JellyBeanThief

I've thought down lines like that, too. Then I ask myself how I draw the line between who's a kid and who gets decapitated, and why anyone else should trust my judgment. After that, I just feel like violence is futile in that it will always produce motivation for more violence, and probably end up hurting more kids, the opposite of what I claim I want.

Instead I reaffirm my commitment to actual sex and emotional education, and easily accessible birth control, and access to abortion. I figure threatening to decapitate people only makes people more fucked up, not less.

Maybe they do respect themselves and have decided the money in the job is just a means to other ways of respecting themselves that don't involve benefiting MS or customers or users.

Relevant Discworld:

The imp gave a nervous cough.

“Good for you!” it said. “You have wisely purchased the Dis-organizer Mk II, the latest in biothaumaturgic design, with a host of useful features and no resemblance whatsoever to the Mk I, which you may have inadvertently destroyed by stamping on it heavily!” it said, adding, “This device is provided without warranty of any kind as to reliability, accuracy, existence or otherwise or fitness for any particular purpose and Bioalchemic Products specifically does not warrant, guarantee, imply or make any representations as to its merchantability for any particular purpose and furthermore shall have no liability for or responsibility to you or any other person, entity or deity with respect of any loss or damage whatsoever caused by this device or object or by any attempts to destroy it by hammering it against a wall or dropping it into a deep well or any other means whatsoever and moreover asserts that you indicate your acceptance of this agreement or any other agreement that may be substituted at any time by coming within five miles of the product or observing it through large telescopes or by any other means because you are such an easily cowed moron who will happily accept arrogant and unilateral conditions on a piece of highly priced garbage that you would not dream of accepting on a bag of dog biscuits and is used solely at your own risk.”

The imp took a deep breath. “May I introduce to you the rest of my wide range of interesting and amusing sounds, Insert Name Here?”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony should be n our vocabulary.

> Anyone with any meaningful experience with using machines should know better.

I think this should be "experience with making or maintaining machines" instead. It's those cases when you don't get to be lazy--you have to fix the machine yourself. As long as you're just the user, it's someone else's responsibility if your machine-aided work is wrong.

Yes, we can point out how that's not actually correct until we're blue in the face. But in practice, the way we have set up our economy and our institutions, it is correct.

This sounds flippant, but I agree with it, so I'll expand on it:

"Property" is a useful social tool for managing stuff that is scarce and which can't easily be shared. Food, tools, shelter, land, and so on. Property produces stability. People can count on having their stuff later, even if they're not using it at this instant. That lets them make longer-term plans, which, ideally, result in lots of different kinds of things becoming less scarce.

Ideas and information, however, are not scarce. Any number of brains and storage media can hold them simultaneously. That's not true of a pizza. But for a long time "intellectual property" worked pretty well because the copying of ideas and information required significant effort and materials. Books had to be typeset and printed. Music had to be stamped onto vinyl or written onto tape, which needed specialized equipment. All this made it so that we could pretend that ideas and information were scarce.

Now, that's not true anymore. Our technology has advanced to the point where the equipment for copying information is ubiquitous and unspecialized. We have to face the actual nature of information: It's not scarce. "Property" doesn't work on it anymore.

Which really does leave artists and authors and other intellectual producers in a bad spot, since the time and effort involved in creating stuff hasn't gone down. We have this kind of thing now where it either doesn't exist at all or it exists in such abundance that the adjective is unneeded. How do we economically incentivize something like that?

Personally, I lean towards the suspicion that for some kinds of things, mainly entertainment, we don't need to incentivize it anymore at all. People are not going to stop writing fiction and recording music just because it doesn't pay anymore.

The real jam is in non-fiction, because that costs of making that stuff are higher than just food and shelter for the producer while they're writing. Research often requires travel, experimentation, equipment, materials. How do these get paid for?

Root^4 cause: https://pbfcomics.com/comics/trauma-trooper/

I can print webpages straight to my Epson TM-T20IV. My web browser just sends it to CUPS.

Thing is, AI will also be able to provide substantial support for software it writes. And it will make self-hosting a lot less painful, too. Quirky behavior will still happen, but eh, Excel imports numbers as dates. You can't buy your way out of quirky behavior for all the money in the world.

I would much rather have been called a computerologist than a computer scientist.

I could get behind "exercise", as in your rights (while you have them), and your power (to stop relying on specific conveniences, businesses). Combines with imagery of gaining strength, independence.

I haven't seen his whole filmography, but I can see Asteroid City in this, yeah.

This was the very first thing I thought when I was taught about requirement traceability matrices in uni. I was like "Ew, why is this happening in an Excel silo?" I had already known about ways of adding metadata to code in Java and C#, so I expected everything to be done in plain text formats so that tooling could provide information like "If you touch this function, you may impact these requirements and these user stories." or "If you change this function's signature, you will break contracts with these other team members (here's their email)."

> One guy with a tendency to procrastinate extrapolates his expierence as a universal truth without providing any grounding.

Other commenters here are doing that too, more or less. But yeah, no one's proposing forced immortality. We have a cultural habit of assuming our right to choose for everyone else, we see people doing it even when they're actually advocating for universal rights to choose.

If you're sufficiently bored at age 450 or 45, go ahead and end your life. Your life belongs to you, not to other people. Just don't harsh the mellow of the person who's happy reading books until age 45,000.

Web Annotations are what we need right now. Let people write and scribble all over webpages and share with other people in an open, vendor-neutral format. Choose who you trust, from journalists to organizations to neighbors to experts to conspiracy theorists. Let commentaries and interpretations appear overlaid on government websites and documents, Wikipedia, opinion pieces, social media, Archive.org, anything and everything. Let it be out of the hands of the content hosts.

It very much is not.

"We can X yet technology has been unable to even Y" is one of the most famously repeatedly defeated positions in history. People have had to run marathons to keep those goal posts out of reach.

> A permit isn't about seeking permission

Then they need to be renamed.

It's worth noting that a lot of parents forced to go through with unplanned pregnancies are uninterested. They didn't want their children, and they will do the bare minimum necessary to keep them alive until 18.

Sounds like we need to shorten the work week

> the ability to organize things freely in space

This is the key. It's not enough for digital tools to just put things in folders or tag them. It's the links themselves that need elevation. People need to add metadata to links, they need to apply rules specifying what links to crawl and how to arrange them in space, they need to specify how content should be displayed in islands of connected content. Then they need to be able to arrange islands on a 2d, 2.5d, or 3d canvas.

We have information input and retrieval solved. For some reason it's taking a real long time for people to get to spread out.

> I think this falls squarely in the realm of bureaucratic administrators who have nothing better to do than assert their power and maintain the illusion of a connection between talent (great chess players) and the trivial signaling games of the upper class (the style of pants one is wearing).

I concur except about the bureaucratic administrators. I think they do this because the upper class will replace them if they don't do the work of asserting the upper class's power.

At a 10 year length of copyright.

Why can't the boys have female role models?

It's not misinterpreted. Misinterpretation is an accident that happens when a good faith message can be reasonably interpreted in multiple ways, and the listener's choice is not the speaker's choice. A good faith message is one where the speaker deliberately removes all likely ambiguity they can foresee.

When a bad faith message is "misinterpreted", it's because the speaker was not interested in communicating successfully in the first place.

There exist two things:

1. A name which amuses the developers by honoring an uninteresting bit of historical trivia.

2. A name which contributes to the project's health and success by attracting new users.

One of these things must be selected as more important than the other.

As far as whether GIMP, in and of itself, succeeds or fails, pretty much no one cares. If GIMP vanished, and the practical value lost to the world was big enough, some new project would spring up to take its place. Maybe Krita would expand its scope. The Blender team sure has bank to play with. Whatever.

But what lots of people do care about is the success of open source in general. When software is expensive and closed, fewer people get to use it, and the fewest of them are screwed if what they need is too niche. When software is free and open, more people get to use it, niches become less niche, and niches that remain niche can be filled by anyone with enough DIY motivation. And because all of the benefits of open source rely on a large user community, attracting users is very important, both to individual projects and the whole community.

And right now, the solution the open source community has to offer the world is an embarrassment. This is bad. The GIMP project is selfishly pissing in the water supply the entire open source community is trying to build. No one is going to take that trivially.

I was thinking exactly the same. You can write

    if (cond) { cons }

on one line and get more readable code admittedly a few chars longer.

> As someone who studied physics and came out with a 2.7 GPA due to studying what I wanted (the hard classes) and not cheating (as I did what I wanted) - I can say that there are consequences to this approach.

I can, too. I wanted to learn, but I also wanted to achieve a high GPA. I had a privileged background, so I got to retake classes after earning Cs or Bs until I got an A, without cheating.

The consequences: My degree took a long time to get, cost more money than my peers in the same program, and I now have a deep-seated feeling of inadequacy.

All that means is that we don't have a one-person one-vote system. Some people's votes matter more than others. What we have is a case of civil inequality.

If we build a system where everyone's votes count the same (radical and extreme idea, I know), then each person will have the same fundamental incentive to vote.

We don't necessarily need to replace it with anything. The problem isn't the corn. The problem is it's too humid. We're a grownup species, we can deliberately change the environment if we really want to.

> The word is “post”.

Most posts on reddit aren't called posts. They're called comments. And nobody called posts on Twitter "posts" either. They were tweets.

If you go around talking about a website's posts, and the people who use the website call them something else, you're going to sound uninformed.