"Come now, don't exaggerate," said numerous apologists. "How bad can a bad person possibly be?"
It would seem that a bad person, elected to the highest office, surrounded by equally corrupt appointees, can do harm on a global scale. And all of it is home-grown. The entire population of deportees posed less of a threat then what the US has bestowed upon itself in one presidential term.
> barriers to producing documentation--should be minimized. Writing well is difficult enough!
Writing is a demanding kind of encoding. At the same time, we all expect but rarely get good, accessible, searchable documentation. Why? The one barrier that cannot be removed is the need to retain semantic structure.
In TFA, the author writes:
The Bad -- We don’t know what we want.
It's exactly this. We fail to recognise why we write and then we fail to express it. We don't write technical documentation for the equivalent of KLOCs. Writing something useful and meaningful -- not just performative filler for KPIs or SEO enshittification -- requires structure. Anything valuable that can't be retrieved effectively is lost. Imagine losing actual code or database rows at the same rate.
We consistently fail to manage meaning. It's strikingly paradoxical because the art of programming is all about meaning. We organise code semantically because it is essential to do so (not just for compiling, but also) for extending/refactoring/review/retrieval/understanding.
We need to write with the same considerations. This need not be complicated. Yet we persist in using the wrong utensils for the recipe.
> Markdown is the best compromise we know of
It reduces keystrokes and makes the handraulic act of writing easier. But... it addresses only part of the problem.
As an example of a small improvement, HTML5 offers a minimal set of semantic tags: <summary> <article> <main> <section> <details> <aside> <figure> <figcaption> <time>
It may be a simplistic set of tags, but it is an improvement over easy-to-type text blobs.
What is (or used to be?) implicit is that a person who has the means to be free of subsistence activities will/should take the time to *acquire a quality education and make an even better contribution to society and humanity.
But what is evident is that the wealthy are rotting intellectually like much of the rest of society. And their brainrot has more impact because they are among the wealthiest people who have ever lived.
> What is (or used to be?) implicit is that a person who has the means to be free of subsistence activities will/should take the time to *acquire a quality education and make an even better contribution to society and humanity.
The rich got rich exactly by contributing to society and humanity. This is exactly what I mean by "rich people bad" local optima trap that you also seem to have fallen into.
Is it true? Even on a small scale, when I taught kids how to swim for $20k/year I believe I did more for society than when I built systems to help a large streaming service deliver ads for $100k/year. There are certainly exceptions, but in general money comes from extracting value from others, while jobs that provide to society are not extractive and this pay less.
This is fundamentally wrong. If Elon created Tesla and made ~$100B of wealth from it, he also made all the other shareholders richer by way more. Not only that - the world now has Teslas it otherwise wouldn't. Everyone wins and there is no extraction of values (old Marxist jargon that needs to go away).
That's all good if you assume people can't be tricked (tricked into paying more, tricked into buying something they don't want, tricked into working harder). The tricked person ends up with less and Elon ends up with more.
Yeah sorry I was thinking about value as more about quality of life and society. If you define it as shareholder value and producing stuff, then by definition corporations and their executives are of course contributing the most.
Donald Trump is extracting mountains of wealth from the taxpayer by leveraging his position and the refusal of the GOP to do anything about his crimes.
When he gets a payout by suing the government and then directing the government to pay him, how is hie contributing to society and humanity?
Heck, a large portion of my wealth came from buying ETFs and watching the number go up. How did I contribute to society and humanity to achieve that?
In one interview, Mush called it the "empathy exploit".
This is the kind of person who would benefit from being raised and humanised in a village where people co-operate. Because then, as countless others have discovered, bluster and insults work only until the self-aggrandising narcissist meets someone not only bigger, but with better principles, and an actual leader of people.
There is a reason why many satisfying movie plots involve a final, usually violent comeuppance served to a self-aggrandising narcissist.
Do you prefer that we not even try to spread beyond our one planet, when an entire galaxy, or maybe even the neighboring ones, might be in reach if we try? What if someday at the very end of the lifetime of our sun and similar stars, we look back, and regret not trying?
> Do you prefer that we not even try to spread beyond our one planet, when an entire galaxy, or maybe even the neighboring ones, might be in reach if we try? What if someday at the very end of the lifetime of our sun and similar stars, we look back, and regret not trying?
The timeline you are speaking of is in billions of year. Yes, in that timescale, it definitely makes sense to try.
This very century, there are very serious scientific concerns about the continued comfortable habitability of Earth and the ensuing geopolitical instability caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the sixth mass extinction event, etc. We have solutions to mitigate those to some degree, but this requires very significant resource allocation to that goal, and so far it seems possible that we would fall short.
I don't think there should be zero resources allocated to space exploration, but it's at least reasonable to question whether we have our priorities set right.
Exactly what I mean. People who obsess over space are so egotistical they can’t imagine someone not thinking it’s “the best”. It’s interesting, but no more important than any other science or field of study.
And no, I’d prefer we take care of our home planet and make it a sustainable place to live first. It’s ludicrous to think we have any chance of surviving elsewhere if we can’t stop ourselves from making our natural habitat unlivable.
Yes we can do both. I still think it’s stupid to place human spaceflight on a pedestal. It’s putting the cart before the horse.
I don't agree with you. An endeavour like this is bringing humanity closer together. After the moon landing people all over the world said "we landed on the moon", not "the US landed on the moon". After they released the photograph of earth as seen from the moon people started to see earth differently, and a flurry of environment protection laws followed.
I too wish we would all hold hands and sing kumbaya and collectively decide to simply make things better here on Earth but sadly it seems far off.
The best alternative demonstrated so far seems to be for some of us to push the limits of what is possible and watch all boats rise with the tide. Better this than slinging Tomahawks at school children.
> People who obsess over space are so egotistical they can’t imagine someone not thinking it’s “the best”
What? No I don't. Some people want to spend money on sports or making our planet sustainable before doing anything else. I think that's fine. It doesn't interest me, however, so I'm looking at this other thing. We can coexist without having to insult each other.
> It’s putting the cart before the horse
How many times in history did necessity create efficiencies versus ambition?
Fair, my first point was poorly worded. People who think space is the best and can’t imagine anyone else thinking it’s not the best are still self centered and lacking in empathy imo.
> How many times in history did necessity create efficiencies versus ambition?
Literally all the time? There’s another saying, “necessity is the mother of invention”.
There have always been lame people like this and for all of human history we have continued to explore and expand. I think at this point those people can safely be ignored.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnumeric