seebs

I don't know about "need", but it's certainly common to reach out to them... But that doesn't mean that they respond quickly. Google does not have a rep for reliably getting back to people quickly or even at all, and when they do get back to people, they very often just say they can't comment, because there's no way for the people handling the press contact to reach a person who would know what was going on in a predictable manner. (Yeah, that sounds stupid. It is. And yet, nonetheless, you can regularly find that no one at Google can figure out who owns something or knows why it's the way it is.)

There's actually an entire genre here, sort of!

The key is, you do not "rephrase texts". You get a court order REQUIRING all communications to go through an app that can be monitored by the court for compliance with the protective order:

https://www.ourfamilywizard.com/practitioners/courts

Otherwise... Honestly, the people who should be rephrasing the messages are quite possibly the police, depending on the terms of the protective order, but if the messages are that upsetting... Once you already have the protective order, the next step is enforcing it. Sorry.

(I am not a lawyer and cannot give legal advice. I heard about the program from a person I know who worked on it, which got me curious about the existence of such things.)

I'm super hyped about this, I've been working on this for the last couple-few years and I'm optimistic about the return to being primarily an open-source thing.

No, it did not used to be that "all forums had pervasive doxxing and swatting". That has never been true. It has never been widespread. Heck, swatting as we know it today wasn't even remotely common until quite recently, and doxxing has been actively frowned on and treated as potentially criminal since, like, the 80s.

I dunno what you think you're arguing, but it's nonsense.

Okay, but consider that I might be better off with a machine that approves or disapproves based on credit history and credit score than a banker who won't lend to me unless I get my husband's signature because he doesn't think women should be making choices about money without their husband's approval. (But who wouldn't even blink at loaning money to a man without his wife's signature.)

Someone pointed out an obvious one: You can open the file "/dev/mem" or equivalent on many Unix systems and break things horribly, and rust can't tell that you're doing it or stop you. Someone used this to write an unsafe-free transmute, which is probably at least two different war crimes.

I doubt the rust team will try to "fix" that.

You say it "comes off as part of an effort ... to mount another attack". Maybe it does to you, but I don't know why. I've never heard of this "fierce and dirty" competition between young languages. I've never seen anything even a bit like that. I've only seen fierce fighting between advocates of large well-established languages.

Xe's post struck me as accurate at the time, and having that context to compare with makes V look a little better now, because it at least establishes that progress is being made towards those claims.

I don't know where you're getting the idea that this is based on some kind of sinister "personal agenda" other than "this thing sounds interesting, I investigated it, it seems less cool now", which is a pretty defensible position for someone to reach.

It's not hard to articulate why: Nearly all the large numbers are beyond what anyone can actually pay. If you assume that the bet pays out at most 4 billion dollars, and simply can't pay more than that, suddenly the expected value is $32, instead of "infinite".

Remember, crime is just surprise pentesting with an ad hoc payment model.

But also remember, surprise pentesting with an ad hoc payment model is crime.

If you make concessions in a circumstance like this, you just have the same problem again in a few years. If doing this gets Putin anything at all that he wants, it will keep happening. We know this because it already did, more than once, and because we've all seen it before many times. Every concession made strengthens Putin and reinforces his desire to keep trying this.

If Ukraine's goal is to exist, concessions of any kind at all to Putin make that harder. It's not "because Russia is wrong" that I don't think they should make concessions. It's because, if they make concessions, Russia will try again, because it worked.

Also, I think you're massively overestimating the strength of Russia's position here.

https://twitter.com/thingskatedid/status/1498803126765191173

hello i'm from the tech industry. today i'm going to explain how to solve all problems with whatever it is you do! based on my experience of writing software! which means i'm qualified to solve any problem in any field. i have checked this with zero people

It may be, but you may rest assured that when a recruiter asks me whether I'd like to work for Amazon, how they treat warehouse employees is going to be a factor in my answer. I've never been confident of the viability of "it's fine, they only hate other people" as a social strategy.

Do you think this applies in general to questions of legal liability, or is this one unique? If it's unique, why should anyone think that this case is unique? If you think in general it's "not hard" to know things about legal liability, either you're Elle Woods or you're an extremely overconfident fool.

Lying is a reasonably fundamental part of research, but lying to humans can hurt them in various ways, and that's why we have human research ethics rules and standards that require an explicit process for obtaining consent to do something, even if we can't say what in advance, and debriefing and harm mitigation.

Which the IRB missed because they didn't understand that, to ask questions about a website's policy, you must get an answer from a human.

The reason for this isn't "cowardice", though. I've read a lot of things by practicing people in the field on reasons for which they don't think human challenge trials produce reliable enough data. (Basically: You don't get a representative sample, and you get an unrepresentative sample in ways that are very likely to result in you getting bad data.) There's other reasons to distrust them, and I don't think your assumption that "an absolute minimum of risk" is really on the table is even defensible. And on the whole I think we probably should be using them anyway, with caveats -- but your argumentation here is bad.

As a person who has watched this kind of thing happen a lot: I think a lot. I had a bunch of friends on tumblr who wrote and exchanged very similar fiction and art. The ones who were known to be trans, female, enbies, or non-white got harassed a lot. The one who was understood to be a white cis male got left alone. And this is on tumblr, where the ostensible position of a large part of the user base is that white cis males are Bad People by default...

So yeah, pretty sure it's that. I almost never get harassed by people who think I'm cis male, the bulk of the harassment came from people who thought I was transmasc.

Probably the furry stuff too, which is honestly sort of terrifying, do these people not know how much infrastructure relies on stressed and overworked furries?

Due process for calling someone to resign is deciding that you personally feel they should resign, and saying so.

If you don't see a difference between the things called "cancel culture" and the mob rule with violence, that's not because they're not different. It might be because you're uncritically accepting the lies people tell because they don't like any kind of accountability at all for their actions.

This is why we have US Senators on TV and publishing articles in major newspapers about how they're being silenced because a company decided not to work with them on something. You don't see these posts from the people who actually got silenced, because they were actually silenced. But if you believe someone who is using multiple media channels with international distribution to tell you that they are being silenced without recourse, that's sorta on you. You can do better than that.

There is a big difference between what's reasonable and acceptable in random people and what's reasonable and acceptable in people who are established or establishing themselves as Community Leaders. We expect leaders to model good behavior and take additional steps to avoid modeling harmful behaviors, because other people will emulate them.

He's been accused of things that are at the very least Somewhat Creepy. "Abusive" is a pretty high standard to reach, but I also think it's irrelevant. The way he treated people, coming from a person with power or authority, was likely to make people feel unsafe, and he was unwilling to recognize that the desire to have that position of social authority implied an obligation to mitigate such behaviors.

I think the community would be richer and better (and probably noticably more diverse in a number of ways) if either he'd changed his behavior and recognized the importance of these effects, or he'd been considered a non-leader of the community and merely an active contributor with strong opinions.

It's easy for people not familiar with these dynamics to massively underweight how much implied social pressure comes with being hit on by a person in a position of power within an organization. My usual assumption for someone with as much implied social authority as he had at MIT would be that it would basically be generally inappropriate for them to be hitting on anyone who wanted to be in or work in the lab or department they were affiliated with, because even if this specific person genuinely wouldn't abuse their power, many other people in comparable situations would and it's not really reasonable to expect people not to react to the possibility when it's such a widespread problem. (And yeah, that can sorta suck if you're lonely but in a position that makes it hard for you to hit on people without making them uncomfortable or afraid. One alternative is not to pursue or remain in such a position if it's a problem for you.)

I don't know about "particularly" famous but I know that I've talked to people whose family members were programmers who reacted with "wait you know SEEBS!?!" when they mentioned me, so apparently some people have heard of me. I used to be fairly active in Usenet discussions of C, and I've published some stuff, most of it now lost to the mists of time.

Haha, wow. I totally forgot I wrote that one.

When I wrote that I was unaware of some of the Sort Of Creepy stuff. I recognize that some of the allegedly creepy stuff is sorta misquoted. I think that matters. But I don't think it changes my overall conclusions, which is that RMS was acting in a way that he could reasonably predict would hurt or distress people, and he didn't think it was important to change this.

But I also note that, completely unaware of any of the allegations now being discussed, I thought he was bad for the development of free and open source software because he was bad at treating people in ways conducive to positive outcomes, and I knew many people who worked on free or open source software, or worked with the FSF or on FSF projects, who also felt that way. I believe quite a few of them had told him of these concerns.

I wrote about the specific more-recent RMS stuff last year: https://www.seebs.net/log/post/2019/09/21/rms-minsky-and-the...

Thomas Bushnell wrote about this, too, and honestly his post was much better: https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-depa...

It is perhaps worth noting that, maybe thirty years ago, I had some run-ins with Thomas Bushnell, and I thought he was sort of a jerk at the time, but when I called him out on an example of that, he acknowledged it and apologized and said he'd try to do better. Nothing external to RMS was preventing RMS from doing that if people said his behavior hurt or distressed them.

The idea that we couldn't try to do better because we were being threatened by Microsoft is honestly sort of condescending and insulting in and of itself.

That's a fascinating take, but I don't think it's particularly related to what actually happened. I wasn't toxic because of some Microsoft FUD, I was toxic because I was a teenager with low empathy who hadn't learned things yet. I grew out of it.

Lots of people in open source were never particularly toxic, and there's no reason they should have been. Even granting the existence of the external stress (and it really was NOT that big a deal), not everyone reacts to stress by treating people badly. Furthermore, people who didn't grow up around those OSS advocates have exactly the same problems sometimes, for the same reason that people in every field of human endeavor have those problems sometimes.

In the sense of a logical implication which follows with full logical necessity: it doesn't.

In the sense of a likely reason for someone to draw an inference: Most people do not specifically seek out excuses to take tests, and do so only because they want something that the test provides them with, such as access to a job-hunting platform. Most people who want access to a job-hunting platform want it because they are job-hunting or plan to be soon.

I think it would make more sense to make this opt-in. For instance, I set my profile not to be displayed a while back, but when I checked on this new thing, it was set to make at least some part of the profile public by default.

Keep in mind that Triplebyte profiles have no reason to exist except people looking for work, and that most people have a reason to want to be sure that a current employer does not have an easy way to find out that they're looking for work. I can have a HN account and it doesn't make anyone think I'm looking for work, but if an employer sees my profile on Triplebyte, it tells them at the very least that I was at some point looking for work. If they see it on Triplebyte after having previously not seen it, it tells them that something changed recently.

I would definitely think this should be an opt-in thing.

Google did something significantly worse -- and spent ages apologizing for it and never really recovered from the reputation hit, and I suspect that negative impressions Buzz gave people were a contributing factor to G+'s total failure.

I think the 5th one is harder because it has a lot of reliance on recognizing a specific syntax for key/value stores, and may rely on realizing that a key/value store can have another key/value store as one of its values. This code couldn't be written recognizably-the-same in at least a couple of the languages I use which have key/value stores, and would be syntactically quite different in some. If you don't recognize the syntax, you have to start thinking about the problem and ruling things in or out, and that's harder. Probably still possible, but it's going to be testing at least some amount of a test-taking skill that isn't always taught.

Yes. For instance, Apple's spent the last couple of years emulating his visionary design decisions, focused specifically on "get thinner and thinner until you can't actually do your job anymore".

The quote I saw was:

OP: "CBP waved me through with hardly a word last week (TSA did grumble at me, for not moving fast enough through their fondling queue)." > RMS: I generally ask, "Could I please be checked by a woman? It's not fair that only gays get to enjoy this."

I don't have a link, but I have not seen this one grow or change at all, everyone referring to it refers to the same thing.

And that one is pretty damn creepy.

The behavior I saw, with creepy-sounding jokes about how being molested by guards is desireable if the guards are cute and similar comments, was definitely beyond "socially awkward adult male".

There is also no reason that "male" should be a relevant qualifier.

The original essay on Medium quoted him as saying that it was "most plausible" that the girl would have presented herself to Minsky as "entirely willing".

No basis is offered for why we should think this is "most plausible", except that Stallman likes Minsky and does not think it plausible that he did a bad thing.

There are some summaries which misrepresent what he said, but what he actually said was definitely something people could reasonably object to, especially given the longer context of him saying crazy stuff on related topics before.

I am not sure I'd go that far, but I want to point a thing out:

Back in the 90s, it was a running joke that if you were going backpacking, you should take along a 3' length of fiber optic cable. "If you get lost, just bury the fiber optic cable and ask the backhoe operator for a ride back to town."

In at least three programming-related communities I'm in, I have made a quip about "I think I'm gonna replace the 3' length of fiber optic cable in my backpacking gear with a short post about Go's garbage collector", and people have filled in "so if I get lost, I can just take the post out, and then ask pcwalton for a ride back to town".

I can't say whether or not the argument is made in good faith, but man, there sure is a lot of it.