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Welcome to Wikifunctions

wikifunctions.org

21–30 of 179 posts

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> I don’t think an encyclopaedia should cater to racist views of its readers over factual information Uh, nobody thinks this. I'm sensing an straw man argument fast incoming.. > So it seems unreasonable to stretch the truth to diversify or narrow down the number of people you mention It's entirely unclear where you see the truth being stretched? Factually recognizing important contributions by people from under-repre…

> Uh, nobody thinks this. I'm sensing an straw man argument fast incoming..

Of course they do. That's what they say:

> The way I understand the program of decolonizing mathematics is to follow two principles:

> first, to recognize the contributions of people with diverse backgrounds, in order to offer more protagonists who can inspire and with whom more people can identify > second, to provide examples and motivations that are relatable to under-represented backgrounds and identities, in order to reach and be more immediately helpful to more people

They imply that people will more readily identify and congregate with people of their own racial and ethnic background. That may be true, that doesn't make it any less racist.

> It's entirely unclear where you see the truth being stretched? Factually recognizing important contributions by people from under-represented backgrounds is doing the exact opposite of narrowing the "number of people you mention".

If you factually recognize important contributions, you don't have to make any efforts or care about the raised issue.

> It's literally mentioning more people who contributed to a certain effort or field of study.

Mentioning more than what?

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#23
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your outrage at this seems to be analogous to outrage of people who think that it is horrible that Unix has a "kill" operation. Basically, you don't understand that "decolonization" is a metaphor for a broader historical perspective, and instead you're trying to interpret it literally and in a bad faith.

The only ones talking about "decolonization" are on one very extreme side of the political spectrum and trying to inject identity politics into everything. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33607032

I don't understand your argument. Where is, aside from the word "decolonization", the author of that document trying to "inject identity politics"? And to what end? (And you certainly seem to be concerned by identity of the people making those claims..)

Take a step back and think about how your statement really sounds. It's like saying that "a group of extremist geeks who wrote Unix is trying to inject violence into everything". It's faux outrage that misses the point.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#24
I love the idea of having a wiki-based spec for the best implementation and/or algorithm that has a bangin' talk page and I can generally trust for most situations.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#25
Wikifunctions is primarily intended to support Wikimedia projects, especially Abstract Wikipedia. It is the code complement to Wikidata lexemes. It might be used for cross-wiki templates to reduce existing duplication and other auxiliary tasks, but Abstract Wikipedia is the reason it was proposed.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#26
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your outrage at this seems to be analogous to outrage of people who think that it is horrible that Unix has a "kill" operation. Basically, you don't understand that "decolonization" is a metaphor for a broader historical perspective, and instead you're trying to interpret it literally and in a bad faith.

People also got mad at Git for having default branch named master.

Yeah, and it was misguided and irrelevant all the same. People who actually use Git understand that "master" is a metaphor, just like people who are concerned about historical views being represented understand that "decolonization" is also a metaphor for this due dilligence.

Context is everything. You're not gonna be killed by Unix command, enslaved by Github, and the land you own is not going to be confiscated by people who are writing an encyclopedia.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#27
post #19

What is everyone's favorite function / formula? Mine is n/(n+x) It has a bunch of interesting aspects: As n gets bigger, it goes from 0 to 1. When n equals x, it is 0.5 As n gets bigger, the difference between n and n+1 gets smaller For two sufficiently large n's, the results are equal. Say somebody told you about a new cafe in town and that it is completely awesome. The best cafe ever. What probability do you assign…

Doesn't quite work. If nobody has told you about the cafe, the probability that it is awesome should not be zero.

Perhaps you only define the trust function from n=1+

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#29
Wondering, if a function execution will be able to (a) be called from a URL, with inputs `https://wikifunctions.org/to-base-64?input=my%20string` (b) retrieve the output from the URL `https://wikifunctions.org/tobase-64?output=bXkgc3RyaW5n`? It could be used directly from the Browser's Omnibox URL address bar, such as with https://searx.be/info/en/search-syntax, https://duckduckgo.com/bangs, https://github.com/internet4000/find

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#30
post #19

What is everyone's favorite function / formula? Mine is n/(n+x) It has a bunch of interesting aspects: As n gets bigger, it goes from 0 to 1. When n equals x, it is 0.5 As n gets bigger, the difference between n and n+1 gets smaller For two sufficiently large n's, the results are equal. Say somebody told you about a new cafe in town and that it is completely awesome. The best cafe ever. What probability do you assign…

Doesn't quite work. If nobody has told you about the cafe, the probability that it is awesome should not be zero. Perhaps you only define the trust function from n=1+

Good point! The formula indeed assumes a base probability of zero. That's actually why I put "The best cafe ever" in there and that it is called an "exceptionally awesome cafe". I got a bit lax later in the text just calling it "awesome".

For a cafe aficionado, who spends most of their time in cafes, reading HN and thinking about formulas, the probability that some random cafe becomes their new favorite is virtually zero.

In other words: The more cafes you already know, the closer to zero the chance that a random one will be the best of them all.

So yeah, it is a formula for cafe lovers. Not for the casual person who is happy with a random filtered coffee swill from the vending machine. Those would have to add a base probability, turning the formula into something like b+n/(n+x)*(1-b).

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