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CapeWearingAeroplane

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CapeWearingAeroplane ,

Software is a tool. I develop stuff that i know is of interest to companies working with everything from nuclear energy to hydrogen electrolysis and CO2 storage. I honestly believe I can make a positive contribution to the world by releasing that software under a permissive licence such that companies can freely integrate it into their proprietary production code.

I’m also very aware that the exact same software is of interest to the petroleum industry and weapons manufacturers, and that I enable them by releasing it under a permissive licence.

The way I see it, withholding a tool that can help do a lot of good because it can also be used for bad things just doesn’t make much sense. If everybody thinks that way, how can we have positive progress? I don’t think I can think of any more or less fundamental technology that can’t be used for both. The same chemical process that has saved millions from starvation by introducing synthetic fertiliser has taken millions of lives by creating more and better explosives. If you ask those that were bombed, they would probably say they wish it was never invented, while if you ask those that were saved from the brink of starvation they likely praise the heavens for the technology. Today, that same chemical process is a promising candidate for developing zero-emission shipping.

I guess my point is this: For any sufficiently fundamental technology, it is impossible to foresee the uses it may have in the future. Withholding it because it may cause bad stuff is just holding technological development back, lively preventing just as much good as bad. I choose to focus on the positive impact my work can have.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

Israel recognised Palestinian civilian and security control of the West bank in the Oslo accords from the 90’s. They are blatantly shitting on their own promises whenever a genocidic occupier or their enabling security forces set foot on the West Bank without express permission from the Palestinian West Bank government.

CapeWearingAeroplane , (edited )

You are aware that what Israel is doing in Gaza is comparable to the nazi treatment of e.g. the Warsaw ghettos… right?

Take a step back, and look at the Israeli soldiers mocking Palestinian dead, mistreating the wounded and captured, and shooting at clearly unarmed civilians for fun. All this while they brag about it on video. Look at that and tell me that it doesn’t give you a sick feeling to your stomach of the type you haven’t had since you saw photos of concentration camps.

There are dozens of children that have literally STARVED TO DEATH in Gaza because of Israel’s actions. They’re dying the same deaths that Jews were put through in concentration camps. Don’t you see the horrifying irony in this?

Israel is at a point where humanitarian workers from recognised international organisations have been targeted and killed, and they brush it off as a “mistake”.

I cannot think about anything in the past 70 years that compares to what Israel is doing, and I hope beyond hope that some force will smite their government and armed forces such that the slaughter will stop. Because it is a slaughter. It’s not a war when Israel is counting its dead on its fingers, while there are enough missing Palestinians in the rubble to fill a football stadium. It’s just Israel wilfully bombing, burning and slaughtering, with nobody stopping them.

All this, and you have the fucking audacity to talk about antisemitism? Take a look at the world, and ask yourself how calling for an end to this can have anything to do with the religious beliefs of the perpetrators.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

I do exactly this: Write code/frameworks that are used in academic research, which is useful to industry. Once we publish an article, we publish our models open-source under the MIT license. That is because companies that want to use it can then embed our models into their proprietary software, with essentially no strings attached. This gives them an incentive to support our research in terms of collaborative projects, because they see that our research results in stuff they can use.

If we had used the GPL, our main collaborators would probably not have been interested.

CapeWearingAeroplane , (edited )

You’re not seeing the whole picture: I’m paid by the government to do research, and in doing that research my group develops several libraries that can benefit not only other research groups, but also industry. We license these libraries under MIT, because otherwise industry would be far more hesitant to integrate our libraries with their proprietary production code.

I’m also an idealist of sorts. The way I see it, I’m developing publicly funded code that can be used by anyone, no strings attached, to boost productivity and make the world a better place. The fact that this gives us publicity and incentivises the industry to collaborate with us is just a plus. Calling it a self-imposed unpaid internship, when I’m literally hired full time to develop this and just happen to have the freedom to be able to give it out for free, is missing the mark.

Also, we develop these libraries primarily for our own in-house use, and see the adoption of the libraries by others as a great way to uncover flaws and improve robustness. Others creating closed-source derivatives does not harm us or anyone else in any way as far as I can see.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

You are almost on point here, but seem to be missing the primary point of my work. I work as a researcher at a university, doing more-or-less fundamental research on topics that are relevant to industry.

As I wrote: We develop our libraries for in-house use, and release the to the public because we know that they are valuable to the industry. If what I do is to be considered “industry subsidies”, then all of higher education is industry subsidies. (You could make the argument that spending taxpayer money to educate skilled workers is effectively subsidising industry).

We respond to issues that are related either to bugs that we need to fix for our own use, or features that we ourselves want. We don’t spend time implementing features others want unless they give us funding for some project that we need to implement it for.

In short: I don’t work for industry, I work in research and education, and the libraries my group develops happen to be of interest to the industry. Most of my co-workers do not publish their code anywhere, because they aren’t interested in spending the time required to turn hacky academic code into a usable library. I do, because I’ve noticed how much time it saves me and my team in the long run to have production-quality libraries that we can build on.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

I just cannot imagine any task you can do in excel that isn’t easier to do with Python/Pandas. The simplest manipulations of an excel sheet pretty much require you to chain an ungodly list of arcane commands that are completely unreadable, and god forbid you need to work with data from several workbooks at the same time…

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

Oh, I definitely get that the major appeal of excel is a close to non-existent barrier to entry. I mean, an elementary school kid can learn the basics(1) of using excel within a day. And yes, there are definitely programs out there that have excel as their only interface :/ I was really referring to the case where you have the option to do something “from scratch”, i.e. not relying on previously developed programs in the excel sheet.

(1) I’m aware that you can do complex stuff in excel, the point is that the barrier to entry is ridiculously low, which is a compliment.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

So what you’re saying is: We have a small sample of unreliable evidence that this thing may be absolutely detrimental to the developing brain. Thus, we should assume it’s fine until we have more reliable evidence. Did I get that right?

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

You are neglecting the cost-benefit of temporarily jumping to the wrong conclusion while waiting for more conclusive evidence though. Not doing anything because evidence that this is bad is too thin, and being wrong, can have severe long-term consequences. Restricting tiktok and later finding out that it has no detrimental effects has essentially zero negative consequences. We have a word for this principle in my native language - that if you are in doubt about whether something can have severe negative consequences, you are cautious about it until you can conclude with relative certainty that it is safe, rather than the other way around, which would be what you are suggesting: Treating something as safe until you have conclusive evidence that it is not, at which point a lot of damage may already be done.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

Please tell me how, getting up at 5 (and going to bed at 21) is going to give me more time than getting up at 7-8 and going to bed at 23-00.

Also, I would like to know why “society” thinks you are “better” if you exercise at 6-7 before work, rather than 20-21 after work.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

I’ve only ever tried one distro. Please enlighten me on what’s wrong with Ubuntu.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

This is starting to be some years back, but I was exclusively using apt when I was using Ubuntu, have they gone away from that?

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

Check out the actual statistics on what women and men choose an occupations when both people-related and non-people-related jobs are otherwise equal. There’s quite a bit of evidence that men and women tend to prefer occupations in one or the other category.

Honestly, looking at how different men and women are physically, it is slightly absurd to assume that they are identical psychologically (i.e. have the exact same preference regarding people-oriented vs. technical occupations).

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

Can someone please enlighten me on what makes inheritance, polymorphism, an operator overloading so bad? I use the all regularly, and have yet to experience the foot cannons I have heard so much about.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

Oh, thanks then! I’ve heard people shred on OOP regularly, saying that it’s full of foot-canons, and while I’ve never understood where they’re coming from, I definitely agree that there are tasks that are best solved with a functional approach.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

This makes sense to me, thanks! I primarily use Python, C++ and some Fortran, so my typical programs / libraries aren’t really “pure” OOP in that sense.

What I write is mostly various mathematical models, so as a rule of thumb, I’ll write a class to represent some model, which holds the model parameters and methods to operate on them. If I write generic functions (root solver, integration algorithm, etc.) those won’t be classes, because why would they be?

It sounds to me like the issue here arises more from an “everything is a nail” type of problem than anything else.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

I would argue that there are very definitely cases where operator overloading can make code more clear: Specifically when you are working with some custom data type for which different mathematical operations are well defined.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

Sounds reasonable to me: With what I’ve written I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation like the one you describe, with an algorithm split over several classes. I feel like a major point of OOP is that I can package the data and the methods that operate on it, in a single encapsulated package.

Whenever I’ve written in C, I’ve just ended up passing a bunch of structs and function pointers around, basically ending up doing “C with classes” all over again…

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

I am very fond of the idea of “stateless” code, which may seem strange coming from a person that likes OOP. When I say “stateless”, I am really referring to the fact that no class method should ever have any side-effect. Either it is an explicit set method, or it shouldn’t affect the output from other methods of the object. Objects should be used as convenient ways of storing/manipulating data in predictable/readable ways.

I’ve seen way too much code where a class has methods which will only work"as expected" if certain other methods have been called first.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

I’ve never thought of myself as a conspiracy theorist, but if jar-jar being planned to be the actual phantom menace, but later being taken out of the role because fans hated him counts as a conspiracy theory: Count me in! I think the arguments are compelling to say the least.

ChatGPT Answers Programming Questions Incorrectly 52% of the Time: Study (gizmodo.com)

The research from Purdue University, first spotted by news outlet Futurism, was presented earlier this month at the Computer-Human Interaction Conference in Hawaii and looked at 517 programming questions on Stack Overflow that were then fed to ChatGPT....

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

I’ve found chatgpt reasonably good for one thing: Generating regex-patterns. I don’t know regex for shit, but if I ask for a pattern described with words, I get a working pattern 9/10 times. It’s also a very easy use-case to double check.

What do you think of the term "short king" as a term that's supposed to champion body positivity for men?

Body positivity is such a strange concept to me. There’s efforts to reclaim words while simultaneously calling them bad if used as an insult. Ideally, people wouldn’t be offended by someone describing their body with common descriptors, but socially there is so much value attributed to certain body types that it’s almost...

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

I definitely roll with “badass tiny mf”, “chill little dude”, “tiny gangsta bro” or any other title making fun of my stature. Call me anything involving “king” and I’ll be inclined to convince you that, even though I’m short, you’ll be shorter once you’re confined to a wheelchair

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

I was thinking something similar: If you have the computer write in a formal language, designed in such a way that it is impossible to make an incorrect statement, I guess it could be possible to get somewhere with this

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

We tried the “trade your skills for something you need”. In every surviving society it eventually lead to the development of a currency (not hard to see why), which requires/leads to regulation, which requires enforcement, aaaand you’re back at a modern society. I’m all for more regulation to reduce economic and social differences in society, but the people that are talking about abolishing governments and currencies need to pick up a history book and follow their ideas to their natural conclusion.

“Controlling speech” is a hallmark of authoritarian governments, be they far-left or far-right, there are plenty of historical examples of both.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

Not 100% comparable, but synchrotron XRD allows for real-imaging of solid state chemical reactions and can, in a sense, resolve the unit cell structure of the crystal. However, what you get from an XRD is nothing like this “photo-like” image, but a diffractogram. I think you could probably re-create an image like this from a 2D diffractogram though, but I’m not sure.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

You’re definitely correct that getting sychrotron time is hard :(

On the first part though: Yes and no. XRD will tell you about things like strain and unit cell size distribution, so in that sense, you can’t resolve a single doping site. On the other hand, if you have a reaction going on, or some dopant diffusing into your sample, synchrotron XRD is powerful/fast enough that you can “film” how the crystal structure changes in real time. That “film” will be a kind of average of many sites, but can still be focused to a relatively small region (don’t remember exactly how small off the top of my head, but I believe we’re talking nm-scale).

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

I mean, in a perfect world, yes. The issue comes up when someone wears out or breaks the drill, and it needs to be replaced or repaired. Whoever spends time and resources ensuring that we have a drill needs to be compensated somehow, because that’s time they’re not spending on making sure they have food and shelter.

Follow along that line of reasoning for a couple steps, and you end up with some kind of economic system, and likely some kind of enforcement system, so you’re suddenly back at an early stage proto-state/government.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

I believe there’s a quote by “Taco” in"Better call Saul" along the lines of “I love robbing criminals, because they never go to the cops”

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

But it might be beer!

CapeWearingAeroplane , (edited )

Wow, I Wonder why everyone that’s left in the regime that deports and persecutes dissenters says they are in support of that regime?

Ukraine never invaded anybody. Giving them weapons so they can throw out the people invading them, taking their land and molesting their people is a good thing. Russia has clearly shown that the only way to get rid of the plague that is Russian soldiers on foreign soil is to kill them. That’s why we have this war that Russia has chosen to engage in, and which Russia can choose to withdraw from at any time. That’s why Russians are dying by the hundreds of thousands.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

It’s sad, but countries like Russia show us very clearly why nations that want peace need to prepare for war.

I would love to not need to spend a cent on our military, or weapons manufacturing, but the hard reality is very clearly that if we aren’t capable of mass producing weapons, we’ll likely be invaded and killed.

That’s a major part of the issue Europe is facing now: We’ve scaled down weapons production since the 90’s, and now that we suddenly need millions of artillery shells it takes time to rebuild production capacity.

Hopefully Russia gets the picture soon, that we’ll keep scaling up until every Russian invader is gone, and we can go back to not spending money on war…

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

Out of honest curiosity: Whats wrong with sopuli.xyz? I literally just picked a random instance when I joined Lemmy, and have never heard anything special about this instance.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

Yup, who would have though that Russia invading their neighbour suddenly caused the entirety of western Europe to start the largest investments in military and weapons manufacturing since the cold war?

Looking at the results of this war so far (major expansion of NATO in the North, massively increased military spending in all of NATO, massively increased size of the Ukrainian military), you would almost think Putins goal was something completely different than preventing NATO expansion and “de-militarizing” Ukraine.

It’s almost like the best way of preventing your neighbours from building huge militaries and joining alliances is by cooperating with them and helping them feel safe, rather than threatening, coercing and bombing them.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

Yeah, the famous fascists that are actively working hard to join the EU, which we’ve seen so clearly the past decade just loves having fascist states in its ranks. You know, the fascist government that had an actual election as late as 2019 where southern and eastern regions largely voted for the person that won.

Notice how there was actually a change of power in that election - a known hallmark of fascist states.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

You actually have to elaborate on what you mean by “pro fascist-coup gov”, I honestly don’t know what fascists your talking about.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

Lol at the people downvoting this like that isn’t exactly what happened: NATO had wanted Finland to join for years, but they didn’t want to join, for fear of provoking Russia. Putin shows the world that appeasement doesn’t work, and Finland joins in a heartbeat.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

I actually hadn’t realised that yet, thanks for pointing it out, I thought I was going crazy with the amount of people suddenly supporting Russian invaders

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

When did he get steamrolled? When he ensured that corrupt people were sentenced by a court before being jailed, or when he applied to join the famously pro-fascist EU?

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

Where I live they were systematically nice people that helped keep everybody safe. If they found some drunk/high person that needed help, they would drive them home. When we were teens and had beach parties, a couple of them would typically hang around somewhere out of the way, and only intervene if someone was being an asshole trying to start a fight (and they would tell people to pick up their glass bottles so kids wouldn’t get hurt the next day). If we were otherwise hanging around they might chat to us and ask what was going on around the neighbourhood, and nobody had an issue telling them anything, because we knew they were just there to look after and help people.

Obviously, I can tell that my experience with police growing up is far from what can be expected a lot of other places. I really do wish more places had police like we did.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

Honestly: Yes. It’s an example that perfectly encapsulates how windows “as a concept” actively babies and dumbs down its users. I the 00’s, nobody had a problem with file extensions, but now that we’re working with users that have grown up with computers we suddenly need to remove them because they’re “too confusing”?

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

The amount of times someone has asked me why something doesn’t work, and I’ve silently pointed to the sentence or paragraph next to the code snippet they’ve copied…

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

I’ve seen this thing where people dislike inheritance a lot, and I have to admit that I kind of struggle with seeing the issue when it’s used appropriately. I write a bunch of models that all share a large amount of core functionality, so of course I write an abstract base class in which a couple methods are overridden by derived models. I think it’s beautiful in the way that I can say “This model will do X, Y, Z, as long as there exists an implementation of methods A, B, C, which have these signatures”, then I can inherit that base class and implement A, B, and C for a bunch of different cases. In short, I think it’s a very useful way to express the purpose of the code, without focusing on the implementation of specific details, and a very natural way of expressing that two classes are closely related models, with the same functionality, as expressed by the base class.

I honestly have a hard time seeing how not using inheritance would make such a code base cleaner, but please tell me, I would love to learn.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

Well yes, I get the differerence between an interface and a class, and what I write is typically a class, which contains properties and functionality that may or may not be overridden in derived classes.

For example, calling a parent class implementation can be useful when I have a derived model that needs to validate its input in some specific way, but otherwise does the same as the base class.

What I don’t understand is why this makes OOP bad?

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

Anther chemist stepping in here: Anything that produces an off-gas of any kind that does anything other than smell bad should be considered potentially lethal. People have died from working with liquid nitrogen or dry ice without proper ventilation. In addition, a gas explosion can be far worse than any other explosion you are likely to pull off by accident, and if you have a leak somewhere you may have no clue how much explosive gas is in the room with you. Some gases will react and form acid when it gets into your airways, essentially acting as an invisible acid that can jump from the table into your face.

In short: Stay away from dangerous gases and stuff that makes them, and consider pretty much all gases as dangerous unless you know for a fact that they aren’t. Other than that, the potential dangers of backyard chemistry can largely be mitigated by using common sense and working with small amounts of chemicals, good luck :)

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

If you have a fume hood that’s good of course, but since the question was about advising amateurs on safety, my advice is restrictive, because gases can be very dangerous in subtle ways.

As an amateur: Do you know how to properly work in a fume hood so that it protects you? Do you know its capacity, and what to do if something unexpected leads to gas development over that capacity? Have you had training in using this stuff, so that you can react properly and quickly if something goes wrong, rather than freezing up?

In short: Because the potential dangers when working with a lot of gases are harder to detect, and harder to mitigate, than when working with other stuff, I’m taking a restrictive approach in my advice.

For you question on pyrophoric gases: They can remain in contact with air for a while (several minutes, depending on concentration) before igniting. Worst case, the room around you can fill with gas from a leak before causing a gas explosion. In principle you can also inhale gas from this leak, such the the explosion also takes place inside you :)

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

Hehe, exactly :) the thing with gases is that the line between completely fine (campfire outside) to potentially lethal (liquid nitrogen evaporating in a small, poorly ventilated garage) can be harder to see and judge for an amateur than a lot of other things. Anyone would understand that they should avoid getting acids or toxic chemicals on their skin, and the protective measures are quite simple to carry out. The same is true for most flammable or explosive liquids or solids. So the idea behind my advice was really “If there’s something that’s likely to hurt you because you aren’t properly aware of the danger involved and how to mitigate it, it’s likely to be a gas, so be extra, extra careful around gases, gas producing reactions, and volatile compounds.”

Court Bans Use of 'AI-Enhanced' Video Evidence Because That's Not How AI Works (gizmodo.com)

A judge in Washington state has blocked video evidence that’s been “AI-enhanced” from being submitted in a triple murder trial. And that’s a good thing, given the fact that too many people seem to think applying an AI filter can give them access to secret visual data.

CapeWearingAeroplane ,

Looking at a half circle and guessing that the “missing part” is a full circle is as much of a blind guess as you can get. You have exactly zero evidence that there is another half circle present. The missing part could be anything, from nothing to any shape that incorporates a half circle. And you would be guessing without any evidence whatsoever as to which of those things it is. That’s blind guessing.

Extrapolating into regions without prior data with a non-predictive model is blind guessing. If it wasn’t, the model would be predictive, which generative AI is not, is not intended to be, and has not been claimed to be.

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