oliviabenson

I openly criticise Dubai for their slavery, I refuse to visit Dubai for that reason alone. However, I refuse to say that Dubai is objectively less moral than the United States because morality is relative to the culture that defines it, in the same way I refuse to say that sushi is objectively better than pizza (despite sushi obviously being superior to pizza).

You may assert it but morality is not defined by or measured in outcomes, morality is a cultural product. If your moral system is not objective, if your moral system is a culturally-influenced personal belief in what is right and wrong, it is totally incoherent to say that Saudi Arabia has not made moral progress or that they have not used "modern thinking" because by their moral standards they have, and by their moral standards you (and I) are the immoral.

If you'd like to compare the United States to Saudi Arabia on human rights, press freedom, education, crime, freedom of religion, gender discrimination, do that. They have outcomes that we can measure, and don't worry, they're influenced by morality, so you can still pass judgement.

My position is quite simple: I do not believe it's possible to compare the righteousness of cultures, certainly not in a way as reductive as you've proposed, in a way that conveniently makes our culture (America) gooder and the others (Saudi Arabia) badder. Please re-read my original comment, I specifically proposed offering cultural asylum as a way to offer western moral values to others who want to live according to them. I am in favour of cultural evolution, I am in favour of taking action against our moral ills, I believe that in your hypothetical that I would have a moral duty to oppose and take action against slavery within my own culture.

My question to you is, do you believe the United Arab Emirates is more righteous than the United States? According to many measures of "goodness" like the Human Development Index (and the inequality-adjusted Human Development Index) the United Arab Emirates is a more "good" place than the United States and therefore, in your view of comparable righteousness, the United Arab Emirates is a more righteous place? Yet, the United Arab Emirates is, to many westerners (including myself and I am sure you) a place of many moral ills (including one of the most heinous: slavery). Do you believe that on your multi-dimensional most-good morality spectrum the United Arab Emirates out ranks the United States?

I'll answer that for you: no, you don't. And deep beneath this facade of objective morality, you know that morality is so deeply ingrained in your cultural upbringing that you cannot sincerely state that the United Arab Emirates is more righteous than the United States, and that regardless of what any measure, whether it's one dimension or many dimensional, whether it's black and white or a spectrum, regardless of what that measure says, nothing is above your sense of what is right and what is wrong.

If your conclusion from my comments is that I would have been indifferent towards slavery then I have either mistakenly passed my comments through an opinion-inverter or you're reading my comments in bad faith. I am very progressive, I hold fringe views that I don't think will be mainstream for a couple more decades.

I hope I wouldn't need to say it, but for the record: I oppose slavery. I oppose gender based discrimination. I oppose sexuality based discrimination. I oppose racism. I oppose the death penalty. I oppose drug criminalisation. I oppose the American prison system. I oppose the smug western superiority complex about our behaviour being "modern" or the "best" or "ahead" of the rest of the world. I oppose referring to Saudi Arabia as "not modern" (or backwards or whatever term is in right now) which I believe is patronising and a view reserved for those without the willingness to be introspective.

For the oppressed gay man in Saudi Arabia, there's a gay man homeless on the streets of the United States, dying from neglect, after being kicked out of their home as a teenager by their Christian fundamentalist parents, thrown to the mercy of a society that couldn't care less about them. Let's put them on a spectrum, how many points is "dying homeless on the streets of America because of being gay" compared to "can't be openly gay in Saudi Arabia"? How many points for "robbed on the streets of San Francisco for the 8th time" when compared to "can leave valuables out in public without concern because there's so little crime in Singapore"?

If your vision for a better world starts with disparaging Saudi Arabia, I fear you are deeply uninspired and will not have the impact on the world that you could have if you instead focused on yourself and your culture. I also hope someday you appreciate the irony of you having worked for Palantir of all companies while talking about moral superiority of the west. I wonder where Peter Thiel would land on our Spectrum Of Moral Superiority. Actually, I don't want to know, let me live another day without reading a defence of that ghoul.

Good outcomes by what measure? Happiness? Freedom? Community? GDP?

I will argue that by many standards, what we view as barbaric has better outcomes. Have you met a Singaporean? I disagree with their criminal justice system (as I do the U.S. but I rank Singapore’s as “worse”) and yet it has better outcomes for the majority of its citizens by most measures. Are they the measures you and I care about? Probably not, because to you and I, hanging someone for using heroin is not a fair price to be paid for a lower crime rate and higher GDP, but that’s a moral judgement, not some objective “modern” absolute. If you don’t value human life above all else (which many cultures don’t) then killing a few drug addicts a year to make life for millions of others better, that’s inconsequential — and excellent “modern” thinking about doing the most good!

If you can’t imagine why the bad of anti-lgbt sentiment is far outweighed by the good of community-spirit from an anti-lgbt religion then you’re not considering “outcomes”.

Do you berate your parents and grandparents each day for their participation in a society that had segregation? Do you walk over hot coals every morning to repent for the benefits you reap by virtue of being born into a society built on the backs of the segregated? Do you deride and express disgust at your peers as they relish in the taste of the pain and suffering of the billions of conscious, feeling animals we genocide every year? Do you opt-out of the industries and services today that take advantage of the suffering of less fortunate individuals forced to service you in order to survive?

Slavery was bad. Slavery is bad. Slavery is not excused. However, frothing at the mouth with rage when speaking about the actions of another society because they don’t share the same moral values as you without thinking a step further is hollow, it is empty, it is meaningless.

Why is “modern thinking” (whatever that means) good? Why is maximum individual freedom at the expense of the whole good? I am like you, I believe in that, but if you interact with people from different cultures, you will discover that is not a belief held by everyone. For many people, individual freedom at the expense of the whole is not good and they have observed that from these “modern” societies. Look at how deeply unhappy the U.S is, the pain and suffering of hundreds of millions of people. Is limiting access to healthcare an example of “modern thinking”?

The point I’m making is that what’s barbaric to you and I is not barbaric in another society and vice-versa. The American culture of kicking your children out of home the day they turn 18 is more barbaric to some than the death penalty, as is a child choosing not to contribute to their family.

Many citizens of Singapore are very happy as citizens of Singapore, many of them look at the west as barbaric: the crime ridden cities of the U.S, the poverty, the abject failure of western governments to protect their citizens despite very high tax rates… if killing a few criminals is the price to pay to live in a comparable utopia, so be it? What’s barbaric about a caning? The U.S. sentences people to death!

I am from the west (despite your assertion, I live in a Muslim country) and believe in very western ideals, I believe in freedom for the individual, it’s deeply ingrained in me, however, my non-academic experience has shown me that this is not a universal truth. Many cultures do not care for the individual, they care for the family, a group of people bound by blood to be one part of the whole. Many cultures believe that sacrificing oneself for the family is noble and right and that to be an individual is to be barbaric.

Once you accept that individual freedom is a western ideal, and not fundamental to the human condition, it becomes much easier to understand that other cultures are fundamentally different.

We are complicit (if not responsible). Accepted practice isn’t an excuse for indifference but criticising your own country isn’t a free pass to criticise the culture of others without challenging our culpability. If we sincerely want to help the citizens of these countries that we believe to be oppressed, we have options that we choose not to take. We could offer cultural asylum, give people a route to access our cultural ideals through immigration. We don’t, though, because we only believe in human rights when it’s convenient.

You, as an individual, may do your best to contribute to the betterment of the world, but when talking about society vs. society, you’re glossing over far too many of our ills while ignoring the positives of the others.

Freedom of religion, individualism, capitalism, they aren’t “good” or “right” they’re just… different. The western individualism (seen most prominently in the U.S.) is not the majority culture, to many, even those who are just as “free” as any American, western cultural ideals are a step backward.

The way you perceive Islam is not the way it’s perceived by Muslims in Muslim majority countries, it is not an oppression put upon them by religious zealots, it’s a community that they participate in with a deep sense of pride and duty. For every Muslim in a Muslim-majority country who wants to break from their religion, there’s an unsuccessful American struggling to survive, desperate to break free from the lonely American pursuit of individual success.

You can hate public executions, flogging, discrimination based on gender and sexuality, and you should, I do, but don’t compare societies. We are not better, just different.

You can achieve both. The only mistake you made was to half-bake the proxy (doing it for IPv6 only): proxy every http(s) request to tailscale.com. Vercel’s platform is valuable for a whole host of reasons, the networking side isn’t that important, your developers will greatly value the use of Vercel even if every request is being proxied through a web server hosting tailscale.com which responds to a request for /install.sh instead of passing it through to the marketing site.

(In Google Cloud you could do it entirely with load balancing rules, no need to even run a web server)

Sending a message can be a big hurdle when you’re new to a job. A junior person likely has a very deified view of senior team members and believes that their time is sacrosanct. Encouraging junior people to “just ping me” is like telling an arachnophobe “it’s just a spider”.

If you work with someone in an office, natural opportunities arise to grab some time, whether it’s when they’re bumbling around the office, grabbing something to eat or walking from a meeting.

A remote company can create an environment to address these problems, with structured time for conversations but it is very difficult to get right.

I am a fan of both remote work and in office work. Remote work is cheap and has little margin for error; in office is expensive as it is paying for guard rails that make it (relatively) difficult to get wrong.

Price based on value. Pricing is hard, something as simple as per-token is alluring because it doesn’t require any thought but it’s leaving a lot of money on the table. There’s nothing unique about LLMs when it comes to pricing, all common pricing wisdom applies.

You’re early and this is effectively a demo but just in case this is a blind spot: “token” is an in-the-weeds LLMism that means nothing in the context of transcription. Your costs may be measured in tokens but that’s not relevant to customers. Just “A free trial” with no quantifier would be better than 1k tokens.

We notice these type of accidents because they’re so rare. 5k+ people die each year because of large trucks on the road, by comparison, boats and bridges are very safe — that’s why it’s allowed.

Probably, but this service has been around for over a decade so it has at least proven that it has some longevity — plus the creator is an HN user and this concern comes up every time the service is discussed, so maybe it’ll outlive us all because of the universe’s desire to prove a bunch of cynical nerds wrong.

We jumped the shark long ago, we (technologists) have been contributing to this for decades: we’ve benefited handsomely from the consequences with our big salaries and hero worship. I don’t disagree with your broad point but you’ve had your head buried in the sand for a long, long time if you think society is “about to” be destroyed.

If you have a prioritised backlog and you’re working in priority order then there’s not much value in sprints — is there? Sprints provide value when you can’t just churn through tickets one after the other in priority order. Sprint planning is time consuming because sprints are useful when you need to plan.

You could use Linear’s cycles and milestones but you probably don’t need any of that structure if you’re just working ticket by ticket.