I appreciate you, tosh!
788 karma · joined April 20, 2016
I think this is probably both the most painful and most useful way to learn how Wordpress works under the hood. It will probably take you another 12 hours (and another week), but at least those hours won't be wasted.
Edit: oh, and take notes while stepping through with the debugger. Having a document you can refer to later that has some kind of outline with your own ideas and opinions is a huge help.
I don't know if existentialism qualifies as "political philosophy" or not, but if all philosophies are political, then I think existentialism fits that description.
"Once freedom lights its beacon in a man’s heart, the gods are powerless against him. It’s a matter between man and man, and it is for other men, and for them only, to let him go his gait, or to throttle him." -- Jean-Paul Sartre, The Flies
And then the question is, well, is the coin more or less valuable when it is held by more people? It seems to me that it would be more valuable, since there would be more people using it.
So even if the immediate effect of the whales cashing out was to lower the price (to something above absolute zero, assuming there will still be buyers), the long-term effect would be more adoption, and increased value.
I'm sure there are holes somewhere in that logic, feel free to point them out.
No, it is absolutely not measurable. We have known since time immemorial that you can't compare apples and oranges.
And now if we unanalogize the argument, ceteris paribus, we clearly see that it is similarly impossible to compare the value of an employee's wages with the value they provide to their employer. Cogito, ergo sum.
I'm guessing it passed for similar reasoning, along with the reviewers being unfamiliar with how "vulnerabilities are injected." To get the bad code in, the researcher needed to have the code reviewed by a human.
So if you rephrase "inject vulnerability" as "sneak my way past a human checkpoint", you might have a better idea of what they were actually doing, and might be better equipped to judge its ethical merit -- and if it qualifies as research on human subjects.
To my thinking, it is quite clearly human experimentation, even if the subject is the process rather than a human individual. Ultimately, the process must be performed by a human, and it doesn't make sense to me that you would distinguish between the two.
And the maintainers themselves express feeling that they were the subject of the research, so there's that.
> Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it.
> Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.
I think this quote demonstrates pretty well what kind of person RMS is. He's somewhere on the spectrum (aren't we all), and entirely human. He's grappling with his own beliefs, entertaining possibilities, and actively working to change his beliefs to be a better person.
I think so much of the current outrage is really about our society in general, and we're in desperate need of scapegoats because we can't actually target society at large, we can only "target" individuals.
That said, I'm just gonna leave this here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1656/1656-h/1656-h.htm
That's like saying the damage George Lucas has done to Star Wars is incalculable. Without George Lucas, there is no Star Wars. Did he fuck it up? Absolutely. Is the world a better place with Star Wars in it? I think so.
We're not going to change these old-timers. That's what makes them old-timers. We're only going to become old-timers ourselves someday (if we're lucky). Probably best to exercise as much compassion for them as we can, and hope the future returns the favor when our time comes.
I'd say it's getting harder and harder to tell the difference.
... and that is precisely why I find HN (despite its flaws) to be one of the most interesting places for discourse. The aggressive moderation by dang and friends gives this forum a coherence that is hard to find anywhere else.
I think it's important to distinguish between applications and protocols.
Successful applications based on decentralized networks seem to be a mix of both application code and protocol. So in discussing email, we are probably discussing SMTP and IMAP, and then the applications are the email clients that speak those protocols. Similarly, when we talk about the web we are talking about TCP/IP and HTTP(S), (also DNS, CGI, etc) and the browsers are again the clients that speak those protocols.
It seems to me that the success of the world wide web has entirely to do with TBL making sure that his superiors released his work into the public domain[1].
Whereas with something like World of Warcraft, there you have an extremely successful application, but it's based on a proprietary protocol, proprietary code, and centralized networks. Could it have been more successful if Blizzard had released the protocol and client into the public domain?
still haven't found a consumer graphics card with a MIMD architecture. I'm guessing there might be more on-going research in this area with the GPGPU on FPGA communities.
Before doing that, though, they should research the difference between SIMD and MIMD. Multi-core CPUs are generally MIMD, and GPUs are always SIMD†.
† If someone knows of a MIMD GPU architecture, please share!
I have similar thoughts like this, that people in power could do some serious good if they would change their tunes, but unless there is something actionable for me to do... I don't see how these appeals to authority are going to make a difference. Maybe some NBA players might care, but I seriously doubt the NBA higher-ups would ever go for something like this.
Stop buying goods from China, and let them know that you're not buying them because of the Uighur genocide. That's about all I can do, and I'm doing it here. I'm assuming China is reading HN as religiously as I am.
I'm also using old laptops (T500s) so that I can replace Intel's firmware with libreboot and also install alternative wireless cards.
The USB 2.0 thing is a problem, and reading this article made me think that there might be a way around that, and sure enough, you can get a PCMCIA card with USB 3.0 ports[1].
I know this isn't a long term solution, but it might be an immediate solution to the time spent making backups.
[1]https://www.newegg.com/p/17Z-00GU-00075?Description=PCMCIA%2...
I think it's easy to feel like you feel, and I do (sometimes), but right now I'm trying hard to feel as hopeful as I can without ignoring the problem.
Why we should care may not be apparent to a large demographic on this forum, but for those of us with small children, the reasons to care are loved ones whose futures we think about a lot every single day.
So some of us are in fact paying close attention to these warnings, and the better ones are the ones issuing them.