marcus0x62

In the late 90s/early 2000's, I would hear voice telephone conversations in central offices quite frequently. (Nobody was spying on purpose, or even paying much attention to what was being said. It was incidental to troubleshooting some problem report.)

I’ve been typing these comments on my phone. But, in any case, I don’t parse “democrat” as an epithet. You are looking for things to be offended about.

So “Democrat” is now an epithet. Please get help.

That's one option. Another option is to reject that either major party offers a sane choice and vote for a third party.

I'd love to have that choice. Neither the Republican nor Democrat party in 2025 offers me that.

> I may be old fashioned, but it actually does matter who is right. Because reality is a thing.

Is that a position you hold consistently? Is there anything you believe that you wouldn’t be swayed on when presented evidence to the contrary of your belief?

I ask, because there is an awful lot of mainstream Republican and (here’s the controversial bit) Democrat thought that simply has no basis in reality.

Q.E.D

(Also a deep-red-state resident like the GP.)

The way I look at Trump/MAGA is they took over an ineffective, sclerotic Republican party that spent 40 years talking about “family values” while selling off the productive base of the country to globalization and letting rural America rot. The tea-party movement of the late aughts was their last chance to avoid being decapitated. They failed. The Republican party has been hollowed out and is simply not the same entity it was 10 years ago. It has been taken over by a very angry insurgent force.

As I see, the Democrat Party is where the Republicans were in 08/09. They have, perhaps, a few more years of whatever it is they are doing before they similarly get taken over.

Best case scenario: we end up with a new political party (or two) that represent the more sane interests of the old guard and of the population as a whole. Worst case scenario: we end up with two absolutely insane zombie versions of our two legacy political parties fighting for control of the nation.

At least we don’t have more guns than people and a bunch of nukes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’d love to see a link to some chat logs demonstrating this if you have any you’re willing to share.

Be that as it may, I don't think most LLMs have figured that out yet.

Claude AI:

> My knowledge cutoff date is the end of October 2024.

Chat GPT:

> My knowledge cutoff date is June 2024.

The practical implementation of this (at the time) was ADSL, HDSL, IDSL, and SDSL. Those technologies all took one or two copper pairs, and terminated them on a DSLAM (or similar device in the case of HDSL) instead of on a telephone switch. For physical pairs connected to an analog voice port on a telephone switch, between the band pass filtering and DSO coding, you were never going to get more than 56kbps. The xDSLs could get between 144kbps to a several mbps in practice, depending on the variant and line conditions.

Keep in mind that at the time, LAN speeds over controlled twisted copper pairs over short distances (100m) were 100mbps - 1gbps.

If you've ever seen the physical condition of the telephone company's outside subscriber wiring (what they call "outside plant") -- and particularly the intermediate splices between central office and subscriber -- you would quickly disabuse yourself of the notion that you could transmit anything close to 1gbps over a twisted pair.

Turbochargers date back to the 1920s, and I'd rather troubleshoot a modern EFI/GDI system than a carburetor any day of the week.

I agree this is unproven conspiracy theory BS, but there are a great many conspiracy theories being espoused in this post. I’m curious why it is only this one you saw fit to call out?

A friend got taken in by a Ponzi scheme operator several years ago. The guy running it was known for taking his clients out to lavish dinners and events all the time.[0]

After the scam came to light my friend said “if I knew I was paying for those dinners, I would have been fine with Denny’s[1]”

I wanted to tell him “you would have been paying for those dinners even if he wasn’t outright stealing your money,” but that seemed insensitive so I kept my mouth shut.

0 - a local steakhouse had a portrait of this guy drawn on the wall

1 - for any non-Americans, Denny’s is a low cost diner-style restaurant.

Some of them don't even start on a month boundary, or even on the same day every year. Cisco, for instance, has a fiscal year based on a retail calendar[0]; their fiscal year ends on the last full week in July.

0 - https://nrf.com/resources/4-5-4-calendar

Ah, yes, that noted bastion of health disinformation and conspiracy theories, Yale.

I guess it isn’t technically wrong to refer to the linked researcher as an influencer, as her 336 publications have been cited 43,649 times.

I totally believe you could find examples of insurance products that have increased in price 4x over the last 20 years. I have a harder time believing that obstetricians were paying $1m/year in insurance premiums 20 years ago (the claim in the GP) when obstetricians make on average around $300k per year now. You'd have to believe they gross around $1.5m to net out a $300k salary, which seems unlikely.

I have no problem debating people who have positions grounded in reality and who appear to be acting in good faith. In this thread you’ve:

* Instead of addressing the substance of brudger’s argument[0], you attempted to tone police his comment and then set up a false dichotomy.

* Accused me[1] of “conflating legal rights with what is socially or ethically right, and I think this is a dubious rhetorical trick.” when I had argued no such thing, and it was in fact you who were engaged in dubious rhetorical tricks[2] as all I had written at that point is that people have the option of running open source projects on their own terms.

All of this in support of the position that people who give away their labor for free have a further obligation to give away more free labor because…checks notes… you say so.

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143414

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143719

2 - see, I do believe in social niceties. Isn’t it much nicer to say someone engaged in “dubious rhetorical tricks” than to say what you actually did in that comment, which is lie?

> Many people do think it’s a thing, though. See my links to past threads, where I am far from alone in my opinion. See also various Linux Distributions’ rules for maintainers.

Against my better judgement, I read through the first thread you linked to.

If there are any substantial number of people writing there that agree with your position that open source maintainers have a "social obligation" -- or anything similar -- to the users of the software they give away for free, I missed it.

Most of the replies to your comments I saw there were people trying to explain the same things we are trying to convey here, followed by your steadfast refusal to deal with reality. I mean, at one point you responded to a quoted section of an MIT-style license and said:

> That text does not disclaim support, security bugfixes, and future development. On the contrary, all three of those things are probably either heavlily implied or outright stated to be available on the project web site.

... when the first two lines of the quoted license does exactly that. To wit:

> ... PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND ...

... which means the copyright holders disclaim support, bug fixes, and future development. That's literally what providing something "AS IS" means. It is provided as it currently is.

I don't think continuing to engage with you here on an even more nebulous concept ('social obligation') when you are unable or unwilling to objectively deal with written text is going to be a good use of my time. Have a nice day.

They used to charge $600 for the service.

The way I found out about them being owned by a PE group is that a friend, who is a radiologist (like for people,) took his dog in and they needed to do an xray. Cost: $500.

What he gets paid for doing a similar study ranges from $6 (for medicaid patients) to around $50.

He asked them directly about being owned by PE and they fessed up.

I don't "keep" doing anything - this is the first and only time I've ever replied to one of your comments, nor have I said anything that a reasonable person could construe as conflating legal obligations and social etiquette.

I'm well aware of the difference between between the two concepts. What I, along with basically everyone else in this thread, is telling you is that this social obligation on the part of open source maintainers you seem the believe in is not a thing. People who give away their software for free do not owe any debt to anyone who might choose to use that software. As I said to the 1 (one) other person who seems to agree with you here, the relevant social etiquette is "don't look a gift horse in the mouth."

Correct. The relevant social etiquette here is "don't look a gift horse in the mouth."

Or -- stay with me -- they have the option of running their public project in the manner and with the level of effort they want. If you don't like that, you are free to run your own projects according to your own standards.

My first (knowing) run in with PE-owned businesses was with my local veterinarian. We’ve used them for years, and always had good experiences with them. Over the past few years, I noticed prices increased substantially, which I attributed to general post-COVID inflation. The last time we were there, one of the new vets gave us this… rehearsed pitch… on why we should pay them $2000 to anesthetize our dog and have his teeth cleaned.

It turns out they were purchased by a PE group right around the big price increases and are now on to various upsell strategies.

I’m only half kidding when I say they should have to put a prominent “Private Equity” sticker on their front door or something to warn the public.

> Will you find it to be different?

Yes.

> Honestly, ground meat is ground meat. What makes you think ground chicken is "quite different"?

Because when people who don't sell chicken nuggets have looked closely, they have found that to be the case.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/10/11/232106472/wh...

https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(13)00396-3/fulltex...

> And in both cases the ground meat/chicken is mixed with binders and flavorings to keep it together and keep it moist and make it even tastier -- variously including flour, breadcrumbs, water, salt, spices, etc. depending on the recipe.

Sure, or textured soy protein concentrate[0] to fill out the meat or soy lecithin [1] to emulsify the unholy mixture

0 https://www.tysonfoodservice.com/products/tyson/chicken/nugg...

1 - https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Fully-Cooked-Chicken-...

There are many variations of this story out there. A few:

* Interview with Bill Yeager https://www.networkworld.com/article/847852/lan-wan-router-m... (of note: gives credit for the early hardware architecture used through the Cisco AGS+ to Andy Bechtolsheim)

* Tom Rindfleisch at Stanford, very similar to Yeager's story https://web.stanford.edu/~tcr/tcr-cisco.html

* Slightly more favorable to the Cisco founders https://historyofcomputercommunications.info/section/14.21/c...

You’ll find the “ground chicken” in a typical industrially produced chicken nugget to be quite different than the ground meat found in a traditional Italian meatball.

Maybe we'll end up with a state where typical computers have a CPU, a GPU, and a QPU to solve different problems.

> But you could also argue the airline industry is fairly concentrated.

That's great and everything, but I don't see what it has to do with what I wrote: even given infinite competition, the risk to the public from an improperly managed airline is great. If an airplane fell out of the sky onto my house, I'd be glad for them to go out of business, but that wouldn't fix my house or heal or revive the people inside the house.

There is simply no amount of competition that would change that dynamic. The concepts are orthogonal.

I don't work in the airline industry, but my father in law did. He was a large jet mechanic. He constantly told stories of airline managers pressuring mechanics (and inspectors) to sign off on returning airplanes to service that were not airworthy, at least by regulation. Some gizmo or another would be broken and it just wouldn't seem like it should be such a big deal. We need this plane back in the air. What's taking you so long?

Competition doesn't make those people go away. If anything, more competition would make those kinds of people more likely to be upset over a plane not generating revenue over what (to them) seems like a minor problem.

Regulation is what keeps those people in check. Today, the airline can't overrule the licensed mechanic or inspector. The licensed expert has to personally sign off that needed repairs are performed and performed correctly, not the idiot who just doesn't understand what the big deal is.