tachyoff

Precisely. The Overton window for this topic seems to have shifted pretty far. The default position should be one of positive consent and assumed privacy. But then again, I think it’s all moot considering that Facebook’s existence is predicated on them collecting data. Asking them to do less of it is like asking a plant to stop photosynthesizing. That is to say: it’s their whole raison d’être, which means they won’t change it without a little encouragement from third parties.

It has to be Quicken, right? They're the largest outfit I can think of. They’re obviously not primarily software, but I think they employ most of the tech workers downtown.

Do they count even though they’re headquartered in Campbell, CA?

The trip, which took place on a luxury bus outfitted with a supply of vegan doughnuts and coal-infused kombucha, was known as the "Comeback Cities Tour."

I live in Detroit. It’s a city that has been pushed to the edge of oblivion... and then into oblivion for several decades. It's fantastic that thers investment, but at the same time, stuff like this feels so incredibly patronizing. "It's nicer than San Francisco!" Yes, there are, in fact, nice buildings outside of San Francisco, even in Detroit.

Midwestern cities don't exist solely to make money, and I'm rather disturbed that they're seen more and more as nothing but investment vehicles. Detroit is 80% black. We didn’t even have working street lights until a few years ago (shout out to the Public Lighting Authority). I just look at San Francisco and the entire Bay Area, and I think to myself: "we don't want that here". Detroit isn't just cheap rent and exposed brick. It's grit and soul and pain and culture and 300+ years of history. I'm sure these investors got a lovely tour. Did they talk about the 1967 riots? Did they show them northwest Detroit, where entire city blocks are basically becoming urban prairie? Did they talk to the regular folks living and working in the city for generations? They’re lovely people, and they live here too. They're as much a part of Detroit as the Madison Building or New Center or Dan Gilbert or the rotting houses or the rich history.

I think there are other places to work besides the Bay Area.

Check the client-side JavaScript just to be sure. ;)

“Despite working in Silicon Valley, where a 1100sqft home with no yard costs $2m...”

You could buy roughly 667 acres of land here in Lower Michigan for that much money, which provides plenty of room for wine and chickens. ;)

The internet was readable before AI/ML. I don’t think bikeshedding should be that complicated.

I refuse to let a simple phrase like that become verboten just because a certain configuration of it was used by someone that our circles of friends dislike. Personally, I think it’s a funny reappropriation.

But either way, this isn’t particularly germane to the conversation, and you could even argue that it wasn’t done intentionally considering that Medium used to be readable.

Anyway, Medium is annoyingly hard to read now, and I’m glad someone’s done something to fix it.

A little nihilism legitimately helps me. One day, the sun will expand and, most likely, engulf the inner planets. Save for a few hunks of metal and bursts of energy, all that was, is, and will be of earth will be incinerated, and rather spectacularly, I might add. We’ll (most likely) be long gone by then, but I find comfort recognizing that my life is but a short blip on the cosmological timeline, and as such, I shouldn’t take life too seriously. Live well, if you can. Be kind to others, love as much as possible, but remember, as they say: you can’t take it with you.

I've heard that argument, but recently I've started to disagree with it. I can only speak to my limited experience, but my three prior gigs have all wanted some amount of "passion", but never once was I expected to work 50/60+ hour weeks as a result. There was crunch time once where we came in on a Sunday and the company paid for lunch and dinner, but that was it.

Anyway, now when I see that companies want "passionate" people, I interpret it to mean "convince us you're enthusiastic enough during the interview". It's all a game of how much you can bullshit. I like to believe that most managers, and especially most developers, realize that most code isn't "sexy", because most software isn't "sexy" and most developers are working on most software.

Caveat: I work in the Midwest. Maybe things are different in Silicon Valley, where every startup seems to fancy itself as changing the world.

She wasn’t powerful enough to avoid the consequences.

Except TangoTrotFox's original statement was:

The speed of light is not a speed limit on effective travel, but on observation.

Which is absolutely factually false.

I'm going to quote my original post:

In 1663, John Twynn, was tried and executed in England for printing material that suggested that perhaps the monarchy should be beholden to the people.

None of this is relevant to whether Twitter want to be complicit in publishing this speech which they are under no obligation to do.

Grandparent was arguing that people can't handle free speech and that:

Speech needs to be protected, but when it starts to encroach on my pursuit of happiness it's a problem. Facebook, Twitter, etc don't need to become chan sites.

I hear this a lot, particularly from the left (although the right does it too), on the grounds of protecting people from "harmful" speech. I disagree with that, which is why I responded, because I don't think enough people know about the modern interpretation of free speech and the long, storied history it has (not just in the US but everywhere). I certainly had no idea before I started reading.

I'm also wondering why the great examples of free speech that people reach for are always racism.

It's not that they're examples, it's that the landmark Supreme Court cases that established our modern understanding of free speech typically involved the KKK and nazis (c.f. National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie). In other words, people with horrible beliefs are the only reason why you can stand on a street corner and preach about socialism, communism, anarchy, etc (which might be "horrible beliefs" too, depending on the individual). 100 years ago, someone distributed a gentle poem by a socialist and was put in jail, and it was legal. Do you want to go back to that? Because it is absolutely possible.

First amendment jurisprudence, thankfully, disagrees with you. But first, some history.

For most of modern history, speech has been censored in some form or another by governments. Naturally so, as any kind of divergent thinking can be dangerous to power structures (this hasn't gone away). In 1663, John Twynn, was tried and executed in England for printing material that suggested that perhaps the monarchy should be beholden to the people. The Sedition Act of 1798 was passed by the American Congress and signed into law by President John Adams. Namely, it prescribed fines and imprisonment for those who "write, print, utter, or publish... any false, scandalous and malicious writing" against the government. This was used to jail several members of Congress, among others.

Modern free speech jurisprudent didn't start to develop until as late as 1917. The Espionage Act of 1917 was enacted at the start of World War I to prevent actions that were seen as unfavorable to the war. The Supreme Court upheld the law as not violating freedom of speech in Schenck v. United States. I believe there was a subsequent 1917 or 1918 case that began to turn the tide (the reference escapes me at the moment and I'm at work), but it wasn't until 1969 in Brandenburg v. Ohio that the Supreme Court ruled that inflammatory speech is protected as long as it satisfies a two-prong test:

1. The speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action," AND 2. The speech is "likely to incite or produce such action."

The case concerned an Ohio Ku Klux Klan member who was recorded saying particularly horrid and denigrating things about African Americans, but, notably, nothing specifically threatening. The Supreme Court upheld your right to say things like "I think we should kill all Jews" because, although a terrible thing to say, statements like that aren't imminently encouraging lawless action and not likely to do so.

Past that point, the Supreme Court has regularly upheld this interpretation of the first amendment. The best argument against a more European, say, interpretation of the first amendment is that, simply: governments only ever censor speech that they don't like. That's why the Espionage Act was used to incarcerate the likes of Emma Goldman and not, say, the people who were helping organize lynchings. If you were to enact hate speech legislation, and history bears this out, the people most affected are the minorities: black people, Jews, Muslims, LGBTQ people, pacifists, communists, anarchists, socialists, etc. Think about all of the police that shoot unarmed black men. Can you seriously imagine police forces across America protecting the speech of someone that calls for the abolition of the institution that person belongs to?

So that's a brief history and law lesson (caveat: I am neither a lawyer nor a historian). This is certainly a larger discussion to have, and I very much enjoy debating things like hate speech legislation and speech restriction in general, but I'll leave you with this for now.

Well-said. The more I see from Twitter, the more I try to distance myself from it. I think a combination of today's political environment and the nature of the internet (pseudoanonymity and not being able to interact with humans face-to-face) and Twitter's short, pithy format creates the perfect storm for all kinds of nonsense.

I know a lot of people (typically young, like me) for whom this kind of discourse is normal. Shouting people down is normal. Shunning them if they in any way disagree if normal. Especially online, it's impossible to hold even a slightly different point of view than someone without being considered an immediate mortal enemy.

I've been reading books more, including reading things I disagree with. It's difficult for me, but it's getting easier to look at things calmly and rationally. I'm working through a book now by someone who has a different (but valid!) view than I do, and instead of getting upset, I'm taking notes and trying to faithfully represent their argument, as well as trying to take the arguments apart and evaluate them. I think I'll still end up disagreeing with them at the end, but it's helpful to know the counterarguments to something you support and to be able not only to faithfully represent them, but rationally argue them.

In my lifetime the vast majority of my acute health issues went away on their own without any particular medical intervention. I mean well over 99.9%.

To be fair, if they didn't, you might not be here to talk about it, so there's definitely some survivorship bias there. The people who waited and died obviously can't say anything because they're dead.

That's because most Americans have no idea how probability or risk mitigation work. It's their body, dammit, and they want you to fix it!

Under relativity, you can't simply add speeds like that, unfortunately (I believe this is related to the fact that the speed of light is the same in all reference frames). Here's a link that can explain it better, though: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/139-physics/the-th...

In short, you can't go faster than light in any reference frame, relative to any other observer.

Here's another source: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/75501/lorentz-an...

Here's a catch-22 comment from elsewhere on this post:

Avoiding women in workplace is essentially sexist. And for non-sexists there is no reason to do so.

So you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Given how easy it is for public opinion to shift, I certainly wouldn't want to take that chance. Who would want to interact with people like that in a professional setting? I wouldn't, and I try not to.

The speed of light is not a speed limit on effective travel, but on observation.

It is absolutely a limit on effective travel (if we ignore things like wormholes for a second). Conventional motion through space is bounded by c for several reasons, not the least of which being that the closer you get to c, the more energy it takes to make smaller and smaller changes in velocity (the object acts as though it's gaining mass the faster it goes). In fact, it's asymptotic. Accelerating a particle to c would require an infinite amount of energy.

Then those "perfectly reasonable" applications are free to eschew languages like Java. People do it all the time to great success. People also use Java to great success. But that's neither here nor there. My point is that it's unfair to call Java programs bloated when the extra space is necessary to support the runtime environment that makes Java Java. I'm not arguing the merits of such a thing (indeed, swap Java with literally any other language), I just want it to be clear that C and Java programs run differently, and both languages/runtimes, such as they are, were developed at different times and to serve different purposes, and therefore it's not correct to bemoan that Java programs are larger. That's like complaining that JavaScript doesn't give you direct memory access or that assembly doesn't have classes.

$50,000 per year for 70 hour per week works out to $28,571.43 if it were a standard 40-hour work week. Oh, and no benefits and you get to pay for gas and wear-and-tear on your car. So I guess if you're okay spending almost every waking hour working for peanuts and no health insurance, then sure.

It’s funny you say that because my workplace is EXACTLY the dumpster fire known as Twitter. No, I don’t work there. Rather, all issues of “diversity” are pretty much the same ridiculous identity politics stuff you find on Twitter. The straight, white men at the office regularly post content that is denigrating to those very same groups (usually in the form of pithy memes; it isn’t even intellectual content). I don’t know how common this is in SV or elsewhere, but it’s certainly prevelant where I am now. And I don’t care how someone feels about “cishet white boys”: that kind of thing is not appropriate for work. Ever. At all.

I can see the Buzzfeed story now: “White Tech Bro Rudely Interrupts Women To Mansplain Something”. There is absolutely a chilling effect. I mean, do you want men to approach you when you’re having a conversation or do you want them to stay away from your space? At this point, it’s easiest to just retreat and not talk to people. At least then you don’t risk becoming a hashtag.

I’m not a lawyer, so I’m curious (and I can’t read the article): are quotas legal? Irrespective of their efficacy or morality, they must’ve held up in court, right? I thought it was fairly obvious that organizations have minority quotas. Then again, I also know that discrimination against ANY gender and ANY skin color (including male and white) is illegal, which was born out recently when Google’s decision to fire a rather opinionated individual who regularly derided straight, white men was upheld. Political beliefs are not a protected class, and you can absolutely be fired for them (although I think in this case the person was let go because railing against vast swaths of your coworkers is disruptive and rude, even if they’re “cishet white boys”).

You can't say "wow, look how much smaller the C program is" and then ignore why it's so much smaller in the first place (no runtime, no garbage collection, etc.) If that's the case, then we should hand-roll assembly all the time because it's "smaller". You also can't just call Java inefficient because it produces larger programs or is "slower". It's all about choosing the right tool for the job.

That's such an unfair comparison, though (and really, with 8+ GB of RAM being the norm, 20 MB is still pretty svelte). Java has an entire virtual machine and runtime, whereas a C program is just a binary that gets loaded straight into memory.

Something something cut and paste.