mwfunk

Because the apps that are considered part of the OS are tightly coupled to the OS itself, and often those app updates are intended to showcase new features of the OS that they want developers to take advantage of. Things that are considered standalone apps like Logic, etc. get updates through the App Store like other apps.

That was dropping the X from the name, not changing the major version number from 10 to 11. It's had a major version number of 10 ever since the first release of OS X. Most people assumed the actual version number would stay at 10.x.x forever, regardless of any changes to the marketing name of the OS itself.

I'm not against preferences and lots of options in general when appropriate, I just don't think they're zero-cost. It's like the surprisingly huge difference between a service being "free" vs. "almost free". But anecdotally (I know...) when fundamental differences between developers are resolved as, "let's just do both and make it an option", it's either people assuming that allowing both behaviors either has no cost, or it's a failure to resolve differences that inflicts one of the thousand tiny cuts that will someday overwhelm the code base.

At the same time, I don't want to be dogmatic about anything, those are just general tendencies. Emacs for example is a beautiful example of an almost opposite design. The software is like a computing instrument that the user has to first learn how to play, but the more effort they put in to it, (up to a point at least, and depending on what they want to do) the more they get out of it. Ultimately it depends on what you're trying to accomplish and who your users are.

I'm sure there's a more scientific explanation involving cognitive bias and rationality and so on, but all I know is that few phrases send more chills down more spines of experienced developers than "it should be easy, why don't you just..." It's up there with "ship it now, we'll fix it later" and "if we can't agree which way to go, let's just make it an option in the prefs" on the Mount Rushmore of famous last words in software development. I've been burned by it so many times, I literally have to catch myself when I hear those words coming out of my mouth (or anyone's mouth, but I can only be responsible for myself), which they still do sometimes, because I'm just as subject to human nature and cognitive bias as anyone.

No private company is obligated to accept a contract from a federal agency. To expect them to do so would be the inverse of the supposed freedoms we supposedly value in America. Specifically the first and third amendments to the Bill of Rights, but that's just scratching the surface of how un-American that would be. Worst case, the government can set up its own infrastructure, and that probably wouldn't be a bad thing anyway. Some people talk about privatization of government resources as if it's an inherently good thing that saves taxpayer money, but if anything the last 40 years has shown the opposite, especially WRT to the likes of Blackwater and private prisons. In many cases privatization is more expensive and simply serves to put public money in private hands without oversight to reward corruption.

Also it's misleading to refer to it as a "political reason". There are two different things people mean by the term "political". One is through the lens of party tribalism. Like, if a restaurant owner put up a big sign out front that said "I only serve registered Democrats, the rest of you can GTFO." That's about the shittiest and most indefensible form of "bringing politics into it" that I could possibly think of. Probably wouldn't be illegal but obviously I wouldn't think too highly of the restaurant owner and I would hope he quickly went out of business because everyone (left and right alike) would think he's a douchebag.

That's one meaning of "political". The other meaning is simply, "reacting to current events", independently of tribalism or political parties. If someone is actually acting based on moral convictions rather than party loyalty or tribalism, that's very different. I realize that an anti-ICE POV and pro-immigrant POV is strongly correlated with Democrats and the opposite is strongly correlated with Republicans, but if we start casting every single moral conviction or political belief in terms of party loyalties then we have freaking lost as a nation. Party-based tribalism is always bad, full stop, but people acting on moral convictions are as good as the coherency of their moral convictions.

Like, if the US government started rounding up folks by ethnicity and putting them in camps based on obviously racist motivations, like they did to Japanese-Americans in WW2, and it was based on bills passed by Democratic politicians, and the Republicans, bless their hearts, decided to fight tooth and nail against it because Democrats, I would honestly hope that all businesses, regardless of their owner's or employee's political leanings, would ignore the party politics aspect of it and only make decisions based on moral convictions. The parties fight each other all the time but we can't fall into the trap of thinking that political parties are anything other than an unfortunate reality of our system of government. Many of their conflicts are fights they pick with each other to rally their base, whereas if they were actually interested in responsible governance they would try to find common ground and try to negotiate something that actually helps the country.

Some people just have a tribal mentality though. They can't formulate thoughts on any issue through any lens except that of party politics. They think of themselves as "this type of person, not that type of person", and their first cut at bucketizing the population is lumping them in with one party or another. That's not democracy, that's about the stupidest freaking tribalism imaginable. Keep in mind that it wasn't until 1994 (or 1996?) that "bipartisan" and "compromise" became dirty words in political coverage, specifically to the Republican Party thanks to Newt Gingrich, but to a lesser degree to the Democrats as well as they circled the wagons in response. It's only been the last 26 years that parties themselves have become more important to some Americans than America itself, or Americans as a whole.

Besides, what possible negative consequence could GitHub suffer from this? Besides losing the ICE contract? Does anyone seriously think that other government agencies or companies would be so butthurt about GitHub's position on ICE, that they wouldn't want to do business with them? That only makes sense through the lens of the two political parties defining the totality of what it means to be an American, and if that's where people are at, America deserves to crash and burn because it's lost whatever soul it may have once had that elevated it. George Washington's farewell address was on this very topic. He thought the poison pill of the Constitution was that it set up a system whereby people would naturally form voting blocs, and before too long voting blocs would coalesce into two diametrically opposed political parties, and then the system (and America) is screwed. Which is exactly what happened. But it doesn't have to be that way. But the election process itself would have to be reformed into a less antiquated, non-FPTP-based system.

In a broader sense, humor that punches down never really works, even if the person using it has the best intentions. The examples in the article are useful because they're clearly intended to defuse tension, not to punch down or make anyone feel bad, but it just doesn't work. It's an example of how hard it is to intuitively see things from other people's perspectives. We interpret and judge ourselves from the inside looking out, but we (and some people in particular) look way different from the outside looking in and understanding the difference is a lifelong effort.

This is not even a drop in the bucket if you think this is some sort of publicity stunt. Outside of the tech bubble nobody knows any of this stuff even exists, and inside the tech bubble there's a much, much higher percentage of incel/redpill types than the general population, so it wouldn't even make sense as a way to change their perception within the tech world.

It may or may not be useful to anyone, I have no idea. But to characterize this as a "heavy publicity push" doesn't make sense. It's not a push, there's no publicity, and there's nothing heavy about it.

Don't those numbers need to be normalized to take into account the size of the populations? You posted absolute raw numbers for blacks and whites, without noting that depending on how the categories are defined, the white population of the US is 4-6x greater than the black population of the US. 4x is the absolute minimum, so if you were to weight them proportionately what you posted would show a very different story.

If the most conservative numbers are used (only 4x as many whites as blacks in the US), then it turns into this:

2017

Whites: 457

Blacks: 223->892

2018

Whites: 399

Blacks: 209->836

2019

Whites: 370

Blacks: 235->940

2020

Whites: 172

Blacks: 88->352

But practically speaking, without splitting hairs too much it's a heck of a lot closer to 5-6x than 4x.

EDIT: formatting

No shit dude.

Apparently the police are OK with any protestors doing basically anything if they've all got AR-15s and burning or lynching effigies of politicians they disagree with, because apparently that's how adults handle disagreements in civil societies. That would be another way to render themselves invisible to the police, based on the last 50 years or so of anecdotal evidence.

I may be missing some critical elements though, like Confederate flags or swastikas or blatantly threatening behavior or obvious symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome. It sure is odd, the sorts of things that put American cops at ease. Really odd.

Almost the entire American right wing media is continually hate- and fearmongering about their perceived political opponents, actively and/or knowingly spreading disinformation, and has been for my entire adult life, at least as long as I've been paying attention, which is going on several decades. That's their only move, give people enemies so they don't actually have to propose solutions to anything. It's easy to give people enemies, much harder to actually solve complicated problems that require getting everyone on board. There used to be a more intellectual, reality-focused American right wing (and still is, but to a vastly smaller degree than just a few years ago). But now Alex Jones has replaced William F. Buckley and modern Republicans are much more likely to know about Rush Limbaugh than Edmund Burke. Buckley and Burke would get tarred and feathered as RINOs nowadays and that's really saying something.

That's not an opinion or a judgement, that's just reality, as much as 1+1=2 or the sky being blue. It doesn't require interpreting anything or contextualizing anything. It's obvious and plain as day, and eyes and ears and integrity and maturity are all that are required to perceive it. I absolutely believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that any reasonable application of any reasonable rules of moderation concerning threats, abuse, and misinformation would have much more impact on a typical Trump supporter in 2020 than anyone else (still faithful in 2020 folks, that's the type of person we're talking about here), and that that would be almost certainly the fault of the individual, and not biased moderation. The only way moderation would affect both sides equally would be if both sides were the same, or composed of the same sort of people.

But both sides have never been the same, and that's more true now than at any time since the Civil War. Except that now Republicans identify with Confederates instead of Lincoln and his ideals, and somehow Democrats flipped from representing Evangelical rural Southerners to representing the industrialized, urban, and successful parts of America, that were represented by Republicans in Lincoln's day.

FWIW I agree with George Washington that political parties themselves are the poison pill that repeatedly divides and screws up America, and that our current system is fatally flawed because it naturally leads to a two-party system, and that two-party systems by definition lead to more corruption and shittier governance. Just because one party is clearly criminally corrupt doesn't make the other party the goodguys, but until (if ever) we get rid of FPTP voting, it's a "pick the lesser evil" situation, and hoo boy is one evil obviously lesser than the other one.

It just feels like weaponized Usenet from the mid-'90s, or almost every popular online forum since then. Multiplayer game communities even. They're like tinderboxes for negativity. Very small numbers of bad faith actors (griefers, trolls, scammers, spammers, or just plain assholes) can trivially derail entire communities. Even without people trying to screw everything up, plain old human nature, and the nature of electronic communications, can make it happen as well. It just takes a little longer.

Put another way, each flame begets one or more flames, whereas each good comment might get responses but maybe it stands on its own. Over time the signal to noise ratio of any forum tends to degrade to nothing as the forum becomes more popular because of this. Moderation, scoring systems, etc. can ameliorate this but in general the less specialized the forum, the worse it is. It's like entropy in that it only goes in one direction, it's just a matter of time and how much you can push back on it. Bad comments beget more bad comments, but good comments don't necessarily beget more good comments. And at some point, the ratio of bad comments to good comments drives away any potential good commenters and the event horizon is crossed and the forum dies. Or it lives on as a cesspool for whatever.

The difference between Facebook and Twitter in 2020 vs comp.os.linux (or whatever) in 1995 is that it's not specialists screaming at each other about which distro or programming language or OSS license is best (or worst). It's a much wider net of far less informed or rational people, encouraged to argue about infinitely dumber and less knowable or debatable stuff. It's like scammy clickbait, but for arguments rather than clicks. The other difference between Facebook and Twitter in 2020 vs online communities of the past is that Facebook and Twitter make money off of it. All this BS fuels "engagement" and keeps larger volumes of people posting and therefore revealing themselves to trackers and creating a stream of ad views for the platform owners. At some point I do think the toxicity of the platforms will start costing them users, but that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon.

People get a UBI regardless of whether or not they work, that's the 'U' part. So any money you get from working is additional money on top of the UBI. It would be taxed, but it's still more money. It's not like other benefits where once you start earning your own money, you lose the benefit, and thus have to make a choice between not working to keep the benefit and working 40 hours a week to make similar or marginally more money.

Or, maybe you're taking that into account already, and are worried about an uncanny valley in between "not working" and "working" where a significant number of people simply don't work because that first rung in the "working" ladder isn't rewarding enough to start climbing the ladder, so they're incentivized to never work. If so, that's certainly a concern, but that would also be an indicator of a failed system that needed to be revised. It goes without saying that any implementation of a UBI system would have to be designed such that that didn't happen, but that's not an intrinsic quality of UBI systems.

Tax increases themselves would have to be progressive (as our current tax system supposedly is and always has been) to avoid creating these sorts of discontinuities that would disincentivize people from working. Any functional UBI system would have to take that into account, otherwise it's a failed implementation.

That only makes sense if you consider someone like Alex Jones to be “just another person who happens to have different opinions about some things than some other people”. He never got shit from anyone for merely offering unpopular opinions, his history (and present) is much more complicated and fucked up than that. He’s definitely on a short list of people for whom humanity in general is worse off overall for having him in it. Like a negative contributor on a team who just makes work for other people, he’s a negative contributor in many, many ways for all of humanity, and not just from spreading transparent lies and obvious disinformation. He never got in trouble for simply saying something someone else disagreed with, he got in trouble for directly fucking with the lives of victims of horrible tragedies, over and over again.

Also, it should be noted that this is only the first time you launch the untrusted app. After that the system considers the app to be trusted and doesn't bug you about it. But self-described power users already know all this stuff, so I'm sure this isn't news to anyone. Self-described power users know everything about everything, or else they wouldn't describe themselves as power users. It's why they're so revered for their humility and lack of obvious cognitive biases throughout the world.

You're right, I was jumping to conclusions that it would be vetoed. In that case I have no idea who was filibustering it, assuming that's why they needed 60 votes. I would love to know.

Sorry, I should've provided the link: https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_...

The president must be at least planning on obstructing the bill, since the only reason they'd need 60 votes would be to overcome a veto.

If we treat the absences as very wimpy nay votes, and lump the 2 independents in with the party they caucus with (both Democrat), then the party breakdown looks like this:

Democrats: 35 yea, 12 nay, so ~75% in favor. Republicans, 24 yea, 29 nay, so ~45% in favor.

The 59 yea votes consisted of 35 Democrats (King is independent but caucuses with the Democrats), and 24 Republicans. I'm much more interested in why it failed to pass, so I'll refrain from listing the yea votes for brevity.

The 4 absent senators were 2 Democrats (Sanders is independent but caucuses with the Democrats), and 2 Republicans:

Alexander (R-TN) Murray (D-WA) Sanders (I-VT) Sasse (R-NE)

The 37 nay votes were from 10 Democrat and 27 Republican senators:

Barrasso (R-WY) Blackburn (R-TN) Blunt (R-MO) Boozman (R-AR) Burr (R-NC) Capito (R-WV) Carper (D-DE) Casey (D-PA) Collins (R-ME) Cornyn (R-TX) Cotton (R-AR) Feinstein (D-CA) Fischer (R-NE) Graham (R-SC) Hassan (D-NH) Hyde-Smith (R-MS) Inhofe (R-OK) Johnson (R-WI) Jones (D-AL) Kaine (D-VA) Lankford (R-OK) Manchin (D-WV) McConnell (R-KY) Perdue (R-GA) Portman (R-OH) Roberts (R-KS) Romney (R-UT) Rubio (R-FL) Shaheen (D-NH) Shelby (R-AL) Thune (R-SD) Tillis (R-NC) Toomey (R-PA) Warner (D-VA) Whitehouse (D-RI) Wicker (R-MS) Young (R-IN)

IMO this might be the biggest benefit. Whenever I feel like the US is a failed state, the reason always seems to be people demanding 1-bit answers to 128-bit questions. This shows the criteria, quantifies everything, sources everything, and clearly shows what the goals are and what the current state is. If people want to argue about when to reopen, this turns the arguments into deciding what the criteria should be and how it should be measured, rather than bullshit like "I want everything to reopen now because that's what the angry man on TV told me to think".

A lot of people screaming about reopening don't even seem to realize there are criteria and metrics involved, rather that it's just some arbitrary decision arbitrarily made by governors, which is why their whining is so useless. I'd be much more open to hearing people's reopen arguments if they came in the form of, "we don't need to care about this metric, because <blah> and this other metric can be lower, and this whole stage of the process doesn't need to exist, therefore we can think about reopening earlier." Instead you get neckbeards with AR-15s and Confederate flags (in Canadian border states!) screaming at public servants about...something. I don't know. They're mad and they want something to change but they have no ideas and they don't know how to communicate with people.

It clearly explains what the criteria for reopening is and shows which of those criteria each region has met, and quantifies how far they’ve got to go. And it’s kept up to date. I can’t imagine anyone looking at this and not immediately seeing how informative and useful it is.

How on earth was RMS unfamiliar with the existence of Org Mode, and how on earth was RMS unfamiliar with the concept of outliners, and why on earth, when he finally figured out what Org Mode did, was his immediate response to be super dismissive because it wasn't something that he's interested in using personally?

He sounds like some random person spewing random subjective opinions about things, rather than the original author of GNU Emacs making an honest effort to provide leadership and guidance that means something (anything) to anyone other than himself. He sounds helpless and oblivious to everything and everyone except his own personal proclivities, which is the opposite of leadership and the opposite of an experienced person providing valuable guidance to the community. Like he's not even making a token effort to do those things, and to say he's metaphorically lifting a finger here to provide leadership and guidance would be very generous.

This is akin to Linus rejecting a driver because he doesn't own the hardware, or because he doesn't like the colors of logo of the company that makes it. It really doesn't get more incurious and intellectually/emotionally immature than that.

This is in 2020, after a couple decades of Emacs being one of the only actual software projects he involves himself in anymore. To be clear, I've had a really low opinion of RMS for going on 20 years now (after a few years in college where I thought he was cool because I didn't know any better and people seemed to revere him because they thought everyone else revered him). But reading these mailing list exchanges are still kind of shocking to me. It's really hard to believe that anyone on the GNU mailing lists pay any attention to him at all, or values his opinion on anything. For those that do, surely that's nothing more than a cult of personality, it just seems as plain as day to me. This is exactly the sort of thing that drives people away from GNU and the FSF, and it sucks because they could be so much more impactful and meaningful and helpful and positive and constructive otherwise.

Sometimes I think if more people had simply stopped making excuses for RMS like 20 years ago, we might currently be living in some sort of GNU utopia dreamworld where everyone everywhere uses Emacs for everything, and GCC is the preeminent compiler suite, etc. etc. etc. It's quite a high cost for people to pay, when the only thing they get in return for keeping this guy around is helping a damaged narcissist continue to feel good about himself and continue alienating everyone else, just like he's been doing for decades. He absolutely got GNU and the FSF off the ground and helped create a large community that has produced tons of great software, but in the past 25 years it seems like all of his efforts have been counterproductive to his own goals.

One thing that’s been super meaningful for me is the notion that if you don’t put something into words, either in speech or in your head or on paper, you don’t know anything about it, even if it’s a feeling or a belief or an intuition deep within you that you’ve held for as long as you can remember.

The act of simply putting a thought into words makes it immediately obvious to you if you really understand it or not, and if not, where your blind spots are.

If the thing you’re concerned with is an unresolved problem or a question, simply articulating the problem or the question can make the solution or the answer obvious. Just going through the process of putting it into words, one way or another, and being sure you’ve settled on the most concise and accurate description of it you can muster, will often make so many things that were hazy obvious, and can reveal to you areas of haziness in your own thinking that you may not have been aware of.

Rubber duck debugging is one result of this. Rubber duck debugging is based on the observation that by the time you’ve explained your bug to someone, often times you figure out your next steps before they even respond. Just articulating your problem in the form of a question asked to someone else will sometimes reveal the answer to you.

So anyone who has a device capable of running > iOS 9 is greedy, vain, and stupid. Got it.

This is a ton of emotionally charged verbiage about community interactions here, but at any point does this person say what they were using Elm to do? That seems like a pretty important point. Is this somebody who was just using the language recreationally, for their own amusement? And if so, did they have some expectation for the language community to be a source of (online) social interactions and connections with people?

Because if so, that really changes the significance of the accusations, in the sense that it makes them almost meaningless. "I wanted Elm to be my new life and my new friends and I wanted to shape it myself as a personal milestone but that stuff didn't happen and now I'm mad and I'm leaving" is a heck of a lot less meaningful to me than, "this language doesn't work well for the problems I'm trying to solve, and the maintainers aren't interested in adapting it to my problem domain, so I'm going to move on to some other language for this thing I'm working on".

I really don't care if someone is pissed that a language development community didn't make someone feel like they belonged to a social club or otherwise interacted with him in a way that satisfied some void inside of him. But if there was some actual purpose to his language noodling, as opposed to being purely recreational, it would be infinitely more interesting to know about how it fell short of the purpose, why the language fell short, why the maintainers didn't want to evolve it in that direction, and what language the author is moving to for their project that does a better job, and why they chose that language. That's meaningful. Anything related to whether or not they felt listened to or if they felt like they were on the inside or the outside is just utterly meaningless, it's like when people complain about news articles that don't have anonymous comment sections.

I realize that to a lot of people, the recreational community aspects of open source development are literally the only thing they care about. But I also realize that to some of those people, they don't understand that this is not the primary purpose of hardly any of the projects they care about, language projects probably least of all. Open source maintainers are not obligated to anybody to create a fun community for recreational users, with a well-lined pathway to becoming a recreational core developer. But that is clearly all that this person cared about, hence all of the emotional stuff which I just don't get. I'm not saying it's invalid, I just don't personally relate to that perspective at all.

I am not aware of this widespread assumption? Who the heck in the last 2 decades has gone through life thinking Apple is a company that prioritizes its developers over both its users and itself?

Source: literally every word written about Apple and developer relations and developer strategies over the last 20 years.

I'm not saying this to be critical of Apple, everyone has their own strategies and priorities. Rather, my mind is actually blown that you know anyone who thinks Apple is perceived as some sort of generous patron to developers, and even more that you know enough people like that to anecdotally think it's a widespread assumption.

I think that's just the fate of every online forum. It's comment entropy, and it's inevitable anywhere, everywhere, always. You saw it with Usenet in the '90s (especially after Eternal September struck), you saw it with Slashdot in the late '90s, and you see it just about anyplace really. The bigger a community is, the more diluted it gets, and the more comment bike shedding happens: people posting for the sake of posting, and not putting any more thought into what they post than they do in most casual conversations (or even less thought), etc.

What happens when a forum or medium expands to basically the entire population? Twitter, at least for people who read both popular posts and reply chains that those posts inspire. It makes Eternal September look like a book club full of the world's most articulate English professors sipping tea and politely conversing about complex plot points while taking care not to say things that could be misinterpreted or incorrectly seen as a personal attack on someone else.

When people post good things (not necessarily positive things, but at least negative things that spark good conversations), those posts may or may not inspire other good posts. They probably won't inspire bad posts, worst case is that they don't inspire any responses but that's OK- good posts stand on their own and not everything needs to be a conversation.

Similarly, when people post bad things (not necessarily negative things, just things that spark bad conversations), it will hardly ever inspire good posts in response, but it's very likely to inspire many more bad posts.

So, good posts inspire more good posts, bad posts inspire more bad posts, but IME bad posts are like 10-100x more likely to spark followups. Going back to Usenet, you could have the greatest newsgroup in the world, but it could all collapse due to an influx of shitty posting from a teeny tiny subset of the people reading the group. It's like a virus that infects a forum. The bad posts explode in response to each other, the good posters slowly drift away altogether, and all of a sudden you find yourself in Slashdot or Usenet circa 1999. It's basically nothing but people insulting each other or using bad faith arguments or just writing at great length about how much they think stuff sucks.

Nobody's talking about shutting anyone down. People can do shitty things even if they have a right to do them, and everyone else can think they're assholes. No contradictions. Same with free speech- people can say whatever they want, but if they say something that makes someone else think they're an asshole, the other person has a right to call them an asshole. Assholes are not criminals, they're just assholes and deserve to be treated as such.

Because TikTok isn't a nightclub, it's a place for people to put their own content out on the Internet. Not just people, but primarily people living in a pathologically authoritarian state that doesn't allow them to access other places on the Internet that they could put their content on.

But even ignoring the authoritarian state angle, surely you'd think it'd be weird and counterproductive for user content from YouTube or Instagram or imgur to have similar policies? Those sites are also not nightclubs or modeling agencies or a Hooters franchise either.

FWIW it's totally shitty for nightclubs to be discriminatory in that way. I get why they do it, but it doesn't make it any less shitty of them, and it sure as hell doesn't let them off the hook for their shittiness in this regard.

Tangentially, this is one of infinitely many reasons that nearly all of humanity hates nightclubs, including the people that feel socially obligated to go to them, and including people still young enough to convince themselves that they must be having fun there because it sure looks like everyone else is, not realizing that everyone else is thinking the exact same thing.

"X Windows"

Everyone has different priorities and motivations, for sure. I'm just saying that, if someone's priorities are growing a newsletter list first, and communicating ideas in good faith second, that's so much less interesting, and there's so much competition.