tynpeddler

You're confusing a single wiretap warrant that was a small part of a large investigation with the investigation itself.

> Groups of people don't have guilt or automatic responsibility, only individuals do.

This is not exactly correct. Governments are composed of groups of people and governments maintain continuity of responsibility even when all the people in that government are different. Black Americans were discriminated against as a matter of state and federal policy and thus both state and federal government is at fault for the treatment of Black American. There is clear precedent in American law that in such cases, harmed individuals and groups are due financial compensation. Precedent for financial compensation due to government abuse of power is an incredibly old precedent and the only reason Black Americans haven't been compensated for the discrimination they've suffered is because the continuation of racism, the tradition of discrimination and the shear size of the problem have turned what should be a fairly straightforward legal case into a complicated political question.

> Black Americans were quite clearly discriminated against as a group.

This is clearly true, but it also reduces the impact of what really happened. Black Americans were discriminated against on an individual level. Ruby Bridges is still alive for goodness sake! She's only 68 years old. It isn't hard to estimate financial damages due to the Jim Crow era and it's extremely easy to figure out who was harmed due to explicit government policy.

I've done many database migrations from db2 to MySQL. It's a thing that happens quite a lot. ORMs and Java's usage of database access layers over the underlying sql drivers vastly simplified the process.

If misleading statements was the problem, then people would be a lot angrier about the blatant lies and propaganda large oil companies pushed for decades.

Dishonesty is the problem, but not in the way you suggest.

Except the whole pregnancy scenario is incredibly common example of a social faux pas.

I was lead on migrating several systems from traditional deployment to a cloud provider for a major company. Part of the migration was switching a microsoft DB to MySQL. The java ecosystem and ORMs makes this so easy it's barely worth talking about. And that wasn't the only time db migrations have some up.

Not sure if that's enough to justify ORMs, but DB migration is a real use case and there are things you can do ahead of time to greatly simplify the process.

What is often missed is that chimeric viruses are easy to detect. The viral genome will show clear evidence of manipulation from random base insertions and clear homology with all the ancestral viruses. Hiding the signs of manipulation would either require vast amounts of time and resources (the expense and man power would make it very difficult to hide) or straight up science fiction technology. The chimeric origin hypothesis is not a plausible explanation for the origin of sars-cov2, which means the nature link is not relevant.

The other lab leak hypothesis is that a specimen collected and cultured by scientists, infected a lab employee and this patient zero then transmitted the virus to others. This is a plausible option, and it is being researched. However it is less plausible than wild transmission based on a simple numbers game. What is more likely, a breakout infection cause by a dozen scientists specifically trained and equipped against this possibility, or a transmission to one of the millions of other people who routinely interact with these bat populations? Both are possible, but one is much more likely. Before covid19, WIV had published research indicating that novel coronaviruses routinely jump from bats to humans in that part of the world. Most of these viruses aren't don't last in human hosts, but it's clear that it was only a matter time before something nasty got through. After all, it's already happened once before.

The real nail in the coffin is that research[0] has shown that there were at least two, independent transmissions of sars-cov2 to humans. For this to happen as part of a lab leak it would require WIV to have found and cultivated 2 different strains of sars-cov2, and then each of those strains would have to escape the lab.

[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715

According to the article, the desired outcome of the election was a free and fair election. Not a particularly terrifying conspiracy.

I'm concerned that you've selectively ignored parts of my comment and have read meaning out of it that I did not put into it.

>do you have any justification for why obsessing over alienation is bad?

Obsessing over alienation is bad for Marxists (and good for capitalists). As I said, Marxists are not being serious (maybe credible is a better word here) when using alienation to critique capitalism. Of the economic systems in discussion, capitalism has the least alienation. Marxist solutions are either pure fantasy, or have been tried and lead to worse outcomes and other socio-economic systems sfrom history are also worse than capitalism. In other words, Marxist concerns with alienation are hypocritical.

>do you think workers would be better off if they were not alienated?

Again, I'm discussing the Marxist use of alienation and how they undercut themselves when discussing it.

> Would you say it's a good or bad thing that all of an employee's work product (during and outside of office hours) belongs to the company (assuming you accept my premise that this is enforced)?

Nothing in my comment can be taken as arguing one way or another on this topic. However, given that you've decided to focus on the goodness/badness of alienation, it sounds like it's important to you. How do you feel about alienation?

Most of the public discourse on the current problems of capitalism is not serious. Many folks aren't actually comparing capitalism to an alternative, instead they're comparing their current situation to a mythical alternative reality. The is exacerbated by the fact that Marx himself and other communist/socialist authors make similar mistakes. The whole marxist obsession with "alienation" is a perfect example. They are largely delusional about the plight of the working class in non-capitalist systems.

Workers in socialist systems are inundated in propaganda in ways that would make the most ardent Fox News producer blush. They don't experience alienation between their work and their non-work life, they experience alienation between the life in their head and life in the physical world. Similarly, workers in a feudal system also experience fear and domination at the hands of a system that vests in them little power or autonomy.

First, the same problem applies to service names like "Galactus" or "Buttforce". Second, a descriptive name is not the same thing as a service description. A descriptive name or label is as much a mnemonic device as is is a name. They're intended to be easier to remember, not to replace proper documentation. Third, just from the names it looks like Text Service is the front end for an ecosystem of texting related services, reach of which is implemented using a different technology. Though twilio and telephony look like especially bad names for services behind a texting service.

After the 10th sms service I'd be curious to know why people have done the same thing ten times. If there is a real difference in functionality between those ten services, I suppose the next question is why don't their names reflect that?

One of the useful things about descriptive names is that it can help you detect duplicate work.

Amazon's contract says something similar. A court case might be difficult to win if your project is very close to your work projects, but other than that, a company generally has to prove that you used company resources in some way for your project in order to claim ownership.

I'm on the record as defending MOND from dismissal, but this article is taking it a step to far and ignoring important context.

It's true that MOND generally does provide a simpler[0] prediction of galactic dynamics but that's not really the selling point of Dark Matter at this point. Dark Matter works with our current understanding of the big bang[1][2], and especially with the measured anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. There have been an attempts to fit MOND to what we know about the big bang, but so far the results have been extremely rough[2]. One possible reason for MOND's deficiencies in this area is that to date there has been far more research into Dark Matter than into MOND. It's possible that MOND does permit a more elegant explanation of the CMB. However, until we see it MOND is going to stay in second place.

Now this is very different from dismissing MOND. For some reason I can never quite figure out, every time new, big research concerning dark matter is published, lots of people who don't understand MOND pop out of the wood work to explain why it's dead.

[0] By "simpler" I mean that when predicting galactic dynamics, using MOND allows fewer free parameters than Lambda-CDM.

[1] https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Sept17/Freese/Freese3.ht...

[2]https://phys.org/news/2021-10-mond-theory-account-cosmic-mic...

Interesting article, but I feel like this article is built around assumptions of similarity that I don't feel really hold up. Take this quote for instance:

> "We miscalculate the extent to which our opponents’ viewpoints differ from our own."

A more accurate statement is that we tend to misunderstand the ways in which another person's viewpoints differ from our own.

For example, my mom recently told me, in almost these exact words, that she is confidant in her opinions, but doesn't feel any need to rely on facts or evidence to build or maintain those opinions. That's a pretty radical outlook and puts her at direct odds with quite a number of other folks.

I strongly suspect that there are very large differences in humanity's views on topics like epistemology, authority, institutionalization and other very core concepts. When I read articles like this, it's not really clear to me that the authors themselves understand just how divergent these views can be, or how best to get participants to elucidate their core feelings. For my own part, I've seen that under most situations, people will rely on euphemisms and fuzzy language to soften their most radical viewpoints. For example I had to be very direct with my mom to get her to make the admissions that she did, and she only did it because I backed her into a bit of a corner. In other conversations, she would deflect, change the subject, or use language in ambiguous ways in order to appear more reasonable.

This article hints at the very reason why this article is difficult to take to seriously:

>while it remains unclear exactly why this intervention works, Rodríguez and Halperin speculated that it has to do with the desire to maintain a positive self-view.”

This only holds when the table stakes are low and the stakes are never low when it comes to someone's most core beliefs. It looks like the authors succeeded in coaching people on how to appear reasonable, but it's not clear to me that they succeeded in actually teaching people how to be more reasonable. In short, I wonder if this article is naive because I'm not sure if they ever got to the heart of any particular person, including themselves.

Only by some measures and only with the caveat that the methods used to approximate wealth distribution in pre-revolutionary France are not directly analogous to the methods used to measure it today which makes direct comparisons messy. For example, other measures built around the gini coefficient would suggest that now is more equal than pre-revoluitonary France (with the caveat that those methods are also imprecise and built on calculated assumptions). Secondly, my comment is about wealth+power. Despite his wealth and connections, Bezos doesn't have nearly the political power that the second richest man in pre-revolutionary France wielded.

The process for rolling out breaking API changes is the same for monorepos as it is for multi-repos since, during a deploy, multiple versions of each service will be running simultaneously. The only advantage of a mono-repo is the atomic commit across multiple services. It's definitely possible through a combination of convention and tooling to do something similar with a multi-repo, but as of yet this is a less explored paradigm.

Really excellent point. Transitioning to a capitalist system is extremely difficult because other economic and political systems almost always have much more extreme imbalances in the distribution of money and power (especially if the situation is bad enough to warrant a large change) and introducing a capitalist system lets those folks simply perpetuate uneven wealth/power distributions and in many cases make things worse. The US got around this problem by having huge amounts of land to give away in the west (after conquering it from the Indians of course), and I think Britain kind of got around this problem by creating a system that let their productive merchant class amass large amounts of wealth and partially displace the inefficient aristocracy. France had a rough go of it and had to have multiple revolutions to clear out their nobles and Germany had to lose a few world wars to level things out a bit.

> The "burden of proof" is on both sides.

This is a common refrain from folks, who either accidentally or on purpose, are attempting to throw up barriers to have their beliefs genuinely challenged, and it works by misconstruing what "proof" actually means in a practical sense.

Here's a real world example of proof. A company wants to sell aspirin. To sell aspirin in the US, the FDA requires proof that the pills do contain a certain amount of aspirin, and that the pills don't contain any materials in high enough concentrations to be considered dangerous. Thus the company must prove a positive (Condition A: pills contain aspirin) and a negative (Condition B: pills don't contain harmful materials in harmful concentrations). For a single pill, both of these conditions are straightforward to prove. For condition A, grind up a pill and using methods of physical chemistry, quantify the concentration of aspirin and verify that the concentration is as it should be. Condition B is more arduous to prove, but still straightforward. You can either test for all harmful materials known to man or you can can attempt to quantify all materials present in the pill and show by exhaustion that there's absolutely no plutonium, arsenic or botulism in the pill (among millions of other things). Whew! Mission accomplished!

But hold on, it was a lot of work just to prove condition B for one pill, maybe we can simplify things a bit as there are approximately 1 billion other pills to test. So lets skip plutonium testing. It's a rare material that is not involved in any way in our manufacturing process. Since we don't have live cultures of any sort either, we can probably safely skip botulism. In fact, we can skip testing for millions of compounds because there's no probably mechanism for them to be introduced into our pills. "But wait," someone says from the back of the room, "How do we know for 100 percent certainty that these things aren't in our pills? Can we really be sure?" After reviewing the physical security of our facilities and double checking our process, we express our confidence in the new process. "But wait," that persistent guy in the back of the room says, "what if there are aliens from another planet with the power of teleportation who are spiking our pills with botulism? What now?" After recovering our senses, we kick that guy out of the room.

Cool, we now have a practical test process for ensuring that a pill is safe and effective. We just need to grind up each of our 1 billion pills, test them all, and we can be certain of the safety and efficacy of each of the pills we just destroyed. Hmm, we may have a problem. How exactly are we supposed to sell pills if our testing process is destroying them all? We closely monitor our manufacturing process, and we test the pills from a test run to ensure that our mixing process is sufficiently thorough to guarantee an even distribution of ingredients in each pill. Now instead of testing every pill we make, we can simply take a few from each batch. If there's something wrong or weird about the pills we test, we can test more to confirm there's a problem. "But wait," the persistent guy in the back of the room says. "What if teleporting aliens from another planet are swapping out the faulty pills in our test samples with good pills in order to trick us into thinking our batches are safe?" Wait, how did that guy get back in the room? Maybe it really was teleporting aliens. Whoops, nope. Someone left the side door open. That makes way more sense.

The problem of asking for proof in this situation is that proof has been provided, and in response you've escalated the request for proof without sufficient justification. We have many examples of folks demonstrating the techniques used to create crop circles, including the techniques necessary for shaping the crops and the techniques used for laying out a pattern. No crop circle presented has ever had qualities that are outside the possibility of the shown techniques, or advancements in those techniques. So trying to drag aliens back into the conversation is no different than insisting we test for teleporting aliens when we manufacture aspirin. If we want to bring aliens back into the subject of crop circles, we first need to prove 1) that aliens exist, 2) that they're visiting the Earth, 3) their methods of propulsion are totally outside our knowledge of the physical universe, and 4) that we have some reason to believe that they use grain fields (for example, why don't they use wild prairies?). If you can present that information, then we can talk about aliens and crop circles.

I wrote a short story on this idea a while ago. Two things become clear very quickly. First, this is a very stark existence. Advanced civilization requires lots of energy and energy production requires lots of physical infrastructure. Building all that infrastructure on the home world takes time and lots of resources, building all of the infrastructure on a planet that is flying past your home world is very tricky. Second, a civilization may end up trapped on the planet. Similar to the first point, space faring capabilities require lots of material and infrastructure, and if that degrades (because they're trying to maintain other capabilities or because the chosen planet is short on raw materials), even when the planet wanders into another start system the civilization may have no capability to transfer their population to the new solar system.

I've had meta and microsoft cancel on me. I also went all the way through the interview loop at one company, received very positive feedback but was told that they had decided to close the position without filling it. There's definitely a pullback and it started about 2 months ago.

Update: As of now, about half of the companies I've interviewed with at one level or another, have abruptly halted their process due to economic concerns.

Echoing the other, how did you configure your test suite to check for correctness?

One of the best programming aphorisms I've heard is "Everything in programming can be solved with another layer of abstraction except for the problem of to many layers of abstraction."

I don't think Intuit's total revenue is relevant to this discussion. The most relevant number is how much money did they make off this little scheme which seems to be much less than their total revenue. I didn't see this value in the article, nor was I able to find TurboTax's pricing model for the years in questions so I went off (my very fuzzy) memory that their lowest tier was about $30.

I assumed that TurboTax has already adjusted their pricing tiers in response to the lawsuit since my vague memory of many years ago is that the lower tier was about $30. If someone can give more accurate pricing information for the effected years that would be cool.

This is the important part of the article:

> Consumers are expected to receive a direct payment of approximately $30 for each year that they were deceived into paying for filing services. Impacted consumers will automatically receive notices and a check by mail.

It looks like TurboTax is being required to return the money they fraudulently obtained, but they're not even required to pay interest or any additional restitution or punitive damages. It's definitely disappointing and a minor miscarriage of justice.

Edit: Two things I want to clarify from my original comment. First, I wasn't able to find pricing info from the years in question so I went from what I remembered as their lowest pricing tier which I think was $30. Second, I use the term "minor miscarriage of justice" as a comparison to the Sackler BS which was a gross (as in disgusting) miscarriage of justice.

First, Revolution is not the same thing as genius.

Second, even genius's don't bring frequent revolutions. Special and general relativity made very little impact on people's lives for decades. It took the Manhattan project, one of the largest industrial project of all times involving tens of thousands of people, to kickstart the nuclear age. And that involved a lot of things besides just relativity.

Third, we live in a world of revolutions that are so common people don't even grasp them. Ten years ago, Go was almost impossible for computers to play with any proficiency. Protein folding was still incredibly difficult and people were building dedicated super computers like Anton to try and make things faster. Now both of those effectively solved problems. Drone's have revolutionized battle fields in ways that are having very significant geopolitcal ramifications that effect hundreds of millions of lives. The raptor engines represent an incredible leap forward in the material sciences that will allow humanity to reach space more cheaply than ever before.

If there are no genius's today because cancer and Alzheimer's are still around, then Einstein wasn't a genius because he didn't solve those problems either.

One more possibility to consider. Modern genius is so industrialized and so common that we don't recognize it as genius anymore. Every year we see an incredible number of technical advances that are just taken for granted. There are so many movies, books, short stories and essays that it's almost impossible to really discover all the works of genius.

I'm also not sure if any of the definitions used for genius, or as a proxy for genius, are particularly great. Acclaim is a dubious proxy because because it's more influenced by popular attention than actual technical capability.

I get that Mearsheimer is supposed to be some kind of astute expert on this topic, but he is really embarrassing himself here. His whole argument basically rests on 3 points:

1. Russia is a great power. As such, it is effectively an automaton that must react in specific ways to external stimuli. There's no reasoning, and no morality, only stimuli and response. Thus the concept of blame and responsibility are meaningless when applied to Russia.

2. Europe and the west are not great powers. Instead they are thinking, feeling actors with a moral obligation to tiptoe around and appease great powers like Russia. Because the west are the only thinking feeling people, they're the only ones that can be responsible for anything.

3. Ukrainians are neither a great power or real people. They just need to sit there and accept whatever other actors want to do to them. Any attempt to make decisions for themselves means they deserve any bad thing that happens.

Mearsheimer's statements read like a setup to a punchline (A great power, a real human, and a useless blob walk into a bar). I appreciate that after the interviewer got over his initial shock, he started making fun of Mearsheimer with questions like "But his bombs are touching it [western Ukraine], right?" Also, "I thought you said that he was not interested in taking Kyiv" is a nice touch.

Most ridiculous of all is that Mearsheimer's defines giving improving the economy, reducing corruption, increasing political liberty, and generally improving peoples lives as "western aggression".