"Please respond to what people actually said, not to exaggerations of their views."
For a start it's Health at Every Size, note the missing 'y'. Their view is that being healthy is somewhat independent of weight, and that it is near impossible for very overweight people to lose weight through dieting and traditional methods such as fat shaming. Rather they prefer to focus on being healthier at the higher weight.
Now I don't necessarily agree with them, I think it would be better to lose weight and there are other ways to do that, but I also understand that they have a point about diets not really working for most overweight people and on balance it probably being better for them to focus on being as otherwise healthy as possible.
What you did was straw man them, accuse them of making unfounded allegations and dismissed them as being irrational and PC. Effectively you are silencing them by painting them as borderline mentally ill and poisoning the well, thus illustrating my point about saying things are PC being a tactic to silence views you don't like. I mean it doesn't even fit the definition of PC so you expanded it.
To quote a google email on the Damore memo "we don't want diversity of ideas".
I searched and this doesn't seem to be a quote. Do you have a link perhaps?
The nearest I could find was:
Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions.
This is not an issue of lack of diversity of your developers, but lack of feedback from a representative group of your users.
For an open source project if someone comes to you with a bug that can only be reproduced by being black, and you aren't black... More over it really helps to think about this stuff earlier in the development of features, rather than someone come along when it's all done and point out that your UI is difficult for colourblind people or the fact that you can't change the font size is a major issue for them.
Honestly the best thing to happen to computers in the last decade has been the ability to properly scale UIs, and I'm not even that old.
Camera film today being bad at capturing black skin because calibrated "by white people for white people" in general? That smells like bullshit.
Even these days with cameras being mostly digital it's still an issue. It's only really in maybe the last five years that Hollywood has got really good at filming black people in anything less than ideal lighting. Even once the technology got there, it took a while for cinematographers to figure it all out.
That's why so many films with black actors won awards for cinematography lately.
"The constant migrations of foreigners to the US is a clear demonstration that past and current foreign policy with Central and South America has failed." No one is being called an illegal, no one is indicating any particular President at fault, and so on.
Unintentionally you have illustrated my point perfectly.
The person making the example statement is clearly making a general statement about migration, both legal and illegal, and determining legal status or assigning blame to particular presidents is irrelevant to that. Their point is that multiple government's policies have failed.
Thanks to the notion of political correctness you have been unable to parse that simple, clear statement without questioning why it doesn't include emotive language or assign blame to an individual. You assume that the speaker feels pressure to avoid doing those things, when in fact they are likely trying to make a different point entirely. And so you dismiss what hey have to say as being PC.
As yourself this, assuming you really cared about this issue what would be the most effective way to improve the situation? Would it be focusing on illegal immigration and assigning blame to one president that every listener likely voted for/against at some point, or would it be to avoid all that divisive stuff and try to get to the real issue which you think is failed foreign policy?
The issue is that the descendents of slaves still face a lot of problems stemming from that history, and honouring the people who were part of the problem with their name on a building doesn't help. In fact, it makes things slightly worse...
It's like those statues of Confederate generals. They were mostly mass produced cheaply long after the war, when the civil rights movement was gaining traction in fact. They were designed to remind the people demanding equal rights that they were not equal, that the communities they live in thought they were property and were willing to fight for that belief. The people putting them up didn't give a shit about the generals, they just wanted to make black people feel uncomfortable.
We need a name for this kind of thing. Maybe "toxic meritocracy"? Everyone starts out as pond scum and has to earn your respect on your terms, or you treat them with at best contempt.
I for one do not welcome our mentally ill gender neutral overlords. You can identify as mayonnaise all you want, but i won't refer to you that way.
This would seem to be covered by the Code of Kindness:
"Please do not criticize people for wrongs that you only speculate they may have done; stick to what they actually say and actually do."
"Please respond to what people actually said, not to exaggerations of their views."
Could probably benefit from something about not diagnosing people with mental illnesses too. Anyway, in this case the issue is clearly that no-one is trying to self identify as mayonnaise, and you are exaggerating their requests to make your point.
Also, note how RMS doesn't suggest using their requested pronouns even, he suggests using gender neutral ones for everyone and has a footnote expanding his ideas.
Okay, so the question then is what if someone decides to ignore his polite suggestion and causes problems. I don't think he means to imply that there should be no way of dealing with such a person.
The fact that he anticipated your assumption and went out of his way to deny it is somehow proof that you were right?
Is there literally anything he could possibly say that would convince you he wasn't "got at" by SJWs? If he denies it you assume it's a forced denial and proof if duress, if he doesn't you assume it's because it is true.
An anonymous source on ESR's blog, really? And despite their attempts to get this person and presumably others, there is no a single example of it actually working. They must be terribly incompetent, considering they have apparently been trying since at least 2015.
The bit about Linus not having spoken about it is the biggest joke. I know from my anonymous sources that Linus keeps a supply of oregano up his arse, the fact that he hasn't mentioned it is just proof that someone blackmailed him into hiding their stash.
Also, might want to Google "ad-hominem" and then get back to us.
He suggests respecting people's gender identity and chosen name, giving people respect by default, not using language that might discourage participation by certain groups etc. All the standard problems people here have with a Code of Conduct...
Which makes me wonder, why the mostly positive response? Is it the lack of any kind of enforcement, in which case what do you do about some toxic asshat causing trouble? Or is it just that people have respect for RMS and can't find some old tweets or blog posts suggesting he is a social justice warrior?
RMS manages to explain the goals of people concerned about things like diversity really well. His footnote about genderless pronouns is really good too, taking it as written that a person's gender identity is their identity but also showing how what matters is respecting that, not the exact words or conforming to some arbitrary standard.
I'm always impressed by his ability to think and write clearly, getting to the heart of the matter in a concise way.
Political correctness is a silencing tactic. By designating something political correctness you are saying that it's trivial and unimportant, and therefore the person complaining is just whining. The idea is to belittle people's concerns and requests to be treated better by implying that they are so inconsequential that the argument/request is ether absurd or not made in good faith.
It really got going in the 80s when people were complaining about things like the building they studied in being named after the guy who owned their great great grandparents. Now it's expanded from just trying to silence them to being part of victimhood narrative where requests to recognize the affect that such things have on others is a form of bullying.
It's a great document. Slashdot could benefit from a lot of these ideas:
"Please assume other participants are posting in good faith, even if you disagree with what they say." "Please do not criticize people for wrongs that you only speculate they may have done; stick to what they actually say and actually do."
"Go out of your way to show that you are criticizing a statement, not a person."
"Please recognize that criticism of your statements is not a personal attack on you."
"Please avoid statements about the presumed typical desires, capabilities or actions of some demographic group."
"Please respond to what people actually said, not to exaggerations of their views."
10 presses per second is incredible, especially for a sustained period. I seem to recall that the world record for button presses per second on a NES pad was 16 for many years, and that's just hammering the same button.
Netflix needs original content to survive. The other studios are setting up their own streaming services now, and removing their content from Netflix. Original content is the only reason I subscribe any more.
When I was in college I had to submit a written request to increase my default allocation of 1MB of disk space so I could work on a ray tracer.
Nowadays I have lost count of how many terabytes I have in my file server. Thing is, hard drives are really cheap and it's just not worth wasting massive amounts of time sorting, compressing and discarding stuff. There was a comment on Slashdot that used the example of a photographer paying an intern minimum wage to do the job, and it turned out that just storing all the photos was cheaper.
My time is valuable. I used to waste untold hours optimizing my Amiga to boot a little quicker or save a few kilobytes of RAM, but not any more.
Same with my phone. It manages the wifi and power saving so well that I usually don't get below 70% in a day, so there just isn't any point wasting my time trying to save tiny amounts of energy by manually adjusting it constantly.
They have to borrow more and more in order to make more new content to both attract new subscribers and maintain their existing ones.
That's the normal way business works. They have a product that is successful and profitable, so people are willing to invest more money in them to expand it.
The next big step for them is to get direct-to-stream movies given the same consideration as those shown in cinemas. Movies are ripe for disruption just like TV was, but it's a little harder because a lot of critics and awards won't look at anything that doesn't get a theatrical release, they consider them equivalent to straight to DVD trash.
The whole idea with Netflix is that they should be able to make better quality programming by relying on the long tail for viewing, and not having to worry about the whims of advertisers. Otherwise what is the point, it's just the same drek as other streaming services.
I'd love to see some really good documentaries, like the BBC used to make in the 70s/80s. Informative and in-depth, none of this Brian Cox gazing at the sky and breathlessly whispering about how amazing it all is. Making a Murderer was pretty good, as was that thing about OJ.
Slashdot Mirror
From the Kind Communications Guidelines:
"Please respond to what people actually said, not to exaggerations of their views."
For a start it's Health at Every Size, note the missing 'y'. Their view is that being healthy is somewhat independent of weight, and that it is near impossible for very overweight people to lose weight through dieting and traditional methods such as fat shaming. Rather they prefer to focus on being healthier at the higher weight.
Now I don't necessarily agree with them, I think it would be better to lose weight and there are other ways to do that, but I also understand that they have a point about diets not really working for most overweight people and on balance it probably being better for them to focus on being as otherwise healthy as possible.
What you did was straw man them, accuse them of making unfounded allegations and dismissed them as being irrational and PC. Effectively you are silencing them by painting them as borderline mentally ill and poisoning the well, thus illustrating my point about saying things are PC being a tactic to silence views you don't like. I mean it doesn't even fit the definition of PC so you expanded it.
I refer you back to the Kind Communication Guidelines:
"Please respond to what people actually said, not to exaggerations of their views."
Perhaps we can stick to realistic examples rather than ridiculous exaggerations.
To quote a google email on the Damore memo "we don't want diversity of ideas".
I searched and this doesn't seem to be a quote. Do you have a link perhaps?
The nearest I could find was:
Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions.
http://fortune.com/2017/08/07/...
This is not an issue of lack of diversity of your developers, but lack of feedback from a representative group of your users.
For an open source project if someone comes to you with a bug that can only be reproduced by being black, and you aren't black... More over it really helps to think about this stuff earlier in the development of features, rather than someone come along when it's all done and point out that your UI is difficult for colourblind people or the fact that you can't change the font size is a major issue for them.
Honestly the best thing to happen to computers in the last decade has been the ability to properly scale UIs, and I'm not even that old.
Camera film today being bad at capturing black skin because calibrated "by white people for white people" in general? That smells like bullshit.
Even these days with cameras being mostly digital it's still an issue. It's only really in maybe the last five years that Hollywood has got really good at filming black people in anything less than ideal lighting. Even once the technology got there, it took a while for cinematographers to figure it all out.
That's why so many films with black actors won awards for cinematography lately.
Over 11,000 words and more than 65k characters - my limited 16 bit brain overflowed.
The TL;DR version is search first, then pick the right venue, then ask nicely.
"The constant migrations of foreigners to the US is a clear demonstration that past and current foreign policy with Central and South America has failed." No one is being called an illegal, no one is indicating any particular President at fault, and so on.
Unintentionally you have illustrated my point perfectly.
The person making the example statement is clearly making a general statement about migration, both legal and illegal, and determining legal status or assigning blame to particular presidents is irrelevant to that. Their point is that multiple government's policies have failed.
Thanks to the notion of political correctness you have been unable to parse that simple, clear statement without questioning why it doesn't include emotive language or assign blame to an individual. You assume that the speaker feels pressure to avoid doing those things, when in fact they are likely trying to make a different point entirely. And so you dismiss what hey have to say as being PC.
As yourself this, assuming you really cared about this issue what would be the most effective way to improve the situation? Would it be focusing on illegal immigration and assigning blame to one president that every listener likely voted for/against at some point, or would it be to avoid all that divisive stuff and try to get to the real issue which you think is failed foreign policy?
White people have nothing to be ashamed about
Yeah, that's not the issue.
The issue is that the descendents of slaves still face a lot of problems stemming from that history, and honouring the people who were part of the problem with their name on a building doesn't help. In fact, it makes things slightly worse...
It's like those statues of Confederate generals. They were mostly mass produced cheaply long after the war, when the civil rights movement was gaining traction in fact. They were designed to remind the people demanding equal rights that they were not equal, that the communities they live in thought they were property and were willing to fight for that belief. The people putting them up didn't give a shit about the generals, they just wanted to make black people feel uncomfortable.
We need a name for this kind of thing. Maybe "toxic meritocracy"? Everyone starts out as pond scum and has to earn your respect on your terms, or you treat them with at best contempt.
I for one do not welcome our mentally ill gender neutral overlords. You can identify as mayonnaise all you want, but i won't refer to you that way.
This would seem to be covered by the Code of Kindness:
"Please do not criticize people for wrongs that you only speculate they may have done; stick to what they actually say and actually do."
"Please respond to what people actually said, not to exaggerations of their views."
Could probably benefit from something about not diagnosing people with mental illnesses too. Anyway, in this case the issue is clearly that no-one is trying to self identify as mayonnaise, and you are exaggerating their requests to make your point.
Also, note how RMS doesn't suggest using their requested pronouns even, he suggests using gender neutral ones for everyone and has a footnote expanding his ideas.
From the Code of Kindness:
"Please assume other participants are posting in good faith, even if you disagree with what they say."
Presumably you don't think that the GP really meant that the problem was three letter acronyms, but correct me if I'm wrong.
He suggests. He is asking.
Okay, so the question then is what if someone decides to ignore his polite suggestion and causes problems. I don't think he means to imply that there should be no way of dealing with such a person.
The fact that he anticipated your assumption and went out of his way to deny it is somehow proof that you were right?
Is there literally anything he could possibly say that would convince you he wasn't "got at" by SJWs? If he denies it you assume it's a forced denial and proof if duress, if he doesn't you assume it's because it is true.
An anonymous source on ESR's blog, really? And despite their attempts to get this person and presumably others, there is no a single example of it actually working. They must be terribly incompetent, considering they have apparently been trying since at least 2015.
The bit about Linus not having spoken about it is the biggest joke. I know from my anonymous sources that Linus keeps a supply of oregano up his arse, the fact that he hasn't mentioned it is just proof that someone blackmailed him into hiding their stash.
Also, might want to Google "ad-hominem" and then get back to us.
My god, I think you are right, he is serious...
"your behavior not be in direct conflict with time-tested and centuries-old Christian ethics"
I'm not going near that project if it means sticking to Christian ethics, I'm not coming down to that level.
He suggests respecting people's gender identity and chosen name, giving people respect by default, not using language that might discourage participation by certain groups etc. All the standard problems people here have with a Code of Conduct...
Which makes me wonder, why the mostly positive response? Is it the lack of any kind of enforcement, in which case what do you do about some toxic asshat causing trouble? Or is it just that people have respect for RMS and can't find some old tweets or blog posts suggesting he is a social justice warrior?
RMS manages to explain the goals of people concerned about things like diversity really well. His footnote about genderless pronouns is really good too, taking it as written that a person's gender identity is their identity but also showing how what matters is respecting that, not the exact words or conforming to some arbitrary standard.
I'm always impressed by his ability to think and write clearly, getting to the heart of the matter in a concise way.
Political correctness is a silencing tactic. By designating something political correctness you are saying that it's trivial and unimportant, and therefore the person complaining is just whining. The idea is to belittle people's concerns and requests to be treated better by implying that they are so inconsequential that the argument/request is ether absurd or not made in good faith.
It really got going in the 80s when people were complaining about things like the building they studied in being named after the guy who owned their great great grandparents. Now it's expanded from just trying to silence them to being part of victimhood narrative where requests to recognize the affect that such things have on others is a form of bullying.
It's a great document. Slashdot could benefit from a lot of these ideas:
"Please assume other participants are posting in good faith, even if you disagree with what they say."
"Please do not criticize people for wrongs that you only speculate they may have done; stick to what they actually say and actually do."
"Go out of your way to show that you are criticizing a statement, not a person."
"Please recognize that criticism of your statements is not a personal attack on you."
"Please avoid statements about the presumed typical desires, capabilities or actions of some demographic group."
"Please respond to what people actually said, not to exaggerations of their views."
Nice work, that's a great explanation of how it works too.
10 presses per second is incredible, especially for a sustained period. I seem to recall that the world record for button presses per second on a NES pad was 16 for many years, and that's just hammering the same button.
Netflix needs original content to survive. The other studios are setting up their own streaming services now, and removing their content from Netflix. Original content is the only reason I subscribe any more.
When I was in college I had to submit a written request to increase my default allocation of 1MB of disk space so I could work on a ray tracer.
Nowadays I have lost count of how many terabytes I have in my file server. Thing is, hard drives are really cheap and it's just not worth wasting massive amounts of time sorting, compressing and discarding stuff. There was a comment on Slashdot that used the example of a photographer paying an intern minimum wage to do the job, and it turned out that just storing all the photos was cheaper.
My time is valuable. I used to waste untold hours optimizing my Amiga to boot a little quicker or save a few kilobytes of RAM, but not any more.
Same with my phone. It manages the wifi and power saving so well that I usually don't get below 70% in a day, so there just isn't any point wasting my time trying to save tiny amounts of energy by manually adjusting it constantly.
Some providers let you cut off access the moment you hit the limit. Well worth enabling. In the mean time did you send the bill to Google?
They have to borrow more and more in order to make more new content to both attract new subscribers and maintain their existing ones.
That's the normal way business works. They have a product that is successful and profitable, so people are willing to invest more money in them to expand it.
The next big step for them is to get direct-to-stream movies given the same consideration as those shown in cinemas. Movies are ripe for disruption just like TV was, but it's a little harder because a lot of critics and awards won't look at anything that doesn't get a theatrical release, they consider them equivalent to straight to DVD trash.
The whole idea with Netflix is that they should be able to make better quality programming by relying on the long tail for viewing, and not having to worry about the whims of advertisers. Otherwise what is the point, it's just the same drek as other streaming services.
I'd love to see some really good documentaries, like the BBC used to make in the 70s/80s. Informative and in-depth, none of this Brian Cox gazing at the sky and breathlessly whispering about how amazing it all is. Making a Murderer was pretty good, as was that thing about OJ.