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ionised

2,447 karma · joined February 20, 2014

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ionised··on Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’
I'd say these things are also 'way in the future'.
ionised··on Google's Project Dragonfly 'Terminated' in China
They are just waiting for the right moment to try again.
ionised··on Google's Project Dragonfly 'Terminated' in China
I attended a talk by Jack Poulson (quit Google over Dragonfly and how it was handled) over the last weekend and he suggested that based on Google's reaction, it has definitely been simply shelved until the resistance and media attention dies down.

The whole thing was carried out in secret to begin with and Sundar Pichai has been completely silent on how it jives with it's own ethical standards.

ionised··on Google Protest Leader Leaves
Nothing, but we're not talking about contextless for-loops here, and you know that.
ionised··on Google Protest Leader Leaves
Your 'work' on military drone technology and censored search is political by nature.

If you want politics out of your workplace, stop working for the company that spends more on political lobbying than any other tech company.

ionised··on Google Protest Leader Leaves
If your politics are encouraging or even accepting of sexual harassment and pay discrimination based on gender, then your 'politics' aren't worth acknowledging, honestly.
ionised··on Amazon offers $10 to Prime Day shoppers who hand over their data
Any opinion looks worthless when you deliberately mischaracterise it like this.
ionised··on Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
My examples are so bad that you had to deliberately mischaracterise the first and third, and completely ignore the second.

Kudos.

ionised··on Ask HN: How do you deal with professional envy?
I think the point is, Bill Gates was already privileged before he got rich.
ionised··on Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
That's the homo-economicus argument and it's fallen flat a great many times.

Humans act irrationally all the time.

ionised··on Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
> Capitalism has been a miracle for everyone, not just a few.

Capitalism has had demonstrably terrible effects for many people all over the world without the luck of being born in a country or even a social class with enough economic clout to dictate favourable terms in trade agreements.

The conflict and genocide in East Timor was driven by capitalist Indonesia (a US ally) and colonial greed. Of course this conflict was ignored at the time because it was more important to focus on the Khmer Rouge, so the US and its brand of capitalism could save face:

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

As was the privatisation of water supply in Bolivia that led to conflict and massacres:

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

Plus the US-backed militias and crackdowns in various South American nations to prop up and entrench its business interests:

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

These are just three examples. There are countless other examples of the destruction and death caused by capitalist policies all over the world. This kind of greed, corruption and harm is not limited to totalitarian states, they're just less reported on by western media. Deliberately so.

Calling it a 'miracle for everyone' is an obscenely narrow-minded claim.

ionised··on Welcome to the K-12 Surveillance State
> I don't have any data or anything, but I think that brain development is not even complete until well after 12th grade in humans. In particular, I think the ability to self regulate is compromised.

12th grade is seriously lowballing it as well.

The human brain doesn't stop developing until well into our mid-twenties, and there is still some plasticity even after that.

ionised··on Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists
Accusations of whataboutism are invalid when you are calling out related points or highlighting hypocrisy and double standards:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism#Criticism

Some commentators have defended the usage of whataboutism and tu quoque in certain contexts. Whataboutism can provide necessary context into whether or not a particular line of critique is relevant or fair. For instance, in international relations, behavior that may be imperfect by international standards may be quite good for a given geopolitical neighborhood, and deserves to be recognized as such.

Christian Christensen, Professor of Journalism in Stockholm, argues that the accusation of whataboutism is itself a form of tu quoque fallacy, as it dismisses criticisms of one's own behavior to focus instead on the actions of another, thus creating a double standard. Those who use whataboutism are not necessarily engaging in an empty or cynical deflection of responsibility: whataboutism can be a useful tool to expose contradictions, double standards, and hypocrisy.

Others have criticized the usage of accusations of whataboutism by American news outlets, arguing that the accusation whataboutism has been used to simply "deflect" criticisms of human rights abuses perpetrated by the United States or its allies. They argue that the usage of the term almost exclusively by American outlets is a double standard, and that moral accusations made by powerful countries are merely a pretext to punish their geopolitical rivals in the face of their own wrongdoing.

The scholars Kristen Ghodsee and Scott Sehon posit that mentioning the possible existence of victims of capitalism in popular discourse is often dismissed as 'whataboutism', which they describe as "a term implying that only atrocities perpetrated by communists merit attention." They also argue that such accusations of 'whataboutism' are invalid as the same arguments used against communism can also be used against capitalism.

ionised··on Let us open 100 tabs of pure madness to fool trackers
I enable all that stuff and the number of ReCaptchas, while annoying is probably on like 30% of the sites I visit. And most of them I can live without.
ionised··on I’ve Picked My Job over My Kids
Me too, but I'm guessing we just had bad, maladjusted mothers.

All mine did was fill me with anxieties and neuroses.

We probably would have felt differently with a good mother.

ionised··on US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries
It's as if people don't consider Generals Smedley D. Butler and Dwight D. Eisenhower as authorities on the subject when they warned against the racket of the military-industrial complex.

It's depressing and utterly pathetic that we refuse to listen to wise words because our primitive monkey feelings don't jive with the advice they gave.

ionised··on Western intelligence hacked Yandex to spy on accounts
We have no reason to believe them.

They have a demonstrable history of lies and terrorist-style anti-democratic activities themselves for political and economic purposes.

ionised··on Google blocks abortion ads in Australia
Why would the current right-wing Australian government fund a socialist station?
ionised··on Consumers Are Becoming Wise to Your Nudge
'Evil' tends to pay very well.
ionised··on Consumers Are Becoming Wise to Your Nudge
Every job requires judgement of some kind.
ionised··on Can Life Exist in 2 and 1 Dimensions?
Isn't it customary to put a Chinese person's family name first?
ionised··on San Francisco Becomes First U.S. City to Pass an E-Cigarette Ban
Same reason I as an asthmatic have to endure your vehicle smog causing me breathing difficulties.

Personal freedoms.

ionised··on San Francisco Becomes First U.S. City to Pass an E-Cigarette Ban
I don't want to breath smog or vehicle fumes either, because I have asthma and an asthma attack could kill me.

I doubt you'll stop driving tomorrow to spare my health though.

ionised··on “I thought I'd share this Boris Johnson story with you”
> You don't get to be King's Scholar at Eton being a buffoon.

No, you get it by hereditary wealth, connections and nepotism.

ionised··on “I thought I'd share this Boris Johnson story with you”
You might want look at nationwide police funding during the Tory government for an explanation on the increase in violent crime.
ionised··on Suicide Rates Among Adolescents and Young Adults in the United States, 2000-2017
You're right, and I apologise. I can get carried away sometimes.

I'll tone down the charged rhetoric and try to keep it civil in future.

ionised··on Doing work locally minimizes problems with Electron apps
This.

Developers shouldn't be assuming that their users will have machines even close to theirs spec-wise.

ionised··on Doing work locally minimizes problems with Electron apps
And yet my Firefox with 48 open tabs and a bunch of addons is currently sitting at 1.2GB.

Chrome is awful with resource usage to begin with, which is why Electron is, it bundles and runs a headless Chrome for each Electron app.

ionised··on Doing work locally minimizes problems with Electron apps
It's not relative at all. That's just awful.
ionised··on Doing work locally minimizes problems with Electron apps
I find the problem lies with the trade-off you are making.

You are making your life as a developer easier in exchange massively increasing the resource requirements and battery usage on end-user machines.

It's just bad practice and Electron encourages it.

I feel like if we ever want to be taken seriously as a profession the way structural or mechanical engineers are for example, then efficiency and reliability need to be primary considerations, otherwise we are basically making toys.

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