cblades

>store it somewhere to be dropped later, either on its own or as part of the structure it belongs to.

Wherever you're storing the reference, you have to eventually free the memory. That propagates memory-management code throughout your codebase, and is error-prone.

I totally agree that if you're allocating on the stack it's a non-issue. If you're returning a reference and always freeing in the caller, that's pretty easy too, but you have to have that logic in every single caller. If you're storing a reference on the heap somewhere, you suddenly have dynamic lifetimes with indeterminate reference counts, and it gets quite hard to 1) correctly manage memory and 2) verify that you're correctly managing memory.

The alternative is that in all three instances in a GC language, I don't have to care about memory management. Barring unusual edge cases, I can't forget to deallocate something and end up with a memory leak.

>he caller will then either use it and drop it immediately or store it somewhere to be dropped later, either on its own or as part of the structure it belongs to.

You're glossing over a lot of complexity there. That's the entire point of GC, you don't have to think about when it's dropped.

Also, I wasn't arguing for the blanket necessity of GC in all contexts and for all problems.

Totally agree. I don't think that tradeoff is particularly out-balanced by the time it takes to do manual memory management.

>programmers spend about the same amount of time worrying about memory management with either paradigm

I have no idea how you've come to that conclusion. For the vast majority of memory allocation in any GC'd language I can think of, you spend zero time thinking about memory management 98% of the time.

whereas in a manual language, you must consider it every time you allocate memory. That's not a bad thing, it's often dead simple in the vast majority of contexts, but still.

I've also very rarely seen code in professional code that's mean to poke or prod the GC into running.

I meant that for existing works of art that are easily digitized (not created, taken from a physical format to a digital one), there is no such thing as scarcity if the consumers don't strongly prefer the physical version to the digital version.

>There is value in scarcity

I'd argue that for easily digitized works, there's no such thing as scarcity.

Certainly publishers have the right to sue and limit legal distribution, but it does seem at least naive for them to believe they can control illegal distribution. Perhaps that's not the rationale; maybe it's a purely principled stance.

Nevertheless, their work will be spread digitally, and it seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face to not have some legal form of distribution that the publisher can make money from.

How does that address the comment you replied to, in any way?

Other people might want prisoners to be raped and smeared with feces, but that doesn't at all make it acceptable. Some people would be all-aboard genocides against certain religious, ethnic, etc. groups. I think we can agree that they're wrong.

I don't understand what's meant by on-phone, but the google feature asks the caller to introduce themselves and why they're calling, and transcribes the response for the user to read in realtime.

I use it for every number I don't know, and so far it's been 100% successful (in the sense that, afaik, no one who I wanted to hear from has hung up on Google Assistant).

After a few decades of no enforcement? I think that would be reasonable.

And the cases where a partner didn't disclose their status, or didn't know that they were contagious, or they hit the shitty jackpot and were infected despite best-effort and best-practice measures?

How do you separate those who contracted HIV through risky (however you define that) behavior from those who didn't?

How do you separate the HIV+ people that engaged in 'risky' (by whatever definition you apply) behavior from those who didn't?

>Resources and capability are available

I think that's something you have to support. Certainly it is possible, but what else are you putting off or de-prioritizing to do it?

I certainly agree that we should aim to make the most impactful improvements in the most people's lives, I just don't quite know how a global society or even individual countries go about a reasonable prioritization process.

At some point, you have to have hard lines. It's entirely reasonable to dictate what a sexual partner gets to do with and to your body.

>can't tell you how many times I've been pressured or refused or looked down upon for refusing non-condom sex or not going on PrEP myself.

Seems like a great social signal that those aren't people you need to bother with having in your life.

This isn't competition.

Competition is two stores offering incentives to users to come buy the product from them as opposed to the competitor.

This is anti-competitive and anti-consumer. If Steam were doing similar things, no one would stand for it, and I find it really odd that Epic gets a pass from some people.

As the consumer, I want to be able to choose which store I buy from based on the merits of the store and the deals offered.

>The CEO of Epic is a big fan of open platforms and cross-platform gaming and a loud and outspoken opponent of walled gardens.

That is fundamentally opposed to exclusivity contracts with publishers including when games have already been listed and sold on other stores.

>But exclusives is the only way to fight the Stockholm Syndrome people seem to have with Steam.

It's also a way to insure that some people will never touch Epic.

That's my point. The value is in the discussion around what's considered ethical, not in the label.

What I would like is for services like this to provide, up-front, a more complete discussion of how they've arrived at their recommendations, and what criteria they consider.

This is really frustrating, and basically the exact same thread as happened a while back with another list of "ethical alternatives".

You can't call something ethical without going into detail about what you mean. and:

Policy No Ads No Tracking We respect you

is not useful.

The value in ethics is in the conversation around what is ethical, not in a big, friendly "this is ethical" sticker.

This is as useful as "do no evil", and from the vague wording on the landing page, I'd imagine the people behind librem don't think google is very ethical right now.

A glorified javascript wrapper around what? Looking over the feature list...none of them are things that are natively supported in ECMAScript or widely-supported browser standards.

It seems you're more interested in pedantry than a conversation.

"asked" being operative there. The college can absolutely say "either observe the quarantine or get off campus".

They do quarantine people for the flu. Happened during my undergrad; they kept a few students with the swine flu in their rooms. Had meals and supplies brought to them and asked them to not leave.

The APA's definition is probably more authoritative, and is inline with what OP suggested:

https://dictionary.apa.org/introversion

I don't understand the thought process that a content host has an inherent obligation to equally promote all the content hosted on their service.

It's a very anti-consumer and anti-capitalism position, and I hear it most often from people that in other contexts are very pro-consumer and pro-capitalism.

Wow, that's downright irresponsible.

Exactly, that was my point.

There are no self-driving cars on the market, or in development by major car manufacturers.

They all explicitly require human attention.

I'd argue it is unreasonable given that (afaik) no one is marketing a self-driving car that doesn't also require a driver be attentive at all times.

You can learn to drive a self-driving car defensively, in the same way you learn to drive a normal car defensively. Pay attention to your surroundings, blind spots, and other cars.

Maybe self-driving is a poor term to use.

I absolutely agree.

Every one of your comparisons is bunk.

Ethics are necessarily a consensus-building endeavor. Your personal ethics only matter in-so-far as they intersect with others'. None of your examples are subject to that same constraint.

>Curation is not consensus. Exactly, and that's why I object to it being labeled a list of "ethical alternatives" with no explanation of the decision making process. The list is the artifact and has next-to-no value compared to the process they went through to come up with the list.

>If you think their definition is too broad or ill-defined, make another list with a more narrow one. Or provide constructive criticism that expresses why I think their list is lacking.

My specific concern is not that this list "isn't correct", it's that I believe the idea of slapping an "ethical" label on a product as a guide to users is antithetical to the goal of having users apply ethical considerations when deciding which software to use.

Also, taking a snarky, passive-agressive tone to people making legitimate criticisms makes me not trust the list at all.

By saying "this is ethical, that is not", you are assuming a position that must be defended.

edit: I am contributing to the cause. Ethics is necessarily a conversation. By minimizing and handwaving away the part of ethical decision making that actually matters, you're doing more harm than good.

We don't need users to blindly use services somebody has slapped the "ethical" label on, we need to inspire users to bring ethics into their decision making process when choosing software services.