It's also reasonably effective proxy to determine whether somebody is actually passionate about the topic they're writing about. If you've got a very strong interest in a specific niche you're typically able to pour pages and pages of ink down talking about it. If you can't be bothered to take the necessary time to distill your thoughts, it signals to me that your thoughts on the topic aren't as worthwhile as someone who's deeply invested in it.
Of course this proxy isn't perfect, I understand many people use AI to make their writing more comprehensible when English isn't their first language.
The medium is the message. I feel like this should be more obvious in 2026 than at any other time in history.
If the author does not care to take the time to craft their message, why should I care to take the time to read it?
If you used AI, and I cannot tell, I don't care that you used AI. But when it's clear and present almost immediately, I feel as though the author does not respect their audience (of which I am a member).
As every composition teacher would say: "use your own words."
I'd argue there's easily more folks lacking said "scruples" in tech's private sector than the typical on the ground government employee or contractor.
Half of what actually makes money in tech these days involves active spying on consumers or manipulation of base human desires at scale. Not exactly the paragon of morality.
>Also, acquiring said clearance is not always straightforward
This, had a friend whose clearance was held up because he knew a bunch of foreign people, people that he had met through a government job with a lower level of clearance.
even if you lack sufficient scruples to be willing to pursue it in the first place.
What an absurd thing to say. As a Canuck, I may even spend some days wondering if I'll have to defend my country from the US, but I can clearly see that there are many governmental and military jobs that are incredibly valuable, ethical, beneficial.
Wikipedia says there are ~2M US governmental employees, and ~2M in the military. The military doesn't use such clearances. When it comes to securing data systems for the government, a clearance is required, even if it's about any number of domestic things, some of which, yes, are valuable and helpful, and needed.
It should be noted that there are all types of security clearances, including very simple ones. In Canada, we have (for example) 'enhanced reliability' and 'secret level II' for governmental work, the first being a simple background, criminal record check, with 10 year's history.
Selling services, even say... cloud based wordprocessing software as a service would require most employees to have such clearances. But of course, what is effectively selling paper and pens, eg wordpro software, is a morally bankrupt thing in your context?!
Description: Provides supplemental, nutrient-rich foods; nutrition education and counseling; and breastfeeding promotion and support to low-income women, infants, and children.
But I guess, because this requires handling money, and therefore a security clearance, you'd be ethically challenged to seek clearance? Or to write software for this?
To paint every job which requires a clearance as morally bankrupt, to paint working for the government to be morally bankrupt, is frankly disgusting. You should literally be ashamed of yourself.
Get your head on straight. Please.
Don't let whatever weirdo US team politics-of-the-day exists, leave you making overreaching statements. The US, as a nation, needs GOOD people in such programs, not ones feeling shame.
I personally feel the US is on a terrible course currently, but it won't be fixed by tearing it down further. And if a time does come to change that course, the framework you have, needs to be filled with good people.
Do you not realise that by acting this way, you're working to ensure that only morally bankrupt people will apply for such jobs? If you make working for the government a badge of shame, it will become true in time? That even the most noblest of jobs, such as helping to feed poor children will only be filled by those with no scruples?
How is this attitude helping?
How is it any better than whatever other team the US has?
> To paint every job which requires a clearance as morally bankrupt, to paint working for the government to be morally bankrupt, is frankly disgusting.
Sometimes you don't know the exact nature of the task until after you've gone through the rigmarole of applying, getting clearance, etc. In that case if you consider some of the jobs to be morally bankrupt, you consider all of them to potentially be morally bankrupt. You could go through all the hassle then turn it down, or leave during a probationary period when you discover the details, but that is a significant wasted time risk to take.
> You should literally be ashamed of yourself.
Many people state-side are ashamed of their government, and don't want to feel their reputation is tarnished by working directly for it, and quite frankly I don't blame them right now nor would I have at all at numerous points over recent years. And that is before considering those who want “conscientious objector” status with regard to anything military related.
> If you make working for the government a badge of shame, it will become true in time?
For some, it has become true. That time is now or before.
As much as “join and fight the corruption from within” is a laudable goal, I entirely understand people not thinking that they've got the nerve for that. Especially given that the first thing a bad administration does to someone raising concerns is to sack and blacklist them in a way that will affect future employment opportunities.
> such as helping to feed poor children
The “but think of the children” argument cuts both ways: many governments have, directly or indirectly, done and continue to do, terrible things to children. It may not be possible in the short/medium term to do anything truly useful about that (you go try tell the current administration over there to refund the good works that have been gutted recently and see how seriously they take you!) and dealing with the crap until things stear back towards the good is too much for some.
Not everyone has the fortunate needed to fight a bad system from within, or the desire to, no matter how many heartstrings you pull to try shame them into reconsidering the good within the bad.
> To paint every job which requires a clearance as morally bankrupt, to paint working for the government to be morally bankrupt, is frankly disgusting.
Sometimes you don't know the exact nature of the task until after you've gone through the rigmarole of applying, getting clearance, etc.
I literally said "every job". You're saying "sometimes" they might be. What is your point? It certainly doesn't counter or answer the point I raise.
> You should literally be ashamed of yourself.
Many people state-side are ashamed of their government, and don't want to feel their reputation is tarnished by working directly for it, and quite frankly I don't blame them
Well I do blame them. And I specifically excluded the military. As I mentioned, the government is a vast and immense entity. Further, my response was to someone saying that to get a clearance would be morally bankrupt. I provided examples as to why that may not be the case. What you are doing, is painting all government as bad, because a specific team is in play right now.
This is literally what is wrong with the US currently. 90% of the issues are due to team politics on both sides. Politics before people. Politics before sensibility. Politics, instead of examining the moral and ethical considerations of each action one takes.
> If you make working for the government a badge of shame, it will become true in time?
As much as “join and fight the corruption from within” is a laudable goal,
You do not have to fight corruption to take a job feeding babies. Or the large amount of good that the government does. You can simply take and do that job. That's my point here. You're doing what the poster upstream did, painting the entire body of the US government as a single entity.
It's OK to say "I don't think this part of government is ethical, I won't work for that part of government", but to say that any government job is morally repugnant is disgusting.
> such as helping to feed poor children
The “but think of the children” argument
It's not a "think of the children" argument in any traditionally way. That argument is typically defined by taking rights away from someone, to "protect kids". This is simply feeding the poor, and babies. No comparison.
Not everyone has the fortunate needed to fight a bad system from within, or the desire to, no matter how many heartstrings you pull to try shame them into reconsidering the good within the bad.
The government is not bad. A tiny part (the current administration) is the problem.
To give context, you'd need a string of "one team" government for decades to turn the course of the entire government. Programs enacted by both US teams are currently in play. Some programs are decades old, and supported by both parties.
Anyone who thinks that a certain team gets into power, and then "all government bad" is not thinking clearly. What you need to do, is look at what each department and each program does. Determine if they are good. It absolutely does not matter which administration passed it, or when. All that matters is "is this thing good?".
The government should be viewed as series of literally tens of thousands of companies. Each has its own task, provides specific services, and so on. To paint them all bad is nutty.
> I literally said "every job". You're saying "sometimes" they might be. What is your point?
You are completely ignoring the “you don't always know the full nature of the task until after clearance” part. If you don't know it isn't one that will be a problem for you, it could be one that is. My point there is that bit.
> And I specifically excluded the military.
So did I. Hence I explicitly said afterwards “And that is before considering those who want “conscientious objector” status with regard to anything military related."
I stopped reading at this point because if you didn't bother properly reading my previous before blurting out a response, then explaining more, giving you more to not fully read, will likely achieve nothing beyond consuming my time.
First, referencing "Nazi" has an age old tradition of immediately meaning you lose the debate. That's back to old Usenet and mailing list ethics.
Regardless, absolutely, yes, I would take a job in Nazi Germany which required clearance, if that job was to feed poor children. What the hell? I literally used feeding babies as an example, please provide some context in where innocent babies should be left to starve. Children are literally the absolute concept of innocence, and a baby is beyond culpability!
That is... unless you're advocating some form of weird let babies starve, because of the crimes of their parents?! Which is effectively along the lines of suggesting ethnic cleansing???
Any form of ideological stance which is this extreme, is realistically actually inline with fascism, for it puts politics before people.
> First, referencing "Nazi" has an age old tradition of immediately meaning you lose the debate.
True. Though to be frank, before typing my longer response I did consider just telling you the same about the “but forget everything else and think of the children” line of reasoning.
First, I purposefully avoided drawing direct comparisons to the Nazis, I only used the extreme end of the logic to illustrate my point, that it's a spectrum and value judgement, not an absolute.
Nobody said Trump is literally Hitler. But literal Hitler did exist, so it all becomes a question of where do you personally draw the line?. For you, it seems to be somewhere between Trump and Hitler. For me, it's somewhere before Trump. I'm not establishing equivalency, I'm establishing subjectivity.
Along those lines, who said anything about crimes of parents?
Let me be more concrete: Would you feed children on camera so the propaganda apparatus can film a movie about a concentration camp titled "The Führer gifts a City to the Jews"? [0]
Everything you do can and will be instrumentalized by the regime. The innocents, too, are just a medium for their machinations.
There is a treshold at which even nominally good acts become morally reprehensible because they serve to sustain a harmful system. The only question is which system do you consider harmful enough to pass that treshold?
You're presenting your moral line as if it's objectively correct. I’m pointing out it's a judgment call with no easy absolutes.
Nobody said Trump is literally Hitler. But literal Hitler did exist, so it all becomes a question of where do you personally draw the line?. For you, it seems to be somewhere between Trump and Hitler. For me, it's somewhere before Trump. I'm not establishing equivalency, I'm establishing subjectivity.
None of that is relevant. Why? My statements have been quite clear; the government is not the party in power. And further, that there may be portions of the government that may offend, that saying "all parts" is obscene and inane.
Recall the original conversation. It's not the mess you've made of it now. Recall my objection was to someone saying that any government job was bad.
I cited a government department with a specific outcome. Feeding children. The counter with the Nazis, therefore, is inline with that statement of mine. Yes, in Nazi Germany, I would work for the government to feed children.
The sensible inference is that my statement is akin to the same for the current US government feeding children. You've now changed that condition to, instead, being some sort of actor for films about feeding children.
This is not what we were discussing. For the record, no, I would not star in a propaganda film willingly.
In as this entire conversation has revolved around how the US government has a myriad of programs which are ethical and moral, and how it therefore would not be untoward to seek clearance and work in those jobs, yes I stand my ground.
I have also indicated that if one found the job questionable, then don't take it! And naturally one can quit if the job changes.
It's such an enormous stretch to try to claim that every single possible job the US government has is reprehensible. The notion is absurd, see my other post about how some of these departments have been unchanged for decades. Lived through both parties.
So yes, there is an easy absolute here. That currently (because, no one can claim to know the future), there are government jobs which are moral and ethical. Period. Hands down. Absolute certainty.
You wonder about the "crimes of the parent". Well, if you refuse to feed children because their parents are in Nazi Germany, then presumably part of that has to do with their parents. For example, would you feed the children of dissenters? If the answer is "yes", yet when asked "would you feed the hungry children of Nazi zealots" you say "no", then you are indeed punishing babies for the crimes of their parents.
A child is a child is a child, and to feed that child is noble. To feed the children of your enemy is noble. To feed the children of someone who murdered your children is noble. To feed the children of those who wish you harm is noble.
There is no ground where not feeding children is reasonable. None. Nada. Ziltch.
Children are not a political game. Children are not something you use to do battle. Children are not something cease helping, because you worry about it helping the enemy.
I would feed the children of both Nazis and Dissenters, but not under Nazi command.
To do so reinforces and legitimizes the power structure, and that is what I take issues with. Children are not enemies, I am fully with you on that.
The enemy is power structures and me not supporting a particularly harmful one might save more children than the concrete act of me feeding them personally.
And yet you have not even remotely addressed how this translates to every US government job being a morally / ethically bankrupt job.
You wave your hands about, and cite far flung examples of how it could be, then there is not here, but then is not now, the future is not now, and we are speaking of the current.
If your concern is that it "could be" at some point, well I hate to break it to you, but that also covers every type of job you might imagine. "Could be" covers a lot of change and time. "Could be" is a wide brush to paint with, especially considering the object isn't even before us, but a misty, intangible, not yet formed thing.
It might surprise you to learn that a large number of software exploits are written without the attacker having direct access to the program's source code. In fact, shocking as it may seem today, huge numbers of computers running the Windows operating system and Internet Explorer were compromised without the attackers ever having access to the source code of either.
I'm actually curious if the windows source code leak of 2004 increased the number of exploits against windows? I'm not sure if it included internet explorer. I remember that windows 2000 was included back then.
They didn't say you "might" be able to use it under the AGPL, but that you "may" be licensed to use it. Which, as a native speaker of American English, seems to be relatively clear in its meaning along the lines of what the GP poster stated. Of course, the various meanings of "may" in English might be subtle enough that I'd readily believe it's less clear to non-native speakers (or maybe even speakers of a different dialect), and it's unfortunate that Mattermost's lawyers aren't interesting in cleaning up the language.
In Haskell specifically, arrays really do allow for the more general definition. This makes the library documentation[1] quite a bit more intimidating to newcomers (speaking from personal experience), but saves you the boilerplate and hassle of figuring out the mapping yourself if you're indexing your array by some weird nonsense like `[(False, 'a', 5000, 0)..(True, 'z', 9001, 4)] :: (Bool, Char, Integer, Int8)`.
I remember having a similar sort of realization early in my career when trying to implement some horribly convoluted business logic in SQL (I no longer remember the actual details of what I was trying to do, just the epiphany which resulted; I think it had something to do with proration of insurance premiums and commissions): I realized that if I simply pre-computed the value of the function in question and shoved it into a table (requiring "only" a couple million rows or so), then I could use a join in place of function application, and be done with it. An obvious idea in retrospect, but the sudden dredging of the set-theoretic formulation of functions--that they are simply collections of tuples--from deep within my memory was certainly startling at the time.
BTW this is extremely common in life insurance systems, where premiums (provisions, surrender values, etc.) depend on formulas applied to mortality tables; these data themselves are simply tables for people from 0 to 100 years of age, so many formulas end up with only 100 possible outputs and are precomputed. (or 200 for combined probabilities, or gender-specific ones)
I've seen this as a "solution" to implementing a function for fibbonacci numbers. The array of all of the fibbonacci numbers that can fit into a 32-bit integer is not particularly large, so sticking it into a static local variable is easy to do.
It seems appropriate that, for a website whose purpose is to make links which raise your suspicions, the visual design itself also raises your suspicions.
That's a pretty lazy analysis. As an easy counterpoint, no one pays to look at Facebook or Instagram posts, but both Meta and (at least some) individual influencers are able to run profitable businesses based on that media consumption (and you could say the same of some bloggers in the late 00s/early 10s, for that matter). More speculatively, I think there is also an argument to be made that even gratis media consumption gives cultural weight to a work which is then available for monetization, especially in this age of tentpole franchises and granularly tracked personal behavior.
Influencers are, by definition, advertisers - and a particularly insidious, ugly bunch at that.
If we go by the vibe of this thread, it's yet another reason to avoid social media. You wouldn't want to reward people like this.
As for the broader topic, this segues into the worryingly popular fallacy of excluded middle. Just because you're not against something, doesn't mean you're supporting it. Being neutral, ambivalent, or plain old just not giving a fuck about a whole class of issues, is a perfectly legitimate place to be in. In fact, that's everyone's default position for most things, because humans have limited mental capacity - we can't have calculated views on every single thing in the world all the time.
>even gratis media consumption gives cultural weight to a work which is then available for monetization
At a certain point you're just making the argument that any lack of action directly opposing something is "allowing it to thrive", making anyone directly responsible for everything.
Not technically wrong, but at a certain point there has to be a cutoff. Can you really hold yourself responsible for enjoying a movie which is problematic because one of the batteries in one of the cameras used to produce it was bought from a guy who once bought a waffle from a KKK bake sale? The "problematic-ness" is there, no doubt, but how much can you orient your actions towards not-benefiting something you disapprove of before it disables you from actually finding and spreading things you actually do like?
I don't find it fair, nor in good faith to claim my argument is lazy. By downloading the media of the artists who's behavior your find abhorrent, but who's art you enjoy (and you can separate the art from the artists), you can assure yourself to some degree that they are not receiving monetary gain. People who were interested in the Harry Potter game (but didn't want the author to finance) simply pirated the game. Roman Polanski, R Kelly, and many others artists are exploited in this fashion.
I do agree that the consumption of that media could very easily increase its cultural strength.
Even in your influencer example, there are ways to bring less traffic/ad views to that content while allowing some ability to consume. example here: https://libredirect.github.io/
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