Re: As the saying goes....
You can envy somebody and still think they are a loser.
692 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Aug 2020
If by "muddy the waters" you mean "try to understand a complex issue through a variety of lenses".
I believe that the primary result of deplatforming people is to turn them into martyrs. "'They' didn't want me to say this, as evidenced by the fact that they literally shut me down". I am fully aware that letting people say whatever bullshit they want will have real-world consequences, but unfortunately the world is not a shiny happy place and I believe that the benefits of a general policy of free speech outweigh the negatives.
Our big problem right now is a lack of compromise, understanding, and mutual respect in public discourse. Telling people to shut up does nothing to promote any of those values. It only makes the people being deplatformed more angry, which helps nobody.
I'd also observe that the people who are being deplatformed are literally on the verge of starting a civil war (and pulling people off Twitter has done nothing to quell this). When that happens, ignoring them is not going to be an option. So you can either try to find common ground as a starting point for discourse now, or deal with THAT consequence later.
II don't think Elon particularly represents the left or the right. It only looks like he is right-wing because it is the MAGAs who have been most agressively de-platformed, and he has been fairly consistent about being opposed to de-platforming.
For a whole bunch of reasons, I also think that it is a mistake to silence people who believe things that I would deem "insane". That doesn't mean I in any way support those ideas, it just means I don't think I anybody should have the authority to unilaterally deem them unfit for human consumption.
I'm concerned about the same thing. Never mind this specific instance, such a council must have mutual respect and the ability to step outside themselves. You can't just throw Alex Jones and Dejywan Floyd in a room and expect anything useful to happen.
That said, such people do exist and I believe such a council can be created. In fact, I'd say that setting these things up usually isn't that hard...it's keeping them going that is difficult, as the members and their priorities change.
^subtle microcausm alert ^
I once wrote a procedure that required my coworkers to add something to PATH. Unfortunately I linked to instructions that were not as clear as they could have been, and somebody instead deleted PATH. Fortunately our machines were configured very similarly, so I had him use mine.
In my defense, my coworker had been documenting Windows software for 30 years, so I didn't really think this would be needed at all.
If you are the sort of person who will spend over a grand on a GPU, does it seem likely that you will tolerate network latency and video compression? I'm also not sure about the environmental benefits, since now you have to run servers which we all know are so good for the environment. Even if you leave your PC on 24/7 (which people are not obliged to do), how many watts does an idle GPU draw above a machine with integrated graphics?
And do you think that you switching to Rust will fix the bug in a library you wish to consume? Because I daresay whoever wrote that library would rather just fix the bug than completely re-write it in Rust.
I also have recently had to deal with a read-access violation in a GPU driver for a 10-year-old GPU. If you use a library that has a bug, there is nothing you can do except work around it. That will never change.
Exactly. I cannot remember the last time my C++ code had a GPF or more subtle memory access bug. We've had RAII for a long time now, it works very well and is easy to learn. You can turn pretty much any concept that should have a limited lifespan into an object by writing a simple RAII wrapper, and it will happen automatically when the stack unwinds...even if there is an exception.
I am growing weary of The Register pushing political opinions on Rust vs C and C++.
I think the mission of teaching women and visible minorities to take on engineering roles is admirable, and it sounds like this group is being effective towards that end. HOWEVER, I wanted to call out the quote in my title as being dangerous.
So long as people are raised with a general sense of empowerment, they certainly can "be what they cannot see". If there is a group of people that does not feel they are able to determine their own aspirations, then it's important to target that lack of confidence directly; don't tell them it's normal, and that they should still be limited by the roles that society has shown them to be acceptable.
I agree that white color crime needs to be treated more seriously, but (assuming his statements are truthful) I don't think this is the place to do it. Circumstances are generally taken into account when determining sentencing, including to people who commit robbery. Mercy IS (and should be) a part of the criminal justice system. If somebody does something stupid, for a stupid reason, and ultimately no harm comes of it...how does society benefit from imposing a punitive punishment. Some punishment of course, but what would be the value of ruining this person's life any more than it already has been?
Showing mercy makes it all the more meaningful when you really bring the hammer down.
(of course he could also be full of shit, I don't know)
I believe that preventing people from saying stupid things turns them into martyrs. Banning certain types of speech is bad enough; putting people in jail over it? All you are doing is making it impossible to have a public discourse with people who hold these positions, which also prevents you from publicly exposing that their positions are untenable.
I am opposed to all infringement of free speech, no matter how much I dislike that speech (barring "fire in a crowded theater" exceptions of course, which would include direct incitement to violence).
It's really weird watching old episodes of computer chronicles, and they are saying stuff like "Will the future be XEROX's ethernet or IBM's token ring? Nobody can say for sure".
And you sit there wondering what possible technical reason could lead people to actually choose token ring. I know that hindsight is 20/20, but I don't think it took a genius to see how much better ethernet was.
I don't want to live in a purely capitalist society, and what you are presenting is one example of why. There are cases where a majority of people would benefit from something, but no individual is willing or able to foot the bill for it.
I am just as opposed to a purely capitalist system as I am to a purely communist one, so to me the argument "that's not capitalist!" is not compelling.
I don't think your evidence proves your conclusion. The reason governments invest in these kinds of projects is because they have significant risk; more than most investors will be willing to bear. If we want to accelerate commercialization of alternative energy vehicles, somebody has to assume that risk. Distributing it across all taxpayers seems like a reasonable option, since they are supposed to be technologies that will benefit everybody.
Of course then if a company is successful they will "forget" about all that investment and charge consumers through the nose. But that's really a separate issue from the question of where such a company can find capital investment.
I say this as a person who loves his supercharged Miata.
If a legitimate business agreement is made, then it is important that such an agreement be enforced regardless of its content (so long as it remains legitimate). If an entity cannot trust that the government will enforce such agreements, then those agreements have no meaning. Thus, the entity cannot make decisions based on their agreements with others.
Ergo, the government must enforce agreements to facilitate economic stability.
- "And what shared there is not accurate and true and gibberish?"
The long paragraph that was a single run-on sentence. Additionally, even the sentence I have quoted doesn't make sense. I think you mean "And what shared there is not accurate and true, and therefore is gibberish?"
I am however upgrading your status from "chatbot" to "the worst writer to ever correctly use a word longer than two syllables".