Well, it is essentially the same-but-modernized party as that which held eastern Germany under the boot of communism for for some 45+ years. They took the route taken by so many communist parties after the dissolution of the Soviet Union by changing their name, here from SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) via PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) to Die Linke (The Left) so that certainly is something to keep in mind. This is the party which built a wall to keep people from leaving their supposed workers and farmers paradise, shooting those who tried to cross over. It may be filled with young women with odd hair colors instead of stodgy old men but the ideology hasn't changed a whit and is ready to add a few more millions to its death toll.
It is patently absurd that communism is still considered as a legitimate ideology while it should be placed right next to Nazism in the "never again" category. It is responsible for more death and suffering than the latter but those edgy students - who don't seem to learn much at all there in academia - don't seem to know or care.
Look, it's a nice sounding narrative with a sprinkle of truth, but it proves a lot less than it sounds like it does.
There were specific reasons historical communism had such a large death toll, and it traces back mostly to the policies that were introduced and the decisions the political elite made.
So I think it's fair to compare actual policies, and not to judge on the basis of whether someone calls themselves a communist, or whether that label gets applied to them.
To my knowledge, Die Linke is not a revolutionary party, doesn't want to force through breakneck industrialization at any cost, and doesn't deny foundational agricultural science.
Oh good lord, the utter majority of the Left Party today weren't even alive in the GDR period (and of those that were, a good bunch got yeeted to the BSW). And on top of that, all the other parties have gobbled up their East German Blockparteien as well and we don't label them collaborators either, nor do we call the CDU and especially CSU a Nazi party despite many former NSDAP members ending up there post WW2 (or a ton of them forming the AfD a decade ago).
Obviously after 36 years many people of Die Linke were not alive when the wall fell. But it’s still the same party as the SED, just a different name.
The CDU and the CSU have nothing to do with the NSDAP.
At some point in time in Germany 30% of the population were either part of the NSDAP or the Nazi Army. Luckily most of them were not war criminals and move on with their lives. And yes, some of them ended in the CDU/CSU but also of the SED/Die Linke.
Just to give you an example, around 10-15% of the DDR state officials had held NSDAP membership pre-1945.
Does that make the DDR a successor of the Nazi Regime? Obviously not. The same about the CDU/CSU.
But Die Linke is still the same party as the SED. Same organization, which just voted themselves into different names.
Usually IEEE floats have an implied 1 in the front. So for the standard represented numbers, there's some minimum number 1.bbbbbb.. * 2^-N. This allows 1bit more precision than is actually stored.
between any two numbers, there's basically the same epsilon difference, but from the smallest number to zero it's bigger.
A subnormal number breaks that convention, it just becomes 0.bbbbb... * 2^-N. As the numbers get smaller, the relative difference between the numbers gets larger. That also means their precision is smaller than the normal floats.
Why not just use an 8-bit LUT to encode the 256 most common ternary vectors with 6 components. That means of the possible 729 possible such vectors, you can only represent 256 different ones. You have to do more aggressive rounding, but at least the scheme is very simple to decompress and stream.
I think the weights are iid distributed, so all 729 patterns will be roughly equally likely. That doesn't make this a bad idea though -- it just means there's no point trying to select the most common 256 to keep, since any 256 will be roughly as good.
In the article it said that in ternary, the majority of weights are 0. The components may be independent, but any group of weights won't be evenly distributed across all probable occurences.
Good point, I was wrong. Groups of weights having more zeros will be more likely, so should be favoured. Due to independence there won't be any meaningful difference in frequencies between two groups of weights that have the same number of zeros, but that doesn't invalidate the above.
It is indeed very strange and annoying. And I don't remember it being so bad ten years ago (although I had to use witcher for alt-tabbing - which actually worked well, unlike AltTab now). Since Linux, and both OG Mac Os, I am used to having multiple Desktops, in total multiple windows of the same applications (browsers, pdf reader, office, file browser). Mac Os is completely hostile towards doing multiple tasks at the same time, and compartmentalizing them into desktops -- you keep getting thrown around to random windows on random desktops (example if you close a window), it's super difficult to find your windows, it's just crazy. You're afraid of ever moving away from a window.
I think this paradim is also what's makes the Mac OS feel snappy. If basically having multiple windows for one software open is "holding it wrong", the OS is pushing you into one application, one window paradigm. As long as you do that, everything is pretty quick. But don't dare open two browser windows, or even worse, two windows of a word processor. The performance will degrade (and you'll keep searching for your windows...)
I don't know, while I miss the super+right click drag to resize window and super+left click drag to move window from KDE on my work machine, I also kinda miss the smoothness of macOS's handling of many windows and desktops utilizing the trackpad on my gaming desktop. The swipe up and down/ctrl+arrow up and down to juggle windows within the desktop, and then left/right to move between desktops even makes their at first awkward handling of fullscreening apps feel right and efficient. What I really miss in KDE though is multiple virtual desktops per display I can switch independently per display. Actually makes me enjoy using multiple monitors slightly slightly more on macOS. What I sadly can't see happening is a merging of KDE, macOS, and the superior i3, as there would be too few few safe shortcut combinations available for programs to rely on.
I don’t get it either. What are these people doing that keep saying that Mac OS is snappy. It’s the same slow garbage as windows.
One problem is that you need Firefox because safari doesn’t peppery do ad blocking. But once you have 20 tabs open or so, it uses 5GB GB ram. But perhaps your also need safari for something else. That’s another 5GB of RAM. Then once you count a finder replacement (2GB ram), and some office stuff (probably 1-4GB for each app window), 16GB of ram are almost as sluggish as an old windows laptop. Add MS Teams, and the thing is brought to it’s knees. And Mac OS has a lot of quirks and the window management is atrocious (alt-tab doesn’t switch between app windows, a bunch of apps to get alt-tab behavior don’t work properly either).
I feel like more and more that Mac Users are being forced by the atrocious window management to only have one window open per software, so then the system is fast. Problem is when you have multiple tasks going on in parallel, then you need many windows and desktops.
I don't really think it's all that much about macOS. I think it more has to do with the state of web development - claude.com or chat.com or grok.com all can use up to 5GB of RAM as an idle webpage in the background regardless of browser. Most apps these days seem to be electron apps which can fire off multiple 4+ GB node processes doing who knows what.
I think most true native apps don't have these issues. Unfortunately there is very little incentive to build on the macOS platform these days, which is where I point more of the finger at Apple. UX, UI, & DX are all quite a bit worse for Mac native.
I live with safari and finder and all my office ware is native (mail.app) or web based (Google Docs). Chat is via slack, but I use the website and not the native app. I've adapted to the quirks and I'd bet that's a lot of the reason why it doesn't feel slow to me. I feel I have plenty of windows open at once but likely less than you do.
If you have to use specialized software to make your system snappy, then it is, as a system, not snappy. The attitude about the MacBook is that it never slows down … what, unless you use MS office?
my point was I'm not using specialized software, I'm using the software shipped with the system. MS Office isn't Apple Software, so holding apple responsible for Microsoft code quality seems counter to your first point.
If I have Office stuff open and the whole system crawls, then the system isn’t snappy.
It’s like the claim is “get a Mac and you’ll never see a slow down ever again! Just as long as you run software that won’t make the whole system come to a crawl”
They were junior party in many previous coalitions.
The weird thing this election was: there were like 7 parties with a mayor candidate - and none of them grew up in Berlin.
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