Don't ask Hacker News. One of the biggest challenges in life is building a set of contacts worth listening to about life. HN can only intermittently put proper context and nuance around statements regarding software. Forget about anything else.
3,038 karma · joined July 10, 2021
If?
The institution you use to socialize your youth results in some attempting to murder their co-participants.
Even if you took away the guns so they couldn't follow-through, why are your schools fucking up child rearing so badly in the first place?
It's simple dehumanization. It's not outlandish or anything, it's just really easy to notice. And the sophistry to try make them equivalent terms is also easy to notice.
For a business to need resources it means a category of stuff that can include people, tools, raw materials, etc... Using the name of a category to mean one thing inside it instead of explicitly naming that one thing is concealment. Just like how I might say "fertilizer" instead of "cow shit."
The better question is why we started concealing it. Why are we so sensitive about the words person, employee, or personnel?
Everyone always knew. The criticisms get lumped in with with the unreasonable nay-sayers because it makes them easier to dismiss.
The honest people I know working for obvious evil will acknowledge it and say they're just doing it for a paycheck. But this gives most people cognitive dissonance and they'll find better rationalization. See also: every cope post on hacker news by someone defending a company they're pretending not to work for.
Every time this happens to me at work one of two things happens:
1) I know a bit about the topic, and they're proudly regurgitating an LLM about an aspect of the topic we didn't discuss last time. They think they're telling me something I don't know, while in reality they're exposing how haphazard their LLM use was.
2) I don't know about the topic, so I have to judge the usefulness of what they say based on all the times that person did scenario Number 1.
Numerator = 4
Denominator = Number of successful pieces of fiction exploring ideas about the future from circa 2000.
I should stop reading here and save myself the inevitable wankery that's coming.
edit: I kept reading. I'm not against discussing that fiction. It's the hook that bothers me. It activates my spidey sense for internet content that doesn't go anywhere. I regret being so curt; unfortunately I don't think I was wrong.
When I was in school, the department that dealt with accessibility could chop the spine off a book, scan it and give you a high quality ebook. I also knew someone who was flagrantly cheating with some test-taking accommodation.
That ebook service was just a nice thing that more people should have taken advantage of. One or two of the professors even subtly encouraged using it to pirate textbooks.
What in the Gemini 3 powered astroturf bot is this?
They probably just had an internal mandate to ship by end of year.
> if it's having so many successes it feels like overload, that's an excellent narrative
Yeah, if this is the best spin you've got I'm doubling down. Those teams were on the chopping block.
And now all their only remaining defense is "our masks don't even look like that."
Imagine the ghost of Henry Ford asked me what I wanted from transportation today and I said "a new novel technology to enable sub-second transcontinental travel". I'd be laughed at even harder than in an alternate reality where I asked for marginally more convenient air travel, without knowing Henry Ford actually did resurrect himself and invent the Stargate last tuesday.
This cuts the first half of your post down to meaninglessness.
It seems like you're just enjoying romantic thoughts about creator freedom in the context of projects you otherwise don't care about.
If you read Hackers and Painters without realizing you're getting conned, yes. Very much so.
No. Not if you're not defrauding your customers, you didn't.
Yes. If you call the "X" club the Senate and the "Y" club the House of Representatives, this is exactly how our bicameral legislature works.
edit: Their votes count for passage in their chamber, not equally weighted against eachother. If you mean Y seats equal seats by population but with a minimum X, then that's how the House works. Any proposal to make the senate proportional starts to ask why we're not unicameral because then you basically have 2x house of reps but with different voting district sizes.
A failure mode with a lot of community management systems is that they're adopted because they have a general vibe of keeping the bad people out. And that vibe will see any criticism of the community management document/team/actions as a way to sneak the bad people in.
Imagine I told you I found a rando discord server dedicated to a tabletop RPG I love, but complained that the moderation team was a clique. I claimed that I feel forced to fit in by pandering to their sensibilities and biting my tongue on other topics even if they're just flat out provably wrong. Nobody would assume I'm just salty because I secretly want to post porn, cuss and be racist in #general. Because we all know discord mods are notoriously petty tyrants.
Now give that discord community a github page and copy-paste in an HR document. The way expectations snap into treating them like levelheaded professionals with unassailable intentions and righteous goals is the reason this topic always goes nowhere.
The prospect of loosing access to those things can seem bleak, but to someone who never knew the luxury of a clothes washing machine it's just another chore. Why would they be any more unhappy? Everyone still does chores. We find ways to avoid letting them make us miserable.
Dunno why people assume that FOSS developers are just dummies lacking insight but otherwise champing at the bit to provide the same refinement and same customer service experience as the "open source" projects that are really just loss leaders of some commercial entity.
That "we could" is doing some very heavy lifting. But even if we pretend it's remotely feasible, do we want to take an institution that already trains submission to authority and use it to normalize ubiquitous "for your own good" surveillance?
As soon as you try to be more clever than electronic counting of paper ballots, yes they are.
You can either audit the count by replaying the input event stream, or you can't.
Yes, they did. It was written by the specter of the US Department Of Justice.