eesmith

6 ms·

1.
by eesmith 4d ago
Products in most organizations are an end to making profit. The job value of an SWE is to maximize that profit. It doesn't matter if the product is better to use, faster, with more features users like - that's an early 20th centur
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by eesmith 5d ago
Global thermonuclear war could possibly end humanity. How were humans in the 1960s supposed to process that? We got close to nuclear war several times (thank you Stanislav Petrov!). This AI concern seems small potatoes to anyone who had nig
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by eesmith 7d ago
Yes, the author gives many examples of how different students and interviewees draw different lines about when to use it and how to use it ... or not use it. I found this line particularly poignant: "Torn between their values and their
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by eesmith 8d ago
Thing is, "And funnily enough, DeVault himself awkwardly failed to state his own flawed policy. ... One of the most consequential pieces of free software on the planet, and the guy writing the rule can't tell you which side it la
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by eesmith 8d ago
> That's the actual thing wrong here. Not that they have opinions today, but that you can never know what they'll have opinions about tomorrow, and they'll never tell you in advance. I've used Sourceforge, Google Code
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by eesmith 11d ago
My point is that your claim 'This administration has done nothing to end or undermine the antitrust cases against Google.' is incorrect if you also include European antitrust cases. Yes, the last 50 years of post-Borkianism has re
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by eesmith 11d ago
Perhaps not US cases, but those aren't the only antitrust cases against Google. What about Trump's threats after Google was hit with a 2.95 billion Euro fine from the European Commission's antitrust investigation? From last y
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by eesmith 21d ago
I am well aware of US immigration law history and the views of the current administration regarding immigration. How does reading up on the history change how the stated reason for this pause has nothing to do with the meritocracy issues, f
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by eesmith 21d ago
I simply do not know how you can use "meritocracy" to support your position, while also supporting an artificial barrier to free movement which prevents a more competent foreign worker from moving to the US to displace you from yo
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by eesmith 21d ago
Is an un-rigged and meritocratic system possible if there are border controls? If not, then using words like "rigged" and "meritocratic" as a complaint about the current system can only mean that you want no border contr
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by eesmith 21d ago
If true, that interpretation hardly seems relevant given that all immigrant visa applications are paused, with the goal of determining whether immigrants are likely to become dependent on public benefits in the US. It's not simply a pa
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by eesmith 21d ago
Are you calling for open border with no controls? That's the only way to get meritocracy. The system is set up so the casino wins. You cannot, with a straight face, argue the odds are in your favor, but there are rules about how the ca
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by eesmith 21d ago
It means no use of Visa or American Express bank cards, which are US companies. I think SWIFT transactions are under US control. No use of Apple, Google, Amazon, AirBnB, Uber, or other US-based services. Eg, "Canadian judge Kimberly Pr
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by eesmith 22d ago
The HN submission link is incorrectly titled. The blog is titled "Merchants of Insecurity". The word "hole" does not exist anywhere on the page, the HTML, or the HTTP headers. Yesterday's submission used the correct
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by eesmith 23d ago
Is this a "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" objection, where even the slightest bit of hypocrisy or impurity justifies rejecting the argument? If a vegetarian, who became a vegetarian because of the high environment
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by eesmith 23d ago
Yes, the intro paragraph at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personhood highlights how it's a controversial subject. You are, I presume, arguing that companies should not have personhood. I think any definition is go
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by eesmith 24d ago
It looks like the emulation simply isn't complete. I tried the Zenith Z-150 (my first PC was a Z-151, and I still have some muscle memory about how to use it!) Start at https://www.pcjs.org/machines/pcx86/zeni
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by eesmith 24d ago
"personhood" doesn't require voting rights. Babies have personhood even if they cannot vote. Personhood can be applied to "natural persons", like people, and "judicial persons", like companies. Personhood
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by eesmith 25d ago
Decided to relive some of my youth with a big of BASIC. Quickly found a crasher. Here's a repo: basica call me (That is, from DOS start basica.exe then in the repl do "call me".) This gives the popup: 'Undef
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by eesmith 26d ago
"Put some Ethyl in your Tank!" Ethyl lead, that is.
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by eesmith 26d ago
Yes, photo safaris have been a thing since at least the 1960s, when it was all film cameras, and the term "shutterbugs" used since at least the 1940s. Indeed, now that you bring it up, I think a good interpretation of this survey
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by eesmith 26d ago
The survey result is 'nearly four in ten travellers (39%) say they have visited a tourist site mainly to take a photo or record a video.' You, I believe, are making a different observation, which is that taking a photo or recordin
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by eesmith 27d ago
At the end it explained why they think it's troubling: "American competitiveness abroad is not just a commercial concern, but a strategic imperative. Protecting the United States’ continued economic supremacy on a world stage star
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by eesmith 1mo ago
But that is still not "corporatism" ("corporativismo" in Italian), as used in Mussolini's fascism. From the Snopes page: > In his Dictionary of Political Thought, Roger Scruton describes corporatism in this way:
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by eesmith 1mo ago
I believe you are referring to the misquote described by McKay as 'Benito Mussolini created the word "fascism." He defined it as "the merging of the state and the corporation."'? I'll now quote from https
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by eesmith 1mo ago
And then there's People Express Airlines in the 1980s, which let you pay the fare in cash, after takeoff. Just walk onboard and take a seat.
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by eesmith 1mo ago
I also know someone who publishes their JAR files under the MIT license, though they don't publish the source code, so ... have fun reverse-engineering!
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by eesmith 1mo ago
I also failed to follow the logic of that quoted part. Free software is the four freedoms you mentioned - use, study, modify, and redistribute. There is no obligation to accept anything, for any reason. I don't think the argument that
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by eesmith 1mo ago
"Other than TSA" sounds to me very much like "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" In the early 1990s, my girlfriend was scared of flying. I went with her to the gate for emotional support. I also sometimes
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by eesmith 1mo ago
This UN report isn't about "foolish uses of freshwater." This report praises AI as a part of the next technological revolution, but points out there are problems that should and can be addressed to make its benefits more equi

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