It really depends on what you’re looking at. The history section of some random town? Absolutely bog-standard prose. I’m probably missing lots of implications as I’m no historian but at least I understand what’s going on. The article on asymmetric relations? Good luck getting your mathematical literacy from wikipedia all the maths articles require you to already have it, and that’s one of the easier ones. It’s a fucking trivial concept, it has a glaringly obvious example… which is mentioned, even as first example, but by that time most people’s eyes have glazed over. “Asymmetric relations are a generalisation of the idea that if a < b, then it is necessarily false that a > b: If it is true that Bob is taller than Tom, then it is false that Tom is taller than Bob.” Put that in the header.

Or let’s take Big O notation. Short overview, formal definition, examples… not practical, but theoretical, then infinitesimal asymptotics, which is deep into the weeds. You know what that article actually needs? After the short overview, have an intuitive/hand-wavy definition, then two well explained “find an entry in a telephone book”, examples, two different algorithms: O(n) (naive) and O(log n) (divide and conquer), to demonstrate the kind of differences the notation is supposed to highlight. Then, with the basics out of the way, one to demonstrate that the notation doesn’t care about multiplicative factors, what it (deliberately) sweeps under the rug. Short blurb about why that’s warranted in practice. Then, directly afterwards, the “orders of common functions” table but make sure to have examples that people actually might be acquainted with. Then talk about amortisation, and how you don’t always use hash tables “because they’re O(1) and trees are not”. Then get into the formal stuff, that is, the current article.

And, no, LLMs will be of absolutely no help doing that. What wikipedia needs is a didactics task force giving specialist editors a slap on the wrist because xkcd 2501.

I feel bad for the schizos.

Don’t. We’re not the ones affected here and definitely, definitely, don’t have a monopoly on psychosis.

Personally, I’m completely unimpressed by the random nonsense LLMs spit out because it’s not my nonsense. There’s certainly people way deeper down the rabbit hole than me but they, too, have an infinite stream of as-of-yet-uninterpreted subconscious stuff knocking at their door so I don’t see why they would bother. And that’s all before paranoia kicks in and it’s the FBI trying to control you via the chat interface.

Feel bad for your capacity to relate to others, instead. Cuddle it, give it space, stop defining it. I don’t ever want to hear that “type of girl I’m interested in” talk ever again, do you hear me, you, you little ego, don’t get a say in that, that’s for another part of you to decide. Stop telling it what to do.

The issue is not lack of logic and consistency, the trouble is a completely different reference frame.

Let me put it, to grossly simplify, in this way: Imagine you’d be dreaming while awake, no way to stop it, and would have to integrate all that craziness in real time. It’s not that dreams make no sense – they all have their rhyme and reason – it’s that they’re talking a completely different language.

You might be hearing, out of nowhere, a cello note off to the side, move your gaze there, notice “that’s my trashcan that makes no sense”, and then be lost, and panic, lose faith in your senses, and that way lies psychosis. More productively, you say “ok mind which thought with as of yet unformed discernible meaning was it that you wanted me to pay attention to”, look for the place the thought came from (as schizo, you can tell with your kinaesthetic sense), consider it for a while, still being oblivious of the meaning, and then go on with your life.

We’re weird.

Oh, back to randomness: It can get you out of a rut and I do suppose that’s how Terry used it, aware of it or not, and framing it however he did. Could also be using it to self-soothe, as in, distracting from a negative spiral. There’s worse habits.

God, with almost 100% certainty, means “the genome and how it’s speaking to me through my instincts” in his dialect. Because that’s what it always means, what it always meant, for everyone, it meant that when it was the ancestors, it meant that when it became more detailed and became gods, it meant that when people realised all the gods are actually one thing, the theologists are just confused AF because politics and physics and cabbage-heads got into the mix. And so much for my schizo rant. Don’t discount what I say because I’m crazy, the reason you consider me crazy is because it’s true.

I mean… my condolences and/or yay you get to be a honorary machinist?

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

The FSFE has an overview over the various terms but tldr FLOSS is the one that has the least amount of agitated neckbeards breathing down your neck because it a) includes both free software and open source and b) includes the “L” that clarifies that what’s meant is free as in speech, not free as in beer.

…and I guess it’s about software hygiene?

The EU is pumping a lot of money into FLOSS, often not even for administrative use (like, say, lemmy gets EU funding), but at far as adoption rate in administration is concerned well the Commission is one of the worst offenders. As in municipalities realising they can’t fully switch to LibreOffice because they need to apply for EU funds and the commission only accepts .docx. Parliament happily spending money on something and the executive getting around to getting its shit together are two different things.

OTOH it’s not all about Microsoft and the like, a lot of administrative software is special-purpose, written by private companies according to specs, paid for by public money. Making that kind of thing open source is a no-brainer. It’s also a way better use of money to improve and customise some open source ERP than to go to SAP and get a customised solution there.

And a lot of that has to do with lacking competency in administration – outside of police, specifically IT forensics, it’s usually quite dire. States have no issues figuring out whether a blueprint makes sense when they’re issuing building permits, road and railroad engineering, of course they can do that, but IT? Nope. Bring in the private consultants and private consultants are basically the marketing arm of big software companies.

Yep exactly that. A fascinating side-effect is that models become better at logic when you tell them to talk like a Vulkan.

Modulo everything, you need to have been a resident for at least five years to have any chance of getting security clearance. Also it would be “not a shredlet”.

Those boxes will be unicorns no matter what, though, also, they’re not necessarily part of the general IT infrastructure. Someone in catastrophe defence might be running fluid simulations using some god awful expensive windows-only software but chances are they can manage their own box, and if not, the ministry will still have IT staff who can deal with that kind of thing.

Blender got ported to Linux in 1998, to Windows in 1999. The modal interface and key command language is no accident, it literally is a 3d vi.

Linux is generally strong when it comes to 3d graphics workstations, it inherited IRIX’ market share, plenty of artists around, especially in the film industry, who’d go on a strike if you took away dragging windows with alt+LMB. Graphics, that is, CAD is dominated by Windows as CAD started out as 2d sketch software which ran on cheap DOS machines.

Houdini is also Unix-native and Blender’s only surviving competitor (considered by features, not industry inertia), Maya started out as cross-platform IRIX+Windows.

Best I can give you is dataport looking for nextcloud admins, it’s also listed as a component of dPhoenixSuite.

Dataport is kinda hit and miss when it comes to developing. It was created by taking the small IT departments of different ministries, agencies, etc, of multiple states, and putting them all under a common roof. They did that because they realised that standard state administration structures and IT weren’t really compatible but on the flipside, they also funded a whole new organisation with people accustomed to those very structures, and as dataport is still a public law corporation the internal administration – think payroll and everything – will still be done by career state bureaucrats.

It’s a different kind of dysfunction than you see in the private sector but dysfunction nonetheless. OTOH working directly with FLOSS upstream will help: It’s not that (sufficiently large) FLOSS projects don’t have their own bureaucracy, and the bureaucrats that be on dataport’s side will respect that.

Regarding maintenance: Aside from hardware upgrades because they make sense (power consumption) or you want new features (latest addition: Graphics tablets to allow citizens to sign stuff without having to print things), there’s a constant churn in software requirements as new orders come in on what to do and how to do it. Just because you wrote perfect software doesn’t mean that parliament stops passing laws.

As far as usability is concerned: Dataport will also have to train people, and they actually have the funds to do usability studies and such. Much will also depend on the different agencies they’re working for, can’t fix an agency’s workflows for them, and that goes beyond mere IT. I guess a public-law consultancy does make sense but having a ministry for administrative affairs reeks of Sir Humphrey. I guess you could hide it by making it a subsidiary of the court of auditors.

No idea where that number is from but at the start it’s just going to be getting rid of MS Office and Exchange, switch to FLOSS telephony, not getting rid of Windows. Licensing costs for 30k seats are certainly higher but you have to offset that with not getting any support from MS any more. Dataport will need a couple of in-house developers to resolve issues and work with upstream. Actual development, not tier 1 support and translating administrative instructions into templates.

Also for the state it’s not really about the money, but sovereignty. 188k are also peanuts in 18bn worth of state budget, that’s yearly maintenance for what 30km of state roads. Given that we currently don’t have any potholes we can afford it.

As to brainrot: Not really applicable. These are managed workplaces and not much will change on the end-user side.

https://lojban.org/publications/cll/cll_v1.1_xhtml-section-chunks/section-parentheses.html

Also https://xkcd.com/191/. Also https://vlasisku.lojban.org/xekce. Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv0QIbGc8i8.

I never understood how people couldn’t understand basic PEMDAS/BEDMAS/Whatever-the-fuck-your-country-calls-it.

There’s no “whatever-the-fuck-your-country-calls-it”, the US is the only country using it, and only up to high school. At least I’m not seeing any papers coming out of the US relying on it so at some point they’re dropping it and do what everyone else is doing: Write equations such that you don’t need a left-to-right rule to disambiguate things. Also, using multiplication by juxtaposition (2x + 4x²).

It’s ambiguous which one of these is correct. Hence the best method we have for “correct” is left to right.

The solution accepted anywhere but in the US school system range from “Bloody use parenthesis, then” over “Why is there more than one division in this formula why didn’t you re-arrange everything to be less confusing” to “50 Hertz, in base units, are 50s^-1”.

More practically speaking: Ultimately, you’ll want to do algebra with these things. If you rely on “left to right” type of precedence rules re-arranging formulas becomes way harder because now you have to contend with that kind of implicit constraint. It makes everything harder for no reason whatsoever so no actual mathematician, or other people using maths in earnest, use that kind of notation.

They passed a new law that suspends freedom of speech when it’s against Israel

You might have missed in your study of law and the news that what passed is not a law, but merely a resolution. It’s the equivalent of a press release.

extra-judicial extradictions without an accusation against pro-Palestine protesters, which a judge eventually blocked.

So it wasn’t extra-judicial.

I’d be much more inclined to listen to you if you didn’t make such glaring mistakes.

Nothing. And that’s why people don’t write equations like that: You either see

     4
6 + ---
     2

or

 6 + 4
-------
   2

If you wrote 6 + 4 / 2 in a paper you’d get reviewers complaining that it’s ambiguous, if you want it to be on one line write (6+4) / 2 or 6 + (4/2) or 6 + ⁴⁄₂ or even ½(6 + 4) Working mathematicians never came up with PEMDAS, which disambiguates it without parenthesis, US teachers did. Noone else does it that way because it does not, in the slightest, aid readability.

Those two things are memorisation tasks. Maths is not about memorisation.

You are not supposed to remember that the area of a triangle is a * h / 2, you’re supposed to understand why it’s the case. You’re supposed to be able to show that any triangle that can possibly exist is half the area of the rectangle it’s stuck in: Start with the trivial case (right-angled triangle), then move on to more complicated cases. If you’ve understood that once, there is no reason to remember anything because you can derive the formula at a moment’s notice.

All maths can be understood and derived like that. The names of the colours, their ordering, the names of the planets and how they’re ordered, they’re arbitrary, they have no rhyme or reason, they need to be memorised if you want to recall them. Maths doesn’t, instead it dies when you apply memorisation.

Ein Anfänger (der) Gitarre Hat Elan. There, that’s the Guitar strings in German. Why do I know that? Because my music theory knowledge sucks. I can’t apply it, music is all vibes to me but I still need a way to match the strings to what the tuner is displaying. You should never learn music theory from me, just as you shouldn’t learn maths from a teacher who can’t prove a * h / 2, or thinks it’s unimportant whether you can prove it.

Is that some new-fangled GNU thing? It’s certainly not POSIX.