6,770 karma · joined February 26, 2009
Thomas was asserting that "rootless cosmopolitan" was an antisemitic slur that Vektorceraptor deliberately applied to Kenarov. I asserted that the knowledge and usage of that expression is not nearly as universal as Thomas claimed. Thomas clarified that it's a Russian dog whistle.
I've just finished reading the essay you linked there. How does it fit in this discussion?
For example, I didn't even think of it until you pointed it out. I disagree with a lot of the sentiment in Vektorceraptor's comments, but I immediately grasped their meaning behind "rootless cosmopolitan".
Maybe it's because I hail from the same region. I was born in what was Yugoslavia back then and is now Serbia, and I left when I was 20. I spent 14 years in South America, and another 10 here in the US, and I guess that makes me one of Vektorceraptor's "rootless cosmopolitans": someone who has been exposed to different cultures and can live in them, but doesn't really feel at home in any of them.
So no, "rootless cosmopolitan" might sound to you like a dog whistle for "Jew", but it doesn't have to mean that on a culturally diverse site like this one.
EDIT: It might be worth reflecting on the fact that English is not a native language for everyone here. When picking words, some of us might make a suboptimal choice. Ask yourself whether you would have had the same reaction if Vektorceraptor had picked "uprooted" instead of "rootless".
I've yet to hear this claim from someone who has been truly poor at least once in their life. When you have to live paycheck to paycheck, and stress out every single month over the uncertainty, not knowing if you'll be able to pay the bills and have enough to eat, let me know if you feel like "the king of 300 years ago".
Funny, I've been hearing this constantly over the 24 years of my professional experience as a software developer and I've yet to see it proven true.
Unless we're talking about toy examples like Hello World, developing quality software is devilishly complicated and, in my opinion, downplaying this complexity as an "excuse" is in itself an excuse to compromise quality.
EDIT: Fixed a few words my phone auto-"corrected" for me.
The second misunderstanding requires fewer words to describe: Russell's teapot.
For my part, I find the original "no and no" reply perfectly adequate for the smug "I'm only asking questions" assertion-in-disguise that prompted it. Life is too short to debate trolls.
I suspect that this is because both the table and the code used were sourced from Wikipedia, and they correspond to different Gray codes. The table is for the BRGC, but the implementation isn't.
Can it, though? The whole point of the article is that ChatGPT "makes shit up".
For starters, it's incomplete. Yes, "some" people think humor itself is offensive. I would wager that there have always been some people like that, since humor itself was invented. How does that relate to what happened to Stack Overflow?
To make your answer complete, you have to connect the remaining dots, and there are multiple ways to do that. Thing is, none of those ways are "obvious".
For example, you could posit that the majority of people find humor offensive today, as opposed to 2014, but I don't see any evidence that's even true, much less obvious.
More likely, you're implying that the majority of people who have influence over Stack Overflow's tone consider the humor itself offensive. If that's obvious to you, it sure isn't to me.
This resonates very strongly with me. I've been doing a whole bunch of side/toy projects in Rust for months, and I can attest that even compile-time metaprogramming can make programs "fantastically hard to understand". Runtime metaprogramming makes that problem an order of magnitude worse.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against metaprogramming, either compile-time or runtime. But it's way too easy to get overly enthusiastic when doing it.
"Just find another job" either assumes that everyone can do this or that those who can't don't deserve a better environment. The former is not true, the latter is a form of discrimination.
But hey, maybe that's why I'm just an engineer without any interest of making the switch to the "leadership" ladder, and not a CEO.
As for why we didn't go back, his decision to try taking the wheels off was completely unexpected -- he had been dead set against it for quite a while -- and I didn't want to take the wind out of his sails by saying, "Okay, but you have to wait 15 more minutes while I quickly hop in the car, drive back home, get your helmet, and come back with it."
It was a calculated risk, and you can always argue that we shouldn't have taken it.
The point of the whole story is exactly what you said in the last sentence. It's not so much what people think they're entitled to say, it's how they say it. Just look at the replies to my story: you've got a whole bunch of people who think it's perfectly fine to lecture me about how I'm part of the problem here and to do so in a rather hostile manner.
This is the kind of thing I was trying to point out in the first place, the fact that the more and more people these days feel entitled to be crappy to other people in order to prove some point.
Think about what you're proposing. You want me to drag my son, a kid who was little enough back then to still ride a bike with training wheels, into a tense argument between a weird lady, some scary-looking adults, and his parents who suddenly decided to lie through their teeth for some reason? Aside from what example I would be setting for him, how do you think a kid would handle a situation like that?
It wasn't enough that this lady already pissed on his parade, I'm supposed to compound it and put us all at risk of having him taken away because we were "negligent" and also falsely accused someone of being a pedo?
Have we forgotten that the #1 priority in this whole situation is the kid, not our pride or out desire to put someone in their place?
The first thing you learn as an immigrant to the US is to avoid escalating conflicts, especially with Americans. Even a perfectly legal immigrant like me, in a "blue state" like Washington, will avoid rocking the boat. You don't have a safety net to fall back on, you don't have extended family to help you out and support you, and you already have too many other things to worry about, so you try to avoid the risk of having a random stranger make your life a living hell because you misjudged how safe it is to tell them off.
It's not the problem, but it is a problem. There's no reason we shouldn't try to work on both.
> The problem is that the police, and then the DA, chose to make this a criminal matter. Either of them could and should have dismissed the issue after verifying that the child was not being put into a harmful environment.
Yes, but what's their incentive to do so? The more I look at the society in this country, the more I see that the incentives for LEOs are perfectly aligned with corruption and abuse of power.
Now, this is a peaceful suburban neighborhood we're talking about, and we're on a stretch between his school and a park near our home. He's riding his bike on the sidewalk, and he's being careful about it.
Off he goes, and the two of us stroll peacefully until we see him stopped, with an old lady talking to him. He wasn't wearing his biking helmet that day, and we had to endure a lecture about it and veiled threats -- "I could have called CPS, you know" -- and smile politely all the way to avoid escalating.
Somewhere along the way, our society blurred the line between "stepping in to prevent child abuse" and "thinking you're entitled to being hostile and sanctimonious to other parents".
It's not exceptionalism to lament the downfall of the tradition of carefully cultivated discourse. I still remember when this community used to be different, and this site was the one I went to first.
> There's no reason why HN should have a higher quality discussion than some generic subreddit or FB comment sections.
Yes, there is. HN uses to have a higher quality discussion because it was carefully moderated both by the community itself and the moderators. Sadly, it seems that all communities deteriorate eventually.