Pharap

general recent conversations

Discussion on question by Jacob E: Be…

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Pharap

May 20 14:50

@JacobE: @mattfreake is right that you should ensure that your account can't be traced back to you. Your question, when combined with a question you asked over on Christianity and that Auchwitz quote in your profile ("If there is a god, he will have to beg for my forgiveness.") could be sufficient to convince a jury that you are biased against Christians.

Discussion on question by Amit Tomar:…

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Pharap

Oct 14, 2024 07:24

@tonysdg You still have to know some of the underneath. You can't use OpenGL fully without understanding Vectors and Matrices or knowing about writing shaders and different kinds of lighting etc. You don't necissarily need to know everything about how these things work, but you need to know enough to know what you're doing wrong when you go wrong (e.g. understanding the layout of a vector is helpful when your problem is that you've accidentally ended up with a transposed matrix).

Discussion on answer by Teresa Pelka:…

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Pharap

Aug 7, 2023 06:26

"Let us take it for a round figure and say, people can produce about 30 speech sounds." Actually, it's at least 100. English alone has more than 30 before you even get into dipthongs.

Discussion on question by verdery: Ca…

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Pharap

Mar 6, 2020 01:22

@Pace You left out a very important one: the ability to not make any mistakes. Even if a human had infinite memory, if it were the same quality as most human's memory, eventually they'd get two digits mixed up or make a similar mistake. One of the biggest advantages a computer has over a human is that as long as a computer's hardware is functioning correctly, they won't make any mistakes that aren't already present in their programming. Humans are prone to mistakes even when doing a task they are well practiced at.

Pharap

Mar 6, 2020 01:22

@OrangeDog Not yet at least (if ever). Arguably humans are merely biological computers.

Pharap

Mar 6, 2020 01:22

@OrangeDog Asking whether a computer "understands" infinity is fundamentally different to asking whether it can "represent" infinity or "represent" an infinite sequence. If the OP intended the later, they should edit the question to reflect this, then someone can say "IEEE floating points" and "Haskell's cons lists + lazy evaluation" and then we can all go home.

Discussion on question by Cyriac Anto…

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Pharap

Jan 24, 2020 21:43

@AnthonyGrist Is chess seen as 'culturally unsuitable for women'? If so, in which cultures is this the case? I have never met anyone who has even implied that a female playing chess is even remotely unusual. But then, maybe I just live under a rock?

Discussion on question by Sandy R: Ca…

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Pharap

Dec 17, 2019 00:23

@Justaguy Rest assured I did not take any offence as it seems I'm the only one who actually missed the title.

Pharap

Dec 17, 2019 00:23

@Justaguy Fair enough. I read the entire question body twice but completely ignored the title out of habit. (9 times out of 10 the title is redundant when the actual question is as long as this.)

Pharap

Dec 17, 2019 00:23

Can we at least get a country tag on this? I'm assuming US because of the use of the term 'freshman', but that's hardly evidence. Aside from helping to determine what laws apply, it can also have an impact on how your question should be interpreted (e.g. a 'public school' in Britain is something quite different).

Discussion on question by Bobby: How …

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Pharap

Oct 27, 2019 07:35

"I mean really, what name could possibly be so offensive as to illicit this question on your part?" Probably Belgium.

Discussion on answer by KRyan: Is the…

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Pharap

Oct 7, 2019 17:40

"Tumblr, for example, as an online community, has a lot of users who include their preferred pronouns as part of their introductory blurb at the top of their blogs" That practice has spread to a lot of Twitter as well from what little I've seen (I don't actually use Twitter, but of the few times I look at someone's page, I reckon at least 25-50% have 'he/she' at the end of their bio).

Discussion on question by Guest1: I s…

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Pharap

Jun 12, 2019 14:02

@RyanfaeScotland Would a mere two sentences be enough to constitute a good answer? I'm inclined to believe that such an answer would merely be noise.

Pharap

Jun 12, 2019 14:02

@Guest1 I am confused. Is the British university not also abroad for you?

Discussion on question by hermann: Em…

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Pharap

May 8, 2019 15:02

"asks to work overtime so she can have extra days off and not use any of her already available days off for the year" I'm not sure why this is a bad thing. Are people expected to not want to take days off?

Discussion on answer by Pharap: Do au…

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Pharap

Mar 22, 2019 17:16

@aquirdturtle The holocaust refers a specific event, but slavery is not a specific event, it is a general act, so it doesn't make sense to draw a parallel between the two. You could draw a parallel between specific cases of slavery, like the Atlantic slave trade or the Arab slave trade, but 'slavery' on its own isn't as specific as 'the Holocaust'. I disagree that casual use of a word strips the word of its seriousness - seriousness is relative to the context in which the word is used.

Pharap

Mar 22, 2019 17:16

@aquirdturtle Such an indirect relation to racism is insignificant. 'Red' and 'black' also have indirect relations to racism, but nobody is asking for red-black trees to be renamed. I don't think I am overstating the issue, if I were to replace the word 'voltage' in a paper about hardware with 'frobnage' it would have the same effect - the paper would become harder to understand because every time the reader saw 'frobnage' their reading flow would be broken because they'd have to stop to mentally substitute the 'incorrect' word with the 'correct' word.

Pharap

Mar 22, 2019 17:16

@aquirdturtle The more formal version of 'kill' is 'terminate', which can still be taken to mean 'kill', so that wouldn't entirely 'solve the problem', though I don't think either the use of 'kill' or 'slave' is a problem - they are abstract ideas being applied to machines and/or processes, not to living creatures. (Though I think 'terminate' is more appropriate than 'kill' purely because it's more technically precise.)

Pharap

Mar 22, 2019 17:16

@aquirdturtle I assumed that since you brought up racism you were somehow implying that there was some direct connection between the master and slave terminology and racism. How exactly does using 'master' and 'slave' in a technical context cheapen slavery, and how does using 'kill' in a technical context not cheapen murder? I'm struggling to see the logic here. Even in this specific paper the change is only easy for the author, not for the reader, which is my point - papers are written to be read, the paper should be easy to read, not defying established terminology.

Pharap

Mar 22, 2019 17:16

@aquirdturtle Slavery and racism are two different things that are not inherantly connected. How exactly does using the term 'slave' to refer to once device/process being controlled by another device/process constitute racism? Computers don't have races. And it's certainly not an easy fix - the terminology of 'master' and 'slave' is highly ingrained and a great many people are familiar with it. Replacing those terms would be an incredibly long and difficult task which would be met with great resistance. Even then you wouldn't be able to erase the terms from historical papers.

Pharap

Mar 22, 2019 17:16

@aquirdturtle Why is it that calling a process a "slave" 'cheapens' slavery but "killing" a process doesn't 'cheapen' killing/murder? My intent is not to suggest that 'to kill a process' should be abandoned, but to suggest that calling a process or device a 'slave' is no more heinous than 'killing' a process. The use of the term 'slave' is not an endorsement of slavery any more than the use of the term 'kill' is an endorsement of murder. Furthermore, slavery is still ongoing in some countries in various forms, so to say 'slavery was' is somewhat disdainful.

Pharap

Mar 22, 2019 17:16

@aquirdturtle So slavery is morally wrong and must be banished from all tech terminology, but killing is absolutely fine?

Pharap

Mar 22, 2019 17:16

@aquirdturtle Should we also stop "killing" processes because murder is wrong? Should we stop calling the language "brainfuck" because swearing is wrong? Should we stop calling plumbing fixtures "nipples" because it's a part of the anatomy many people don't like discussing? The line must be drawn somewhere.

Pharap

Mar 22, 2019 17:16

@aquirdturtle If the USA switched to the metric system, it wouldn't be because the metric system is more 'politically correct', it would be because the metric system is already in widespread use and provides tangible benefits. Thus it's not comparable with changing tech terminology for reasons of political correctness. Changing tech terminology because the current terminology is unclear or because there's an established better practice perhaps, but not for the sake of political correctness.

Pharap

Mar 22, 2019 17:16

@aquirdturtle There's a difference. Mentally substituting fabricated terminology for the correct terminology is an active mental effort on everybody, including seasoned experts. Accepting industry-standard commonly-used terminology that just happens to be a bit odd or amusing is something that any non-experts would have to do in order to become experts. Aside from which, 'ridiculous' is very much in the eye of the beholder. Personally I do not find the term 'brainfuck' at all jarring, and while I find the term 'nipple' odd, I suspect I'd get used to it if I were to become a plummer.

Pharap

Mar 22, 2019 17:16

@aquirdturtle In what way is 'brainfuck' an odd word?. That's the language's proper name, as it has been since its inception. Besides which my point was that people will be distracted by the substitution familiar terms with unfamiliar terms, not simply by 'odd words'. Technical terms might sometimes be odd. For example, there's a fixture in plumbing called a nipple, which might seem odd to people unfamiliar with the field, but it's the correct technical term, and using something else would cause confusion to people working in plumbing.

Discussion on question by Tétef: Can …

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Pharap

Mar 11, 2019 12:59

What exactly is it that motivates you here? Is it the money, the fame? It doesn't sound like its the benefit of your company or the benefit of mankind.

Discussion on answer by Sourav Ghosh:…

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Pharap

Mar 8, 2019 10:06

@feynman Doing things like replacing 'you' with 'u', 'with' with 'w' and not using capital letters at the start of sentences are not considered appropriate on this site. In fact these days it's probably not acceptable on most websites, Text-speak has pretty much become antiquated.

Discussion on answer by user2768: Pla…

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Pharap

Mar 6, 2019 16:27

@user2768 I would consider 'no copyright notice' to be inappropriate because it is the absense of a copyright notice and thus not actually a copyright notice. I think we will have to agree to disagree there. Either that or to take it up with law.stackexchange.com.

Pharap

Mar 6, 2019 16:27

@user2768 At what point has the OP stated that they did not include a copyright notice? At the moment there's no evidence either way. I am not necessarily suggesting that the alleged plagariser should have added a copyright notice. If 'no copyright notice' were acceptable I would expect the licence to explicitly state that to be so. I think 'no copyright notice' is a very odd interpretation of 'an appropriate copyright notice', the absense of a copyright notice is not 'a copyright notice' of any kind.

Pharap

Mar 6, 2019 16:27

@user2768 What evidence is there that 'no copyright notice' is permissible? I would have expected an author to include a copyright notice at least somewhere on their code. Much open source code contains a legal header at the top of at least the main files (if not all files), which also tends to state that the code has no warranty.

Pharap

Mar 6, 2019 16:27

@user2768 Nox's comment was incorrect, the GPL does require attribution: "You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program." See opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4582

Discussion on question by Pasted: Pla…

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Pharap

Mar 6, 2019 16:25

@Pasted In future, please remember to include the header at the top of every piece of code you write. Some IDEs can be configured to add it automatically. However, unlike user2768 I think the fact they removed the loading scripts is suspicious, especially if the code won't work without those scripts (though you must verify this fact first). Furthermore, the fact the person downloaded your code and then reuploaded it rather than forking it seems quite suspicious to me. Especially considering that forking is much easier, and that reuploading destroys the commit history.

Pharap

Mar 6, 2019 16:25

@MattP GitHub only recently introduced private repos for non-paying users. I suspect at the time the OP published the code they would have had to pay a subscription to GitHub to have access to private repos.

Pharap

Mar 6, 2019 16:25

@Pasted Could you please confirm whether or not you provided a copyright notice on your code (such as the one recommended by the GNU foundation), this seems to be a sticking point in the current argument. And if you did include such a notice, has the alleged plagiariser removed it?

Pharap

Mar 6, 2019 16:25

@user2768 It's common practice to include the following licence header at the top of any GPLed code: gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto

Pharap

Mar 6, 2019 16:25

@Pasted This person has indeed violated the GPL terms: "You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program."

Discussion on question by Nick van de…

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Pharap

Mar 1, 2019 19:52

@SebastiaanvandenBroek I would expect so, but I like to check to be sure.

Pharap

Mar 1, 2019 19:52

"football sized rock" What kind of football?

Discussion on answer by Richard U: Ho…

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Pharap

Mar 1, 2019 06:00

@JeffC I agree with the people saying that calling something or someone 'testosterony' is potentially sexist. It implies that testosterone should be associated with negative behaviour. Look at it the other way around - if I were to enter a room of women and announce "wow, this place is really oestrogeny", I'm quite certain it wouldn't be long before someone accused me of being sexist, or at the very least offensive.

Discussion on answer by cag51: Do aut…

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Pharap

Feb 27, 2019 21:25

@forest That definition is the one that's becoming more common knowledge though. Phystiology and zoology are becoming the exception to the rule. I rememeber a time when 'gender' and 'sex' were considered interchangable, but that is changing, as it has been for at least a few decades. As I say, the point is that the parallel of 'male' and 'female' in electrical connectors is being drawn to biological characteristics, and genitalia do have a role in determining biological sex/gender.

Pharap

Feb 27, 2019 21:25

@llama Precisely, so when the terms were created the intent would have been to be drawing a parallel with what is now classed as (biological) 'sex' rather than (social) 'gender'. Genitalia are an important factor in determining (biological) 'sex', thus there is no disagreement to be had.

Pharap

Feb 27, 2019 21:25

@llama I think you are confusing sex and gender. The male sex has one form of genitalia, the female sex has a different form of genitalia. The parallel is drawn between the physical features of each sex, social aspects like 'gender' don't even come into the equation.

Discussion on answer by CCTO: Is it d…

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Pharap

Dec 15, 2018 01:55

@KatinkaHesselink Why only to a female job applicant? There are plenty of men who are interested in sewing/crocheting/knitting etc. (Also, in Britain students are taught how to sew in school - both male and female.)

Discussion on answer by Laetus: Why d…

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Pharap

Sep 27, 2018 15:16

@blip I believe the definition of 'neutral' in this case would be giving equal flak to both ends of the political scale. Perhaps 'unbiased' or 'balanced' would be a better term than 'neutral'. One can quite easily take the mickey out of policticians on both ends of the political scale without going against one's political beliefs. No politician is immune from criticism.

Pharap

Sep 27, 2018 15:16

@blip How? Comedy falls under the "Entertainment Industry" which is clearly on the left in this chart.

Discussion on answer by Philipp: Why …

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Pharap

Sep 17, 2018 01:19

@Philipp I'd be surprised if anyone who has slept on the streets for any length of time is well-organised or mentally stable. One of the side effects of doing so is surely a catestrophic impact on one's mental state and morale.

Discussion on answer by Joe: Why don'…

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Pharap

Jul 25, 2018 22:29

Discussion on answer by user4012: Why…

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Pharap

Jul 20, 2018 10:38

@user4012 One cannot make a decision about either without first evaluating whether there is something that should be changed or improved upon. Additionally, one person's "not broke" is another's "not functioning as intended". Perhaps some parts of the constitution are in fact bugs and not features?

Pharap

Jul 20, 2018 10:38

@jamesqf "Again, if it ain't broke, why fix it? Why is that so hard to understand?" In software engineering they say "we've always done it this way" can sometimes be some of the most dangerous words going.