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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 7th, 2023

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  • “From computer science papers/academic texts I know this method of reading works perfectly”

    This is almost certainly due to pure familiarity. CS papers are just as indecipherable to unfamiliar persons. Possibly even more since things like complexity are heavily used, without any explanation of what it is. Data structures are another common one that the vast majority of non-CS people would not understand when referenced.

    I know because this is exactly how I felt coming from an intermediate mathematics background.



  • Mathematicians are good at writing algorithms, but not at the development aspect, which is basically building for different systems, packaging software and documentation.

    I would disagree on the performance part, the vast majority of software developers aren’t writing high performance software and the ones that are tend to be computational mathematicians or physicists.


  • “seeing the differences in the result”

    This just means that you are testing against a very narrow output. It’s actually pretty common to run across tests that don’t even check for the likely failure cases, because the developer(s) don’t actually understand the algorithm.

    A common example is prime factorisation, most nontrivial factorisation algorithms (Pollard rho, elliptic curves), don’t guarantee producing a prime factor they simply tend to produce them because they prioritize small factors. Programmers see that their function produces primes for the one or 2 test cases (out of say 2^64) and assume that it works. It generally does, but when it doesn’t you get incorrect results (often undetectably) which poisons all the rest of your calculations.


  • Sure but what degree of influence is actually “radicalising” or a point of concern?

    We like to pretend that by banning extreme communities we are saving civilisation from them. But the fact is that extreme groups are already rejected by society. If your ideas are not actually somewhat adjacent to already held beliefs, you can’t just force people to accept them.

    I think a good example of this was the “fall” of Richard Spencer. All the leftist communities (of which I was semi-active in at the time) credited his decline with the punch he received and apparently assumed that it was the act of punching that resulted in his decline, and used it to justify more violent actions. The reality is that Spencer just had a clique of friends that the left (and Spencer himself) interpreted as wide support and when he was punched the greater public didn’t care because they never cared about him.


  • “A deradicalising effect”

    I’m sorry what? The idea that smaller communities are somehow less radical is absurd.

    I think you are unaware (or much more likely willfully ignoring) that communities are primarily dominated by a few active users, and simply viewed with a varying degree of support by non-engaging users.

    If they never valued communities enough to stay with them, then they never really cared about the cause to begin with. These aren’t the radicals you need to be concerned about.

    “And those people diffuse back into the general population”

    Because that doesn’t happen to a greater degree when exposed to the “general population” on the same website?