wslack

Try getting off VPN if you're on one.

I'd politely push back a bit. It makes sense that trans people don't want someone else assuming their pronouns - I wouldn't like it if someone called me something besides "he" - so the question in good faith is reasonable, unless someone is offended to be treated in a trans-friendly way.

I suggest the book "Failure is not an option" by Gene Kranz, an Apollo flight director (played by Ed Harris in Apollo 13). He describes how the primary work of flight controllers in all missions is risk management. You are constantly balancing mission needs, fuel needs, mass needs, temperature needs, and etc etc.

I don't think that a raw metric of the number of SPOF is the right way to measure the risk of this spacecraft. It's a fun term for PR purposes (and emphasizing the risk here) but the actual risk posture is more complex.

I imagine that in the course of developing this, they worked out a possible strategy without all of those SPOF - but doing so doesn't eliminate the risk, and the impact to mission is likely massive.

> Being paranoid about lawsuits against some personal blog shows a lack of legal sophistication and this type of sensationalism promotes an irrational fear of being somehow financially vulnerable to almost any legal predation.

And yet, many people reacted just like this writer. Perhaps, given that the reaction was widespread, it could and should have been anticipated, instead of expecting every person to have your evident legal knowledge.

It sounds like they are trying to imply it was his land without actually stating as such (because it was likely just over the property border).

> They removed the Baron's homosexuality and sexual perversion

Probably because at the time Dune was written, people conflated those things in a way that caused a lot of harm to people not interested in harming children. Seems highly reasonable not to feed a trope like that.

> Controversial opinion, but I think adding Magsafe back (along with the other ports) was a step backward for the industry.

It's too useful not to add back. Every laptop should have something like this; it prevents accidents and damage.

r/talesfromtechsupport is full of these sorts of stories. I make a visit on days when my job is frustrating and inevitably feel better.

It's a good story and relevant. Not your fault the internet got spun up in a totally other direction with it.

They seem to be treating it as a marketing opportunity, as well as explaining these topics for journalists. If their post didn't add to the public conversation, it wouldn't have been so viral.

Super-niche subreddits still have something to give, but inevitably success > popularity > memes unless there is strong moderation.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court decided 5-4 that the courts should have no power here, so its up to state legislatures. (https://www.npr.org/2019/06/27/731847977/supreme-court-rules...)

I think its meaningful that the first one of these wasn't "a billionaire and his three friends."

I also like the fundraising component, such as auctioning one of the seats via charitable lottery and deliberately choosing a peds cancer survivor.

> the world has become overly sensitive to certain subjects.

I'm not sure that the world has become sensitive. Rather, opinions that people didn't feel safe to express about nonsense they experienced in their earlier life are now coming out. I recall a story about a church that held an "Aunt Jemima" event in 1991 and were surprised that so many black families chose not to show up - but none of those folks protested or said what bothered them. (https://theundefeated.com/features/it-was-past-time-for-aunt...)

Broad, sweeping statements about groups of people have been used to discriminate all over the place. They've been used to justify not teaching certain kinds of people, or to justify myths that certain groups of people "should" always be a certain way because of the majority trendline.

The people that built these myths sometimes did so (or do so today) with pseudoscience. So, for some who have heard this kind of nonsense their whole lives (maybe it was used to discriminate against a parent), actually valid + careful scientific research can sound like the same old nonsense.

Every trans person I know knew this about themselves as a young child. They were not "influenced." Many of them had no idea that being trans was possible and thought they were gay, if they knew what that was.

Correct! (I work at USDS, am commenting here just personally to shed light where I can).

That would require (literally) an Act of Congress to pay civil servants more.

That said, there are plenty of mid-senior programs for tech talent. There haven't been the same pipelines for more junior talent.

Many people in that first wave of USDSers are back in government, some with USDS, some at other agencies.

I think there's some of "this is shiny and new and putting the plane together as it flies" excitement that's different now (from what I saw in 2015 when with 18F), but USDS is better positioned thanks to long-developed trust to get more things done, IMO.

> Slow, bureaucratic, opaque, slow, low-compensation, slow. That's just not attractive to me.

Some degree of slowness is (in some ways) a feature because of the harm, abuse, and eventual investigations that can happen at maximum speed. Some of it is 100% not a feature.

I think it's less opaque and bureaucratic from the inside than might be expected - some of the work is ensuring that one person is accountable, and then ensuring that person can make meaningful decisions.

https://playbook.cio.gov/#play6

> The government ought to put up or shut up.

That requires congress to "vote to massively raise the salaries of bureaucrats." How do you suggest that happening? The media won't care about the distinction of it only being for security experts.

Tolerance of wrong viewpoints is different than the active support algorithms give to discovering false content.

Did they eliminate the primary process? The real value of IRV (IMO) is when you can have a Sanders and a Clinton (or a Trump and a Rubio) both on a general election ballot.

> you can't distribute the counting well without transmitting the contents of all of the ballots

There are only so many combinations of rankings that are possible. It shouldn't be hard to encode each of those possible orders and transmit them as a whole.

His point is that if few rank the fourth candidate first, they will be the first eliminated in the runoff process.

That's true - but approaches that identify those best compromises get mathematically more and more complex as the system gains fidelity.

We shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If a place wants to implement another voting system, I'd be interested to see how it plays out, and if the voters see the winner with legitimacy.

IRV is relatively simple and candidates in NY are still attacking it because of the complexity it has over FPTP.

Scraping for non-profit purposes feels fine. Scraping for commercial purposes feels dirty. I don't know if there's a way for the law to square that circle.

> If the CFAA doesn't apply to sys admins working at the highest levels of authorization, it seems to be a useless law. Foreign actors can simply hire sys admins to access whatever they want, no need for hacking.

It's still illegal to steal IP. But no, you can't charge a janitor with keys to the whole building for breaking and entering if he uses those keys to steal something.

You charge him for theft.

However, in past decades, those other networks didn't cause the same level of propagation of misinformation.

It's tricky because these accusations resonate because they remind us of things that really happen. (and in fact, lies can be formulated for maximum impact when truthtelling is usually more nuanced)

Because powerful people have strong lawyers, the tools that the falsely accused can use to clear their name can be used, to more effect, by the guilty.

There are no easy solutions here. The past looked calm only because people often had no recourse unless a newspaper took up their cause.

I think the point of the original comment is that everyone can't follow that path, at least right now. Someone has to pick the oranges and work in the warehouse.

So pretending that everyone in those jobs is making bad choices is wrong, because someone has to do those jobs.