Fiona

Higher education is truly a scam.

It really depends. From what I hear about the US a lot of it is there. But in some ways that is also the exception.

Compare Germany: By most rankings KIT is one of, if not the top university for computer science in the country. The requirements to get a spot there are literally just that you are qualified to study (aka: have the right high school diploma) and haven’t lost your right to study computer science at a public university by conclusively failing to do so at a different German university. When I was there until 2019 we payed a bit over 100€ per semester in administrative fees and got a limited train ticket in exchange.

The only selection criteria were “did you pass your exams?” that during the bachelors were almost all written exams that were the same for everyone. What you learned was to an extend up to you, it was a university, not an apprenticeship, so there certainly was a significant focus on theory, but especially during the masters a lot just fully depended on what you wanted.

The main cost at the time was just general housing and living costs, which in my case was payed for by my mom, but for those for whom this is not an option, provided that they were either German citizens or legal residents for reasons other than the education, there was BAföG, which comes down to an interest-free loan from which you only have to pay back 50%.

And yes, I definitely learned a lot of useful stuff there.

you definitely don’t have the authority to say he’s definitely beyond ANY help. That’s the part I find ridiculous, not the part where you think there’s something wrong with him

It’s an approach known as perpetrator type theory (or “Tätertypenlehre” in German) that was notably deployed by the Nazis to be able to punish people they didn’t like much harder than others, by allowing them to say for example that someone was inherently and unchangeably a murderer and should thus be executed. The crime was essentially just proof of that, what you got punished for, was what some judge deemed to be the innate criminal personality you had. In particular this allowed to hand out lighter sentences to “Arians” and to decide that Jews for example were inherently bad and could thus be punished much harsher for the same crime.

It’s very obvious from your posts that you neither know what the purpose of a punishment in a legal state is, nor what the effects of them are.

The idea that a multi year sentence is “getting of easy” is insane. And from what you are writing I get very strong vibes that you are one of those people who still subscribe to debunked ideas of perpetrator types, which are unironically Nazi-ideology.

The world that you want to create is not a safer one, quite the opposite in fact. Rehabilitation is the by far most important aspect of a punishment and the idea that crimes like the one in question are committed by people who carefully weigh how many years they are willing to spend in prison and could thus be deterred is beyond ridiculous.

Trace the execs

Importantly you need to trace the execs who copied it, not the ones who decided to try it the first time. Giving things a try and not immediately throwing it away when it isn’t perfect is a good thing and behavior that needs to be encouraged. The problem is when others start copying it blindly because it is new before it could demonstrate benefits. It’s the people jumping on hype that are the problem, not the people giving new things a try, even if they may fail.

It should not be legal to hand out life sentences to minors, period.

In Germany the maximum sentence for minors is 10 years and depending on your developmental state you can count as a minor until you are 21 (You are always treated as one if you are under 18). And that is how it should be. Locking people up for life helps nobody.

There has to be a meaningful number of companies where each individually is spending more on adobe licenses than it would cost them to pay a bunch of developers to get gimp to the point where it is a fully sufficient alternative. But hey, the only thing more important to capitalists than making profit seems to be, to not go for cheaper FLOSS options, rather than spending pointlessly large amounts of money on proprietary software…

Not telling someone something isn’t gaslighting. That’s a very different thing.

And you are making the mistake of assuming that other people think like you, have the same preferences as you, also have memories on an at least subconscious level, …

There are just so many factors, that depend on the person and this is one of those cases where extrapolating from your own lived experience is not the right way to do things. Like: I’m trans and you can trust me, that I have my own places, where I know that I can’t apply my standards to other people (“what do you mean, people don’t like the effects of cross-sex hormones?”).

I’m positively surprised that the article acknowledges the nuance of question of whether unknowing victims should be informed, instead of just jumping on the “tell them all, no matter if it hurts them more than the crime did”.

Anyone who claims that there is a simple answer that is always best is acting out of ideology, rather than an interest in improving people’s lives…

The one thing that might help somewhat, at huge logistic cost, would be to ask everyone what their preference in a situation like that is, ideally with the possibility to have different answers for different crimes. Like, combine it with a question on being an organ-donor and a couple of similar things. Since it goes to everyone, people who don’t know and don’t want to know can stay in blissful ignorance, because the question doesn’t arise suspicions, as it would be if only they got asked. You could still get bad results, but in that case they would at least be the results the people in question choose. Though even this approach can’t easily deal with the cases of minors being involved…

All that said, there is another component to the case, that might be the biggest problem with it: The perpetrator getting of easy because it was assumed that the victims didn’t know and the implication of a much harder punishment had they been known to have known: Whether the victims knew, didn’t change the crime that was committed, only the outcome. And punishing the outcome rather than the action is an extremely bad way to enact justice. (Yes, attempted murder should be punished like murder!)

I saw “driverless waymo” in the title.

Also: Prejudice against people wearing fedoras is still prejudice and thus not really a great thing to have. One of my best friends also likes to wear a hat at times (not sure if it counts as a fedora, I know very little about heads) and is one of the sweetest people I know.

Okay, this really seems more like a case of sexual harassment, rather than harassment of Waymo customers, which was my first suspicion. Had it been the latter as part of a politically motivated action against the company I might have had a lot more sympathy, but this is disgusting…

That “m” should be a “b”. For a company that size, there is truly no excuse!

I’m not advocating against a seatbelt, I’m advocating against not wearing it, “because I am confident that I can hold on to something in case of a collision” or similar stupid reasons. Expecting that blocking does anything to hide public posts that you can simply open in another browser (or in the same browser in private browsing mode) is not a seatbelt, it is the equivalent of a slightly stronger handle on top of the car window that is being advertized as a feature to protect you in case of an accident.

This change first and foremost makes it clear that that handle does nothing meaningful and that you should wear an actual seatbelt (follower-only posts, ideally with restricted followers) instead, if you are worried about a collision. Twitter is a public forum. You can’t tell people to leave you alone, shout with a megaphone across the marketplace and then be annoyed when they hear you. If you don’t want them to hear you, don’t use a megaphone.

The argument here is literally about stalkers. Not about random uninterested people that don’t care.

Please read again what he changed and then try to figure out why your rationale is clearly not what this is about.

Twitter massively reduced visibility for logged-out users,

I know, but it still didn’t fully remove it.

Not sure that being “more honest” is worth the price

The thing is that there really is no price, nor was there ever one. Your suggestion that you think there is demonstrates that the way blocking worked gave people dangerously wrong ideas. It’s about being clear to people what they can and cannot expect. Anything else is ACTUALLY dangerous.

As much as I despise Musk and Twitter and hope that both die a painful death, what is actually proposed here is honestly a change for the better: It’s not about preventing people from blocking users, it’s about blocked users being able to see public posts, which they could also see by just logging out. This is being honest about what a block does and avoids giving people a wrong sense of privacy that they simply don’t have on the platform. From what I’ve heard there is a possibility to post for followers-only which in combination with requiring approval to follow and that isn’t going away here either…

On Arch you can easily uninstall Linux.

The fun part is that there are even legit reasons to do so, the by far most likely one being that you want to use a different package that provides you with a kernel, such as linux-lts or linux-hardened. Definitely know what you are doing in that case though!

AI not, but I’d be less certain about LLMs.

The hype-cycle is the exception, not the norm. Very commonly stuff just ends up dying.

Yes, that looks like it!