Thank you for this tedious discourse with your haughty dismissals based on arbitrary fallacies. I'm afraid I have to decline any further exchanges you offer with this histrionic and smug disposition.
3,057 karma · joined December 24, 2022
If drawing parallels from history is being delusional, the entire world is. Comparisons may not match in scale but the intent is the key. And the intent is absolutely clear here. That's why I said that you are 'histrionic' and 'hyperbolic'. You're being dramatic in your over exaggerated outrage at normal things people do.
> If nobody of 7 billion earth want to spend a few pennies to save something, then it's obviously not valuable in any way to anyone.
'Nobody cares' doesn't equate to 'not worth it'. That's false equivalence. Climate data especially. Who knows what's backed up and what's not? That's why I said it has to be collaboratively backed up and hosted. Instead you create this fanciful scenario that doesn't exist, in order to reach incoherent conclusions that you use to perform your over-the-top drama.
I'm talking about precious data being destroyed by anti-intellectuals because their predecessors didn't foresee that possibility. There are no delusions here. You're just being unimaginative, hyperbolic and histrionic.
> For gosh sake, the internet is public, nothing is being truly erased, published papers will be there for literally all of time. The publishing industry may control some distribution for a very short period of time but it's not relvant in the grand scheme
Is that what you see happening here? Didn't the Internet Archive race to save the data from the websites of US research institutions before they were deleted by the current regime? They could have done it with ease if they had started as soon as the election results were out. This is not to say that IA is inefficient. It's to point out that while the Internet has a great preservation ability, it's not perfect and hardly always the case. There are a lot of data that aren't sufficiently protected.
Instead of trying to even understand that possibility, you go on a shallow and low-effort dismissal with excess drama. Is that the quality of discussion now?
The only specialty that we possess over others is a deeper knowledge about technology and the politics behind it. But it DOESN'T have to be exclusive to us. We're not the only ones fed up with this amount of BS from the gilded class. People do listen and act if we're willing to inform them. Even if everyone doesn't respond, there will still be enough to make a difference. Just dismissing their will like this is uncharitable at best.
I don't know how long ago the library of Alexandria was burned down. But what I do know is that we never learn the lesson. It's rather stupid to store public research data (i.e, excluding classified info) at a single location. There are any number of unpredictable future scenarios that can lead to this same unfortunate outcome.
Scientists and politicians should work together and agree to store and host such research data in multiple countries, including with rival nations. That should make it a lot more resilient against such eventualities. It won't cause any security risk. After all, you were going to publish it anyway. Why waste the information worth a lot of money and effort?
But instead of that, many governments and greedy corporations go after independent groups who do exactly that - scihub and internet archive, for example. We as a species possess the stupidity of stubbornly avoiding the obvious right path.
I'm puzzled by autocrats beyond a certain limit. Their actions don't really seem to fit any logic, if their intention is to be become unchallengeable and unassailable. This seems like ceding the advantage to any future rivals.
There was a concept named Web 3.0 a while ago, aka the 'Semantic Web'. It wasn't the crypto/blockchain scam that we call Web3 today. The idea was to create a web of machine readable data based on shared ontologies. That would have effectively turned the web into a giant database of sorts, that the 'agents' could browse autonomously and derive conclusions from. This is sort of like how we browse the web to do research on any topic.
Since the data was already in a structured form in Web 3.0 instead of natural language, the agent would have been nowhere near the energy hogs that LLMs are today. Even the final conversion of conclusions into natural language would have been much more energy-efficient than the LLMs, since the conclusions were also structured. Combine that with the sorts of technology we have today, even a mediocre AI (by today's standards) would have performed splendidly.
Opponents called it impractical. But there already were smaller systems around from various scientific fields, operating on the same principle. And the proponents had already made a lot of headway. It was going to revolutionize information sharing. But what I think ultimately doomed it is the same reason you mentioned. The powers that be, didn't want smarter people. They wanted people who earned them money. That means those who spend their attention on dead scrolling feeds, trash ads and slop.
> but it's a shame that so many companies who built their empires on the shoulders of those visionaries think the only valid way to browse is with a human-eyeball-to-server chain of trust.
Yes, this! But only when your eyeball and attention earns them profit. Otherwise they are perfectly content with operating behind your backs and locking you out of decisions about how you want to operate the devices you paid for in full. This is why we can't have good things. No matter which way you look, the ruins of all the dreams lead to the same culprit - the insatiable greed of a minority. That makes me question exactly how much wealth one needs to live comfortably or even lavishly till their death.
The UI paradigm created by the emacs transient package [1] can improve the discoverability of CLI commands significantly. It's one of the components of magit, the famous git frontend, that makes it so awesome. It's discoverability is very close to that of GUIs and somehow even more pleasing to use than GUIs. I wonder if someone is trying this on terminals.
I was asking how an (elected fascist) government can be corporatist, if they are fighting a corporation. Doesn't a corporatist government fight for the corporations? From the answers I see, this government is partially corporatist. They'll fight smaller corporations if the latter don't fall in line.
I'm afraid, I agree.
> People mention GrapheneOS but that relies entirely on Google.
I really admire the developers of various AOSP distros for their tenacity, technical brilliance and empathy. But honestly, I don't see AOSP as a solution. It's a deliberately moving target that wastes their time in chasing down the shifting goal posts and hurdles. The only viable solution is to go for a fully open mobile OS, probably based on Linux or a BSD. There are two big difficulties here.
The first is as you mentioned, most devices are severely locked down and their internal details hidden behind NDAs. Getting even the basic set of drivers working is a challenge. The solution is to ask friendly vendors (like Fairphone) for support and then aggressively purse compatibility with them. I'm very much willing to restrict my purchase choices to vendors who agree to such collaborations. If this works, others will follow eventually - like what we've seen with Linux on desktops and laptops.
The second problem is the app ecosystem. It's a chicken and egg problem. You need customers for software vendors to support the platform. But you need a large software ecosystem to attract customers. At least some customers will have to forgo convenience in the beginning and put up with the limitations, in pursuit of a better future. Again, I'm willing. But I don't know if the entire community is big enough to make a difference.
Nevertheless, these are worthy goals to pursue. Once the basic framework is established, the rest of the ecosystem will progress rapidly, since the developers can focus on functionality rather than fighting the never-ending parade of capricious 'safety features'. I'm just tired of putting up with all the wanton consumer abuse by these infinitely greedy corporations.
Who's even discussing the four freedoms today, even in the context of events like this, much less argue and agree or disagree about it? The entire point of my 'essay' was to remind everyone that those very relevant messages were deliberately deemphasized and drowned out. Arguing 'both sides were at fault' will only prolong our misery forever.
When is that? When he declares himself the supreme dictator of the US? Or when he nukes another nation because of his racism?
Look around and compare with the Nazis. There is already the demonization and dehumanization of a large demographic group. There are concentration camps and extralegal police forces around already. Just like in Nazi extermination camps, the people who disappear into these ICE facilities are near impossible to trace again. There are already fatalities in there from inhumane living conditions, very bad food, lack of medical care and occasional premeditated murders. Even among the civilians, they see differently abled people as a burden, just as the Nazis did. Just as in Nazi Germany, there is an expansion of military power at the expense of the civilians and flouting of international laws. And just as in Nazi Germany, smart people who can see the writing on the wall are already on a mass exodus.
If you still believe that you're in a democracy, you forgot what happened on Jan 6, 2021. Their ego is too fragile to accept anything except their victory. There is zero chance that the despots will risk getting impeached, trialed and punished by the Congress and face the severe consequences of absolutely horrendous stuff they've committed so far. Even if the public opinion is overwhelmingly hostile towards them, they'll just claim election fraud. They have started efforts for that on multiple fronts with truly bizzare incidents being reported.
And let's talk about the BIG massive elephant in the oval office (besides the obvious one). Trump is NOT the main character, even though I'm sure that he doesn't know that. Look at what their mouthpieces are saying, their dubious billionaire friends are doing and their unelected psycho-minions are pulling off. This isn't just a dictatorship. This is a multi-generational authoritarian regime with clear succession plans. You're all distracted by just the beginning of a long chain of misery. And the beginning isn't even the worst. This is one thing where this regime is unlike the Nazis or the Fascists. Those regimes were controlled by the figure head who formed it - making them vulnerable to decapitation. This one is acting more like a secret society that puts someone in the front to act as their symbolic figure head. Removing the figure head isn't going to end the regime.
You're waiting for an imaginary signal when every alarm around you is screaming at you. The time for 'if' is long gone. That ship sailed a while ago.
There are zero reasons to assume this regime's victims, except for known tyrants like Maduro and Khameini, to be guilty at all. The regime has zero credibility when it comes to human rights. So those fishermen were most likely innocent victims and not drug smugglers.
In addition to all this, don't assume that this US attacks on Iran were because of his love and benevolence for the Iranian civilians. If it were so, he wouldn't have provoked the Iranian regime to crackdown on the protestors and kill around 30K of them. That farce was unnecessary for the liberation of Iran. Instead, he used them to create an excuse to carry out an attack that they had already planned.
So, as much as I understand the Iranians' joy in seeing the end of Khameini, I strongly suspect that this is just the beginning of another authoritarian regime over there, controlled remotely by the US regime this time, just as we see in Venezuela. Expect everything from human rights violations to mass scale plunder of their natural resources. All that we see now are just ploys to establish a worldwide neocolonial order under a very racist and xenophobic regime operating from the US. Let me remind you of the meme that this orange dictator posted that shows Canada, Venezuela and Greenland as part of the US territory. I don't see this end well for any civilians on this planet, including US citizens.
Open source philosophy emphasizes the sharing and openness of code source so that the collaboration improves its availability and quality. For free software on the other hand, openness is only a means to an end. In fact, you're not even required to distribute the source. You need to supply it only to the users of your software, and only if they request it. Free software instead focuses on the concept of computing freedom. The idea that the computing devices you own MUST do only what you want, and anything you want (within the limits of technological possibilities).
In practice, free software ideology and open source ideology achieve nearly identical results. Most open source software are free software. Most OSS licenses qualify as free software license too. But free software philosophy raises an important question that OSS philosophy doesn't. Does the software do what you want? Does it work in your interests as a device owner? Over time, we saw the emergence of software that are open, but harms your interests in multiple ways. Examples include AOSP, Chromium, VSCode, etc. And yet, we falsely call them FOSS.
And now when governments and corporations implement measures and laws that take away our freedom to use the devices we paid for and supposedly own in ways we want, the OSS philosophy rarely questions their sanctity. Sure, there is some opposition from the OSS community to these measures, but they are mostly based on practical issues like the inability to enforce the restrictions or to face its consequences.
However, these restrictions are antithetical to the free software philosophy in a more fundamental, ideological and political way. Had it been the dominant philosophy among the two, there would have been a bigger push back in the name of violation of our rights and freedoms. This is why our stances, ideologies and politics with respect to technology matters.
The loss of emphasis on free software philosophy has blunted our opposition a bit. Free software proponents were screaming about such eventualities from the beginning. But they were dismissed as eccentric. And that brings us to the sustained vilification campaigns I talked about earlier. It was clear from the beginning that these campaigns were coordinated by moneyed interests. They don't want us to have strong opinions or political beliefs about what we do, lest we revolt when they exploit us for resources or force us to do their bidding. Always be wary of people who argue against the interests of the common. Who knows what lurks under the sheep skin?
subprocess module isn't a reasonable example to the contrary, because it isn't Python's syntactical sugar that makes it confusing. And even in case of modules that aren't well designed, the language developers and the community strive to provide a more ergonomic alternative.
But instead of addressing the point, you decided to make it about me and my development patterns based on some wild reasoning. But that's not surprising because this started with you asserting that it's the developers' fault that bash appears so confusing to them. Just some worthless condescension instead of staying on topic. What a disgrace!
Gemini strives to finish an entire request in a single transaction. So TLS certs are really the only option for authentication. That's how I learned the elegance of TLS client authentication workflow and started asking why this is so neglected in web browsers.
> refuse to admit there are alternatives to RAII
I'm even more curious about this. Can the author or anybody else explain what this means specifically? Can anybody list those alternatives other than GC and RC?
PS: Computer Science isn't exactly my primary professional competence.
+1
> If you ask me, the time for tactful language is long over.
Sadly, I reached the same conclusion a while ago. Subtlety seems to have lost all value and too much is at stake to keep on appealing to everyone's sensibility.