@hipsterelectron it still bugs me every time people say web browsers are operating systems
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@hipsterelectron it still bugs me every time people say web browsers are operating systems
@babble_endanger they are parroting propaganda. an operating system provides affordances to the user that a web browser does not. much like the way private corporations want to be allowed to provide government services for profit without the corresponding anti-discrimination clauses and equitable distribution that government provides, google wants to power to profit from an operating system without providing services to the user
@babble_endanger i also get pissed off when people say copyright is a monopoly over distribution, which is what passes for insight in the online libertarian world of wikipedians and the IA. a monopoly is something corporations produce, not individuals. copyright is intended to be a flexible tradeoff between individual protection and corporate misuse. reducing it to "copyright is a monopoly" without building anything in its place is forcing artists to work for little or no pay because they have essentially no labor protections and as i see it the purpose of law since the civil rights movement is to combat institutionalized harm. if anti-copyright activists ever said a damn thing about the police i'd believe them more but like google's operating system what they want is to remove protections against exploitation
@hipsterelectron yeah I'm all right with copyright and trademark in general, patents have me skeptical
@hipsterelectron graph theory really seems to be the end all be all of logical structure. but compilers, and i say this as someone who writes them, compilers are just translators.
@lritter i have two reasons for saying it one because i like graph theory two because i don't think a lot of people have a very strong background in it (which is fine) and they reference it to posture (which is not fine) and i only allow myself to pull rank when people act like math separates them from others
"everything is a transformer model" is the kind of false epiphany from someone who does not understand that one of the fundamental goals of applied science (which is what programmers do) is to identify which models do and don't apply. upon this basis atrocities have been performed by investors who don't need anything to be true if it can seem true long enough to make a profit
math is generalizable because it's intentionally not an applied science. theory is very useful in this way. but there are real consequences when you make statements about other fields you are not an expert in with use cases you don't understand and users who are actually harmed. see: statistics being used to post-hoc justify racial and gender discrimination
part of why i respect gebru and bender's work so much is that their expertise also takes the form of drawing a boundary between what statistical machines are actually capable of. is anyone doing the same for compiler design? because this is part of why parsing theory has been largely immobile since the 1980s
i think there is so much harm done by propagating this idea of subsuming other fields instead of celebrating the ways different applications can generate surprisingly complex new forms of analysis. "everything is a compiler" is a fundamentally incurious and potentially even anti-intellectual notion
and of course i'm mad because this shit is why i can't get a job despite being a global top expert in at least two respects and people consider the stuff i work on to be cheap tricks they can steal instead of published works they should cite
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