dumpsterlid

With that said, I think it’s a bad faith argument to lump all concern together as concern trolling. If enthusiasm had been weak, the shoe could have just as easily been on the other foot, with countless armchair politicians lamenting those ‘fascist agitators’ who convinced Biden to drop out, thereby handing Donnie Dipshit the presidency.

Hindsight is 20/20, I’m just glad we’re still in this.

I don't think you are listening, people were saying this over and over again BEFORE Biden stepped down, we didn't need hindsight, YOU did because you refused to listen.

I love that y'all admit you were wrong superficially but then insult people who have been making strong arguments for quite a long time that Biden should step down and not run again with statements like "well, who could have known!" with a happy shrug.

We did and people like you almost cost us the election. Do you understand how dangerous a role people like you played in shutting down criticism of Biden and attacking concerned Democrats like they were all Russia trollbots or something?

You speak of the danger of divisiveness, of having democrats split up and fractured... hopefully you do realize that is PRECISELY what democrats shouting down concerns about Biden were doing? Can you at least see that in 20/20 hindsight?

What have you learned that will lead you into NOT making the same potentially catastrophic miscalculation next time around?

...because you realize y'all look like clowns in the wake of Harris raising 200 million and 170,000 volunteers in a week right?

Honestly, you need to stop commenting on politics until you dismantle your world view and understanding of how US politics works please, you don't understand very basic shit here. I don't know what more proof you need than the last month or so of politics.

Don't give me this "Wow, happy surprise! Who woulda thought things could go so well!" nonsense, it is insulting and minimizing to those of us who have actually been paying attention and understood the political forces at play.

The cognizant google employees I worked with were actually VERY in support of unionizing, even more so than google employees themselves, it was a really interesting mix of people and they didn't have their heads up their asses like normal techbro google employees who are used to everything working out and handwaving away systematic concerns.

Multiple attempts over the years had been made to unionize, but Google always crushed them with an iron fist.

Notice how Google Maps data hasn't been improving, and if anything getting worse?

I worked for Cognizant, a contractor for Google maps at the Bothell office. I worked for a contractor that Google would fire every 5 years, contract it to another company and change the sign on the office building they owned...then rehire everyone. One of the benefits of this for them (one of the key benefits) was it made it much harder for workers to organize especially because Cognizant and Google can just play "go talk to the other parent I cant do anything" when workers ask for help because they were suffering/needed higher pay to survive/needed basic accomodations.

I worked for Google but Google didn't want to pay me or my coworkers a living wage, so Google paid some lawyers to make it so they could pretend we didn't work for Google.

Google is a trash company with absolutely zero idea how to move forward into the future, the company was absolutely chock full of intelligent interesting smart people but Google was so shortsighted that they forced my whole department back to the office for no good reason (literally everything was remote work too).

My experience after working for Google was that Google was most definitely going to collapse within the decade in terms of market power, at the very least in the realm of maps/spatial data.

What a shameful, pathetic company and the management should be ashamed of how stupid and out of touch they were.

Also, completely and utterly anti-worker.

(Cognizant is trash too but if you have ever heard of the company Cognizant you already know that).

A particular point of shame I want to level at the management above me at Cognizant and Google, most of our work was involved with prototyping google maps data editing and QC workflows... that could then be exported to India or somewhere else with cheap labor.... except upper management was racist as fuck against Indian workers and would complain about their shoddy work indirectly all the time...

...and never bring up that they specifically wanted to hire Indians so they could pay them shit and treat them like shit. If you were a tech worker in India would you work as hard as I did for far far far far less pay and WAY worse treatment?

I actually led a training class on a workflow that was absolutely not suited for new workers to Google Maps gis data editing to... totally new entry level hires in India, and the Indians were frequently cheating or totally checking out.. again because why the hell would they take this shit seriously? To be clear most people were like most people, they just did the best job they could, but there were lots of people I was training that could see right through the bullshit of the entire system and I can ZERO percent blame them for not disrespecting themselves by treating Google like it was genuine in its offers of employment, stability and a career.

Management encouraged a culture where lowkey shitting on Indians for being lazy and dumb was basically accepted because it rationalized the cruelty, inefficiency and stupidity of the entire system.

I hate Google.

I think it is rather that conservatism has nothing to do with being conservative really at the end of the day, that is just the team colors these people wear to identify what team they are on.

Conservatives are conservative so they can hate without guilt and so they can control and possess with violence and be rewarded for it. From this angle the synergy heinous shitheads see in being a Republican and being a pedophile (but also defining your public persona completely around hating pedophiles too) is pretty straightforward in my opinion. Also probably the most pathetic thing on the face of the earth.

I don't really understand your point here. Are you claiming that a centrist supports some amount of genocide?

Yes

Hacker News might be the most insufferable and childishly naive place on the internet.

Well yes, in the sense that sandcastles exist on the beach until the tide comes back in but worry not they are quickly trying to solve the problem of their own existence in as many ways possible as they can whether it be killing themselves with reckless and proud self exposure to Covid, lack of clean water in the places they spend all their money on a big house, mental health, lack of healthcare etc… you just have to give them time to kill themselves off (and make sure your loved ones don’t get mixed up in their collective self destruction if you can).

Change takes time unfortunately :(

Do you understand you sound like someone at a cult claiming that because your robes are a different color that your sect is totally way different than the other sect of the cult that split from your sect because of a disagreement over the color of the robes worshippers should wear?

Economics isn’t a real science (I almost used “hard” instead of “real” but I honestly have infinitely more respect for the soft sciences than I ever will for economics and I don’t want to conflate them), it is an ideology masquerading as a science with lots of math and handwaving to shove reality into shapes that please the people who control the status quo blended together with a potentially lethal dose of cargo cult style beliefs.

If you think there is a crisis of reproducibility and trust in real science…. don’t take a closer look and honestly ask at what people around you generally think of economics “experts” or you aren’t going to like it…

Bro I bet if you did allll that work and took all that risk just to make your life maybbeee better that at the end of the day the people living in the place you made it to would be blown away by your incredible bravery and resolve and would welcome you with open arms into their society and economy!

……..

Or maybe they would just pay their coast guard to troll around drowning migrant boats with heavily armed speed boats with expensive lights on and an automated voice message that says “go home” and shrug and say “well we tried!!” as families drown right in front of their eyes.

The worst thing about many programmers and tech people is that in general these types of people will always be more obsessed with the next technology that will save us by allowing us to consume more and become more selfish than with genuine solutions to actual human problems not neatly defined computer/math problems.

Like problems computer programs are useful for, techbros see the climate crisis as an optimization problem with easily definable numbers and quantities. Politics, ideology, emotions and systematic oppression and suffering don’t enter the algorithm in quantifiably explicit ways so they are considered trivial for the purposes of solving the problem. Most computer programmers I have met would have no problem writing a computer algorithm to save time for cops having to manually choose who to pull over and instead use a crime prediction algorithm trained on who police officers have previously pulled over in the past to “solve crime” and “make policing unbiased”. Maybe that is changing, but it isn’t because most of these people actually get what is so evil about writing a program like that in their hearts, they just understand they get shamed every time they suggest crap like this.

Thus you get legions of these people decrying environmentalists and their strategies with a fatalist cynicism in places like hacker news while they simultaneously trot out whatever lame Elon musk style “revolutionary technology” that they think will solve the crises we face that revolves around catastrophically stupid global scale geoengineering or tech that is eternally 30 years away just magically becoming distributed and ready for mass market use tomorrow.

Everything is optimization, everything must scale as quickly as possible, everything is about bigger and bigger regimes of control that enforce rigid operations and interactions. These people think the entire universe can be seen through the lens of factorio and it makes me vomit in my mouth a little every time I think about it.

This is of course by far the most dangerous part about many programmers and tech people, by and large they seem to believe that because they understand computers that they understand everything they need to know about the world. It is really no different than any other kind of hubris, it’s just the rest of us give tech people more leeway to engage in it because the tech world preys so intensely on our practical real world hopes and dreams while laying claim to large swathes of our imaginative capacity to envision different realities.

There are also many amazing tech and programmer type people, I am speaking in generalizations that will never include every instance of the type. I love you, cool and radical lefty techies!!!! This isn’t aimed at you.

Very Sharp

I mean… how big really is the category of software tasks that you can’t properly do on Linux in 2024? I feel like it is getting to the point where you do genuinely have to be specific about what Linux can’t do that is a dealbreaker for you rather than just falling back on “Linux can’t do what people need to do” as a general criticism of it.

Windows can’t do what people need it to do, and it fails to do so while sucking up your private data (which if you work at a business with confidential information IS a dealbreaker). At least when Linux fails it usually isn’t simultaneously violating the IT security structure of your organization….

The funny thing is businesses and government entities can’t even claim with a straight face that they can trust Microsoft to adhere to the meager insufficient data privacy laws that do exist when there is zero evidence Microsoft would behave that way based on the track record even if the financial penalties for failing to do so were actually real to the ruling class and not just theoretical thought experiments that involve a slap on the wrist or more like a light tickling with a feather on the nose.