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friendlysock
2 days ago
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link
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Former Tesla employee "ssh'd to as many cars as possible" and other stories
Can we not post scuttlebutt on twitter from a thread in the dedicated SomethingAwful technology shitposting forum?
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how many comments of yours do you think are policing what people post here? 10%, 20%? Before you respond with something along the lines of “eternal september” or “hacker news” just know I’ve lurked at HN for almost as long as its been around and I had a computer in the late 80s.
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CEOs would not have a lot of time in the day…
Funny, he seems to have time to respond to random twitter accounts all day.
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Taking your jab at French jurisprudence seriously, what do you mean by that? Is this some recent court case?
Because France basically invented the modern Continental legal framework (well, Napoleon overhauled the ancient Roman system) which is used all over Europe (and beyond!) today.
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I don’t think Tesla as a corporate entity or Musk as a private individual / CEO will dignify this source with any sort of acknowledgement. That’s a PR no-no.
However, if a personal actually trained in ferreting out the truth and presenting it in a verifiable manner (these people are usually employed as journalists) were to pull on this thread, who knows where it might lead?
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The standards of evidence in most places, including science, are that you present evidence for your claims since (a) you should already have it and (b) it saves readers time. Bullshit spreads fast as both media and Facebook’s experiment show. Retractions and thorough investigations often don’t make it to same audience. So, strong evidence for source’s identity or claims should be there by default. It’s why you often see me citing people as I make controversial claims to give people something to check them with.
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There’s nothing surprising about the employee’s claims. It’s like asking for evidence that Google spies on users. They admit to it, and so does Tesla. So there’s your evidence, and I think it’s sad that you’re taking these trolls here seriously.
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Thanks for the link. Key point:
“Every Tesla has GPS tracking that can be remotely accessed by the owner, as well as by Tesla itself. That means that people will always know where a Tesla is. This feature can be turned off, by entering the car and turning off the remote access feature. I am not sure why you would want to do this, but you can. Unfortunately, there are ways for a thief to turn off the remote access feature, and this will blind you to the specific information about the car. It will not stop Tesla from being able to track the car. They will retain that type of access no matter what, and have the authority to use it in the instances of vehicle theft.”
re taking trolls seriously. We’re calling you out about posting more unsubstantiated claims via Twitter. If your goal is getting info out, then you will always achieve it by including links like you gave me in the first place. Most people aren’t going to endlessly dig to verify stuff people say on Twitter. They shouldn’t since the BS ratio is through the roof. Also, that guy didn’t just make obvious claims like they could probably track/access the vehicle: he made many about their infrastructure and management that weren’t as obvious or verifiable. He also made them on a forum celebrated for trolling. So, yeah, links are even more helpful here.
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But the point isn’t to even say that everything written here is true. The point is to share a very interesting data point that likely constitutes primary source material, and force a reaction from Tesla to stop their dangerous practices (or offer them a chance to set the record straight if any of this is untrue, which we’ve established is unlikely).
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“Dangerous” compared to what? Force how?
Low-effort regurgitation of screencaps is not some big act of rebellion, it is just a way of lowering quality and adding noise.
But the point isn’t to even say that everything written here is true.
If we wanted to read fiction we could go enjoy the sister Lobster site devoted to that activity.
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Which is why several people are asking you to stop it.
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Is there any evidence your tweets or Lobsters submissions have changed security or ethical practices of a major company?
If not, then that’s either not what you’re doing here or you should be bringing that content to Tesla’s or investors’ attention via mediums they look at. It’s just noise on Lobsters.
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I agree. I did at least learn from your link that Arnnon Geshuri, Vice President of HR at Tesla, was a senior one at Google that some reports said was involved in the price fixing and abusive retention of labor here. That’s a great hire if your an honest visionary taking care of employees who enable your world-changing vision. ;)
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friendlysock
4 days ago
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link
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CVE-2018-1000657 - Arbitrary code execution in a core Rust library
We don’t want to get submissions for every CVE and, if we do get CVEs, we probably want them tagged
security.-
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That’d be a good meta tag proposal thread.
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Yeah, I’d rather not have them at all. Maybe a detailed, tech write-up of discovery, implementation, and mitigation of new classes of vulnerability with wide impact. Meltdown/Spectre or Return-oriented Programming are examples. Then, we see only the deep stuff with vulnerability-listing sites having the regular stuff for people using that stuff.
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seems like a CVE especially arbitrary code execution is worth posting. my 2 cents
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There are a lot of potentially-RCE bugs (type confusion, use after free, buffer overflow write), if there was a lobsters thread for each of them, there’d be no room for anything else.
Here’s a list a short from the past year or two, from one source: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/oss-fuzz/issues/list?can=1&q=Type%3DBug-Security+label%3AStability-Memory-AddressSanitizer&sort=-modified&colspec=ID+Type+Component+Status+Library+Reported+Owner+Summary+Modified&cells=ids
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i’m fully aware of that. What I was commenting on was Rust having one of these RCE-type bugs, which, to me, is worthy of discussion. I think its weird to police these like their some kind of existential threat to the community, especially given how much enlightenment can be gained by discussion of their individual circumstances.
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It claims few things - from the rustlang website:
Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.
None of those claims are really true.
It’s clearly not fast enough if you need unsafe to get real performance - which is the reason this cve was possible.
It’s clearly not preventing segfaults - which this cve shows.
It also can’t prevent deadlocks so it is not guaranteeing thread safety.
I like rustlang but the claims it makes are mostly incorrect or overblown.
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Unsafe Rust is part of Rust. I grant you that “safe Rust is blazingly fast” may not be “really true”.
Rust prevents segfaults. It just does not prevent all segfaults. For example, a DOM fuzzer was run on Chrome and Firefox and found segfaults, but the same fuzzer run for the same time on Servo found none.
I grant you on deadlocks. But “Rust prevents data race” is true.
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I’m just going to link my previous commentary: https://lobste.rs/s/7b0gab/how_rust_s_standard_library_was#c_njpoza
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this is really cool and I’ve wanted to write a gopher server for fun for awhile now, thanks for writing it and posting it
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friendlysock
1 month ago
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link
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ARM kills off its anti RISC-V riscv-basics.com site after own staff revolt
a chipmonger kills its webshit propogands after some employees complain
If you can easily n-gate a submission, maybe it shouldn’t be here.
Spam about ad campaigns and counterreactions is not a core value prop of lobsters. :(
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on the other hand, this story is currently on the front page with an above-median vote score, and the other riscv-basics story is the highest voted story currently on the front page, so evidently the users of lobsters found both relevant to their interests.
Yours is some low-quality gatekeeping.
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News is the mindkiller. Humans are hardwired to be really interested in new things regardless of their utility, usefulness, or healthiness–you need look no further than the 24 hour news cycle or tabloids or HN front page to observe this phenomena.
If you look at any given submission, it has a bunch of different things it’s “good” at: good in terms of educating about hardware, good in terms of talking about the math behind some compiler optimization, good in whatever. Submissions that are news are good primarily in terms of how new they are, and have other goodness that tangential if it exists at all. The articles may even have a significant off-topic component, such as politics or gossip or advertising.
This results in the following pathologies:
- Over time, if a community optimizes for news, they start to normalize those other components, until the scope of the submissions expands to encompass the formerly off-topic material…and that material is usually something that is at best duplicated elsewhere and at worst pure flamebait.
- The industry we’re in specializes in spending loads of money on attractive clickbait and advertising presenting as news, and so soon the submissions become flooded with low-quality crap or advertising that takes up community cycles to process without ever giving anything substantial in return.
- The perceived quality of the site goes down for everybody and the community fragments, because news is available elsewhere (thus, the utility of the site is diminished) and because the valuable discussion is taken up with nitpicking news stories. This is why, say, c2 wiki is still around and useful and a lot of news sites…aren’t.
What you dismiss as gatekeeping is an attempt to combat this.
EDIT:
A brief note–your example of the two ARM articles being on the front page illustrate the issue. Otherwise intelligent lobsters will upvote that sort of stuff because it’s “neat”, without noting that with everybody behaving that way we’ve temporarily lost two good spots for technical content–instead, we have more free advertising for ARM (all press is good press) and now slightly more precedent for garbage submissions and call-response (news thing, rebuttal to news thing, criticism/analysis of rebuttal). It’s all so tiresome.
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I bookmarked and often shared this post since it seemed like a nice set of guidelines. Had a lot of votes in favor, too.
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Haha. Depends on the context. They’re important for meta threads since it can determine site’s future.
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This is interesting news, it’s not just drama or clickbait. The big chip makers have maintained an oligopoly through patents on abstract math: an ISA. It’s insane that innovation can only come from a few big players because of their lawyers. RISC-V is the first serious dent that the open source movement has been able to make in this market because (unlike ARM, OpenPOWER, and OpenSPARC) it has a serious commitment to open source and it is technologically superior.
ARM will be the first player to fall to RISC-V because they have a monopoly on lower end chips. Samsung, Qualcomm, NVidia, Apple, Google, etc. are all perfectly capable of making a competitive chips without having to pay a 1% tax to ARM. We are already seeing this with Western Digital’s switch to RISC-V, there is no advantage to paying ARM for simple micro-controllers … which is a huge portion of ARM’s business.
That they are resorting to FUD tactics shows that ARM execs know this. People interested in the larger strategic moves, like myself, find this article about how their FUD tactics backfired very interesting. I would appreciate it if you didn’t characterize this sort of news as spam and the people who follow how big industry players are behaving as just being into drama.
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With respect, a good deal of your post is kremlinology.
That they are resorting to FUD tactics shows that ARM execs know this.
The ARM execs cannot be guaranteed to “know” anything of the sort–it’s more likely that there is a standard playbook to be run to talk about any competing technology, RISC-V, OSS, or otherwise. Claiming that “oh ho obviously they feel the heat!” is speculation, and without links and evidence, baseless speculation at that.
the people who follow how big industry players are behaving as just being into drama.
The people who “follow” big industry players are quite usually just people that want to feel informed, and are quite unlikely to be anybody with any actual actions available given this information. Thus, just because something is interesting to them doesn’t make it necessarily useful or actionable.
characterize this sort of news as spam
Again, all news is spam on a site with historically more of a bend towards information and non-news submissions. Further, it’s not like this hasn’t been covered extensively elsewhere, on Slashdot and HN and Gizmodo and elsewhere. It’s not like it isn’t being shown on many fronts.
Please understand that while in this specific case, you might have an interest–but if all lobsters follow this idea, it trashes the site.
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With respect, a good deal of your post is kremlinology.
I’m not allowed to infer basic information about the internal state of an organization based on its public actions?
That they are resorting to FUD tactics shows that ARM execs know this.
The ARM execs cannot be guaranteed to “know” anything of the sort–it’s more likely that there is a standard playbook to be run to talk about any competing technology, RISC-V, OSS, or otherwise. Claiming that “oh ho obviously they feel the heat!” is speculation, and without links and evidence, baseless speculation at that.
Do you understand why I might feel frustrated when someone mocks arguments defending a topic but then demands others provide extensive context to the conversation s/he inserted themselves into?
It’s not like ARM hasn’t spoken out on this subject before; a high level ARM technology fellow debated RISC-V foundation members a couple of years ago. The debate sounds a lot like an early draft of the arguments presented on the FUD website: RISC-V can’t possibly replicate ARM’s ecosystem and design services.
If you go look at the RISC-V foundation membership list, you will find a lot of ARM licensors and competitors including Qualcomm, Samsung, NVidia, IBM, Huawei, and Google. They are using RISC-V as a vehicle to jointly fund high-quality replacements of ARM’s IP, much of which consists of ISA patents and tooling. RISC-V has a very thorough patent review process, making it difficult to sue RISC-V manufacturers based on the ISA. There is a lot I don’t understand about the value ARM adds in terms of chip design and industry collaborations, but NVidia alone is worth 3x what SoftBank paid for ARM just two years ago.
If ARM execs aren’t worried about RISC-V taking market share, they should be. ARM creating a FUD website is very strong, direct evidence that this is the case.
The people who “follow” big industry players are quite usually just people that want to feel informed, and are quite unlikely to be anybody with any actual actions available given this information. Thus, just because something is interesting to them doesn’t make it necessarily useful or actionable.
It feels like you are talking down to me and other interested readers. Are kernel hackers the only people allowed to be interested in kernel development news? I don’t get a lot of actionable information based on the latest scheduler drama, but (as a UX engineer) I am interested in the outcome of these debates.
I came to Lobste.rs for a deeper understanding of the underlying technical and political factors at play here.
Again, all news is spam on a site with historically more of a bend towards information and non-news submissions.
I am open to this argument and I probably wouldn’t have perceived your comments so negatively had I not started from the standard definition of spam. Of course, I also understand that it is hard to justify the time to fit such nuance into a comment on an article : )
You clearly have thought a lot about this and discussed it with others, but new and causal readers haven’t. Perhaps you could use less incendiary language? Just say that Lobste.rs focuses on non-news submissions and that you feel industry news is offtopic.
Further, it’s not like this hasn’t been covered extensively elsewhere, on Slashdot and HN and Gizmodo and elsewhere. It’s not like it isn’t being shown on many fronts.
The technical analysis on HN and other sites is … non-existent. I would love to hear more from experts with informed opinions on chip design and manufacture and that’s what I expected of the comments here.
Please understand that while in this specific case, you might have an interest–but if all lobsters follow this idea, it trashes the site.
Well, I’m kinda peeved that the comments section of both stories turned into a slow-burn flamewar : /
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ARM will be the first player to fall to RISC-V because they have a monopoly on lower end chips.
They actually don’t. A good chunk of the chip market is 8-16 bitters. Billions of dollars worth. In the 32-bit category, there’s a lot of players licensing IP and selling chips. ARM has stuff from low end all the way up to smartphones with piles of proven I.P. plus great brand, ecosystem, and market share. They’re not going anywhere any time soon. MIPS is still selling lots of stuff in low-end devices including 32-bit versions of MCU’s. Cavium used them for Octeon I-III’s for high-performance networking with offload engines.
With most of these, you’d get working hardware, all the peripherals you need, toolchain, books/training on it, lots of existing libraries/code, big company to support you, and maybe someone to sue if the I.P. didn’t work. RISC-V doesn’t have all that yet. Most big companies who aren’t backers… which are most big companies in this space… won’t use it without a larger subset of that or all of that depending on company. I’m keeping hopes up for SiFi’s new I.P. but even it probably has to be licensed for big money. If paying an arm and a leg, many will choose to pay the company known to deliver.
From what I see, ARM’s marketing people or whatever are just reacting to a new development that’s in the news a lot. There some threat to their revenues given some big companies are showing interest in RISC-V. So, they’re slamming the competition and protecting their own brand. Just business news or ops as usual.
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ARM will be the first
player[large monopoly] tofall[lose lots of market-share] to RISC-V because they have a monopoly on lower end chips.Argh, I thought “fall” was too strong a choice of words while writing this, I should’ve listened to myself.
My line of thought was that it’s really hard to create a competitive server platform, as evidenced by the niche market SPARC, OpenPOWER, and ARM occupy in the server space. However, there are plenty of low-power, low-complexity ARM cores out there that are up for grabs. I’m hoping that Samsung, Qualcomm, and other RISC-V backers are supporting RISC-V in hopes that they can take their CPU designs in-house and cut ARM out of the equation.
I am largely ignorant of the (actual) lower-end chip market, thanks for the insight.
With most of these, you’d get working hardware, all the peripherals you need, toolchain, books/training on it, lots of existing libraries/code, big company to support you, and maybe someone to sue if the I.P. didn’t work. RISC-V doesn’t have all that yet.
The RISC-V foundation was very intentional in their licensing and wanted to ensure that designers and manufactures would have plenty of secret sauce they could layer on top of the core spec. This is one of the reasons OpenSPARC failed and why so many different frenemies are collaborating on RISC-V.
From what I see, ARM’s marketing people or whatever are just reacting to a new development that’s in the news a lot.
Their marketing people made the site, but an ARM technology fellow pitched similarly bad arguments in a debate ~2 years ago. Or maybe I’ve just drunk too much Kool Aid.
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I upvoted both submissions. I consciously bought Lobsters frontpage spot for RISC-V advertising and paid loss of technical content in exchange. I acknowlege other negative externalities but I think they are small. Sorry about that.
I think RISC-V advertising is as legitimate as BSD advertising, Rust advertising, etc. here. Yes, technical advertising would have been better. I have a small suspicion of gatekeeping RISC-V (or hardware) against established topics, which you can dismiss by simply stating so in the reply.
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Thanks for keeping up the effort to steer the submissions in a more cerebral direction, away from news. I totally agree with you and appreciate it.
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I almost never upvote these kind of submissions, but seeing as it can be hard to get these off the main page, maybe it could be interesting for lobsters to have some kind of merging feature that could group stories that are simply different stages of the same news into the same story, thus only blocking one spot.
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Now that is interesting. It could be some sort of chaining or hyperlinks that goes in the text field. If not done manually, the system could add it automatically in a way that was clearly attributed to the system. I say the text field so the actions next to stories or comments stay uncluttered.
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It would also allow it to act as a timeline of sorts. Done correctly I could even apply quasi automatically to tech release posts as well, making it easier to read prior discussions.
The main question right now would be how to handle the comments ui for those grouped stories.
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All publicity is good publicity is actually totally false.The actual saying should be something like “Not all bad publicity is bad for you if it aligns with your identity.”. Fighting OSS definitely doesn’t align with the ARM identity/ethos.
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It’s so easy to just react and click that upvote button without thinking; the score is a reflection of emotional appeal, not of this submission’s relevance. “But it’s on the front page” is also a tired argument that comes up in every discussion like this one. @friendlysock makes excellent points in his reply to you, I totally agree with him and appreciate that he takes the time to try to steer the submissions away from news. There are plenty of news sites, I don’t want another one.
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or maybe n-gate is a worthless sneer masquerading as a website that doesn’t need to be used as a referent on topical material? Especially given that literally anything posted to HN is going to be skewered there? I’m not the go-to guy on HN cheerleading (at all, in any way) but n-gate is smirky petulant crap and doesn’t exactly contribute to enlightenment on tech topics.
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worthless sneer masquerading as a website that doesn’t need to be used as a referent on topical material
El Reg could be described the exact same way!
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thats…..actually a good point.
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I’ve skimmed through an earlier version and have started on this one, this is a wonderful resource filling a yawning chasm of approachable tutorials on SAT/SMT. The scholarly literature is huge on SAT/SMT and while there are books they tend to grad student level exposition. I’m feeling like this is going to be a precursor to a nostarch text relatively soon enough given the increasing interest in the subject.
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Good on you. It’s worth mentioning here that Microsoft is going in the other direction. https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/06/19/microsoft-defends-ties-with-ice-amid-separation-outcry/amp/
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In response to questions we want to be clear: Microsoft is not working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Customs and Border Protection on any projects related to separating children from their families at the border, and contrary to some speculation, we are not aware of Azure or Azure services being used for this purpose. As a company, Microsoft is dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border.
Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems they are going in the exact same direction…
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It’s a very confusing article; my best guess is that they are working with ICE, but not on “projects related to separating children from their families at the border”.
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But that perspective is very un-nuanced. Is everything ICE does wrong? It’s a large organization. What if the software the company that @danielcompton denied service to is actually just trying to track down violent offenders that made it across the border? Or drug trafficking?
To go even further, by your statement, Americans should stop paying their taxes. Are you advocating that?
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From https://splinternews.com/tear-it-all-down-1826939873 :
The thing that is so striking about all three items is not merely the horror they symbolize. It is how easy it was to get all of these people to play their fascistic roles. The Trump administration’s family separation rule has not even been official policy for two months, and yet look at where we are already. The Border Patrol agent is totally unperturbed by the wrenching scenes playing out around him. The officers have sprung to action with a useful lie to ward off desperate parents. Nielsen, whom the New Yorker described in March as “more of an opportunist than an ideologue” and who has been looking to get back into Donald Trump’s good graces, is playing her part—the white supremacist bureaucrat more concerned with office politics than basic morality—with seeming relish. They were all ready.
I’m going to just delegate all arguments to that link, basically, with a comment that of it’s not exceedingly obvious, then I probably can’t say anything that would persuade you. Also, this is all extremely off-topic for this forum, but, whatevs.
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There’s always a nuance, sure. Every police force ever subverted for political purposes was still continuing to fight petty crime, prevent murders and help old ladies cross the street. This always presented the regimes a great way to divert criticism, paint critics as crime sympathisers and provide moral leeway to people working there and with them.
America though, with all its lip service to small government and self reliance was the last place I expected that to see happening. Little did I know!
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Is everything ICE does wrong? It’s a large organization.
Just like people, organizations should be praised for their best behaviors and held responsible for their worst behaviors. Also, some organizations wield an incredible amount of power over people and can easily hide wrongdoing and therefore should be held responsible to the strictest standard.
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Its worth pointing out that ICE didn’t exist 20 years ago. Neither, for that matter did the DHS (I was 22 when that monster was born). “Violent offenders” who “cross the border” will be tracked down by the same people who track down citizen “violent offenders” ie the cops (what does “violent offender” even mean? How do we who these people are? how will we know if they’re sneaking in?) Drug trafficking isn’t part of ICEs institutional prerogative in any large, real sense, so its not for them to worry about? Plenty of americans, for decades, have advocated tax resistance precisely as a means to combat things like this. We can debate its utility but it is absolutely a tactic that has seen use since as far as I know at least the Vietnam war. Not sure how much nuance is necessary when discussing things like this. Doesn’t mean its open season to start dropping outrageous nonsense, but institutions which support/facilitate this in any way should be grounds for at the very least boycotts.
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Why is it worth pointing out it didn’t exist 20 years ago? Smart phones didn’t either. Everything starts at some time.
To separate out arguments, this particular subthread is in response to MSFT helping ICE, but the comment I responded to was referring to the original post, which only refers to “border security”. My comment was really about the broader aspect but I phrased it poorly. In particular, I think the comment I replied to which states that you should not support anything like this indirectly basically means you can’t do anything.
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Its worth pointing out when it was founded for a lot of reasons; what were the conditions that led to its creation? Were they good? Reasonable? Who created it? What was the mission originally? The date is important because all of these questions become easily accessible to anyone with a web browser and an internet connection, unlike, say, the formation of the FBI or the origins of Jim Crow which while definitely researchable on the net are more domains of historical research. Smart phones and ethnic cleansing however, not so much in the same category.
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If you believe the circumstances around the formation of ICE are worth considering, I don’t think pointing out the age of the institution is a great way to make that point. It sounds more like you’re saying “new things are inherently bad” rather than “20 years ago was a time with a lot of politically questionable activity” (or something along those lines).
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dude, read it however you want, but pointing out that ICE is less than 20 years old, when securing a border is a foundational issue, seems like a perfect way to intimate that this is an agency uninterested in actual security and was formed expressly to fulfill a hyper partisan, actually racist agenda. Like, did we not have border security or immigration services or customs enforcement prior to 2002/3? Why then? What was it? Also, given that it was formed so recently, it can be unformed, it can be dismantled that much easier.
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No, it requires you to acknowledge that using any currency is unacceptable.
Of course not using any currency is also unacceptable. When faced with two unacceptable options, one has to choose one. Using the excuse “If I follow my ethics I can never do anything” is just a lazy way to never think about ethics. In reality everything has to be carefully considered and weighed on a case by case basis.
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Of course not using any currency is also unacceptable.
Why? Currency is just a tool.
Using the excuse “If I follow my ethics I can never do anything” is just a lazy way to never think about ethics.
I completely agree.
Indeed I think that we can always be ethical, but we should look beyond the current “public enemy”, be it Cambridge Analytica or ICE. These are just symptoms. We need to cure the disease.
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Unfortunately, while the headline is clever, it’s not true.
Palantir’s worst is done with code written in house, with the same open source codebase we all start with. So long as there are people willing to work there, bad things are going to be written into code and deployed.
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One note, the specific company wasn’t Palantir, but was in a similar space.
I agree that not serving this company has a very small effect on them, but it was better than the alternative. Additionally, if enough companies refuse to work with companies like Palantir, it would begin to hinder their efforts.
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not serving this company has a very small effect on them
It has a big effect, instead. On the system. On their employees. On your employes and your customers…
Capitalism fosters a funny belief through its propaganda (aka marketing): that humans’ goals are always individualistic and social improvements always come from collective fights. This contraddiction (deeply internalized as many other disfunctional ones) fool many people: why be righteous (whatever it means to me) if it doesn’t change anything to me?
It’s just a deception, designed to marginalize behaviours that could challenge consumerism.
But if you cannot say “No”, you are a slave. You proved to be not.
And freedom is always revolutionary, even without a network effect.
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Sounds like it was https://www.wired.com/story/palmer-luckey-anduril-border-wall/ ? Palantir at least has some positive clients, like the SEC and CDC.
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But….that wasn’t his moral question? He was being offered a chance to be a vendor of services to a palantir-like surveillance outfit engaged in ethnic cleansing, not offered a job with a workstation. So yeah, the headline was absolutely true. It is up to individuals to refuse, and by publicly refusing to engage, not necessarily internally, they will inspire others to not profit by these horrors.
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yeah, not really understanding this from the original post. and for the record the low barrier to entry is absolutely not what is allowing people to put vile stuff in code. extremely talented, well educated, highly intelligent people do horrifying stuff every single day.
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We can act like a village, we just can’t act like the entire population. Choosing not to work at completely unethical places when we can afford it does at the very least increase the cost and decrease the quality of the evil labor. Things could even reach a point where the only people willing to work there are saboteurs.
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Good job standing up for your principles even if it costs you something. That’s usually when it counts the most.
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That is exactly when it counts the most.
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I’m curious what book people would recommend for someone to pickup C++. I already can program, but I’ve avoided C++ because of the reputation and also the syntax, but its something I’d really like to get at least comfortable in.
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thanks for posting this, I’ll definitely check out the book, especially if a new edition is right around the corner.
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I like C++ Primer. It’s a whole lotta book, but it’s a whole lotta language and the book does an excellent job running you through a relatively recent version of the language. I’m currently working through Introduction to Design Patterns in C++ with QT. It’s a little dated but I’ve heard good things. Accelerated C++ is another I’ve picked up recently that seems to be well regarded. I’ve worked a bit with older C++98 style code in the past, but things have changed a bit with the advent of C++11 and especially later…
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thanks for taking the time to reply. One of the reasons I’ve avoided the language so far is just the massive size of it in comparison to my other languages.
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this is wonderful so far. love to see OCaml content especially such rich stuff as this, thanks for posting it.
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Massive kudos to this guy for not putting up with this SJW madness. I wish him all the best!
We at suckless are heavily opposed to code of conducts and discriminatory organizations of any shape or form.
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It’s very simple. Any non-technological matters during software development move the software away from its ideal form. Thus, to make your software suck less, you only take the best developers no matter what race, gender, heritage, etc. these persons have.
We do not believe in equal status (i.e. e.g. forcibly obtaining a 50/50 gender ratio), as this immediately leads to discrimination. We do however strongly believe in equal rights, naturally. You also naturally cannot have both.
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Any non-technological matters during software development move the software away from its ideal form.
Suckless makes a window manager: a part of a computer that human beings, with all their rich and varying abilities and perspectives, interact with constantly. Your choices of defaults and customization options have direct impact on those humans.
For example, color schemes determine whether color-blind people are able to quickly scan active vs inactive options and understand information hierarchy. Font sizes and contrast ratios can make the interface readable, difficult, or completely unusable for visually impaired people. The sizes of click targets, double-click timeouts, and drag thresholds impact usability for those with motor difficulties. Default choices of interface, configuration, and documentation language embed the project in a particular English-speaking context, and the extent to which your team supports internationalization can limit, or expand, your user base.
With limited time and resources, you will have to make tradeoffs in your code, documentation, and community about which people your software is supportive and hostile towards. These are inherently political decisions which cannot be avoided. This is not to say that your particular choices are wrong. It’s just you are already engaged in “non-technical”, political work, because you, like everyone else here, are making a tool for human beings. The choice to minimize the thought you put into those decisions does not erase the decisions themselves.
At the community development level, your intentional and forced choices around language, schedule, pronouns, and even technical terminology can make contributors from varying backgrounds feel welcome or unwelcome, or render the community inaccessible entirely. These too are political choices. Your post above is one of them.
There is, unfortunately, no such thing as a truly neutral stance on inclusion. Consider: you wish to take only the best developers, and yet your post has already discouraged good engineers from working on your project. Doubtless it has encouraged other engineers (who may be quite skilled!) with a similar political view to your own; those who believe, for instance, that current minority representation in tech is justified, representing the best engineers available, and that efforts to change those ratios are inherently discriminatory and unjust.
Policies have impact. Consider yours.
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I don’t know if that was your goal, but this is one of the best arguments for positive discrimination I’ve read. Thanks for posting it, and also thanks for noting that all decisions have some inherent politics whether we like it or not.
Unfortunately there is simply no solution: positive discrimination is opposed to meritocracy. Forced ratios are definitely an unethical tool, as they are a form of discrimination. However, this unethical tool brings us to a greater good, which is a final product that incorporates diversity on its design and accommodates more users, which is a desirable goal on itself, for the reasons you explained.
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color schemes determine whether color-blind people are able to quickly scan active vs inactive options and understand information hierarchy. Font sizes and contrast ratios can make the interface readable, difficult, or completely unusable for visually impaired people. The sizes of click targets, double-click timeouts, and drag thresholds
Let me see if I understand what you’re saying. Are you claiming that when color schemes, font sizes and drag thresholds are chosen that that is a political decision? I think that many people would find that quite a remarkable claim.
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It’s impossible to not be political. You can be “the status quo is great and I don’t want to discuss it”, but that’s political. The open source “movement” started off political - with a strong point of view on how software economics should be changed. In particular, if you say a CoC that bans people from being abusive is unacceptable, you are making a political statement and a moral statement.
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It’s impossible to not be political
Could I ask you to clarify in what sense you are using the word “political”?
Merriam-Webster (for example) suggests several different meanings that capture ranges of activity of quite different sizes. For example, I’m sure it’s possible to act in a way which does not impinge upon “the art or science of government” but perhaps every (public) action impinges upon “the total complex of relations between people living in society”.
In what sense did you use that term?
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Let’s start off with a note about honesty. FRIGN begins by telling us “We do not believe in equal status (i.e. e.g. forcibly obtaining a 50/50 gender ratio)” as if someone was proposing the use of force to produce a 50/50 gender ratio - and we all know that wasn’t proposed by anyone. There’s no way to discuss this properly if people are going to raise false issues like that. What comment’s like FRIGN’s indicate is an unwillingness to have an open and honest conversation. The same bogus rhetoric is at the heart of Damore’s memo: he claims to be in favor of equal rights and just against mythical demand for 50/50 gender equality so that he can oppose obviously ineffective affirmative action programs at Google where 80% of technical staff are male (Damore’s misappropriation of science is similarly based on an objection to a position that nobody ever argued.).
The next point is that some people are objecting that a CoC and a minority outreach program are “political”. That’s true, but it involves the use of the more general meaning of “political” which the Collins dictionary provides as “the complex or aggregate of relationships of people in society, esp those relationships involving authority or power”. If we are using that definition, of course a CoC and a minority outreach program are political, but opposition to a CoC and a minority outreach program fits the definition as well. If you have an opinion one way or another, your opinion is political. You can’t sensibly use this wide definition of political to label the effort to adopt a CoC and to recruit more minorities and then turn around and claim your opposition to those is somehow not political. So that’s what I mean by “it is impossible to not be political”. The question is a political question and those who try to claim the high ground of being objective, disinterested, non-political for their side of the question are not being straightforward (perhaps it’s just that they are not being straightforward with themselves).
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I agree that a CoC, a minority outreach program, and opposition to a CoC all impinge upon “the complex or aggregate of relationships of people in society, esp those relationships involving authority or power”.
Would you also agree that there is a popular ideological political movement in favour of CoCs (some combination of the feminist, civil rights and social justice movements)? Perhaps there is also a popular ideological movement against CoCs (some combination of MRAs and the alt right). Are you also claiming that if one claims a “neutral” stance on CoCs one is de facto supporting one of these ideologies?
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I’m making a very concrete assertion, which I sense does not fit into your schema. My assertion is that there is no neutrality on workplace equality and inclusion for anyone involved in the workplace. Anyone who, for example, participates in an open source development effort has a position on whether efforts should be made to make it more inclusive even if that position is “this is not important enough for me to express an opinion.”
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Thank you for clarifying. When you originally said “It’s impossible to not be political” I got the wrong impression.
Do you also hold the same point of view when it comes to roughly comparable statements in other spheres? For example ‘Anyone who eats has a position on vegetarianism even if that position is “this is not important enough for me to express an opinion.”’?
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You’ve been quoted by LWN: https://lwn.net/Articles/753709/
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How are the best developers identified?
I think this is a totally reasonable question, and one I’d like to see the answer too–if for no other reason than it might help those of us on other projects find more objective metrics to help track progress with.
Do you all at suckless use something like:
- defect rate
- lines of code/feature shipped
- execution time
- space in memory, space in storage
Like, what metrics do you use?
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You know, suckless is not a big company and the metrics that can be applied are more of a heuristic. A good developer is somebody who e.g. supplies a patch with a bug report, provides feedback to commits, makes contributions to the projects, thinks his commits through and doesn’t break stuff too often and does not personally identify with their code (i.e. is not butthurt when it’s not merged).
What needs to be stressed here is that the metric “lines of code” is completely off. There are horrible programmers who spit out lots of code and excellent ones who over time drop more lines than they add. Especially the latter group is very present among us and thus the LOC-metric will only give false results. Same with execution time, you find that when not enough time is spent on a problem you end up solving it wrong, in the worst case having to start all over.
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By being very diverse and doing fackelmärsche of course. https://suckless.org/conferences/2017/
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@FRIGN What’s the purpose of this “torchlight hike” in the context of producing code that sucks less? Don’t you see that the activities you choose to have during your conferences are a cultural stance, and because of that, can be perceived as exclusive by programmers that don’t recognize themselves in these activities?
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I get your point, but must honestly say that your argument sadly aligns with the ever-excluding and self-segregating destructful nature of cultural marxism. By eating food together at the conferences, do we exclude anorexics that might otherwise be willing to attend such a conference? I don’t drink any alcohol and never have. Still, it was not a problem when we went to a local Braukeller and some people drank alcohol and others like myself didn’t.
The fundamental point I think is that one can never fully and analytically claim that a certain process is completely unaffected by something else. If we dive down into these details we would then move on and say that the different choice of clothings, hairstyle, means of travel and means of accomodation all affect the coding process at suckless. This can be taken further and further with no limit, as we all know about the butterfly effect. At some point it is just not measurable any more.
If you ask me, this is a gross overstretching of what I said. There are quite a lot of people who do not attend the conferences but still work together with us on projects during that time. What really matters is that we e.g. do not ignore patches from these people or give them less relevance than those of others. To pick the example up: The torchlight hike did not affect any coding decision in a direct way, but it really bonded the team further together and was a very nice memory of this conference that I and the others are very fond of from what I’ve heard. On top of that, during the hike we were able to philosophize about some new projects of which some have become a reality. The net-gain of this event thus was positive.
In classical philosophy, there are two main trains of thought when it comes to evaluating actions: Deontology and Teleology. Deontology measures the action itself and its ethical value, completely ignoring the higher goal in the process. Teleology is the opposite, evaluating actions only by their means to reach a goal, completely ignoring the value of the action itself. The best approach obviously should be inbetween. However, there is a much more important lesson that can be taken from here: When evaluating a decision, one needs to realize what they are measuring and what is unimportant for a decision. What I meant is that to reach the goal of software perfection, the gender and other factors of the submitters do not matter. So even though we here at suckless have a goal, we are not teleologists, as we just ignore the factors that do not matter for coding.
It is an ethical question which norms you apply to a decision.
If we look at organizations like Outreachy, one might be mistaken to think that they are deontologists, striving to improve processes. However, after closer inspection it becomes clear that this is not the case and they are actually working towards a certain goal, increasing the number of trans and minority people in such communities. No matter how you think about this goal, it makes one thing clear: When you are working towards such a goal and also do not ignore irrelevant factors in your norms (and they in fact do by not ignoring e.g. race and gender), you quickly end up discriminating against people.
I hope this clears this up a bit, but as a short sentence, what can be taken from here is: When discussing ethical matters, it’s always important to make clear which norms are applied.
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fackelmärsche
I’m not going to wade into anything else on this, but I’d like to just take a second and let you know that, while you may not mean it in this way the phrase “cultural marxism” is very, very often used as a stand in for “jews”. Some links for the record:
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2003/cultural-marxism-catching
https://newrepublic.com/article/144317/trumps-racism-myth-cultural-marxism https://www.smh.com.au/world/cultural-marxism--the-ultimate-postfactual-dog-whistle-20171102-gzd7lq.html
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It’s not my fault that some idiots don’t understand this term or it’s critical analysis. Cultural marxism, as the term implies, is the classical theory of marxism applied to culture. It has nothing to do with jews directly, it’s just an idea. If you know any better term to describe it, please let me know.
Anyway, in the philosophical realms it’s known as ‘Critical Theory’, which originated in the Frankfurt School. However, nobody knows this term.
Unless a better term is found, I disregard your argument and won’t accept your attempt to limit language of perfectly acceptable words to describe an idea. At the end of the day, terminology must be found that adequately describes what a certain idea is, and I see no reason why this should be wrong.
Regarding the torch hike: Yes, marching with torches was abused by the NSDAP as a means of political rallying. However, at least in Germany, it is a much older and deeper-reaching tradition that dates back hundreds of years.
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You have amply demonstrated that you don’t know anything about the topic. You could start with the decent Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School
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wow, uh, kind of a weird red flag that pointing this out is getting seriously downvoted. I picked these links pretty quickly, and anybody who comes behind and reads this and wonders how serious this is, do yourself a favor and image search and see how many memes have the star of david, greedy merchant, world strangling octopus or any of a number of openly anti-semitic imagery. Its not hidden, its not coy. If you’re tossing “cultural marxism” around you’re either willfully ignoring this or blatantly playing along. Its not a thing in the world. There are no leftists (at all) who call themselves “cultural marxists”, and in fact there is a sizeable faction of marxists who are openly disdainful of any marxism that eschews political struggle. The new republic article linked above goes into this, Perry Andersons “Considerations on Western Marxism”, a well known, well regarded text across a number of marxist subsects, is explicitly based on this. Anyway, enjoy contributing to a climate of increasing hostility toward jews. good stuff.
edit: have some fun with this https://www.google.com/search?q=cultural+marxism&client=firefox-b&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjz2tWrhvnaAhUJ7YMKHVgcCccQ_AUIDCgD&biw=1247&bih=510#imgrc=_
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The term ‘Cultural Marxism’ describes very well what it is, and not all leftists are cultural marxists. The classical theory of marxism, roughly spoken, is to think of society as being split in two camps, the Proletariat and the Bourgeoisie, eternally involved in a struggle, where the former is discriminated against and oppresed by the latter.
Cultural Marxism applies these ideas to society. In the Frankfurt School it was called ‘Critical Theory’, calling people out to question everything that was deemed a cultural norm. What is essentially lead to was to find oppressors and oppressed, and we reached the point where e.g. the patriarchy oppressed against women, white people against minorities, christians against muslims and other religions and so forth. You get the idea. Before you go again rallying about how I target jews or something please take a note that up to this point in this comment, I have just described what cultural marxism is and have not evaluated or criticized it in any way, because this here is the wrong platform for that.
What you should keep in mind is that the nature of cultural marxism is to never be in a stable position. There will always be the hunt for the next oppressor and oppressed, which in the long run will destroy this entire movement from the inside. It was a friendly advice from my side to you not to endulge in this separatory logic, but of course I understand your reasoning to the fullest.
Just as a side note: I did not see you getting ‘seriously’ downvoted. What do you mean?
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It’s uncommon to find such a well-put explanation; thanks for that.
There will always be the hunt for the next oppressor and oppressed, which in the long run will destroy this entire movement from the inside.
If the movement runs out of good targets (and falls apart because they can’t agree on new ones), wouldn’t that imply that it will self-destruct only after it succeeds in its goals? That doesn’t sound like a bad thing.
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I’m glad you liked my explanation. :)
That is a very interesting idea, thanks for bringing this thought up! It’s a matter dependent on many different factors, I suppose. It might fall apart due to not being able to agree on new targets or when everybody has become a target, but it is a very theoretical question which one of these outcomes applies here.
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Did you actually read any of the links I posted? Specifically the New Republic and SPLC links? I don’t know how else to say this and you pretty much side stepped what I said the first time so I’ll try to reiterate it: There is no such thing as “Cultural Marxism”. At all. Its not a descriptive category that any marxist actually self applies or applies to other marxists. I’m fully aware of the Frankfurt School, Adorno, Horkheimer, etc. I’ve read some of them and many, many of their contemporaries from Germany, people like Karl Mannheim. I read marxist publications everyday, from here in the states and from Europe. I’m a member of an explicitly marxist political party here in the states. I can’t emphasize this enough, “cultural marxism” isn’t real and is roughly on par with “FEMA camps”, “HARRP rays” and shape shifting lizard jews, meaning; its a far far right wing paranoid fantasy used to wall off people from other people and an actual understanding of the material conditions of their world. I also didn’t say, specifically in fact pointing out that I wasn’t saying this, that you were “targeting jews”. That being said, if you use a phrase that has its origins in anti-semitic polemics, is used explicitly and over-whelmingly by anti-semites, than that is on you. (Did you take a look at the linked image search? Does that sort of thing not give you pause?) To say that you “just described what cultural marxism is” is also inaccurate, you absolutely used it in a descriptive way
I get your point, but must honestly say that your argument sadly aligns with the ever-excluding and self->segregating destructful nature of cultural marxism.
White supremacist organizing is experiencing an enormous upsurge, not only here in the states but in Europe as well. From Le Pen to AfD to SVO in Austria and on and on. These people are not interested in polite conversation and they’re not using “cultural marxism” as a category to illuminate political opponents, its meant to denigrate and isolate, ironically given thats exactly what Neo Nazis and white supremacists here in the states accuse left wingers and “SJWs” of doing.
I appreciate that you’re discussing this peacefully but I’m going to bow out of this thread unless you’re interested enough to take some time and read the links
FWIW these also dismantle the trope and point out pretty much exactly what I’m saying around anti-semitism: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/78mnny/unwrapping-the-conspiracy-theory-that-drives-the-alt-right https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/22/chris-uhlmann-should-mind-his-language-on-cultural-marxism
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I took some more time to read it up and from what I could see, I found that indeed cultural marxism has become more of a political slogan rather than a normal theoretical term in the USA.
Here in Germany the term “Kulturmarxismus” is much less politically charged from what I can see and thus I was surprised to get this response after I just had “translated” this term into English. It might be a lesson to first get some background on how this might be perceived internationally, however, it is a gigantic task for every term that might come around to you.
So to reiterate my question, what term could be better used instead? :)
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interesting that it has a different grounding/connotation in Germany, but then again I’m not surprised since thats where its supposed to have originated from. I’ll reread your other posts and come up with a response thats fair. Thanks for taking the time to read those links.
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Generally people who use “cultural marxism” as a pejorative are sloganeering. The idea of an “eternal struggle” is completely foreign to any kind of marxism which is based on a theory that classes come out of the historical process and disappear due the historical process. Marxism claims that the proletariat and bourgeosie are temporary divisions that arise from a certain type of economic organization. Whatever one thinks of that idea, your characterization of Marxism is like describing baseball as a game involving pucks and ice. Your summary of “cultural marxism” is even worse. Maybe take a class or read a decent book.
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Removing differing viewpoints? It is precisely this kind of behavior that maddens people who complain about SJW, who (the SJW) seem unable to take any discussion beyond calling their opponent’s position “evil”, “alt-right”, “neo-nazi”, or, if they are exceptionally well-spoken, “mad”.
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Voting isn’t a replacement of moderation. It helps highlight and reward good comments and it can punish bad comments, but it’s not sufficient for running a community. I’m trying to head off places where people give up on argument and just try to hurt or tar the people they disagree with because it doesn’t lead to a good community. Lobsters is a very good place for discussing computing and I haven’t seen that in communities this size with hands-off moderation (but I’d love counter-examples to learn from!) From a quick query, we’ve had comments from 727 unique users in the last 30 days and there’s around 15k unique IPs in the logs per weekday, so people are constantly interacting with the others who don’t know their background, don’t share history, can’t recognize in-jokes, simply don’t have reason to trust when messages are ambiguous, let alone provocative. Friendly teasing like “ah yeah, you would think that” or “lol php sucks” that’s rewarding bonding in a small, familiar group hurts in a big one because even if the recipient gets the joke and laughs along or brushes it off as harmless, it’s read by thousands of people who don’t or can’t.
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Lobsters is a very good place for discussing computing and I haven’t seen that in communities this size with hands-off moderation
I support your position on sub-topic but even my Trial you linked to shows a bit otherwise on just this point. This site has more flexible, hands-off moderation than many I’ve seen with this much political dispute. Even in that link, we saw an amount of honest, civility, and compromise I don’t usually see. There’s been quite a bit better results in this thread than usual elsewhere. There seems to be enough community closeness despite our size that people are recognizing each others positions a bit. Instead of comments, you can actually see it by what’s not said more since it’s prior ground we’ve covered. The others are learning as discussion furthers. Then, there’s the stuff we don’t want which seems to be basically what those individuals are intending in a way that has nothing to do with site’s size.
So, I support you getting rid of just pure abuse, trolling, sockpuppeting, etc. I don’t think we’ve hit the full weaknesses and limited vision of large sites yet despite our increase in comments and views. We’re still doing a lot better than average. We’re still doing it with minimal intervention on things like politics relative to what I’ve seen elsewhere. I think we can keep at current moderation strategy for now because of that. For now.
Just wanted to say that in the middle of all this.
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Voting isn’t a replacement of moderation. It helps highlight and reward good comments and it can punish bad comments, but it’s not sufficient for running a community.
I’m not sure if I see why it’s not a good replacement. To me, I see voting as distributed moderation and the “real” moderation is automatically hiding (not removing) comments when they fall below a threshold.
I’m trying to head off places where people give up on argument and just try to hurt or tar the people they disagree with because it doesn’t lead to a good community.
I think this method relies on an accurate crystal ball where you can foresee people’s actions and to an extent, the reactions of the people reading the comments.
I’d have to question what you mean by “a good community”, it seems like it’s just a place where everyone agrees with what you agree with and those that disagree aren’t heard because it risks offending those that do agree.
I think the best discussions on here are because we have many people with wide and varied opinions and backgrounds. The good comes from understanding what someone else is saying, not excluding them from the discussion. The only places I see that warranted is where someone has said something purposely and undeniably vile.
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The automatic hiding of low-scoring comments is also a “sole discretion” thing; jcs added it and I tweaked it a few months ago. The codebase enforces a lot of one moderator’s ideas of what’s good for a community in a hands-off way and the desire to do that motivated its creation.
I strongly agree that a community where everyone agrees with the moderator would be bad one, even if I am that moderator. It’s tremendously rewarding to understand why other people see things differently, if for no other reason than the selfish reason that one can’t correct learn or correct mistakes if one never sees things one doesn’t already agree with.
I think the crystal ball for foreseeing problems is experience, from many years of reading and participating in communities as they thrive or fail. I think it’s possible to recognize and intervene earlier than the really vile stuff because I’ve seen it work and I’ve seen its absence fail. I keep asking for examples of excellent large communities without active moderators because I haven’t seen those, and after a couple decades and a few hundred communities I see the anthropic principle at work: they don’t exist because they self-destruct, sink into constant vileness, or add moderation. At best they have maintain with signal-to-noise ratios far below that of Lobsters where the thoughtful commentary is crowded out by trolling, running jokes, ignorance, and plan low-quality comments because it doesn’t seem worth anyone’s while to care when posting.
But moderation is not a panacea in and of itself. Without good experience, judgment, and temper a bad moderator swiftly destroys a community, and this is a very common way communities fail. If it helps any, the author of the comment I removed agrees that it wasn’t done to suppress their opinion.
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The benefit I see from moderation being part of the codebase is that it’s public, predictable and repeatable (it terms of reliability). When you take moderation decisions into your own discretion many of these virtues are lost.
As for experience, I think that’s tricky because it can easily lead you to making the same mistake twice. It’s also made of your personal experiences and you’re using that to curate the discussion of other people, I would caution that it’s another method of controlling dialog (perhaps subconsciously) to what you find acceptable, not necessarily what’s best for everyone.
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The benefit I see from moderation being part of the codebase is that it’s public, predictable and repeatable (it terms of reliability). When you take moderation decisions into your own discretion many of these virtues are lost.
Most of them go into the Moderation Log. I’ve been watching it since the jcs days since it’s what folks are supposed to do in a transparent, accountable system. Gotta put effort in. I haven’t seen much of anything that bothered me. The bans and deletes I’ve been able to follow @pushcx doing were trolling, alleged sockpuppeting, and vicious flamewaring. Some I couldn’t see where I’d rather the resource go off the front page rather getting deleted so someone looking at logs could see it for whatever it was. Nonetheless, his actions in the thread about me, the general admining, and what I’ve seen in moderation have been mostly good. A few really good like highlighting the best examples of good character on the site. I think he’s the only one I’ve seen do that on a forum in a while.
You have little to worry about with him in my opinion at the moment. Do keep an eye on the comments and log if you’re concerned. Scrape them into version storage if concerned about deletions. What goes on here is pretty public. Relax or worry as much as you want. I’m more relaxed than worried. :)
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Yeah, I agree on the pitfalls of experience. As SeanTAllen noted in a separate branch of this thread a minute ago, there’s “but you didn’t say” and other wiggle room; I think that’s where automatic moderation falls down and human judgment is required. Voting has its own downsides like fads, groupthink, using them to disagree (which is all over this thread), in-jokes, a drifting definition of topicality, all the parallels to the behaviors of political rhetoric, etc. Lobsters has never been voting only and I don’t see a compelling reason to change that. jcs’s involvement in the site was steadily declining so I’m certainly more actively moderating, but I don’t see that as a change in character. I guess what it comes down to is that I agree with you about what successful communities do and don’t look like, but I haven’t seen one that works on the model you’ve outlined and I don’t see that kind of fundamental change as a risk worth taking.
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Not exactly, I was sarcastically non-replying because I assumed he was intentionally misunderstanding me. I assumed this because I didn’t see any ambiguity in my answer. On later inspection I noticed the ambiguity so I gave an actual reply:
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To be fair, suckless is not well-organised enough to be a group that can have a single opinion to be spoken for.
That said, FRIGN is a prominent contributor and I from what I’ve seen most contributors are heavily on the side of “the code will speak for itself”.
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friendlysock
3 months ago
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link
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Smartphones Are Killing The Planet Faster Than Anyone Expected
These kinds of submissions aren’t very actionable, they are very alarmist, and they kinda gloss over a complicated topic. To quote a quote from the article:
“We are already witnessing internet-enabled devices, ranging from the smallest form factor such as wearable devices, to home appliances, and even cars, trucks and airplanes. If this trend continues . . . one can only wonder on the additional load these devices will have on the networking and data center infrastructures, in addition to the incremental energy consumption incurred by their production,” the team writes in the study. “Unless the supporting infrastructure moves quickly to 100% renewable power, the emergence of IoT could potentially dwarf the contribution of all the other traditional computing devices, and dramatically increase the overall global emissions well beyond the projections of this study.”
The number of conditionals, assumptions, and frankly just bogus stuff here should be a good hint that this sort of article is problematic. Just picking apart that one bit:
- Is the renewable power part of this, as opposed to say the mining of rare earths, really the most damaging part to the planet?
- What do we mean by internet-enabled? Does this mean simple little ESP8266 chips? Large farms of bitcoin miners that can get an IP?
- Is this supposed “additional load” networking and data center infrastructures actually a big deal? What about edge processing architectures?
- Have any of these authors actually done anything in technology that would hint at their expertise in projecting the future?
- The referenced paper claims to go out to 2040–are any technological projections relevant after a decade, much less four?
Like, I could go on and on, but this is the sort of article that everybody has opinions on, nobody has the power to change, and few have the ability to critique.
It doesn’t belong here.
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I would agree (if that was your argument) that these articles actually tend to produce more heat than light on message boards, but thats not what you’re saying and also, it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way(at all). I’ve gotten links to useful information, actionable information (to use your formula) and also been introduced to new perspectives from journalism found on message board/forum style websites (in the comments as well). Also, its worth pointing out that “nobody has the power to change [this]” is patently, demonstrably false, both from within a capitalist perspective and from other more anticapitalist perspectives. People, individuals and organized groups, effect change, sometimes quite drastic, in economic and governance institutions every single day, and they do it with insight gained from cultural works, social interaction, and , as here, from journalism.
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Also, its worth pointing out that “nobody has the power to change [this]” is patently, demonstrably false, both from within a capitalist perspective and from other more anticapitalist perspectives.
Assume that every single Lobster on this site decided to spontaneously stop…doing whatever it is this article was decrying. That’s less than 100,00 cell phones over the next let’s say 30 years (to match the article). That’s peanuts.
At it’s peak during runs, Foxcoon makes 5 times that many phones per day.
If the article had been “Here are the top 5 plants and how you can disrupt their logistics”, it’d be actionable in the sense that I mean–not a vague “oh golly gee the planet is sure getting beat up according to some academics, please be afraid (and read more of our fearmongering!)” which barely has a call to action of any sort and which is most probably being read by consumers on the same devices it decries.
People, individuals and organized groups, effect change, sometimes quite drastic, in economic and governance institutions every single day, and they do it with insight gained from cultural works, social interaction, and , as here, from journalism.
And even 4chan /b/ threads are useful once in a while–that doesn’t mean I want to see that here either because of the theoretical yield of enlightenment.
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Yeah, I, uh, don’t really need academics to hand down stone tablets writ with immutable moral imperatives, thats not how journalism works, thats not how the academy works and its not how I (or anyone, really) expects or wants to engage large scale economic systems. Small actions contribute to larger actions which initiate large scale changes, these actions absolutely do start with individuals but they also come from individuals getting educated and organizing others. One or a few people so motivated act on others to take up their own parts in the struggle. This isn’t rocket science, it isn’t a fairy tale, its literally how organizing works. I’m not really going to engage your comments on “fear mongering” given that there is an utterly soul crushing amount of evidence for the ways that production is contributing to ecological destruction , especially the modes of production involved in creating high technology products, if you think caring about that, studying it, organizing around it is “fearmongering” I’m not sure that there is much we are going to productively discuss.
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Original author here; happy to answer any questions. Working on part 2 which should be up in a few days.
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late to the party on replying here, but this looked stellar. Congrats on the win, and thanks for introducing me to Fennel, hadn’t heard of that one before.
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dtornabene
4 months ago
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link
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Software Testing as Species Discovery (statistical properties of fuzzing campaigns)
It is very exciting. I’m super curious if anyone takes the time to read it to come back and comment.
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would love to know what was causing the efficiency bottleneck in the reading of the csv file, seemed important and I wish the author had spent a bit more time going into it!
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Just a note if anyone finds this later, I’ve been unable to find PDFs for the books listed. The books themselves are excellent, and well worth ones time if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
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Correct, the books are
.tgzof html, but they are still self contained, downloadable books.lf.tgz plf.tgz vfa.tgz-
Absolutely, I just got excited, thought I’d be able to print them out after all. Thanks for posting the link.
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Ah they tricked me with this one, it’s a Medium article hidden behind another domain.
(Whenever I see “medium.com” next to lobsters articles I know not to click, since the result will be a weak thinkpiece by a frontend developer, wrapped in obtrusive markup.)
i had literally the exact same response. “Ah, a medium article….about frontend dev……(tab closed)”.
Interesting ‘hot take’!
You judge people based on the ‘medium’ that they use.
“The medium is the message” ;)
I have to admit though that seeing a medium link is generally a negative signal for me. Still click on many of them.
I think Medium’s original USP was “only quality content”.
Predictably, that didn’t scale.
Many confuse Marshall McLuhan’s original meaning of that phrase. It didn’t really mean that the way a message was delivered was part of the message itself. It actually meant that the vast majority of messages were medium or average.
It would have been better said, “meh, the message is average.”
Interesting interpretation. I am not sure how he originally came to that phrase, but his book certainly spent a lot of time and effort arguing for the now prevalent meaning.
This didn’t really make sense to me, so I looked it up, and I don’t think that’s right. The original meaning is exactly what we’ve come to understand it as:
I wonder where you’ve heard your interpretation?
This comment is obviously a troll. Fitting, given that McLuhan himself was a troll.