dissent

> I cringed while reading his many comparisons between people of different regions, as if they were species of finches

Only because we know better now. It must have seemed self evident at the time and we can forgive Darwin for making that mistake. He was a scientist and I'm sure he'd have accepted the evidence that all the so-called races are embarrassingly alike.

Not a fan of these retrospective moralistic takes.

This reminds me of the Harvard Implicit Association test, particularly the gender career one. It will tell you if you implicitly associate certain careers with certain genders.

Since the overwhelming majority of, say, auto mechanics, are held by men, associating these roles with men is entirely accurate. Without saying anything of what it "should" be.

If your results were anything else, it suggests some kind of powerful overcompensating counter bias is as play. That your desire to see more gender balance in this role is so great, that you subconsciously already believe it to be normal. The real world is a deviation from where it "should" be. This strikes me as a rather pernicious position. Dogmatic. Almost religious.

You're arguing in favour of OP there.

For most of the past 10 years we've seen the liberal left celebrating this kind of McCarthyism. They normalised it, raised the stakes, and now it's being leveraged by the traditional actors who've always wanted to. Liberal elites should have been a bulwark against this, but they were not.

This sounds suspiciously like the "noble savage" myth perpetuated by imperialists during the colonial era. Guessing which context you intended your comment to be read in, I can't help but find that a little ironic.

Aware of the US distinction, and it's mostly sensible. I believe in the US you actually can yell "fire" in a crowded theatre and if nothing happens, you'll be given the benefit of the doubt. As it should be.

Anything else a genuinely slippery slope.

Then that'll be factored in as intent and they'll be held accountable for the consequences - not the speech itself.

The important part is that yelling "fire" is fine if the entire theatre laughs it off.

Some people broke the law, and the poster can be held accountable for successful incitement. It's not the post that broke the law per se.

You can yell fire in a crowded theatre. Just hope you don't cause a panic or you'll be in trouble.

I've never set foot in the USA, but from an outsider looking in, it seems like academic integrity was sidelined by ideology during that period. Once this has been normalised, it's not difficult for a competing ideology to move in. Seems like a real shame, but surely this didn't just happen overnight in 2024.

That's not entirely true.

It just moved the work somewhere else, generally an Apache config on a shared host. The user could very often just dump some PHP files in place and they'd be served up, but if you had to set up a new host then it was as fiddly as anything else.

This pattern also meant dropping everything the docroot, using .htaccess to hide things, having different behaviour depending on the global php.ini. All architectures had to be mashed into a request/response cycle (and anything more complex was no longer just drop the files in). It was a very long way from the idea of reproducable builds.

I agree it was popular, but not really for the right reasons.

Anybody is free to agree or disagree with that as they see fit. You yourself qualify them as "trans women", after all. However, you can accept them as "real women" without that automatically entitling them to participate in women's sports. It is justified by the importance of women's sports to the well being of the vast majority. They ought to pick a different hill to die on.

That's an American legal distinction.

Free Speech is a value

Are people, developers included, who feel threatened with the loss of their income to AI, any different to the Luddites?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

Genuine question. I'm trying to find a difference, but not succeeding.

I had the opposite thought. That it was the most difficult of things to replace with AI, and that the eagerness to do so was driven by non developers who see it as an expensive cost centre that is holding them hostage. Where I work still uses very bad outsourced service desk humans, and almost computer illiterate (and sometimes actually illiterate) manual testers and wages approaching that of a senior developer. Why not them first?

I also don't really care if my job is automated. If it doesn't need doing anymore, why should I want to do it? I will do something else.

The theatre thing ought to be contingent on harm being done as a result of yelling "fire". This is a natural consequence and there isn't a law against the speech itself because none is needed.

Otherwise it's the same as the "consequences" of disappearing because you criticised the government.

Is that not a rather pernicious idea? That I may or may not be punished based on how the recipient of my speech "feels"?

Why can't the rallies be permitted while policing the violence if and when it erupts? Banning the rallies themselves preemptively sounds like a great tool for an authoritarian dictator.

Even that's a slippery slope. If I was to say publicly "death to all agile practitioners", it's up to interpretation whether I'm serious or not. I deserve the benefit of the doubt, which is traditionally how it's been handled. Perhaps if I was successful in inciting violence, I could be held accountable for my success. That would make a lot more sense.

I dunno, this whole idea of "hate speech" or even "hate" being something prohibited feels like a sleight of hand. I'm sure it's been said before many times, but it's so easy to subvert and weaponise this against a society - including those it was meant to protect.

Is it not my right to not like something? Or even to hate it? If it is not, then we're policing thought crime through the only visible evidence - what is said. Whatever this is a cure for, it's worse than the disease. The cynic in me suspects it not intended as a cure though. It's intended to control.

Point #2: Say nothing behind another's back you'd be unwilling to say, in exactly the same tone and language, to his face.

This has essentially been shut down in the modern corporate workplace, at least in the Anglosphere. The overpolite "be nice, be respectful" culture punishes anything that can be construed as "not nice", forcing it to go unsaid or at least pushing it underground. We talk in code and euphemisms about these things. You are justified in avoiding any kind of negativity entirely to protect your income. The net result is everybody loses a little.

It's less than I'd like to play at, but wasn't the point that it is great for something running on laptop hardware with integrated graphics? The implication is it would have been similar on native windows on comparable hardware.

The article reiterates the facts about the notions of race and essentialism. The context is that the far right are leaning on historically harmful, scientifically inaccurate, and honestly, kind of absurd ideas about "race".

Having said that, is this not what the entire world has been doing recently? Does BLM not fall for exactly the same fallacy? Is "person of colour" not an egregiously bad phrase to define a person? As if we are white, unless somehow tainted? Is this not something that should concern us all whether it is done with good intentions or not?

That's the point really, you can generate JSON or YAML and it doesn't really matter. If you want to include 100 similar objects in that output, you can use a for loop. You can't do that in plain JSON/YAML.

There are probably two use cases.

Configuration files for programs. These tend to be short.

DSLs which are large manifests for things like cloud infrastructure. These tend to be long, they grow over time.

My pet hypothesis is these DSLs exist mostly for neutrality - the vendor can't assume you have Python or something present. But as a user, you can assume just that and gain a lot by authoring in a proper language and generating YAML.

See https://github.com/cloudtools/troposphere for a great example for AWS CloudFormation.

I reckon if this is really a big concern for anybody, then they are probably writing way too much YAML to begin with. If you're being caught out by things like this and need to debug it, then it maps very cleanly to types in most high level languages and you can generate your YAML from that instead.

Perhaps it is not ideal, and you carry some expense and risk to yourself and the business by doing so, but in some organisations the constraints are so absurd that the competitive advantage you get by doing this and breaking the rules highly incentivises this. If the cyber security departments involved had any skin the game, or any sense of proportionality, then it would not be difficult to have a company issued laptop that also provides adequate security. But they don't, so developers like me end up having to make a tough decision. Break the rules, or work somewhere else.

I use an Android phone by preference. There are faster and more powerful laptops on the market, but they are not better, and calling some of them laptops at all is a bit of a stretch. Apple have a vertical that is very difficult to compete with when it comes to overall quality. People aren't just buying them because they've all been hoodwinked by clever marketing.

You are correct that the word "best" doesn't appear, but this was their meaning. These laptops are superior - you cannot buy anything better from another vendor at any price, period. The gap will likely close, but it's a fair comment to make today.

OP actually says it's the best laptop, not the computer, or even laptop, with the most powerful compute.

This is all well and good, except we all know the current zeitgeist is to go to any length necessary to frame absolutely everything in terms of race. As a reader, it's hard to distinguish between that and genuine academic interest. I now tend to close the tab the moment race is mentioned. I'm glad I don't live in the USA, it must be awful.

It's a culture that has grown up around a dominant platform that had little or no security built in. Where I work, Windows is heavily locked down with all sorts of security junk on it, but iOS gets by with minimal MDM.

I go the other way, it's absolutely their fault. Their historical business model of monopolizing the enterprise while outsourcing security is at the root of all this. The same thing could happen with Crowdstrike on other platforms, but it's only on Windows where these suites are considered essential.