ajross

> How can you say that 19th century Britain wasn't obsessed with worshipping a dead god?

I think the burden of proof goes the other way? Obviously there were christians in England. But the British Empire really just was not a "Christian Empire" in any way that works in fiction. All the archetypes are secular! Tweedy bemonacled professors, Victorian romantics sharing cucumber sandwiches with their love triangles, gritty-but-cultured naval officers sipping tea and exploiting natives, Sherlock Holmes, for Christ's sake! (pun intended).

Like, this is a very deep well of narrative source material and like none of it is explicitly religious in even the most minimal way. Like, where outside of 40k is anyone trying to construct an explicitly "British" cult warrior along the lines of a Space Marine[1]? I just don't see it. And if this is the only example, maybe it's just a bad example.

Basically: the idea that 40k is based around British ennui about its imperial history is mostly a meme. It just fails as analysis in my eyes. 40k is about drunk nerds laughing too hard about weird stuff, and the analysis was a retcon picked up by atheists like us to flog our own particular culture wars.

[1] And to the extent you can find better analogs, they're to American grunts in the 20th century and certainly not redcoats!

Yeah, oversold to me, sorry. Just to start with: "definitely" and "subtly done" are at odds with each other. You can't be both. Klaatu is "definitely" a Jesus analog. The Emperor... meh. It's strained, precisely because GW never really went there: fine, he's Jesus, but then what represents the Gospels? The Old Testamanet? The Emperor is only "Jesus" insofar as that's how "Jesus" looks to a 20th century disaffected nerdy atheist. Well... OK I guess?

Also... the 19th century British Empire is... kinda not at all viewed as a theocratic totalitarian autocracy consumed by cult-like worship of a dead god. Like, at all? It was a bourgeois, wealth-focused and extremely secular colonizer power driven by very worldly desires and a vaguely racist idea of How Things Should Be. And there's a lot of valuable source material for fiction there![1] And... GW didn't really do any of it, and almost none of that until much later.

[1] c.f. like 80% of Cyberpunk

> It was more than just a joke. It was a satire on England and 1980's society.

Well... while I buy that to some extent, I think the point is oversold. While there are absolutely satirical aspects to the early game[1], they're mostly limited to puns. What (original) 40k is absolutely not is subtle highbrow comedy. It's a bunch of drunk nerds guffawing about whatever they thought was funny in the moment.

[1] Which again, didn't actually include a lot of the later lore. Like, the emperor in the 1e rules was entombed but strongly implied to be actively leading the empire. Likewise the original conception seems a lot closer to dystopian sci fi than "1980's society" to me.

Which is to say, the original authors didn't care and were just writing latinesque gibberish that sounded cool.

One of the critically important things to remember about 40k lore is that the game was originally a joke. Their "real" game was Warhammer (the game to be later called "Warhammer Fantasy"). Originally it was just "Let's put space opera tropes onto a game board and have them fight D&D monsters". Then they shoe-horned the chaos stuff in, then had a (presumably drunken) exercise in lore writing where they "invented" "Grimdark" by essentially turning the Despair knob up to 11.

And then it turned out to be popular, and it was time to start trying to write real stories on top of the mess. And... people loved it. Including a lot of people for whom the comically ridiculous Grimdark stuff turned into a kind of authoritarian wish fulfillment, which wasn't great. But you have to remember it was all a joke to begin with.

Honestly more than half of this sort of mess is incompetence rather than malice. But... yeah, sigh. Our grandkids just aren't going to believe what it was like.

> Remember, 640K ought to be enough for anybody.

This is one of those countersmells that flags people as unserious. It was at best an amusing quip from the days of extended memory PCs about why they should move to modern OSes.

Gates, of course, was talking about the address mapping design points in software on a CPU that had 20 address bits. Unless you're arguing that 384k was too much for the paltry framebuffers actually deployed on 8086's and would have preferred a 896/128 split; in which case I agree! But alas.

To be fair, this kind of dominance is not unprecedented. Intel was even further ahead in the early 2000's. Every new competitor process was further behind the leading edge and not closer. TSMC started launching half nodes like 28nm just to have something in the market that would sell.

But then you started to see the cracks. New competitors would launch new products with very slightly better metrics than Intel's older stuff, just to be, heh, meep-meeped at the next press conference. But the overlap was real, if small. And it grew over time until everyone looked up around the 5nm node and realized Intel had lost.

That's where we are right now with Apple. "Funny in a way", sure. But history says this is more likely to be the beginning of the end. Everything goes in cycles.

> later Chinese would speak of Xia the way Romans would speak of Troy

Troy was indeed largely fabricated though! Really I think that's of a piece with stuff being, y'know, really old. There are big holes in Sumerian and Egyption history too (though the latter helped out a ton by digging secret tombs and hiding them really well). Post-classical Mayan history is pretty suspect in a lot of places, etc...

> This isn’t a war

Fingerprinting and other quasi-malware techniques being used by desirable third party software are absolutely a war, otherwise we wouldn't have this permission structure in place in the first place. And as much as you believe the contrary, Alibaba et. al. are 100% smarter than you about how to exploit these tricks and will win.

> Not personal data.

LOL

Cargo (and PyPI) is undeniably better than NPM, which is just shockingly bad for cultural reasons. Yet it's not safe, and it's subject to the same class of exploit, as we're seeing.

Indeed, the solution is to get away from the wild soup of author-managed dependencies and go with something with an audited collection of software that is maintained by separate human beings from the known-vulnerable hackers writing the software.

And indeed Go and .NET and Java all qualify. But the gold standard here is Debian and all its downstreams.

Oooph. So this is all down to dithering on whether the public option qualifies as "single payer"? Like, is the "single" applied to everyone or just to the beneficiary? I'll point out that Medicare (the global archetype for this kind of coverage!) isn't "single payer" by this definition either, as senior citizens exist with private coverage or self-coverage.

Indeed you've wasted too much time on this. And I still have no idea what it is you really are trying to argue about. You agree with me on everything I've tried to pin you down on, and want to dither over tone and jargon when challenged.

Well to be fair you didn't say that in the linked tweet. Delay is bad too, but again the original spirit of the license was absolutely OK with the idea of weeks-long delays. Our modern world of instant github access has spoiled us, but courts are not going to see damages from just "we had to ship a month late" unless you can show something more specific.

That does nothing but start an arms race. Fine, audio "works" but do you get noise? Can you read back the sounds you play? No, right? It doesn't work, QED. Now the platform needs to fake the noise.

Likewise for any other hardware access you want, and most of them are harder. How do you fake local storage without storing anything? How do you fake Bluetooth access without virtualizing an entire device? Do you fake the screen dimensions to look like something else? Input latency? Where does it stop?

No, "does this work" is among the easiest questions to answer in technology. We aren't going to win this war.

What you want is basically how it works. On both phone platforms and PWAs, all permissions are visible to the user explicitly. All of them can be revoked at any time. Apps are disallowed from requesting an already-denied permission.

Obviously apps can tell if they haven't been granted a permission (even if you tried to fake this, they aren't dummies and will know if it's not working), and obviously third party software isn't under any obligation to work without them.

But the platforms have done what the platforms can do, at the architecture side, really. The next stage is human-audited enforcement of malware, which this AliExpress nonsense might hopefully run afoul of.

To clarify given the subject at hand: German courts are 100% not going to find a Google Drive link to be disallowed by the GPLv2. That's literally about physical coins.

People are getting way too bent out of shape over that "medium customarily used for software interchange" bit. It doesn't mean github. It doesn't mean "the medium I use most commonly".

Basically, if you think courts are going to be OK with interpreting "download from this FTP site" as acceptable but "download the same tarball from Drive" as unacceptable, you're fooling yourself.

Drive is fine, given the spirit of the license. It's merely inconvenient.

It's not even that. Downstream projects host their own mirrors already, this is an annoying hoop to jump through for the maintainers (basically suck down a bunch of tarballs for every release, analogous to grabbing stuff from FTP sites back in the day), but not exactly a terrible hardship compared to the really very significant work of maintaining a large project.

> “In violation of GPL” is a stretch.

The originally envisioned distribution method, in fact, was "Send FSF a blank 9-track tape and they'll fill it and mail it back". Nor, obviously, does anything prevent someone who downloads this from Drive from mirroring it on GitHub or wherever.

This is arguably bad stewardship of a historically open source project. It's certainly not a license violation.

> Joe Biden said he would veto Medicare for all

Oh for... Joe Biden was literally the tiebreaker vote in the senate when the public option was still part of Obamacare and was stumping for it like crazy. MfA is one particular proposal from one particular faction of the party. We aren't talking about MfA specifically, and that's quite clear all the way upthread.

This kind of dissembling and trickery is what's driving me crazy in this thread. You just don't seem to be arguing in good faith. No, Joseph Biden Jr. is very clearly not opposed to government-provided health care, nor is any democrat in office right now that I'm aware of.

"Mostly" partisan. Good grief.

Oh, come on. That edit was a clarification added like 40 seconds after the post. Really, it seems like you're the one getting bent out of shape. Again, I thought (and still think) you agree with me on the partisan nature of the issue, right? That's not putting words in your mouth, that's your opinion.

You just don't think I shouldn't have engaged with advocacy around the issue or taken offense that you and upthread commenters feel that this isn't something that can be... I guess "achieved by voting"[1]. I think that's a weird thing to troll a discussion this deep about, but OK.

[1] Does that match your understanding of the point? Genuine question! I think it's bonkers and wrong, but you seem attached to it and I'd like the opportunity to convince you.

Please don't tone police on HN. If you agree with me but think I'm an asshole, the polite thing to do is just to keep quiet and not troll a discussion by convincing me you disagree.

But I'm very happy you agree that health care policy in the USA is among the most directly partisan issues and know who to vote for given those priorities.

> Who said any of this? "I" said nothing of the sort

You quite clearly came in to defend someone who did, though. This is the second time you've tried this end-around strawman. Please engage with the discussion as it is.

> That's a lot of words they didn't say. It is a true statement that Congress did not give the USA single-payer healthcare

But that is what they didn't say! They said it wasn't "votable", in the sense I took that means that this isn't an issue you can get by voting. And it is, clearly. And was, in 2010, when they were within one senate vote for a "public option" in the ACA. It 100% boggles my mind that you'd look at that once again incredibly partisan voting result and decide "Oh well, I might as well vote republican" (instead of "damn Joe Lieberman").

> there are many people who would prefer that healthcare is run by a private industry,

The grammar is a little ambiguous around this, but you seem to be claiming that this is a majority position. It isn't. Single payer polls over 50% basically every time it's tested (the exception being some spun partisan reframings you occasionally see pushed), and has for decades.

> The issue is that the people in Washington won’t make it a “votable” decision.

Sorry, that's ridiculous. Universal Health Care policies are an almost 100% partisan issue. I can literally count on one hand the number of federal lawmakers who cross party lines here.

The real problem is people like you refusing to vote for the people with the policy you want, as often as not as part of a bothsidesist stance designed to get more upvote in peer forums like HN.

The two party system may be flawed and unjust, sure. But people who want single payer are still democrats.

I'm not sure I follow your argument. The privacy abuse already happened. The data is already there. And it was the airline that did it, not a tech giant who just wants to train a bunch of MLs.

Surely if this is the scenario you're worrying about, and you accept the lack of regulatory protections, Google buying Spirit's data is a good thing, right? Much better them than the airlines who you already know to be corrupt?

That's... sort of wildly spun. There was no funding fight, it was just an executive order. It didn't apply to public grants, only some federal agencies. It was largely unenforced.

Do DEI statements (which amount to "Our staffing decisions aren't discriminatory because...") constitute "Democrat social ideology"? Well, maybe! But it's spun, in exactly the same way that "Republican" ideology appears to be constructed around the "freedom to be racist and bigoted".

To be blunt: I'd rather live in a society that demands toothless DEI statements from the bureaucracy than one that defunds good science based on political language. And I suspect the same thing is true for you.

> The ecological effects of this, though, seem so disastrous. If the Colorado river dries up, what then? The whole of the Southwest just like, dies?

The lakes behind the Hoover dam are are the ecological catastrophe. Releasing the dam water just restores the river canyon to its natural state.

Draining the river is bad, but it's just as bad downstream of the dam. The dam by itself doesn't do anything but hurt the ecosystem it already destroyed.

What's the counterexample of significant funding withdrawn by democratic administrations because of "possibly conservative" language in the output?

"Tone deaf" seems not to be capturing the essence of the malfeasance here.

This article is repeating a transparently false framing as the truth. This wasn't a law about cartel money laundering, which doesn't happen near the border anyway. Money laundering at scale happens in the global market and always has.

The clear purpose of the regulation was exactly the "side effect" detailed in the article: hurting immigrant communities that maintain ties across the border. And it worked. It does no one any good to pretend otherwise.