This certainly won't solve the problem, but I would at least like to banish the term "side load", which is a kind of Orwellian word that takes something everyone used to do all the time and makes it sound obscure and a bit nefarious. Maybe we, the tech literate, can start calling sideloading a "free install" or something. When asked, we can clarify that the 'free' stands for both freedom, and not paying middlemen 30%.
I really don't understand this war on language that is so prevalent in tech circles. There's a bunch of these like switching git branches from "master" to "main" or "blacklist"/"whitelist" to "allowlist"/"denylist" and I have yet to see a single problem that all of this term shuffling has actually solved.
If it weren't effective, large businesses and interest ("lobby") groups wouldn't spend millions on trying to establish certain words.
Calling it "sideloading" instead of "installing" software successfully cements the notion that it is somehow not a completely normal thing to do. That's problem solved for the Googles and Apples of the world.
True, but on the other hand the meaning of words often follows usage rather than the other way around.
There is no choice of words that will make it normal to install mobile apps from anywhere other than an app store. Whatever word we use will take on the meaning of doing something unusual.
"Sideloading" doesn't have an inherent or deeply ingrained negative connotation. I don't see a reason to try to change it.
It's usually pushed by people who want to feel "modern" and "proper". It doesn't have any value added, never helped anyone other than people who pushed that.
The curious thing about the word "slave" is that it originates from "slavs" i.e. people living in slavic countries, who were forced to slavery, yet we aren't freaking about that (I'm a slav by myself), it's just a word.
There are societies, however, where words aren't (shouldn't be) treated emotionally, like engineers and scientists. Engineers put priority on ease of communication and clarity. We just do the job, we didn't ask for DEI lectures. You want to be included - show your skills. As simple as that.
Just because it's not conscious and intentional doesn't mean that there isn't still an effect.
It's the way our brains work - the intention doesn't necessarily matter. Next time you're pissed off, try expressing out loud how "darn peeved" you are and watch how much words change how we think and feel
Apples and oranges. Blacklist→allowlist is 2010s social justice virtue signalling thing. Sideloading→installing is about a word that is scary to normies vs a word that's completely normal and neutral.
See the history of words such as "jaywalking" or "carbon footprint" and how their usage cements the respective ideas.
It's not an apples and oranges thing, it's the same practice of changing one term to an another because someone out there chose to believe that these words are somehow so powerful that they're pushing away swaths of people. You have no way of proving that "side loading" somehow scares away people because such proof does not exist.
It’s modern tech sycophancy. Meaningless change that serves no one, but the ones pushing it. They get to say they did something to “fight” some sort of inequality when it’s all just performative. Worse, in the examples you gave, it draws attention away from real issues to fight a culture war that was kind of already won years ago.
This is a great point. Not sure if it’s possible, would be great if there was some way to reclaim the notion of installing software as a general practice, regardless of whether a computer is “mobile” or “desktop”.
Like people still download software packages from the web on Windows, MacOS, and Linux… right? Maybe hard to grasp for the kids that grew up with tablets with no notion of a file system, idk
I think of it as manual installation, since I also have to manually update it. The app stores automatically install and update it (they find the appropriate APK for my device, download it, run the installer, and do the equivalent each time a new version is released).
Direct install isn't true either when you think about package managers like Fdroid, Epic store, etc. They are about as indirect as the official stores. Perhaps you should try 'user loads' for them and something like 'officially blessed loads' for the play and app stores. (I hope the latter is offensive enough to let the users know that it's the corporations in control)
Focusing on "stores" is part of this problem in the first place.
It's one of those seemingly innocent UI and communications changes that causes most users to develop a wrong mental model that obscures what's actually happening.
F-droid isn't actually installing the app. Neither does Play Store or Galaxy Store. Nor does Steam install your games on PC. People think they do, because the store fronts take over informing about installation progress. This little UI change alone - taking over the installer's progress bar - makes people develop bad mental models.
Direct installation is a great term IMHO. That's what you do when you download an APK onto your phone's file system, and then use e.g. file manager app to find that APK file, and run the system's package installer over it.
All F-Droid or Play Store or other stores do is to automate the "find the right APK" and "invoke installation" parts.
I thought that was the default understanding. That's one of the options you have to choose in many installers. For example, an option exists to install the software over ADB from within Android (eg: Shizuku). So, one of the other options you get is "install using system package manager" or something similar. In fact, that was the only method that worked for me until recently.
> When asked, we can clarify that the 'free' stands for both freedom, and not paying middlemen 30%.
Every time you have to clarify, it’s another opportunity to lose the asker. It’s not a good strategy to use a term we have to keep defining or that people may misunderstand. Stallman and the FSF continue to make that mistake and we have had decades to understand that’s a bad approach.
Call it something else, like a “direct install” or something better. You can still have a deeper meaning to it (“direct because it bypasses the App Store middleman”) but make it something people can understand fast. You can’t fight marketing with ideology alone, you have to beat them at their own game.
I'm so used to installing via F-Droid or straight APKs, installing something using the Play store feels weird and hack-y. If anyone's doing the "side loading" I think it's Google :P
I recently started learning the piano as an adult, and from what i've gathered from reading and watching videos, the 'folk wisdom' about how to avoid rsi-type injuries is to minimize tension in your wrist by maximizing relaxation of your fingers and wrists (especially the thumbs, which tend to get locked into a permanent state of mild tension on the piano keyboard). So you want to do your best to develop more finger independence, so that you can press with one finger while keeping the neighboring fingers relaxed. It's really hard.
If you can I'd recommend getting piano teacher and live lessons. I got one and improvement in posture was a biggest gain I got. That and some cultural push (e.g. there's no wrong music, only the music someone doesn't like, or put piano next to window to learn to not watch on own hands).
I’ve thought quite a bit about getting a teacher, but have hesitated for a few [somewhat legitimate] reasons. Among them, I’m partially disabled and can’t practice consistently. However, having a teacher berate me about my posture would actually probably help that at least a little bit, now that you mention in :-) Thanks for taking the time to share your experience and encouragement with me! Best of luck on your lessons as well.
Describing it as "Octopus DJ with no fingers" got rid of the hands for me, but interestingly, also removed every anthropomorphized element of the octopus, so that it was literally just an octopus spinning turntables.
I don't think that characterization is fair at all. It's certainly true that you, me, and most humans can't solve these problems with any amount of time or energy. But the problems are specifically written to be at the limit of what the actual high school students who participate can solve in four hours. Letting the actual students taking the test have four days instead of four hours would make a massive difference in their ability to solve them.
Said differently, the students, difficulty of the problems, and time limit are specifically coordinated together, so the amount of joules of energy used to produce a solution is not arbitrary. In the grand scheme of how the tech will improve over time, it seems likely that doesn't matter and the computers will win by any metric soon enough, but Tao is completely correct to point out that you haven't accurately told us what the machines can do today, in July 2025, without telling us ahead of time exactly what rules you are modifying.
> you haven't accurately told us what the machines can do today
It told us that using probably unreasonable compute they can solve few math problems that are very hard to solve for high-schools students in 4 hours. That's all the rules. No need to state them ahead of time or at all because they are obvious from the context.
It was just a fun thing to check and good meme for the media. Obviously the machines can do a lot more in some aspects and a lot less in others.
If we at least maintain the current pace in few years instead of machines solving 5 problems almost all high-schools students are incapable of solving in 4 hours they are gonna solve a problem Terence Tao is not capable of solving in one lifetime. Hopefully.
I looked at the Typst documentation and from what I could tell, it has 3 hard-coded "Modes" for 3 hard-coded kinds of syntax (normal, math, code). I couldn't find any way to add any custom syntax - is there a way to do this?
Tex/LaTeX are completely syntactically extensible. For example, a logician might want to use the software with any number of their notations, or a physicist drawing Feynmann diagrams, etc. I think at one point Lillypad used it for typesetting sheet music.
I hated most Latex syntactic extensions that I ever has to deal with. They basically force you to learn completly different languages, each with their own quirks. I found simple function-looking macros to most often be more intuitive and reliable.
"The researchers analyzed bilingual dictionaries between English and more than 600 languages, looking for what they call “lexical elaboration,” in which a language has many words related to a core concept. It’s the same phenomenon that fueled the Inuit debate. But this study brings a twist: rather than the number of words, it measured their proportion, the slice of dictionary real estate taken up by a concept."
This seems inadequate to make the kinds of claims the researchers are quoted as asserting in the article.
Indeed, I looked at some highly scored words for Polish in google translate and they are words where the foreign word, transliterations into Polish, and Polish word are used. And when you pare it down to say five real distinctive meanings, you often find similar less commonly used synonyms in English. Also as I was looking through it seemed that possibly it was not taking into consideration verb vs. noun in English cause the counts seemed oddly way off for some where it could have happened. If you are familiar with English and another language, I would like to know what you see.
Icelandic has a bunch of dictionary abbrevations: medic(al), temp(us), germ(anic), veg(etation). Tarifit is dominated by linguistic terminology. German has a few German words that look like English words meaning something completely different (mantel, tier, boot, stall), one loanword (angst) and what might be dictionary abbrevations again: humor(ous), miner(alogy), spa(nish)...
I think the issue was that they are representing a real as a product of a rational and that more complicated type, so without a symbolic representation for 1, when representing and rational, they would have to multiply it by a RRA representation of 1 which brings in all the decision problem issues.
It was discovered that the procedure mechanism of Algol 60 was effectively equivalent to the lambda calulus. This insight was written out in a famous paper by Peter Landin, "Correspondence between ALGOL 60 and Church's Lambda-notation: part I"
