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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • If you’re the kind of person who wants a particular person banned, you probably want to be on the kind of instance that would ban them, and then from your perspective, they’d be banned, so you’d never have to see their posts. It still being possible to interact with them from other instances isn’t any more of a big deal than it being possible to interact with them on an entirely different website after they’re banned from regular social media - no one can ban someone from the whole Internet.


  • Geolocation of images isn’t sci-fi or magic. You need to have something recognisable in an image that can distinguish the image from a similar image taken somewhere else. It’s not an intelligence breakthrough that the image was taken by a human, and any efforts to identify which human will be fruitless as their face is only about nine pixels, which are out of focus and eroded by the bokeh from the sky in the neighbouring pixels. From the detail available, we can’t even tell if they’re wearing a balaklava, which would make the face unidentifiable even if an analyst did have access to magic.




  • The interpreter can’t make the replacement until it’s about to execute the line as __bool__ and __len__ are both (Python’s equivalent of) virtual functions, so it’s got to know the runtime type to know if the substitution is valid. Once it’s that late, it’ll often be faster to execute the requested function than work out if it could execute something faster instead. Even with type hints, it’s possible that a subclass with overridden methods could be passed in, so it’s not safe to do anything until the real runtime type is known.

    Once there’s a JIT involved, there’s an opportunity to detect the common types passed to a function and call specialised implementations, but I don’t think Python’s JIT is clever enough for this. LuaJIT definitely does this kind of optimisation, though.