mo_ztt ✅

This dude on Youtube did an in-depth examination of the weird corporate reasons why the ice cream machines can’t be maintained properly. Sorry for the Youtube link, but I honestly couldn’t find a text story that went into the same type of analysis about it.

Edit: Timestamped the link to skip some folderol at the beginning

1. We all know why they put “AI-driven” in the headline… I mean, it worked on me; I clicked on it.
2. That doesn’t mean they’ll be “autonomous” in the sense that people think of when they see the headline and click on it.
3. Having a human in the loop does make a difference. Snowden talked about watching on his desktop people getting killed by drone strikes in real time, as part of his motivating factor for why he turned against the NSA and its mission. The Nazis had a lot of “morale problems” with Nazi soldiers who were assigned to holocaust-adjacent operations and had to find other solutions. Etc. Every human you take out of the equation is one less person who can rotate home and tell people, “Yo what they’re telling us to do is really fucked up, let me tell you…”
4. I see the air force’s point. I honestly don’t blame them for feeling that there’s no future in an air warfare system that has to have a squishy slow-thinking meatbag in the middle of it putting limits on its performance. This kind of thing was already part of the plan for the US’s next generation fighter (with the pilot as the “commander” of a little network of drones) and has been for a while.
5. If you haven’t seen Slaughterbots it’s well worth a watch.

The fact that you would consider your counterfactual a mirror image is itself problematic.

It’s definitely an imperfect mirror image, yes. One is a private person spending $1,000 of his own money contributing personally to a political campaign (for something fairly abhorrent, I agree.) The other is a public foundation spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of the money it’s been entrusted with on various things which don’t seem to line up with what I think most people’s idea of their mission would be (i.e. software). I glossed over the asymmetry in the analogy to make a point but they’re actually wildly different situations.

If you consider the EFF left wing, I think that says a bit more about where you stand.

What on earth are you talking about? I genuinely can’t even make sense of you got yourself to this leap of logic.

Mozilla I think is generally understood as a software organization. The EFF didn’t get their start by making a web browser called “EFF” which now has been rebranded as “EFF Firefox” and collects ad revenue for them through partnerships. I do realize that the Mozilla Foundation’s mission statement now says they support general internet activism – which, again, is fine – but how you got from there to thinking anything about what I think about the EFF is genuinely very weird.

Also, I’ve contributed to the EFF. Have you?

The original article was outrage-bate blog spam, with random Capitalized Words and the prolific use of “scare quotes.” It doesn’t even say anything. No charges of misinformation. No citation of law. Just “They have a Billion Dollars!!” kinds of sentences.

Did you dig into its sources? I did. I’m sort of in agreement with you that it smells of some kind of right-wing hit job (like “HOW DARE THEY give money to this woman when she’s on THE LEFT”), and I think I pointed out up above that obviously Mozilla has the right to support left-wing causes with their money if they want to, even if it makes some right wing person VERY upset. I would just think that Eich has the same right. Even if it makes you very upset. Doesn’t he?

Be that as it may, specific things that I went back to its original sources and verified were:

• They’re spending less money on software development
• They gave almost half a million dollars to a one-woman consulting outfit without much explanation of what got produced (for them or for the world at large) in return

It said some other specific things that I didn’t dig into enough (that it paid one executive around $5 million dollars personally, which seems like a lot) (that they’re claiming to people that they rely on people’s donations to keep operating when they don’t) (etc). But, I poked around enough to determine that at the very least the article passed the obvious-bullshit test.

On the other hand, the CEO of a company - particularly a small company - lends his personality to the company. It often makes sense to co-identify them, given that the CEO has an incredible amount of influence.

You know that this is the same type of logic that the right uses to claim that some company whose executives once gave $1,000 to Hillary Clinton now needs to be boycotted, right?

I know, I know, the left is correct, and the right isn’t, so it’s different. Look… I’m pretty sure I’m on your side, politically. I just think it’s weird to advocate avoiding a web browser because one executive affiliated with them once gave $1,000 to a political cause I strongly disagree with. I think flipping it around to the other way is a pretty clear way of explaining why it’s weird. That’s all.

Why was appointing Eich as CEO so controversial? It’s because he donated $1,000 in support of California’s Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California’s state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

I want to try a thought experiment. Imagine that you observe this comment in reaction to the above:

I just don’t get why the author is so pissed about their political contributions. Guess what, people who are involved in big business are usually right-wing and support right-wing organizations. Shocking. Who could have known. I don’t even want to imagine how the author comes to the conclusion that this is some big conspiracy but I think we all know what political spectrum that guy belongs to.

What I just wrote is a mirror-image version of the top rated comment on that article from a few days ago about the Mozilla foundation funding left-wing organizations. Do you agree with one of those statements and not the other? If so, why?

It is one-sided to say that someone involved in Brave should only be “allowed” to do so if he doesn’t support anything conservative. Just as would be one-sided and wrong to say that Mozilla shouldn’t be “allowed” to support left-wing organizations. Flipping it around, and looking at the reaction when it’s the other way around, is an easy way to analyze your own internal reactions on it.

(Generally, I’m in agreement with the idea that you shouldn’t use Brave because of all these other shady things; just this one part jumped out at me as one thing that’s not like the others.)

I believe you that you got a “no space left on device” error, but I think you are misremembering it being a result of a simple rm command – if you really did get that error from rm, then it’s an indication of something much more seriously wrong than a full disc (filesystem corruption or bug).

Citations (first two results from a google search for “can’t rm because no space left on disc”):

Citation 1 (BTRFS specifically can get into that situation, which represented an argument for never using BTRFS in production)

Citation 2 (Happened because of a corrupted filesystem)

What error message did rm give you?

So… I had more or less exactly the same reaction. The subtle shade that pervades the whole article jumped out at me, and we’ve only got his word for it that any of this is suspicious or that he actually reached out to anybody to ask what was up with these expenditures. That said, I did dig through the sources he cites, and (1) what he’s saying is factually accurate (2) I think he’s kind of got a point. E.g. it sounds like they gave $387,000 to a one-person consulting outfit. They have a left-leaning slant, which is obviously fine (although I’m guessing Bryan Lunduke doesn’t think that it is). But they also have a track record which I would not consider solid enough to justify giving them $387,000, and I think the question “what did they do in exchange” is a pretty fair one.

I know what a string is.

Have you ever actually seen this happen? I have filled many discs, and the answer has always been to rm something, and I literally have not once seen or heard of rm not working because the disc is full. The system calls within rm that list files in the directory do not consume disc space.

Edit: On reflection I think you are saying this just to on purpose irritate Unix / Linux people and goad them into correcting you. In which case, mission accomplished. 🥲

What are you on about sir

What is ' string '?

Why is this better than rm?

Why would rm -rf not work with a full disc?