refenestrator

We'll never know, but at that number of sorties, you figure we destroyed the regime's air power and mechanized units, aka the edge they have over a popular revolt.

Openness is irrelevant, the issue is their rise in power and the fear of losing hegemony in America.

If they had continued on the Hu Jintao trajectory, getting slightly more open while amassing economic and political power at the same rate, you'd see the exact same moralizing from Americans about how bad they are.

"NATO flew 26,500 sorties since it took charge of the Libya mission on 31 March 2011."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_...

It's obvious graft because DisneyWorld is in Florida.

It was the same people on the north vietnamese side all throughout this entire multi-decade period, from the early 1940s till the mid-70s. They fought a rotating cast of western-backed fig leaf local rulers. I'm not sure what else I can tell you, here.

Dienbienphu was in 1954, just for starters.

Maybe trying to exploit and maximize ethnic differences in other countries is fundamentally a bad idea in the medium/long term.

I just googled when 'The Ugly American' came out. 1958! Nobody can say "noone could have known".

I'm not an expert on Vietnam, but I'll just say that whatever their problems with a Chinese merchant class, the problems with a Western burning-villages class were probably bigger at the time.

It was always a war of independence, first from France and then from the US.

It would have been over by the mid-1950s, otherwise. 20 years of fighting primarily western troops with a fig leaf of local rule.

They grounded the plane, didn't they?

Which threats were most salient to which parties is an interesting exercise but not the main point.

I feel like there's a vast, decent middle ground between deliberately misgendering your coworkers and the current inquisition-style shitfest.

If I recall, the context was that he was dating a woman who was a bit of a tomboy and saying how cool it was that she was better at power tools and such than he was, and this comparison to typical SF tech women was part of that extended riff. It wasn't part of an incel monologue about 'femoids' or something.

Ultimately, if we let this continue, it becomes a war on flavor and humor, where no rhetorical fun is allowed lest someone take it the wrong way.

It's an incredibly privileged definition of 'harm done'. They had less budget and manpower than you wish they had, and their shitty off-brand cropping algo occasionally had too much titty. If that's the level of harm that registers with you, you're clearly doing very well.

> We’re not talking about shoestring developers. We’re talking about platforms that millions of people including heads of state use to affect billions of people’s lives.

Jedberg was >5 years ago, maybe closer to 10 for this algorithm. They were relatively shoestring compared to now, and especially compared to current-day FAANG.

No, I'm positing the premise that it was shipped with an absolute minimum of QA that didn't approach the level of trying to build 'inclusive' reference sets, on the cheap. It wasn't about caring in terms of priority of what was tested, it was about NOT caring that much in any direction and shipping it.

And it was a naive image cropping algorithm, years ago, and not making use of any sophisticated 'new technologies'. The beauty of the algorithm is that it was a simple function that could have been written in 1975 and required no training, deep learning or any of that. If you want to talk self-driving cars, you've got a much more relevant measure of harm and I'm right there with you.

As it is, I'd say there's a disconnect between where you and those years-ago shoestring developers stand on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. They were being scrappy with limited resources, and you're mad at them for not having an amount of QA that would have seemed unbelievable to them under their resource constraints.

Sure, more testing would be better, but nobody cares how many landscape shots it messed up, right?

Years ago reddit was, IIRC, not very staffed at all compared to their traffic. It's a pretty privileged take to say they should have done expensive QA entirely around your particular things that you care about.

That's an AWFUL lot of assumptions, there. You've constructed an entire complex narrative around something where all we know is that it's very simplistic.

It sounds like it was blasted out in an afternoon.

Maybe they weren't thinking about boobies a whole lot, tried like 5 random test images and shipped it?

Presumably there are a ton of failure modes for that algorithm, why get so moralistic and high-horse about just one?

I suppose we'll have to take it case by case. Sometimes someone was wronged, but much more frequently, they wanted their politics agreed to 100% and someone had a slightly different worldview, let's try to get them fired.

There's no consistency, which really ruins the label 'justice' for me. Conservative star wars lady compares conservatives being criticized to the holocaust? Fired. How dare you disrespect the dead. Basecamp people bring the holocaust into an equally stupid argument? They're heroes, everyone else is problematic.

Oscar Wilde had a quote about how patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel.. maybe we should update it to "calling people toxic is the last refuge of the antisocial". Not that sincere patriots and activists don't exist, of course.

I view cliques as alienating, like I said above. Of course I'm for 'justice', but it's such a fuzzy word that people can have different views of what is just.

If you conducted a gallup poll, what % of Americans do you think self-identify as "I find justice alienating"?

Most reasonable people are for justice and caring, and the vast majority aren't out to find people they can label as 'problematic' and chase them off the island.

I appreciate your earnest engagement here.

I think 'problematic' when discussing legal terms of a license is a lot less loaded than 'problematic' about a person, or personal behavior if we want to narrow that down.

It raises questions of who gets first right to be alienated. And do we credit their alienation. If I said I feel alienated by the constant social justice signalling, do I get credit for my alienation? Or do I get the stinkeye and maybe fired?

But even the actual disagreement they had at Basecamp was small fry, angels on the head of a pin level stuff.

Would you break out 'problematic' to describe that? How small is the circle of non problematic people?

The comment I responded to said "how problematic they were" -- not "they were being".

And it was about a case where a funny names list had circulated, the founders said "yeah, don't do that" but then objected to holocaust references in the reaction to it. This was extremely 'problematic' -- not the references, the objection to them.

So, exclusionary to whom? Some people might value not dragging the dead into a dumb debate about a funny names list. It's not unreasonable.

Labelling someone problematic is super exclusionary. Usually more so than the 'problematic' behavior.

Take a step back and it's cliques all the way down.

'Problematic' is such a fantastic word. Labelling a person, in whole, as 'problematic' but we're the nice and inclusive ones.

Way better ROI to invest in more capabilities than engage in a zero-sum conflict which will inevitably trash the fabs in Taiwan anyways.

Those trade restrictions just galvanize the Chinese to develop the capabilities themselves. And their system doesn't create a need for a big splashy foreign conflict to sell to the hogs for votes. They're more capable of making the smart play than we are.

The TSMC chip bottleneck makes it a red line for the US and China knows that. They're patient, no need to do it in a time period when it guarantees maximum blowback.

More likely your kids visit than your party buddies from decades ago.

Honestly it's a tiny assumption, nobody's perfect but it takes being terrible for your kids to avoid saying goodbye on your deathbed.

Well, we're not going to hire software engineers that don't exist in the name of equity. And, yes, the answer to 'how do I do better in this seniority system' is literally always 'wait', no matter who you are.

If people are primarily upset about general societal things rather than clear cut workplace discrimination, I would submit they should focus their activism at those societal things.

Because childhood nutrition, healthcare, schooling/community and other living conditions are huge causal factors towards a talent pool of people who are prepared to pass a software engineering interview? The original complaint here is all about 'seniority' being inherently unfair due to those societal conditions.

Trying to 'unbias' (meaning a calibrated, countervailing bias actually) at the other end of the funnel, where incidentally 80%+ are already super liberal, doesn't really get the same mileage.