The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.
The insertion of an all knowing checker who could have written it himself anyway
The checker does make all the difference, but he doesn’t need to be able to write it by himself. It could be even a brainless process, such as natural selection.
I think the point is less about any kind of route to Hamlet, and more about the absurdity of infinite tries in a finite space(time).
I know. It’s just that creationists misuse that metaphor so often that I couldn’t help but share my brainfart here.
Perhaps even worse: Wobblesticke, Jiggleweapone, stuff like this.
If we’re considering even chimps “monkeys”, there’s already eight billion of them, I think that’s enough.
I have a way to make it work.
Have the monkey write down a single character. Just one. 29/30 of the time, it won’t be the same character as the first one in Shakespeare’s complete works; discard that sheet of paper, then try again. 1/30 of the time the monkey will type out the right character; when they do it, keep that sheet of paper and make copies out of it.
Now, instead of giving a completely blank sheet to the monkey, give them one of those copies. And let them type the second character. If different from the actual second character in Shakespeare’s works, discard that sheet and give him a new copy (with the right 1st char still there - the monkey did type it out!). Do this until the monkey types the correct second character. Keep that sheet with 2 correct chars, make copies out of it, and repeat the process for the third character.
And then the fourth, the fifth, so goes on.
Since swapping sheets all the time takes more time than letting the monkey go wild, let’s increase the time per typed character (right or wrong), from 1 second to… let’s say, 60 times more. A whole minute. And since the monkey will type junk 29/30 of the time, it’ll take around 30min to type the right character.
It would take even longer, right? Well… not really. Shakespeare’s complete works have around 5 million characters, so the process should take 5*10⁶ * 30min = 2.5 million hours, or 285 years.
But we could do it even better. This approach has a single monkey doing all the work; the paper has 200k of them. We could split Shakespeare’s complete works into 200k strings of 25 chars each, and assign each string to a monkey. Each monkey would complete their assignment, on average, after 12h30min; some will take a bit longer, but now we aren’t talking about the thermal death of the universe or even centuries, it’ll take at most a few days.
Why am I sharing this? I’m not invalidating the paper, mind you, it’s cool maths.
I’ve found this metaphor of monkeys typing Shakespeare quite a bit in my teen years, when I still arsed myself to discuss with creationists. You know, the sort of people who thinks that complex life can’t appear due to random mutations, just like a monkey can’t type the full works of Shakespeare.
Complex life is not the result of a single “big” mutation, like a monkey typing the full thing out of the blue; it involves selection and inheritance, as the sheets of paper being copied or discarded.
And just like assigning tasks to different monkeys, multiple mutations can pop up independently and get recombined. Not just among sexual beings; even bacteria can transmit genes horizontally.
Already back then (inb4 yes, I was a weird teen…) I developed the skeleton of this reasoning. Now I just plopped the numbers that the paper uses, and here we go.
And we need more of them!
Just for reference: in my State (somewhere in Latin America), since 2007, we have a law that TL;DRs to “if you offer a service through a certain mean, you must offer the cancellation method through the same mean; plus by phone, or internet, or snail mail”.
It works like a charm because, contrariwise to what Michael Powell is claiming, customers aren’t such disgustingly stupid trash that will “accidentally” hit the cancel button, nor they deserve to be punished by making cancellation a fucking pain in the arse. (There’s probably similar laws elsewhere.)
There’s no right answer.
The Tumbleweed users are likely doing this separation just to use different partition formats for /home and /. It’s one of the reasons why you’d want a separated /home; the others being already mentioned by other users (easier distro-hopping, easy backups), as well as the con (sometimes you’ll have free space, but not in the partition where you need it).
I like this piece. Well-thought, and well laid out.
I do believe that mods getting weathered, as OP outlined, is part of the issue. I’m not sure on good ways to solve this, but introducing a few barriers of entry here and there might alleviate it. We just need to be sure that those barriers actually sort good newbies in and bad newbies out, instead of simply locking everyone out. Easier said than done.
Another factor is that moderator work grows faster than community size; you get more threads, each with more activity, users spend more time in your community, they’re from more diverse backgrounds so more likely to disagree, forest fires spread faster so goes on. This is relevant here because communities nowadays tend to be considerably bigger than in the past; and, well, when you got more stuff to do, you tend to do things in a sloppier way.
You can recruit more mods, of course; but mod team size is also a problem, as it’s harder to get everyone in the same page and enforce rules consistently. If one mod is rather lax and another is strict, you get some people getting away doing worse than someone else who got banned, and that makes the whole mod team look powertripping and picking favourites, when it isn’t. (I’m not sure on how to solve this problem besides encouraging people to migrate to smaller communities, once they feel like the ones that they are in are too big.)
I think that it would be theoretically possible with a modified client. But in practice you’d filter a lot of genuinely active users out, and still let a lot of those suspicious accounts in. Sadly I think that blocking them individually is a better approach, even if a bit more laborious.
On a lighter note, this sort of user isn’t a big deal here in Lemmy. It’s simply more efficient to manipulate a larger userbase, like Twitter or Reddit.
Then the kid installs Proton and your keikaku* fails miserably.
*TN: keikaku means plan.
And yet if you post it in 4chan expect at least some Anons telling you that you’re a “dumb frogposter”.
Reworded rules for clarity:
- Min required length must be 8 chars (obligatory), but it should be 15 chars (recommended).
- Max length should allow at least 64 chars.
- You should accept all ASCII plus space.
- You should accept Unicode; if doing so, you must count each code as one char.
- Don’t demand composition rules (e.g. “u’re password requires a comma! lol lmao haha” tier idiocy)
- Don’t bug users to change passwords periodically. Only do it if there’s evidence of compromise.
- Don’t store password hints that others can guess.
- Don’t prompt the user to use knowledge-based authentication.
- Don’t truncate passwords for verification.
I was expecting idiotic rules screaming “bureaucratic muppets don’t know what they’re legislating on”, but instead what I’m seeing is surprisingly sane and sensible.
That includes me. Or at least my geospoofed location for the sake of google search (when I need to use it - I’d rather use DDG but… meh), so Google stops trying to sell me local shit.
It’s also missing IMO some mass to discuss more specific topics. For example, there’s enough people to discuss “anime” or “games”, but too few to discuss a specific anime series, or a specific game.
That’ll get better in time too, I believe.
I see this as a small victory for the Fediverse.
For real. Companies being extra pushy with their product always makes me picture their decision makers saying:
“What do you mean, «we’re being too pushy»? Those are customers! They are not human beings, nor deserve to be treated as such! This filth is stupid and un-human-like, it can’t even follow simple orders like «consume our product»! Here we don’t appeal to its reason, we smear advertisement on its snout until it needs to open the mouth to breath, and then we shove the product down its throat!”
Is this accurate? Probably not. But it does feel like this, specially when they’re trying to force a product with limited use cases into everyone’s throats, even after plenty potential customers said “eeew no”. Such as machine text and image generation.