rytor718

Can you clarify what you mean by "housed in entirely separate sections"?

Because housing is separated (male barracks, female barracks for E-1 thru E-3 exactly with minor exceptions) throughout the military. But are you saying basically have a male section of the base and female section of the base?

And how would this prevent sexual assaults?

Agreed and what you say is true for many, if not most workers. I think this brings up something we're all a bit reluctant to add to this conversation about UBI: the reason to do it at all.

As practiced, capitalism is just high stakes musical chairs. Everyone, rich and poor, works fervently to ensure they aren't the last ones standing with no chair. UBI asks: what if everyone always has a chair?

Its a very unsettling question, one can almost hear the record scratch when its posed. So unsettling, we start asking who deserves a chair!

And suddenly we're not talking about capitalism OR UBI at all. This is something else entirely: class. The allegedly unwashed lazy hordes versus the Ultra Clean Society of the Diamond Shower Faucets.

The primary incentive for anyone to work (as we understand the term today), is to maintain food and shelter above all else. That's it. Proponents of UBI want everyone to have food and shelter, be less of a slave. Opponents worry about whether we can afford to give everyone a chair.

Thank you for summarizing (I actually read the whole article before seeing your reply and might have posted similar thoughts). I get the appeal of romanticizing our past as a country, looking back at the post-war era, especially the space race with a nostalgia that makes us imagine it was a world where the most competent were at the helm. But it just wasn't so, and still isn't.

Many don't understand that the Civil Rights Act describes the systematic LACK of a meritocracy. It defines the ways in which merit has been ignored (gender, race, class, etc) and demands that merit be the criteria for success -- and absent the ability for an institution to decide on the merits it provides a (surely imperfect) framework to force them to do so. The necessity of the CRA then and now, is the evidence of absence of a system driven on merit.

I want my country to keep striving for a system of merit but we've got nearly as much distance to close on it now as we did then.

This is so tragic. Ive tried reading the reports in this thread that have more info about the cases, but I don't understand how there wasn't enough evidence to exonerate these people at the time of the accusations.

It doesn't seem the post office had to prove their software worked as they claimed it did. I may have missed this or misunderstood something but there are access logs, receipts given to customers, the money itself vs the stock/services sold ...these are can all be counted by hand no? There should be a 1-to-1 relationship between the business that came in and the products/services that went out, physical evidence. I feel like I've missed or misunderstood something about this situation.

Its horrific to imagine management would ruin lives over something like this. They really ought to be prosecuted and thrown in jail today, even if they're 90 yrs old. Anyone who took part in this cover up really shouldnt be let off the hook here.

Yeah im still a bit surprised that Github doesnt work in firefox for me. It wont load a repository page, its just blank with nothing but the navigation on the page. This happens after turning off all plugins. dont know if github has made it so only chrome works but thats a pretty major site for firefox to not work with.

Try going to your account then from the menu go to Settings > Third-party AI

Heres what the link looks like for me in the US: https://www.dropbox.com/account/ai

Paid subscribers can see it in US, not sure whether it depends on the subscription tier though.

I think I've tended to think of scripts as documents. Typically when I use it I'm describing to another programmer the name of a file (document), as in "Use the calculator(.py) script" or what have you.

While I'm sure I've used the term interchangeably with program as others have mentioned, I tend to use it to identify the names of specific language files. And as others have mentioned, they're all more or less programs when it comes down to it.

This. In US especially, the thought processes around race are just ...catastrophically delusional due to our terrible history with it. And by that I mean it seems to reduce us to rituals like DEI because we simply are terrible at reckoning with it in meaningful, material ways.

But the resistance to dealing with race and class together is real, in part because class is seen as individual problem. Race is seen as more cultural, systemic, or the province a minority running around with sheets on their heads.

I've personally only seen strong efforts to dissect them both, in earnest, at the same time, in the margins of society.

This is when programming really clicked for me: I learned that if the problem isn't well understood and solved before you sit down to write a line of code, then its not time to code yet. Model the problem space first.

And as another commenter chimed in, its true that some problems only emerge once you start writing the code. But that's alright, its part of the process. The planning isn't so much to figure out every problem ever, but to model the known problems so that programming the solutions can begin. I go back and forth between white-boarding and coding as things emerge.

I always tell myself that if I'm sitting at the keyboard and I don't know what to type, it's time to go back to the whiteboard because I'm not understanding the problem.

edit: clarity

As a quick aside: I love Slipways. Amazing job, very interesting little game :)

On topic, I'm working in the same vein as you currently (without the indie hit) - I like building worlds that I want to see the light of day. I've found itch.io to be an amazing community and resource as a part-time games developer. It makes it stupid easy to get a game to the web and similarly easy to use sophisticated tools like Unity to make games for other platforms.

I could be wrong, but I read the implication as bots/machines that trade in the financial markets. But again I could have totally misunderstood OP.

Unfortunately, the surest way to kill a culture is to make it irrelevant. By that I mean, it has to be information that's incorporated the current cultural context, not just the context as it was when the custom arose.

Teaching children history and customs is great -- it informs how they live within society. But forcing them to only heed the customs of the culture back then makes them ill equipped to survive in today. That's many times more so in a multi-cultural society, as everyone's culture goes into the so-called melting pot.

I have respect for where I come from, but that knowledge alone is absolutely not enough to equip me for living in today's world. My parents (and many others) say it all the time "when I was X it was different ...". Yeah. It was.

Edit: to emphasize my sincerity. No disrespect intended and I hope non-taken.

I second this but mostly because I'm an unrepentant nerd who REALLY wants one of these to show off at my tech workshops for kids :D

Yeah this should be linked in the top comment because I couldn't really grasp what Polis was even for by going to the link on this topic. This article really does a great job of clearing up its purpose and benefits. Thanks a lot for linking this!

I think in the US our situation was pretty dire from the start in regards to misinformation: the president and his staff were saying a ton of crazy crap from day one, from denial, to downplaying to telling people to effectively drink bleach. Pretty clear cut why we have trust issues right now and people denying any information about Covid at all. I mean the article raises great points, but the US hasn't had that problem, because its' been blatant misinformation with no attempt to tether it to any reality from the start. The trust was never there and I'd love to read more articles about how to repair that.

But it has been interesting to see these dynamics described in the article in play out in other Western countries. I have to agree that we have to trust the public, but its conclusion -- that the people will not trust the government otherwise -- is sage. US currently is struggling to claw back any trust. We're in very dire straits.

EDIT: formatting.

As another commenter also observed, "volunteer" is a very poor description of the situation. What exactly are the options here for the prisoner involved?

And I think this is worth distinguishing: a slave is always prisoner of their enslaver. The reverse need not be the case, and yet our system turns prisoners into slaves through forced labor. There's no volunteerism involved here. It's about those with power, those without. Slavery can be understood best by how the powerful behave, not the powerless. No one would volunteer for this or prisoners wouldn't have to be forced to do it.

I'm always disappointed that the lessons of slavery still aren't understood in this country. It's painful and shameful.

EDIT: clarity of terms

So slavery is legal as long as the slave is a criminal? I'm not following what's being implied.

I missed this, very interesting read. He's not entirely wrong.

But why are these protocols frozen? I've never developed one so I may just be ignorant of the challenges there, but if, for example, I wanted the XMPP protocol to be able to work with rich media, what's stopping me from updating said protocol to work with rich media instead of relying on optional extensions? In my mind, users of the protocol will receive the update (if they choose of course), thereby making the feature a default for the protocol that isn't reliant on extensions.

I admit I don't fully understand why protocols are frozen in this way, even though I agree with the author that the ones we currently have are definitely frozen. Any insights appreciated!

I believe this because when I see people dying from living in flooded basement apartments -- a *well known*, documented risk of flooding from natural disasters -- I don't see "the cost was not justifiable", because it would have cost almost nothing to save their lives.

I'm not saying we can prevent any/all deaths -- that is impossible. I am saying I want responsible planning and policy that centers human life, not money, as the very point of all this planning and spending in the first place. But some of the deaths, such as the basement situations, from this disaster were very needless and do not cost trillions to prevent.

Another way of saying the same thing is enough people just havent died to justify the cost. We can't keep reasoning about how to safely build cities by how much money is justifiable. It's madness.

It is a city on the ocean, surrounded by bays and lakes. The investment is justified. The political will, however, remains to be seen.

EDIT: clarity

The black community in America has known this forever. We've had to rely on these kinds of businesses, not just as sources of goods and services, but as literal community centers that help people out, sometimes for free. Thats still true, same for salons, corner grocery stores, churches etc. Growing up, these little pieces of community were amazing and still are. While people are of course a little different, I still see these things in the community where I live and they still have the same compassionate professionals most of the time. They dont just sell things. They also give.

I really enjoyed reading this one and loved the example. Unwittingly I found that my approach feels similar to what the author did as far as isolating the domain and writing unit tests. I learned some new things as well. Thanks for the link.

Yeah Ive come to learn that Stronghold is something of a semi-hidden gem that only really gained the popularity it deserved a good decade or more after its inception (I wager due to Steam and the efforts to renew its name). This game felt the most medieval to me when I first got it, not that I knew what realistic medieval settlements were like :)

Its the only settler game I've played where I enjoyed the siege warfare at all.

Love this story because this has been my experience as well when teaching youth. Children in a classroom scarcely need a teacher explaining things to them. Give them the materials and leave the room for an hour. I guarantee you they'll know what to do and how to to do it when you return. However, they won't have any particular depth of knowledge of the topic. And thats because they usually move onto their own ideas of how to use the new knowledge. They're not interested in how I use that knowledge. So different approaches for youth vs adults has always been something I needed to train either. One approach doesn't really work for the other.

And thats fair, every locale gets a say on how their city functions. For myself, I'd rather not have my town made up primarily of private vehicles clogging up traffic. I'll take a trolley/bus/train/cab any day of the week if I can get to where Im going quickly. I suspect most people who have to commute feel the same way: the shortest, fastest transportation. Few want to spend hours of their day in any vehicle.

That doesn't mean I don't want any roads for private vehicles. Just that need not make up 99% of them. Even if we knocked that down to 75% of roads I think we'd see amazing positive impacts on every metric (except the private roads; those will continue to suffer from congestion until cities offer a better way to get people from A to B).

Ive been saying this for over a decade: we're working on the wrong problem right now with autonomous vehicles. Their chief obstacle is operating on the roads with humans. They need dedicated infrastructure where only autonomous vehicles operate. Anything short of this will be implemented in very restrictive, small, niche areas and never become the new way most people move around. Tesla and Uber, et al have taken this as far as it will go without infrastructure in my opinion.

I think we'll be on the right track when city planners reclaim some of our current roads and make them available only to autonomous vehicles. They'll need their own garages, highways and streets to operate to fully realize it. For example, FSD vehicles can be moved to dedicated streets similar to how alleys work in many cities currently (where they're largely routes for maintenance and utilities -- removing them from normal commuter traffic).

Im not the person youre responding to but I have a similar experience and I usually let the pairs make their own decisions about how they work. I've found that to be many times more effective than "switch every x minutes" or interfering in any other way. Let them work it out. I only step in if there's a problem (students not showing up, refusing to work, etc -- which is very, very rare).

I see your point. But I think this is why I don't think either giving a kid a savings account nor a debit card alone teaches them anything. That said, I think a savings account offers much more valuable lessons to be learned, or at least it did for me growing up.

I saved money all the time as a kid because I was taught that saving is good. One of the first accounts I got was a savings account. However, I soon learned that I needed to access that money so I got a checking account and started to divide my deposits between each. And on and on, you get the point.

To this day I keep a cash savings -- I need it. Yes its not earning as much as my other investments, but I don't need it to. I need liquidity and I value being able to pull large chunks of my hard earned money from the bank to do a miriad of things: spontaneous vacation, buy a car, medical emergencies, etc.

I think both devices offer something to youth. However, it seems like giving kids debit cards leans in the wrong directions as far as valuable life lessons. I don't want my kids learning to spend their money. Kids are already great a spending my money. They need to understand how money actually works (beyond spending).

A motion-detecting light isn't surveillance. It follows the same principle as your refrigerator light: when someone opens the door, shine the light so that they can see.

Surveillance is the monitoring of peoples activities. A very, very different thing from an energy saving device -- I'd even argue the opposite, as surveillance requires constant energy. To monitor someone in the current system is to literally follow them around. To use your example, surveillance would be placing sensors in your products so that when your customers buy them, you can follow them around and record how they're using it. But I don't think an energy saving light can be called surveillance.

This problem really does require competent city planning and a willing cohort of politicians to step up and make some dramatic, timely changes (good luck with that tho). The market cannot and will not figure this out, unless we define solution as "whatever the wealthy want to do is fine, homelessness and rents higher than a mortgage be damned".