nikdaheratik

What helped me understand this better was thinking about writing software as a subset of all types of writing. People do write for free because they enjoy doing so or because they feel like they can advance knowledge in a particular area. This is true for both prose and also for the software medium. In both software and prose, you can gain valuable contacts and social credit by sharing your writing with others even if you don't make as much direct income from it.

The publishing industry is much better than software at getting the money to flow towards the creator, but software jobs overall pay better than most writers because of the skill sets involved. Both publishing and software, however, do have multiple ways of going from amateur enthusiast to highly paid professional if you have the talent and connections. And open software, like contributing to small literary magazines, is one way that you can make that transition.

> What I don't understand, is this idea that firing people in response to media shit-storms is somehow something to be applauded.

1. RMS wasn't just some random guy in the foundation, he was supposed to be a leader which means he should be held to a higher standard. Firing someone who doesn't meet that standard means your organisation has integrity which is important and should be applauded.

2. The downsides for keeping him around, especially since RMS didn't seem to be all that apologetic, are also important. The goals of the FSF are not advanced by being pushed into this media storm.

If FSF didn't do something, they would have been forced to answer alot of questions in the media about how they actually feel about age of consent laws, whether they took any money from Epstein and/or Minsky, how they felt about Epstein and/or Minsky, etc., and would then have had to give a number of awkward statements about this mess. Then they would have also had to answer many of those same questions from their donors. And likely if the controversy gained traction, their largest donors may have then been forced to answer their own set of awkward questions from the media about this whole mess. Especially if those donors also had ties to MIT. At some point, many of them would have also reconsidered whether they wanted to donate money to FSF, which would also be bad for the organisation.

All of which is to say that it's not about free speech, it's about protecting the organisation.

Except it's not just about "free speech", it's about protecting the organisation's integrity which was already shot because of Epstein. Context matters, and in this case MIT couldn't afford to just let him off with a warning after already being hit for taking money from a sex trafficker. If RMS had thought about the big picture, he would have known better than to engage on the topic to begin with, especially in that forum.

The FSF is even worse because he's supposed to be in a position of leadership there and represents the organisation. And they shouldn't be put in a position where they have to decide whether to support some controversial statement about age of consent laws just because one of their leaders decided to stick up for one of his friends. It's just not worth it.

> To whom? To those that endorsed questionable business relations that drew attention in the first place that still are in leading positions at the MIT?

Side note: Ito, at least, is out at MIT. Others may be as well.

As far as to whom, it would have been to "anyone who was harmed by his statements". This could include those at the FSF who he represented, the students and researchers at MIT, who also were associated with the statements, and to people victimised by Epstein and others like him.

It's not as hard to find someone to apologise too, as it would be for the guy to actually admit he's wrong in the first place.

I feel like your position would have more traction with me if we as a society were better about enforcing the existing laws regarding sexual assault and consent. Adults in that situation are willing to go on the record and state that the acts were not consensual and no one is willing to believe them. At least not enough to investigate and put their rapist away in a majority of cases. I can't imagine a child would have an easier time of this no matter how mature they seem, but at least with the consent laws, they wouldn't be forced into the same thing that seems to happen with a number of victims where a lawyer puts them on the stand and tries to make them look like they are lying about everything.

If it was just a one-off thing isolated from other recent events, you might be correct. But due to Epstein's association with MIT and his other history of controversial statements and actions with FSF, they couldn't just let him make an apology and hide out for awhile.

The fact that this is a more friendly forum than the general public, and yet the majority of people who are sticking up for him here seem to be anonymous conspiracy theorists and people who want to advocate lowering the age of consent, seems to be pretty damning in itself for his prospects.

Except your opinion is as an anonymous person on the Internet, while his was the director of the FSF and a trusted member of an academic community in a public forum. He has to be willing to think about the people and organisations he represents before he opens his mouth and makes them look bad. If he isn't willing to do that, then he should get sacked.

I think that it has next to nothing to do with technology. MIT was still reeling from the fall out with the Media Lab and Epstein. If it wasn't for that, they might have gotten by with a simple apology, but that wouldn't be enough at this point.

There is also a history of controversial stuff related to his time at the FSF which meant that probably wouldn't settle for a simple apology either (not that RMS seemed willing to give one).

As organisations change over time, what they need in leadership also changes. In this case, they didn't need an ideologue with a history of generating controversy, they needed someone who can keep the ship going forward so that the projects they are overseeing don't lose enough talent that they become irrelevant.

The "turn of events" in this case is losing his job because he made the organisations associated with him look bad. And I think it's completely fair for them to kick him to the curb in this case. No one person too important to lose if they turn into a liability. And in this case, I think RMS was well past that point.

I think your response is very self centered at best. Feeling of being "`raped` of your free agency" is not enough to make a law unjust. It certainly doesn't outweigh the actual exploitation that was what led to these laws to be written to begin with.

The bottom line is that your agency wasn't removed as a minor, you were just left with the same choice as many other minors, to obey the laws regarding drinking, smoking, pornography, etc. Or to break them in order to gain whatever you felt you were being denied. The laws were written to punish people who exploit minors, and the consequences of those crimes pretty much always fall on the adult in the situation (for good reason).

When I was 17, and unable to vote or see certain movies, or 20 and unable to legally buy alcohol, I definitely felt like my freedom was abridged, but it didn't make the laws behind those immoral, it just made them slightly unfair. And that was for some low stakes stuff compared to sex trafficking or adult exploitation of children.

It's not just about free speech, it's about his position of leadership in those organisations. He needs to either moderate his public viewpoints in order to look out for the best interests of the people there, which is what a good leader would do, or he needs to resign because he clearly doesn't understand his job.

When you're the head of the FSF, or any other organisation really, you can't just be some kind of agitator, throw out a bunch of controversial nonsense, and then expect it to not look bad for the people you're supposed to represent. It's not an "assault on free speech" to get kicked to the curb for making your organisation look bad, it's cause and effect.

The site you're linking to is junk. Your comments about records ignores the fact that the hottest record setting days are not distributed randomly, but are in fact clustered around the turn of the 21st century. On top of that, the overall science is not solely based on temperature records, but on a number of different phenomena which you completely ignore.

TL;DR, the polar ice caps are melting, as predicted by scientists; the intensity of tropical storms is increasing, as predicted by scientists; the average mean temperature has been rising steadly, as also predicted. You fail to account for these things with any alternative theory that fits the facts, and your claim that it is all "scaremongering" is dubious at best. Especially since the world's largest companies are all petrochemical and have an invested interest in creating as much FUD about climate change as possible.

The problem is that they aren't as rare as they used to be, and they are pushing the overall average up. If you look at other natural phenomena, like the tide coming in, it comes in waves and each wave is higher than before. You still have moments between each wave, when it seems like it was before, but the change does happen.

Microsofts worst enemy, IMO, is their OEMs who are allowed to put all kinds of custom side-hustle garbage into the OS and it takes alot of work to remove it. Essentially, you have to pay a premium to a manufacturer to signal you're a "serious" user instead of "consumer" user, or you have to spend time removing spam... I mean "custom" apps that the OEM got paid to put onto your machine. At least, Apple only hustles their own ecosystem apps and let you safely hide or remove most of them.

You're right that the off-the-shelf experience with Windows can be very dodgy depending on what your OEM is and what crap they decided to put into the core OS.

I'm conflicted about all this myself because I have a good experience with Win10 once I get all the extra nonsense removed, the settings changed, and my shell setup working. I feel like Windows rewards people who are willing to put the time into it now, but its not as easy as dealing with Mac OS where you basically just clear off the toolbar, put the shell and whatever dev apps onto it, and maybe tweak a few settings and you're okay to go.

I can't speak for symphony, but that's just not the way it works in laravel. The "artisan serve" action is used when you want to make a quick demo (maybe). The actual deployment is in an apache server like everything else.

The rest of the actions that use artisan, for the most part, are for creating boilerplate code like database models or empty controllers quickly. They aren't a requirement to use the framework, but are faster and less error-prone than copy/pasting an old empty class file.

The last class of actions that call artisan are for things like cron jobs which you setup once and forget about. Their use case is pretty obvious once you read the manual.

> These frameworks have never added anything that I couldn't do simpler and faster, nor have they provided me with constructive guidance in the design or maintenance of a project.

That's nice to hear, but it's probably not true for the majority of people. The entire point for these projects is to allow programmers to create a rapid prototype for design purposes that can then be iteratively developed into a final product. If they don't make sense to you, maybe it's because you aren't working in that space, and not because the tools themselves are lacking.

Well I've been gainfully employed for pretty much my entire career using PHP and I've never had a problem with recruiters. It really depends on the city, the companies in that city, and the overall market in your region.

Big business runs on Java/.NET, but small-midsized businesses run on a variety of different platforms partially based on the history of their IT department and their development needs.

The bottom line is that you can write a good greenfield web application for a midsized business faster, with less overhead, and with fewer headaches using PHP and a good framework than you can with Java or any of those other tools you mentioned. The tradeoff is that they don't integrate as easily with the huge backend software packages and may not scale as well as Java and .NET. Which is why huge businesses don't run with them as much.

I've spent basically two years working to convert a legacy project built on PHP 5.x into Laravel on PHP 7.x and I can agree that it's come a long way as a language, and that frameworks like this help.

The biggest issues, however, are not technical but are based on changes in the development philosophy overall. The legacy project was written by people who envied Java and its object system and wanted to make everything an object. Laravel (and similar projects) have moved towards something that is a mix of object-based approaches and Functional/Lispy approaches. This puts it more in line with the direction alot of languages (JS, Rust, etc) have been taking.

TL;DR: PHP is in a better place than it's been in awhile, largely because it's willing to borrow good ideas and execute them while still being able to make use of its legacy libraries when needed.

Or maybe he actually did it and deserves to go to prison for it. Hiding in a cupboard for seven years rather than going in and facing the charges is a good way to look guilty. Blaming "foreign spies" in an attempt to hide what you did so that you don't look as bad is the kind of thing an narcissistic toolbag might do.

It is possible for Assange to be a bad guy and also for the U.S. going after him after all this time to also be unjust and bad. Not everything is a conspiracy and you don't necessarily have any "good" people when you start messing with international espionage and related areas.

Assange, and his lawyers, made all kinds of arguments and appealed his extradition to Sweden all the way to the High Court and lost. He hasn't actually had any court time related to the U.S. extradition because he fled. I would assume that if he had a decent chance of winning on the merits for the U.S. extradition, he wouldn't have spent 7 years hiding in a cupboard.

That isn't true about war and it certainly isn't true about public utilities. People went to jail all the time for overcharging the government during times of war. Money is a way to measure value and it always matters.

As far as public utilities go, the problem is that people who give them money expect a small but static return on investment. For almost all the 20th century they were a mostly safe place to keep money. That was part of the reason why Enron was one of the few companies where the white collar criminals were actually punished.

One of the major problems is that the people running them don't know how to manage projects that are more risky and the people doing the investing don't know how to account for the uncertainty around fossil fuels, versus intermittent renewables, versus huge nuclear projects. The message from the politicians is always "your money in these projects is safe", and they've made sure to keep that promise even if they've put a different spin on it because the underlying shockwaves would be as bad as government bonds going bad.

You seem to be leaving out the fact that most nuclear plants have a fair amount of downtime as well in order to refuel. While I don't have UK statistics, in the US it's typically 30-40 days per year when they don't run (so 10% of the time or more). So, you would need more than one source to make up for the nuclear plant's downtime just as you would to make up for areas offshore where the wind isn't blowing at top speed.

Again, if nuclear power is such a great idea, why aren't more companies lobbying for it? The reality is that every place in the U.S. that it is economically feasible to build a plant, already has one. There's a nuclear plant in the middle of Kansas and it's barely viable. And that's ignoring the proliferation issue when we try and export any new versions of the tech to other countries that need new energy.

We're better off making solar, wind, etc. viable than pouring tons of money into a single area that we can't safely export to other places in the world.

And electrical energy is still only one part of the problem since we still need to replace the internal combusion enginees, and jet engines or at least find an alternative fuel source. Nuclear power isn't a panacea.

And yet, very few companies (in the U.S. at least) want to build them. It's because the worst case scenario they're planning for is very bad indeed, so they have to spend all this expense to keep it from happening. Compared to every other renewable energy technology, it is more risky and has a much higher cost to get up and running.

And that's setting aside the other problem which is that many of the countries that are still growing, and will need new, clean sources of power are countries that don't have as much nuclear expertise to begin with. And some of them are countries that the West has tried to actively keep from having nuclear capability.

Better solar, wind, etc., has fewer risks than better nuclear tech in the long run.

You say that, but Detroit is a pretty good counterexample. Tons of money / land just left to rust because it wasn't worth the effort. And that was just due to industrial changes not even something approaching a natural process.

If the ports not worth that much, the beaches (and tourism) has washed away, they've got a new sewage problem due to rising waters, and they can't get fresh water as easily, then what reason is there to rebuild? You need trade, fresh water, and waste removal to keep a city running, and for Miami, they're going to have problems with all three areas.

I don't know if they could do much more with it, but that was a darn enjoyable video game.

I've recently read some of Glen Cook's "Chronicles of the Black Company" and I think that was very much in line with the story in Myth in some ways. It was kind of like reading a novelisation of the game, only to find out the novel was written 15+ years ahead of the game!

Been reading through the full book of this guy who designed alot of the dungeons in World of Warcraft. He's realistic about alot of the challenges they faced but overall had a good experience with the project.

Site: https://whenitsready.com/wowdiary/

It's not a very weak argument to say that learning LaTeX just so you can write your paper is a waste of time. The caveat is that, for some kinds of papers, it is less of a timewaster than other kinds. Especially if they have alot of math, or some wonky tables.

I think the blog post was okay, but could have used some editing as I ended up skimming some of the points he was trying to make but that's kind of what blogs are about.

Emacs has always had a reputation of being a text editor for wizards. And it's even worse as modern computer editors have gone in a completely different direction. IMO, nano is probably the easiest of the standard editors on command line, and vim is somewhere in between.

Paralysing fatalism is just as bad as living in a denalist fantasy: both embrace doing nothing rather than facing up to the difficult work that needs done.

The IPCC report is not "a complete joke". Nothing in it requires the invention of radical new technology. We're not talking about needing some kind of ATMOS silver bullet. The reality is that there's alot of work to implement it, and it may not get done on time, but it's also not impossible (yet).

The technical challenges of moving to a renewable energy economy are doable, it's the political problem of forcing entire sectors of the economy worth hundreds of billions of dollars to replace themselves or drop out of existence.