However, this fuckin’ half-in/half-out state has become the engine of a manifold of security issues, primarily bc nobody but nerds or industry specialists knows that much about it yet. That has led to rushed, busy, or just plain lazy devs and engineers to either keep IPv6 sockets listening, unguarded, or to just block them outright and redirect traffic to IPv4 anyway.

Its kind of interesting to me how conservative the IT industry is with stuff like this.

The industry loves to say “move fast and break things” or “innovate and disrupt”, but that generally only applies to things that can be shat out in a two week long Python project (or shat out in 2 weeks after publicly funded universities spent years figuring out the algorithm for you). For anything foundational, like CPU architecture, operating systems, or the basic assumptions about how UI should work, they’re terrified of change.

This is why I laugh about people holding up the US constitution as some sort of sacred document, when the right to free speech and the right to peaceably assemble has literally never been respected ever in the history of the country.

Not immediately after the country was founded and the Alien and Sedition acts were passed.

Not when abolitionists were protesting slavery.

Not when unionists were fighting for the right to collectively bargain.

Not during WWII when people were rounded up and put into camps for the crime of being Japanese.

Not during the red scare or the civil rights movement, and certainly not at any point after that.

Oh? Is the orange man building nuclear plants and high speed rail at a rapid pace and for super cheap?

No? Then can you explain to me why this comment is relevant at all? I’m aware that China has shitty policies in regards to some minorities, but are you insinuating that’s the reason they’re able to build infrastructure so quickly?

No? Then who is being oppressed when companies are forced to “tow the line” and complete a project quickly instead of stopping to sue each other and/or the state constantly like they do in North American? Am I supposed to feel bad for Guangxi LiuGong Machinery Co? Is China Energy Engineering Corp Ltd crying in the corner?

incredible government overreach to ensure every company is towing the same line.

Sounds like just the right amount of reach to me.

So they essentially hired you for no reason and then had to come up with something for you to do?

Companies and individuals play by different rules.

When a big company purchases software a team of people from both parties (whose entire job and career are based on doing this) negotiate with each other to decide exactly who is liable for what and to what degree.

When you purchase software you agree to let the company fuck you over at their leisure because you literally do not have enough hours in the day to even read everything you agree to, let alone understand it, let alone argue with it. And even if you did you don’t have enough bargaining power to make a large company care.

Wow, I’ve seen plenty of games launch unfinished but ‘unlaunching’ is a new one for me.

I mean I’m bit of an Ubuntu hater, not because its bloated or whatever, but because they’re too corpo.

I stopped using it back when they put Amazon in their start menu.

I understand your frustration and I apologize for reading into your comments something you didn’t mean. I, too, wish people would say what they mean and mean what they say, and that when you say something its taken to mean what you said.

Unfortunately very often people will make a very reasonable (even factually true) point as a preamble to support something very unreasonable. If you agree with the reasonable point the person will then act like you agree with the unreasonable one. This is not only more time consuming and tiring to argue against, it also lends a great deal more credibility to the unreasonable point than it is really owed. To the uninformed reader to looks like the two sides of the argument partially agree, when nothing could be further from the truth. Its immensely frustrating to have your words used against you like this, so many people try and preempt it by jumping straight to (what they assume to be) the unreasonable point and arguing against it directly.

This is toxic for actual discussion. It means that good faith actors have to add all sorts of qualifications and clarifications about where they stand before they say anything about anything, which is tiring in itself. But its the world that we live in. If someone makes an unqualified comment about the CO2 emissions of volcanoes in a thread about anthropogenic climate change people are going to assume that they don’t think climate change is real. And, operating that way, those people will be right more often than they’re wrong.

Then you should probably be a little more explicit about that, because I have never, not once in my life, heard someone say “well you know wearing a seatbelt doesn’t guarantee you’ll survive a car crash” and not follow it up with “that’s why seatbelts are stupid and I’m not going to wear one”.

I want you to imagine that your comments in this thread were written by an engineer or a surgeon instead of a programmer.

Imagine an engineer saying “Sure, you can calculate the strength of a bridge design based on known material properties and prove that it can hold the design weight, it that doesn’t automatically mean that the design will be safer than one where you don’t do that”. Or “why should I have to prove that my design is safe when the materials could be defective and cause a collapse anyway?”

Or a surgeon saying “just because you can use a checklist to prove that all your tools are accounted for and you didn’t leave anything inside the patient’s body doesn’t mean that you’re going to automatically leave something in there if you don’t have a checklist”. Or “washing your hands isn’t a guarantee that the patient isn’t going to get an infection, they could get infected some other way too”.

A doctor or engineer acting like this would get them fired, sued, and maybe even criminally prosecuted, in that order. This is not the mentality of a professional, and it is something that programming as a profession needs to grow out of.

This is an example of how appearance-based and feeling-based a lot of the activities of businesses are.

If you look at previous social orders its very obvious how much activity served a social function vs a real physical need related to survival. The pyramids, for instance. While there’s a bunch of things you could say about their role in the ancient Egyptian religion, and the effect of the make-work on Egypt’s economy/society, I don’t think anyone could argue that a giant pile of stones could physically help anyone put food in their belies or keep them warm at night; and when you get right down to it it seems pretty clear to me that the root cause of the pyramids is the ego of the guy in charge.

And yet there are many people who will tell you that everything a modern business does is maximally efficient. I would argue that this is pretty clearly not the case. One of the most blatant examples is dress codes and air conditioning. Cooling a large office building is not a small expense, and yet many businesses opt to have their employees wear hot suits (even their non-public facing employees) and turn down the temperature lower than it otherwise would need to be. You could extend that idea to the design of the building itself: a glass box is not the easiest thing to heat and cool. You could even extend it to the existence of the office building in general: while larger buildings are easier to heat and cool per unit area than a bunch of small ones (because of the square cube law), and there are certainly benefits to agglomeration, many office buildings are enormously tall and therefore enormously expensive (as construction costs do not grow linearly with height). Additionally, a lot of these buildings are built on some of the most expensive land that exists, which balloons their cost even more. I’m not saying that I think high rises are completely useless, but I do wonder if they need to be as common as they are, especially now that the internet exists (but lots of other people have talked about that).

Its interesting to note though that because businesses are supposed to be efficient, and the more efficient they are the better they are (more powerful, cunning, brutal, manly, etc) businesses adopt an aesthetic of efficiency. The use of LLMs is one example of this (using a new technology has the aesthetic of efficiency even if it measurably makes productivity worse) but it extends to a lot of the things businesses do. Even a lot of their architecture and industrial design fetishizes efficiency without actually being efficient, IMO.

Counterstrike was originally a Quake mod, then a Half-Life mod, before Valve hired the modders and made it into a standalone game.

The teeth are going to learn that sometimes life isn’t fair.

Clearly its correlated because neurological injuries cause you to want to play golf.

Even if you use an honest-to-god land line how long is the distance your call has to travel before its running on the same fiberoptic lines as the internet?

Reminds me of this video.

The author speaks directly to the reader about this:

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

She laments her inability to make Omelas seem like a real place, to convince the reader that such a society could actually exist, and invites the reader to try in her stead:

But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all.

Finally, after some more description she again directly speaks to the reader to ask them if Omelas seems real:

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

When the answer is “no” they add the detail of the suffering child, which is necessary for all good things that occur there. How exactly torturing a child results in the city’s scholars being smart or ensuring good harvest is not explained at all, and yet by some narrative alchemy the setting is transmuted from something meaningless into something interesting.

The non-subtextual point of the story is that we as a people cannot imagine even a fictional setting without injustice. The subtextual point of the story is that we cannot imagine a society without injustice, fictional or not. Just as the people of Omelas described in the last section convince themselves that the injustice of their society is necessary, inevitable, and futile to fight against, so to do we convince ourselves that the injustices of our society are the same way. And yet there is some hope offered in the titular ones who walk away:

The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

The author admits that she herself cannot imagine “the kind of place they’re going to”, in other words the kind of society that is not based on exploitation but is not an impossible utopia like the Omelas described in the first section, something that could exist in the real world (it seems the author failed to convince even herself). Nevertheless these people who are not her “seem to know where they are going”. This is an invitation to the reader to try to do what she couldn’t by herself: figure out how to structure such a society.

So, you can see what I mean when I say that its funny that this story that laments our inability to engage with anything but suffering and exploitation, is engaged with almost exclusively by talking about the mechanics and moral implications of the suffering that it uses as an example of this very tendency.

The funny thing about that story is that its not supposed to be some sort of moral quandary, the suffering child isn’t the point at all. And that’s not subtext, the author straight up speaks directly to the reader and says its not the point.

And yet its practically the only thing I’ve ever heard people mention about it.