Canadian software engineer living in Europe.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Whether you like it or not, politics is into you and directly affects your life. It’s good to learn more about it.

    “Neoliberal” refers to an economic push (typically championed by right-wing parties). The short explanation is that neoliberal proponents want to strip regulation wherever they can, believing that “the market” will provide what the regulations were guaranteeing (safety, competition, etc.) organically.

    An extreme example would be removing any controls on food safety. The idea is that if a company gets a reputation for producing toxic/dangerous food, the market (ie, the people buying food) will naturally avoid that company because they don’t want to get sick and that company will go out of business. That risk is what keeps them in line.

    A more common example is vehicle emissions. We regulate a lot of terrible stuff out of car exhaust — lead for example — because the market refused to do it themselves.

    Opponents to neoliberalism point out that:

    1. The massive amount of money in the hands of corporations means that their ability to manipulate the market (through advertising, media manipulation, or intimidating/buying their competitors) means that the market is insufficiently free for such policies and…
    2. That (perhaps most importantly) the individual often will not make purchasing decisions based on what’s good for the broader public.

    Also, a few thousand dead kids due to some executive deciding to add arsenic to corn flakes to reduce costs is too high a price to pay for “liberalising” the economy.


  • 5-over-1 refers to a building/zoning design where you have one floor of commercial business space on the ground (typically small businesses, cafés, etc.) and then around 5 floors of residential apartments above it. Your classic “mixed use” neighbourhood: great for land values, walkability, sustainability, transit, cycling, etc.

    I’m dubious about the claim that neoliberal policies naturally lead to this design though, as those with the money routinely seem more interested in paving a few hectares of green belt and filling it up with single family homes.

    What would be helpful is for zoning bylaws to start redrawing cities with more 5-over-1 areas, replacing wide/noisy/dirty/dangerous through roads with narrow winding ones and broad sidewalks littered with trees and cafés.


  • So my first impression is that the requirement to copy-paste that elaborate SQL to get the schema is clever but not sufficiently intuitive. Rather than saying “Run this query and paste the output”, you say “Run this script in your database” and print out a bunch of text that is not a query at all but a one-liner Bash script that relies on the existence of pbcopy – something that (a) doesn’t exist on many default installs (b) is a red flag for something that’s meant to be self-hosted (why am I talking to a pasteboard?), and (c) is totally unnecessary anyway.

    Instead, you could just say: “Run this query and paste the result in this box” and print out the raw SQL only. Leave it up to the user to figure out how they want to run it.

    Alternatively you can also do something like: “Run this on your machine and copy/paste the output”:

    $ curl 'https://app.chartdb.io/superquery.sql' | psql --user USERNAME --host HOSTNAME DBNAME
    

    In the case of the cloud service, it’s also not clear if the data is being stored on the server or client side in LocalStorage. I would think that the latter would be preferable.



  • Generally, I agree. I think what I meant by the above is “how would you tell someone how to use the thing”. My favourite example is email vs email-with-PGP.

    How do you send an email?

    1. Open client
    2. Click “send new email”
    3. Type your email
    4. Click send

    How do you send a PGP-encrypted email

    Let’s first talk about this thing called a “keyserver”. Once you know what that is, you’ll have to go out and find some keys to add to it. We’re not going to talk about styling your message 'cause that’s not something you should be able to do… etc. etc.


  • This is a common problem with Free software, and honestly I think it’s our biggest one: we build stuff for ourselves and stop there. If we want our stuff to be adopted (which, for things that rely on network effects, we do) then we need to pay more attention to usability.

    Here’s a suggestion for anyone starting a project they think they might share. Before you start writing any code, write the documentation. Then rewrite it from the perspective of the least tech-literate person you know who you’d still want to use the project. Only after you’ve worked out how easy it should be for this person to get started, then you can start writing the thing.





  • I think what he’s missing is that he’s approaching the question of “how do I make these people care?” from a liberal position. It just seems like such a weird question to even ask someone who cares about others by default.

    If you think of it from the perspective of a self-centred conservative though, you can ask the question as “how can I frame the pain of others as their problem?”

    Try talking about solutions in a way that affects them personally:

    • You want transit and bike lanes 'cause nothing reduces traffic other than viable alternatives to driving. Get those other people off the road so you can drive.
    • You want to stop sending weapons to Israel because we’re spending your money on weapons for their war.
    • You want to divest from fossil fuels because renewables have better energy security. Your costs don’t go up whenever those people start a war over there.
    • You want high taxes on the rich because they’re festering parasites sleeping on a pile of gold and we want to spend that money on the poor so they aren’t so desperate that they steal your shit.

    These people do not (cannot?) care about how many children are killed by our bombs or about the fate of some bird, so constantly appealing to emotional arguments meant for liberals will never work on them.



  • So here’s the thing. If someone is going to say with a straight face that they “stand with Israel”, even when Israel is committing genocide in their name, then those people are effectively throwing in their lot with genociders and frankly I have little sympathy for them. Thankfully, nearly every Jew I’ve ever met has been very critical of Israel (including the Israeli citizens), many of which have confessed zero interest in an ethnostate, preferring a liberal democracy with no state religion. A secular state for both Jews and Muslims – from the river to the sea if you will.

    These people may well be the minority, but you’ll forgive me if I won’t accept the assumption that the majority of the 15 million Jews around the world support genocide. Call me a naïve optimist if you like, but I want to believe that most people are better than that.


  • Actually, this is one of the things that drives me crazy about Jesse’s take on this. Putting aside for the moment the base selfishness that would lead someone to ask: “how does your committing genocide affect me?”, he’s taking Israel’s position from the start that their actions are directly tied to the lives of Jews around the world. There are millions of Jews out there who are (a) not Israeli citizens, (b) are not Zionists, and © even actively condemn its actions purportedly in their name, but Jesse always starts with the position that Jews == Israel.

    It’s Israel’s favourite shield: to claim that their actions are linked to Jews everywhere. They use it to smear any opposition to their war crimes as antisemitism, and lines of questioning like this only reinforce this link. You just can’t bemoan how Jews are being linked to war crimes while starting from the position that Israel is inherently linked to Jewish identity. What you get is a conversation where both parties agree that Israel is both inexorably linked to Jews everywhere but that they’re also not responsible for their safety because they can’t be – they’re not Israelis.

    To put it another way, no one would do an interview with the Iranian ambassador and suggest that they’re somehow responsible for Islamophobia in Canada. That would be absurd, but because it’s in Israel’s interest to claim representation of all Jews everywhere, you get this ridiculous session where both parties agree on a distorted version of reality. Since journalism is supposed to be about distributing factual information, beginning an interview on such a flawed position is both illogical and irresponsible.


  • The former.

    Responsible journalism is more than simply showing up for an interview and broadcasting whatever lie the subject wants you to share for them. If he’s not going to fact-check the ambassador immediately, then he’s operating as a defacto mouthpiece for his subject. Attaching a fact-checking document, after the fact, in an entirely different medium that outlines just how much of the interview was obvious propaganda is not journalism.

    The worst part is that Jesse has levelled this very criticism in the past against other journalists! Specifically in reference to how Trump is covered, but others as well. You can’t just hand your mic, your platform over to a 3rd party and claim that you’re doing journalism when you’re really being complicit in the distribution of propaganda.