amrangaye

Thank you - that’s what I’ve been thinking. Maybe read up on LBJ first before you spread such confident conspiracy theories?

LOL! I can’t tell if this is a joke / satire that I’m missing, but LBJ DEF didn’t have JFK killed, esp for Monroe - wut?

Sorry this is an aside: but why’re we still doing this? It stopped being funny a long long time ago, doesn’t contain any information in regards to OP’s question, and we all know in real life people mean XOR when they say OR. so I’m just curious: did you recently find out about this and still find it amusing? What is it adding to the discussion? Nothing personal / maybe I’m just getting too old :)

No in this case it was just the pearling. :) otherwise we do use master without a second thought in all the forms of the examples you gave.

Not arguing that you’re wrong, but as a (counter / data)-point, both me and my friend were… relieved (for lack of a better word) when the convention of referring to things as master / slave in computing changed to primary / replica, etc. We are both from one of the countries where the slave trade was most active. It wasn’t something we would complain about out loud, it did not affect our work or productivity in any way. In fact we would have been content / happy to continue using the previous names. But it still felt good / noteworthy to not have to see them continuously, all day long. So sometimes providing that kind of context, or changing names of things to make everyone more comfortable, is a small thing but much appreciated by the minorities involved. I’m not sure it’s necessary to take it to the extent that you’re facing however :)

This sounds a LOT like “there’s always been slavery throughout human history - I’m not denying the transatlantic slave trade was brutal. But we need to put it into context [insert Wikipedia article talking about the history of slavery]”. You can’t “both sides” this with Wikipedia links or arguing you’re speaking from a logical / non-personal perspective.

You’re making it either / or and it’s not. I can feel sympathetic to the Uyghurs, fight for their rights, canvass my representatives, donate to charities etc.

But I (a black African man) can never truly know or experience what the average Uyghur goes though day to day, because I just haven’t lived it.

So no, when we say that, we are not “excluding” anyone - in fact the more allies a minority has, the more likely they will achieve equality. But lived experience is different.

I don’t think this is correct. Just yesterday I was thinking about the many brave white people who fought as abolitionists to end the slave trade, risking their lives. But they could never truly understand what it was to be a slave, because they went home at the end of the day, whereas the slaves were not only forced to work without pay, they were also bred like horses, with the “strongest” ones forced to mate to make strong slaves. It doesn’t mean the abolitionists can’t understand and sympathize and even work at great personal risk to free slaves. So yes maybe anybody can “understand” it as you said - I’m not debating that. But it’s completely different to live with the constant humiliation and discrimination, getting things said and done to you that are not illegal, that ghe discriminating group then dismiss as you being a snowflake etc.

So yes you’re right anyone can empathize. But I don’t think that’s what OP is saying. You really cannot fully understand unless you live it. Just like you cannot understand true poverty in African countries, when you’ve spent your whole life living in a (relatively) rich one.

I kept rereading it to see if perhaps I missed something - even went on his twitter and his blog. And his quotes are being repeated verbatim - really showed the danger of having journalists work on stories in areas where they have absolutely no idea what’s going on. Any competent tech journalist would’ve laughed this story off - man spoke to a chatbot. But I guess the Public’s perception of “AI” at the moment is what they see in movies and wildly exaggerated ads about intelligent devices. One of the answers (“It is what makes us different than other animals.”) also tipped me off - regularly, we would use “different from” - so this sounded like generated text. I wish it was true - sentient AI would really shake things up. But the person who discovers it isn’t going to be just put on administrative leave. Strong AI is the holy grail of the industry right now.

I think the fact that you keep framing this as a matter of “opinion” is revealing in itself. You speak of “provocation” as if it’s equal and commensurate to bombing and invading a country. I really cannot understand people who keep pushing this point. Ukraine decided they might like to join NATO - so therefore Russia has a right to invade and level the country. Please make this make sense to me. The bombs dropping on Ukrainian citizens every night while Russian citizens sleep in peace should tell you enough - this is not a matter of “opinion” - how easy to say that from a privileged position in which you and your home are under no threat.

And your analogy with Canada and China doesn’t hold up either. In that case too the US would have no right to invade a sovereign country for making decisions about its own future. You speak as if this imagined scenario somehow justifies Putin’s actions when it fact it highlights how wrong they are even more.

My dude, I’m saying calling 50p a “surprise fee” is quite a stretch, and a couple minutes to fill up a tank isn’t a “delay”. What policy are you talking about - that I disagree with your summation? Didn’t know that was against the rules.

Stopping for gas is a 50p “surprise fee” now :-D nice. And filling up the tank takes what - a couple mins? Smh

No - a “reasonable” person wouldn’t be haggling over 50p because the driver stopped to get gas. I’ve never seen anyone - couldn’t even imagine it before I read this - reverse charging a driver because they stopped for gas on the way. Those are the kind of people the OP is talking about - what they’re doing is “technically” just standing up for their rights etc. But this person sounds extremely toxic to be around

Meh - they’re being asked to take jabs, wear masks, and be tested. It’s not that deep - we are in a public health crisis. I guess the next set of “protests” will be for people’s freedom to use carbon, against the tyranny of renewable energy. :-/

>> Trudeau aka mr blackface put black truckers out of a job, then when they organized to protest, he called them racists. Now they are really digging in exercising their charter right to peaceful protesting and Trudeau is going to remove them using this.

Wow - that’s quite a summary of what’s going on right now. I keep seeing the same pattern of your comment on right wing media lately (e.g. with the insurrectionists): defend the racist group by blaming either a false flag or “a handful of individuals”, call the protesters “largely peaceful and just exercising their rights”, then turning the charge around to call the people accusing you, of being the actual racists. I find it fascinating to see this on hn - it’s usually the kind of comment I would find in the Breitbart / Fox News comment sections.

Oh I see :-D thanks for clarifying.

I’m sorry but I can’t help but ask: what is this? Is OP your worker and this is work comms? Just curious.

What is your use case here? Why would you want to send an SMS to another user who also has iMessage? Or do you mean you think that should just be a capability of any messaging service?

Yeah no - just like the sister comment I too have never met anyone who doesn’t know the difference. I think you’re underestimating the intelligence of the average “non tech” user.

Not only that (how tech brought you out of poverty), the calculus is also very different for immigrant workers on immigrant visas. I wish their perspective was more represented in the conversation.

Do you have anything to support this “dummies” claim? What I remember from the N95 “guidance” (it wasn’t a “ban” iirc) was that the reason was to ensure there was enough supply of them for healthcare / frontline workers, who need them more than the rest of us, which made sense at the time (and I can see reasons why it would change later). I’m curious when that reason switched to “you are all dummies who can’t be allowed to use masks”?

This app is one of my very faves and one of the first I install on a new phone. Just wanted to post to say thank you for putting so much thought into the design - getting lost in articles, creating reading lists to come back to later, being able to switch languages on the fly - it feels like being in the library as a kid again going through Britannica hardcovers, except with a better interface and search instead of an index. :)

But in this case wouldn’t it be more like they keep seeing people around them being burnt to death all the time, and you have a pretty solid theory of why this happens / how to predict the next burn victims, but they keep insisting it’s actually spontaneous combustion and you’re just being “alarmist” with your predictions of further (and even worse) burnings?

But is it really “alarmism” to yell at people inside a house on fire that they need to “get the hell out now!” even if some people in a separate part of the building (not touched by the fire yet) insist that the growing heat is due to something else, God has it in control and would never set the fire, in fact the people yelling out the warnings are just being “alarmist”, it’s against their constitutional rights etc? We really don’t have time at the moment to resort to gentle persuasion techniques (on a group I might add who are ready to never become convinced because they dismiss every rational argument and all the data). It may not work in a country as politically divided as the US, but trying to convince (the right especially) will achieve nothing but waste time that could be better spent elsewhere. Those who are not persuaded at this point are not going to be just because we approach them with more gentleness or empathy or whatever.

>> How could you possibly interpret this new world of digital sharecropping ("cloud computing") as empowering?

Because it lets people - such as my older relatives - who wouldn't use a desktop and would have problems setting up and configuring one - especially for an "advanced" use case such as setting up your own private cloud.

As a computer instructor back home in west Africa, before smartphones I had students (especially older ones) who struggled with even using a mouse or keyboard. I've never had to teach a single one of them how to use their smartphone (at least for things like browsing the internet, taking and editing photos, making notes, etc). Providing things like photo editing on-device, without having to download and figure out a program like photoshop (or image magic for example) is a non-starter. Now they can edit, filter, share, make home movies- all without needing any help.

>> Where is the passion for 'personal computing' when nearly everything personal about it is delegated to the cloud?

I don't know what you mean by passion, but these people love their phones and the things it lets them do, with an intuitive UI (as well as a transferable one between Android and iOS, since they're about the same feature wise at the moment)

>> Personal computing is a box under your desk or in your pocket beefy and smart enough to solve your problems

This is ONE version of personal computing, and tbh an option only available to us "hackers".

>> without checking in with daddy warbucks and the mothership.

You don't need to check in. My country has crappy bandwidth and of course it's impossible to do things like pay for iCloud or gdrive without credit cards, so most use the phone without backups, and they're fine.

>> Nearly everything about modern cloud computing is the opposite... it disempowers individuals and creates an unhealthy relationship with things that are out of the users control.

How is allowing my students, older relatives, etc - who wouldn't be able to use a laptop or desktop machine - to go online and talk to their children abroad using apps like whatsapp - disempowering? I understand your point - I miss the days when we had computers to mess around with and learn Linux and coding on. Most of us on here came up that way, compared to kids now who don't have to see the underlying OS or tinker with it - they can just play Fortnite and watch YouTube.

But most people aren't interested in these things, or even care about machine models, OS versions etc. They buy phones because they want to communicate online and talk to their friends and family. That's it.

Before whatsapp the only way I could talk to my family was through international calls, which are prohibitively expensive, so they would happen about once a month. Once they got on whatsapp though we moved to being able to talk, share videos and pics of things happening at home, every single day. In addition a large part of getting rid of our dictator was people being able to use apps like whatsapp to share the latest information, even as he cracked down and only allowed propaganda to be published even in private newspapers.

This is a net positive however you look at it - it has brought far more people (especially in poorer countries) into the digital age. I find that very empowering in the sense of putting tools in the hands of more people, including barely literate ones (my country has something like a 40% illiteracy level rate) who use things like whatsapp voice notes to communicate.

>> How many peoples' livelihoods have been messed up because FANG decided to lock them out for some reason or another?

This is true but not really related to your larger point about computing devices and how they are being used now.

>> The server in my closet or at my datacenter isn't going to lock me out because I pissed off Google.

This really doesn't happen that much often considering we're talking billions of users.

We are on a "hacker" site where most people are skilled "tech people" so of course when things break for them they write blog posts and comments and we get to see and argue over those. Most people using these devices don't know or care about any of this, and have gmail accounts going back a decade that they've used without any issues.

In summary your version of computing (which is similar to mine) just isn't the universal version. I always find joy whenever I go back home and find taxi drivers using their phones to play music, people using YouTube to check instructional videos and post their own etc. When my grandmother died my uncle gathered all the photos, videos, etc that we have of her as a family on whatsapp, and made a nice video tribute of her life to share with us. Gathering the photos and videos took longer than making the movie itself, which was a few taps, and it was a very powerful moment emotionally esp for us family members outside the country. We were able to participate in remembering her life together in a way that international phone calls and a complex (to my uncle) photo editing app on a PC under a desk would ever have let us.

I find this very empowering, and it makes me happy how far we've come and how many more people we have brought across the digital divide. Let's not be myopic because those of us on here have the technical knowledge to disdain and even dump these platforms.

And keep in mind that American / Western users' use cases are very different from the farmer who can only afford a cheap android phone, being able to come online finally to check on crop prices so they won't get cheated, send pictures of their crops to prospective buyers, and even do things like checking the weather.

Perhaps you should educate yourself about this, instead of dismissing it as outrage to bore my friends with. You can start with this article:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-invention-...

I didn’t bring it up before because it wasn’t germane to my point, but I’m an African man (from West Africa, where the effects of chattel slavery are still being felt every day) who has lived in the US for a decade. So yes, as a person who has experienced both the racism displayed to us people living in the so-called “third world”, as well as racism in the US, I think I am entitled to my outrage. Perhaps working in a cell-extraction team as you said is making you take this personally. But this isn’t about you, it’s about a system set up after slavery to keep black people in their place. It doesn’t mean every policeman / woman is racist, just as I wouldn’t say “all white people are racist” just because they continue to benefit from a system that was setup to heavily favor them. So please don’t dismiss my viewpoint as mere outrage informed by the Internet. Of course the world is a complicated place - even back home not all our problems can be blamed on slavery and colonialism (we have had terrible leaders, our government is rife with corruption etc). That doesn’t mean racism’s effects don’t play a huge part in our current state, or continue to lead to young black men especially having their lives treated as more expendable than their white counterparts.

>> As a practical matter, I'd say it's more along the lines of just how do you control a crazy acting person without hurting them. A certain number of them are going to die, there's no way around it.

That’s… quite a summary of a cop putting his knee on someone’s neck while people all around screamed at him that the man was suffering, and staying in that position until the man died. Floyd was already on the ground and had four armed policemen surrounding him - how was he a threat, or someone who couldn’t just be hauled up and cuffed / placed in a police car? Compare it for example to the almost-courteous way Dylan Roof - who committed a crime far worse than anything Floyd ever did - was treated by the police when they finally caught up to him.

I’m sorry but you sound like a right wing TV host doing their best to paper over the truth / make it about anything else but the inherent racism of American policing. Perhaps if Floyd was an aberration your point might hold - but this is clearly a pattern, as we’ve seen over and over. The only way to solve the problem is by understanding its roots, not blasé statements reducing it to statistics and a “crazy acting man” who couldn’t be subdued without hurting him.

Yes I know about the structure of a film, dialog etc. But even with that kind of breakdown it still comes down to whether you like the film or not, which is completely subjective. Back in the day Ebert and Siskel - arguably the top film critics of their day - also knew about all the things you listed and could break down any film in the same way. Yet on the show they had vehement disagreements over certain movies that one liked and one didn’t. I’m not arguing over anything you said - all I’m saying, like the parent comment, is that this isn’t as objective as you’re trying to make it. Experiencing any art is subjective, whether movies, paintings, books, etc. Objectivity requires something that is true for everyone. Your opinions of the series certainly isn’t true for me and my friends, and other people on this thread who’ve said they liked it. So they’re your opinions, and only that.

Like the comment you’re replying to said: this is your opinion. I loved Mandalorian and looked forward to it every week. I - and my friends who watched it - certainly didn’t see it as boring drivel or an “unassuming adventure for kids” (I don’t even know what that means). But you’re speaking with great conviction as if this is an objective fact. It’s not - we all get different things from it just like any other media. No need to insult Star Wars fans either. You don’t like it - that’s fine - but this is completely subjective.

I agree with everything you said, but I don’t think it’s fair to blame “mentally ill” people. Not attacking you or anything but I think it was a poor choice of words in this case, and way too broad a brush to even apply :)