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6AA4FDon How Basecamp Blew Up

I think they might be alluding to things like "kill all landlords" which are I suppose jokes for some and simply calls to action for others.

6AA4FDon How Basecamp Blew Up

I think based on other discussions in the thread, that just pulling out definitions will not be so helpful, so I just want to directly inquire, what sort of problem (since there is obviously a problem with this) do you think causes things like the "war on terror" and "war on drugs"? Do you think that these sorts of political actions would be acceptable to the voting public if they only affected white people?

6AA4FDon How Basecamp Blew Up

That's also not what Singer said. Singer said that he doesn't believe we live in a white supremacist culture. In a statement lower in the article he explicitly says it does exist, and I don't see that as necessarily contradictory with anything else he had said during the meeting in question.

6AA4FDon How Basecamp Blew Up

I understand your frustration with the polarization of political discourse in the workplace- I imagine it is stressful for all involved. However I think the notion that everything is becoming more and more political, is a little bit misleading. What of your work does not affect society? Do the products and services produced by the firms that employ you not affect it? Do the employees not work for wages necessary for their immediate survival? Do most working people not spend a substantial portion of their daily lives in a fashion dictated by those furnishing those wages?

I have trouble imagining how labor could ever lack a political dimension, and the distinction that presents itself to me between the past supposedly 'less politicized' workplaces, is that workers (or at least minoritized workers) were simply less safe to discuss politics and justice in this context that dominates their life and survival.

6AA4FDon Hacktivism, leaktivism and the future

Maybe I'm missing something about the MalwareTech story, but I don't think it's surprising people celebrate him. When I read some large feature on him (I'm sorry, I don't remember where) my impression was that he had royally screwed up as a young person, but that he was trying to turn his life around and did a serious good deed for the internet as a whole with his contribution to the wannacry thing. Many people make mistakes at any phase of life, and it's not surprising to me that people might celebrate people who try to move past that and do good.

edit: I believe [0] was the feature I read.

[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/confessions-marcus-hutchins-hack...

6AA4FDon The Road to Utopia: A manifesto for reclaiming a humanist future (2020)

I won't disagree about a relative improvement, but that is simply not what the word utopia means. 'a place of ideal perfection especially in laws, government, and social conditions' - merriam webster.

As for being tricked by poverty, malnutrition, etc. statistics, check out these from the UN group FAO.[0] One in nine people go to be hungry every night. That doesn't just make me think 'this isn't perfect' that makes me sick to my stomach. Can you imagine one in nine people in your group of friends and family going to bed without enough to eat? I don't find that acceptable, and while I surely owe my life to modern medical science, I find it truly galling to compare our current state of affairs to a utopia.

Or we could extrapolate from this UN report about child mortality: [1] 'At least one child dies every ten minutes in Yemen because of preventable diseases such as diarrhoea, malnutrition and respiratory tract infections.' That boggles my mind. Assuming that trend was accurate for an entire year, more than 50 thousand children would have died of preventable causes, just in Yemen, just in 2016. That is not utopian.

0: http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/1152031/icode/ 1: https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/malnutrition-amongst-c...

6AA4FDon The Road to Utopia: A manifesto for reclaiming a humanist future (2020)

I think a lot of people are reading this as "technology is bad" which is totally off base. I very much agree with your sentiment- technology is obviously very useful and I literally owe it my life from my first breath (emergency c-section), but it is only as just and good as is allowed by its distribution and implementation. It's like saying "hammers are not inherently utopian"- of course they aren't, but they are damn useful. It's an important insight, and I always feel concerned when it sparks so much controversy.

6AA4FDon The Road to Utopia: A manifesto for reclaiming a humanist future (2020)

Even if that was true, the people who are suffering the most in those high birth rate countries have very little they can do to alleviate that suffering. If there are major changes that could be made in a political system to drastically improve it, and they haven't been made, that is a sign that we are very far from utopia, once we ask ourselves "why hasn't that happened yet"? Either it's not that easy or simple, or it is, and the people with the capability to make those changes are unwilling. The former invalidates one of the assumptions behind that reasoning, and the latter tells us that rather severe injustices are occurring.

6AA4FDon The Road to Utopia: A manifesto for reclaiming a humanist future (2020)

I think utopia is a really high bar. To restrict that bar to a single and simple facet of economy, I will say that a necessary condition for an economic system to be utopian, is for no one to regularly find themselves without an adequate quantity of food. However, apparently in 2020 more people died of malnutrition than any other cause. [0] I don't want to make this a long post, however I think on the basis of this fact alone, I am justified in not considering myself part of a utopian global economy.

0: https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/global-nutrition-re...

6AA4FDon Airwindows – Free VST Plugins for Mac, Windows and Linux

Oh okay, thank you for the correction.

ps. I love JACK and Ardour, you are awesome!

6AA4FDon Airwindows – Free VST Plugins for Mac, Windows and Linux

This might not be the answer you are looking for, but this is one of the things you use a DAW for. If you have a project where you need to use a programming language to live generate midi, I would recommend taking a look at puredata for generating that MIDI, and a plugin host from this list[1]. You could probably use one of the programming libraries in that list for jack to write a program that uses the jack midi api directly.

1: https://jackaudio.org/applications/

6AA4FDon Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

I agree that person experiences are not exactly reliable, but I think it's also good to remember that they can have the appearance of facticity and accuracy, as indicated by the sentiment of the person you were replying to.

6AA4FDon Virality and Chaos

Thank you for the feedback!

What I meant by 'making rules out of chaos', is taking evidence from places like search rankings and recommendation widgets, and interpreting how that ranking came to be, the extent to which it was influenced by the presence of links on other sites, the presence of keywords, accessibility features, the video length, and so on. Is that a poor understanding of SEO, and/or do you disagree more with the original phrasing?

As for the other inaccuracies I would be grateful if you mentioned them as well so I can rectify them.

6AA4FDon Factorio 1.0

This is more of a hypothetical scenario used to describe the origins of a modern capitalist state, rather than any present scenario. However there have certainly been people in history who have been able to make decisions about what laws they want to be subject to. Political lobbying, international migration, and bribery to the purposes of selective enforcement are all methods people have used to this date in the US.

If you're interested in a more theoretical (and less bourgeoisie oriented) discussion of the tensions between a social contract justification for punishment and our practical inability to leave the state, I would recommend "Legal Obligation and the Duty of Fair Play" as well as "A Theory of Justice", both by John Rawls, as well as "The Principle of Fair Play" by A. John Simmons. You may know the second as a standard component of any introductory political philosophy curriculum, and the first and third were parts of a philosophy of law class I took, taken from a textbook by Frederick Schauer. They are quite interesting.

The conclusion I have come to is that we are morally bound by the laws of a state in proportion to the degree that they benefit us in comparison to other possible bodies of law. This approximates our willingness to agree to a given scheme of rules if we were presented with free migration between all possible states, and the extent to which we would prefer the state we are actually in, we should be considered to have willingly agreed to their laws even if that did not happen in reality.

6AA4FDon Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tax-corporate/many-bi...

Doesn't seem like it to me.

6AA4FDon Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

Does inequality drive you? Personally, I don't work because I want to enjoy more goods, services, or life stability than my friends or family. I work because I want to be able to afford my own health insurance and pay my own grocery bill. I don't think my interest in doing that is really a function of anyone else's insurance or economic status.

6AA4FDon Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

>Workers are also a pretty big beneficiary

You mean all of the workers at foxconn benefiting from their innovative suicide nets?

6AA4FDon Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

All international agreements represent a sacrifice the "highest authority" makes, setting their reputation and future ability to make agreements as collateral. The "highest authority" further diluted its own authority by making a corporate deal that went against previously made agreements with its actual peers (states), damaging the collateral it already put up.

Whatever ideas you have about the state needing to have the highest authority in the land, if we follow that through by not holding them accountable for agreements made, then that actually substantially dilutes the power the state can have.

6AA4FDon I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

Exactly! I used to be in the latter camp as a child - allowance paid for some stuff, but not a lot, now I'm in the former group and am happy to subsidize the enjoyment of those less privileged than me. Especially because some of those people are probably going to be inspired and create some great art I'll really enjoy.

6AA4FDon Hacking with environment variables

> On a recent project we gained the ability to specify environment variables

> We were also unable to control the contents of a file on disk

From the first and second sentence.

6AA4FDon Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

I would try fedora or centos. They have good stability and documentation. In my admittedly limited experience centos has worked better for me than debian or ubuntu.

6AA4FDon Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

`nix-shell -p ghc` does it for me.

6AA4FDon Anti-algorithmic music: How Bandcamp is helping artists beat the odds

Any underground IDM recommendations?

6AA4FDon The fall of Quibi: how did a starry $1.75B Netflix rival crash so fast?

Reminds me of the "great man" theory of history and Randian leadership myths.

6AA4FDon Almost 1 in 3 pilots in Pakistan have fake licenses, aviation minister says

I strongly agree. For laws to work effectively, there needs to be a critical mass of support for them in every group involved.

6AA4FDon Journalist’s phone hacked: all he had to do was visit any website

Whatsapp on linux still requires a turned-on phone iirc.

6AA4FDon Linux Touchpad Like a MacBook update: progress on multitouch

Could be wayland/xwayland if you're using that. My first thought.

6AA4FDon I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors

Don't forget that California is a big state and a lot of it is not very populated or popular. A house in the bay or LA will probably run you a lot more than that.

6AA4FDon Patagonia joins growing list of companies boycotting Facebook ads

I didn't say speech wasn't special, I asked you to consider it as a kind of action, which it is. I value the free exchange of ideas because speech is such a significant kind of action. What I said is that I should be free to associate with people who do good things with that amazing freedom. What is the conclusion of your argument? That speech is so important that I shouldn't be able to pick who I want to be friends or business partners with based on what they say?

6AA4FDon Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

Visual studio code has an arm build now [0]. I don't know what regular VS is written on but assuming it's .NET framework I assume a build will show up as the framework itself improves on ARM.

[0]: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/releases/tag/1.46.1 (basically just MS source minus branding)