5C5C5C @ 5C5C5C @programming.dev

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2 yr. ago

Campaigning these days is not about convincing anyone to vote for one candidate or the other. Everyone who might conceivably vote will have known who they'd vote for before the campaign season even began.

The campaign is about convincing the people who would vote for you that they actually should show up to vote instead of staying home or just going about their day. As a bonus if you make your opponent look like a big enough clown, maybe you can demoralize the opposition's voting base so they don't bother showing up to vote.

This is a big part of why Republicans always want to make it as hard as possible to vote: The people who tend to vote Republican have perverse incentives (lower taxes, ban abortion, etc) so they're generally much more motivated to get out and vote despite barriers than the typical Democratic voter who just wants a sane government but probably feels like sanity is never delivered on no matter who wins.

... She hasn't chosen her VP yet...

I don't know what got your goat but you're projecting an enormous amount of non sequitur into my very innocuous remark.

I was pointing out one itty bitty silver lining of an effort that's doomed to fail. I never suggested that we should be satisfied with that silver lining and call it a day.

I'm fully supportive of all actions, including those outside the realm of politics, to defend against fascism. But that's no reason to stop taking political actions, even those which we estimate to be doomed.

Porque no los dos?

It'll still be nice to get the "small government" party saying in writing that they support the presidency having unlimited power.

I think a lot of our collective notions around "merit" need to be challenged in general. How is merit really measured? A person's achievements? Who decides what qualifies as an achievement? If a person has the deck stacked against them (e.g. coming from a low income household, not as much access to quality education) and manages to get a college degree then it's easy to say they've "achieved" more than someone who grew up privileged and obtained the same degree with similar grades.

But how should these things be weighed? If someone grew up privileged but is also exceptionally skilled, have they achieved more or less than someone who grew up underprivileged and obtained above average skills? Who has more merit? Who deserves greater recognition? And who decides if one skill or another is even meritous? Is the merit of a skillet ultimately just decided by how much the job market is willing to pay for those skills?

These aren't meant to be leading questions; I genuinely don't think there are any good answers here. When I'm in a position of making hiring decisions for my company, I make a point of not thinking in terms of merit. Instead I think about these factors:

• Alignment: Will the candidate be interested and motivated in the work that we have available for them?
• Qualification: Do I have good reason to believe the candidate will be able to competently handle the role we're hiring for after a reasonable ramping on period? They don't need to immediately have all the skills required, but I should see evidence that they have a good foundation to build off of and a willingness to learn what's needed.
• Perspective: Does this candidate bring and new and potentially valuable perspective to the role? This perspective could come from past work experiences and/or their personal life experiences. I don't want a team that's totally homogenous because that will fall too easily into groupthink and miss valuable opportunities to improve.

I think when people talk about merit they fixate on qualifications, but I genuinely believe that alignment and perspective are equally important. I would much rather take someone who is highly motivated but less qualified on paper than someone with amazing credentials who won't really care about what our team is trying to do. I would also rather have someone who is going to challenge our team's assumptions and bring insights from other fields and experiences than someone who will very competently agree with our status quo.

I think people who complain about DEI are totally missing the value of diverse perspectives, to say nothing of the moral concern of systematically reinforcing social divisions and the inequity that naturally follows from that.

Maybe someone that expresses a little authentic human joy is exactly what the American public needs right now.

As someone that has never had soda my entire life (my parents were normal soda-drinking people, I'm just weird and was never interested in trying it), maybe I don't know what I'm missing out on, but water is soooo gooood. It's so refreshing and delicious if you're thirsty. I don't comprehend why these drinks even exist.

If you live almost anywhere in America or another developed nation, you get dirt-cheap clean water delivered right to your home constantly, and it's so great. Why does anyone spend money on garbage that's going to give them diabetes? And then the people who are sensible enough to try to avoid the diabetes just drink some other garbage and complain about the taste..??

WATER IS DELICIOUS YOU FOOLS

Honestly I think it's more than fluff. Her relationship with her family says a lot about her character and her integrity. She really is the anti-Trump in every conceivable way, and I'm really starting to believe that the stark difference between the two is going to pay off.

It's well established that she has an excellent relationship with her kids-by-marriage, and even became close friends with their bio-mom while attending the kids' extra-curricular activities together.

And my personal favorite part: the kids refer to her as Momala, because step-mom just didn't feel right to them.

Anyone who doesn't find that video endearing has something seriously disturbed going on in their head.

This is the first time I can recall having someone so human and genuine run for the presidency. Obama was close, but he was also so polished and reserved, probably because he felt he needed to be as the first black president. Kamala seems like someone who's really speaking from the heart, and I think that's what America needs most right now.

My only concern is the demographic that would have been too lazy to vote but now will be frothing at the mouth to vote against a black woman.

I can only hope they're outweighed by the demographic that was apathetic toward Biden but is willing to get off the couch to vote for Harris.

I've been thinking a good line for her to whip out some time would be "From my line of work I'm accustomed to guilty felons being afraid of me, and former president Trump is clearly no exception to that."

Would you have us believe that while money is still the deciding factor in politics, we should let our own political campaigns starve and die so that strangers on the internet can't falsely accuse us of being hypocrites? 🙄😮‍💨

I don't doubt that in this case it's both silly and unacceptable that their driver was having this catastrophic failure, and it was probably caused by systemic failure at the company, likely driven by hubris and/or cost-cutting measures.

Although I wouldn't take it as a given that the system should be allowed to continue if the anti-virus doesn't load properly more generally.

For an enterprise business system, it's entirely plausible that if a crucial anti-virus driver can't load properly then the system itself may be compromised by malware, or at the very least the system may be unacceptably vulnerable to malware if it's allowed to finish booting. At that point the risk of harm that may come from allowing the system to continue booting could outweigh the cost of demanding manual intervention.

In this specific case, given the scale and fallout of the failure, it probably would've been preferable to let the system continue booting to a point where it could receive a new update, but all I'm saying is that I'm not surprised more generally that an OS just goes ahead and treats an anti-virus driver failure at BSOD worthy.

Rust makes sense though.

When talking about the driver level, you can't always just proceed to the next thing when an error happens.

Imagine if you went in for open heart surgery but the doctor forgot to put in the new valve while he was in there. He can't just stitch you up and tell you to get on with it, you'll be bleeding away inside.

In this specific case we're talking about security for business devices and critical infrastructure. If a security driver is compromised, in a lot of cases it may legitimately be better for the computer to not run at all, because a security compromise could mean it's open season for hackers on your sensitive device. We've seen hospitals held random, we've seen customer data swiped from major businesses. A day of downtime is arguably better than those outcomes.

The real answer here is crowdstrike needs a more reliable CI/CD pipeline. A failure of this magnitude is inexcusable and represents a major systemic failure in their development process. But the OS crashing as a result of that systemic failure may actually be the most reasonable desirable outcome compared to any other possible outcome.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kq8Xlbb3bOw

I've had to explain this to a lot of people who naturally assume that any organization of people will be organized around some kind of shared values. Most of the time that's true, but not for Republicans.

Republicans are just a mish mash of obsessive single-issue voters, and by in large they just don't care about the other single issues that their fellow party members are going on about.

At the head of the Republican party it's people who want to minimize their tax burden, eliminate regulations on corporations, and cannibalize as much of the US government as they can into for-profit institutions. You could say that's three issues instead of one, but the overarching theme is to cater to personal greed, no matter the harm to society. These are the ones who are primarily pulling the strings in the party, at least historically.

Just below them is the military industrial complex and gun manufacturers who just want to sell guns no matter the harm to society. They like to rile up 2A fanatics with conspiracy theories that the government is out to steal all their guns so they'll be defenseless, paving the way for King Biden to ascend to his throne. The industry only cares about selling guns and the fanatics only care about having guns, and neither care about any kind of harm to society.

Then there's the radical Christians whose obsessions cover an eclectic mix of social reactionary positions and literal death cult worship (e.g. Christians who give absolute support to genocide in Palestine because they think Israel's conquest is a crucial step towards the rapture, which they believe is imminent). Broadly speaking the people in this group just want to hoist their religious doctrines onto everyone they can by any means available and no matter the harm it causes to society. They literally only care about "God's Kingdom" in the afterlife.

Then there's people who just lack any capacity for adaptation or learning. Their obsession is to feel like things are staying the same, or even reverting back to a past that they only know how to view through rose tinted glasses. They can't be bothered to comprehend the problems we're facing as a society or how the past was not the idyllic utopia that they mistakenly remember, nor can the old way of doing things sustain a growing and transforming society. These people just want to exist in comforting ignorance by feeling like they get to remain in familiar surroundings, no matter the harm to society.

There's really only one thing that truly unites them: Each one wants one specific thing no matter the harm to society, and that one specific thing that they each want IS HARMFUL to society. But they work well together because none of them care about the harm being caused by any of the others, and as long as they all tow the same line, each one gets what they want.

And what if someone is convinced that acts of cruelty towards some humans is the most effective way to reduce cruelty towards a large number of animals? They might think that you're not vegan because you're allowing more cruelty towards animals to exist than they are. I have encountered self-identifying vegans who genuinely think this way.

This has to be the stupidest take on the term "plant based" I've ever heard. I swear, "plant based" is just the "No true Scotsman" of vegans.. anything that a non-meat-consumer does that a vegan doesn't like makes them plant based instead of vegan. It's so asinine and intellectually dishonest.

Vegan people can be assholes too. Assholes will inevitably exist in any demographic that gets sufficiently large. I have known people who identify as vegans who insist that it's preferable for humans to die than for non-human animals to die.