smcphile · HackerTrans

hace 6 añosdiscuss

They were all over 60: a man (a doctor) in his early 60’s with no apparent previous health problems; a woman in her early 70’s with a major previous problem, a cancer; and a woman in her early 90’s with no life threatening problems, but mobility issues, who was living in a retirement home (some other people in her retirement home also died from COVID-19).

smcphile

hace 6 añosdiscuss

> Do you know many people who have died? Who have gotten seriously ill? Are you afraid? Do you think the response in your own location is too little or too much?

I live in France. I know of three people who have died and of many people who’ve been ill. I’m not afraid myself, I avoid crowded areas and getting physically too close to anyone (other than my wife). I think the response by the government here in France has been acceptable, other than that for a long time there was a shortage of both masks and tests. (It would have been better to have had both a stockpile of masks available and the capacity to manufacture them here locally.)

smcphile

hace 6 añosdiscuss

> I am partial to the idea of someone getting to decide, in advance, who they can see or hear. Letting the mob in, and then muting or banning after the fact can be exploited too easily.

I see that that could be done in a private group setting where everyone knows each other. In a forum for the general public though I have difficulty seeing how that could be done. Do you have any implementation details in mind?

smcphile

hace 6 añosdiscuss

It can be a first step to creating a new distribution, but most people just do it as a learning experience.

Here's one example though of someone who went on to create a new distribution: http://www.nutyx.org/en/

To create a distribution, you need a package manager of some sort to manage software updates, and while LFS discusses some possible package managers that's not really its focus.

smcphile

hace 6 añosdiscuss

It depends, there's no simple, standard answer.

Layoffs in France correspond with the idea of a "licenciement économique" and the details of how that is managed are presented here: https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/N481 .

Simply put, it's a negotiated process between the company, union representatives, and the government / legal representatives.

In France, layoffs are difficult to do if a company is making money, but can be done to keep a company from losing money or shutting down or moving somewhere else (i.e. another country).

smcphile

hace 6 añosdiscuss

> Also technically I guess (IANAL) you might have to prove that you obtained the source code prior to the license change.

I don't see why. If some code is made available under an MIT license and then the copyright owner switches to a new license, nothing stops others from continuing to use the original code under the original license.

Of course to do this you would have to know the code exists, but you could learn about its existence after the license change from someone other than the copyright owner.

smcphile

hace 6 añosdiscuss

> From what I heard France has strong worker protection laws, even stronger than Germany. Do you think this is/could be a problem for startups?

Yes, France has strong worker protection laws, but if someone is found to have been abusively fired there’s a cap on how much they can sue for. The amount is based on how long they’ve been with the company. For example, after 2 years, the amount is 3 months salary, after 5 years, 6 months salary. The complete table is here: https://droit-finances.commentcamarche.com/faq/54743-bareme-...

smcphile

hace 6 añosdiscuss

No, open source licenses impose no obligations on the copyright holder for their own code. For example, if the copyright holder releases their own code under a GPL licence, no law prevents them from also releasing a modified or unmodified version under a proprietary licence. This is allowed by law, but the proprietary version doesn’t of course negate the rights already given to those who received the GPL version.

If a project has many contributors (copyright holders), they would all have to agree to a license change, so in practice something like the Linux kernel is very unlikely to ever change to a proprietary licence, but it’s theoretically possible.

The copyright holders are never bound by the terms of a user licence.

smcphile

hace 6 añosdiscuss

> My question to you, gentle reader – are there any licences which compel the distribution or publication of the development history?

No, other than that any given project has to give proper credit to code used from other projects / copyright holders.

My understanding of why this is so is the following: A free software or open source software licence is based on copyright law. As such, it restricts what users can do with the source code, but it never restricts what the copyright holders can do with the software (assuming all the copyright holders collectively agree).

A user can never (theoretically at least, there may be a few edge cases) sue the copyright holders for anything, because there’s no warranty. No warranty on the code source history (or anything else). So code source history is always optional.

smcphile

hace 6 añosdiscuss

The submission appears to be available only as a video. It would be helpful to prefix the title with "[video]", if that's possible.

smcphile

hace 6 añosdiscuss

> Ending at-will employment is a legal solution to a cultural problem. Unlikely to work, but more importantly, I’d argue it’s unwise to rely on legal codes to solve non-legal problems.

Let me prefix my remarks by noting that I'm not American and that I live in a country where at-will employment for the most part doesn't exist.

I disagree that getting someone fired from their job is merely a cultural problem. It's also a financial problem and hence a legal problem.

As I see it, if someone burglarizes your home, they're depriving you of the goods they steal. If you're arbitrarily dismissed from a job that you're performing perfectly well (including treating coworkers, clients, etc. correctly), you're deprived of the lost income. In either case, there's a financial loss involved and I fail to see why the law shouldn't try to protect the victim of such a loss.

I do agree that laws will never offer a complete solution to cancel culture, but a solution doesn't have to be complete to be justified, various partial solutions are OK.

smcphile

hace 6 añosdiscuss

> But if most employers were to go fully remote, at that point the shortage-driven Silicon Valley wages would drop near the national average, regardless of how much more it costs us to live here.

Yes, and, using the same reasoning, at some point the cost of living in Silicon Valley would also go down so as to approach the national average.

smcphile

hace 6 añosdiscuss

> But the arguments I see from Facebook and in this article are about cost of living. That's wrong. Price it based on value created by the employee.

Salaries aren’t based primarily on the value created by the employee and never have been. Salaries are based on supply and demand. Workers are in a market and they sell their time and skills to the highest bidder. They’re in competition with other workers capable of doing the same work.

Of course not all workers are equally capable of doing the same work, so in that sense the value created by an employee does come into play when determining what they’ll be paid. But if two equally skilled and competent workers are competing for the same job, the one who will accept a lower salary will get the job. This will tend to favour employees living in an area with a lower cost of living.

smcphile

hace 6 añosdiscuss

The URL given doesn’t seem to be working (404 error). The correct URL seems to be: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/11/fawlty-towers-...

Update: The new URL states the episode is being reinstated: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/jun/12/john-cleese-...

smcphile

hace 6 añosdiscuss

The URL given didn’t work for me. The correct URL appears to be: https://www.fox5ny.com/news/walmart-looks-to-remove-all-cash...

smcphile

hace 6 añosdiscuss

> Too much is made of the idea of 'objective facts' and 'subjective experience'. It causes so much linguistic confusion.

I disagree on this point. When we think of matter, in terms of physics or chemistry, we think of matter as having certain qualities, such as mass, volume, velocity, etc. However subjective experience doesn’t seem, at least on the surface, to share those qualities.

Can the existence of subjective experience be explained using only the qualities currently associated with matter, as understood in today’s physics? It doesn’t seem so.

So it seems to me that the fact that subjective experience exists is a hint that our current models are incomplete and need revising.

How exactly do they need revising? No idea whatsoever.

smcphile

hace 6 añosdiscuss

> I don't know if that is a helpful way of constructing the issue; it certainly isn't a neutral one.

Reading what I wrote again, I agree that it could have been expressed better. Sorry about that.

> If you are a physicalist (which I'm not) consciousness is not an epiphenomenon with no influence on the physical world, but a component of the physical world which takes part in and influences the physical world.

Ok. If I try to look at it from the physicalist's point of view, I have trouble understanding how the subjective side of consciousness is explained. It seems to me to be just ignored or waved away.

Why couldn't the functions of consciousness in influencing the world exist without subjectively experienced consciousness? What evolutionary value does this subjectively experienced consciousness have (as seen from a physicalist point of view)?

> All I am arguing this that the normal formulation of the hard problem of consciousness begs the question.

You're not necessarily wrong, it depends on what exactly is meant by begging the question.

What you wrote was:

> What is the relevant quality being distinguished between the description or explanation of the physical processes that correlate to certain mental states and behaviours, on the one hand, and the description and explanation of the conscious first-person experience of phenomenal states, on the other? <

Intuitively it seems to me that there is a difference of quality, even if I'm incapable of describing exactly what that difference is. I can't even imagine how one would go about explaining the difference in quality to the satisfaction of everyone.

This doesn't bother me too much though, because, put perhaps too briefly, philosophy is not science and logical arguments are not mathematical logic.

However, I can also see how someone could see not answering your question as begging the question.

> I am myself agnostic on the question of consciousness because we have so little knowledge of the issue. A lot of philosophy in this area is interesting, and fun to think about, but more often than not it is speculative and linguistic in character.

My way of thinking is perhaps not so different.

I think of philosophy as being constrained by science, in that you don't want philosophy to contradict well established scientific facts, but as being otherwise freer than science to explore how the world might work. I also think of philosophy as having a role in dealing with questions that are largely outside the domain of science (beauty, ethics, etc.), but which can still sometimes be informed by science.

smcphile

hace 6 añosdiscuss

> But the obvious physicalist response is that consciousness has evolved as an efficient information-processing device in in the course of evolution and so that it is, really, understandable through the empirical investigation of the empirical world.

What I don’t understand here is how consciousness can both 1) have survival value and thus be passed on through evolution and 2) be an epiphenomenon that has no influence whatsoever on the physical world.

I suppose both statements could be true, but only if a very non-intuitive definition of consciousness is used, and that seems to me to be also begging the question.

Update: fixed a typo

smcphile

hace 6 añosdiscuss

> Sentience has a subjective quality to it, but it’s not clear it has any power.

As I said, I don’t know. I agree it’s not clear.

The first book I read on the subject, many years ago, was “Body and Mind”, by Keith Campbell. The book outlines various positions taken on the mind problem. I still have the book. Your position appears to be a version of epiphenominalism.

I found the book helpful as a short overview of the subject. For example, in chapter two the book describes the mind-body problem as four propositions that form an inconsistent tetrad. Any three are mutually consistent and can all be true. But any three together imply that the fourth is false.

The four propositions are: (1) The human body is a material thing. (2) The human mind is a spiritual thing. (3) Mind and body interact. (4) Spirit and matter do not interact.

The author describes a “spiritual object” as “one that does not have all the qualities of matter; it lacks at least some of: mass, volume, velocity, solidity”. (Some qualities of matter are allowed, just not all.)

smcphile

hace 6 añosdiscuss

> “Quantum mechanics disproves determinism and therefore disproves free-will-skepticism” is an asinine argument ...

I agree, it doesn't disprove determinism. If someone argues that it does, they're mistaken.

> The real reason free will doesn’t exist is not to do with determinism, but the fact that you don’t exist. You’re a collection of cells that, regardless of whether they behave deterministically or randomly, are out of your control.

I don't believe the assertions you're making here have been proved either.

I'm not an expert by any means, I've just another layman who's been following the "mind body problem" for a while from the peanut gallery.

I tend to agree with David Chalmers's arguments that there's a "hard problem of consciousness".

I know that other philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, don't agree that this hard problem exists. I've read some of Dennett's books, but I'm not convinced that he's right on this point. I wasn't convinced by "Consciousness Explained", for example.

So, to sum up, I don't believe anyone really knows yet how mind and consciousness work, it's too early to say.

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