Then again, a lot of beliefs have direct, strong and immediate consequences on your actions. So if your action is political, and you did that action because of your belief, is your belief still apolitical?
251 karma · joined March 16, 2017
> If we are in search of truth and want to build a consistent model of the world then we just can't accept this kind of reasoning.
Yes, you can. It's called generalizing. Remember, we're not doing math here, this is ethics.
Think about all the different situations where being treated equally to someone else is a good thing. Now you generalize that into "everyone is created equal", and that turns into a justification for all these situations.
If you want to criticise the generalization into A, there is a way:
Construct some C so that
1) A => C
2) C is not beneficial
Alternatively, you can attack the implication "A => B" or you can question whether or not B is beneficial.
In a more general sense, consider the "laws of physics". People believe in them not because of their consequences, but because they explain reality (and quite well). So people believe in gravity because it has worked for them in the past, and because it has been verified.
Also... _not_ believing in gravity will not make much of a difference for your life (as long as you don't start jumping off cliffs of course).
EDIT: I forgot about religion. AFAIK, most people believe in religion because they have been taught/indoctrinated/raised to believe in it, and _not_ because they have (deeply) thought about the social consequences of their particular religion.
So if people choose to believe in something because that has certain consequences - then a belief can be political.
EDIT: To expand on this a little... It seems to me that you divorce a belief itself from its consequences. As there are a lot of beliefs that have immediate and direct political and social consequences, i think that this separation is questionable.
If you have a belief, you probably will act on that belief. Having a belief and _not_ acting on it _at all_ seems rather useless and abstract to me. I'm not saying that this doesn't happen, but in general, if some person has a belief, he (or she) will act on that belief.
So, to be blunt: for some beliefs, having them is a political act.
1) Your sources of information are advertisers (Google and facebook) - why are they trustworthy?
2) The huge database in your behavior is so easily exploitable for evil it boggles the mind. Ever read any science fiction?
3) Even if you are rational and unafraid of surveillance (nothing to hide, nothing to fear, right?)... Advertising makes your purchases more expensive. That should make you especially angry, since it is so useless (according to you).
I mean, you're probably reading a bit too much into the guy's post. He's probably not talking about lynching, more likely about way smaller stuff.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/remote-content-in-messa...
This seems to be a sufficient countermeasure against the kind of tracking in the article.
Now that you mention, there was this fascinating denial-of-service vulnerability in PHP which is (kind of) related... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2066352 http://www.exploringbinary.com/why-volatile-fixes-the-2-2250...
EDIT: To expand on this: The following code is valid, and may print "weird":
double x = f();
double y = x;
if(x != 0 && y == 0) {
printf("weird\n");
}
Sadly, it is not associative (i.e. (a+b)+c != a+(b+c))
Imagine a being a large number, and b and c being so small that adding each single one to a will result in a, but adding their sum will result in just the smallest increment over a.
To add something constructive: There are several solutions for collaborative editing that you can host yourself, like Etherpad or gobby.
- Those that do not rape as long as they can buy sex.
- Those that do rape when they can buy sex.
In my humble opinion, it is rather likely that there are more in the former than in the latter category, thus I would think that causation is plausible here.
On the "something doesn't quite feel right" thing - do you have an emotional reaction to this topic?
Anyone who doesn't want a cryptocurrency miner in his browser?
Anyone security conscious?
Could you please elaborate?
If i recall correctly, you need to generate two large prime numbers to get a key. There are already several caveats for the prime generation, so you cannot just take any two primes that are big enough. So for a proper key generation, you generate a lot of random numbers, verify that they are prime and that they are "proper" for RSA.
This discovery "just" means that there are some additional steps for verifying the properness of the prime, that every RSA implementor has to add. So for mitigation, there is work to do for implementors, but similar work has been necessary before...
Of course, this might have been used to generate backdoorable RSA keys, and giving them to people without their knowledge. If that happened, this issue becomes... more significant for all that have been backdoored.
These "weak" primes are perfect for backdoors, however, if you know about them being weak, and noone else does.
That means the person is not kept anonymous, his name is simply not included in this article.
Now, I think that omitting his name makes the article better, because it removes a distraction.
On the whole i think that whether or not his name should be mentioned depends on whether or not his behavior has changed -- with some bias in favor of not mentioning him, because... well people should be allowed to learn and improve themselves?
However, the author ended up reporting him, so i guess it's a moot point.
... As long as the guy has learned something or changed his behavior, i mean.
There are some companies that sell them, e.g. getdigital:
Also, I already have a perfectly working dell xps 13 with linux, so this would really be more of a luxury item.
First of all, the author wants backup, switching machines, and collaboration all integrated into VC. This is a worthwile goal, and i can see that shoehorning git et al into those rules can feel... clunky. I think there is room for improvement there.
The author comes off a little greedy, when he wants to (a) be able to instantaneously create a new workspace while (b) being able to manage huge code bases. Oh, and everything should work even on his chromebook - as long as he has one computer that can do the work, all his other computers should offload the work to the one capable of doing it. Transparently of course.
This sounds great and all... but i would not want to implement it :-)
That is true, and it is a very good thing indeed.
However IMHO there is an important thing missing: Feedback for your mistakes. This is something that every good education should have: an examination of your results, and feedback on what to do better. Especially in CS, it is very easy to produce something that technically works, but is error prone, fragile, inefficient, broken, hard to understand or maintain, etc... These are all things you do not learn without human feedback.
Technically you can give that human feedback to yourself, by reading the stuff you wrote 6 months earlier. That takes at least 6 months for every iteration though :-)
MS reserves the right to look at memory dumps and crashed binaries "to improve the customer experience" or something...
Take these two things together, and... you lose your source code :-(
Then why don't they make it opt in?
> Is there actually a good reason to turn this off?
Security. In the sense of "enable only needed features, to reduce attack surface".
Of course it would be even better to not have it turned on by default in the first place.
Microsoft comes from a place of being automatically distrusted by a lot of people, and for good reason. It may seem unfair to you, but they have to conduct better than this to make up for this disadvantage.
However, it has that in common with Keurig - which is a huge success.
My point is that just because something is stupid and wasteful it doesn't have to fail...
IMHO you are right though about discrimination existing.
Is there anyone inconvenienced by this?
Given that the number of C projects that use similar toolsets is... low (?), I'd guess that said comparison would favor rust, but I'm prepared to be surprised :-)