1,483 karma · joined June 8, 2023
lol not even close. I have a positive outlook and think the world can be a better place. I just think that world will involve most people working together in workspaces and clocking in. There will always be some professions & situations where that's not the right call but I have no reason to believe SW dev will always be one of them.
Is the goal to produce high-quality software, or is the goal to produce an apprenticeship scheme for developers who are interested in the project but not so interested that they are willing to write an email to introduce themself or otherwise engage in normal human social interactions?
Normal people will still be able to get involved if they want to, just like normal people can get jobs. You learn about the organization you’re interested in joining, you try to meet some people and introduce yourself, you gain trust and prove your worth. It can be true that a pull request once embodied some of these tasks, but it is not true that being unable to submit a request means that these tasks are no longer possible to perform. It just means you’ll have to do them differently, just like the rest of humanity does when they want to get involved in an organization.
It was different, to be sure, but it was not worse. We are living through a transition, but people do that all the time and we adjust our behaviour and we find new equilibriums. We will do that with open source too, and if it ends up looking more like open source in the 80s or 90s, it’s gonna be fine.
Maybe some people who got really good at gaming their Github reputation are going to lose out, but that was never the point. Anyone who likes this kind of work and wants to get involved will find a way.
In the 1700's, "executive" referred to a person or group holding supreme legal power
In the 1900's, "executive" described high ranking business people.
In the 2000's, a junior sales rep, 3 months out of high school, will be given the title of account executive.
A better example would be how many axles a road vehicle can have to be considered a road vehicle.
You might reasonably conclude that the number starts at one and essentially goes to infinity and you’d be right.
But somewhere, deep in academia, some critical theorists are going to get upset that you’ve excluded zero and excluded the all the real numbers. They are going to call this oppression, and they’re going to invent a theory that says “actually vehicle axle identities exist on a spectrum that includes zero and all the real numbers, irrational numbers, etc.” if you give them long enough, they will also tell you if you don’t consider a vehicle whose axle count is an imaginary number, then you are imaginary axle-phobic.
Out here in the real world it’s very obvious that vehicles can’t have half an axle or 4.29 axles.
And the point is not because you want to exclude or oppress any road vehicles, it’s simply that being able to count the number of axles is a useful categorization for humans who work with road vehicles, so it has to be possible to say how many there are in an objective sense, in the real world.
Similarly, knowing which of the two sexes an individual belongs to does not tell you everything about that individual, but it definitely tells you a few things that are very useful in policy, law and custom.
It’s one thing for a man to put an a dress, it’s quite another for us to allow the law to consider that by putting on the dress he is now the weaker sex.
Ah the classics!
“Everyone who disagrees with me is stupid”
If that is literally the only reason you can comprehend that someone doesn’t buy this ideology hook line and sinker, then you are the one with the small mind.
I have spent the last several months learning everything I can, and not just about trans, but about the academic undercurrents like queer theory, and of course about the concept of sex in biology.
Until earlier this year, my assumption was the trans rights was just gay rights 2.0 and that seemed pretty fine to me. I was aware that there was controversy, but I paid a little heed. Like you I assumed anyone who was fighting it was just a small minded bigot. Eventually, the good people would prevail and the world would go on.
But then I started actually listening to what trans activists and queer theorists were saying. And then I started reading from people with a wide variety of thoughts.
I came out the other end pretty much aligned with J. K. Rowling:
Wear whatever clothes you like.
Sleep with whoever will have you.
But sex is real and immutable in humans, and this has real consequences for policy and law that cannot be ignored in pursuit of a utopian fantasies of a world where everything is a spectrum and all categorization is interpreted as oppression.
Nope. Not what I said at all. Nothing I said in any way related to the idea that some combinations were “blessed”. Merely that there are two pathways. Individuals may travel those two pathways in numerous ways, but until someone discovers a third gamete, there are only two pathways.
> The thing about reality is that it persists no matter how stridently one denies it.
Very true! No matter how many drugs or how many surgeries or behaviour changes, reality persists - males in dresses are still male, females in suits are still female.
There are two developmental pathways for sexual reproduction: - one produces small mobile gametes - one produces large immobile gametes
There can be plenty of variation in how an individual organism in different species ends up on one pathway or the other, there can be plenty of variation in how an individual organism on either pathway develops, and there can be plenty of variation in how an individual on either pathway behaves. But in sexually reproductive organisms, there are only two pathways.
A male who wants to obey stereotypical feminine stereotypes in behaviour and dress is free to do so, but it doesn’t make him any kind of female, or a different kind of male.
Sure, of course.
But to even ask the question presumes that politics isn’t already overriding science within the academy, just from a different direction.
The fun part of all this is that when union demands start forcing the industry in the opposite direction - higher cost, higher prices, smaller market. In a sane world, we would connect this, but in this world, we will just blame management. The union will forever have an invincible PR shield no matter how crazy the demand.
It's difficult to look at any remotely contentious Wiki page today and conclude that they have succeeded.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashe...
Because to the extent that collectivism works at all, it requires that you create an extreme power hierarchy that compels people to do work they do not want to do and to accept whatever meager resources the state decides to offer them.
The type of people who think this is a good thing A. Believe they will be the ones in power rather than subject to power B. Are not very nice or fun people
Buildings last 60-100 years. It does not take that much over building in a previous era to decimate the bargaining position of landlords of a future era. We have been using the law to prevent this horrible no good outcome /s for the last 100 years or so. We can stop anytime.
Just giving people the incentive to use the bathroom before they get on the plane to save a few bucks would probably save billions on fuel worldwide.