I see your $100 and raise you $200
5,525 karma · joined August 10, 2012
Similarly, someday MS will remove live tiles from the start menu. It’s inevitable, but clearly internal politics are keeping the feature around. Guaranteed that 99% of humanity will rejoice when it happens, but equally guaranteed that someone on HN will express how appalled they are that a company as big as MS didn’t choose to keep the feature alive for the sake of the handful of people who liked it.
It's as if a study came out that showed that, according to their exhaustive statistical analysis, people that drove Mercedes tended to be wealthier than people who drove Chevys. Then they concluded that the key to upward mobility must be to get a Mercedes.
What I get really, really, really frustrated with is the attitude that some people have where retractions of stories or articles makes them trust the source less, rather than more. If a journal publishes a retraction, I have that much more faith in that journal, and that much more faith in the scientific process in general.
Similarly: news outlets retracting stories or issuing corrections makes me trust those outlets that much more, because it shows that they care about making a best effort to present truth, and they care more about their reputation as being a source of facts than they do about whatever short-term backlash there might be.
Any media outlet, journal, web site, or other publication that doesn't regularly issue retractions and corrections is not to be trusted. It'd be better if the erroneous information didn't get out there in the first place, but there's no scenario where everybody gets everything right the first time, all the time- it's going to happen.
You can really see the different perspectives highlighted from people posting to social media in response to things like changing estimates of the age of the universe. There's always a contingent of outraged morons screaming stuff like, "now they're saying it's 5 billion years older than they thought it was before, and people continue to trust them?!? All those scientists are such hypocrites for doubting my belief in anti-vax/Austrian economics/chemtrails/Noah's Ark/etc., how dare they!" They act like changing your mind based on new data, or admitting you were wrong about something is a sign that you shouldn't trust someone, whereas I would say the ability to constantly revise your beliefs is a fundamental requirement for trusting someone's judgement. The inability to do so is a reason to not trust anything someone says.
I'm sure both SO and Wikipedia have their own dysfunction even within the constraints of their stated policies, which I'm sure is a constant struggle to deal with. But that's inevitable, communities always have issues to deal with. Those are different issues than users wishing a site had different goals. I'm all in favor of sites like SO or Wikipedia (or Reddit, or HN) having all sorts of constraints on what types of content they want and how they operate. Maybe it's frustrating sometimes for people who are set on relying on one of those sites for everything (and therefore want them to be all things to all people), but overall I think those types of self-imposed constraints are exactly what makes them useful and interesting, and allows them to grow in ways that are unique to the mission of the site.
These types of phrases are common and obvious enough that I'm surprised there's not a word for them. See also:
"I hate to tell you, but" (they don't hate to tell you, in fact the delight they get from telling you is why they're telling you)
"NOW, this may NOT be a poe-lit-tic-cull-lee core-rect thing to say, BUT" (in practice, for some reason it's very important to linger on every single syllable of "politically correct" when playing this card, maybe even roll it out so slowly that there are extra syllables, because apparently this is still 1995 and political correctness is some hot button issue that exists in their world that they're always inadvertently stumbling into) (also they're about to say something totally shitty and stupid, guaranteed, and political correctness has nothing to do with it)
"I'm not a racist, but" (they're about to say something so totally racist, and if they weren't racists themselves they'd know not to prefix anything with this phrase- it's up there with "but I have black friends" as being an obvious and transparent tell)
"I'm just keeping it real" (they really want to say the quiet part out loud and think this gives them license to do so)
"I'm a straight shooter and don't pull punches, and I hope everyone treats me the same way" (only ever said by the thinnest skinned people you'll ever meet)
"I'm going to be brutally honest" (in practice, the people who preemptively declare themselves to be brutally honest are always in it for 100% of the brutality and 0% of the honesty.)
The FSF/RMS insistence on calling things by different words seems so irrational and dishonest. Likewise with taking common words with many meanings (like "free") and claiming that word as their own, then claiming that what "free" really means in the context of software can only be expressed once you tack on several KB of legalese that tells you what you can't do with it and how you're a bad person if you do. It's like the naming of the PATRIOT Act- it had nothing to do with patriotism, but it surely changed people's perceptions of it in subtle ways. What congressman would vote against patriotism? How could anyone be opposed to freedom? It's the same BS rhetorical trick, and it makes whoever uses that trick seem less honest and more irrational (to me at least). It's still an effective propaganda technique, which is exactly why they should avoid these sorts of rhetorical tricks. I don't want to hear their propaganda, I want to hear their philosophy. Because if their philosophy is truly built on a foundation of propaganda and rhetorical tricks, then their philosophy is meaningless. I agree with much of what the FSF advocates but they've always done such a terrible job advocating for it.
Personally, I think it's easier to get along with people I have a lot in common with, but that's the extent of it. It's a teensy bit easier because at least we have things to make small talk about. Us having stuff in common doesn't have anything to do with how we approach problems or how rational we are or how we work together in a group though. It doesn't have anything to do with our respective social and emotional hangups, which are bound to be different despite us having the same tastes in some form of entertainment. It doesn't have anything to do with how well I can articulate the problem I'm having to that other person, or how well that person can draw meaning from what I told them, come up with a solution, communicate it back to me, and then iterate with me on that solution during a conversation.
I think that for a lot of people in the tech world, especially those still in their teens and 20s, the biggest social impediment that they perceive in themselves is that they have no idea how to interact with someone who's not like them. They think that if they can somehow overcome that, that they'll be golden, because they assume that they do great with the people who are like them. But that's rarely the case IME. It's just less obvious to them that they do just as poorly dealing with their own peer group, because things get papered over with fun small talk that they misinterpret as succeeding at socializing and communicating.
It's less a tax break and more like vulturing public money to pay off their friends and maybe buy some more votes. Unsubsidized tax breaks of this nature, by these people, for their stated reasons over the last 40 years are really just ripping off the entire American public and funneling it to the likes of Betsy Devos' family, and the Koch brothers, and the Mercers. And obviously Trump himself has been dipping his beak in it, any way he possibly can. A better man would do everything in his power to avoid even the appearance of corruption, but he has been utterly shameless about it. Example: raising the fees for Mar-a-lago membership from $100k to $200k at the same time as he became president. I believe they are $500k now. That makes a lot of sense, I'm sure there's nothing weird going on there and that's just a totally normal thing to happen in plain sight.
But seriously, it sure as hell looks like base corruption to me, nothing high-minded or philosophical about it. The Austrian economic philosophies used to justify the whole R fetish for unfunded tax cuts were the economic equivalent of healing crystals and magnetic bracelets 40 years ago, never mind now. Now it's just embarrassing to see anyone making these claims. Especially the whole notion that it is somehow fiscally conservative to have huge unfunded tax cuts, because cutting taxes will magically increase tax revenue by fueling growth. They may as well change their platform to, if elected they promise to be really good boys and girls and will donate the additional gifts from Santa to the IRS, thereby offsetting the huge transfer of public funds to their donor class.
Of course there are no shortage of people who think of themselves as smarter than average (and unburdened by weaknesses like empathy, or feelings of great responsibility towards their fellow citizens) might excuse it as a "starve the beast" scheme, but if anything that's even more idiotic. "Starve the beast" is a shitty excuse for passing the buck in the shittiest way possible, when all you really want to do is take a bunch of everyone's money and give it to yourself and your donor class. It is such a weak excuse, and is especially feeble when it's used in the name of some brand of fiscal conservatism.
I remember a comedian in the '90s fondly describing Republican politicians as, more than anything else, "mean old men who will guard your money". Like, sometimes you need that- you need people who will make it a priority to guard public money tooth and nail, and fight to lower taxes and let people keep more of their money. I don't know if I would vote for that person, but I get it, and for most of my life at least that's how they've unapologetically presented themselves. And I kinda get it, there's a need for fiscal watchdogs like that in the government. They're still using a lot of the same words that they did in the '80s and '90s, but they have never been more hollow, or used to this degree to defend what appears to be the diametric opposite of their fiscally conservative claims: bankrupting the government and paying off their donors and trying to brush it off as some noble act that somehow increases freedom and prosperity for all of America.
For the longest time game journalists and people on game forums were careful to refer to these games as "rogue-lite", etc., but in recent years it's become more common to just call them roguelikes as well, even though they don't play anything like Rogue/Angband/Nethack/etc. That's fine by me, it feels more like a natural evolution of the terminology than people using the wrong words for things.
I hate to use the possibly overloaded term 'virtue signaling', but I definitely see a lot of this as a form of virtue signaling within the communities that posters sometime imagine exist, or imagine that they're part of. I've seen so much of it over the years that it almost has a smell to it. A very vocal and bitter personal hatred towards Lennart and Lennart-related projects is sometimes a leading indicator, especially when it's presented not in the context of meaningful discussion of technology, but simply as "init was perfect and never needed to change and people who think otherwise don't understand what makes Linux Linux", stated as a truism.
I think a lot of people really like the community aspect of Linux, reading and posting to forums all the time, and latch on to certain mindsets as being the mindsets of who they imagine the insiders to be- you're supposed to love this person unconditionally, you're supposed to hate this person unconditionally, this company is good, that company is evil, this software is good, that software is evil, and if you're a true insider in the community you'll parrot all the same lines as everyone else. But when I see it, no one involved appears to be an insider. It comes across more as teenagers arguing on Reddit about iOS vs. Android, where basically they've decided that whatever phone their mom got them is the best thing ever, and the other thing is terrible, and it's their duty to go online and spew vitriol about it. They think they're arguing stuff that's much much deeper and more technical than what they're actually arguing about, and no one involved has any actual understanding of the technology or industries or communities or histories of the things they're screaming at each other about. It's almost like vitriol for the sake of vitriol, and people just let it seep out as a demonstration of their in-groupness.
Which is not to say that there are plenty of valid reasons and places and ways to argue about the merits of Lennart and his software, as one example. I'm really not talking about Lennart in particular though. I'm not talking about people having valid arguments about valid issues. What I'm talking about the FLOSS equivalent of those teenagers and their "the phone my mom got me is better than the phone your mom got me, and that makes me a good person and you a bad person" sorts of arguments. It just all seems very petty and immature sometimes, and that is not a positive aspect of the community.
That's how obvious it is that he's a bullshitter and a useful idiot for a lot of shitty people, and has no idea how anything works, and basically has the intellect and integrity of a first grader. Downvote me all you want everyone, but that's the truth. Every downvote I will take with great, great pride. If you voted for him, you're even dumber (or more selfish, if you think of him as your own useful idiot) than he is.
I have had a lifelong problem with constantly doubting my own perceptions about things, and always thinking that I can never be 100% certain about anything, and being hypervigilant about my own potential sources of bias and irrationality and unreliable information, but multiple years into this thing I have no choice but to admit that everything I wrote above is just plain true. It's not rocket science, it's not brain surgery, it's not even grade school arithmetic. It's OBVIOUS, and if someone doesn't see it after all these years they either don't pay attention or are as bad or worse than he is. Or they're literally children who are just that sheltered and naive about other people and the world and how it works.
It's similar to how capitalism can get recontextualized into something meaningless and shitty by Objectivists. When capitalism works, it can almost seem magical, because it's basically a greedy algorithm that can often produce a net good for most of the population, based on individuals looking out for their own interests. Hence notions like "greed is good" or "selfishness is a virtue". But the whole point of those notions is, they're built on an assumption that those things lead to a net good for everyone involved. To the degree that capitalism works, it's because it allows wealth to be created, which is a net good for everyone.
The purpose of capitalism as the core of a civilization is wealth creation, where people exchange things they don't want in return for things they do want. All participants in the transaction are better off than before in their eyes, but nothing new has been created. Money and goods and services have simply changed hands. Everyone's better off than they were before, but no new goods have been created, and no new money has been printed. It's like creating something from nothing. If any argument can be made in favor of selfishness being a virtue, this is it- it's a virtue because in this context it supposedly leads to a better world for everyone, not just individuals.
But I've known plenty of right wingers who claim to draw inspiration from libertarianism, or who claim to have a special understanding and reverence for capitalism because they're Objectivists. And yet, they never talk about wealth creation. To them, selfishness is a virtue simply because that's the world they want to live in. These are the temporarily frustrated millionaires living in compounds in Wyoming, mooching off the government while complaining about urban welfare recipients. They think Objectivism or libertarianism or their religion gives them cover to go around thinking that greed and selfishness are actually good things, without ever embracing or even understanding the foundations of those beliefs- that they're only good things in the context of maximally efficient and rational markets, and only because they supposedly lead to wealth creation (everyone getting richer in some sense, not just individuals getting rich at the expense of other individuals). But they're not in it for the wealth creation- to them, capitalism isn't good because it creates wealth, rather capitalism must be good because they think it means it's OK for them to be selfish assholes.
But anyway, that's a long winded way of saying you are correct. The term "conservative" refers to conserving the norms, values, economics, and power structures that already exist, and resisting changes that would challenge them in any way, or at least being naturally skeptical of anyone proposing big sweeping changes, both to protect the old order and out of a fear of unintended consequences going forward. It doesn't refer to conserving nature in any way, even though Teddy Roosevelt was a champion of conservation and Nixon created the EPA.
However, in the US at least, "conservative" now seems to mean whatever the GOP wants it to mean. When things like decades-long commitments to free trade or international security or even domestic security can fall by the wayside seemingly on the whim of a human random number generator, you know Edmund Burke's hands are completely off the wheel and have been for a long time.
One thing that helped me personally was realizing that in my case, "just be more confident" really meant not worrying about putting up a falsely confident front. Like, I always felt this pressure to appear confident and charming and however I wanted people to see me, but I never felt that way on the inside, especially around women I was attracted to or other people I wanted to impress. So if I didn't feel confident, the only thing I could do was at least attempt to appear confident. After all, that's what everyone kept telling me to do, or so I thought. Anyway, this pressure (probably rooted in a form of narcissism) that I subconsciously put on myself in the moment to be confident/charming/etc. was just overwhelming, to the point where it sometimes rendered me incapable of social interaction at all. It was like the part of my brain that was in the driver's seat during social interactions would just lock up sometimes and I wouldn't even know what to say. But even when it was working it was exhausting.
In hindsight, this was the source of much of my social anxiety. It was like an ass-backwards subconscious instinct to play the role of the person I wanted other people to see me as. That's never going to work, it's like scripting and acting in a role in real time, a role that you don't understand well enough to write in the first place. I could never begin to get any better socially until I really truly internalized the fact that I didn't need to pretend to be someone I wasn't when I presented myself to other people, and I should just try to be in the moment rather than anxiously observing my own behavior. But, that's probably pretty specific to me and may not even make sense to anyone else.
Also my brain parsed "confident and assertive" into "extremely confident". When I think of someone who's consciously assertive, I think of a display of confidence for its own sake. Maybe that's not what they meant though.
And to all the guys thinking, “but if I’m just myself, nobody likes me.” Well, that’s probably not true (sounds insecure actually), but even if it is, that’s either a personal growth opportunity or a sign that they’ve been talking to the wrong women.
For example, item 2 ("Simplify") tries to debunk the notion that simpler systems are more robust. The author seems to be trying to say, "simplifying a system isn't always going to make it more robust". Likewise, item 1 ("Add redundancy") tries to debunk the notion that redundant systems are more robust. Item 7 ("Remove the people who cause accidents") tries to debunk the notion that if you have someone who is always screwing stuff up, getting rid of that person will help you.
But...OK, I get it, none of these things are silver bullets or sacred cows or whatever. But what's the suggestion? Make systems more complicated? Avoid redundancy? Keep people around who always screw stuff up? This would make a lot more sense if it was presented as things which might help, but shouldn't be thought of as silver bullets that will automatically fix everything. Instead it's presented as myths being debunked, implying that the "myths" aren't just imperfect, but wrong, which doesn't make sense to me. Simpler is better than overly complicated. Redundancy doesn't solve everything but can certainly help. Getting rid of terrible employees who never seem to improve is generally a good idea. The way the list is presented seems not actionable at best, and misleading at worst.
Yes, I'm definitely including megachurches (esp. nondenominational megachurches) as evangelicals, and I totally agree with the friendly small church vs dystopian megachurch experiences. Just about any TV pastor is an evangelical as well. For someone who's not a believer, I'm surprised at how sad this state of affairs can make me. Joel Osteen/Jim Bakker/Jerry Falwell Jr./Pat Robertson/etc. are just the worst.
If I could point at any one evangelical belief that for whatever reason offends this atheist, it's Prosperity Gospel. The idea that you should follow Christ so that material wealth will be drawn towards you, in correlation to how hardcore you are about Jesus. Of course this conveniently explains why the Joel Osteens of the world have mansions and private jets and so on- it's not a pyramid scheme, it's Christ's blessing magically seeping into their bank accounts on account of their innate holiness. But what's more depressing by far is that they've gotten so many people to actually believe that that's what's in the Bible.
I'm more complaining about the automatic 24->60 (or 120 or 240) conversion that's enabled by default on a lot of new TVs. I'm not at all opposed to higher frame rate video, I like it. I've just never watched something on a TV where the 24->60 conversion didn't look significantly worse to me than playback at the native frame rate.
Maybe my unconscious assumption is that people's preferences about the ideal frame rate can change over the years, but that reinterpolating the video to a different frame rate will always look worse than native, regardless of the source and destination frame rates. Maybe this isn't true, but that is my assumption.
In America at least, the trend has had the effect of minimizing the positive effects of religion on society, while maximizing the irrational, corrosive, and divisive effects. It's like the worst of all possible worlds. I blame politicians for catering to the worst instincts of religiously-motivated voters, and I blame religious voters for allowing their politics to corrupt their own spirituality. As a result, you see these Evangelical megachurch pastors preaching beliefs that are in blatant, obvious, direct opposition to the clearest and least ambiguous words of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, for example. His observations on the Pharisees have never been more relevant.