Bloat is a very wide term that in the context of [software](software.md) and [technology](tech.md) means overcomplication, unnecessary complexity and/or extreme growth in terms of source code size, overall complexity, number of [dependencies](dependency.md), [redundancy](redundancy.md), unnecessary and/or useless features (e.g. [feature creep](feature_creep.md)) and resource usage, all of which lead to inefficient, badly designed technology with [bugs](bug.md) (crashes, unusable features, memory leaks, [security](security.md) vulnerabilities, ...), as well as great [obscurity](obscurity.md), ugliness, **loss of [freedom](free_software.md)** and waste of human effort. Simply put bloat is burdening [bullshit](bullshit.md). Bloat is extremely bad and one of the greatest technological issues of today. Creating bloat is bad engineering at its worst and unfortunately it is what's absolutely taking over all technology nowadays, mostly due to [capitalism](capitalism.md) causing commercialization, [consumerism](consumerism.md), rushed "[just works](just_werks.md)" products, creating demand for newer hardware and so on, also allowing incompetent people ("let's push more women/minorities into programming") trying to take on jobs they are in no way qualified to do.
A related but different term is **bloatware**; it's more commonly used among normie users and stands for undesirable programs that eat up computer resources, usually being preinstalled by the computer manufacturer etc. Further on we will focus on bloat as defined previous.
A related but different term is **bloatware**; it's more commonly used among normie users and stands for undesirable programs that eat up computer resources, usually being preinstalled by the computer manufacturer etc. Further on we'll rather focus on bloat as defined before.
@ -4,9 +4,11 @@ Encyclopedia (also encyclopaedia, cyclopedia or cyclopaedia, from Greek *enkykli
**Encyclopedias are awesome**, get as many of them as you can, especially the printed ones -- they are usually relatively cheap (especially second hand books) and provide an ENORMOUS amount of information, FOREVER (no one can cancel your physically owned paper book, you will retain it even after the [collapse](collapse.md) when such books will become practically your only source of human knowledge). Also remember, paper books are still of much higher quality than online resources such as [Wikipedia](wikipedia.md) -- even if they lose in terms of shear volume, they make up in quality of writing and still many times contain information that's not available online, and the older ones are more objective and trustworthy, considering the decline of [free speech](free_speech.md) online. Shorter articles may also do a better job at providing overall summary of a topic and filtering out less important information, as opposed to a gigantic Wikipedia article. Furthermore even if such a book isn't [free as in freedom](free_culture.md), the knowledge, information and data contained in it is in the [public domain](public_domain.md) as such things cannot (yet) be owned, therefore it is possible to legally paraphrase the information into a new source which we may make public domain itself (however watch out to not merely copy-paste texts from encyclopedias as text CAN be [copyrighted](copyright.md), as well as e.g. the mere selection of which facts to include; always be very careful).
Since an encyclopedia will typically focus on encompassing wide knowledge, as the other side of the coin its disadvantage will also oftentimes be shallowness, it will go into greater depth only on very important topics, although very big encyclopedias largely eliminate this issue and go fairly deep on all subjects; encyclopedias specialized on some particular subject can also afford to provide in-depth knowledge.
{ A favorite pastime of mine is looking up the same term in different encyclopedias and comparing them -- this can help get to the essence of actually understanding the term, as well as revealing censorship and different views of the authors. ~drummyfish }
Great nerds read encyclopedias linearly from start to finish just like a normal book, which may help expand one's knowledge as well as ignite curiosity in new things and spot some cool interesting facts.
Great nerds read encyclopedias linearly from start to finish just like a normal book, which may help expand one's knowledge as well as ignite curiosity in new things and spot some cool interesting facts. { And yet bigger nerds write their own encyclopedias. ~drummyfish }
**Similar terms:** encyclopedias, which also used to be called **cyclopedias** in the past, are similar to **dictionaries** and these types of books often overlap (many encyclopedias call themselves dictionaries); the main difference is that a dictionary focuses on providing linguistic information and generally has shorter term definitions, while encyclopedias have longer articles (which however limits their total number, i.e. encyclopedias will usually prefer quality over quantity). Encyclopedias are also a subset of so called **reference works**, i.e. works that serve to provide [information](information.md) and reference to it (other kinds of reference works being e.g. world maps, tabulated values or [API](api.md) references). A **universal/general** encyclopedia is one that focuses on human knowledge at wide, as opposed to an encyclopedia that focuses on one specific field of knowledge. **Compendium** can be seen almost as a synonym to encyclopedia, with encyclopedias perhaps usually being more general and extensive. **Almanac** is also similar to encyclopedia, more focusing on tabular data. **Micropedia** is another term, sometimes used to denote a smaller encyclopedia (one edition of Britannica came with a micropedia as well as a larger macropedia).
*Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions* is an amazing [book](book.md) from 1884, now completely in the [public domain](public_domain.md), whose story takes place in a flat [plane](plane.md), a [two dimensional](2d.md) world inhabited by sentient two dimensional geometric shapes (men being [polygons](polygon.md), [women](woman.md) just [line](line.md) segments). The book is classified as [mathematical](math.md) [fantasy](fantasy.md) -- besides being a very rare case of a great quality, completely public domain fantasy before [The Lord of the Rings](lotr.md), it is also both a social criticism and an interesting and entertaining examination of mathematical and scientific concepts such as "how would two dimensional beings build their houses?", "how would they see?" etc. Flatland was written by Edwin Abbott Abbott, an English theologian, priest and teacher. There were sequels and spinoffs written by other people, even movies, but these aren't generally in the public domain yet.
*Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions* is an amazing [book](book.md) from 1884, now completely in the safe/strong [public domain](public_domain.md), whose story takes place in a flat [plane](plane.md), a [two dimensional](2d.md) world inhabited by sentient two dimensional geometric shapes (men being [polygons](polygon.md), [women](woman.md) just [line](line.md) segments). The book is classified as [mathematical](math.md) [fantasy](fantasy.md) -- besides being a very rare case of an exceptional quality completely public domain fantasy before [The Lord of the Rings](lotr.md), it is also both a social criticism and an [interesting](interesting.md) and entertaining examination of mathematical and scientific concepts such as "how would two dimensional beings build their houses?", "how would they see?" etc. Flatland was written by Edwin Abbott Abbott, an English theologian, priest and teacher. There were sequels and spinoffs written by other people, even movies, but these aren't generally in the public domain yet.
{ As the book is in the safe public domain, I won't restrain from going on deeper on summarizing the plot etc., legal dangers of any "infringements" are quite definitely zero here. YES, I know I can summarize plots even of proprietary works, but this wiki goes further, it want to also ensure that someone can e.g. take the plot and turn in into a video game, which in cases like fair use could lead to infringements. ~drummyfish }
From now on expect **spoilers** :)
The book is written as a narration by a square, an upper middle class shape, and describes all the peculiarities of living in Flatland, talking directly to the reader, a supposed inhabitant of "Spaceland" (the 3D world). The year in the book is 1999 of the Flatland world. The book explains and examines spaces of different [dimensions](dimension.md), firstly mathematically and then as a social topic -- the square protagonist basically starts thinking about the possibility that besides his 2D world there might exist worlds of different dimensions -- first he dreams about being in 1D land -- Lineland -- and later, at the turn of the millenium, he is visited by a [sphere](sphere.md) from the 3D world, a kind of alien to the square, but the sphere is able to convince the square that it came from a higher dimensional space. The ideas of existence of different dimensions are consequently seen as a kind of lunacy and heresy by others, he is basically seen as a [schizo](schizo.md) and conspiration theorist and gets in the trouble for his freethinking, just like many of those who in the past questioned religious ideas or those who nowadays question [official "science"](soyence.md). There is also examination of the 0 dimensional space, Pointland.
The book is written as a narration by a square, an upper middle class shape, and describes all the peculiarities of living in Flatland, talking directly to the reader, a supposed inhabitant of "Spaceland" (the 3D world). The year in the book is 1999 of the Flatland world. The book explains and explores spaces of different [dimensions](dimension.md), firstly mathematically and then as a social topic -- the square protagonist essentially starts thinking about the possibility that besides his 2D universe there might exist worlds of different dimensions -- at first he dreams about being in 1D land -- Lineland -- and later, at the turn of the millennium, he is visited by a [sphere](sphere.md) from the 3D world, a sort of alien to the square, but the sphere is able to convince the square that it came from a higher dimensional space. The ideas of existence of different dimensions are consequently seen as a kind of lunacy and heresy by others, he is basically seen as a [schizo](schizo.md) and conspiracy theorist and gets in trouble for his freethinking, just like many of those who in the past questioned religious orthodoxy or those who nowadays question [official "science"](soyence.md). Examination of the 0 dimensional space, Pointland, also appears in the story.
The following are some further details about the work:
@ -102,7 +102,7 @@ There are different types of numbers, in mathematics we classify them into [sets
- **all**: Anything conceivable as a number, even by stretch. E.g. [zero](zero.md), minus [infinity](infinity.md) or aleph one.
- **[transfinite numbers](transfinite_number.md)**: Numbers that are in a sense "infinite", used to compare objects that are infinite in size (e.g. number sets themselves). E.g. omega, omega plus ten or aleph one.
- **Qp: [p-adic numbers](p_adic_number.md)**: Another way of generalizing rational numbers, they may (a bit mindblowingly) have infinitely many digits to the left (for which they are sometimes called *leftist numbers*). E.g. (10-adic) ...333.33, ...87187, ...11112 etc.
- **Qp: [p-adic numbers](p_adic_number.md)**: Alternative way of generalizing rational numbers; p-adics are quite mindblowing as they may have infinitely many digits to the left side (for which they are sometimes called *leftist numbers*), there are numbers that are their own squares without either being 1 or 0, they also contain negative numbers and fractions without having to add extra symbols. There are different kinds of p-adic number sets for different *p*s, e.g. 10-adic, 3-adic and so on (prime number *p*s are chosen for good properties). E.g. (10-adic) ...333.33, ...87187, ...11112 etc.
- **H: [quaternions](quaternion.md)**: A sum of real number, imaginary number and two other kinds of numbers, forming a number in four dimensional space. E.g. 1 + i + j - k, 50 - 0.6k or 2i + 7j.
- **C: [complex](complex_number.md)**: A sum of real and imaginary number, forming a number in two dimensional plane. E.g. 3 + 2i, 0.5 - 13i or 100i.
- **[algebraic](algebraic_number.md)**: Are roots of one variable [polynomials](polynomial.md) with integer coefficients. E.g. 4/3, the [golden ratio](golden_ratio.md) or square root of two.
Trolling is a linguistically fairly recent term that has evolved alongside the [Internet](internet.md) and whose meaning ranges from an activity of purposefully causing [drama](drama.md) (mostly on the Internet) for entertainment (the original, narrower meaning) to just shamelessly abusing rules of any system on the detriment of others (narrower meaning, e.g. *[patent](patent.md) trolling*, pre-election *media trolling* etc.). Core value of the narrow-sense trolling is simply [fun](fun.md) on the detriment of others -- trolls are those who before the Internet would be called something like jokers or pranksters, however [real life](irl.md) pranks have limited potential -- on the Internet on the other hand trolling can flourish (likely owing to the aspect of [anonymity](anonymity.md), lack of nonverbal communication, lack of consequences and responsibility and so on), so this [art](art.md) has evolved into something more, it is by now an inseparable part of Internet [culture](culture.md) (and should probably become protected by Unesco). Trolling is cherished by people who don't take things too seriously and can make fun of themselves and is therefore embraced by forums like [4chan](4chan.md); on the other hand it is demonized by those without sense of humor and those who mostly get butthurt by it ([reddit](reddit.md), [Wikipedia](wikipedia.md) and other "safe space" networks). [Evil](evil.md) is always afraid of fun.
Here are some potentially [fun](fun.md) ways of trolling (they'll be written from the point of view of a fictional character so as to avoid legal responsibility for potential crimes they may inspire lol):
Here are some potentially entertaining ways of trolling (they'll be written from the point of view of a fictional character so as to avoid legal responsibility for potential crimes they may inspire lol):
- **[Link troll](suck_coq.md)**: on my website I randomly put dangerous links that look like normal links, for example "back to homepage" leads to a Google search of "free CP" or "how to get a bomb on the plane". This way anyone who clicks it automatically gets on the NSA watch list :D
