smcphile

They were all over 60: a man (a doctor) in his early 60’s with no apparent previous health problems; a woman in her early 70’s with a major previous problem, a cancer; and a woman in her early 90’s with no life threatening problems, but mobility issues, who was living in a retirement home (some other people in her retirement home also died from COVID-19).

Do you know many people who have died? Who have gotten seriously ill? Are you afraid? Do you think the response in your own location is too little or too much?

I live in France. I know of three people who have died and of many people who’ve been ill. I’m not afraid myself, I avoid crowded areas and getting physically too close to anyone (other than my wife). I think the response by the government here in France has been acceptable, other than that for a long time there was a shortage of both masks and tests. (It would have been better to have had both a stockpile of masks available and the capacity to manufacture them here locally.)

I am partial to the idea of someone getting to decide, in advance, who they can see or hear. Letting the mob in, and then muting or banning after the fact can be exploited too easily.

I see that that could be done in a private group setting where everyone knows each other. In a forum for the general public though I have difficulty seeing how that could be done. Do you have any implementation details in mind?

It can be a first step to creating a new distribution, but most people just do it as a learning experience.

Here's one example though of someone who went on to create a new distribution: http://www.nutyx.org/en/

To create a distribution, you need a package manager of some sort to manage software updates, and while LFS discusses some possible package managers that's not really its focus.

It depends, there's no simple, standard answer.

Layoffs in France correspond with the idea of a "licenciement économique" and the details of how that is managed are presented here: https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/N481 .

Simply put, it's a negotiated process between the company, union representatives, and the government / legal representatives.

In France, layoffs are difficult to do if a company is making money, but can be done to keep a company from losing money or shutting down or moving somewhere else (i.e. another country).

Also technically I guess (IANAL) you might have to prove that you obtained the source code prior to the license change.

I don't see why. If some code is made available under an MIT license and then the copyright owner switches to a new license, nothing stops others from continuing to use the original code under the original license.

Of course to do this you would have to know the code exists, but you could learn about its existence after the license change from someone other than the copyright owner.

From what I heard France has strong worker protection laws, even stronger than Germany. Do you think this is/could be a problem for startups?

Yes, France has strong worker protection laws, but if someone is found to have been abusively fired there’s a cap on how much they can sue for. The amount is based on how long they’ve been with the company. For example, after 2 years, the amount is 3 months salary, after 5 years, 6 months salary. The complete table is here: https://droit-finances.commentcamarche.com/faq/54743-bareme-...

No, open source licenses impose no obligations on the copyright holder for their own code. For example, if the copyright holder releases their own code under a GPL licence, no law prevents them from also releasing a modified or unmodified version under a proprietary licence. This is allowed by law, but the proprietary version doesn’t of course negate the rights already given to those who received the GPL version.

If a project has many contributors (copyright holders), they would all have to agree to a license change, so in practice something like the Linux kernel is very unlikely to ever change to a proprietary licence, but it’s theoretically possible.

The copyright holders are never bound by the terms of a user licence.

My question to you, gentle reader – are there any licences which compel the distribution or publication of the development history?

No, other than that any given project has to give proper credit to code used from other projects / copyright holders.

My understanding of why this is so is the following: A free software or open source software licence is based on copyright law. As such, it restricts what users can do with the source code, but it never restricts what the copyright holders can do with the software (assuming all the copyright holders collectively agree).

A user can never (theoretically at least, there may be a few edge cases) sue the copyright holders for anything, because there’s no warranty. No warranty on the code source history (or anything else). So code source history is always optional.

The submission appears to be available only as a video. It would be helpful to prefix the title with "[video]", if that's possible.

Ending at-will employment is a legal solution to a cultural problem. Unlikely to work, but more importantly, I’d argue it’s unwise to rely on legal codes to solve non-legal problems.

Let me prefix my remarks by noting that I'm not American and that I live in a country where at-will employment for the most part doesn't exist.

I disagree that getting someone fired from their job is merely a cultural problem. It's also a financial problem and hence a legal problem.

As I see it, if someone burglarizes your home, they're depriving you of the goods they steal. If you're arbitrarily dismissed from a job that you're performing perfectly well (including treating coworkers, clients, etc. correctly), you're deprived of the lost income. In either case, there's a financial loss involved and I fail to see why the law shouldn't try to protect the victim of such a loss.

I do agree that laws will never offer a complete solution to cancel culture, but a solution doesn't have to be complete to be justified, various partial solutions are OK.

But if most employers were to go fully remote, at that point the shortage-driven Silicon Valley wages would drop near the national average, regardless of how much more it costs us to live here.

Yes, and, using the same reasoning, at some point the cost of living in Silicon Valley would also go down so as to approach the national average.

But the arguments I see from Facebook and in this article are about cost of living. That's wrong. Price it based on value created by the employee.

Salaries aren’t based primarily on the value created by the employee and never have been. Salaries are based on supply and demand. Workers are in a market and they sell their time and skills to the highest bidder. They’re in competition with other workers capable of doing the same work.

Of course not all workers are equally capable of doing the same work, so in that sense the value created by an employee does come into play when determining what they’ll be paid. But if two equally skilled and competent workers are competing for the same job, the one who will accept a lower salary will get the job. This will tend to favour employees living in an area with a lower cost of living.

The URL given doesn’t seem to be working (404 error). The correct URL seems to be: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/11/fawlty-towers-...

Update: The new URL states the episode is being reinstated: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/jun/12/john-cleese-...

The URL given didn’t work for me. The correct URL appears to be: https://www.fox5ny.com/news/walmart-looks-to-remove-all-cash...

Too much is made of the idea of 'objective facts' and 'subjective experience'. It causes so much linguistic confusion.

I disagree on this point. When we think of matter, in terms of physics or chemistry, we think of matter as having certain qualities, such as mass, volume, velocity, etc. However subjective experience doesn’t seem, at least on the surface, to share those qualities.

Can the existence of subjective experience be explained using only the qualities currently associated with matter, as understood in today’s physics? It doesn’t seem so.

So it seems to me that the fact that subjective experience exists is a hint that our current models are incomplete and need revising.

How exactly do they need revising? No idea whatsoever.

I don't know if that is a helpful way of constructing the issue; it certainly isn't a neutral one.

Reading what I wrote again, I agree that it could have been expressed better. Sorry about that.

If you are a physicalist (which I'm not) consciousness is not an epiphenomenon with no influence on the physical world, but a component of the physical world which takes part in and influences the physical world.

Ok. If I try to look at it from the physicalist's point of view, I have trouble understanding how the subjective side of consciousness is explained. It seems to me to be just ignored or waved away.

Why couldn't the functions of consciousness in influencing the world exist without subjectively experienced consciousness? What evolutionary value does this subjectively experienced consciousness have (as seen from a physicalist point of view)?

All I am arguing this that the normal formulation of the hard problem of consciousness begs the question.

You're not necessarily wrong, it depends on what exactly is meant by begging the question.

What you wrote was:

What is the relevant quality being distinguished between the description or explanation of the physical processes that correlate to certain mental states and behaviours, on the one hand, and the description and explanation of the conscious first-person experience of phenomenal states, on the other? <

Intuitively it seems to me that there is a difference of quality, even if I'm incapable of describing exactly what that difference is. I can't even imagine how one would go about explaining the difference in quality to the satisfaction of everyone.

This doesn't bother me too much though, because, put perhaps too briefly, philosophy is not science and logical arguments are not mathematical logic.

However, I can also see how someone could see not answering your question as begging the question.

I am myself agnostic on the question of consciousness because we have so little knowledge of the issue. A lot of philosophy in this area is interesting, and fun to think about, but more often than not it is speculative and linguistic in character.

My way of thinking is perhaps not so different.

I think of philosophy as being constrained by science, in that you don't want philosophy to contradict well established scientific facts, but as being otherwise freer than science to explore how the world might work. I also think of philosophy as having a role in dealing with questions that are largely outside the domain of science (beauty, ethics, etc.), but which can still sometimes be informed by science.

But the obvious physicalist response is that consciousness has evolved as an efficient information-processing device in in the course of evolution and so that it is, really, understandable through the empirical investigation of the empirical world.

What I don’t understand here is how consciousness can both 1) have survival value and thus be passed on through evolution and 2) be an epiphenomenon that has no influence whatsoever on the physical world.

I suppose both statements could be true, but only if a very non-intuitive definition of consciousness is used, and that seems to me to be also begging the question.

Update: fixed a typo

Sentience has a subjective quality to it, but it’s not clear it has any power.

As I said, I don’t know. I agree it’s not clear.

The first book I read on the subject, many years ago, was “Body and Mind”, by Keith Campbell. The book outlines various positions taken on the mind problem. I still have the book. Your position appears to be a version of epiphenominalism.

I found the book helpful as a short overview of the subject. For example, in chapter two the book describes the mind-body problem as four propositions that form an inconsistent tetrad. Any three are mutually consistent and can all be true. But any three together imply that the fourth is false.

The four propositions are: (1) The human body is a material thing. (2) The human mind is a spiritual thing. (3) Mind and body interact. (4) Spirit and matter do not interact.

The author describes a “spiritual object” as “one that does not have all the qualities of matter; it lacks at least some of: mass, volume, velocity, solidity”. (Some qualities of matter are allowed, just not all.)

“Quantum mechanics disproves determinism and therefore disproves free-will-skepticism” is an asinine argument ...

I agree, it doesn't disprove determinism. If someone argues that it does, they're mistaken.

The real reason free will doesn’t exist is not to do with determinism, but the fact that you don’t exist. You’re a collection of cells that, regardless of whether they behave deterministically or randomly, are out of your control.

I don't believe the assertions you're making here have been proved either.

I'm not an expert by any means, I've just another layman who's been following the "mind body problem" for a while from the peanut gallery.

I tend to agree with David Chalmers's arguments that there's a "hard problem of consciousness".

I know that other philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, don't agree that this hard problem exists. I've read some of Dennett's books, but I'm not convinced that he's right on this point. I wasn't convinced by "Consciousness Explained", for example.

So, to sum up, I don't believe anyone really knows yet how mind and consciousness work, it's too early to say.

I’m in France and I’ve lived here for 30 years. What you’ve written is correct.

However here’s the reality: If your employer dislikes you, they can fire you for some false reason. You then take it to court and you win. You will be awarded some amount, and there’s now a legally defined cap on that amount, which the employer knows before they fire you. The amount is roughly one month’s salary for each year worked at the company. And you don’t get your job back.

Of course not all employers use this strategy for various reasons, but it exists as a possibility, so it has to be taken into account when planning what response is in your best interest.

For the context it is a small business of 6 people.

I think the size of the company explains why you were asked to take emails while on vacation. In a bigger organization, with more redundancy, handling vacations would be less of a problem.

I’ve never been told take emails while on vacation, but I’ve volunteered to do so when there was nobody available with the skills and/or specific knowledge to replace me.

Since you’re asking for advice, I’d advise you to accept taking emails and just try to ensure it doesn’t take you to much time. Avoid doing too much hand holding in your messages and just answer the critical stuff. Before you leave, explain to the two programmers what they can decide on their own and what they can’t.

This time I'd like to start really pouring my soul into something that can provide meaning to my life, without rushing into the next app/side project/hustle/startup to temporarily calm my curiosity.

I'm not sure it's wise to link seeing life as meaningful to any future project you might take on. Projects can succeed or fail and they can start with good intentions but have unforeseen bad consequences.

Also, Rolf Dobelli, author of "The art of the good life", makes the case that doing what you do best and donating some of the money that you earn to worthwhile causes is far more efficient in obtaining results than doing volunteer work a professional could be paid to do much better (especially if that professional is in a part of the world where earnings and the cost of living are low).

In general I believe people find meaning either through a religion or some sort of philosophy of life (such as stoicism).

From a taxation point of view I'm under the impression that for a country such as France for example seniors are gonna get _on average_ way more benefits during their pension than the equivalent of their lifetime contribution. Mainly due to demographics and life expectancy evolution.

(I'm making a digression here from the main topic, so don't read on if you're not interested.) I'm not sure why you would think pensioners in France will get far back far more than they paid in.

Under the current system in France, when you're working, you pay into one or more of the dozens of different pension plans. Each plan is designed to be self-sufficient. It receives money from those who are currently working, invests or saves the money, and pays out those who paid in in the past and who are now retired.

Doing things this way has several pitfalls. The main problem is that if demographics change (greater percentage of pensioners as compared to workers) it puts a strain on those left in the workplace. This doesn't mean however that each pensioner is getting more than they paid in, it just means that proportionately there are less people left paying into the plan.

The retirement system is currently being revised. In the future, there will be one universal plan where each euro paid in will buy a certain number of points, which will have some value when you retire. Since the value of a point can fluctuate, pensioners may end up getting more or less than they paid in. (They'll get what the plan can afford to pay out.)

I wouldn't mind prepping 6 months on the side using cracking the coding interview, leetcode, etc. but I feel like I will be judged too harshly due to my lack of progress in my career during the last five years.

I would recommend reading “So good they can’t ignore you” by Cal Newport to get realistic advice and strategies for career advancement.

For example, firstly you need to be clear about whether you’re in (or want to be in) a “winner takes all” market or an “auction” market. The strategies for building “career capital” are completely different for each.

I don’t think an all or nothing approach is necessary.

I was too stressed out at one point and what worked for me was just making myself unavailable for certain periods of the day and handling emails, voice messages, phone calls, etc. in batch mode at scheduled periods of the day.

The details of how exactly you go about doing this will depend on your situation, but it’s quite doable.

The IP lobby overreached when they got life of author + 70 years / 120 years corporate copyright monopolies passed into law.

I agree, but I don’t see why that automatically makes the recent modifications (that brought on the lawsuit) by IA morally right.

Even if some works should already be in the public domain and are not yet, the IA modification was also taking money away from relatively recent works.

Do you think people should be allowed to take out any software they want for free for 2-3 weeks for a "National Software Emergency Library". If not, why books.

I'm not sure what the IA was thinking when they made that modification. Perhaps they thought that during the pandemic such a change would be found temporarily acceptable.

I agree with your point that programmers, software publishers, authors and publishers should all be able to make money and get paid for their work. I'm not sure though what are the best business models for making that happen.

What I've settled on myself, for the moment, is buying physical (paper) books, buying ebooks without DRM, downloading old ebooks in the public domain for free (or buying them cheaply from sites that do a good job on the markup) and taking out books from my local library.

My wife buys Kindle ebooks (with DRM) from Amazon, because she requires a very large font size, and the Amazon solution was the best that I found (biggest selection of books of the type that my wife reads).

I don't understand how so many people here are commenting as if giving out books for free was a good idea.

I'm not sure how many people are thinking that. Some must be, but not necessarily many.

There's a difference between "giving" and "lending". The IA have never given away copyrighted books.

I've used the IA's lending library in the past and the copyrighted ebooks were protected by Adobe DRM. You were allowed to take out a few books for a few weeks (like in a real library). You were required to return the books before a given date. And if you didn't, the ADOBE software wouldn't let you read the book anymore (because of the DRM).

According to the article, until recently, the IA would scan a book and would lend out the created ebook only to a limited number of people at a time, based on how many copies of the physical book that they had.

What changed recently is that they began lending out to a potentially unlimited number of people at a time. But, you still didn't get to keep the book for more than two or three weeks (I forget the exact number).

In March, as the coronavirus pandemic was gaining steam, the Internet Archive announced it was dispensing with this waiting-list system. Under a program it called the National Emergency Library, IA began allowing an unlimited number of people to check out the same book at the same time—even if IA only owned one physical copy.

I don't understand why the IA people thought this change would go unchallenged. Seems like a pretty suicidal move to me, although I wish them luck.