1. That’s a personal preference. Many people do care about aesthetics and I don’t think invalidating their taste is fair. Hence, if you wanted to add factors accounting for that preference, you’d have to define some additional variable for it.
2. If a is a subjective measure of aesthetic value - as it must be, since taste is a subjective thing - you might as well include the factor already.
3. If a is normalised against some fixed scale, but bloat (having effectively no upper limit) is impossible to normalise, it would be more reasonable to increase f instead in order to model the fact that a larger distro may also come with more functionality.
4. You don’t need the extra parentheses around 0.5*a
5. We’re both fucking nerds and I love it

10 days seems too low to fully grasp the misery of long-term homelessness, and a few millionaires isn’t quite the same as a few billionaires. Still, I like the premise.

Really, the metric we should be looking at is (f+a)/b where f is some subjective weighted measure of functionality, a of aesthetic value and b describes the bloat.

I suggest to remedy what must clearly be a misunderstanding, we give him a deep and personal insight: Cut him off from all of his assets, give him nothing but a set of cheap clothes and kick him to the curb.

Of course, we’d need to make sure his billionaire buddies don’t help him, but maybe we can just enroll them in this experiment too.

Actually, they might just promise someone a reward once they get access to their funds again, so we need to make sure that this can’t influence the experiment. Maybe we could just seize the assets without giving them back? With their hard work, surely they can get back to where they were, pulling bootstraps and all.

When he called them shitholes, I’m starting to think that might have been geopolitical tsundere.

An individual would risk corporate lawyers lobbing suits at them they don’t have nearly enough resources to fight. In that way, it’s much like other forms of activism: individual actions are easily singled out and retaliated against.

If a ton of people were to do so, however, they might have an impact. Either the registrar would have to take steps to limit who can submit them, which might conflict with some laws, or they’d invest a great deal of resources trying to sort out the legit ones. Trying to single out people for retaliation is hard when there’s enough of them. In this way, too, it is like other forms of activism:

There is strength in numbers. There is power in unity.

If, hypothetically, someone were to coordinate such actions in the style of a crowdsources DDoS, and they could get enough participants, they might get away with it.

Idiots participate in Bigger Idiot scheme, upset to find out they’re the Bigger Idiot.

Hard to predict.

This act broke the taboo against violence and shattered the perception of powerlessness. Turns out there is something you can do against these assholes, and it’s not as unpopular an option as you might have expected.

It may inspire imitation, emboldening other pissed victims. It may scare the other CEOs into treading more carefully. It might embolden progressive politicians to challenge the status quo, now that they see how popular that can be.

Or it might end up a big ball of hot air that doesn’t do anything. Like I said, hard to predict.

Like the fact that diversity kept it together and attempting to enforce unity of culture shattered it?

Or that a great way to win loyal allies is to generously reward them with citizenship benefits, while making treaties with barbarians to have them defeat your enemies and then snubbing them is a great way to suddenly have a bunch of new enemies you need to find new allies to fight?

Or that having the military meddle in the affairs of civil government tends to get quite expensive and end up quite ruinous?

Gosh, there really are a lot of things that went wrong. I guess lead pipes go on the pile too, and maybe “climate change can fuck shit up really badly”.

I once made a reddit comment in anger that was most certainly over the line. I don’t remember the context, but someone had my blood boiling quite badly, which I voiced by wishing pain on them. However, it was a support-oriented community, and my outburst was definitely not tone-appropriate for that environment - the last thing people seeking support need is a graphic description of pain. I got a two-day (I think?) temp ban from that sub, citing that reason. First I was pissed, then reflected, acknowledged my error and didn’t repeat that mistake.

In hindsight, I think that makes for a good moderation approach:

Lock an escalating thread, clean out comments that cross the line, hand out brief temporary bans to particularly excessive offenders or those continuing their venting spree in other threads after the first one was locked, give them an opportunity to step back and reflect.

Of course, there’s still the question of “what do the mods consider excessive?” But that’s a question you’d have either way.

I feel we’re arguing about definitions here, except that you’re just asserting the equivalence instead of proposing a definition that would lead to that conclusion.

I offered my distinction. What part do you disagree with?

I’m thankful I don’t do software dev (I did two years as a working student, that was enough), but working in Data Engineering / Analytics* doesn’t make things better. I’ll overengineer the database, ETL and reporting, define a dozen measures I’ll never use, prepare a dozen ways to slice and view the data I’ll never look at and build a whole data warehouse I’ll never look at.

Eventually I remember that it exists, realise that I’ve answered all my questions by directly querying the database, except for “What am I running out of?”, which I answer by looking in the cabinet because I never update my inventory anyway.

*I don’t even know where the line is anymore and how much of my responsibilities is on either side of it

“6 for the beer, 9 for the longdrink, 4.20 for the water… That’s a total of 694.20 please.”

He uses a pencil, paper and a mechanical calculator to tally up the bill, which I absolutely understand when your career is in IT.

When the alternative is either having to search, evaluate, compare, select and configure an application for that purpose that you’re never quite happy with, or to scope, design, develop, test, deploy, maintain, eternally find things you wish you’d done better, refactor, realise you’re spending your free time on doing more of your job, regret your life choices, resolve to only make this last improvement and then call it good enough, renege on that promise to yourself a week later, burn out, curse that damn app for ruining your hobby…

…yeah, using the most trivial low-tech solution possible does look rather sensible.

My new data structure:

Given a heuristic for determining data quality, it homogenises the quality of its contents. Data you write to it has pieces exchanged with other entries depending on its quality. The lower the quality, the higher the rate of exchange.

If you put only perfect data, nothing is exchanged. Put high quality, you’ll mostly get high quality too, but probably with some errors. Put in garbage, it starts poisoning the rest of the data. Garbage in, garbage out.

“Why would you want that”, you ask? Wrong question, buddy - how about “Do you want to be left behind when this new data quality management technology takes off?” And if that doesn’t convince you, let me dig around my buzzword budget to see if I can throw some “Make Investors Drool And Swoon”-skills your way to convince you I’ll turn your crap data into gold.

I think it’s a symptom of the age-old issue of missing QA: Without solid QA you have no figures on how often your human solutions get things wrong, how often your AI does and how it stacks up.

I’m not denying his hatred or crime. A massacre born from racist hatred is a pogrom, a hate crime, an atrocity. Anakin isn’t a good guy just because he only butchered one group, and I don’t think anyone is claiming otherwise.

I’m arguing whether the massacre of one group of their race constitutes genocide in terms of scale (local outburst of violence as opposed to a planet-wide persecution) and intent (revenge out of rage and hate born from topical pain as opposed to a persistent effort to eliminate an entire race).

Not every pogrom is genocide. We don’t need to reach for the most extreme terms to describe violence born from racism. In case it needs to be emphasised, Anakin committed a hate crime, incited by grief and rage, but likely fueled by preexisting prejudice.

There really is no need to stoop to insults and condescension about it either. If you have a contribution to make about the subject matter - perhaps because you think I’ve forgotten something - just contribute instead of prefacing and closing it with vitriol.

The thing I hate about Star Wars is how stuck-up and elitist some fans get. God forbid you get something wrong - if you haven’t consumed and intricately memorised every piece of canon (and “Legends”) lore, you’re trash. And because everyone gets something wrong at some point, they all suck and everyone that likes it is an idiot (except me of course, I know everything). Damn Star Wars Fans, they ruined Star Wars!

That isn’t the environment any fandom should foster. If you love something, help others love it too! If someone gets something wrong or doesn’t know something, share what you know. If someone holds a position you disagree with, talk to them and figure out where you disagree. Be part of the reason someone says “I fucking love Star Wars”. Let’s love it together.

It’s a common bait-and-switch joke. “I have Ligma” “What’s Ligma?” “Ligma Balls!” (The joke being that “Ligma” sounds like “Lick My”)

Maybe you’re familiar with a similar joke: “Hey, do you think it smells like updog in here?” “What’s updog” “Not much, what’s up with you?” (Here, the joke is that “What’s updog” sounds like “What’s up, dawg”)

Science communicators that make complex things accessible for the general public are a critical component to building and maintaining public support for scientific institutions. If we want science to serve public interests rather than corporate ones, we need to establish public funding for it, which requires a public understanding of what they are doing and why it’s valuable.

A blog I very much like and keep recommending talks about both the importance of this and the differing viewpoints within academic culture (specifically about history, but many of the concepts apply to sciences in general). It also has cat pictures.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard about toxic culture in universities (Section “The Advisor”). Again, the entry is about graduate programs in the humanities, but it’s not just a humanities-specific issue.

I personally didn’t know about HowStuffWorks (I was under the misconception that it was just a YouTube format, which I generally don’t watch a whole lot), but checking it out now, I definitely missed out, and I think it fits the criteria of the field-to-public communication.

To drive such a valuable contributor to such despair they no longer want to live at all is a disservice to the public, a threat to what good their institution can do (which, for all its toxicity, probably also provided valuable research) and most of all a crime against that person. I hope they’re held accountable, but I also hope that public scrutiny can bring about improvements in academic culture so that his death might still do some good in the end.

Imagine you have a sandwich to spare. You could really use a drink though. There’s a hungry guy with a drink to spare, and he’d give it to you in exchange for the sandwich. That’s trading.

Now imagine you run a sandwich shop. You need things like bread and toppings. If you just give your sandwiches away with nothing in return, you’ll run out of ingredients. No more sandwiches :(

So you need someone to give you sandwich ingredients. They also don’t just want to give their things away, because they also need other things.
Not everyone who has bread or toppings to share needs a sandwich though. A baker, for example might need flour. The miller might need grain. The farmer however does need a sandwich.
So to get your bread, you’d trade your sandwich to the farmer for some grain, that grain to the miller for flour, the flower to the baker and finally get your bread.

That’s a bit tedious though, so instead you all agree on a token of some value representing the work you put in to make this. You give your sandwich to the farmer in exchange for such a token, then go to the baker and trade it for bread. The baker trades it for flour, the miller for grain. That token is money.

Now, how do you get that token? Someone needs to have it first, after all, and give it to the farmer so the farmer can buy a sandwich. They’ll want something in return too, eventually - maybe they don’t need anything right now, but they will somewhere down the line, and they need to have that token back for that. That’s a loan.

Now, the farmer gave the token back, but the lender gave them a larger set of tokens. They used it to buy a better plow that helped them cultivate a larger area, netting them more grain they can trade for tokens. After giving the loaned tokens back, he’ll still have some left over. That’s profit.

Now one farmer starts gathering more tokens, because he got particularly lucky, and offers some to other people in exchange for a share of their land. Those other people had a bad year and desperately need some food, which the tokens can buy. In the long run, trading away their land will leave them off worse, but the short term is more important. That’s exploiting the misery of others.

The lucky guy, on the other hand, can’t work all that land himself, so he offers to let the less lucky ones work on his land in exchange for a portion of the tokens their work brings in. Again, they need that money to compensate the fact they now have less land, so they agree. That’s labour.

Notice how the lucky guy gives them a portion of their labour’s worth? He keeps the rest, for the privilege of owning that land he bought from them in the first place. That’s landlording.

He uses some of his profit to pay others to enforce his claim to that land. He uses some to buy more land. He uses his control of the majority of grain supply to leverage the miller into selling his mill too (although a skilled miller is worth a lot, so the lucky guy keeps the poor miller on as a labourer too). That’s concentration of wealth.

Eventually, he can use all that surplus to buy draft animals and more plows to make the farming even more effective. Obviously, his own lands benefit first, then he lets the poorer farmers pay to use these as well. By controlling the means of production, he forces the labourers into dependency at unfavourable terms. That’s exploitation.

Now, all that extra money from surplus grain can fund more things that aren’t food production. That enables the development of specialists in other areas, and due to it being non-perishable, the money can also be allowed to trade things across greater distances, because merchants can now use it to buy food and other things along the way instead of having to trade locally. Technologies, tools, material and luxuries all reach a broader customer base. That’s an economy.

Of course, due to the majority of the money being controlled by a few lucky people, those people end up affording most of the luxuries while the rest has to work hard for a living. That’s oligarchy.

Eventually, the steam engine is invented and heralds an age of industry. However, setting up factories to effectively harness the productive capability of those machines requires a lot of up-front investment for the machines, space, infrastructure and administration required to operate it efficiently. There just so happens to be a group of people with the wealth to fund all these things, and just as they controlled the land, the grain supply, the mills and so on, they now control the means of production.

Now imagine if the poor farmers were bailed out by a communal fund instead - a form of social safety net to catch them that they all pay into in good years, knowing a bad year won’t ruin them. They could afford communal draft animals and plows, they could fund an administrative apparatus to enable all those advantages of a monetised society, a military to secure them against the jealousy of greedy neighbours, all without parasites growing fat off of their sweat. Pretty sure there’s a name for that too.