lordlic

I already gave the two examples necessary to address this.

- Kissinger. He was Nixon's National Security Advisor, intimately involved in prosecuting the Vietnam War, a war which he fully supported on the grounds of containing the influence of communism. By awarding the peace prize to him, the prize committee shows that they don't think it's crazy for millions of Vietnamese people to die in order to protect the interests of global capital. No credibility.

- Obama. His prize was awarded nine months into his first term. This was based on essentially nothing. The prize committee treated it as little more than a Time Magazine Person of the Year style popularity contest. No credibility.

So there's no need to keep score on correct vs incorrect calls based on unreliable prognostication about future outcomes. These are concrete examples of times when, even just considering the information they had at the time, they made an absolute mockery of the prestige of the Nobel prize.

My point was that giving the prize to an American diplomat for taking a break from his collaboration with Nixon to try to end the imperialist war that we started, on terms agreeable to us, after at least a million Vietnamese people were killed, is insane. He also got behind the bombing in Cambodia as a way to force North Vietnam to capitulate to American demands. This is not a man you award a peace prize to unless your idea of peace includes Carthaginian peace.

It's a good thing they have any credibility left after giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Kissinger in 1973 (!) or to Obama in 2009.

That's not what salting does, and different hashing methods are irrelevant. The danger of having your hash leaked is that it can be cracked and the plaintext password recovered. The hash itself is entirely useless for logging into other services.

No, it's my observation that conspiracy theories about organized child sex abuse are largely a right-wing narrative. For example:

> QAnon (/ˌkjuː.əˈnɒn/) is a far-right conspiracy movement centered on false claims made by an anonymous individual or individuals, known by the name "Q", that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles operate a global child sex trafficking ring

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon

It plays into classic themes of degeneracy and a need to return to traditionalism, and is designed to shock and whip up passions among the family-values crowd.

But it's the comment about the Taliban that really showed your hand. The meme on the right is a grudging admiration for the Taliban because of their highly conservative social ideology; i.e. commitment to traditional gender roles, forbidding abortion, persecuting trans people, etc.

Any time conditions exist for someone who doesn't care about others to get what they want, that person will try to get what they want. That's not particularly insightful on its own. That's like the one-sentence synopsis of the entire field of critical theory. Go read Marx, or feminist theory, or critical race theory, or something. This fixation on child sexual abuse as an inevitable consequence of power seems like some weird right-wing conspiracy stuff, especially unironically using the words "The Taliban certainly has its faults but."

You make it sound like priests are just bad at maximizing their income, so they must be damaged somehow. But putting it in economic terms like that is silly. Priests aren't in it for the money or an easy lifestyle. Similarly I don't think the church is so worried about optimizing their training costs that it could be a plausible root cause. Reducing everything to a dollar amount is some weird sigma shit.

Though I agree... there's probably no coordinated conspiracy of abusers covering for other abusers, just a pervasive culture of secrecy and willingness at all levels to do anything to protect the clergy. And seriously, who thought it would be a good idea to sexually stunt young people with religious indoctrination, get them to swear to a vow of chastity, and then go their whole lives without sex or porn, and think it'll just be fine to trust them absolutely in situations of incredibly significant power imbalance? Like organizational reform aside, this doesn't seem fixable for the church. It's too fundamental to their whole model. They'll keep going because they have so much momentum, but more victims are going to keep getting hurt.

> I don’t think anyone would ever dispute the mental health benefits

Excuse me, what? I certainly would, and I don't know how you could possibly think that nobody else would.

That is a big part of it I think, and just being able to provide meaningful names for code/documentation/discussions makes a huge difference, though I'd say communication problems alone don't tell the whole story.

Even when you're just working alone, having seen something before and knowing the theory/literature means you can build on it instead of wasting time thinking about how to reinvent the wheel. Like you can imagine someone who knows nothing about ACID or transaction isolation being frustrated by apparent concurrency bugs in their database and hand-rolling some abomination of a locking mechanism to manually serialize database transactions. They're going to waste a ton of time on that, and it'll be fragile and have terrible performance. Or if you're working on some task tracking application and wondering about how you can untangle dependency relationships for users, you should have a basic suite of graph algorithms in your head so that you can use them effortlessly and focus on the actual problem instead of being mired down in retreading basics that every CS graduate already knows.

Also it doesn't seem like an issue of communication in the case of the homebrew guy; he was just stumped.

There is no "standard library function" for inverting a binary tree. That's not a thing that exists, probably anywhere in any standard library for any language, and even if it did you should still know how to write it yourself.

Also the article you linked doesn't argue that you shouldn't know how to write a linked list, it argues that you should implement ADT operations in functions instead of trying to wing it with ad-hoc logic all over the place. Blizzard's developers were definitely smart enough implement a doubly-linked list one time, they were just fallible humans who got tripped up consistently implementing the same logic in a hundred different places.

I actually do think you have a point about the fetishization of trivia knowledge in this field. It's really not ideal, and I think it's more driven by social dysfunction or over-compensation for various kinds of imposter syndrome.

But that is not this. In the case of inverting a binary tree, what you call logic-puzzle minutiae is just taking a fundamental building block in computer science (binary trees) and asking the person to demonstrate even the faintest ability when it comes to writing an incredibly basic algorithm. Max Howell not only can't do it, but he doesn't even see why he should need to know how to do it!

That kind of proud ignorance is what grinds my gears. I'm sure someone can gather requirements and deliver value to customers and fix bugs and string together code and everything without knowing how to work with trees, but I don't really care. If they've somehow gotten that far without even a glimmer of curiosity about the fundamentals of computer science then something is disturbingly wrong, and I would worry about what other mammoth blind spots they inexplicably have.

Beyond parody.

I think usually people who try to make this point are just pouting over how they shouldn't be expected to know basic, fundamental things. Like https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

> I don't have to memorize random things I don't even use in my day job

Yeah, imagine what kind of nerd would be interested in the field and genuinely want to learn all they can, ha ha.

The article says why. The US Chamber of Commerce has fought tooth and nail against climate legislation because they view themselves as "job creators" and see anything that threatens corporate profits as an existential threat to society.

They've only recently been forced to admit that climate change even exists, but it's still like pulling teeth because they insist that any solutions have to be technology driven from the private sector, with no mandates whatsoever from government.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Chamber_of_Comme... and try to keep from retching.

That doesn't conflict with anything they said.

I'm just pointing out that it's a common belief (and it is, your ignorance notwithstanding) and giving them the search term to read more if they're interested. What's so difficult to understand about this? And it's the philosophy of mind; there's not really "corroborating evidence" to present so much as there are logical arguments that you need to read up on yourself.

Conscious beings flourishing is the goal, whether they be human or AI.

That might seem like a fine distinction, but the importance going forward is stark given a quote from TFA:

> The third judge, Lord Justice Birss, took a different view. While he agreed that "machines are not persons" ...

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computationalism

It's a very common worldview among the tech set.

Edit: Uh, downvotes, really? I think it's totally reasonable to assume this as a given since it's, like, pretty obviously true. If anything the parent needs to provide their own extraordinary evidence for why consciousness would be non-computable. I'm just trying to provide some context for them to read up more on some stuff that apparently everyone but them (who has given it any thought) already knows about.

> they're at least all consistent so there's plausible deniability that the author just didn't know English that well

No, I'd argue that there's basically no use case for email beyond stuff that you want the other person to be able to ignore.

If you're expecting a response, but don't care when it comes, that's ideal for chat.

I agree that there's not a single instance of double-spaces in the text, and I thought that was a really bizarre claim, but there are some instances of misspellings that help it along.

For example:

1. missles instead of missiles

2. carefull instead of careful

3. futher instead of further

But they're at least all consistent so there's plausible deniability that the author just didn't know English that well. And ofc the tweets are still on-point saying that it's an impressive and unappreciated feat.

I meant "really" worth, for some reasonable definition of "really." But I can't argue that market cap is a more pragmatic definition of worth, so your point is fair enough I guess.

I just scanned this, but some of it seems ludicrously wrong. Like rating chat a neutral face for "find" when honestly one of the biggest advantages to chat in my mind is being able to search for key terms long in the future and be able to turn up the exact transcript of the discussion you're thinking of. Or like this quote:

> Using interactive chat is a good idea for the kind of communication that requires immediate, interactive mutual feedback from two or more participants. If that is not the case, chat is not a good idea.

No. Just... no. This is so wrong it's absurd. The point of text chat instead of in-person chat is that it's asynchronous and it doesn't require immediate, interactive feedback. I'm honestly just baffled at how someone could actually use chat and come to this kind of conclusion.

$4.9B over what the fine would otherwise have been is pretty hefty. I don't think any human alive is worth $4.9B to their employer.

I'm not sure what you think minority ownership of a public company should entail, but surely you'd agree that it should protect them from the majority shareholder spending unlimited amounts of company cash to save themselves from personal inconvenience/embarrassment?

If you're assuming I haven't gone through nicotine withdrawal myself then that's mistaken.

Yes? Duh? That's the point of anti-forgery laws.

It's kind of jarring to see Doctorow praise hypnosis in one paragraph and then excoriate tobacco companies for their science obscurationism in literally the next paragraph.