Joyce scholarship in some sense seems like mathematics --- the construct is an invention, axioms can be whatever they are decided to be, and the only question is in how productive and beautiful the construction is.
That being said, from this point of view the whole enterprise seems empty and vain. Even if you finally find what the book "means", the whole project seems like a dead end and does not lead to anything else --- you have gained nothing that generalizes beyond a narrow scope, and Joyce is long dead. This means that the work is not beautiful.
> From the simplest cases like being ignored on PRs
You're not entitled to having your PRs merged, or even having anyone look at them. PRs not of particular interest to those maintaining the project simply get low priority. Especially with volunteer work, time is limited and while your PR might appear large and of importance to you, it may not look like that from other perspectives.
But the stackoverflow answer is right, and accounts for the fact that in the majority of cases the person who is asking a confused question is indeed confused.
If what you are trying to do is to get best performance, make use of work that other people already did, rather than wasting your time on a solved problem.
If you want to learn about how efficient matrix multiplication can be implemented, that is a different problem.
This is totally irrelevant, because the governance model of a a company is a limited dictatorship, and not all those people are equal. A company is only the people at its top, the rest are chattel.
A company is also not made of people in the legal sense, it is a separate entity.
Evolution only optimizes for having offspring in the future. Trying to find a rational reason for some evolved behavior is not necessarily a fruitful way to think about it.
Not a surprise and not a disappointment either, when it was clear from the start that all results are within measurement error bars, so that there was neither experimental nor theoretical reason to expect to see something.
It was not "NASA" who indicated something, but a couple of guys working for NASA. Also, the "pilot wave theory" stuff is just idle speculation on topics of which the authors did not appear to understand much.
> There is no substitute for you, the person reading these words, to stop accepting plastic bags and as much similar things -- coffee cups, utensils, etc.
There is: regulation by the government, restricting use of items harmful to the environment.
It appears naive to suggest that the tragedy of the commons can be avoided by individual action, when the financial interests are not aligned.
The basic feature set is pretty much the same, and requires similar effort to grok. Some things are much harder to do in Mercurial, and some things are just confusing (multiple heads, pushing branches, multiple branching models, the "tip", etc.). Online platforms are worse (Bitbucket vs Github) in practice.
The problem with stackoverflow is that answering questions sucks in the long term, for most people. It's basically an user support job, and if you are not suited for that sort of job eventually you start to lose patience with fools, of which there is no shortage on the internet.
It's technically somewhat amusing as it runs a morphological parser in order to deal with the Finnish word inflection system, which is then utilized as an integral part of the language grammar. As a consequence, since this allows relaxing constraints e.g. on word order, the resulting code does actually read like natural language.
I hear (but is it true?) that for a philosopher to build a career, it is important to be thought as very smart by other philosophers --- and that this is much more so than in other fields, such as the sciences. If it's true, it would explain why appearing smart is stressed.
Perhaps it is an action boosting EU-based companies? Otherwise they are at a disadvantage in competition, because US-based Googles and Facebooks game the e.g. the tax system in a way that EU-based companies cannot.
> I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free.
Nobody is telling publishers what they have to do.
The directives are aimed at publically funded institutions, instructing them how public research funds can be used.
This is about the customer's money, and I imagine also in any capitalist philosophy the government as a customer has the right to decide how its own funds can be used.
> When Nature releases an article, they put a lot of work into formatting it for publication so it looks nice. That final product does and should belong to them.
Don't you think that this is of very little added value? Nature could publish the submitted articles as is, and nobody would care. The only value the journal has is the supposed prestige of getting an article published there, which has ridiculous early career effects.
In view of history including colonialism this statement sounds very naive indeed.