bumping the author's chain and bluntly suggesting that others (like myself) without much/any stake in openBSD's C compilers should stfu with the name flaming now, because the fact that it's still continuing in replies at this point is more a matter of narcissism and disrespect for the submission than anything else.
Geez guys, all I'm saying is the name is unfortunate in the same way coq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq is bound to be awkward when pronounced in other parts of the world.
I'm not implying there is anything nefarious about it.
I didn't downvote you. There are only so many phonologically near-optimal patterns to recycle into things that sound kinda-sorta like words, so you're bound to run into these things. You just pick your poison and hope that you don't end up being shipwrecked by a gale-force meme like "fedora" as a pejorative with time.
fwiw, the concern you're thinking of tends to be sidestepped either by a pseudo-initialism or a vowel shift in actual practice. In this case, the first options / paths of least resistance in an arabic-speaking community would seemingly be:
- to raise the first vowel to more of an [ɪə]¹ or
- to pronounce the /kəf/ - /kɑf/ then "IR" as single letters.
¹ which afaik would turn it into a long vowel that might act like a geminate? dunno
I mean, I've got my feelings about formal methods, so the implications about people going to technical conferences to talk about Coq are spot on.
As a relatively unenlighted person on the topic of nasty slurs, I apprechiate the tipoff that using the name of a cultured milk drink sounds uncultured. Although, I tend to name things with overworked puns, so there's that.
> I'm from the US, Kefir is healthy fermented yogurt-like drink that is in every grocery store pronounced "kee-fur".
Pretty unfortunate. Take a look here at a pronunciation in English more closely resembling the original Caucasian / Slavic: https://www.lexico.com/definition/kefir (/kəˈfɪə/ in IPA). There's audio in the link, which should hopefully clear up confusion.
This is also the common way I've heard it pronounced in the UK, where the product appears on most major grocery store shelves.
"Kafir" is an Arabic word meaning unbeliever or infidel, and is used in the Islamic word as a pejorative for non-Muslims. It's also been adopted elsewhere, such as a nasty slur in South Africa for blacks.
It sounds similar to kaffir which is a derogatory term used in the Middle East for people who don’t practice a certain religion. It is also used in South Africa in a manner similar to the n-word in America.
Here in the US, I can go to many grocery stores, and have my choice of kefir.
As an actual Hindu who has lived in a Muslim majority Middle Eastern country, I'm not the tiniest bit offended, because a fermented yogurt drink happens to have a somewhat similar name as an insult based on religious bigotry..
I choose not to answer you because you're either a troll or ignorant. Hopefully it's just the latter, in which case feel free to use google to educate yourself.
Not many people in the US or the EU speak Arabic. If I'm ignorant of it and you're a speaker of Arabic, then why don't you just enlighten me? Since when is removing one's ignorance not the point of asking questions?
I'm quite obviously asking about Arabic as it is being used in the Middle East. I've even spelled it out, and so did the comment I was responding to. The irrelevant South African fringe usage was also already mentioned in the comment I was responding to (hence your repetition of it bringing zero new information) but of no interest to me (unless you believe that Arabic is a widespread language in South Africa), hence me not referring to it.
No, the fringe usage half a globe away still doesn't make it relevant if I'm asking how some things are called in a Middle-Eastern language. Likewise, the Czech word "Polák" for a citizen of Poland with no alternative to it in that language does not become suddenly offensive or inappropriate just because the cognate "Polack" happens to be offensive in the US. And as one can clearly see, I'm not even being rude to people with inconsequential segues.
not for the joke it isn't; i am not, in fact, thinking of the racial slur; we all have google (but not all of us will idly assume to know the etymology of a project's name based on this); semicolons are awful punctuation
Hey now, wait a minute. We can argue all day about kefir, kafir, and kaffir, but don't you impinge on the dignity of the semicolon just because the previous poster used one incorrectly.
I don’t think it’s an incorrect use of the semicolon. Semicolons are out of fashion these days, but using a semicolon to join two related clauses is perfectly fine, as far as semicolon usage goes.
But the verb in the second clause is not the elided verb in the first clause, so it is not linking in that fashion. The two clauses are independent of each other.
It's debatable, but they could be linked by [You're thinking of] wrong root word.
I agree that if you think "Wrong root word. You're thinking of Kafir." is acceptable, so too would be the semicolon usage, which is why I said "arguably incorrect" rather than just "incorrect"
"[That is the] wrong root word; You're thinking of Kafir".
Since in the first clause, it seems like the intention is to point to the previous comment that is the matter at hand, which was actually written not just thought about. However, other readings might be possible.
I don't see the wrong usage there, assuming that "Wrong root word. You're thinking of kaffir." would have been correct. Which it seems to be the case to me since both "Wrong root word." and "You're thinking of kaffir." seem to be correct sentences and juxtaposition is OK as well.
Who said anything about "racial slur"s? In Urdu, one of the languages I speak, "kaffir" means "non-believer". Your suggestions 'mushrik' and 'neocon' seemed to fit pretty perfectly with that interpretation.
----
Aside: semicolons are pretty great once one learns to wield them. Try it; you'll like it. Just think of it as a shorter pause than a period, but longer than a comma.
the typical romanization of arabic كافر is "kafir". the typical spelling of the slur associated with apartheid-era south africa is "kaffir".
> one of the languages I speak
why would i care which languages you speak
you are not me
i am not you
neither of us are everyone else
>try it
perhaps instead of me doing any of that, you could simply stop arrogating reflexively in your internet comments and presuming to know the inner contents of others' minds (you do not)
>semicolons
the purpose of your original reply was to condescend in typical nerdsplaining fashion. the reason my reply to you, in turn, was written like it was, including the side mention of semicolons, was to escalate abruptly and unambiguously, such that there was no ambiguity as to what i thought of the situation. i was expressing contempt. it's merely a circumstantial convenience that semicolons do happen to be dogshit punctuation used as epistemic crutch notation in prose
A screenshot of a tweet is already a low fidelity capture (cf. a web archive). Why would I want to alter it further?
If I needed a tweet to look better than it actually does irl, I would screenshot something from Mastodon or Pleroma instead.
If I need to screenshot a tweet at a high resolution, I'm going to do this in any Gecko-based browser with <my own enhanced system font rendering preferences>.
If the screenshot needs to be larger-than-life, I'm going to use any of the puppeteer-based tools for this.
If I'm one of those godawful aggregators that needs square images with colorful patterned wallpapers behind the tweets, I have to use my library of cursed wallpapers and whatever shitware macro has already been written for the job.
Not knowing much about archiving, this also struck me as a fairly superficial way to build an "archive" - seems more like an opinionated "best of" than an actually useful archive for future humans. I would like to see an actual OPAC!
Yeah, I appreciate HN not having a notification system for replies unlike Reddit, but even so there's some pressure to reply quickly more than deeply. I'd be very interested in seeing a discussion forum that's intentionally much slower, e.g., having replies only show up at the next hour or half-hour.
One thing you'd want to be careful about is letting people say "This is obviously wrong" and having something to that effect show up quickly, so you don't waste a bunch of people's time replying with the same thing.
Certain groups have been serious the replication crisis for 10-15y, but academic culture at large is simply not cut out to discuss fraud in a 'street epistemology' sort of way, such as the way security researchers might discuss cybercrime.
There's a wild amount of pushback to any amount of meta-criticism. But once you get past that point, many roadblocks remain.
In particular, there's extreme bias for meta-statistical methodologies that infer QRPs over other methods of investigation. Often, these methods aren't strictly necessary in context, and afford the opportunity to turn the metasci discourse into endless bikeshedding about the meta-framework rather than the object of dispute.
Many interested parties will participate/perform in this discourse, but few will sit down and really look at things as simple as the logical structure of the paper's claims, or even simpler problems with its content.
In the case of social psych, for instance, many problems lie with (a) stimuli and (b) unexamined assumptions on the part of the researchers that a certain manipulation holds, so these are important to assess. But extending critique to these things is seen as "reviewer 2" behavior — uncollegial, unfair, sniping, waaah etc.
Since "researcher x produces bad research, but evidence of fraud is only circumstantial" isn't sufficient grounds for doing much of anything, little comes of these efforts. When an investigation does nail a fraudster to the wall, well, so? The papers remain, the poisoned citation tree remains, the culture remains.
More than anything, the pushback in the form of tone-policing is what gets me. "Methodological terrorism" this, "reviewer 2" that. It shows how far from consequences the gatekeepers are. If you're a young person, whole branches of the academy have been pre-bankrupted for you. There's no hope there, short of a research path that manages to avoid citing any prior literature. But don't get tetchy with the grantlords!
Meanwhile, all around the US, real effects of this dogshit excuse for scientific inquiry can be seen every single day. Police departments are adopting new policies around known-bad implicit bias papers. These won't work. We know they won't work. We've known this for years.
What would make it stop? Every time cops kill an unarmed person, academics who still haven't retracted their implicit bias papers get fined?
There's the rub. You can't do much to force the point. Effective, timely measures would be fairly brutal ones, and academics aren't ready to admit this to themselves. In some ways, COVID-19 may end up being one of those measures, though it will disproportionately affect younger researchers.
> All but about 5 to 7 percent of the world’s museums are currently shuttered because of the coronavirus pandemic, said Peter Keller, the general director of the International Council of Museums. According to the council’s research, one in 10 may not reopen, he added.
More than 30 respondents to a 41-country survey, by the Network of European Museum Organizations, said they feared they would have to close permanently, among them the Museo de La Rioja and Museum of the Americas in Spain; Kornberg Castle in Austria, the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center in Hungary, and the National Historical Museum of Albania.
The gravity of the situation varies by country, depending on how much museums rely on ticket sales and tourism, and how much government funding they receive. Museums in the United States which survive from earned income and philanthropy are more vulnerable than government-subsidized European institutions. The American Alliance of Museums reported to Congress in March that as many as 30 percent of museums could fail in the crisis, if there was no immediate intervention.
GPT-3 is a neat party trick. But the things that'll be done with web archives* in the next 20y will make it look like the PDP-8. ~love, a web archivist
The transformer model as presented in GPT-3 may be a few tweaks away from a human-acceptable reasoning, at which point we may realize that human brain is just a neat party trick as well. This may come difficult for some people to internalize, especially those who understand the technology in depth. Because it means that the medium of our reality is the consciousness.
I doubted that as well, but I don't think it is--at least it's not a simple copy paste. There's an emphasis on _is_ in the last sentence which I don't think the algorithm could have generated.
However that makes one wonder if it can also learn to generate emphases, and if so, how would it format? With voice generation it can simply change its tonality but with text generation it has to demarcate it in some way--does the human say "format the output for html", for instance?
You are confusing pattern matching with reasoning. If your brain was replaced by GPT-3 model and you were cast away on a distant island, I highly doubt you will be able to perceive, plan and prosper during your survival against all the calamity nature would through at you.
The transformer model in GPT-3 has a short context window and no recurrence. Without some significant architecture changes that is a fundamental limit on the problems GPT-3 can solve.
No pressure: feel free to ignore me, please. Would you mind elaborating? I'm interested in what you have to say (and, of course, feel free to say it privately if you prefer). I would like to even hear your dreams, wild speculations, or gut feelings about the matter.
Some of us are cooking up futuretech aimed at storing all of IA (archive.org) in a shoebox. Others are working on putting archival tools in more normal web users' hands, and making those tools do things that people tend to value more in the short-term, like help them understand what they're researching, rather than merely stash pages.
My ambitions for web archives are outsized compared to other archivists, but I'm fine with that. I'm looking beyond web archives as we currently understand them toward web archives as something else that doesn't quite exist yet: everyday artefacts, colocated and integrated with other web technology to an extent that they serve in essential sensemaking, workflow, and maybe security roles.
Right now, some obvious, pressing priorities are (a) preserving vastly more content and (b) doing more with the archives themselves.
A: The overwhelming majority of born-digital content is lost within a far narrower time-slice than would admit preservation at current rates, and data growth is accelerating beyond the reach of conventional storage media. So, for me, the world's current largest x is never the true object of my desire. I'm after a way to hold the world that is and the world to come.
Ideally, that world to come is one where lifelong data stewardship of everything from your own genome to your digital footprint is ubiquitously available and loss of information has been largely rendered optional.
This, of course, requires magic storage density that simply defies fundamental limitations of conventional storage media. I'm strongly confident that we're getting early glimpses of the first real Magic contenders. All lie outside, or on the far periphery of, the evolutionary tree that got us the storage media we have today. For instance, I'm running an art exhibition that involves encoding all the works on DNA.
B: Distributed archival that comes almost as naturally as browsing is well within reach, and with that comes some very new potential for distributed computation on archives. One hand washes the other.
One important thing to realize here is that, in many cases, you can name a very small handful of individuals as the reason why current archival resources exist. GPT-3 is cracking the surface by training on data produced by one guy named Sebastian, for instance.
…i'm sorta tired and have to respond to something about every twitter snapshot since June being broken, though, so I'll pick this back up later.
This is an interesting thought. GPT-3 used 45TB of raw CommonCrawl data (which was filtered down to 570GB prior to training). The Internet Archive has 48PB of raw data.
I'm running the Coronavirus Archive. Largest thematic archive on the pandemic, since January. I'm also teaching community biolab techniques to people in parts of the world without ready access to commercial COVID-19 test kits, on all but zero resources at this point.
I could use… what's the word? I think it's more funding.
