Doc Avid Mornington @ docAvid @midwest.social

Not actually a doctor.

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2 yr. ago

Emacs Magit is so much better than the CLI, and I don't say that lightly. And it's available on Linux.

I barely know Vim, I'm an Emacs guy. Every time I pair with a colleague using an IDE, I find myself having to exercise great restraint, and not complain about how slow and fussy everything they do is. When I've worked with skilled vimmers, I have to admit that they invoke the deep magic nearly as efficiently as I do. Hotkeys? Pshaw, child's play.

I'm nearly fifty, now. Why am I disillusioned by capitalism? Because the illusion is thin and flimsy. I really hope the disillusionment of millennials isn't just because they don't have a good enough retirement plan, or anything else that can be easily fixed. I hope that they are waking up to realize that giving unelected, unaccountable, private owners of capital control over the production and distribution of goods, services, and information, is an extremist, antidemocratic idea, that is driving the global climate crisis, and the slide toward fascism.

Our democracy is deeply broken, but it is a democracy. If we lost it, you'd just get the batshit insane party candidate put directly in, and they could do whatever they wanted.

To confirm and expand on what others are saying: a general strike is not protected, and any union that endorses one will lose their recognition. How can you get that many people to risk their jobs, with no organizing union that can even legally participate?

If you can get that many people that dedicated to your cause, it would be a whole lot easier to just get them to vote in a primary.

Why? Because they're well attested by multiple sources.

That's an entirely different criterion, though. I honestly don't even know how to respond to this non-sequitur.

For the same reason you're doing it now?

You mean to say these "enemies" would have doubted that Jesus existed because they heard that there is some historical debate on the matter, and that there may not be any good evidence to support the claim, looked into it, agreed, and found it to be an interesting topic to debate on the Internet? That seems really unlikely to me.

Look at it this way: if I told you that a guy I know claims that his buddy Frank, who died ten years ago, had made certain religious and political statements, which I agree with, and you found those statements to be blasphemous and offensive, would you argue back with "well, uh, how do we know this Frank guy even existed? Huh?!" Or would you take his existence as a fairly trivial given, and argue against the actual statements he allegedly made?

It's honestly bizarre to me that anybody would imagine this "enemies" argument has any weight at all. That's not how people work.

The closest thing we have to a first-hand account of the life of Jesus is the Gospel of Mark, a book of uncertain authorship

the followers of Jesus likely would've been illiterate, and likely so would've Jesus himself, and the first gospel was likely only written after decades of "playing telephone"

I don't mean no first-hand in-depth account, that's some serious goal-post moving. If anybody even remotely describable as a historic Jesus existed, that dude made waves. He would have been a public figure, of great interest, and some contemporary would have probably at least written down something about him that would have survived to the historical record.

Evidence of belief is not evidence of existence

True, but it is usually the first step towards finding something that does exist

Is it? When has that happened? I think the first step towards finding something that exists is observing it, or observing its tangible effects that cannot be explained in other, simpler ways.

Jewish writers like Philo of Alexandria believed he existed and apparently had reason to believe he existed since him and all of his contemporaries never thought to question Jesus's existence

Again, why would they? Would you, honestly, in their place?

Is that a broadly accepted historical criteria, or just one of the many made-up ones used by biblical historians? Why would the "enemies" themselves have any reason to think that some dude a lot of people talk about isn't even real? In a world with no photography, no printing press, no telegraph? How, was there not one single first-hand account? Evidence of belief is not evidence of existence. If it were, we'd have to acknowledge the historical reality of God, Satan, Zeus, Thor, and Bigfoot. At least there are contemporary first-hand claims from people who say they saw Bigfoot.

Yes, I completely agree, so far as I can without looking up your post and comment history to confirm that you do what you are saying here you do, but taking your word for that. Good faith criticism isn't what Pan_Ziemniak seemed to be describing.

Two things can be happening. People with a legitimate moral concern, such as myself, don't actively act against that concern by helping elect a candidate who would make that concern even worse. There are ways to express our anger and sorrow about Biden's handling of this without supporting Trump.

I would prefer to say "all publicly traded corporations are effectively amoral, and capable of any imaginable evil, if it is in their interests. It's just a question of when their interests will align with an evil action."

Private ownership of capital is antisocial and antidemocratic. Owner-operated private businesses, the classic "Mom and Pop" store, are still antidemocratic, but much more distinctive in character, and may be more pro-social. Worker-owned cooperatives are significantly better altogether.

Honestly, people are so bad at challenging their ideas that mostly we just cause a backlash effect. Being in their own safe little bubble might help some of them have the "are we the baddies" moment.

Saying that some projects, at some point in their lifecycle, don't need certain things, is not saying that those things have no place. Also, if one can't design a monolith that isn't bloated and tightly coupled, one definitely has no business designing microservices. Using microservices is neither necessary, nor sufficient to achieve decoupling.

Monolithic services are the ideal way to begin a project, as using basic good practices, we can build a service that does many things with minimal coordination, and as it grows and requirements change or are discovered, we can easily refactor to keep things simple. As the software matures, we find the natural service boundaries, and find that certain pieces would perform better if they were separated out and could scale independently, or act asynchronously. Since we have followed good practices, this should usually be a simple matter of removing a class or module to a new service, and replacing it with a facade, such that the rest of the monolith doesn't have to change at all.

Something something Procrustes?

I do rather like science.

Facebook is capitalist spyware and a social engineering tool. You have to remember that capitalism is not a normal power relationship, even though they have been working tirelessly to make the world believe they are -- capitalism is at the bleeding edge of techno-fascist authoritarianism.

OK you get the idea, and I'm not trying to defend China, but they're just one of many powers - most private - that are using tools like this. I'd favor legislation to break them all up, to say any social network over a certain size has to federate, to say no one company or government can own more than one social network, lots of possibilities I would favor, but cherry-picking TikTok seems like Congress is working for Zuck. Taking out one of the big players just consolidates the incredibly dangerous power of the others.

And truthfully, in my time scrolling TikTok, I've generally found the content to be a lot less manipulative, more liberal, and more democratic-leaning than on capitalist social networks, so if the CCP is actively using it for social engineering, they're doing a terrible job of it.

So many people consider any kind of nuance to be weakness and failure.

No, you absolutely transparent troll, the people talking about the impact of the primaries and the steps the Democratic leadership need to take before the general to win and stop Republicans are not Republicans. Just stop. We all know what you are doing.

Party leadership on both sides play all kinds of games to keep the balance of power, to keep voters scared of the other guys, in order to maintain control of their own parties, but that system isn't infallible. Bernie almost won the primary, twice, and Trump actually did. If he weren't so abysmally bad at placating centrists liberals, he'd still be in the Whitehouse. I think that's a terrifying prospect, but also, both hopeful, and instructive. A true left-populist candidate, who respects the rule of law and democratic consent of the governed, once in office, would be almost impossible to remove.

Overall, your assessment of the current system isn't bad, but you are very wrong to describe that as fascist. It just isn't, definitionally, what "fascism" means. Not yet. Certainly, significant aspects of fascism have been put into place, or have been there since the beginning, but our current system is not, overall, at the bar of fascism, and saying it is cheapens the critique of, and warnings against, actual fascism. In the big picture, our current system is actually much more democratic, and further from fascism, than it was not that long ago, even though there have been some specific, and worrying, steps backwards.

Being vigilant against fascism is good. Being defeatist about it is not.

I think Vim is more popular with sysadmins because, historically, you could count on Vi or Vim being available on just about any server you had to do some work on, while Emacs might not be. That's still probably somewhat true, although in the world of clouds, containers, and source-controlled, reproducible configuration, it's probably less common to edit files in place on a server.

However, with Emacs tramp, you can edit files just about anywhere you can access, by any means, even if there is no editor installed there at all, using your local Emacs, with all your accustomed configuration. Like popping open a file inside a container running on a remote server by ssh, something I've done a lot of lately, debugging services running on AWS ECS.

Just use a single instance of Emacs to edit everything everywhere all at once. You can even use vim keybindings if you have no taste.