What I find wild is the presumption that with a prompt as simple as “I want to wash my car. My car is 50m away. Should I walk or drive?”, everyone here seems to assume “washing your car” means “taking your car to the car wash”, while what I pictured was “my car is in the driveway, 50m away from me, next to a water hose”, in which case I 100% need to drive.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to reduce the article to a single sentence that's in parenthesis and links to a widely shared publication about an a MIT report. Especially when said article continues with "Don’t get me wrong: I am not denying the extraordinary potential of AI to change aspects of our world, nor that savvy entrepreneurs, companies and investors will win very big. It will — and they will."
One doesn't have to agree with the original report, but one can't in good faith deny that the whole thing smells of a financial scheme with circular contracts, massive investments for an industry that's currently losing money by the billion and unclear financial upside for most other companies out there.
I'm not saying AI is useless or that it will never be useful, I'm just saying that there are some legitimate reasons to worry about the amounts of money that are being poured into it and its potential impact on the economy at large. I believe the article is simply taking a similart stance
I didn't create an account because it's asking for my email address when using my google account. Don't want more spam.
Also, some decisions seem more politically charged than necessary, like using "Donal Trump" as an example of an "Easy" debate opponent.
Finally, I don't know the SMS-style abbreviations are much appreciated on HN (u for you is the most annoying example in your introduction). I'm not sure why it's bothering me enough to tell you about it...
Some could argue that the transistor wasn’t an invention but a discovery: the physical behavior of the semiconductors has existed for millennia, and we discovered that behavior, but we had already invented vacuum tubes before which did the same thing, just a lot less efficiently. Notice that I said “invented” vacuum tubes because the behavior comes from careful engineering and manufacture which didn’t exist in the known universe before that.
But here too, arguing on invention vs discover is pointless because there’s no common truth…
From Wikipedia: "After the war, Shockley decided to attempt the building of a triode-like semiconductor device." If attempting (and succeeding) in using one's knowledge to produce a specific thing that does not currently exist is not invention, what is?
More generally, if there's no common truth then that itself cannot be a common truth...
> Notice that I said “invented” vacuum tubes because the behavior comes from careful engineering and manufacture which didn’t exist in the known universe before that.
That would mean an invention can become a discovery, potentially millennia later, if we discover (no pun intended) that the thing already existed in some form. I think few people would agree with that.
Also, the same ”discover or invent?” question is frequently asked about mathematics, where “exist in the known universe” is very much open for interpretation. Euclidean geometry ‘existed’ in the known universe for centuries, for example, until Einstein found out that it didn’t.
I'm not sure if the linked pages was updated recently, if I'm completely misreading it or if you're trolling. There's only one processor family (matisse) that's documented as "no fix planned). All datacenter products already have a fix published, and all non-matisse chips will have a new firmware available by october 2024
The Ryzen 3000 series ("matisse") is less than 5 years old, with the models coming out in late 2019 and 2020. To not issue a fix for those is very disappointing.
I just built a gaming PC with a Ryzen 3600. It is more than sufficient to run modern games with demanding graphics and performance. I now need to learn about this exploit. Yes, if someone gets the level of access required to exploit it I was pwned anyway, but now if I get pwned I need to open up my computer and throw away a perfectly powerful CPU, then put it back together with a new one.
That's pretty damn frustrating. It will definitely push me away from AMD when I am making future hardware decision.
EDIT: As pointed out by sqeaky and others, there shouldn't be a method for persistence that lives on the processor, instead it would likely be on the motherboard, or in the bootloader on a storage device.
We need more details before claiming that the sky is falling. Many exploits that are theoretically possible have so many pre-requisites in practice that they don't matter. We need to see if that's the case here.
Intel CPUs have been self-destructing, so you need to throw away CPUs even if they aren't pwned. They have also had far more security vulnerabilities than AMD, some of them cannot be patched, and operating systems had to work around them. Heck, the Sinkclose name came from 'Sinkhole', which was an Intel vulnerability.
Yes, fair enough. My hasty anger was emotionally driven because I just built a fairly powerful gaming computer with a Ryzen 3600, and because I am perpetually chafed by the hardware treadmill. I still think "no fix planned" for their CPUs that are widely used and <5 years old is ridiculous.
> As a matter of fact, the researchers say that the code would likely survive a complete reinstallation of the operating system. The best option for infected computers would be a one-way ticket to the trash heap.
> In fact, for any machine with one of the vulnerable AMD chips, the IOActive researchers warn that an attacker could infect the computer with malware known as a “bootkit” that evades antivirus tools and is potentially invisible to the operating system, while offering a hacker full access to tamper with the machine and surveil its activity. For systems with certain faulty configurations in how a computer maker implemented AMD's security feature known as Platform Secure Boot—which the researchers warn encompasses the large majority of the systems they tested—a malware infection installed via Sinkclose could be harder yet to detect or remediate, they say, surviving even a reinstallation of the operating system.
> Only opening a computer's case, physically connecting directly to a certain portion of its memory chips with a hardware-based programming tool known as SPI Flash programmer and meticulously scouring the memory would allow the malware to be removed, Okupski says. Nissim sums up that worst-case scenario in more practical terms: “You basically have to throw your computer away.”
I have no information that conflicts with what you posted but none of that indicates that the CPU gets written to.
Consider that even things like CPU microcode don't get stored on the CPU, it's simply doesn't have persistent storage. CPU microcode is often applied early during OS boots and loaded into memory or CPU cache.
What you have quoted indicates something similar, perhaps the main board or other device with storage of some kind is being written to or perhaps an attacker could write a payload that lived entirely in the bootloader on the main storage.
Not 100% true - a microcode-based CPU without microcode isn't able to execute anything, so CPUs will ship with an early version of the microcode that's then (as you say) updated during boot.
They could potentially do that to motherboards, but they could do that anyway (physical access would give you as much access to flash as this vulnerability does). But yes, CPUs should be fine in that respect.
Appreciate the clarification, that makes sense. Maybe we'll get more details on potential persistence methods from the talk they'll give tomorrow: https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54863
That just sounds like they can install a rogue bootloader, bypass secureboot, or hide from the operating system by operating on a higher privilege level than it. I don't see how it can infect the CPU itself, or how the infection can persist after swapping out the hard drives.
If you get code execution in SMM you can flash the BIOS on the motherboard. You'd be junking the mobo (unless it has one of those "BIOS Flashback" setups), not the CPU.
I’m going to rebound on that and explain why it doesn’t make sense to hold on to RSUs.
Disclaimer: I’m an IC myself.
I worked for my 1st company for 15 years. Held to their RSUs most of the time. Then moved to another (public) company and stayed there for a year before leaving. Now in a startup with a lower salary and no immediate liquidity on my stock options.
When you work at a public company, you have multiple exposures to the company’s growth: the RSUs that have already vested, the RSUs that haven’t vested yet and through your own career growth and salary increase that goes with a successful company. If you were early enough, you also get market cred for having made the company successful. If the companies goes under (or shrinks, or lays people off), all those assets are at risk.
Usually, one has more in granted stocks than in vested stocks. If your company just went public, you might have a lote more sellable than in your pipeline, but even that is unusual. Usually, you’ll still have more in the pipeline than you’ve already vested.
If your company has been public for a while, you should get frequent refreshes, which means you still have a significant numbers of unvested shares.
Regardless, you should sell as soon as you can, because of the remaining exposure through unvested equity. Use the proceeds to place in an ETF, or in a high-yield savings account, or some more aggressive investment strategy. Or use it for the downpayment on your house, or fund your kid’s college funds, whatever floats your boat.
Anyways, keep in mind that you still have a significant exposure to the growth of the company through your unvested equities. If you’re worried about short-term cap gain, don’t be. If you sell immediately, there’s no growth between cost basis and selling price, so no cap gain. Another upside to selling is that you’re not bound by the blackout periods, so your assets are much more liquid. And remember you still have exposure
That's the incorrect belief that causes so many people to hold their RSUs. The day you vest the RSU is the day someone decided to:
(1) give you the amount in cash (as regular income)
(2) take that cash and buy that stock on your behalf
(3) turn around and give you the stock
and somehow you decide to let (2) and (3) happen without returning to the cash position in (1) and buying whatever else you would prefer to hold. The LTCG clock starts on that day, and all you're doing by holding your vested RSU is let someone else decide to buy stuff on your behalf and make the decision for you.
(that's assuming that there's an ability to liquidate the RSU on the vest date)
At vesting time you are taxed (immediately) at ordinary income rates on the fair market value the day that it vests, and that's what the cost basis is set to. If you sell on that day, your capital gains from the sale will be (near) $0.
The only reason to wait for LTCG on RSUs is if you decided to hold it for some non-zero amount of time after vesting and then the stock price shot up. But then you're also taking on the risk that the stock price will drop again before the year has passed, and end up with less post-tax money than if you'd sold at short-term tax rates.
Some companies might make you hold for a few months until the next earnings report and trading window. After that it depends on your tolerance for risk and your attitude about the IRS.
Earnings reports happen once a quarter between the company and the public. A couple of business days after that, employees (without material nonpublic info) may trade company shares for the next month or so. Maybe you can't sell April shares until mid-July, and then you have to decide whether to wait until next July to minimize tax on gain.
Sometimes you can elect to sell every released share in a quarter, or file a 10b5-1 plan with a schedule, but you have to do that during a trading window.
Most (all?) public tech companies have policies that prohibit employees from trading the company's stock outside designated windows following a quarterly earnings release.
It might not be such a bad thing to increase cost of trans-oceanic transportation. Right now we’re shipping stuff that makes little sense no to produce locally simply because (cost of overseas labor + cost of transportation) < (cost of domestic labor). I would suggest this is absurd both from an ecological and from a humane standpoint. Increasing the cost of transoceanic shipping might help flip the scales a little bit
Alternatively, I’d suggest that the premiums might not increase that much.
Cost of insurance would be (cost of a claimable event)*(probability of such event). I’d hope the latter tends towards zero, significantly reducing the product of the 2.
We can also look at the potential impact of such a “new” policy on total insurance costs. Apparently, the Dali is able to transport 10k containers. And current shipping prices of $4,000 per container, that means that the cost of the trip alone is in the $40M range. If we take the lowest possible value of the goods, that’d be $40M and the arrival location. I’d argue that the probability of losing the vessel and its cargo is higher than that of hitting a bridge, especially if ports start deploying tugboats around their facilities
I think this can be applied more generally as:
Everything should be priced in. Lots of big problems seem to occure because externalities are passed down to future tax payers. Pollution, climate change, garbage etc.
Really nothing disingenuous here. “Trusted by top companies with learning budget” is pretty damn clear and accurate. All in the same font, so there’s no “fine print” argument to be had either.
seeing as some people have already added some comments criticizing the code of conduct, I thought I'd add what I think is the most important parts of that code of Ethics :
> No one is required to follow The Rule [...] or even think that [it] is a good idea. [...] anyone is free to dispute or ignore that idea [...]
> This is a one-way promise [...]. the developers are saying "we will treat you this way regardless of how you treat us"
No one is forcing their beliefs onto anyone. keep the pitchforks in the shed.
Agreed, as an atheist it all sounds fine to me. I can respect their code of ethics without feeling the need to adopt it myself.
I'm grateful to the author of SQLite for releasing this excellent piece of software into the public domain and continuing to maintain it for the benefit of all. If providing this good work to the world was driven by his Christian principles, then really, who are any of us to criticise. Indeed, we should all be thankful.
I can't help but notice the contrast with the popular, Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct, which makes it abundantly clear its aim to enforce a set of beliefs on its contributors, with no boundaries between professional and personal life.
The elephant in the room in many current attempts to encourage "diversity" is that a genuinely diverse range of opinions and/or beliefs ends up being not welcome at all.
Let’s be blunt, when people complain about lack of a diversity of thought/opinion, it’s almost always a complaint that they can’t be a bigot. Of course nobody says that so directly- they use dog whistles so that people who are being attacked know to leave while the bigots retain a veinier of civility so they can radicalize others by saying “look how hostile and irrational that group got over my innocuous sounding statement.”
Maybe you think spaces would be better if we allowed unmoderated bigotry in the name of free speech, but a practical consequence is that when the bigots move in, the people that they are targeting go away. The end result isn’t “diversity of thought” and it was never intended to be- it just ends up being one more space where people get bullied into leaving.
"And so when I hear, for example, folks on college campuses saying, “We’re not going to allow somebody to speak on our campus because we disagree with their ideas or we feel threatened by their ideas,” I think that’s a recipe for dogmatism and I think you’re not going to be as effective."
- President Obama, complaining he can't be a bigot.
> - President Obama, complaining he can't be a bigot.
If you a actually read the article you quoted, the main argument he’s making is essentially “well, they may be bigots, but you need to learn to argue with bigots if you want to make progress”. That may or may not be true on a college campus (and at a public college the argument is likely immaterial because a government run institution is, and should be, bound by free speech in ways that private forums are not and should not be).
Open source projects and technical communities are different- they have different goals, needs to operate under different constraints, and so should behave differently.
I have read it many times. I really like it, which is why I quoted it. I also think moderating communities is a hard problem and I don't think private forums should be open to all forms of speech. In fact I only read forums which are heavily moderated. What I disagree with is your statement that
"...when people complain about lack of a diversity of thought/opinion, it’s almost always a complaint that they can’t be a bigot."
Supporting diversity of opinions and being a bigot are very different things. As can be seen with Obama. Labeling any one who disagrees with you on the topic of free speech as a bigot is A) rude, dismissive and B) not an effective argument. Its easy to think you're right when you assume the other side is racist.
> Its easy to think you're right when you assume the other side is racist.
The crux of my experience is that when the thing people disagree with you on _isn’t_ racist/homophobic/misogynistic/etc. then they tend to directly name and openly discuss the subject of their disagreement. The general and innocuous sounding term “diversity of thought” tends to get brought out when the opinions themselves are one of those opinions that people don’t want to admit to so openly.
If people are going to disagree about a choice of software license, or technical architecture, or copyright assignment, or even about moderation standards and free speech, they tend to just directly name the thing they are disagreeing about (as we are now).
I’ll give some ground here and say that in some cases “diversity of thought” isn’t raised because the particular person raising the thought wants to say bigoted things, but at the very least it tends to get trotted out to defend speech that ends up driving people away because of either direct overt bigotry or, more often, a pervasive use of dog whistles.
You know it when you see it, and ultimately it’s going to be a call left up to whoever is moderating the community. Any attempt at a narrow or precise definition leads to disingenuous people exhausting the moderators with endless rules lawyering.
“well, they may be bigots, but you need to learn to argue with bigots if you want to make progress”
In my experience, the more opinionated a person is, the less rational they are, so arguing with them is a waste of time. Most bigots enjoy arguing with you, but it doesn't change their opinions.
> In my experience, the more opinionated a person is, the less rational they are, so arguing with them is a waste of time. Most bigots enjoy arguing with you, but it doesn't change their opinions.
The implication here is of course that it is only worth talking to those that you can convert to your side, which is of course admitting that you are in fact opposed to diverse thoughts. Are you open to change your opinions or do you only expect others to adjust to your standards?
Of course those calling others bigots and using unionically using dog whistles like "dog whistle" is a very opiniated thing to do. Should we also take those things as a sign of irrationality and not engage with their ideas? Perhaps.
Sure, it's much easier to discount competing thoughts and opinions if you just discard them as bigotry.
If anyone is radicalizing others it is those that treat everyone that does not 100% agree with them as radicals that must be pushed out instead of as people.
What experiences do you have to the contrary? I’ve moderated a few community spaces and this has been the way it’s gone every single time it’s come up for me.
Have you reflected on the fact that all those community spaces have had one thing in common - you moderating them? Perhaps listening to peoples concerns about lack of diversity of thought instead of labeling them bigots would allow you to see things differently. Most people don't feel as strongly about controlling the discourse of others that they end up moderating any not to mention multiple spaces.
> The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
I find that somewhat short-sighted. Let's use a different example.
Imagine you live in a society that allows personal gun ownership. Obviously, in such a society you still don't want people running around shooting each other willy-nilly, so you make a law: shoot someone, go to jail.
Now imagine someone pulls out a gun and shoots you. Result: you're dead, they go to jail.
However, you'd really prefer not to be dead. So imagine that someone pulls out their gun to shoot you, but then you pull out your gun and shoot them. Result: they're dead, you go to jail. It's what the law says, after all.
This is undesirable to most people because it looks like you've been punished for defending yourself. So we'll change the law: if someone is pointing a gun at you, you can shoot them without going to jail.
Now imagine that someone pulls a gun on you, then you pull a gun to defend yourself, but then they shoot you anyway. Result: you're dead, and they don't go to jail. It's what the law says, after all: you were pointing a gun at them. Oops, it's equivalent to having no law at all! This is the worst form of the law so far, and it's also the same thing as the paradox of tolerance.
The way you solve this is the same way you solve the paradox of tolerance: you say that the initial aggressor does not receive any protections if their own weapons are used against them. This produces a result that matches people's intuitions. This also creates a lesser problem, where people try to toe the line of aggression and goad someone else into making the first move so that they can justly retaliate, but it's still a vast improvement on the situation that intuitively matches how people expect things to work, which just so happens to involve ethics that are conditional on the behavior of others. The condition in this example: violence is acceptable, if it's in self-defense.
EDIT: I see this is being downvoted, would anyone care to explain their reasoning?
The issue I have with this is that you are effectively strawmanning this by proxying an individual's code of ethics with a society's code of laws.
The laws of a society are imposed on you regardless of whether you want them. A person's code of ethics is adopted by choice. The law you are referring to is only unjust because it is being imposed on everyone. A devout monk can be a good person, while a society that forces you to behave like a monk would be tyrannical. The coercion is the difference.
I think you would agree that a person whose code of ethics includes "if I shoot someone, I will promptly report myself to the police for murder" is not an unjust condition at all. However, a society that forces you to live that way in a gun-loving society would be very unjust indeed.
a) someone being shot and someone pointing a gun are very well defined things while what is or is not intolerant is very subjective
and
b) unlike in your analogy, if someone expresses a opinion you consider intolerant then you are not dead, you can still defend your own opinion and counter theirs and most importantly you have not been harmed irreparably.
I don't agree at all with the gp or the use of the "paradox of tolerance" to shut down those you agree with, but I agree even less with discounting commings based on their length. Long from responses should be encouraged as they require the commenter to at least put in some time and hopefully some thought as well and also because many things are complex enough that shortening them just to please the twitter-brained loses vital details.
I think a lot of people on HN are just anti gun/very left wing, which may taint their judgement while your example was nice about the initiation of violence being the issue.
Why would I have an issue with people using guns as an example?
It doesn’t work nearly as well with knives, which other people aren’t totally defenseless against (or cars, which are hard to pull out of your pocket in response to someone pointing theirs at you).
Ok, so maybe I couldn’t resist being a little bit snarky, but really, it was a good example.
FYI: contrary to popular belief, these are mutually exclusive.
"Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary." -- Karl Marx
Anyone who advocates disarming the working class and leaving it entirely defenseless against capitalism and the state apparatus it inevitably begets is not leftist, and I'm personally rather tired of pretending otherwise. Gun control advocates might be "left" of the far-right, but that's a stunningly low bar.
The paradox of tolerance was aimed at those who would with "fists or pistols" prevent others from sharing their views and was premised on the right of self-defense.
In historical context, it's seems squarely aimed at the paramilitary organizations of various movements popular around the 1930s or so who physically injured people for saying things they disliked.
Welcome to the messy uncodifiable reality of ethics and politics. You can pick a practical code with an exploit or you can pick one that lets you be cut down by anyone that doesn't go along with it.
Or you can try to fix the exploit. At least you can try to notice when people are exploiting it in the wild, which is to a first approximation "every time somebody cites the Paradox of Tolerance".
This is a misquotation. The entire quotation from Open Society is:
> But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
Note that Popper is not claiming that "fists or pistols" are a necessary condition for not tolerating intolerance: they're a final stage of said intolerance. Popper explicitly says that we might reserve the right to preempt intolerance before it reaches the point of its followers resorting to violence.
The whole paragraph makes it even clearer that he’s talking about people who would shut down free debate, starting with “denouncing all argument.” He’s actually talking about how progressives are today—ranging from declaring some topics beyond debate to “punch a Nazi.”
I think this is the paradox's greatest weakness: whataboutism :-)
Karl Popper is not talking about today's progressives, because he died in 1994. The closest extension we can reasonably draw does not include them either, because Popper exclusively identified totalitarian ideologies with reactionary beliefs[1].
It's very easy to use the PoT as a blunt weapon, and there are some embarrassing applications of it on the political left. But none are quite as embarrassing as suggesting that Popper might seriously entertain "free debate" with a Nazi.
I didn’t say he was talking about progressives today, I said what he talked about is applicable to progressives today. When Popper uses the word “tolerance” he’s talking specifically about people who don’t tolerate a free society with free debate, not people who express intolerant views. For example, the Trump voter who is intolerant of immigrants isn’t “denouncing all argument” about immigration. It’s progressives who do that.
I didn’t say Popper would entertain free debate with a Nazi. My point is that, under Popper’s framework, there’s a huge incentive to declare anyone you don’t like to be Nazis, and reframe speech as tantamount to threats to physical safety.
I've never met a progressive who "denounced all argument" about immigration. Instead, they seem tired of the same handful of (xenophobic) tropes that get trotted out during national discussions around immigration policy: immigrants as social burdens, as criminals, as drug mules, as "anchors" for some dogwhistled demographic replacement, &c.
Those tropes (and the reactionary politics that underlie them) strike me as precisely the kind of intolerance that Popper might have concerned himself with.
(Separately: it's unclear how progressives have satisfied the "intolerance of intolerance" condition here. Are you claiming that progressives have successfully won some on that front of the culture war? Current policy suggests otherwise[1].)
> none are quite as embarrassing as suggesting that Popper might seriously entertain "free debate" with a Nazi
(This really is a genuine question) who is to be allowed to determine if our opponents are that, and hence worthy of what one might call preemptive intolerance?
That is the eternal question. However, I will submit for consideration that the person we're talking about when we use the phrase "punch a Nazi" is, in fact, a neo-Nazi[1].
Dealing more abstractly: I personally think we are justified in practicing "preemptive intolerance" when the party in question (1) has a bad faith (not merely faithless) relationship with the "language" of our political systems, and (2) demonstrates repeated intent to employ the mechanisms of our systems to subvert them. Both conditions are necessary; the absence of the latter makes the individual a LARPer.
You are advocating behavior that is highly corrosive and fundamentally antithetical to the effective functioning of a healthy democracy.
Weimar Germany wasn’t fertile political soil for extremism because there weren’t enough people punching Nazis. In fact, the opposite — pervasive, normalized political violence gave cover to extremists who could then argue that they were justified in escalating their behaviors.
If I were to follow your own ethos (and to be perfectly clear, I do not), I should be advocating punching you in the street, as your ethos represents a bad faith attempt to undermine and subvert our political systems by using violence to control the words and ideas shared by others.
All I've done here is rephrased Popper's words, with some additional conditions. The fact that you don't like it mean that it's in bad faith; I've made no such presumption about you or anybody else in this thread.
And no, that's not what caused the decline of Weimar (and the rise of Nazism). Nazism was preordained by a confluence of political factors, including the need for an easy post-war scapegoat in the form of Jews and other outsiders. 20th century European Fascist movements follow a uniform pattern: the loss of face or sovereignty (Trianon, WWI), followed by irredentism and revanchism towards any group perceived as having either benefited (or merely not suffered enough). Those sentiments culminated in a concerted effort to use newfound civil freedoms to undermine the system itself, chiefly by directing a disposition for intolerance towards those easiest to vilify.
This is all in marked contrast to our current situation and historical context, one where liberal activism has consistently made America freer for increasingly large swathes of its population. We easily forget that you could have gone to jail in 1955 for buying a copy of Ulysses, or been fined for daring to eat a meal with a more privileged race. My sole interest has and will continue to be expanding those freedoms.
We need a new secular code-society, where we separate code from personal beliefs, and assign "societal points" only by merit.
The problem with tolerance and intolerance is, that a few people (a loud minority) think they're the universal good guys, even in cases where their "good thing" is incompatible with itself.
Karl Popper was talking about Nazis and Communists organizing street brawls and putsches, not people insulting each other on Twitter:
> I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
As long as nobody is bringing pistols to tech conferences or starting fistfights in the hallways, Popper would not support excluding attendees for having intolerant ideas. Perhaps if contributors to your open-source repository are doxing and SWATting each other, putting lives at risk, then Popper would exclude them. But as long as they're just making offensive comments, Popper would not "claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force." (It might still be better to decline their patches so as to avoid being associated with them.)
I wouldn't go even as far as Popper, because his argument eats itself; as demonstrated in this thread, when people start applying his ideas, Popperism itself becomes an intolerant idea that, according to Popperism, we should suppress by violence. Moreover, any political position that advocates that the government take an action is advocating that some policy be imposed on the unwilling parts of the population by violence.
Much more sustainable is to suppress the violent actors and protect those who are merely calling for violence, while remonstrating with them to change their minds.
> not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
Wow, this ironically sounds exactly like the people spouting off about needing to "fight intolerance" in the past couple years.
It's not about labels. Speech that singles other people or groups out for different treatment or is otherwise racist, sexist, etc is intolerant. In a just society, we simply ask that one makes one's point without throwing specific groups under the proverbial bus.
> Speech that singles other people or groups out for different treatment or is otherwise racist, sexist, etc is intolerant.
I think most people can get on board with that. The trouble comes when people start berating others for using words/phrases like blacklist, sanity check, backlog grooming, master, and spaz - just to name a few. 99.9% of people who use these words do not possess the mens rea of bigotry or intolerance.
E.g.: Right now, someone who read your comment is probably enraged on behalf of the people who have been hit by buses. Most of us know you mean no harm by it.
I’m glad you think most people would agree with me, but your follow up example seems a bit unfortunate.
You might not believe that language affects thought or behaviour, but saying so directly might arguably be a better way of making your point than singling out others who disagree with you.
I'm not sure what any of that is supposed to mean. You might be conflating my comments with someone else's because I'm not singling out anyone. Unless you're chafed at my use of your own words -- I assure you, it was meant as a kind word of caution and not as mockery.
> Popper was talking about a very specific case, where the intolerant exploit the tolerance of a society to physically take over that society and enforce their views. Until and unless you have evidence of that plausibly happening, there is no Paradox of Tolerance.
Considering what the USA is going through right now... well, I just have no words.
What Popper probably meant was something more akin to, “don’t be a pacifist when people are starting to resort to violence”. At least that’s my reading.
It’s also interesting that the more extreme version of the “paradox of tolerance” is very close to the legal reasoning used during the Red Scare to justify bans on communist parties.
Popper's Paradox of Tolerance is widely misunderstood to be a licence to be intolerant yourself. For the last time : it is not.
Popper was talking about a very specific case, where the intolerant exploit the tolerance of a society to physically take over that society and enforce their views.
Until and unless you have evidence of that plausibly happening, there is no Paradox of Tolerance. You can perfectly tolerate people who hate women, who hate men, who hate gays, who hate the rich, who hate the poor, who hate any and every religion, ideology, way of life, identity, worldview or personality type. You can tolerate each and every single one of them, you can tolerate infinite number of them, as long they don't try to make reality conform to what they preach.
It's well known in software that a data structure can have infinite readers, but the presence of even a single writer either necessitates that the data structure is completely private to the writer, or an explicit and consistent writing policy needs to be devised to coordinate the writer with the readers and possibly other writers. Popper's Paradox of Tolerance is a restatement of this basic observation in the context of human societies. You can have infinite tolerance and diversity, as long as not a single ideology or group "writes" their conflicting views to society. If you have a group that does that, then you must choose whether you will cede all control of society to that group, or to set a strong writing policy that is much less permissive than infinite tolerance.
Stop using an argument for tolerance as an excuse for intolerance.
> You can tolerate each and every single one of them, you can tolerate infinite number of them, as long they don't try to make reality conform to what they preach.
If you let them say whatever they want on an online forum without any moderation you’ll end up with Voat, or something similar. The intolerant views take over.
Argue all the philosophy you like, practical experience shows that every time someone tries an unmoderated forum in any medium it ends up a cesspit of intolerance.
I didn't know about Voat, sad that it was closed down. I would have loved to try it.
>The intolerant views take over.
This sounds to me like a you problem. You can very well admit that you don't know how to argue and shout back (in whatever style necessary to win), or that your views are so unpopular that you can't defend them unless to a supportive audience, but don't make this some sort of universal law or inevitable tendency. There is nothing about any view that makes it inherently more popular or appealing.
>a cesspit of intolerance.
This usage of 'intolerance' hints that you don't really understand Popper's sense of the word. Popper wasn't talking about what offends you, Popper was talking about people violently forcing you out of a society. There is no intolerance on 4chan or 8chan or any similar platform, literally everyone is allowed there, everyone is just an anonymous unique number. Only your own offence prevents you from participating, which is not anybody's fault. Every single "bad" tech platform, the ones that allow speech that mainstream progressive-dominated US companies love to rave about, only suffer due to external pressures imposed on them, the audience of those services very much like it, and they don't seem to physically force reality or other people to like what they like. The only one doing the forcing here are the self-appointed tolerance defenders, who are so so worried about tolerance that they are willing to freely dispence intolerance left and right to protect it. It's like how pro-war folks say that war protects and preserves the peace: It's indeed very true in a certain narrow sense, but you can't be doing it willy nilly, or you will risk destroying the very thing you claim you want to preserve.
I also don't understand why defending unlimited expresssion of views must imply defending unlimited expression of view without moderation. There is no reason why we can't moderate any ideology at all, see the subreddit r/themotte for example to see a place where everyone from radical feminists to white nationalists expressing their views in moderated threads.
> Popper was talking about a very specific case, where the intolerant exploit the tolerance of a society to physically take over that society and enforce their views.
Where they pose a danger of it.
If you let them do it before reacting, you've already lost, and that's the point.
Anyhow, it's not widely misunderstood, AFAICT, since when it is invoked it is invariably with the strong implication, and usually the explicit statement, that that is the threat being addressed. You might at times question the judgement behind the assessment of the risk, but that's not a misunderstanding of the paradox of tolerance.
Whereas your use of “a group of people from multiple ethnicities, genders, sexualities and creeds” is code for:
> People who agree with my political ideology.
A woman of color that held heretical beliefs contrary to your orthodoxy would be no more welcome than anyone else.
It’s telling that you argue that your opponents are “people who want to silence, suppress and destroy anyone not part of the dominant group”, and then immediately turn around use that assertion to justify the necessity of silencing and suppressing those not part of your dominant group.
It would be extremely naive to think that fascism only happened in the 1920s-1940s.
Obviously, todays fascism looks nothing like that of the modern era, just as todays leftists are different.
But it’s back, poisoning our democracies and pushing the world into a new hell. Putin is a neofascist. I could tell you which Americans are fascists, but you all get touchy when anyone brings it up.
Ah yes, the crypto-fascism conspiracy theory - or the blackshirt scare.
There's fascists everywhere. They don't call themselves that, they don't organise under that label, and their views aren't particularly similar to historical fascism - but it's a serious threat! It's so powerful that they have to keep it a secret because they'll be cast out of polite society...
At least McCarthy actually found people spying for the USSR.
> They don't call themselves that, they don't organise under that label
Why would they? Much of our current mythology is based around slaughtering fascists in WW2. Why would anyone identify with that?
> their views aren't particularly similar to historical fascism
Hence the appellation of neofascism. There is a direct thread of political genealogy from the alt-right to the OG fascists, through the European Nouvelle Droite (inspired by Mussolini) and including figures like Steve Bannon who used to push the British BNP: a legitimately neofascist party. He also was buddy with Dugin for a while: a confirmed neofascist.
Read some fucking history and get stuck into the thought and theories of the far right if you want to play this game son.
> it's a serious threat!
Finally, we can agree! Look at the escalating far right violence in the US and Canada, and the erosion of the open society in Europe, and the current actions of Russia and China.
Or how about, instead of that, we recognize that the vast majority of people are not engaging in political violence, revolution, or physically attacking their political opponents, or any of these allegedly horrible things that you think are happening.
And instead of that, we should recognize that most people just want to do work at their workplace, have friends, and live their life, and are not apart of any neo nazi groups that are going to target minorities at the drop of the hat.
Most people, are just regular normal individuals, who are not engaging in horrible actions or attacks against others, and we do not need to be on a witch hunt to find the secret nazis that you think are hiding just around the corner.
My sibling in humanity. I beg you. Read about the history of fascism and its contemporary movements instead of just parroting ill informed bumper stickers, because you’re about half a step away from saying the that the Democratic Republic of Germany was democracy.
Piece of advice - if someone disagrees with you and you want to change their mind don't tell them they are ignorant of history and they get their ideas from bumper stickers.
> Remember, that the other word “nazism” is a short for National Socialism, a purely left based ideology. The two (fascism and nazism) had a good run together as the best friends since they didn’t have a lot of topics to fight about.
This is a grossly inaccurate framing. Hitler and his allies found the socialist party a convenient ladder to power, however were not themselves not particularly leftist. For them the ethno nationalist project was the focus, and eventually Hitler would consolidate his control over the party by literally stabbing to death the leaders of the worker centric wing of the party.
I wouldn't say National Socialism was purely left. It was economically extremely left-leaning and most of their social policies were extremely right-leaning. (Though, racism knows no political bounds... Stalin also practiced genocidal policies.)
It's true that Hitler thought the US's free market economy was a Jewish ideal, and he thought the economic free market incentives (in the form of huge government contracts) would only benefit Jews without efficiently producing war material. The Nazis did have a form of command economy as a result, which turned out to not be as efficient.
I mean, the economics of National Socialism aren't what people usually hate about it, they hate the authoritarianism where you were either their kind of socialist or they would beat you up and cast you out of society, even if you were some other stripe of socialist.
So they became nearly universally hated by fighting anyone who wasn't one of them.
It was ethnostate socialism. It was a command economy where industry was at the service of the people, but they had a perverse idea of who their people were and who they weren't.
It really was a left-wing economic model with extreme right-wing social policy, plus lots of genocide.
> It really was a left-wing economic model with extreme right-wing social policy, plus lots of genocide.
So it was a right-wing political model (with lots of genocide) that happened to have a somewhat left-wing economic model.
In economics, economics ranks above politics, but in politics, politics ranks above economics. And Nazism was (is) a political ideology, not a school of economics.
It's amusing to me that you comment complaining that fascists will seize power given the chance. I have seen the same thought process but pointing at wokism instead of fascism. The parallel is so strong I had to reread your post to double check which side you were arguing to support.
Well, you wasted no time whatsoever in playing the Nazi card.
If you're willing to hear a counterpoint: I disagree wholeheartedly with your worldview, and yet I support your right to express your views. See, I'm not looking to "silence", "suppress", or "destroy" you, even though I disagree with you. Please make a mental note that people like me exist and not everybody who disagrees with you is a fascist.
I’m not talking about silencing people I disagree with in terms of opinion. I’m talking about fascists disagreeing that certain ethnic/sexual/gender groups should be alive or allowed to thrive, or have certain rights.
If you think holding views like that is OK, you walk, talk and quack like a fascist.
> I’m not talking about silencing people I disagree with in terms of opinion. I’m talking about fascists disagreeing that certain ethnic/sexual/gender groups should be alive or allowed to thrive, or have certain rights. If you think holding views like that is OK, you walk, talk and quack like a fascist.
That's a nice motte-and-bailey lumping together "should be alive" and "have certain rights". The former is a very specific kind of extreme biggot, and the latter can mean almost anything. You know, words have actual meanings and not everybody who disagrees with you is a fascist. You can look up the definition of the word "fascist" in a dictionary. The definition is a lot narrower than you think. A religious person who opposes abortion is not a fascist. An athlete who opposes trans womens' rights to compete in womens' competitions is not a fascist.
> A religious person who opposes abortion is not a fascist.
I’d call them a theocrat, but lets not forget the close ties between fascism and the church/new political-religious movements in Germany and Italy.
> An athlete who opposes trans womens' rights to compete in womens' competitions is not a fascist.
This one is nuanced because transgender folks being allowed to exist openly is still fairly recent, and openly in sports is more novel still. There are fascists in that camp for sure, but also a lot of reasoned debate needed to work out the cultural niche for trans people in this area. Unfortunately the left will seek to stop any debate, and fascists will poison the debate until trans people are bludgeoned into silence once more.
Holding a view is different than thinking the view is OK to hold.
AND, most people (you'd accuse of thinking the view is ok to hold) don't think these views *are* ok to hold, but are caught in a purposefully wide net.
Like, often we hear that:
* proposition 8 was fascist
* brendan eich is a fascist because he donated to it
* supporting brendan eich is fascist
I agree with marriage equality. (it is actually good conservatism, even!) But I disagree that prop 8 was fascist (and according to some that probably makes me a fascist as well)
The Contributor Covenant is the gold standard for a reason: it is a response to the bigotry and harassment problems that were endemic to the open source communities. Alone it doesn't achieve much, but combined with a good faith enforcement board it helps keep a community a pleasant, joyful place to contribute to, for everyone. And that will increase software quality and attract quality people, aside from being, you know, the right thing to do.
The SQLite developers (developer?) are not interested in inviting more contributors to the table and that's fine, but for a functional public community the Contributor Covenant or something like it is pretty much table stakes.
Good faith users don't need security policies because the security policies weren't written for them. They were written for the pathological cases.
Good faith citizens don't need laws because the laws weren't written for them, etc.
Systems designed around the pathological cases help keep those pathological cases at bay. They are a framework for allowing the good-faith people to continue to act in good faith without having to constantly worry about the pathological cases themselves. I'd love to go back to the days when people left their doors unlocked and no one had a password to get into their account, but those days are gone. So are the days of not having a code of conduct on your open source project.
Having safeguards, let alone against criminals, is a very different conversation to having a code of ethics.
Perhaps the fact that we as a society are so ready to associate codes of ethics with policing should be raising some red flags in how we think about this issue.
With good modding, no code is needed. And with bad modding, the best code imaginable can achieve nothing. It is all down to the quality of the modding.
The justification for the banhammer is "I think you should be banned." The CoC doesn't enable or permit the mods to ban you. The mods can ban you because they're the mods; "can ban you" is pretty much definitionally identical to "is a mod." At most a CoC can serve as a guidebook for users.
This is nonsensicle and shows a lack of understanding. A code of conduct is just a guidebook for users to understand how your moderators will act, what to expect in a community.
I guess I agree with that. But then there's still no point in using a prefabricated code. The code should be a README, a guide for users to predict mod behavior. An aid to the primary modding tool.
Moderation starts and ends with the mods, not with the CoC. The CoC just saves labor.
Using a prefabricated CoC is what you do when you need to fulfill a checkbox item saying "has a CoC", but have no intention of actually following it.
> This Code of Conduct applies within all community spaces, and also applies when an individual is officially representing the community in public spaces. Examples of representing our community include using an official e-mail address, posting via an official social media account, or acting as an appointed representative at an online or offline event.
Up to version 1.3 the covenant didn't have a section limiting scope. 1.4 introduced it along with a loophole:
> Representation of a project may be further defined and clarified by project maintainers.
Eg, if you say something the maintainers don't like on your personal Twitter, all they need to say is "you're representing the project in a bad light" and it's fair game to ban you.
Then in version 2.0 the text you quote appears, but changes
> This Code of Conduct applies within all project spaces
to
> This Code of Conduct applies within all community spaces
but never defines what community spaces are. Is your personal Twitter account a community space? Well, once again that's up to the maintainers to decide. It's the same loophole as 1.4 but more cleverly disguised.
Have you raised your concern with anyone who can do anything about it?
In any case, I fail to see how this is any worse than any other project. Do you expect some sort of due process before you're banned from any random OSS project? I wouldn't. If you don't like it, you can fork the project. That's how it works.
> The founder of SQLite and all current developers have pledged to follow the spirit of The Rule to the best of their ability.
Sure, as far as I'm aware code of conducts/ethics only ever apply to contributors, no-one has beliefs being forced upon them. But that seems to be about the highest bar of entry for an interested developer I have seen in any project.
Not waving pitchforks here, I'm fine with them having this code of ethics, even tough I disagree with about half the points and find being asked to do such a pledge way to intrusive into personal life.
Even when not accepting outside contributions, to fulfill their long term support commitment through 2050, they might have to make changes to their current core team.
If they do, then they will have to find people who embrace Christian spiritualism. That's going to be a lot easier than finding Lisp devs. Similarly, Christian institutions seek Christian employees and they fire those who cannot abide.
Can't a software project be like a Christian church?
Personally, I don’t have a problem with a software project being run like a church. Don’t know what the legal situation is.
How common are those views in question tough? I’d say about 9/10 Christians I know from Europe and Latin America would find several of these points too extreme. But yes, that leaves probably still more people than lisp devs …
I don't understand why he didn't just use MIT or CC0 as license.
It gives the same rights and the same limitless nature, so why use an arbitrary license which might cause problems in some countries ? And also makes the contribution workflow more complex?
MIT requires that a copy of the license is distributed with the software—which means it is not strictly public-domain equivalent.
CC0 was not intended to be used as a software license, and IRCC includes a clause that the author withholds any patent rights, which which has its own set of concerns.
In practice, either of them would have worked fine, but part of the beauty of public domain code is that you can avoid having to specify a license.
There is no license. And all the contributors are in countries that recognize the concept of public domain. Why should they concern themselves with the niceties of licensing in some countries? How would choosing a different license guarantee a different outcome in those unspecified some countries?
This point seems incongruous to me, without its opposite:
"45. Be in dread of hell."
In zeal for mutual understanding, and practical fruit in general solutions that solve problems escaping a single perspective, would be that opposite for me.
We cannot approach the sublime within ourselves by fear, in my opinion.
There are a few other well-known teachings that appear to be missing from these rules, the first among them is the New Commandment.
I'm not sure what their organization is exactly but a private company isn't allowed to force a religious test on employees. I think it doesn't apply to an open source project but I sure don't like it. It's exclusionary.
Every time you come home and the SQLite developers aren't having sex with your wife, you should appreciate their code of Ethics. What other software makes that promise? Heck, Oracle probably probably upcharges, $500,000 or more for a 6-9s no adultery support plan (and that still gives them 52 minutes a year to commit adultery with your wife!)
I guess all the contributions magically appear out of thin air since nobody is allowed to contribute from outside the organization and nobody has ever joined the organization to contribute from the inside either.
>The founder of SQLite and all current developers have pledged to follow the spirit of The Rule to the best of their ability. [...] In other words, the developers are saying: "We will treat you this way regardless of how you treat us."
I would definitely not be able to honestly commit to such a pledge. Do you think they will add a "(except epa095)" if I get hired? Or maybe I just won't get hired. IDK, but just like OP I read it as a requirement for contributing.
Why not? If you're, for example, irreligious, then the best of your ability obviously doesn't include religious observations (and in fact, one could even make a solid argument that "interactions with each other, with their clients, and with the larger SQLite user community" don't touch the religious portions of Benedictine rules even for religious SQLite contributors because the clauses talking about relationship with God or Christ are simply not applicable to these interactions because none of the developers, clients, or larger SQLite user community include God or Christ). For example I'm a 110% atheist and yet I'd have zero problems with this. And again, you seem to be selectively ignoring the "this is not mandatory" part for some reason. If that part is a lie then the whole document is worthless as a guideline. You can't take a document telling you what to do and assume that it's randomly lying to you. If did that, then you'd have to consider your whole expected behavior to be unknowable.
Granted, it is a bit complicated to figure out what it means to pledge to follow the "spirit" of a rule which includes the rule that anyone can choose not to follow it.
But you asked why I would not be able to commit to such a pledge. For me pledging is a kind of social contract (I don't belive in God, so its not between me and it), and I care quite alot that other people know that when I promise something it means something. So it becomes important that we, me and the people who care about the pledge, agree on what it means. If we all agree that it essentially means nothing, then fine, I pledge. But if it means something, what does it really mean?
It says "They [the founder of SQLite and all current developers] view The Rule as their promise to all SQLite users of how the developers are expected to behave". So the developers view it as a promise of how the developers are expected to behave. If I take the pledge, and start working there, am I breaking the pledge if I:
- Don't "[...] love the Lord God with my whole heart, my whole soul, and my whole strength."? [1]
- Don't love fasting. [13]
- Prefers cremation to burying. [17]
- Make people laugh [54-55]
etc etc, you probably get the point. There are a lot of rules, and they can all be interpreted. It is kind of hard to be certain that we all agree on what it actually means to pledge to follow the spirit of these 72 rules.
So, that is why I find it hard to commit to the pledge.
Now, I agree with you that is says that "No one is required to follow The Rule". But it also says that "They view The Rule as their promise to all SQLite users of how the developers are expected to behave". So, it very much says that the founder of SQLite (part of "They") promise SQLite users that he expect SQLlite developers to follow "the code". Maybe, because of the "No one is required to follow The Rule", that means essentially nothing. Or maybe it means something. IDK.
That's a really bad analogy because I'm really not being asked to identify as a Benedictine here. In fact in order for your analogy to be more correct, the exact opposite -- "they could just say they don't identify as men" -- would have to be said.
Don't forget 'was created for the purpose of filling in a box on "supplier registration" forms [.....] This document continues to be used for its original purpose - providing a reference to fill in the "code of conduct" box on supplier registration forms.'
> ...how could one possibly get this impression, when it literally says "No one is required to follow The Rule"?
Now hear here miss, while true that the board of directors are all men, and have been so for 5 decades, we reject any notion of sexism as we clearly have here a document which states that “We believe men are superior to women, but we do not require employees to hold this belief…” also it’s voluntary and a compete coincidence that all employees have voluntarily vowed that they agree to this and that all employees are also male. It can’t be sexist since we do not force anyone to agree to do anything.
Hope the context shift makes it a bit easier to see why some people might call this suspicious.
Not quite sure where the document says anything about women. While Benedictines couldn't include women, I strongly doubt that there is any such insinuation here.
