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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Thanks for clarifying! I’ve heard nothing but praise for Kagi from its users so that’s what I was assuming, but Searxng has also been great so I wouldn’t have been too surprised if you’d compared them and found its results to be on par or better.

    By the way, if you’re self hosting Searxng, you can use add your own index. Searxng supports YaCy, which is an actively developed, open source search index and crawler that can be operated standalone or as part of a decentralized (P2P) network. Here are the Searxng docs for that engine. I can’t speak to its quality as I still haven’t set it up, though.




  • I gather you’re from the US.

    Yes, but also the prison abolition movement is US specific. I’m not affiliated with it, to be clear - not that I oppose it or anything, but I certainly don’t speak for any of its activists.

    If we “only” reduce the prison population to 5% or 1% of its current count in the process

    Then why call it abolish prisons?

    Have you ever heard the quote “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars?” “Abolition” is a goal, an ideal - and even if it isn’t accomplished fully, working toward that end goal and considering everything necessary to get there along the way is the point.

    Along those lines, I posit that if 90% of prisons are torn down or repurposed and the remaining 10% are drastically changed - holding fewer prisoners; not being privately owned and operated; focusing on rehabilitation, like learning new job skills, when possible, and otherwise simply being more humane, then the prison abolition movement would have succeeded.

    But if you disagree with the name, what would you call it? “Prison Reform” is already taken and means something drastically different.

    And to be clear, for some the goal is to eliminate prisons entirely. The movement isn’t monolithic. Abolishing the “prison institution” as it exists today is a pretty common goal, though, and using “prison” to mean “the prison institution” is a pretty common literary technique called “Synecdoche,” which you likely use every day.

    I see now that you’re trying trying to trigger an additional emotional response. Working on association, rather than logic.

    It’s a logical association, though. If the name evokes feelings of slavery, that’s a good thing, as the situation is similar enough to slavery to warrant that.

    Slavery in the US is still legal (so long as the person is in prison). Black Americans are 5 times as likely to be in prison as white Americans. A black man born in 2001 has a 20% chance of being in prison at some point in his life.

    The systemic oppression of black Americans is obviously because of racism, and the parallels between slavery and the prison institution aren’t accidental. For example, here’s a quote from Slavery and the U.S. Prison System:

    Gary Webb’s famous investigation revealed that the CIA was operating a gun-running and drug-smuggling operation that brought guns to the Nicaraguan contras that the U.S. was using to destabilize the popular government in that country, while bringing cocaine into the U.S. and funneling it to street-level dealers with access to black inner-city neighborhoods.  The history of black street gangs is part of the afterlife of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counter-intelligence program that actively sabotaged black social movement throughout the long civil rights era.  Bobby Lavender, one of the founders of the Bloods in Los Angeles, explained that the COINTELPRO assassinations of black leaders, and the terrorizing of rank-and-file civil rights activists, left an organizational vacuum in many communities that youth like him filled with their “own brand of leadership.”  COINTELPRO established a pattern of law enforcement interference and sabotage of black self-determination, including gang truces, from the 1970s through to the present.

    Such manipulation, especially, is something I would not want to be a part of. It’s vile.

    Personally, I think the systemic sabotage of black people’s livelihood, communities, and families is vile, but you’re welcome to your opinion.


  • hedgehog@ttrpg.networktoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlOn prison abolition
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    The name is important because of the parallels between slavery and modern day prisons.

    At minimum, the movement is about completely rethinking our approach to dealing with crime. If we “only” reduce the prison population to 5% or 1% of its current count in the process, we won’t have abolished all prisons, but we will have succeeded in abolishing many parts of the current criminal justice system.


  • Understandably frustrating, especially if you’re new to investing. But it’s expected that the market will have both ups and downs.

    The best advice I can give is to choose a good investment allocation and then stick to it. Contribute as much as you can each pay period or month and avoid looking at your balance as much as possible. You should figure out a rebalancing strategy, and you’ll probably need to look at your account to do that. Also, see The Best Order of Operations For Saving For Retirement.

    Right now you have unrealized losses, but you haven’t actually lost any money (i.e., you have no “realized losses”) until you withdraw it. As it’s a retirement account and you just started it, I assume you aren’t planning to retire in the next decade, much less the next three years.

    Is this your only retirement account? If so, why have you not been continuing to add money to it? If you wait to do that until the market recovers, you’ll lose out on all the gains between now and then.

    I know you haven’t said you’re considering selling, but I recommend you check out the “Maintain Discipline” section of the Bogleheads investment philosophy, just in case that’s on your mind. I also recommend that you read up on dollar cost averaging (if you’re investing in a retirement plan every pay period, you’re already doing this).

    You pointed out that the entire market has been impacted. I haven’t personally been paying attention in enough detail to confirm that (and my accounts that I just checked have gone up about 10% over the past three years, not down), but if so, that means you could change your asset allocation without selling low and buying high. I’m not saying you should change it, but if you take the time to learn about different investment strategies and decide a different one works for you, it’s nice to not have to sell your current investments while they’re underperforming relative to your new investments. (On the other hand, you can always change the allocation for your future investments without worrying about that.)


    1. I was showing that my understanding of the word “asset” was based in fact. The 4th definition wasn’t relevant to that.
    2. I literally talked about the 4th definition in the next paragraph.

    If anyone’s operating in bad faith, it’s you. Are you drunk? You’re being an intentionally obtuse pedant and a liar (by your own definition). Try replying once you’ve sobered up, clown. Once you reread and realize how much of a dick you were, I’m sure you’ll apologize - unless I’m right about you being too much of a coward to admit when you’re wrong about something.



  • Before I reply to your comment, I’d like to share this link. It didn’t change any of my existing understanding because Linus’s comment already made it clear that this was out of their hands, but maybe it’ll help clarify something for you.

    I realize now that this comment on that post was made before this one (“What’s free about delisting maintainers based on their country of residence?”) by the same person. It’s disingenuous for someone to act like this is about “country of residence” when they already engaged with a post clarifying that it’s because of sanctions against specific companies.

    that you unironically think asset means property

    I unironically think that because it does mean that:

    1. assets plural

    a. the property of a deceased person subject by law to the payment of his or her debts and legacies

    b. the entire property of a person, association, corporation, or estate applicable or subject to the payment of debts

    1. ADVANTAGERESOURCE

    a. an item of value owned

    b. assets plural the items on a balance sheet showing the book value of property owned

    When I do a search for “state asset,” the results I get are all related to property, resources, etc., things that belong to and can be exploited by the state - for example https://www.epa.gov/dwcapacity/state-asset-management-initiatives-documents

    Searching for “asset” specifically I see a tertiary definition reading “A spy working in his or her own country and controlled by the enemy” as well as the wikipedia definition, but that still means “spy,” not “paid lobbyist.”

    just that incredibly obtuse

    I’d apologize for not being well versed enough in counter-intelligence lingo to properly interpret the comment, but even with a proper interpretation, the comment I replied to was still incoherent, so I’m not really sure what you expect here.

    It feels weird to say that it was incredibly obtuse of me to not spend more time trying to figure out what someone meant when they were, as far as I can tell just mad that Linus and other Linux maintainers didn’t ignore what their attorneys advised, regardless of what impact that might have had on them personally, and spouting a bunch of nonsense as a result.

    Maybe I’m wrong, though. If so, would you care to explain how this was a violation of the GPL and/or how all of the 4 freedoms I listed were violated?



  • Are you thinking of something like Stack Overflow’s reputation system? See https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation for a basic overview. See https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges for some examples of privileges unlocked by hitting a particular reputation level.

    That system is better optimized for reputation than the threaded discussions that we participate in here, but it has its own problems. However, we could at minimum learn from the things that it does right:

    • You need site (or community) staff, who are not constrained by reputation limits, to police the system
    • Upvoting is disabled until you have at least a little reputation
    • Downvoting is disabled until you have a decent amount of reputation and costs you reputation
    • Upvotes grant more reputation than downvotes take away
    • Voting fraud is a bannable offense and there are methods in place to detect it
    • The system is designed to discourage reuse of content
    • Not all activities can be upvoted or downvoted. For example, commenting on SO requires a minimum amount of reputation, but unless they’re reported as spam, offensive, fraudulent, etc. (which also requires a minimum reputation), they don’t impact your reputation, even if upvoted.

    If you wanted to have upvoted and downvoted discourse, you could also allow people to comment on a given piece of discourse without their comment itself being part of the discourse. For example, someone might just want to say “I’m lost, can someone explain this to me?” “Nice hat,” “Where did you get that?” or something entirely off topic that they thought about in response to a topic.

    You could also limit the total amount of reputation a person can bestow upon another person, and maybe increase that limit as their reputation increases. Alternatively or additionally, you could enable high rep users to grant more reputation with their upvotes (either every time or occasionally) or to transfer a portion of their rep to a user who made a comment they really liked. It makes sense that Joe Schmo endorsing me doesn’t mean much, but King Joe’s endorsement is a much bigger deal.

    Reputation also makes sense to be topic specific. I could be an expert on software development but be completely misinformed about hedgehogs, but think that I’m an expert. If I have a high reputation from software development discussions, it would be misleading when I start telling someone about hedgehogs diets.

    Yet another thing to consider, especially if you’re federating, is server-specific reputations with overlapping topics. Assuming you allow users to say “Don’t show this / any of my content to <other server> at all,” (e.g., if you know something is against the rules over there or is likely to be downvoted, but in your community it’s generally upvoted) there isn’t much reason to not allow a discussion to appear in two or more servers. Then users could accrue reputation on that topic from users of both servers. The staff, and later, high reputation users of one server could handle moderation of topics differently than the moderators of another, by design. This could solve disagreements about moderation style, voting etiquette, etc., by giving users alternatives to choose from.




  • Literally none of those freedoms were impacted. Everyone is still free to use the program as they wish, fork it, make changes, etc… Linux doesn’t have a new license that says “anyone but Russians” can use it.

    he then followed up by gloating about Russian maintainers

    How did he gloat? He explained the change. If your complaint is that he was abrasive, I feel like you’re not familiar with Linus.

    Ok, lots of Russian trolls out and about.
    
    It's entirely clear why the change was done, it's not getting
    reverted, and using multiple random anonymous accounts to try to
    "grass root" it by Russian troll factories isn't going to change
    anything.
    
    And FYI for the actual innocent bystanders who aren't troll farm
    accounts - the "various compliance requirements" are not just a US
    thing.
    
    If you haven't heard of Russian sanctions yet, you should try to read
    the news some day.  And by "news", I don't mean Russian
    state-sponsored spam.
    
    As to sending me a revert patch - please use whatever mush you call
    brains. I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be *supporting* Russian
    aggression? Apparently it's not just lack of real news, it's lack of
    history knowledge too.
    

    Sounds a lot more like he’s frustrated than delighted to me.

    Calling your former volunteer contributors bots

    He didn’t call the contributors bots.

    He called the people submitting reverts and complaining about those maintainers, who weren’t contributors themselves, “troll farm accounts.”

    and state assets because of their home country

    When did he call anyone a state asset? To be clear, being a troll or a paid actor doesn’t make you someone’s property.

    He also explained that this was a legal matter:

    > Again -- are you under any sort of NDA not to even refer to a list of
    > these countries?
    
    No, but I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not going to go into the details that
    I - and other maintainers - were told by lawyers.
    
    I'm also not going to start discussing legal issues with random
    internet people who I seriously suspect are paid actors and/or have
    been riled up by them.
    

  • First, you’re acting like the decision was made by Linus or another member of the team and that they weren’t following the law.

    Second, even if that weren’t the case, it’s still completely free. Unless you can name one of the following freedoms that was impacted by those actions:

    • Freedom 0: The freedom to use the program for any purpose.
    • Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
    • Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can help your neighbor.
    • Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.


  • “But tante, then we will never have Open Source AI”. Exactly. That’s how reality works. If you can’t fulfil the criteria of a category you are not in that category. The fix is not to change the criteria. That’s playing pigeon chess.

    This is a bad take. If your criteria aren’t grounded in reality, they aren’t useful, so of course you should change the criteria.

    It’s also a missed opportunity to point to an AI model that did things right and that would qualify as “open source AI” even if that definition were not watered down. For example, OLMo (which I just learned about) says that they provide full insight into the training data as well as “full model weights, training code, training logs, training metrics in the form of Weights & Biases logs, and inference code.” Their most complex models are 7B models, which is enough to be relevant.

    Saying “Meta and Alphabet will never release Open Source AI that meets the proposed definition” is fine. Saying “we’ll never have Open Source AI, period, that meets the proposed definition” means your proposed definition needs rewritten.