Dark Arc

The problem is a hash algorithm is exactly the sort of thing that copyright would be horrible at protecting. The source code is hardly relevant at all, it’s the operations that matter.

A big part of patents is to allow private sector research to occur. RCA failed and maybe patents should just fail too.

like the umbrella wedge/spring to make it open automatically.

That to me is a very specific algorithm. It’s a simple mechanism but putting it together might be a bit tricky.

That’s very similar to SHA, it’s a fairly simple set of mechanisms but the actual composure of those ideas into something that works as well as SHA does takes very specific research experience. It’s not at all an abstract idea, it’s a very concrete and specific set of operations that you invented first.

Imagine if the patent was “an umbrella can open itself with the push of button” no further details. That’s close to the level of detail some software patents are argued at and effectively what the “put a game in your loading screen” patent was awarded on.

You can’t patent the idea that “an umbrella should be able to open [somehow]” so I likewise think it’s ridiculous that someone was able to parent “your game [somehow] runs another simpler game before it runs.”

Patents should be to protect very specific research so that the private sector can do said research and profit from it. Patents should not block out broad concepts. The patent in the video game situation was and should’ve been ruled as bogus. It’s not the type of thing anyone needed to research or think about, you just literally go “what if I added a game to my loading screen” and you’re in violation.

I think software patents should really only apply to extremely tricky algorithmic “discoveries” (which I would consider inventions, as someone that’s written a SHA256 implementation from reference material, nobody is “just coming up with that”).

“Ingenuity patents” like that loading screen game are everything that’s wrong with software patents. It’s not all that crazy of an idea to add a game while waiting to play the main game. There’s no radical research required there, just an idea.

I don’t think vague ideas like “a game in a loading screen” are sufficiently creative to warrant a patent.

Or at least the bar should be much much higher. Like if you’ve invented the SHA algorithm… Fine.

However, if you’ve just invented “a way to purchase something over the network via a phone”… That is not patent worthy.

I just read opinion articles (for those that don’t know, opinion articles are intended to bridge the gap; they’re articles papers publish to share angles the editors disagree with). The problem is honest conservative media is basically gone. The sides have diverged to little more than fact vs fiction. Even the opinion articles can get totally ridiculous at times.

People typically aren’t stuck on minimum wage because the powers that be won’t let them have a decent wage. Most adults are not on minimum wage ( in the US, less than 2% as of 2022; in the UK, low pay accounts for less than 4% as of 2024 ).

There’s something to be said for the rich taking advantage of folks, but … bothering worrying about abstract rich guy metrics like making the GDP go up is not going to help anyone get out of their situation.

Sure, focus on other aspects of politics like making education affordable, strengthening unions, etc things that will help you achieve your goals or help you once you’ve achieved your goals. However, there’s a lot one can directly do to address their situation that’s a lot less abstract than “vote for a representative, to write a bill, to potentially help you, to possibly get passed by your legislature, and possibly get passed by your executive branch (or your equivalent process).”

… and even then that latter concept has little to do with “why someone on minimum wage should pay attention to the GDP.”

So… Regardless of county, I would say minimum wage workers should not worry about the economy. Instead put that energy into finding a career path of some sort.

That’s not me bashing minimum wage workers, it’s just … the best thing a minimum wage worker can do to improve their circumstance.

Worrying about the GDP or stocks or anything else isn’t particularly helpful, especially if you’re living paycheck to paycheck (which at least in the US where I live, most minimum wage workers are).

Even for middle and upper middle class, worrying about GDP growth and how the stock market is doing day to day (unless you’re on the verge of retirement and trying to time cashing out stocks) is not a particularly helpful exercise.

Maybe it has some abstract effect on what social services you get or whether your employer survives another year… but you can probably find better indicators of that (e.g. in the days where computers were reducing paper usage, it should’ve been increasingly obvious that working at the paper mill probably wasn’t going to be a great long term plan).

Staunch Obama and Biden supporter here … I’ve read Obama and Kamala’s most recent books…

You do not need to be a Trumpie to get annoyed with the “everything is emshittified”, “fuck capitalism”, etc posts and comments.

The problem is you’re effectively leaving “can I program and work through the kinds of tasks this job entails” and entering “how do you work through a complex theoretical research topic” land.

White board questions should be relative softballs related to the work you’re actually doing to see how you think… Now that’s often forgon for “welcome to a game of algorithm and data structure trivia!” but this is just a much more extreme version of that.

Also if you don’t actually know the answer, how can you judge the direction? Even if you do know the answer for a problem that complicated, can you say the interviewee isn’t solving the problem in a novel and possibly better way?

I presume he was looking for specific terms like DAWG (directed acyclic word graph) and things like that as well… Which I know because he would teach me the names of things as I slowly rediscovered them in conversation. Personally, I don’t put much stock in grading someone on their knowledge of obscure data structures and algorithms either.

I think the interview I least enjoyed was with an unnamed big tech company.

It was the first interview of the day and the guy came in with “so me and my buddy have been trying to solve this algorithm problem for years. I’d like you to try and solve it for me.”

Like… Dude, that’s not a reasonable interview question! You should not use algorithm questions that you don’t know of any answer to in an interview. You’re effectively asking someone to give you a solution to something way too complicated of a problem without even a few hours to think about the problem or sit down with it on their own.

No, we’re really not…

Didn’t look but I’d bet the details are in their post or comment history.

Re: harder to change, your electoral logic is already self-defeatjng. What do you think you are changing when your electoral logic is, “fall in line vite blue no matter who” including fucking genocide. Who would ever take you seriously? You think they’re going to do anything to “win your vote”? Genocide apologist, they know they already have it. You announced you were giving it to them free of charge, that you will tolerate anything they do and still vote for them, and are actually pressuring others to do the same on their behalf.

The correct time to express such thoughts is during a primary. We didn’t have one because we had an incumbent; it happens.

The better place to have this fight is through congress anyways. They’re the ones that actually approve the aid.

Better yet, go talk to the Israel people and get them to vote for someone that stops using our weapons in such an offensive manor. Israel knows that their position is critical to the US interest and their current leaders are happy to exploit that.

Literally, abstaining makes you part of the “party of not voting” and nobody does anything for them, because they don’t vote.

We are literally in a battle for our ability to vote.

Abstaining from said battle is effectively saying “I don’t care” and letting Trump do what he will. If he chooses to send nukes to Palestine to end the conflict immediately, that’s on everyone that abstained. If he ends aid to Ukraine and those people die, that’s on everyone that abstained.

If he ends voting, you “won some moral battle” but you’ve all but permanently lost the war against genocide as the most powerful military and weapons on the planet are now in the hands of an authoritarian, raciest, fascist, regime that previously imposed a “Muslim ban” and I’m sure would happily do so again.

There is no hypocrisy here, and it’s disingenuous to imply there is.

If you want to protest genocide, then GO DO IT, don’t throw away a vote because that’s not a protest, it’s a pathetic excuse.

You know, you can find something evil in just about any politician’s policy depending on your personal perspective.

So let’s just not vote, because we shouldn’t choose. We should just morally abstain from having choices because making no choice is the only way to make a choice.

Do you realize how absurd that sounds?

If you want to protest genocide, then GO DO IT, don’t throw away a vote because that’s not a protest, it’s a pathetic excuse.

Your vote is not your consent; that’s some nonsense made up to get people to not vote.

In your metaphor, you vote for one your family dies, you vote for another your family and another family dies. You refuse to participate in the system and both families die.

You didn’t consent to that, but you allowed it to happen via your vote of INDIFFERENCE which is what not voting means. It means you don’t care which way things go, because that’s all it can mean to not make a choice.

For local elections, I try and consult local papers covering the candidates.

I kinda think instance blocks at the user level are the right way to handle this. If you don’t want to have your content federate with my rather small server… I mean okay, but I’d mostly just be annoying it required me to fulfill that request manually rather than it being something you did.

What would a negatively full cup look like?

Yeah, this reminds me of a core conclusion in this article I read earlier today: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/hurricane-milton-conspiracies-misinformation/680221/?gift=LfMDGClsXPxuFi6NzzlsSmMf2SO62OLofWrLa23Hg1Y&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

Basically all of this isn’t about convincing people of anything new. It’s just information to reaffirm existing beliefs and prevent people from coming to terms with the fact they’ve gone down a rabbit hole of crazy.