In Canada, there was a lot of controversy over the government awarding ~$200M in contracts to one consultancy, almost always without competitive bidding. They chronically underdelivered, e.g.:
There has been much scrutiny over how much the ArriveCAN app cost to develop and who was subcontracted for its development. Contracts show that the federal government will spend close to $54 million with 23 separate subcontractors. A Parliamentary committee ordered federal departments to submit contracting documents related to the app but have been told that the names of subcontractors cannot be released citing issues of confidentiality. In October 2022, two developers at two separate IT companies took part in a hackathon where they both developed duplicates of the ArriveCAN app in under two days, for an estimated cost of $250,000.
Surely the actual app was more complicated than the hackathon duplicates. But where in between $250k and $54m should the cost have been? To be fair, I read estimates saying Healthcare.gov cost around $500m, and a friend who I know is a great engineer worked on that (albeit in a rescue capacity). And a single F-35 costs $80m, so maybe we need to triage things.
> cannot be released citing issues of confidentiality
How the f can this even be an excuse? How can the government be confidential from itself? If so why has the person that allowed confidentiality in these contracts not been removed. Rhetorical of course, "The un-accountability machine" grift in action.
The query language is definitely underdocumented. In case it helps you, what helped me was realizing it’s basically a funky pattern language, à la the match pattern sublanguages in OCaml/Haskell/Rust.
But the syntax for variable binding is idiosyncratic and the opposite of normal pattern languages. Writing “x” doesn’t bind the thing at the position to the variable x; instead, you have to write e.g. foo @x to bind x to the child of type foo. Insanely, some Scheme dialects use @ with the exact opposite semantics!! There’s also a bizarre # syntax for conditionals and statements.
Honestly there isn’t really an excuse for how weird they made the pattern syntax given that people have spent decades working on pattern matching for everything from XML to objects (even respecting abstraction!). I’ve slowly been souring on treesitter in general, but paraphrasing Stroustrup: there are things people complain about, and then there are things nobody uses.
Not really. It uses S-expressions but Scheme pattern matching is totally different. The most common Scheme pattern matching syntax is basically the same as pattern matching in any other language: x means “bind the value at this position to x”, not “the child node of type”. See: https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Pattern-... or syntax-rules.
It’s as much a Scheme dialect as WASM’s S-expression form is a Scheme dialect.
Treesitter’s query syntax is slightly understandable in the sense that having x match a node among siblings of type x works well for extracting values out of sibling lists. Most conventional pattern syntaxes struggle with this, e.g. how do you match the string “foo” inside of a list of strings in OCaml or Rust without leaving the match expression and resorting to a loop?
But you could imagine a syntax-rules like use of ellipses …. There’s also a more powerful pattern syntax someone worked on for implementing Scheme-like macros in non-S-expression based languages whose name escapes me right now.
Igalia is a pretty interesting business. For context, they are a consultancy whose engineers contribute quite a bit to the various browser engines (WebKit, Blink, and Gecko; perhaps Servo too?), among other things. From Wikipedia:
In 2019 they were the #2 committers to both the WebKit and Chromium codebases and in the top 10 contributors to Gecko/Servo. Igalia has helped the interoperability of some features across web engines; they implemented CSS Grid Layout in WebKit and Blink.
To my surprise, they sold these things in pretty much every big store I went to in Japan. A record store sold them, albeit in the adult records section. But an otherwise normal department store also sold them behind a curtain.
I bought one in the record store “as a joke,” ha ha. I tried to use the self checkout machine but hit an error; obviously it was in Japanese. The machine made an audible ding. A friendly clerk heard the ding and came over to help. Maybe it was business as usual for her, but I was too mortified to even look at her face to see her expression.
Also in the end I couldn’t really get into it (as it were) and threw it away. The only thing satisfied that day was my curiosity.
Not to worry, the friendly clerk probably found the joke funny!
On another note, I really love the vending machine culture there. Never saw ones like this, but did end up scouring every machine I ran across for a particular white grape drink with odd chunks of something in it that I came across outside a small shop/market surrounded by rice fields. Found other grape drinks but not that one in the city.
I loved the vending machines for drinks!! I had at least one novel drink every day and enjoyed almost all of them. If you remember the name of the white grape drink you mention I’d love to look for it, it sounds great.
I wish I knew the name or had saved the can or at least a picture. I actually tried to explain to someone at a store hoping they knew what I was talking about; like in below; the result was me appreciating their culture of respect (or at least not openly saying all their thoughts) even more, because I'm sure they thought I was crazy.
It was all Japanese, I only knew it was white grape because of the picture of a green grape cluster. The rest of the can was all manner of Japanese characters of random sizes and boldness with I think a green star-burst or circle and a horrible picture indicating the fruity chunky things (or thats what I tell myself it was).
Weird, this whole time I had the impression that the Apple App Store was more strongly reviewed than the Google Play Store. I remember searching on the Play Store and getting e.g. lookalike/phishing apps pretending to be Firefox, but which I’m sure actually did cryptocurrency mining.
This is very cool. I was randomly clicking on circles and thinking it was weird that none of them sounded bad yet. Then I clicked on one of the presets, which merged its state in, and realized it was indeed possible to end up with a loop that just sounds bad!
On the one hand, Musk has already retracted his claim[1] that he's a "free speech absolutist"[2], so I don't think it's fair to come after him for that:
In last month’s interview with the BBC, Musk said, “the rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict, and we can’t go beyond the laws of a country … If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we will comply with the laws.” At another point in the interview, Musk said: “If people of a given country are against a certain type of speech, they should talk to their elected representatives and pass a law to prevent it.”
But blocking links to hacked documents regarding JD Vance seems a little suspect considering that, as the article mentions, he was opposed to blocking links to hacked documents about Hunter Biden:
Twitter, before it was bought by Elon Musk, had a policy regarding hacked materials — but the page is no longer available. A pre-Musk version of the policy, dated 2019, stated that posting or linking to hacked content is prohibited. Under this policy, links to a story by The New York Post about Hunter Biden, the current president’s son, were banned. But in October 2020, Twitter changed its policy to say that it would no longer block hacked materials, after an outcry about how the company had handled the Post story. “Straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix,” wrote then-CEO Jack Dorsey.
Musk was one of the people who was unhappy with the decision to ban links to the Post’s story. “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate,” Musk wrote of the decision on the story in April 2022. He even invited former Rolling Stone pundit Matt Taibbi to examine internal documents showing how Twitter handled the decision. (In the course of tweeting his conclusions, Taibbi exposed the email addresses of Dorsey and Representative Ro Khanna.)
> “If people of a given country are against a certain type of speech, they should talk to their elected representatives and pass a law to prevent it.”
Yet Brazil's speech laws he publicly flouted and attacked.
As a theory worth exploring: Is it because India's government matches Musk's far-right politics (or do they have any direct relationship), and Brazil's does not? Are there other data points we can use?
Yes, he has censored information on Erdogan's request as well. He never calls out the censorship from strongmen authoritarians but loves attacking nations with strong democracies.
Thanks. We should be careful of confirmation bias, of course: How many authoritarians / far-right causes has Musk obstructed based on free speech? How many non-far right and liberal causes has Musk enabled?
At a certain point, if Musk consistently blocks things favoring one party and not another does X risk losing its Common Carrier status and start opening itself up to more liability?
If you're referring to US law, Twitter was never a telecommunications common carrier. So it can't lose that status through any sort of moderation decisions.
Twitter (I still refuse to call it X) doesn't have "Common Carrier" status, no website or platform does. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 protects platforms from liability for user content even if they display bias towards that content.
It is absolutely fair to continue to point out his ongoing hypocrisy.
“If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we will comply with the laws.” in 2023.
Here he is on Brazil just a few months ago [1]:
“We are lifting all restrictions. This judge has applied massive fines, threatened to arrest our employees and cut off access to in Brazil.
As a result, we will probably lose all revenue in Brazil and have to shut down our office there.
But principles matter more than profit.”
If we have to risk employees going to jail, then we will follow the law.
We risk employees going to jail, so we will ignore the law on principle.
Literal opposites. He is just a free speech opportunist who realized that you can say “free speech” to get people to overlook your selfish goals and get the benefit of the doubt when you deserve strict scrutiny.
You must realize this document doxxes JD Vance. Including birthdate, phone number, most of SSN, his home address, criminal history, etc. The dude will have to move now.
>Musk has already retracted his claim[1] that he's a "free speech absolutist
The article you link shows that his subsequent actions are inconsistent with that claim, but not that he's 'retracted' it.
Musk has repeatedly said that Twitter will allow 'all legal speech'. There's nothing illegal about sharing links to this document in most jurisdictions (certainly not in the US).
I don’t think you and I disagree! I agree that Musk is being a hypocrite and that his actions are inconsistent both with (1) being a ‘free speech absolutist’ and with (2) allowing all legal speech.
But (2) is definitely not (1). He used to say he supported (1), now he says (2). I guess you could say that that isn’t retraction, and that he still claims he’s a free speech absolutist, but as much as I think he’s a hypocrite I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and allow him to change his mind.
It’s also legal to post flight tracker information, but Musk opposes that in contradiction to (2) as well. That’s also incredibly hypocritical.
I get the feeling you and many others didn’t finish reading my comment before concluding that I’m an Elon Musk fan when in fact I’m the opposite :P I’m guessing people stopped around the first quote, before I point out that what he’s doing here is also hypocritical: blocking documents on JD Vance while having been vocally against blocking documents on Hunter Biden.
I think the main issue that people took with your original comment is just that it makes a false claim (the 'retraction').
Even if we accept the alleged retraction, it doesn't really make sense in this context to say that it's unfair to come after Musk for saying (1) because he's subsequently said (2), given that (2) is equally inconsistent with banning posts sharing this dossier.
I mean, I'll accept your interpretation with as much charity as I take Musk's public statements, even though I think both are wrong :) Hope to chat again in a happier context!
>But blocking links to hacked documents regarding JD Vance seems a little suspect considering that, as the article mentions, he was opposed to blocking links to hacked documents about Hunter Biden
Per X, the links were blocked because they included un-redacted personal information such as address and SSN.
If that’s true I would say blocking is credible. I’d rather err on the side of caution on exposing potential privacy information.
If there was no private info - obviously the block is b.s. But considering they’ve mentioned privacy details in the doc I’m prepared to give them the benefit of doubt for a few days or ask the initial poster to send a redacted version.
The policies of the United States government really have nothing to do with the policies a social media website can or should enact. I'm honestly not sure what I think of this precise situation, but it's not crazy to think that nothing good will come from running around posting the home addresses of unpopular politicians.
His address is public info, available on dozens of state and local election sites.
For comparison, Elon previously leaked "the Twitter files" to reporter Matt Taibbi, who posted the address of prior Twitter executives. Needless to say, Taibbi was not banned.
> He and Kressner’s algorithm is delightful. Ultimately, it uses randomness in only a small way. For most coefficients a_1, a_2 \in \real, a matrix Q diagonalizing a_1 H + a_2 S will also diagonalize A = H+iS. But, for any specific choice of a_1, a_2, there is a possibility of failure. To avoid this possibility, we can just pick a_1 and a_2 at random. It’s really as simple as that.
Does anyone use randomized algorithms like these at work? I’m very curious about the conditions where it makes sense. Another comment links to a monograph but I’m more curious about the product side. I worked a little on geometry processing for maps in the past and I don’t think we used any randomized algorithms.
I can see how you could e.g. fix a the random seed for a partition of the data so that if you end up in the bad case you can change it (similar to how you can change consistent hashing keys to load balance).
Depends a little bit on what you mean by "like these". In the broadest sense, quicksort is an algorithm like this in that it can use random numbers to minimize the likelihood of bad data messing up an algorithm.
IIRC the conclusion is that it’s optimal for stores to be positioned at extremes relative to each other (e.g. at two ends of the city) but the socially optimal situation is actually for them to be positioned closer together.
I noticed that my neighborhood is all Lawsons, so I got the location of all Conbinis and ran some basic analysis to see if these pockets of brand territory are common.
I wonder if that explains why neighborhoods end up mostly containing one kind of store? Other explanations might just be it’s simpler to stock your stores if they’re closer together.
