It might be fair play, however. If I correctly recall, LessWrong had, for a while, a prominent wiki admin who had been punted from Wikipedia for his frothing npov.
I am not aware of Less Wrong having a Wikipedia admin. Are you perhaps thinking about David Gerard, admin of RationalWiki and Wikipedia, who once got in trouble for his decade-long internet crusade against Scott Alexander?
I will throw in an additional factor: any group, community, or segmentation of the general population wherein the participants both tend to have a higher than average intelligence (whatever that means) and whose preoccupation revolves around almost any form of cogitation, consideration, products of human thought ... will invariably get hit with some form of snobbery/envy, even if no explicitly stated intelligence threshold or gatekeeping is present.
Bluntly put, you are not allowed to be even a little smart and not all "aww shucks" about it. It has to be in service of something else like medicine or being a CPA. (Fun fact I found in a statistics course: the average CPA has about five points of IQ on the average doctor.) And it is almost justified, because you are in constant peril of falling down into your own butt until you disappear, but at the same time it keeps a lot of people under the thumb (or heel, pick your oppressive body part) of dumbass managers and idiots who blithely plow forward without a trace of doubt.
Odd. As an undergrad in physics, we had a project for our team which involved percolation theory and "testing" it. So, we had to make differing grids of conductive ink, with a certain number of "links" (resistors, edges in the graph) as missing. Getting even-flowing conductive ink was hard. I wrote all of the software for the XY plotter, pushing out instructions to make rectangular and triangular grids. Then we would measure the resistance from one side to another.
I have a fairly unusual genetic disorder, and quite rare to boot in this particular variant. The gold standard cocktail contains a medication which, while effective in dealing with one facet of the pain, absolutely turns down the dimmer switch on my mind in fairly particular ways. Gait is affected the next day, along with a mild aphasia. During the peak, however, I am dumb as a box of rocks. Math and spatial business seem fine. I can still program, however. Just do not talk to me, as communication is ... troublesome.
I usually skip this portion of the cocktail unless things are particularly bad. The disorder is progressive, so when it comes for my brain, well, that's when things are over. I do not have much going on for me in terms of personal value except for, well, solving problems.
A very close friend of mine has had two hospitalizations for gangrene, and the second one absolutely devastated his cognitive abilities. He has leveled off at about eighty-five percent of where he was before. If he is tired or feeling unwell, verbal perseveration begins.
My mother is fairly well-on in her years. She used to have a tremendous vocabulary, despite her very limited education. Now, she has begun to lose words and I end up "translating" for her because I know what she is getting at. She could do crosswords but refuses to, even the Monday selections, which are typically the easiest. Very recently, she has begun misplacing things. I had my suspicions, and during a routine head, neck, and brain imaging for something else, I checked out the results and, sure enough, some loss of volume in the right hippocampus.
I had to gently chide a surgeon who came out in the middle of a friend's hysterectomy (and bonus ovary removal) to do a kind of "drive by, not expecting any kind of feedback" picture show in the middle for not having a plan on adhesion barriers. He hadn't planned on doing them!
I pointed out her history (or hystery, heh) and the kinda obvious gluey, webby bits in the pictures (they're quite visible once you look at enough of them).
Then I grilled him on which of the then-three brands were on the market and which were had on hand. Dude acted like he was just yanking a bad video card on a Friday afternoon, which I found less than optimal.
I was not surprised when, post-surgery, the rest of the staff attempted to hustle us out the door. I had abort their well-rehearsed ejection procedure to get aftercare instructions ... and to make sure the scripts had already been called in ... and then to get the follow-up appointment cemented and the "oh shit something has gone wrong" post-surgical emergency contact information. I suppose in the future they will have a kind of water slide from the recovery room into the parking lot, and they just will aim for the open passenger-side door.
I am keeping an eye on this thread, as I plan to eventually rip my somewhat large collection, but would prefer to do it just the one time.
Exact Audio Copy, the author seems to have moved on to other interests, which is a shame because I was looking for something compatible with an autoloader. And it looks like dbpoweramp is the only one left in that arena.
I am allllll about the metadata. Also, a thumbnail, synced lyrics if they could be found, custom metadata for hyperlinks back to entries on Discogs and MusicBrainz, perhaps some ReplayGain values in fields on the FLAC, depending on my MP3 processing case ... but I have so many unanswered questions.
> Exact Audio Copy, the author seems to have moved on to other interests, which is a shame because I was looking for something compatible with an autoloader.
Nah, it's mostly just reached the stage where there's nothing left to do - all the "objective" stuff works as it should, and any feature adds would be a pretty heavy undertaking. It was updated a little less than a year ago, and when I contacted the author he was very responsive.
Would it be nice to have a keyboard shortcut for proper [1] cuesheet creation (ironically, all the options except the proper one have keyboard shortcuts)? Yeah, but I've learned to live with it. Would it be nice to have super-duper tagging options? I dunno, from where I'm sitting, it seems like it'd just be duplicating a bunch of foobar2000 features for negligible gain.
[1] Because nobody wants a .FLAC that starts with a few seconds of silence, inter-track gaps need to be appended to the end of the previous track, which is not how Red Book audio handles it, and means that the "proper" cuesheet format is technically a non-compliant cuesheet.
> Because nobody wants a .FLAC that starts with a few seconds of silence, inter-track gaps need to be appended to the end of the previous track
Side digression: For regular albums, where the pregap is just two seconds of silence I can absolutely understand that and prefer to put the pregap at the end of the previous song myself.
However for live albums my feelings are a bit more torn – on the one hand there is something to the music starting immediately when playing a random track, but on the other hand any stage patter that might be present in the pregap usually refers to the upcoming track, and having that incongruously stuck at the end of the preceding track is at least to me somewhat annoying during random playback, too.
Or Poul Anderson's Brainwave (1953), in which the Earth finally leaves a part of the galaxy which inadvertently made thinking hard. And everything with two neurons to rub together gets smarter, not just humans. Essentially, we evolved in what Vinge would later call "The Unthinking Depths" (if memory serves) to deal with the strain.
I used to work mapping in EMS. It is absolutely not that simple, nor will it ever be. Yes, Google was often wrong. Sometimes I would drive out to a street to make sure I had not lost my mind.
Sometimes, the local addressing authority was wrong, and I would have to prove it to them. "But it was checked!" It was checked wrong. Street numbers would be off by thousands. It would take some pointing out of obvious problems in the progression of numbers, plus a plat, plus an email from the building manager to prove to them that I knew what I was talking about.
I was contacted by a woman who kept having drivers for all kinds of services attempt to use her driveway as a street, even if she had a sign up, which she did. Her local municipality was no help. Nobody was. She was irked and frantic, as these trucks would destroy her driveway, lawn, even garden.
Much digging ensued. It turned out that the proximal source of the error was a statewide system, one of many which Google simply hoovers up and digests like a baleen whale siphoning up plankton, then digests and tries to "make work." I got the proximal source to make a correction, which they might publish in another three months. The original source of the error was a long-missing minor street from many decades ago, which I had to find in caches of searches and the like.
It was idle curiosity, but it took me about twenty hours of digging on evenings and weekends.
Address points are easy. Parcels, aka the polygons upon which zero to many address points might rest, are harder. Road networks are terrifically hard. I managed to catalog ten different cases of road discontinuity in the process of trying to find such things in an automatic fashion. And I might not be bright enough to have enumerated them all!
And then we have cases of people who deliberately insist that their address number is "00." As in the first two-thirds of a certain not-so-secret agent's code number. Or imagine the fools who decide to put up a sign at the end of their long driveway and simply declare that it was a road.
Each county has its own addressing standards, and included in each are addresses from the Olden Days, real wild west stuff, which the authorities are just itching to scrape out of their systems once and for all.
None of that applies in my particular case: my country does have a database of addresses and the lookup of the address in question (my address) did produce the correct geographic location.
It was Google that did not bother to update their data for years.
When I code, I try to make everything I write not clever. I am not saving a byte here and there because I am not typing in a program from a magazine in the 1980s (I was there, I am not going back). No code golf. I did my time on the Timex-Sinclair with its miserable two kilobytes of memory and reserved keywords as special-function strokes at a character each.
Each line should do one thing, in general, and it ought to be obvious. Cleverness is held in reserve for when it is truly needed, namely data structures and algorithms.
One of my accomplishments which seems to have mattered only to me is when my apartment-finding/renting system, written entirely in Perl, was transferred into the hands of students, new programming students. Perl is famously "write-once, read-never" and seems to have a culture favoring code golf and executable line noise. Still, the students got back to me and told me how easily-ported everything was, because I had done just one thing per line, avoided $_ and other such shortcuts, and other practices. They were very happy to take it over because I had avoided being cryptic and terse.
