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eevilspock

3,876 karma · joined March 13, 2011

vas sudanagunta

<my first name> at commonkarma o r g

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/vassudanagunta; my proof: https://keybase.io/vassudanagunta/sigs/UvLL9AmKpYkLB_yGfSVmGSz5zW8QpzrD-jkiJOZmhSk ]

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eevilspock··on Map showing birthplaces of "notable people" around the world
But without the enticement of membership in the elite, with a greater share of society's wealth, power and privileges, no one would bother working hard to become doctors, lawyers, software developers and CEOs. We need a stratified society to have all these things the modern world gives us. It is only the desire to escape the cotton fields and sweatshops that spurs people to work. It is the only reason that our world has seen amazing advancements in science, technology and business. Capitalism depends on inequality, and we depend on capitalism.

This is logic of capitalism. This is our society's justification for incredible differences in pay and wealth.

eevilspock··on Hardly Anyone Talks About How Fracking Was an Extraordinary Boondoggle
https://archive.ph/ajZA8
eevilspock··on Djot: A light markup language by the creator of Pandoc and CommonMark
https://talk.commonmark.org/t/djot-a-light-markup-language-b...
eevilspock··on The rise of air conditioning (2018)
See my other reply. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32119221

Agreed that there is often an elitist liberal holier than thou dynamic at work. But that doesn't make the issue a non-issue. If you want to sink a knife into liberal virtue signaling and hypocrisy, I will twist that knife. But let's please not conflate things.

I also find your "anti-humanist" label completely unfair and prejudiced by your ideas of what is better for humanity.

eevilspock··on The rise of air conditioning (2018)
If it weren't for your second paragraph I'd have assumed you were being sarcastic. :/
eevilspock··on The rise of air conditioning (2018)
This is a strawman argument. Air conditioning doesn't need to be used at the current levels it is being used to save exactly the same number of lives. So many people and businesses set the thermostat to the 60s. Even a setting in the 70s is totally unnecessary. Few people, if any, will die if the temperature is in the 80s or even 90s, and people could be honest about making such circumstantial choices.

If the first world population used air conditioning less, it would allow poor people, the third world, who tend to live in environments that are hotter and more subject to costs of climate change, to use air conditioning more without adding more to humanity's carbon footprint.

We as humans are quite greedy. We can live perfectly happy and comfortable lives with less plastic, less driving, less waste, but we have become addicted to all this consumption, all this convenience, and the ever greater convenience of consumption (couch shopping and to-your-door delivery, same day or hour even). We have tied our happiness to it. We have no qualms about being a small fraction of the Earth's population yet consuming and hoarding an extremely disproportionate amount of its resources, usually at the expense of poorer people, apparently because a meritocracy is at work.

The modern world's values are ever more driven by "me, me, me!" and less by "us".

eevilspock··on Compare Webb's Images to Hubble
Are the four vs six point starbursts an artifact of the different lens / mirror designs? The Webb telescope has hexagonal mirrors, but not sure about Hubble.
eevilspock··on Djot: A light markup language by the creator of Pandoc and CommonMark
Just opened discussion on CommonMark's community forum, which John MacFarlane reads: https://talk.commonmark.org/t/djot-a-light-markup-language-b...
eevilspock··on Archaeological analysis suggests warfare helped societies become more complex
Very many human endeavors and technology were accelerated/funded by war (including cold wars). Some very recent examples:

- satellites and space travel

- the internet

- GPS

I'm sure we can add many more things to this list. (Please do in reply.)

I don't think it's a contradiction to acknowledge this and at the same time be anti-war, just as it isn't a contradiction to acknowledge greed and selfishness as a strongly motivating factor in human nature (such acknowledgment is the very basis of capitalism) and at the same time advocate for human society to find a way to transcend our base natures and evolve a society and economic system not built on them.

Transcending our base nature is the whole point of culture.

eevilspock··on Brave Search Goggles: Alter search rankings with rules and filters
The point made is that is going to happen regardless, and additionally biases of the search providers are imposed on everyone. Not to mention that the feedback loop of virality will also bias search engines.

The solution put forth by Goggles is to make such biases explicit and transparent, and to make them switchable. No one can honestly claim to be objective if they are using the "MAGA" Goggle. That said, people are particularly good and wearing biased goggles and believing they aren't wearing any goggles at all, or that they are wearing "the one true" goggle.

Anyway, read the white paper, which discusses your point. https://brave.com/static-assets/files/goggles.pdf

eevilspock··on Brave Search Goggles: Alter search rankings with rules and filters
Is/will there be a way to combine Goggles? e.g. "No Pinterest" + "Copycats removal" + "1k short"? It would be a union of the discards, and the boosts/downranks either being cumulative, max(boosts/downranks from each Goggle), the current precedence rules[1], or something else.

---

[1]: https://github.com/brave/goggles-quickstart/blob/main/gettin...

eevilspock··on SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking Elon Musk
It does when employees can be treated as commodities and be at the mercy of employers because of the way our economy is structured.
eevilspock··on It was a mistake to write off the Russians: Neil MacFarlane takes a long view
How does one distinguish between intelligent contrarian views and a broken clock being right once every 24 hours? How to know if your examples point to an unnecessarily high failure to listen to contrarian views rather than reflecting a survivorship bias mistaking natural randomness for a problem?

I don't disagree with your observations or that we have a hear no evil problem, but I'm a contrarian by nature, so I guess I'm being contrarian about contrarianism.

eevilspock··on Quick Tip: Enable Touch ID for Sudo (2020)
That's why I said "should at least have an option". And even when that option is enabled, it still "just works", but with a simple user confirmation and perhaps a visual of the file before and after (What if Apple changes the file format?).

I think you overstate this tradeoff in this case since there is a win-win solution.

eevilspock··on Quick Tip: Enable Touch ID for Sudo (2020)
I'm leery of configuring user code to automatically modify system files, especially security related ones. I think your tool should at least have an option to ask user confirmation, perhaps showing the expected file diff, before making its change. https://github.com/YuriyGuts/persistent-touch-id-sudo/issues...

System updates are not frequent. I prefer doing it manually, and just automating a notification that it needs to be redone. I added this to my `.bashrc`:

    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
eevilspock··on Human attention has become a commodity
A related post and discussion: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26153331

archive of OP: https://web.archive.org/web/20210216125517/https://craigwrit...

eevilspock··on Human attention has become a commodity
You might appreciate Stuart McMillen's The Amusing Ourselves to Death comic: Neil Postman’s ‘Orwell versus Huxley’

https://biblioklept.org/2013/06/08/huxley-vs-orwell-the-webc...

Note from the creator, who had to remove it from his website at the request of Postman's estate: http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/amusing-ourselves-to-deat...

eevilspock··on System Preferences Reimagined on macOS
It's easier, not harder. You can find settings easily using the search box.

Seems to me like your reaction is rather out of proportion.

eevilspock··on System Preferences Reimagined on macOS
Took me one second to type "name" in the search box. Results:

    Computer Name
    Network Name
    Login Name and Password
    VLAN
    ...
eevilspock··on Ffmpeg Buddy
Isn't the better solution for most users a GUI tool like Avidemux?[1] The point being that those who want to use the command line are precisely the people who need to understand all its complexity.

---

[1] https://avidemux.org. Avidemux has a "built-in libavcodec library from FFmpeg (i.e. Avidemux contains its own copy of libavcodec, external FFmpeg is not used)"

eevilspock··on What Trait Affects Income the Most?
Why is it so difficult to abandon old myths? One reason is that these myths are used to rationalize social order. Take, as an example, the Earth’s orbit. It took the Catholic church nearly 400 years to admit that the Earth revolves around the sun. Why so long? Because the church’s power was at stake. The church tied its dogma — and hence its authority — to a geocentric view of the universe.

Faced with a challenge to its authority, the church acted predictably. After convicting the heliocentric proponent Galileo of heresy in 1633, the church banned heliocentric teachings for another two centuries (until 1822). It took another 170 years for the church to formally admit (in 1992) that Galileo was right. Think about that. Almost four centuries of denial for an idea that had no effect on daily life. All because it threatened the authority of those with power. The lesson here is simple. When ideas challenge authority, evidence will be ignored, denied and suppressed.

That brings me to economics.

eevilspock··on An proposed language-neutral change to GitHub's Markdown admonitions beta
Link to the alternative proposal is in this comment: https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions/16925#discuss...
eevilspock··on Bugs are evolving to eat plastic, study finds
Rate of population evolution is proportional to generational turnover rate.

Microbes can cycle through generations in minutes. Humans these days 2-3 decades.

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-living-things-die/answer/Vas-Su...

eevilspock··on Migrating millions of lines of code to TypeScript
Records in ReasonML are represented as arrays. And generated code looks like a human wrote it if humans could remember indices of every property of every type like a compiler does.

So ReasonML is compiled into somewhat obfuscated Javascript that won't be naturally consumable by vanilla Javascript, whereas Typescript transpiles into Javascript with the same API without typings (type erasure).

eevilspock··on Walking While Black (2016)
"For a black man, to assert your dignity before the police was to risk assault. In fact, the dignity of black people meant less to them, which was why I always felt safer being stopped in front of white witnesses than black witnesses. The cops had less regard for the witness and entreaties of black onlookers, whereas the concern of white witnesses usually registered on them. A black witness asking a question or politely raising an objection could quickly become a fellow detainee. Deference to the police, then, was sine qua non for a safe encounter."
eevilspock··on Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives
Watch this without the audio, which is annoying:

https://www.tiktok.com/@danil_chernyy/video/7096930280765721...

eevilspock··on Ask HN: What are some good non-subscription Mac apps?
draw.io, aka https://www.diagrams.net

- Like OmniGraffle, but free, works great and open source! - You can use it online, saving to your cloud drive - Or you can install the desktop version

GitHub: https://github.com/jgraph/drawio

eevilspock··on After losing contact with its helicopter, NASA put the Mars mission on hold
I don't think a Mars mission compares in any way to what most SV hackers do, whether they do it for profit (especially the ignoble kind, ad revenue) or for the common good (open source dev). Not just in scale and timeframe and budget, but in how the organization (or lack of organization in the case of many open source projects) operates.

Also, your application of the word "hacker" to their simply having to adopt to circumstance or be able to update priorities and approaches pretty much takes all the meaning out of the word, because your loose meaning pretty much applies to any endeavor, from business to war to parenting to love.

eevilspock··on Moving a macOS window by clicking anywhere on it
It's nice that once you get it moving, you can drag on any axis.
eevilspock··on Moving a macOS window by clicking anywhere on it
THANK YOU!
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