We can make similar arguments for the corporations: if you want to sell your software in the US market, you need to pay for a VAT for digital services that fund national endowments giving grants to individual US developers that apply to the program.

Corporations should start paying their …

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That is not how people and society function. The status quo and culture is that open source is good for society and all. You are not told about why big corporations can use all this code for free. You’re actually told you’re doing a good deed by making code open source.

Then you jump on t…

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Talking about the design, the further we get from 2012, the more obvious it becomes that windows 8 was kinda like the bauhaus movement for an operating system that wanted to be on touch screens but was made to work on traditional mouse-keyboard interface. It was technically correct, aesthetically pu…

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1. Set a default label for issues (e.g. “autoclose”)
2. Make your auto closing and locking logic based on that label (eg the label-actions github action)
3. As a maintainer, remember to remove the label when creating an issue!

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On the engineering side, using LLMs to write code is as fun as hiring a taskrabbit to solve my jigsaw puzzles. And if you think of LLMs as an extra teammate, there's no fun in managing them either. Nurturing the personal growth of an LLM is an obvious waste of time. Micromanaging them, watching to p…

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As a matter of science, an attempt to sort good porn from bad is futile. The brain's reward circuitry, which drives sexual arousal, has no definition of 'porn'. It just sends a ‘go get it!’ signal in response to whatever releases sufficient dopamine.

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‘Double-blind’ means that neither the investigator nor the subject knows that a variable has been altered. For example, neither knows who is receiving drug or placebo. ‘Single-blind’ means the investigator knows but the subject doesn't. It should be evident that neither type of study is possible in …

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Whenever something becomes the norm, there's an unexamined assumption that it must be harmless or 'normal', that is, that it cannot produce abnormal physiological results. However, that proved not to be the case with smoking.

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Big Tobacco's campaign to cast doubt on the link between smoking and disease is now a classic case study in a science called agnotology: the study of the cultural production of ignorance.

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Quitting internet porn is the equivalent of removing refined sugar or trans-fats from your diet. It is simply the elimination of a form of entertainment that no one had until recently, and everyone got along without.

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I keep watching people who used to write 10,000-word explorations of complex topics now produce dozens of disconnected fragments per day, each optimized for immediate engagement.

It's like watching someone who composed symphonies decide to only make ringtones.

https://www.joanw…

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We are in the disapora phase; there is a steady stream of these announcements, each with a different GitHub alternative. I speculate that within a few months, the communities will have settled on a single dominant one. I'm curious if it will be one of the existing ones, or something new. Perhaps a w…

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There has been a change in the community here over the last decade, we've lost a lot of the hacker spirit and have a larger proportion of "chancers", people who are only in tech to "get rich quick". The legacy of ZIRP combined with The Social Network marketing.

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ActivityPub is Deeply Underspecified because it was created by Semantic Web people who think that if you create a detailed enough *syntax* for something, the *semantics* appear by magic. It turns out that they don't, and so a lot of the actual protocol design has to happen outside of the specificati…

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Mildly reminds me how being online on AIM or ICQ was an actual invitation to chat. I had so many interesting conversations with people I barely knew.

There's no source of that signal that someone is open to chitchat these days, and it's in my opinion kind of killed what was once great abo…

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Business always involves the same game with the same steps: advertise, channel, merchandize. Capitalism works so long you make enough money in one step to make up for the rest.

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re: roblox dude's interview crashout. the thing he wants to say but can't is "at scale, kids are gonna get hurt. that is the price for scale." the thing nobody wants to say out loud is "maybe scaling to a level where harm isn't manageable is bad, and scale should be contained"

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LLM AI exists to crush labour. That's not even my surmise, the people paying billions of dollars to fund this stuff are extremely open and explicit that this is their goal.

There are no ethical use cases for LLMs at this point in time. Maybe when the bubble has popped thoroughly. Not befo…

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Libs will always blame the people but never their own party officials. Liberals always punch down and never up

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I've seen a lot of posts focusing on the specific issues that caused the recent Cloudflare incident, but no discourse about how these companies are being run.

We've known how to build completely reliable computer systems for decades. When things fall apart, it's not because we don't know …

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In these cases, AI is being used to solder together the libertarian goal of dismantling administrative capacity with the fascist goal of ever present control and enforcement. This mediating function between contrasting desires is at least as important whether it actually works.

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I hate ‘self-taught’. You’re not self-taught, you’re community taught. Self-taught is erasing all the work that allowed you to learn from freely available materials and people.

It’s a poor phrase for the idea that you are degreeless. And there’s nothing wrong with skipping formal educati…

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It is ironic that people so often “contrast” the rising popularity of the four-day school week with the relatively slow uptake of the four-day work week.

The four-day school week is driven ENTIRELY by teachers wanting shorter weeks. It’s a (arguably short-sighted) labor demand.

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Please don't act surprised that kids are using AI in college. Most are only there to get a degree in the hopes that they won't be forced to work for minimum wage for their entire life. Capitalism has turned higher education into a means to an end.

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The main issue I see is that papers are actually becoming so focussed on form that they are now unreadable. People prefer reading my blog for my papers than reading the papers themselves. In fact I hear people telling me they understood the blog _better_. The whole academic writing shtick has become…

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Something I strongly believe is that we mustn’t allow the death of a person to be the cause of unhappiness. The reason for that is simple: if we let everyone who dies be a cause for unhappiness, that would mean people are being born to become unhappy. But the opposite in fact is true. People are alw…

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Burnout syndrome is considered by some to be a type of depression. But while depression begins with stress or fatigue or a large shock like an accident or a loss, burnout syndrome originates with the thought that all of one’s efforts were in vain. It strikes at a time when life is not turning out as…

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Burnout syndrome is considered by some to be a type of depression. But while depression begins with stress or fatigue or a large shock like an accident or a loss, burnout syndrome originates with the thought that all of one’s efforts were in vain. It strikes at a time when life is not turning out as…

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This is not talked about nearly enough, there are so many factors for being childless. I think there is a thought that if you “decide” not to have children that there is no grieving involved because of being lucky enough (biologically) to have a choice in the first place.

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Stories of people who find their own pace and direction, of people who believe in others and wait by their side as they go through difficult times, lost in worry. Stories of those who support others, who celebrate small efforts and resolve in a society that puts people – and everything about them – …

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