In Haskell specifically, arrays really do allow for the more general definition. This makes the library documentation[1] quite a bit more intimidating to newcomers (speaking from personal experience), but saves you the boilerplate and hassle of figuring out the mapping yourself if you're indexing your array by some weird nonsense like `[(False, 'a', 5000, 0)..(True, 'z', 9001, 4)] :: (Bool, Char, Integer, Int8)`.
I remember having a similar sort of realization early in my career when trying to implement some horribly convoluted business logic in SQL (I no longer remember the actual details of what I was trying to do, just the epiphany which resulted; I think it had something to do with proration of insurance premiums and commissions): I realized that if I simply pre-computed the value of the function in question and shoved it into a table (requiring "only" a couple million rows or so), then I could use a join in place of function application, and be done with it. An obvious idea in retrospect, but the sudden dredging of the set-theoretic formulation of functions--that they are simply collections of tuples--from deep within my memory was certainly startling at the time.
BTW this is extremely common in life insurance systems, where premiums (provisions, surrender values, etc.) depend on formulas applied to mortality tables; these data themselves are simply tables for people from 0 to 100 years of age, so many formulas end up with only 100 possible outputs and are precomputed. (or 200 for combined probabilities, or gender-specific ones)
I've seen this as a "solution" to implementing a function for fibbonacci numbers. The array of all of the fibbonacci numbers that can fit into a 32-bit integer is not particularly large, so sticking it into a static local variable is easy to do.
It seems appropriate that, for a website whose purpose is to make links which raise your suspicions, the visual design itself also raises your suspicions.
That's a pretty lazy analysis. As an easy counterpoint, no one pays to look at Facebook or Instagram posts, but both Meta and (at least some) individual influencers are able to run profitable businesses based on that media consumption (and you could say the same of some bloggers in the late 00s/early 10s, for that matter). More speculatively, I think there is also an argument to be made that even gratis media consumption gives cultural weight to a work which is then available for monetization, especially in this age of tentpole franchises and granularly tracked personal behavior.
Influencers are, by definition, advertisers - and a particularly insidious, ugly bunch at that.
If we go by the vibe of this thread, it's yet another reason to avoid social media. You wouldn't want to reward people like this.
As for the broader topic, this segues into the worryingly popular fallacy of excluded middle. Just because you're not against something, doesn't mean you're supporting it. Being neutral, ambivalent, or plain old just not giving a fuck about a whole class of issues, is a perfectly legitimate place to be in. In fact, that's everyone's default position for most things, because humans have limited mental capacity - we can't have calculated views on every single thing in the world all the time.
>even gratis media consumption gives cultural weight to a work which is then available for monetization
At a certain point you're just making the argument that any lack of action directly opposing something is "allowing it to thrive", making anyone directly responsible for everything.
Not technically wrong, but at a certain point there has to be a cutoff. Can you really hold yourself responsible for enjoying a movie which is problematic because one of the batteries in one of the cameras used to produce it was bought from a guy who once bought a waffle from a KKK bake sale? The "problematic-ness" is there, no doubt, but how much can you orient your actions towards not-benefiting something you disapprove of before it disables you from actually finding and spreading things you actually do like?
I don't find it fair, nor in good faith to claim my argument is lazy. By downloading the media of the artists who's behavior your find abhorrent, but who's art you enjoy (and you can separate the art from the artists), you can assure yourself to some degree that they are not receiving monetary gain. People who were interested in the Harry Potter game (but didn't want the author to finance) simply pirated the game. Roman Polanski, R Kelly, and many others artists are exploited in this fashion.
I do agree that the consumption of that media could very easily increase its cultural strength.
Even in your influencer example, there are ways to bring less traffic/ad views to that content while allowing some ability to consume. example here: https://libredirect.github.io/
FWIW, this is usually called buying either "life insurance" or a "life annuity," depending on whether you want to take a short or long position. The underwriters of such bets tend to be reticent about offering them to 3rd parties, though, for what are probably obvious reasons.
Not really a counterpoint, but interestingly there used to be a fairly widespread practice of corporations buying life insurance for low level employees. It was often called "Dead Peasant Insurance", and when the employee died the corporation benefited.
It never made an iota of economic sense -- if insurance underwriters are on the wrong end of that deal, they aren't doing their jobs very well -- but a number of large corporations would do it, and gleefully pocket the payouts when rank and file employees died.
For complex music, sure, but if I'm looking up a folk tune on, say, thesession.org, I personally think a plain-text format like ABC notation is easier to sight-read (since for some instruments, namely the fiddle and mandolin, I mainly learn songs by ear and am rather slow and unpracticed at reading standard notation).
But, Netflix did lose their content by choice! Way back in the 00s, you could pay Netflix something like $5 a month, and they would mail you physical DVDs of almost any movies you could ever want to watch. In fact, my recollection is that the physical library was generally much more extensive than the streaming library, at least through the early ‘10s.
Sure, they had the rug yanked out from under them with digital streaming, but they very deliberately put themselves into that position when they pivoted to streaming in the first place.
> In fact, my recollection is that the physical library was generally much more extensive than the streaming library, at least through the early ‘10s.
Because streaming licences are different from DVD licences for example. Hell, even 4k streaming licenses and lossless audio streaming licenses are different (and significantly more costly) than streaming 1080p and compressed audio.
> put themselves into that position when they pivoted to streaming in the first place.
As we all know physical DVD businesses are thriving
Expressing frustration at the pervasive tendency of technologists to look at everything, including art which is a reflection of peoples' subjective realities, with an "at-scale" lens, e.g., "let's collect ALL of it, and categorize it, and develop technologies to mash it all together and vomit out derivative averages with no compelling humanist point of view"
Well, that seems like a pretty reasonable thing to be pissed off about, thanks for taking the time to elaborate.
I think the overlap between the bureaucratic technologies developed by people who, by all accounts, are genuine lovers of the subjectivity and messiness of music qua human artistic production (e.g. the algorithmic music recommendation engines of the '00s and early '10s; public databases like discogs and musicbrainz; perhaps even the expansive libraries and curated collections in piracy networks like what.cd), and the people who mainly seem interested in extracting as much profit as possible from the vast portfolios of artistic output they have access to (e.g. all of Spotify's current business practices, pretty much), should probably prompt some serious introspection among any technologists who see themselves in that first category.
I read an essay a number of years back, which raised the point that, if you're an academic or researcher working on computer vision, no matter how pure your motives or tall your ivory tower, what do you expect that research to be used for, if not surveillance systems run by the most evil people imaginable. And, thus, shouldn't you share some of that moral culpability? I think about that essay a lot these days, especially in relation to topics like this.
We're very much trained to solve the most general case of any problem, for sensible reasons.
I first learned about this formulation of the rule from a case study in Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, where breaking the rule resulted in a much better user experience.
I think in that case, you, the hypothetical wage worker, got hoodwinked pretty effectively by the beancounters when they were able to get away with compensating you in contracts that are apparently worthless to you.
Do you think about the things you say, or is it just reflex?
Everyone working for a startup knows it may be 5 years to a liquidity event. We're all big boys, we work on uncertainty and expectation. If the government changes the rules halfway through, it's pretty brain-damaged to blame the beancounters for hoodwinking the employees, and not using their magic oracular powers to predict how the laws would change under their feet.
Do you not factor in the risk of government tax policy changing when you make large financial decisions? I certainly do (for instance, when I choose between traditional and Roth contributions for my 401k, or when I was purchasing a new car a few years back), and it doesn't strike me as a particularly difficult thing to do; I think I may have even done so the last time I was hired for a job which offered options (although that was quite a while ago and my memory is hazy).
More to the point, however, I think if 2 years is insufficient notice to get your tax situation in order w/r/t employee stock options, either your finances are enough of a mess, or you're frankly just so stupid, that you would not be helped much more with 5 years, or even 10 years, of advance notice. And at that point, you (the poster, not the hypothetical hapless employee) are just arguing that the government should never change its tax policy, which is just absurd.
[1] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/array-0.5.8.0/docs/Data-...
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