Just because it’s in GitHub doesn’t mean it’s more credible than the stuff my mother posts on Facebook about mark zuckerberg not having permission to use her photos.
What I love about that report is that the author created it with the intention of making Stallman look bad. And if you look at the author's summaries, he looks bad. However, the author also made us the favour of collecting all the statements in one single place. And if you look at the things that Stallman actually said (as opposed to the author's summaries) he doesn't look bad, he looks strictly correct.
Yeah yeah but the reason why I link to that, is that if someone is interested they can with minimal effort find by themselves all the information to understand it was just a smear job.
Like, someone says "C assaulted B". And Stallman says "If A forces B to offer herself to C, C didn't assault B". Which is obivously correct. It could only be incorrect if you were redefining words to serve your purposes.
I had a look at what Stallman said and what Minsky allegedly did.
Apparently, Minsky had sex with one of Epstein's girls, who later said she was forced into it. Now, his wife denies the allegation, as she was apparently with him at all times on Epstein's island.
Now, I can believe that he went once, and maybe had sex with someone he didn't know was not doing so willingly. But, what about his wife? Was he cheating on her? Was she a part of it?
And why did he return a second time? And after Epstein's conviction in 2011???
And here comes Stallman, and he's not even denying that he's slept with someone, potentially cheating on his wife? His issue is with the wording?
He is a weird, socially awkward, maybe autistic guy. And such people tend to be quite pedantic and focused on strange details that "normal" people just jump over.
His issue is that saying "assault" to mean "sex with someone" is dishonest, even if that person is 17. Which is obviously is.
Any sane person hears "assault" and thinks that means "assault" instead it means something else.
What is happening is that the meaning of words are being changed for the purpose of using pre-existing laws. Example, you think that Bla is very bad and isn't punished enough by the law. There's law that severaly punishes Fleem. So, whenever you see Bla you call it Fleem and argue that the anti-Fleem law applies. That way you can effectively re-purpose a law. Specific example: "catcalling" is now "sexual assault" in the UK. It's easier to do it this way, than to argue that people should be punished for catcalling.
Ok, but surely there are more important thing going on there than the wording.
It feels like Stallman wants to defend his friend, but doesn't really have any way to do that. So, instead, he pivots to pedantry.
Like ok, assuming that Marvin really did not know, it's wrong to label him as a sexual assaulter(?). Though legally a sexual assault still occured.
But, it still doesn't explain, justify or deny that he allegedly slept with someone , possibly behind his wife's back. And it also doesn't explain that they went *BACK* to Epstein's island after knowing he was a sex trafficker. And that presumably the girl he slept with might have also been trafficked.
The specific point I'm talking about is the accusation of Minsky. To my point (and Stallman's) doesn't matter if coersion was done by Epstein or Mickey Mouse.
Anyway, I get that you're confused. However, I've lost interest in talking to you.
Many big institutions lean heavily on mobile apps and other gated computing.
I live in BC Canada and by far the easiest way to authenticate a login to provincial sources involves using the BC ID App as a second factor, even when logging in via desktop. Many banks now also use their app as a second factor, rather than a generic OTP option that can run on any hardware.
There were also issues like running Netflix DRM in browser on Linux for a while.
General purpose computers won’t go away, but they will continue to be gated from more and more services until you are more or less required to have a phone or locked down ecosystem device.
> Many banks now also use their app as a second factor, rather than a generic OTP option that can run on any hardware.
This is one I’m willing to tolerate, as long as it’s optional. Something I don’t understand though is banking app setup. When I got a new phone this year, the RBC app made me submit some kind of live selfie.
The thing is, I know they can scan your debit card with NFC and authenticate the PIN. I’ve used it for a password reset in the past. Why is a selfie better than that when they presumably have nothing to compare it to?
It would be quite a scandal, legally and socially, if it was discovered that a bank was creating a database of images of their customers without consent.
That's quite interesting! So in Canada, it seems PIPEDA means the banks can't use atm video footage to build client profiles. Cannot say the same for the US, unfortunately.
According to ChatGPT: Only Illinois, Texas, and Washington really constrain that, and Illinois is the only one with real teeth.
> Many banks now also use their app as a second factor, rather than a generic OTP option that can run on any hardware.
A financial institution I have an account with requires MFA to log in, and the only options they support are SMS MFA and their proprietary smartphone app. This is acutely annoying to me, because it means I have to get up and get my phone if I want to log into this site from my PC (or rig up a complicated Android emulator setup).
Jia Tan with the XZ backdoor was caught because some performance obsessed person noticed a tiny delay... I'm sure they learned their lesson and are ensuring their next backdoor doesn't impact performance.
That is the insidious question - how many parallel efforts were/are in play when xz was going down? Surely that was not the only long term plan to compromise an "unrelated" component of system security. The Jia Tan organization might have already inserted back doors into dozens of different projects by now.
This aligns with what I've observed in computational physics.
Trying to handle instantaneous constraints and propagating modes with a single timestepper is often suboptimal.
I developed a framework that systematically separates these components: using direct elliptic solvers for constraints and explicit methods for flux evolution. The resulting algorithms are both more stable and more efficient than unified implicit approaches.
The key insight is that many systems (EM, GR, fluids, quantum mechanics) share the same pattern:
- An elliptic constraint equation (solved directly, not timestepped)
- A continuity law for charge/mass/probability flux
- Wave-like degrees of freedom (handled with explicit methods)
Witgh this structure, you can avoid the stiffness issues entirely rather than trying to power through them with implicit methods.
Please don't "publish" on Zenodo. If you think your work has merit, go arXiv -> peer review -> open access journal. Otherwise, put it on your own website. Zenodo is a repository for artefacts (mainly datasets): if you try to put papers on it, people will think you're a crank. It's about as damaging for your reputation (and the reputation of your work) as a paper mill.
Of course, make sure you've done a thorough literature search, and that your paper is written from the perspective of "what is the contribution of this paper to the literature?", since most people reading your work will not read it in isolation: it'll be the hundredth or thousandth paper they've skimmed, trying to find those dozen papers relevant to their work.
Just to add, people in the field are unlikely to find a paper on Zenodo. I don't think any of the major search engines or databases for papers will include anything on Zenodo in their results.
That said, posting on arXiv can't be done unless someone vouches for you, which might be difficult or not for an independent person.
I think the best bet would be to submit your paper directly to a journal. However the paper in GP is unlikely to be published by any reputable journal. One direct feedback: if you can't explain at the start why your paper is relevant to current researcher's then why should anyone care? A sniff test for this is that you discuss in the introduction recent papers which have tried to solve the same or similar problems. But GP paper's references are over two decades old.
Getting someone to endorse you on arXiv is easy if you have work to show. (If you don't get endorsed, it's theoretically possible that the endorser might plagiarise your work, but you'll have a paper trail to prove it; I've heard more stories of PhD supervisors plagiarising their students' work than of arXiv endorsers doing so.) It's hard for us plebs who don't yet have work to put on the arXiv to get endorsements, but that's not actually much of a problem.
In practical terms it’s not unusual to reset the integrator when something instantaneous happens. When i did magnetic research, an application of instantaneous field for e.g. usually required this because otherwise the adaptive integrator spends a lot of time reducing the time step size
> Trying to handle instantaneous constraints and propagating modes with a single timestepper is often suboptimal.
When I read statements like this, I wonder if this is related to optimal policy conditions required for infinitely lived Bellman equations to have global and per-period policies in alignment
That's a fascinating parallel! both involve separating timeless constraints (value function / elliptic equation) from temporal dynamics (policy / flux evolution).
Trying to timestep through a constraint that should hold instantaneously creates artificial numerical difficulties. The Bellman equation's value iteration is actually another example of this same pattern...
The core conditions for Bellman policy equivalence are pretty straightforward and handled in Stokey/Lucas, Recursive Dynamics:
[1] Discounting: The discount factor β ∈ (0,1) is crucial. It ensures convergence of the value function and prevents “infinite accumulation” problems.
[2] Compactness of state/action sets: The feasible action correspondence Γ(x) is nonempty, compact-valued, and upper hemicontinuous in the state x. The state space X is compact (or at least the feasible set is bounded enough to avoid unbounded payoffs).
[3] Continuity: The return (or reward) function u(x,a) is continuous in (x,a). The transition law f(x,a) is continuous in (x,a).
[4] Bounded rewards: u(x,a) is bounded (often assumed continuous and bounded). This keeps the Bellman operator well-defined and ensures contraction mapping arguments go through.
[5] Contraction mapping property: With discounting and bounded payoffs, the Bellman operator is a contraction on the space of bounded continuous functions. This guarantees existence and uniqueness of the value function V.
[6] Measurable selection for policies: Under the above continuity and compactness assumptions, the maximum in the Bellman equation is attained, and there exists a measurable policy function g(x) that selects optimal actions.
https://github.com/MidnightBSD/src/commit/7d956a27123f2d77a0...