I care far far far more about technical excellence and capability when it comes to security critical pieces of software like 1Password and as long as they demonstrate they are capable then I could care less if the founder voted Rasputin and worships Morgoth.
I don't care if the guy who made my hammer is a Pastifarian I care how well the hammer hammers, I don't care if my accountant likes to dress up as a skunk and go to conventions demanding people address him by Sir Reginald Stinkington as long as he does a good job at my taxes.
In this case it seems the concern is that the company donated to an OS project that is headed by a guy whom you don't like....
That just seems like there are plenty of other problems to address in the world.
To push this further to the logical extreme, so you're saying that if the founder was to say they are using their profits to directly fund a group who's sole purpose is to wipe out a particular ethic group that they believe has no right to exist, you'll continue your support because the product is technically excellent?
I think your analogy goes the wrong way. If you buy bananas from a grocery store, along the entire chain of people that were involved in selling you that banana there could be all kinds of sick fucks. You'd never know because you've only met the store clerk and you don't really know that person either. I also don't know why anyone would care, except maybe the manager.
Your situation would describe something like Panda antivirus. They're known for funding scientology. I'd rather not buy from them, but honestly I also don't know if the competitors are worse. Perhaps that Norton guy has flipped swastikas all over his basement and that Kaspersky dude also runs an illicit brothel in south-west Asia on the side. Who knows.
Read the OP comment again. They expressly said they only care that the tool works; nothing else matters to them. So they will buy bananas from a grocery store even if they know that the owner is sourcing those bananas from... "sick fucks" and there's another grocery store across the street, also stocking bananas but sourced from an ethical supplier, but maybe those bananas are usually a bit more ripe than they prefer.
No, that's your interpretation. OP merely gave examples of acceptable (mis)conduct. If you want to know where the boundary sits, go ask OP.
I, for one, also wouldn't know why it matters what the toolmaker voted or to what organisation he donated to. Voting is considered everyones own private business. That's because some people can't stand it if others disagree with their choice, but democracy doesn't work that way. If people are coerced by peer pressure to tell what they voted and it's contentious, they could be inclined to cast a dishonest vote.
Would you care if your accountant liked to sit outside a high school and watch teenage girls with binoculars? What if a local shop owner was known to harass female employees? Everybody has a line somewhere.
In a world where capital is the only vote that counts it makes sense to vote with your money. That said, everyone should read what DHH actually said rather than this blog post before you decide on this one in particular.
On a liberal-ness scale from 1 to 10 I'm an 11, and even I can't imagine that many folks would read what DHH actually said and jump to the conclusions that these people did. This is not a Godwins law case... The dude just wants some homeless people to stop shitting in the bushes in public.
Either some people have poor literacy skills, or they just want to be mad.
One question I've got is why Texas? It gets very warm there and DCs need cooling. Wouldn't like Wisconsin or Minnesota or Michian be cheaper. I mean Michigan's whole schtick is land of 1000 lakes, and that's not even considering Alaska which is massive, unpeopled, and colder than a nun's ruler?
I'm not saying for or against, I'm just curious why they are choosing Texas?
It's not even taxes. It's the fact that municipalities and cities are making deals with these companies to give them, e.g., 10 years of tax breaks to build there. If you live in Texas, you are subsidizing these companies
It's easier to get permits in Texas than most other states, which is especially important for the power generation that some of these data centers are building.
It's actually an interesting question there. Because I've been wondering if I buy something in taking ownership of it, whereas if I steal something I am still taking ownership of it without compensation. However if I'm not buying something but merely licensing it the wouldn't that mean that technically I'm not stealing it I'm only violating the terms of the license of it, which is now a civil not criminal matter.
Firstly, you're not "stealing" (committing the crime of theft) by making digital copies of a work. You are infringing copyright. Even a single copy infringes copyright. To not infringe copyright, you need a license for your copying from the copyright holder.
You can still manage to infringe that license even if you went through a normal storefront and paid the copyright holder the amount they asked for. You can do that by doing things with your licensed copy that the copyright holder wrote into your license that you mustn't do. If they sold physical items, they would not be able to apply such adverse terms to your copy.
If you void your own license in that way, you no longer have that license, and so any copying/modification/distribution you're doing is back to being copyright infringement.
Finally, there is such a thing as criminal copyright infringement. That's when you make a significant profit from copyright infringement (for example, getting people to pay you to watch a pay-per-view event that you're illegally redistributing, or even just having adverts that make you money on a website offering unlicensed Nintendo ROMs for emulators)
Yeah, exactly, it's not stealing, it's just ignoring the terms of license. The same thing in spirit as e.g. different corps shitting on GPL. And should be enforced with the same eagerness (lol).
I think in this case the OPs point is that even with the money the electric company can't do the necessary maintenance because it violates environmental laws about cutting down trees or disturbing the habitat of the Blue Titted Elbonian Mud Grouse.
Then you just can't. I'm sure the utility companies are heart broken they have to not spend on maintenance and can instead pocket the extra cash but it doesn't change the levithianian regulatory mess California has erected around doing anything in the name of protecting the environment, compromise and competing concern be darned.
> can't do the necessary maintenance because it violates environmental laws about cutting down trees
In California, Pacific Gas and Electric is documented to make a business choice of relying on contractors to do the vast majority of tree removal and trimming after a certain change in the executive leadership. Subsequently, extensive documentation shows a chain of pressure to cut costs on tree trimming and extract better terms from the sub-contractors using harsh negotiation and policy.
Later, after catastrophic wildfires time and again in the last ten years, an avalanche of low-paid, low-skill tree cutting has occurred. In many cases the zeal to cut old trees seems to have some extra energy, between the abused sub-contractors, harsh labor oversight, insulated management and back-room executive management meetings.
The framing that it is environmental protections that are the impediment to power line maintenance is as worn thin as a floor carpet at a twenty dollar motel near Sacramento IMHO
I had totally forgotten about the rain generator item in that edition of What If! I think because it includes this gem:
Q. What if you strapped C4 to a boomerang? Could this be an effective weapon, or would it be as stupid as it sounds?
A. it's the second one. Aerodynamics aside, I’m curious what tactical advantage you’re expecting to gain by having the high explosive fly back at you if it misses the target.
There's two kinds of boomerang, the one to try to hit something with has a different shape and goes in a straight line without returning. It indeed might be a clever alternative to a grenade, made of explosives in a thin metal shell because one person could throw more explosive mass further than a person could throw a grenade.
That's for a turbine setup. We need to do the math on a kind of rain powered flow battery instead. And it doesn't need to offset grid power, just handle cases where hookup is inconvenient and solar is off the table.
I mean you may be trying to make a point but the counterpoint is Einstein, Bohrs, Planck, Shannon, Turing, Von Nuemann, Feynman, Bohr and most of the other big names all came out during that time.
In contrast since then we've had almost not noteable physicists or Computer Scientists that I'm aware, we've got a couple, Hawking and Knuth. But apart from that I don't know if there is a single scientist I could point out today that has revolutionized our understanding or even done any real breakthrough work in the field of Physics since Einsteins era.
Not a good argument. Those were big names because they were (co)founders of major fields. Physics and CS aren’t like fashion where you can come out with a new color or design every six months.
You also seem to be restricting yourself to pop science knowledge of who’s made breakthroughs. That’s because our collective understanding of physics has become much more detailed, to the point where it starts to lose the ability to be meaningfully comprehensible to the average layperson.
There’ve been many major developments just in that area since the early 1970s, to through the late 90s all the way to 2019 (the island formula), with many major contributors like Bekenstein, ‘t Hooft, Susskind, Maldacena, and many less well-known names.
If you resurrected some of the scientists you mentioned, they’d have a lot of work to do to catch up, and making field-changing major breakthroughs would be just as difficult for them as for anyone else alive today.
Something similar is true in CS. There’s been plenty of progress in all fields of CS, but similar to the situation with physics, its nature is not as simple as what the founders of the field were dealing with, so there’s less awareness of it outside the field. Just to pick one small example, Conor McBride’s insight that the derivative of a regular type is the type of its one-hole context ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34358663 ) is beautiful and kind of amazing, but not a result that you’re going to hear much about outside of PhD programs and the like. CS is chock-full of such work. The entire field of programming language theory has come a long, long way since Turing and Von Neumann’s time, to pick a broader example.
We have gotten better at working as a group. The standard model is a tour de force. It was a collaborative effort over decades but is a lot more complex than anything Einstein did. To some extent we haven’t gotten new physics since then because of reality - we have built higher energy experiments but haven’t got new results.
But my reply was I guess implicitly assuming the post I was replying to was talking about the median level of critical thinking. Your reply is talking about the peaks of creative accomplishment which is not what I was addressing.
Well first off if you ask Microsoft everything is Copilot.
Secondly the confusion is designed to benefit the bull** by using ambiguous language they can do as humpty dumpty did in Alice in Wonderland and say "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean. Neither more nor less"
Which benefits whatever they are pushing.
Beware those that attempt to muddle language and avoid precision in speaking.
Although AI substantially changes the situation the hard part of being an engineer was never the code.
A technician is defined by the tools they work with, an engineer is defined by the problems they can solve.
Taking a dozen different business processes and stakeholders and figuring out how to actually solve the problems they have is engineering.
Save yourself 5 minutes and just read the Wikipedia article on "The Dilbert Principal" it's more useful, has more content and doesn't have this atrocious layout.
I don't care if the guy who made my hammer is a Pastifarian I care how well the hammer hammers, I don't care if my accountant likes to dress up as a skunk and go to conventions demanding people address him by Sir Reginald Stinkington as long as he does a good job at my taxes.
In this case it seems the concern is that the company donated to an OS project that is headed by a guy whom you don't like.... That just seems like there are plenty of other problems to address in the world.
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