“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: […] like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift

  • 52 Posts
  • 558 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 25th, 2024

help-circle

  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldMaths
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    14 days ago

    … okay? Yes? Nobody thought otherwise? Do we now have to clarify every statement about algebra by specifying that we’re talking about an algebra over the reals or the complex numbers? Or the polynomials or the p-adic integers, whose multiplications are also commutative?

    No one would call these “n-dimensional” number systems either. The algebra for each of these operates in R1 and R2, respectively, but, like, you would describe their algebras as being over an n-dimensional vector space. It’s not wrong, but I don’t think “two-dimensional number system” is something you’d hear mathematicians say.

    This pedantic aside feels so “I just watched a 3blue1brown video and feel verysmart™” that I don’t know what to do with it. It’s good to be interested in math, but this ain’t it. Everyone knew what they meant.


  • They struggled to deliver their ambitious mainline Linux phone on time during Covid yes, but they eventually delivered.

    And for the people who requested refunds who waited months if not never received them? Despite them moving back their timeline literal years with repeated delays? I don’t care what challenges they faced; they knowingly took people’s money and refused to give it back to them when they couldn’t deliver. It’s their responsibility to be prepared for challenges. And in some extreme edge case where they couldn’t have been prepared, it’s their responsibility to be transparent about that to the people who gave them over a million dollars (let alone purchased the product after the Kickstarter was finished). I suppose too that the pandemic affected Purism in January 2019 when they were supposed to deliver their product?

    The fact that they did is a huge win for the mobile Linux ecosystem becoming a real contender just when we need it.

    The Librem 5 is not a contender for shit. It’s so overpriced that it can only be successfully marketed to people who care so deeply about their privacy that they’re willing to use an inconvenient mobile OS, get completely boned on hardware specs, and deal with a company notorious for fucking over its customers. Purism’s behavior is a fucking embarrassment to the Linux ecosystem.

    NXP i.MX family debuted in 2013; Intel i7 family in 2008. Their phone uses a 2017 i.MX 8M Quad, the same year they crowdfunded their phone.

    That CPU is based on the ARM Cortex-A53 and Cortex-M4, launched in 2012 and 2009, respectively.

    2017 i7 computers are equally not from 2008…

    When I say “2013”, I’m not talking about the debut year of i.MX. I’m talking about the fact that you can compare this phone side-by-side with a Galaxy S4 or S5. 3 GB of RAM, 32 GB of eMMC storage, a 720 x 1440p IPS display, no NFC, USB 3.0, an 8/13 MP front/back camera (which they inexplicably call “Mpx”; good job, guys), 802.11n Wi-Fi, no waterproofing, and a shitty-ass i.MX 8M CPU. I still remember watching a trailer for the Librem 5’s continuing development, and as they were scrolling through a web browser, it was noticeably stuttering. This was years and years ago; I can’t even imagine it today.

    It still today remains one of the best ARM processors with open source drivers without an integrated baseband. It means basically any flavour of Linux can install on the device, with a significant layer of protection from carrier conduited attacks. Other modules have similar tradeoffs between performance and interoperability/security.

    I do not give even the slightest inkling of a shit try to confirm or deny this, so I’m just going to assume it’s 100% true, because it’s not relevant to the point that the spec is absolute trash and being sold for $800. If you are not absolutely married to privacy, this is not a sellable product in 2025.

    Want better specs? We either need SoC companies to release more of their drivers open source, or more people to patiently reverse engineer closed source ones.

    Actually, if I want better specs, I’m just going to go out and buy a phone that isn’t from Purism. It really sucks that it’s not open, private hardware, but Purism is such a scummy company that so wantonly fucks over their customers that I wouldn’t touch the Librem 5 even if I could justify spending $800 for that spec just for privacy’s sake.















  • OP, you say “free, open source, and fully attributed”, but it’s really not fully attributed. I know Google will live, but you need to be more attentive to licensure and credit. Here are some major problems (in no particular order):

    • The weather icon pack is licensed under CC BY 4.0, yet you never mention this license. It’s not sharealike (“SA”), so you can relicense, but it would be nice for users to know that you are, in fact, allowed to do that.
    • You never link to the weather icons page so users can easily find the original icons.
    • You say “inspired by Google’s Weather Icons v4” but then never say what you changed or how. Did you modify them? Build these from scratch using Google’s as a reference? You don’t have to say for the license; this would just be nice. If it can’t be summed up in a sentence or two, then fair enough.
    • In “Credits & Acknowledgments”, you never mention the Google Weather icons – which are the entire reason this repo exists. Given the only requirement of CC BY is proper attribution, something needs to go here.
    • You don’t even link back to the third-party repo where you got them from.
    • Under “License & Legal Notice” and in your LICENSE file, you call the copyright status of the icons “uncertain”. This confuses the hell out of me, because on the icons pack page for Google, it clearly reads at the bottom: Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.
      • This to me indicates you did minimal research and didn’t actually care about the license but called it “open-source” anyway and happened to get lucky. It seems like instead of finding the official source, you got them from this repo which is similarly sloppy.
      • One of the lines reads “No official Google documentation has been located that confirms these specific icons are released under an open source license”. OP, for the love of actual god, this would’ve taken less time to find than it took you to type that sentence; below is the second result on DuckDuckGo for “google weather icons pack” after your own repository:

    A screenshot of a DuckDuckGo search result for "google weather icons pack"

    Now you have all your research done for you, and Cunningham’s law is proven right again.







  • The short answer is that I really, really suggest you try other things before trying to create your first article. This isn’t just me; every experienced editor will tell you that creating a new article is one of the hardest things any editor can do, let alone a newer one. It’s why the task center lists it as being appropriate for “advanced editors”. Finding an existing article which interests you and then polishing and expanding it is almost always more rewarding, more useful, easier, and less stressful than creating an article from scratch. And if creating articles sounds appealing, expanding existing stub articles is great experience for that.

    The long answer is “you can”, but it’s really hard:

    • New editors are subject to Articles for Creation, or AfC, when creating an article. The article sits in a draft state until the editor flags it for review. The backlog is very long, and while reviewers can go in any order they want, they usually prioritize the oldest articles out of fairness and because most AfC submissions are about equal in urgency and time consumption. “Months” is the expected waiting time.
    • If you’re not using the English Wikipedia, you can try translating over a well-established article from English. There’s no rule that says sources have to be in the language of the Wikipedia they’re on, although it’s still considered a big plus if sources are in the same language. You’d have to keep in mind that the target language may have standards not followed on the English Wikipedia.
    • Wikipedia’s notability guidelines are predicated on you understanding other policies and guidelines like “reliable sources” and “independent sources”. They’re also intentionally fuzzy so people don’t play lawyer and follow the exact letter without considering the spirit of the guideline.
    • The English Wikipedia currently has over 7 million articles. There are still a lot of missing articles (mostly in taxonomy, where notability is almost guaranteed), but you really need to know where to look.
    • When choosing an article subject, it’s extremely important to avoid COI.
    • Assuming you have a subject you think meets criteria, now you have to go out and find reliable, independent sources with substantial coverage of the subject to confirm your hypothesis.
    • Now you need to start the article, and you need to do this in a manner which:
      • Is verifiable (all claims are cited)
      • Is not original research (i.e. nothing you say can be based on “because I know it”)
      • Is reliable (all citations are to reliable sources)
      • Is neutral (you’ve minimized bias as much as you can, let the sources speak for themselves, and made sure your source selection isn’t biased)
      • Is stylistically correct (there’s a manual of style, but just use your best judgment, and small mistakes can be copy-edited out by people familiar with style guidelines)
    • If the article is nominated for deletion, you have to keep your cool and argue based solely on guidelines (not on perceived importance of the subject) that the article should be kept.
    • New articles are almost always given more scrutiny than articles which have been around; this isn’t a cultural problem as much as it is a heuristic one.
    • An article deleted feels much more personal than edits reverted (despite the fact that subject notability is 100% out of your control).

    Some of these apply to normal editing too, but working within an article others have worked on and might be willing to help with is vastly easier than building one from scratch. If you want specific help in picking out, say, an article to try editing and are on the English Wikipedia, I have no problem acting like bowling bumpers if you’re afraid your edits won’t meet standards.