The Plot Against Einstein

    The Advisory Committee on Uranium was the beginning of the US government's effort to develop an atomic bomb, but it did not vigorously pursue the development of a weapon.

    The Frisch–Peierls memorandum and the British Maud Reports eventually prompted Roosevelt to authorize a full-scale development effort in January 1942.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Oliphant#Manhattan_Projec...

it might have helped if he hadn't named it after himself. though that wasn't without precedent; xiafs was also named after its author, and of course there are lots of other examples that aren't failsystems (linux, the boehm–demers–weiser garbage collector, the stl by stepanov and lee, and of course every software project named something like ZEUS or THOR)

the default is for free software to die if nobody works on it, and though murdererfs did have some users, it evidently didn't have enough enthusiastic users for them to take up the mantle

pretty similar to what's happened with firefox and chromium; the hypothetically less evil forks like palemoon keep dying off from failure to recruit new talent

In any case they didn't remove it because of the murder.

Some development and maintenance has happened after Hans Reiser's conviction, such as enabling ReiserFS to use more than one core.

However, some problems like y2038-compatibility or 1 second date resolution are not even easy to fix without changing the on-disk format. It's a right pain, y2038 in particular. And ReiserFS doesn't actually have a lot of usage, partly due to this and other problems, so why bother going through a difficult and painful migration?

It's slated for removal now due to the y2038 issue, but even with that the removal of ReiserFS is conditioned on "no one really objects and/or brings a good use case to front", similar to the Itanium removal.

It's more than likely that ReiserFS would have been in the same state if Hans Reiser has died in a sudden accident before he killed his wife.

The trolley problem adjacent research has shown (if inconclusively) that more rational people are more likely to be OK being a cause of harm to other people to achieve some goal. In those experiments such goal is usually “save more people”, but all you need is to define some terms and “kill some now” might seem imperative to “save more later” to a sufficiently rational, long-term-thinking, “smart” person.

So the Nazi did, and there is much less conjecture here since it’s mostly well-documented. They were specifically inspired by natural sciences, including the then-new Darwin’s theory of natural selection. If anything, their shtick might’ve been to overcome the “bad” (for the Nazi) emotions that one may experience when sending some disabled person or a Jew to death. Which, according to them, had to be done since they were detrimental to survival of humanity (as Nazis defined it, of course) by polluting its genetic pool—so they were taught to train themselves to treat Jews as non-human bedbugs, stripped Jews of citizenship, disciplined fellow Germans who dared to shake hands with a Jew, etc. To Nazis emotions were a hindrance, they included the “irrational” compassion, and we might be better off remembering that when we discuss rationality, which consequentialism tends to go hand in hand with.

Addendum: An obvious argument can be made that Nazis were “not rational enough”, i.e. the problem is not with rationality per se but only with rationality based on premises that we now know are wrong. That, however, shows nothing because if we’ve learned anything it should be not to assume that now we have finally got all of our premises in order and possess absolute truth and complete understanding of reality.

This framing is interesting considering how HN is such an IQ-worshipping forum: The context is the most pig-headed, blatant racism imaginable—doesn’t even try to rationalize it, just “Jewish Physics”—and then we pivot to how these exalted rational people (translation: physics-smart specifically) must clearly be more rational than “less rational people” (average people?) and in turn how racist they (less rational people) must be. So we went from blatant racism exhibited by physicists to inferring how these scientists must be leagues better than “less rational people” in terms of racial tolerance or rationality with regards to race (if race is even a thing).

Except the only thing we have in front of us is racism expressed by physicists. Not commoner racism.

So what grounds do we have to expect “less rational people” to be more or less racist than these exalted scientists? Absolutely nothing.

Imagine if a gaggle of biologists in Antarctica committed mass murder of another group of scientists and smeared their blood in some Satanic ritual. I bet the conclusion would be to speculate about how less rational people would be even more inhumane and cruel if they had to live through an Antarctic winter or two? Absolutely bonkers.