Interesting Links for 05-08-2016

[andrewducker]

What it's like to be a midwife (tags: babies childbirth work healthcare viaSwampers ) The beauty of bitwise AND (tags: logic computing mathematics ) OneCore to rule them all: How Microsoft finally got the same operating system running on all of its platforms (tags: microsoft windows Technology computers history ) Columbia Researchers Find

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

I agree with Andrew H. That's more like the sort of progressive alliance that I think is hits the sweet spot of being practicable, appealling to voters, and not actually anti-democratic whilst also not requiring the smaller parties to become the stooges for a bunch of stuff they actively don't want

[andrewducker]

The main issue I see there is that during the formative phases of this party the voting will be swayed by the kinds of people who sign up. So if it's made up of 40% lovely people and 60% bigots then its representatives will be 100% supporting racist motions, which will make it hard for them to attract new liberal people to join.

What I'd want would be for the representatives to vote _in proportion_ to the people they are proxying.

[danieldwilliam]

There's a definate snowball effect with the plurality version of the liquid democracy proposal.

And that might get you in to an interesting arms race situation as all sides in the particular debate try and win the internal vote by one in order to gain all the representatives votes.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, that feels imbalanced to me.

And turns every vote into a referendum. Whereas actually I want my representatives to be negotiating with each other, and trying to find areas of compromise, which I'm not sure this would achieve.

[octopoid_horror]

I felt uncomfortable when I started a replay of the Mass Effect series, and I'd feel the same if I replayed Firewatch. Unlike Journey though, it's because those games for me were all about the decisions that I made along the way. My Shepard, my Henry - I felt I made their decisions and the journey they took was the product of those decisions. When I tried to replay Mass Effect as a renegade rather than paragon, I didn't think it was right because that wasn't what my Shepard would do.

I guess that's why I liked the Citadel DLC for ME3 so much, because if you play it after the trilogy is complete, it works really, really well as a coda to the story of your Shepard.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, going back and playing them as a different character would be really hard.

[sidhe_uaine42]

I agree with the Something Positive webcomic (I read it earlier today it's one of my bookmarks that I visit daily or every other day.) It also pertains to other branches of fine arts (remembering the last concert that The Who allowed "festival seating" because several fans died after being crushed in the stampede for entry: it was also featured in an episode of WKRP In Cincinnati.)

[alextfish]

That bitwise AND article was strange. All the "properties they wouldn't expect" seem rather obvious to me, and feel like they'd be obvious to most computer scientists.

The resulting graphs were... pretty, I guess? Putting together lots of trivial observations to end up with something nearly-trivial-but-not-quite. And pretty. But it seems a somewhat strange way to visualise what's an exceedingly simple function.

[andrewducker]

I think the point was to show that even a ridiculously simple function can produce interesting patterns that you may not be aware of.