eevilspock

A paraphrase of Blaise Pascal's famous line (that is commonly misattributed to Mark Twain: I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

It's a very self-serving. We tell ourselves pretty lies and avoid inconvenient truths constantly. Because doing otherwise has huge costs in terms of personal comfort, convenience, wealth, security and social standing. This becomes a group dynamic when we join social circles that maintain the same pretty lies and avoid the same inconvenient truths. And of course for this to work it has to be an unwritten, almost subconscious rule: Never express a thought or question a choice that will disturb the material and moral comfort of yourself or your social groups.

Here's a way to observe/test this (two parts): The next time you have moral doubt (e.g. Why do I feel uncomfortable that all of the people serving us are brown people?), listen to your conscience rather than silencing it. (If you never have moral doubts I'd say it's because you've become very good at silencing it.) The more you listen, the more you follow through with honesty and integrity, the more you'll find that you'll have to give up something comfortable or nice in your lifestyle.

Part two: Express moral questions about something your group does that, when examined honestly, actually goes against the groups purported values. Be prepared to lose friends.

How did you "stop it from working"? You even admit "they didn't mind".

If anything, what you really showed is that your analogy, while interesting and amusing, has limited accuracy. The concept of a state machines is precisely that, about machines. Not humans. The human staff took notice of the unexpected flow, externally manifest their on-the-fly adaptive mental processing of it on their faces, and then adapted. The restaurant didn't devolve into chaos.

The staff didn't freeze and lie down on the floor like driverless cars are doing on the streets[2]. The fact that automation of anything complex and unpredictable as driving isn't built on anything even vaguely akin to a state machine is telling. That would lead to disaster.

In other words, you didn't break anything at all. It was your analogy that got broken.

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[1]: You display this smugness even in your reply, "Language is weird. <fx: shrug />". Just sayin. As an writer who posted his work on HN himself looking for feedback should humbly listen to negative reactions as much as if not more so than seek to bask in admiration and success.

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/technology/driverless-car...

".." navigates to the parent directory of the directory containing the current file.

"." refers to the directory containing the current file.

The research paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.22.21257615v...

Per the Washington Post:

> If you need the convenience of ultra-processed foods, you can check labels and comparison shop. Try to pick the products with the fewest ingredients. For help while shopping, you can pull up a website on your phone called truefood.tech. On the site you can type in a food that you want to buy — such as chicken nuggets or breakfast cereal — and in response the site will show you dozens of brands and recommend the least processed versions. The site uses machine learning to rank foods on a scale of 1 to 100 based on factors such as how many additives they contain and their degree of processing. The lower the score the better.

> The site was created by Giulia Menichetti and Albert-László Barabási, two scientists at Northeastern University who study ultra-processed foods and developed a database of over 50,000 foods sold in grocery stores. You may be surprised by the wide variation in processing among different types of macaroni and cheese or that your favorite organic gluten-free chicken nuggets score higher than a standard recipe.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/09/27/ultraproc...

Per the Washington Post:

> If you need the convenience of ultra-processed foods, you can check labels and comparison shop. Try to pick the products with the fewest ingredients. For help while shopping, you can pull up a website on your phone called truefood.tech. On the site you can type in a food that you want to buy — such as chicken nuggets or breakfast cereal — and in response the site will show you dozens of brands and recommend the least processed versions. The site uses machine learning to rank foods on a scale of 1 to 100 based on factors such as how many additives they contain and their degree of processing. The lower the score the better.

> The site was created by Giulia Menichetti and Albert-László Barabási, two scientists at Northeastern University who study ultra-processed foods and developed a database of over 50,000 foods sold in grocery stores. You may be surprised by the wide variation in processing among different types of macaroni and cheese or that your favorite organic gluten-free chicken nuggets score higher than a standard recipe.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/09/27/ultraproc...

Any honest open source project would not say such a thing categorically, and would welcome and support community improvements that take it to an even higher level.

But instead it sounds like you will rig the game, with "open source" just meaning "let's get people to work on our proprietary product for free, and we can fly the banner of open source while we're at it!".

See my other reply on this thread.

    if ! grep -q "pam_tid.so" /etc/pam.d/sudo ; then
      echo "touch ID no longer enabled for sudo. Insert the following line as line 2 in /etc/pam.d/sudo:"
      echo "  auth   sufficient  pam_tid.so  # enables touch id auth for sudo"
    fi

2021.03.01: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26302139

72 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31750560

Unless he is a danger to himself or others, as determined by an independent professional, what is your family's justification for unilaterally deciding he should be banned from talking to people?

Is functional programming yet another style, or is it a subset of call/return, or a subset of pipes & filters? If it is its own style, how might Objective-S implement this style? What would map-reduce look like? What about higher order functions and currying?

Or is Objective-S itself at root a functional language? You've said very categorically in another comment that Objective-S is NOT just reinventing Lisp. Can you explain?

Perhaps my questions don't make any sense. As I said, I'm no meta-language expert.

http://objective.st

Even if what the author says is true about medieval upper caste people (I don't doubt it), I have trouble believing that peasants could afford the cost and time required of regular bathing. Water didn't come easily unless you happened to live next to a river or have a well next to your house. We've all seen women in third world countries carrying water for cooking and drinking on their heads, often long distances. And we haven't even gotten to the costs of the other things she mentions. Poor people rarely ate meat because they couldn't afford it; where are they going to get animal fat to make soap?

The author doesn't provide any evidence, just makes claims using words to imply you're stupid if you doubt her. All the "photographic" evidence she provides all pretty clearly DO NOT depict poor people.

Taiwan until around 1990 froze into place representatives from all the mainland provinces in its legislature, thereby effectively nullifying the democratic voice of the people who lived on the island.

Taiwan's "外生人", those born on the mainland and who fled to Taiwan at the end of the civil war, took over the government, suppressing the views and interests of the "Taiwanese", the Chinese who speak the local Chinese dialect and who lived there before. You know, kinda like what Russia wants to do with Ukraine.

The Taiwanese themselves previously took over the island, suppressing the view and interests of the aborigine people, who are Austronesian, not Chinese. Again, kinda like what Russia wants to do with Ukraine.

So if we're going to talk about democracy and freedom and sovereignty, we need to be less tribal/self-serving about it and more honest.

If we're going to castigate China, are you also going to castigate America about Hawaii? If not, then I don't think that's honest. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I recommend you read about what Native Hawaiians feel about America. There's also Puerto Rico. And the US taking the Southwest form Mexico, and then closing its border, treating migrant workers from south of the border like shit, all the while looking the other way as we can make them work for below minimum wage and no protections all so we can have cheaper produce and have cheaper restaurants and all the other things that depend on cheap brown labor. We can go further and talk about Europeans taking it all from the indigenous people.

I'm not defending China or Russia. I'm pointing out the huge amount of self-serving cherry-picking and hypocrisy.

What I really need is a great open source OCR and hand diagram to SVG tool.

I hunted to no avail. Anyone got good recs?

I'm not Chinese but I did lived in Taiwan for 6 years and was married to a Chinese woman who's father escaped to Taiwan from China after the Nationalists lost the civil war and fled to Taiwan.

Apple's policy is exactly in line with Taiwan's own official policy.

To be sure, there is official policy and there is actual sentiment on the ground. "Made in Taiwan" reflects the Taiwan populace's growing desire to distinguish itself from China, as well as reflect the de facto reality.[4][5]

But if Taiwan itself as a country is unwilling to change their official policy, be it because they still cling to the "One China" notion, or because they are afraid of pissing off China, why is everyone here demanding that Apple do something that Taiwan is itself unwilling to do? Why should they, as an American company, push any particular angle, especially when there is position they can take that is compatible with the policies of both Taiwan and China?

If you are arguing for a world that pushes values over profit and other self-serving things, I'd give you a hug and then tell you there are far more important stands to take, including a serious and honest analysis of capitalism. Are all the people dissing Apple on this issue also willing to diss Apple for the exploitation of cheap labor in Asia all while growing to have the greatest market cap in the whole world? If you are not then I don't think you have much of a leg to stand on.

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[1] Note the words at the top of the government's home page: "Government Portal of the Republic of China (Taiwan)" www.taiwan.gov.tw

[2] See Taiwan's own constitution, even after modern amendments, continues to hold that China is one country. https://english.president.gov.tw/Page/93

Note that the constitution also claims Mongolia and Tibet as part of the Republic of China. Even Mainland China doesn't claim Mongolia.

The amendments adopted afterwards have not rescinded the idea of One China implied by the original: https://english.president.gov.tw/Page/95

They now use the phrase "free area of the Republic of China" and specifically say, "Rights and obligations between the people of the Chinese mainland area and those of the free area, and the disposition of other related affairs may be specified by law."

[3] See this comment on this same thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32358180

[4] There is a good Wikipedia article on the issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_status_of_Taiwan

[5] An ongoing debate within Taiwan about changing the constitution: https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2021/05...

Also that entropy proves expiration dates are misleading; shelf life is not a cliff but a monotonically decreasing value.

For Frankl, meaning came from three possible sources: purposeful work, love, and courage in the face of difficulty.

~ from Viktor Frankl on the Human Search for Meaning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32283033

Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

~ Viktor Frankl

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10793226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14282791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10451733

I don't think it helps to have a contest about which forms of discrimination are more impactful, because they all add up.

Gender, race, social class, within which nation's borders one is born... they all add up, and it gets worse if you "lose" in more than one category.

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

But there are cases when the comparison should be made, and I hint at it in my first sentence. We do spend more effort on gender equality than racial equality because, frankly, white women have more power and value in our society than black men or women. For example the #MeToo movement was triggered and driven by the injustices done to powerful, privileged white women.

Sadly, social justice is driven too often by self-serving interests rather than social justice itself.