2,266 karma · joined November 6, 2017
“Where you live” should not be the determinant here
I don’t see how Stallman’s admittedly autistic comments are damning. He was pointing out that it is very plausible that to Minsky the girl presented herself as willing and consenting despite secretly being coerced by Epstein.
I think we need to have actual standards of evidence when it comes to booting someone not just from the FSF but the community as a whole
However your characterization of his comments wrt Minksy does make me question your credibility. If you couldn’t honestly characterize them, it is more likely that you could be equally disingenuous in recounting “independent allegations”.
And if it’s not clear, that’s a feature, not a bug.
If I can speak casually for a second I have no doubt that if they oust RMS they’d replace him with a diversity hire who simply is not singlemindedly focused on free software enough to actually fight like they need to. I think it’s really easy to underestimate the extent to which being absurdly logical to a fault and incredibly principled is critical for success in RMS’ position, and that’s what he offers warts and all. You don’t have to like the guy, you can think he’s a dick, but can we at least agree that he does mot have a track record of being malicious and at least half the controversial things he’s said aren’t even unreasonable they’re just the things you’re not supposed to say
Separately I find it hilarious that he’s called transphobic because he believes in non-binary identity but doesn’t believe in grammatical usage of the singular they (FWIW I naturally use the singular they and reject the idea that it’s invalid, but ironically I too fall afoul of it because I use the singular they as a genderless singular but now the trans community has made they its own pronoun meaning my usage of they as a sane default is itself considered transphobic...sigh...)
Hot of the presses: a pawn of IBM on the one hand and Microsoft on the other both oppose a free software advocacy group that fought against everything Microsoft/IBM stand for! Shocking, I tell you!
The political commentator Dave Smith has a great point where he views “wokism” as essentially a corporate plot. Post-2008 we had hordes of angry people occupying wall street, and however ignorant the footsoldiers may have been of basic economics they left a real mark. Fast forward ten years later and the corporations, big banks, and the CIA et al have all embraced woke identity politics and here we are arguing over the usage of the singular they and trying to decide if Aunt Jemima is racist or not. Viewed through that lens, wokism is the perfect performative ritual with which to placate the masses. And the beauty is it works on both sides. The left focuses on being woke instead of opposing the wars (both foreign and domestic) and the national “security” apparatus, and the right is busy fighting against the woke while they’re banned from going to church (COVID) and while their gun rights are gradually whittled away.
Reality is obviously not that simple but there’s a real kernel of truth there.
Yup. And if you haven’t noticed, that is exactly who is running almost every major institution in Western society currently.
The enlightenment has died not with a bang but with a whimper.
We have organizations openly advocating for discriminatory hiring based off race/sex/gender identity/sexuality. It’s a bit deeper than RMS not wanting to use the singular they or him asking the questions about pedophilia / consent that good neurotypical people know not to ask.
IDK, I get what you’re saying that they chose to reinstate him. But this feels more like a moral panic than a victory for ethics to me.
You might not be surprised to know that most people at my organization are very in favor of all this stuff so I recognize I’m in the minority here
And you may already be aware of this, but for any third parties reading this, please be aware that these types of things are not a one-off innocent mistake. When you start actually looking you realize that literally everything the corporate press outputs is all part of a carefully crafted narrative, and at no point does actual capital-T Truth come into play.
See also: Gell-Mann Amnesia effect (except more malicious)
(I do think your guess is a plausible one)
For example when BTC split into BTC and BCH, for me the ticker for Bitcoin went from BTC to BCH because BCH was the continuation of "real bitcoin". And the absurdly-small-blocks crowd obviously felt the opposite. And that's completely fine.
One of the most pernicious beliefs of the BTC crowd is that a hard fork is some evil, unforgivable thing. It shows a total misunderstanding of how free software works.
It’s possible to have a 10x multiplier in “individual output” or whatever you want to call it, but 9 times out of 10 the most valuable engineer is the one who can provide detailed, actionable feedback on patches, architectural change proposals etc but is also willing to get their hands dirty when it makes sense. That, IMO, is what I consider a ‘true’ 10x engineer to be
To be explicit, there is absolutely a place to “shield the team”, but I’m talking about a pattern I’ve observed that many managers will use that as a pretext to avoid keeping people in the loop and essentially get to boost their own career by holding others back. Real shielding is when you politely tell team Y that their proposal is going to require your team to have to own and operate a net new production service, not when you make critical decisions without consulting some of the biggest stakeholders - your own team.
And to take it further, even if you’re one of those (many) people who thinks the sky is constantly falling with COVID...there is still no reason to wait until “post-COVID”. If you want to build a skillset start working towards that now, not tomorrow
> Bitcoin will become massively deflationary as hash rates plummet and vast quantities of the world's computation & food supply are turned towards mining 1 or 2 blocks a year, but transaction fees sky rocket.
(1) Mining difficulty is scaled to the hashpower of the network. In the long run the EV of ten minute time between blocks is maintained.
(2) Fun fact, BTC tx fees already spiked high years back, during the bitcoin civil war. The day I had to pay an $80 transaction fee was the day I dumped BTC and never looked back. The tx fees were not due to some true technical limitation but rather an artificially imposed constraint when BTC got taken over from within by a faction that wrested control of /r/bitcoin and censored all dissent, convincing the unending hordes of speculators that the block size was a holy constant that could never be touched without ruining the vaguely-defined “decentralization”. Just a fun bit of history that felt relevant.
In this hypothetical, I clearly wouldn't be able to afford the complex surgery, so either I would do without it or make use of any non-profit foundations/charities set up to give people in my position money.
It's worth noting that the cost, while still significant, would be FAR lower in a world with no regulation/licensure whatsoever. It's hard to understate how much cost (nominally expressed in dollars but the cost is so much more than that, to be clear) is introduced by all the layers of red tape.
And actually, now's a great time to mention that this problem occurs in our current US system, except it's way worse because (well, at least pre-Trump) you will get fined for not having insurance in addition to all the fun that comes with not having insurance. The obvious counterpoint here is to argue that if we had a single-payer system, where there's not actually private insurance companies at all (or at best they exist for people who aren't satisfied with single-payer and so those individuals both pay taxes for the single payer system and also pay for their own private insurance in parallel), that this problem wouldn't exist because it's impossible to not have insurance since the government already has it. That part is true, although you run into the classic problem that when everyone has government insurance, the client of a doctor/physician/etc is the state and not the individual, and therefore incentives are aligned against you right off the bat. Then factor in that you don't get to make decisions about your medical care - or rather, you can reject treatments but you can't decide to take a treatment that the government has decided you can't take, etc etc.
> And if the response is to simply pay the cost out of pocket, what if that "choice" not to have insurance was made because you're working at a minimum wage job?
I already implicitly answered this with my answer to the first question because I didn't shy away from saying that if you can't afford the surgery then you can't get the surgery without a benefactor. If I had tried to pretend that magically you would always be able to get the surgery then this would be more of a "gotcha" than it is.
While we're here though, this is a good time to mention that minimum wage shouldn't exist either. (Doesn't change your point, to be clear, but I can't help but mention that the whole concept of minimum wage is regressive policy masquerading as progressive policy)
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So, to conclude: resource scarcity is a thing and always will be a thing, and the best way to address is that to utilize our resources as efficiently as possible and maximize innovation, both of which require regulations to not be a thing. Regulations are always sold as "this will make things more efficient/safe/etc because the market dynamics aren't properly addressing this", but the reality is that regardless of your philosophical views on regulations, the actual utilitarian result is to make things more expensive with no increase in safety. And it of course makes things more inefficient.
So it solves the bin-packing problem automatically rather than having to manually map out an efficient way to use your infra. It doesn’t reduce the complexity per say - the interactions can get complicated if you’re using stuff like node taints/tolerations instead of the more computationally simple “App X needs this much RAM but beyond that I don’t care where it lives”
If I find a bunch of raspberry PIs in my basement and want to have them join my fleet, I just do that and even if my fleet varies from 256 core CPU boxes with huge raid arrays all the way down to tiny raspberry PIs, the scheduling just works. Note here the broader pattern of abstracting away the physical hardware; it’s a really important concept to grok.
To your point, when talking to your db or [insert shared infra here], then you may want to thinking about real collocation. But it very much depends on your application’s needs - and remember that cloud providers can offer guarantees about which AZ or region you’re in.
They were just expressing the notion that while the acute personal cost is zero the actual cost is still borne. They didn’t make the point in a very nuanced way but any system that divorces the cost from the person receiving the treatment hides information by suppressing the natural price discovery mechanism.
Anyway, I agree that insurance has a similar problem, at least if policies like “no pre-existing conditions” are followed. However if such policies are not in place then premiums would go up and thus the information propagation of the price mechanism is (all else equal) restored.
I don’t have time to get into it but speaking from the US perspective I really wish we had a real free market system with no government revelation or licensure laws whatsoever. What we have now is criticized by the ignorant as a “failure of unbridled capitalism” but it is of course anything but. It is absolutely absurd that I can’t decide that I don’t want insurance and equally that I’m not told what a procedure or drug or item will cost beforehand. I’ve been to the ER several times and you’re always treated like a bag of meat to poke and prod and I have to be very diligent about constantly getting them to tell me what they’re actually doing. (And don’t even get me started on the chargemaster system where they initially charge you 10x more than what they expect to recoup purely for leverage to negotiate with insurance)
This is simply not true, although I suppose it depends on the definition of naked. Here's some random examples - although like anything, whether it qualifies as propaganda depends on one's beliefs:
- When the previous US president wanted to pull out of Syria, or at least scale down the activities there, a bunch of headlines to the effect of "[President's name] abandons the kurds, leaving them to die" were written, and went straight to the top of Reddit. (This is a classic war propaganda technique where there's always an excuse as to why you can't end a certain war, while failing to account for the negative effects of continuing wars, or the facts that many of these "problems" only exist because of previous foreign policy blunders and doubling down on those blunders simply doesn't help)
- Without going down the COVID rabbithole too much, there would routinely be articles that either (a) spread Chinese-state-originated propaganda videos of stuff like "man randomly collapses in the middle of the street", (b) articles that would credulously take China's metrics at face values, (c) scientific publications that immediately denied the possibility of non-naturalistic origins of the virus, (d) articles intended to shame those who don't believe in masking as an intervention, etc
- (This is a fun one since many won't agree) Many articles raced to the top which made just completely wrong statements about the portfolios of firms like Melvin Capital and basically depicted the WSB gamestop fiasco as a classic david vs goliath narrative, instead of the reality which was for a brief period of time it was a real short squeeze and then almost immediately became a classic bubble/pump and dump scenario that had no connection to fundamental asset valuation. (To be clear, in a short squeeze stock prices can easily be pushed past the "intrinsic value", but so long as there's still a squeeze it is not irrational to buy the asset. However, once it's no longer actually a short squeeze and is now just a normal bull-run / bubble, an article selling the david v goliath narrative is now propaganda)
- Here's a headline that's #2 on /r/politics, which I just visited to find the first headline that counts as propaganda in my book: "Conservatives Are Furious Biden Delivered a Non-Insane Presidential Speech" (regardless of what you feel about the speech or conservatives, it should be trivially obvious that they are not furious about a "non-insane" speech)
- Any of the dozens of articles about the "Capitol Hill Insurrection" which grossly exaggerated what occurred as an attempted coup instead of the reality which was a bunch of (largely deluded) self-styled patriots who changed and prayed and took stupid selfies inside the capitol building (note: me saying that it was grossly exaggerated is not the same as saying that there was no wrongdoing, etc)
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I do think it is true though that "articles which are clearly propaganda to the average user" i.e. one thats go against the status quo of a cite will be downvoted. But propaganda in the other direction won't because they will never think of it as propaganda