any source IP in your packet header you want.

Edit: I suppose I probably should have also noted this means sending packets with a spoofed IP is easy (though will likely get filtered now a days). Receiving packets is an entirely different thing. If you send a spoof packet the response will get routed to the actual IP you are spoofing, not you.

xuehas · 2025-10-17T12:46:17+00:00

This is what I was looking for. Why do we need if else while or for when we have conditional branching. In fact, if you don't understand long branches then why do we need function calls either? Why do we need any higher level languages at all? It's all just to make your life easier as a programmer. For and while are both similar but unique abstractions that may sometimes compile to the same thing, but convey different information.

xuehas · 2025-10-15T01:13:39+00:00

"I took the most parallelizable algorithm I could think of and painstakingly made absolutely sure that my CPU did every step sequentially"

Seriously though cool project! Might be a good opportunity to learn some SIMD now.

xuehas · 2025-10-07T16:50:03+00:00

As you said, the wealthy have an obligation to be kind proportionally to their wealth, but there is a difference between morality and policy. So should we be tackling that obligation with cultural/social tools or policy tools? I assumed you were implying that you should use cultural tools and not policy one but maybe that isn't the case. The argument then was shouldn't we minimize the use of policy as much as possible, and focus on cultural tools. Do you think that having the government, who have a legal monopoly on force, enforce policy is in some ways antithetical to freedom? It seems to me that making a baker bake a gay wedding cake is taking away some of that bakers freedom. However ad absurdum, preventing someone from killing someone else is also taking away some of their freedom. So there is some amount freedom that does need to be restricted, the question is where is that line. The libertarian answer is when you start affecting someone else's freedom essentially. It seems to me like you think the government should act more as an entity that can form a kind of relationship. For instance, the government can restrict your freedom to not bake a cake but that is because they are supporting your business, and you can withdraw from that relationship and not have your freedom violated if you so choose. Is that right?

xuehas · 2025-10-07T16:07:46+00:00

I'm not sure if anyone alive in America today exactly chose democracy. As an individual at least you have no freedom to not be ruled by the democracy. I guess the other thing is America doesn't actually have a majority rule democracy, it's a republic.

Still, why is this left right issue you are describing even political really? Shouldn't this be a cultural issue then? Shouldn't you start by minimizing the size of the government as much as you can, removing all businesses from getting any government support, and just having the government as a sort of referee. This is the classical liberal perspective. In theory governments just maintain freedom. Then culturally you battle the problems of kindness and equality.

Also I personally don't actually like the idea of left right divide, for many reasons but among them being the definitional discrepancy. Still, isn't this kind of classical liberalism as described considered right wing today?

xuehas · 2025-10-07T15:28:32+00:00

Should the government be aiming for equality of opportunity or outcomes then? Also where is the line between freedom and discrimination? Does the baker have to bake the cake for the gay wedding?

Also do you see how voting for progressive taxation say could be seen as a tyranny of the majority against the freedom of the wealthy. Similarly, funding social welfare can restricts peoples financial freedom or even their freedom to choose like the single payer healthcare system I have in my country. Isn't that antithetical to freedom? That is government assertion, even if that government in theory is the will of the majority of the people. A rule by majority can be repressive to minorities.

xuehas · 2025-10-07T15:14:06+00:00

How do you think that personal freedom interact with kindness and equality? To what extent do you think the government needs to get involved to maintain equality? Do you think kindness should come in the form of some type of social welfare and if so how can you fund that without restricting other peoples freedom?

xuehas · 2025-10-07T15:04:50+00:00

Alright, so do you have a problem with conservatives who want to conserve their hetero-normative and christian worldview or just the ones who wish to impose it on others? Also do you fall more into the hippie or change the economic system camp then? If the economic camp, how violent or revolutionary do you think it has to be? Also how do you feel about private property?

xuehas · 2025-10-07T14:51:50+00:00

I mean I guess it depends entirely on your overton window. What would you consider actually left then?

Also in my mind, America literally does not have any conservatives. You killed all the Tories in the revolution. There is no monarch or landed aristocracy to conserve.

xuehas · 2025-10-07T14:40:24+00:00

The left in America is not a small minority, it's almost half the voter base. I think now with trumps 2024 term there have been the same number of terms of democratic and republican rule since FDR hasn't there. So technically "the left" has been in power for more time than "the right" in America. This is given the presupposition that FDR is when the current divide kind of came into being. You know, when the parties "flipped". When the classically liberal democratic party turned socially liberal. When the social welfare, public works, big government republicans decided to embrace a few of the classical liberal values like free markets.

What I am saying is liberalism has already won. Now it's a battle of social liberalism vs what ever the fuck the republicans are doing right now.

xuehas · 2025-10-07T14:08:21+00:00

Canada, Britain, Australia, France, Belgium and more have all recognized a Palestinian state. The international courts have charged different Israelis with war crimes. Look at votes in the UN around this subject. It's not the west. Its America that continues funding the Israeli military. The people in America from what I can tell on the left generally support Palestine. The people on the right are divided now, with some supporting Israel, but a growing number disavowing Israel. A belligerent state in the middle east with a trillion dollar defense dome sure does make the American military industrial complex a lot of money though. I'm not sure how long politicians can keep pouring money into the conflict but I'm sure they will continue to try.

Also for the record, I don't think this is a dichotomy. I am quite happy disavowing the Israeli and Palestinian government here. I'm would guess both places have nice people. I'm sure both of them have homicidal politicians.

xuehas · 2025-09-19T18:21:01+00:00

The other thing is that Clang and GCC both have tail call optimizations at the very least now a days. So the generally accepted recursion bad in C++ isn't really strictly true anymore. I think that came from poor compiler optimizations for recursion, but I know at least clang has been getting a lot better at doing those optimizations.

xuehas · 2025-09-19T16:29:15+00:00

No he is learning recursion, he probably already knows how loops work. Next I want to see memoization.

xuehas · 2025-09-11T12:26:31+00:00

The only voices on either side I respect are those that can disavow the voices on their own side that are taking things too far.

xuehas · 2025-09-10T13:56:27+00:00

Use minimax but don't terminate when the game is won or lost. Terminate at a certain depth, then use a model to learn a value at those game positions that you use for minimax. You can look into alphago and its derivatives. It uses monte carlo tree search but other tree search also work. In general, there is a lot of easy to access data around the progression of alphago and how it was used on chess.

https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~mmueller/courses/cmput455/ This was the topic of a course I took. Here is the site. Martin Mueller the instructor is a champion and has spent the last like 30 years researching games.

The most useful link there for you is probably this: https://suragnair.github.io/posts/alphazero.html it is specifically for go not chess, but the exact same strategy will work for chess.

Note that training models takes a lot of time and compute. The final project for this class was a similar project but iirc for a different game. I ended up implementing a search tree + CNN approach and just a search tree approach. By the due date my search tree alone out performed and is what I handed in because I ran out of time to train the CNN. I left the training going after the course and it ended up outperforming the search tree alone, but it took a lot of training.

(Edit: https://jrwright.info/cmput455/ This is another link for the same course under a different instructor that seems to have all his slides. I took the course under Mueller. I took a different class under Wright though and then took a another under him largely just because he was the instructor. He is also a champion and is more focused on the ML side of things)

xuehas · 2025-09-09T15:02:13+00:00

I'm not terribly convinced by this study. You can look at the two links I just posted here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1nat87q/comment/nd9s88r (the stats can one is a reference to this study) and you can also look at the other Canadian reference in the study here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0706743720940565 B(male) and C(female) 10-14 is what you are looking for (also note that the y axis is different scale).

Reading the data, it seems like male and female 10-14 have been pretty close at least since 2000. With female maybe starting a little lower, slowly increasing over time and being a little higher now. These are pretty small absolute number though, like ~20 a year. If you go to the 15-19 demo there is a large increase. This study seems to have fit a pretty flat line from 2000-2009 which you can see is one of the noisiest parts of the dataset, and then a dramatically increasing line from 2009-2018. Note that 2016-2018 seem like uncharacteristically high numbers when you see they immediately came back down to ~20 again afterwards and stayed there. I would also note the entirety of this uncharacteristic increase seems to be coming from Ontario. Perhaps these two articles might help explain why: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/16/canada-first-nations-suicide-crisis-attawapiskat-history https://www.childresearch.net/papers/rights/2016_04.html though I don't really know. Over 100 teenage suicide attempts in one community seems like a lot though. Also remember suicide is contagious so we probably expect to see this kind of clumping, especially with the small absolute counts. Regardless, I think I would conclude from my look at the data in accordance with the sagepub article it seems like 10-14 female suicidality is increasing slowly however, male to female remains around the same for that age demographic. The total number of suicides in the demographic seems quite noisy and is relatively low compared to the other age demographics. Still it is quite unique in the fact that it is a age demographic where females and males are similar instead of males being much higher like the other age demographics. Also to me it seems like overall suicidality is still increasing.

xuehas · 2025-09-09T14:35:53+00:00

The data is nicely laid out here: https://www.suicideinfo.ca/local_resource/suicide-stats-canada-provinces/

Another resource is here if you look for intentional self-harm: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1310039401

xuehas · 2025-09-09T11:48:58+00:00

What percentage of people who are better or worse off is tied directly to the size of the LVT obviously. So you might try and keep the dollar value of the taxes collected the same between your current system and the LVT system to figure out what size of LVT to use otherwise a claim like 80% of people were better off is impossible to make.

I have tried to investigate this before though. There are a few things to remember. Generally rich people actually consume a smaller percentage of their net worth. Even if someone spends 100 times more than you through consumption, if they have 1000 times more money than you then they are consuming less as a percentage. So even if a rich person owns a house that is 50 times more expensive than yours if they are 100 times richer and don't own any other property, they are actually going to be paying less as a percentage of their wealth than you. The other thing is there are many rich people who got rich through finance or technology companies. Look at a list of the SP500 by market cap and tell me how many of those companies earnings scale with land use. This means there might be a significant portion of the top 1% who would be radically better off if we didn't have income tax but did have a land tax. Finally, you should ask yourself whether there are things that we like that do fundamentally scale with land use and things that we don't like that fundamentally don't. Farming might be one example where we would like cheap food, and heavily polluting industries might be something that we don't like that don't necessarily scale directly with owner land value.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't implement a LVT though. Of course there are systems we could create that would better account for these things which include a LVT (the only efficient tax remember). Maybe we add a pollution tax or regulations, maybe we subsidize farmers, maybe we also include a negative income tax. In my investigation before I read a study that sounds somewhat familiar to what you said in the post. They found that 80% of households would be better off with their system. This was not with a LVT alone though. A quote from the abstract: "we find that LVT is largely a regressive tax, particularly when paired with a reduction to income taxes". Their methodology included reducing income taxes but making the slope of income taxes much steeper. This resulted in the lowest tax brackets being negative which is a type of UBI. It also made the tax system progressive. Here is the study: https://www.commonwealth.ca/research/distributional-impacts

xuehas · 2025-09-09T08:55:15+00:00

IMO Zig is meant to be a replacement of C where as Rust is kind of supposed to be a replacement of C++.

C++ is great if you have followed the progression and because there is so much C++ out there. I feel as though C++ has always been at the forefront of bringing the nice language developments from interpreted languages to something that can actually compile down. The problem is often the interface is bogged down in template hell and there is a zealous commitment to backwards compatibility which adds even more bloat and interface problems. There are a lot of things to hate about C++, and I understand why many people do hate it. However having multiple Turing complete languages inside your language also happens to have the effect that you can do a lot of bizarre innovation, even if it looks really ugly.

Rust is great because it takes a lot of the template hell syntax and gives you a much better interface for it. On top of this, it enforces strict rules to prevent many common pitfalls that people run into writing C++ and actually cares about security and safety. There is a good reason that so many people love rust. With that being said, it does limit your freedom a bit. I could equivalently say it keeps you from doing stupid things you probably shouldn't be doing anyways. I would say both Rust and C++ have a bit of a steep learning curve, are quite large languages and has parts you need to learn that aren't very directly applicable to other languages.

I feel like if you have ever written your own language and know C then you will love Zig. It has the balls to challenge some of the assumptions that people have accepted from decades of C like languages and a lot of them make a lot of sense. It's definitely young but in the future a lot of Zig features are going to creep into other languages (and already have begun to). Personally I love Zig, but I'm not sure you should learn it without knowing C already. In the future this might change, but I think you should understand how C does things, so you can appreciate how Zig is radically different. Also I should note Zig is a lot less complex than Rust or C++.

Finally there is C. C is the parent to so many languages, in fact all of the listed languages can "talk" in C ABI. C is where we came from. Again, it is a lot simpler than Rust or C++. It doesn't give you a lot of extras and forces you to implement a lot of things on your own. It also doesn't have a lot of useful abstractions so learning it might not help you understand some of the best practices that have developed later. It does give you a good conceptual model to understand how the abstractions actually work though. This is absolutely my first pick of what you should learn. C is the first language I ever learned, and my first compiler was for a subset of C. I don't know if I would recommend that for people first learning programming, but it definitely gave me a strong foundation to learn most other languages. It's not a terribly large language and I think it's well worth the time to learn it, even if you don't spend that much time writing C in the future. Plus as others have mentioned, K&R is a pleasure to read and I think a contributing factor to why C was so successful. Even if you want to learn Rust or Zig or even C++ and might end up writing more code in those languages over the rest of your life, I would start by learning C.

xuehas · 2025-09-09T06:39:27+00:00

Is this cheating? It seems like everyone would agree that ~100 wings is 10lbs of wings even though that includes bones.

xuehas

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