Once again, this is something I hear often and I strongly disagree. I'm lucky to be born into western civilization with the paradigm to respect the power of an individual. It seems to me it is eastern influence to speak in this dismissive way about individual actions. "No one is irreplaceable" is another common phrase. Someone says he decides to leave a community, and there's inevitably someone saying "goodbye!" with some equivalent of a mocking smirk.
I'm also lucky to have affected stuff myself in the past, e.g. I caused local government (~10 000 residents) to change. Actions of an individual very often do matter. It's just unfortunate we often don't get any feedback for our actions and it seems like they don't matter which demotivates people from any form of activism and puts them in this depressive, hopeless state of mind. Imagine how beautiful the world would have been if you had some kind of a debugging tool to inspect how your actions affected others, with a side by side comparison of your universe and some alternative universe where you haven't taken an action. This is also why I try to give feedback to people, send thanks to authors of free libraries etc.
Imagine what would happen if everyone did what the author did. The system would collapse. I think you put a wrong diagnosis that the author couldn't possibly affect the administration. Maybe not much, maybe there was only a chance, but statistically he did put some pressure on that organization.
I see this type of an argumentation very often and I strongly disagree.
You're removing all responsibility from an actor that is a part of a bigger thing. Imagine if you slapped someone on his hand for doing something wrong, and he or someone else argued what you did is wrong because it wasn't that hand that has offended.
I'm an antitheist but the Bible (gospels) put it well "The student is not above his master" [translation mine] - which means if you follow said master you have to share responsibility for his doings or the doings of the gang as a whole.
From the perspective of the effect, if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure.
Moreover, consider what happens if your argument convinces too many people: malevolent actors can just wall themselves with "innocent" people and get away with pretty much anything.
(1) - there's a photo of a graffiti in the article. But the translation of the article to English doesn't mention the insult was actually painted on a wall...
Maybe you should update your epistemology and stop listening to the guys that said so; I listen to the experts who say (since 2022) sanctions hurt, but russia is like a big tree - even if you poison it, it won't fall on the next day; it doesn't help that russia has disproportionately big spy network - people will take more abuse before they rebel against their government.
> Reminder that HN is SV centered and therefore everyone and everything is oriented around tribal group think.
Don't such absolute statements (everyone, everything) remind you of religion as well?
> Meta was funded by Thiel, yet most of the people in this thread use their products.
I imagine it might be as true as:
- most people in this thread also using Discord, despite criticizing it and
- most people using Meta criticize its products.
That is, You can use something and criticize it, and it probably happens both with Discord and e.g. Facebook.
> The CCP[…]
I'm happy to see in the political threads there's very often in the very least a significant presence of critique against China and maybe even overwhelming the defenders of the regime.
> I grew up around brainwashed religious zealots. […] moralistic condemnation […] [HN] looks more and more like that every day.
I think it's good religious zealots don't have the monopoly on moralistic condemnation. Just because A is bad, and B has feature x just like A, doesn't mean the feature x is bad.
> Meanwhile, Discord will not have the slightest tiny drop in user numbers, because nobody outside of this moralistic circle jerk cares.
Discord is not going to delete users, and few people care to request their account to be deleted. If Discord asked me to provide ID, I'd probably at least try to resist by not using it and maybe eventually succumb by providing a fake ID - but as far as I know, Discord will just set my account to a teenager mode, so instead of speaking about a drop in user numbers, we should speak about a drop of activity in adult interactions (or interactions/activity in general) on Discord.
There's very little decision making in the game: You don't choose battle rewards, they are forced onto you, you get only one reroll that rerolls the entire triplet. Choosing the path is choosing between fighting an elite or not, and between visiting something different than normal battle encounter or not. Only the shop allows for some strategy. On the plus side, everything worked for the most part on Firefox, except when I decided to pass an item as inheritance, it wasn't passed.
> The imperial boomerang is the theory that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens.
This is different from what parent post describes. Parent means developing tools by one side of a barricade, that the other may eventually use against them, e.g. when the power shifts to them. Whereas you speak about developing the tools to be used abroad, but those tools eventually also get used domestically, but the administrator remains the same.
- Go buy seeds, plant them, water the field and once you gather the corn report back
- I'm back with the corn, proving AI can grow corn!
This is the experiment here, with nuance added to it. The thing is, though, if you "orchestrate" other people, you might as well do it with a single sentence as I described. Or you can manage more thoroughly. Some decisions you make may actually be detrimental to the end result.
So the only meaningful experiment would be to test a bot against a human being: who earns more money orchestrating the corn farm, a bot or a human? Consider also the expenses which is electricity/water for a bot and also food, medicine etc. for a human being.
What can you do with 90%? Accuse people of plagiarism and ignore the fact you will hurt 10% of innocent people, while still allowing 10% of cheaters? Of course there's ambiguity in the "accuracy" term, but I assumed you can be inaccurate in both directions.
I'm not an expert on this, but the way I see it, the opposite is true: people don't vote on small parties, because if a small party doesn't reach the minimum required, the vote is wasted. This way there's only a few parties (if the minimum is 5% then there can't really be more than 20 parties, and since the distribution is very far from even, you get around around 4-7 parties with 5% minimum).
However, the big parties often consist of sub-factions.
However, it seems there are mechanisms that turn parties into dictatorships with one person ruling everything in the entire party, as well as people get carried away with negative emotions and vote against, polarizing the politics into just 2 parties alternating in power.
Yes, the thing is, the browser is an extremely expensive abstraction layer. It's like having a car factory where everything is built by general purpose robots - it's very versatile, but obviously if you build an assembly line using dedicated machinery, it's going to run much faster.
Once again, this is something I hear often and I strongly disagree. I'm lucky to be born into western civilization with the paradigm to respect the power of an individual. It seems to me it is eastern influence to speak in this dismissive way about individual actions. "No one is irreplaceable" is another common phrase. Someone says he decides to leave a community, and there's inevitably someone saying "goodbye!" with some equivalent of a mocking smirk.
I'm also lucky to have affected stuff myself in the past, e.g. I caused local government (~10 000 residents) to change. Actions of an individual very often do matter. It's just unfortunate we often don't get any feedback for our actions and it seems like they don't matter which demotivates people from any form of activism and puts them in this depressive, hopeless state of mind. Imagine how beautiful the world would have been if you had some kind of a debugging tool to inspect how your actions affected others, with a side by side comparison of your universe and some alternative universe where you haven't taken an action. This is also why I try to give feedback to people, send thanks to authors of free libraries etc.