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alephr

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The article points out how homeless people aren't popular or often defended. This reality is probably the biggest force against homeless people. Most people don't even want to consider their existence at all, especially if you see them daily. I don't see how trying to divert attention from this harsh reality that exposes weakness in our ability to collectively solve problems actually helps anything. If private prisons we're outlawed would all of even most of homeless issues eventually just go away? Is that something people really believe?

Corruption definitely exists as people are periodically convicted for it, but outside of those convictions the majority of talk about it seems to be a cope for the failures of systems we create freely. This writer references a corruption conviction but then misrepresents its overturning by the supreme court as more corruption when the court unanimously just set a probably agreeable definition and allowed the case to be persued under this definition. Once you do any digging on most claims of corruption you find inconvenient constraints and facts that most people have no understanding of that take the righteousness out of the claims.

Corruption is overwhelmingly an easy scapegoat you can gesture towards and have people agree with you without much effort. If we think there's something that is corruption that isn't covered by the legal code we can agree on what that is and push for it in the legal system. If we think our executives aren't enforcing our legal code we are the ones who elect them. If the problem is that no one cares enough to make the "right" decisions then whining about elites isn't going to do anything.

an important thing to realize with this analogy is the difference in purpose between code and writing. Writing is meant to be read whereas code is meant to specify a program. For people who read code like writing this makes sense but when the focus is more on the resulting program the concerns change a lot.

well that's a start, kudos for the probability and evidence that would shift it.

Like most people I haven't looked into any of this much before the last year so I'm far from knowledgeable here but:

.5 is a surprising number without any additional explanation because it suggests you think this is about as likely as a zoonotic origin (or at least not specifically the result of an accident). Does that probably extend to other viral outbreaks or is it specific to something? My baseline probability would be significantly lower (although non zero because I'm not denying the possibility; the article makes the case that lab safety is a concern worldwide) based on my, admittedly limited, understanding of past outbreaks. Is it the case that you think about as many viral outbreaks were due to lab accidents as not? or maybe this is more specific to coronaviruses or this specific virus? I'm curious how you'd model this, even if informal.

A lot of the discussion I see on this hinges on possibility and not strongly believing the claim is false. Sure, this theory is "possible" in some sense but I rarely see anyone presenting concrete evidence for it and I don't think I've seen anyone who supports it suggest a piece of evidence that would change their mind on it.

If most of the discussion on an idea is about how people dismiss it or how any evidence is being covered up the idea might not be that strong.

Is that tweet really "extremely negative" towards Linux? All he says is that he doesn't want to abandon Windows but instead push back on changes to it he doesn't like; he doesn't make any judgements about Linux. The reality is there are many barriers to Linux replacing Windows as a desktop platform for users today so it's not surprising that someone who runs a business that depends on users doesn't want to push for a huge switch to Linux if it's not necessary. If a company not wanting to act outside it's interests makes it Linux's "biggest enemy" then it will be a very long time before it succeeds as the major desktop platform.

The 80/24 Rule 7 years ago

I don't think it's a preference issue. The problem you have when you split up functions is you're making decisions that have consequences in a fairly arbitrary way(not backed by an understanding of the system, just how you feel things should be broken up).

On top of arbitrarily pushing the system in directions, you yourself note that you hide the actual context of the code when you split it up. It might make you feel better in the moment but I don't think it's the right response to feel emboldened by making decisions with less context. Premature abstraction is at the heart of a lot of bad design and complexity.

With even primitive dev tools you can get a lot of the benefits (grouping, naming) with comments and braces. More could definitely be done on this front but dev tool progress is sadly pretty slow. Going this route you can have organization while not throwing away the all-important context of what the code is actually meant to accomplish.

you're probably not alone but the issue here is forcing it on the user. that the option exists means they understand some people want a raw timeline which makes repeatedly changing the display that much worse

I agree that there should be action taken to push things like this in a better direction but I think the obvious things to do can easily back fire and just make the situation worse. AFAIK in china there is a lot (not necessarily universal) of support for the government so it would be easy to cast something like this in a way that just bolsters that support (foreign countries trying to hurt china for their own gain) and makes things like this worse.

Foreign policy is hard and I don't pretend to know the best way to do it but I think given recent history we have to be more careful about how we try to influence developing nations so that we actually have the effect we want. This might include doing things that could seem unpalatable in the short term.

I don't claim to be an authority on this by any means and it's a very complex space but...

the approach of "forcing" a foreign country to take on social/political beliefs seems like a very difficult task when the local culture doesn't already support them implicitly. The worst example of this in recent history is probably our(US) interactions in the middle east that in many ways have backfired and made the situation worse by creating economic uncertainty and power vacuums.

I think generally more liberal values become more attractive as economic prosperity. if this is true it seems like a simpler/more effective foreign policy strategy to create economic opportunity for citizens of the foreign country and simply tie an example of the liberal values we want to spread to those opportunities. Then pushes for these sorts of changes would have a much stronger local, and thus more aware of the local situation, base of support.

If the views really are superior it should be easy to derive them independently given examples as your lower level concerns become less of a problem. And if they come to those positions in a more independent way the likelihood that they'll last is much higher.

The curve isn't necessarily implicit or explicit; multiple forms exist. Think of the standard form of a line versus a parametric form.

For beziers you might explicitly evaluate them at time t if you're doing animation of implicitly evaluate them at position x,y if you're rendering them.

the surface normals don't change when the mask rotates from the front to the back so the lighting appears to "change direction". I think looking at the edges gives you more cues to see that the mask is rotating vs only having the reversing lighting cues in the center

the problem is that "ugly" isn't precise and can get translated from other reactions that aren't based on experience but are instead just cargo cutting. it's great to use the faster parts of our brains to reason but still important to make sure we're not accepting the mistakes they might make.

This article is poorly researched (the only "visual" tool it mentions is scratch???) and pretty lazy in considering the merits of extratextual programming. It's worrying that something of this quality resonates with people.

metaprogramming is useful (for the same reason programming is, computers are great at transforming data. your program is data and it can be much faster to write it with this in mind) and templates are an existing, portable way to do metaprogramming. despite how bad they are designed, that they already exist and are portable puts them in a position where they can be the most cost effective way to do something