Nah, the irony is that you think that this was not done on purpose. E.g. look at the hamburger menu on the top right.

It is called "making fun of" not "irony".

It's ironic if it's unintentional. If the grotesque design was intended as sarcasm, I guess it went over my head.

Which is very much on purpose to make fun of exactly that. Try some of the other settings in the top right, e.g. the literal hamburger menu.

In what way does it make fun of it? It's simply an example of it. And with no apparent way to turn it off. (Edit: There is a non-apparent way to turn it off. I still think having irritating visual effects doesn't constitute making fun of irritating visual effects.)

Tried that. Does nothing regarding snowflakes that make article next to unreadable.

For matter over thread you do need a hub and you need more certifications for matter, so for manufacturers it is less open.

The standardization is a plus though.

> Because an FFT (short for "Fast Fourier Transform") is nothing more than a curve-fit of sines and cosines to some given data

That is not even wrong. A Fourier transform is a basis expansion. In particular, the full expansion is exact (not just an approximation). Of course, truncated expansions are approximations.

The actually interesting part: Why is this basis expansion so much more useful than, e.g. expanding into some eigenfunctions, Hermite polynomials, etc.? The decomposition into (complex) exponentials converts between addition and multiplication, i. e. sin(x+y), cos(x+y) you get from multiplying sin(x), cos(x), sin(y) and cos(y). This in turn has important implications such as turning derivatives into multipliers. More generally you can consider nonlinear Fourier transforms with different groups and generators other than exponentials.

TLDR: It is a transform. What you are transforming between is what makes it so useful.

> Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth,”

This is satire, right?

The robots.txt is pretty explicit that this scraping is "disallowed"

https://www.goodreads.com/robots.txt

So legalities aside, this seems unethical.

Why would it be unethical?

This obsession with "everything must be commercialized" is really killing creativity.

Now if the author was commercializing other peoples reviews, sure, it's potentially(!) unethical. But scraping a website for reviews that are publicly(!) posted, training a recommendation LLM and then sharing it, for free, seems ... exactly the ideal use case for this technology.

It is truly criminal that such a bright and brilliant model of ethics, Amazon, should endure such an attack.

Unethical behavior does not become good just because it happens to hurt "bad people" (or more accurately, companies bought by bad people).

Using a sword to stab someone is evil, therefore, stabbing someone who is stabbing me with a sword is evil?

Another factor is that Amazon is big enough that crawling a minor website under their umbrella for a noncommercial project is unlikely to notably affect them.

Stabbing people with swords is evil, unless they are so big that to them it's at worst a light poke with a fork

I agree. As a frequent reviewer on Goodreads, this feels really icky.

You are right.

At the same time, everything you ever posted online has already been scraped by hundreds (maybe thousands) of entities and distributed/sold to countless other entities. The only difference is that OP shared his project here.

TLDR: regulations

The toothpaste maker wants to claim something like "Novamin is useful". In the EU this is treated as for cosmetics, so relatively low bar to clear. In the US this is treated as pharmaceutical, so a high bar to clear. The manufacturer has decided that passing that bar is not financially sensible for them.

History, venture capital, single language market, ... . Probably a dozen different factors you could point at instead.

Not inane at all, just your phrasing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

This is not about "X sucks", but the very first questions from an engineering perspective should be whY? What do you want to accomplish? Is X actually a good approach towards Y?

If it turns out that trying to shoehorn X into kinda accomplishing Y is very hard work, then suggesting to use X2 instead is a perfectly sensible suggestion.

If you have a hard constraint that you must use X, even if it does not fit well to Y, fair enough. Then you add that as a reply or state it in the beginning.