The list below includes 1092 deleted tweets by alexelcu.

There are also 110 tweets that are indicated as not currently deleted by the Twitter API that have been scraped from pages of deleted tweets (as replies, etc.). These possibly undeleted tweets are included for context and are indicated by a (live) link.

This report was generated by ✨cancel-culture✨, an open source project by Travis Brown.

You can create your own updated version of this document by checking out and configuring the repository and then running the following commands:

$ cargo build --release
$ target/release/twcc deleted-tweets --report alexelcu

Please note that all tweets quoted here are sourced from the Wayback Machine and were not directly accessed through the Twitter API or any Twitter client.

• 28 March 2022: Google has been competent, but they shouldn’t collect & attach that history to profiles in the first place, while convincing people to keep their history on via dark patterns. E.g., doing health-related searches on Google can jeopardize medical insurance or endanger minorities.
• 28 March 2022: I wouldn’t attend a conference in which people make fun of other people’s illnesses or where violence, for whatever reason, is tolerated.
• 28 March 2022: Google is no longer my default search engine b/c I don’t trust them. It’s not good when a service you rely on can be your adversary. I still use it as a fallback, especially for programming-related or local searches. Reasonable alternatives are DuckDuckGo or Brave Search.
• 28 March 2022 (live): Google is the best search engine by far, but on each search I have to think about the implications beforehand, given what Google may learn about me. What weaknesses will expose me to financial loses or manipulation? What may constitute wrongthink in the future?
• 27 March 2022: There is a lot to criticize about cryptocurrency and its unregulated nature, which has fueled scams and which might trigger another financial crisis. Even so, cryptocurrency is here to stay, long term, as it’s becoming a reaction to statism.
• 27 March 2022 (live): One point of contention I have with crypto-skepticism is the idea that cryptocurrency is only useful for funding “crime”. Whether you agree with the weaponization of the financial system or not, cryptocurrency is legitimized for funding “dissent” and dissent isn’t crime.
• 27 March 2022: I’ll never understand the anti-intellectualism among devs. For one, it closes your mind to new things. And even if you believe that a certain tool or paradigm or practice isn’t the best thing since GC, you can still be respectful, even mindful of other people & their work.
• 27 March 2022 (live): Almost all improvements in CS are incremental, but add up. E.g. Future/Promise was a marginal improvement over callbacks, yet by now most people avoid callbacks. It’s fine to show enthusiasm for marginal improvements. We’re builders, taking pride in our craftsmanship.
• 26 March 2022: I’m not fond of Romania’s Christianity, BTW. People practice a lot of traditions and customs (churchisms), but there’s less learned Christian ethics. I guess that serves a purpose too, but I sense a potential for toxic nationalism during crises.
• 26 March 2022: Religion is in human nature. Atheism, at least the non-agnostic kind, is a religion too, defined in terms of Christianity, often focusing on man’s own ability to evolve (another religion) — found this book by John Gray on “7 types of atheism” interesting: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36482672-seven-types-of-atheism
• 25 March 2022: What separates liberal democracies from dictatorships? Why aren’t all countries devolving? Is it wealth, education, rule of law? What systemic processes helped democracies in achieving these, and aren’t we destroying them by converging on authoritarianism? End 🧵
• 25 March 2022: It’s easy to just ban disent, no trial necessity. Out of sight, out of mind, burn those books, problem solved /s
• 25 March 2022: We’re losing the information war, and the way governments, activists, or Big Tech choose to fight is censorship, which is iliberal and always has unintended consequences. We’re using the tools of dictators, of losers, but that authoritarian siren is strong.
• 25 March 2022: Phrases for spotting most conspiracy theories in 21st century: - “You’ve been lied to” - “Corporate interests” This describes, for example: - every fad diet; - anti-vaxxing; - putinism; - flat earth; - QAnon; - most recent Russell Brand videos;
• 24 March 2022: My opinion is that they fear a direct NATO intervention (e.g. closing the sky) so they are threatening with the escalation everyone fears. However I was also of the opinion that Russia won’t invade Ukraine, as it would be a pretty dumb and irrational move, and yet they proceeded.
• 24 March 2022: Hearing flanger or phaser sound effects applied on a singer’s voice is unappealing, as I ended up associating such effects with not having a good singing voice 🤔
• 23 March 2022: Carbohydrate-insulin model is dishonest quackery. If you want to get lean by reliving a glorious past, go back to 19th century and work the land to exhaustion, feeling hungry most of the time. Living in USSR or during WW2 works too. Also give up meat & fat, it was too expensive.
• 23 March 2022: “The Big Fat Surprise” is a book describing a conspiracy theory of why people got fat. And it’s absolute bullshit. This quackery has been believed, even promoted by well known programmers. We aren’t immune to BS; not much of a difference compared to anti-vaxing or homeopathy. https://twitter.com/MrSollozzo/status/1506239292175118336
• 23 March 2022: In #Akka Streams, is there a way to make those streams log something whenever buffers are full and it goes into back-pressure? Asking a friend 🙂
• 22 March 2022: And I admit my view may be naive, but I wouldn’t necessarily say “equality good, inequality bad,” as it’s a complex problem. I love the equality in Nordic European countries, BTW. But we can’t ignore the geopolitical reasons behind their wealth, not easy to reproduce.
• 22 March 2022: I mean, I may be mad at China’s human rights violations, but I can’t be anything but happy to see their middle-class growing (due to unscrupulous businessmen, no less). Ditto for Vietnam, India, etc. We need to pull all people out of poverty in order to tackle world problems.
• 22 March 2022: US citizens will rightly point out that the standard of living and wages in the US are stagnating since 20th century. Such numbers are misleading due to population growth, but even if true … there is also wealth redistribution to poorer countries due to outsourcing…
• 22 March 2022: This idea that wealth should be measured by standards of living, instead of stashed money, isn’t new. Adam Smith was a proponent. Rich people get richer due to re-invenvesting their wealth (just like the state), which creates further innovation and even jobs (with caveats)…
• 22 March 2022: When Marx noticed the poor working conditions of the proletariat in factories, he was right, except he didn’t take into account the population explosion, as people were no longer starving to death. Does it matter if we have inequality, given people’s lives are much better?…
• 22 March 2022: It depends on perspective. In feudalism/slavery, for people to get rich, they had to take from the poor as the pie was constant. The industrial revolution changed the paradigm due to innovation, which is growing the pie…
• 22 March 2022: I think public education and public healthcare are a must, BTW. And social democracy isn’t communism.
• 22 March 2022: Education, BTW, is never a right but a privilege. It’s awesome to have public education, but it consumes resources, and to receive public education, this means someone else is forced to provide it. So, it only works as long as people can pay for it. Usually, the West can manage.
• 22 March 2022: Individualism means the rights of individuals. These are rights humans are born with, that the state should protect. Like being free (instead of being slave) or ability to speak up (w/o being deported), or ability to move, or to practice whatever trade you want…
• 22 March 2022: I should also add: 3. Rule of law; People say that USSR failed b/c it evolved from feudalism, so it was corrupted. I think you can’t have a rule of law w/o individualism, which means freedom of speech or private property that are antithetical to “ultimate” social orders.
• 22 March 2022: The distinguishing features of political ideologies that we can live with should be.. 1. Individualism; 2. Pluralism; Democracy is basically a struggle b/w the left pushing for equality and the right pushing for freedom, the 2 goals being opposite, democracy providing balance.
• 22 March 2022: The spectrum from social democracy to whatever you understand by neoliberalism is all good for now, as long as we have liberal democracy and market economy (as opposed to the command economy). I’ll refrain from predicting an ultimate social order, as only radicals do that…
• 22 March 2022: I should stop now – end 🧵🙂
• 22 March 2022: In former comunist Romania too, although we didn’t kill our bourgeoisie, we just imprisoned them in labor camps or deported them, forever labeling their families as pariah (e.g. their children unable to attend school), where bourgeoisie included peasants w/ a piece of land.
• 22 March 2022: For completeness, I was informed that Marx’s quote may be an inaccurate combination of Marx+Engels. Bad source. I am familiar w/ his work, esp the class-strugle view of history, which was turned by Lenin up a notch, responsible for literal class war. https://otaviopinto.com/index.php/2016/08/04/did-marx-write-this/
• 22 March 2022: It happened in comunist Romania too BTW, although we didn’t kill our bourgeoisie, we just deported them or imprisoned them in re-education camps, forever labeling them and their families as pariah (where bourgeoisie soon became all peasants that had a piece of land).
• 22 March 2022: I was informed that the quote by Marx may be an inaccurate combination of Marx and Engels. The class struggle theory is Marx’s creation, though, which Lenin turned up a notch, as overthrowing the old world order couldn’t come soon enough. https://otaviopinto.com/index.php/2016/08/04/did-marx-write-this/
• 22 March 2022: Communism is poison. Russia may no longer be communist, but it’s still haunted by the ghost of communism. Also, the big communist country that still stands is performing genocides of its own, as we speak, while we keep doing business as usual.
• 22 March 2022: Karl Marx was basically a theorist of political genocide, one of the first, and you’ve got European and US leaders still celebrating him and his legacy. When people promote Marx’s theories, they are promoting an ideology that killed tens of millions of innocents.
• 22 March 2022: At the heart of communism is the class struggle, and communism, just like fascism, is fixated on creating a “new man”. “The classes and the races too weak to master the new conditions of life must give way.” They must “perish in the revolutionary holocaust” — Karl Marx
• 22 March 2022: Nazism was based on false biology, while communism was based on false sociology, both “scientific”. It’s why USSR is being discredited as “not a true communism”, all such attempts boiling down to a “no true Scotsman” fallacy, but it’s just the difference b/w dreams and reality.
• 22 March 2022: Communism killed more people than Nazism, Stalin killed more people than Hitler, even the Holocaust was preceded by Holodomor (in which 10 million Ukrainians were killed by famine). Only one of these monsters / ideologies / countries were universally condemned. 🧵
• 21 March 2022: It happened in Romania too 😔 i.e. ex-communists that were part of the oppression apparatus to become leaders after the revolution. If it weren’t for the EU integration, we’d be screwed.
• 21 March 2022: I wish for Russia to become a democratic member of the EU and for us to prosper together in peace. But for that to happen, its post-WW2 identity must be crushed, and communism must be condemned; otherwise, we’ll never have peace, imperialist Russia behaving like a tidal wave.
• 21 March 2022: Putin is an ex-KGB that was trained to hate everything about the West. Can you imagine a former Gestapo or Stasi agent becoming chancellor of Germany after WW2? You can’t because it’s not possible.
• 21 March 2022: I’ll also add that Putin is possible because we never condemned comunism, we never demanded an apology from Russia. Germany, Japan, they apologized for WW2; they condemned their mistakes, and we’ve moved on. But not Russia.
• 21 March 2022: Soviet Russia also squashed dissent inside the Iron Curtain by invading with their army. Like when they invaded Czechoslovakia for becoming too liberal, or Hungary for revolting. USSR or the Iron Curtain fell because revolts happened without the Russian army showing up!
• 21 March 2022: Romanians were no angels in WW2, we participated in the Holocaust and in operation Barbarossa. Our “liberators,” however, plundered, murdered and raped, then exploited our resources for years, something which happened throughout Eastern Europe.
• 21 March 2022: Romania has a long history w/ imperialist Russia. They “liberated” us since the Ruso-Turkish wars, yet they behaved like an occupational army, plundering, murdering peasants, raping women. Romania happened w/ sponsorship of France/UK as a buffer, b/c Romanians hated Russians.
• 21 March 2022: Molotov-Ribbentrop is no singular event of Soviet-Nazi cooperation. In fact, the nazi army was rebuilt between 1922 – 1933 at secret bases in USSR. Stalin and other soviet leaders wanted to destabilize Europe. Stalin’s Russia had no issue w/ nazism until they were invaded.
• 21 March 2022: Russia has forgotten the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which quite literally divided Poland b/w Germany and Russia. We, the Romanians, know it as that’s how Stalin occupied Bessarabia too (current Moldova). Their whole post-WW2 national identity, that of nazi liberators, is a lie. 🧵 https://twitter.com/maxfras/status/1505845102811533313
• 17 March 2022: I didn’t say anything about wanting it to be mandatory & investing in mutual funds might be better, as public pension depends on population. Milenials got out of communism w/o financial ed, they work on the black market, they don’t save and I’m foreseeing a lot of homelessness.
• 17 March 2022: Not sure about other places, but I wouldn’t get more money with contracting, versus regular employment. A lot of taxes are paid on my salary, around 42%, however 25% is for the public social security system. And if I’d contract, for earning more I’d end up paying VAT 19%.
• 17 March 2022: > b2b doesn’t necessarily mean being a contractor But it does, as that’s what your contract says. Everything else is handshake trust, which tends to not be much, as the company you’re working for is not your family. Nvm that most people are not saving in a retirement fund…
• 17 March 2022: I don’t disagree 😢 War needs goals too though (something which US lacked in Afghanistan for example). I sometimes think a direct confrontation with NATO to push the Russian army back would have been better, but I may be talking nonsense.
• 17 March 2022: Two things conspire against revolt: 1. Russia is controlled by a secret police that now terrorizes the population; 2. Strict control of information using modern tools / massive censorship; Most westerners have never lived under such conditions, or their parents.
• 17 March 2022: I both agree and disagree. You can be a shareholder only in a democratic country. I think Russians have shared responsibility for what happened, but that will only matter as a learning lesson, as changing the course of this war is still out of their control.
• 17 March 2022: I think you should reconsidered. Citizenship doesn’t matter, as it’s not necessarily a personal choice, and citizens may or may not be able to revolt. Targeting citizenship with sanctions is dehumanizing, and with no clear goal of defunding the war machine, it doesn’t even work.
• 17 March 2022: And for example, do you know what the world will do after seeing that national currencies or banking systems are weaponized? The world will start switching to alternatives. These sanctions, as needed as they are to stop the war, just legitimized cryptocoins…
• 17 March 2022: I liked how the US president, in light of Snowden’s revelations, reminded the world that non-citizens have no rights. I always remember it whenever doing business w/ any US company. Effects of such decisions are very unpredictable, an obvious one being de-globalization…
• 17 March 2022: Actually liberal rights are rights we are born with, the state is there just for protecting them. We consider them “natural”, a lie we tell ourselves b/c we’ve noticed that missing them creates big social problems and we’d like to continue having a civilization…
• 17 March 2022 (live): These are very good points. Also, in any company contractors are the first to go during a crisis, due to no having employment protections. You need to factor in not just sick leave, but downtime b/w clients too, i.e. the risk associated with contracting.
• 17 March 2022: Betting on making the population uncomfortable enough as to change the regime is a losing bet. It only radicalizes the population against a common enemy. It took Eastern Europeans decades to get rid of stalinism.
• 17 March 2022: Yes, but with caveats. The state can simply nationalize everything. Economic sanctions will make life harder for Russians, it’s undeniable. But the war machine won’t be affected by canceling Dostoevsky or by foreign companies refusing to do business w/ Russians.
• 17 March 2022: Judging individuals for how they were born is always illiberal, always wrong, the circumstances don’t matter. While bombs are dropping & I’m wishing for Russia’s war machine to be destroyed, there will have to be a reckoning for how unjust some of the canceling has been.
• 17 March 2022: Imagine you’re a Russian fleeing this dictatorial regime. Your Visa/Mastercard stops working, your ability to get a job or a promotion just went down, and Namecheap is blocking your blog on which you post political opinions for your friends & family…
• 17 March 2022: 1/3 of the Russian population AFAIK opposes the war w/ a minority protesting at great danger for themselves & family. We don’t want to alienate them, without a more doable primary goal in mind, b/c there will be nobody left there to pick up the pieces once the regime crumbles…
• 17 March 2022: Sanctions work only with clear targets, like stopping the war machine. Sanctions don’t work for overthrowing a dictatorial regime that crushes all dissent. It never happened. Cancelling culture, or targeting the well being of Russians is counter-productive and illiberal…
• 9 March 2022: Nope.
• 9 March 2022: Those 40000 soldiers from the NATO response force aren’t enough; mobilization takes time, air defenses at border don’t exist, security of neighboring countries can’t be guaranteed, and you kind of need their support and consent.
• 9 March 2022: The simple fact may be that NATO isn’t ready for armed conflict with Russia yet. In spite of Russian military incompetence, they have the capacity for broad front war that will spill in the Baltic countries, Poland, Romania, Moldova, Hungary, Slovakia, etc. In essence, WW3.
• 9 March 2022: In Romania, we have a new fascist party that was supposedly right-wing, but it was rejected by our conservatives for being, well, a party of fascists, and now the public can finally see why 🤷‍♂️ You can see the phenomenon across Europe, actually. I hope it lasts.
• 9 March 2022: Nowadays, this gets distorted in the US due to the 2-party system. Republicans have a strong conservative tradition, but they started appealing to the far-right and turned to populism. It’s fun to see the 2 republican factions now, finding that they don’t have much in common.
• 9 March 2022: Term might be fluid, but common themes prevail, like being anti-revolution or anti-totalitarianism. In the 20th century, for all their faults, the biggest enemies of totalitarianism were the conservatives, like Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher.
• 9 March 2022: Good point: conservatism doesn’t have a textbook, and it has evolved since the French revolution. I’m talking of Anglo-Saxon variant, as expressed by Edmund Burke or the founding fathers of US, a tradition that shaped modernity, see Russell Kirk’s “Conservative Mind.”
• 8 March 2022: PS: I’m writing this because these days it’s as clear as day who the fascists are. I see them in Romania; I see them in the US. And they aren’t that many, actually.
• 8 March 2022: Putin’s Russia is the ghost of the 20th century coming back, or at least trying. We aren’t in the 20th century anymore. The world is much more connected, humanity was living its best years on record, and information isn’t so easily controlled, not even behind Iron Curtain v2.0.
• 8 March 2022: Fascism & comunism were born in the revolutionary fires of 19th century. Both believe in “ultimate social orders”; both are primitivist, believing in man’s moral & social decay, wanting to turn back clock. Conservatives hate revolutions, love modernity, and are full of doubt…
• 8 March 2022: Fascists want war. It’s how their power can grow, as their popularity is fueled by hatred towards a common enemy that must be vanquished. They also have an obsession with nationalism and thus always want more land…
• 8 March 2022: This is a simplified worldview ofc. In reality fascism has strong socialist roots, and fascists also want to save humans from themselves, but with a strong nationalist and anti-globalist flavor. Both are anti-capitalism actually, but fascists prefer corporatism…
• 8 March 2022: Communists end up with authoritarianism as a consequence of their naive and broken worldview, but fascists crave it on purpose. The former want to save humans from themselves; the latter want everyone in their place. A command economy is thus preferred by all…
• 8 March 2022: In reality fascists only borrow conservative ideas while coveting command and control, aka authoritarianism. The goal is a submissive population that knows its place in some bullshit natural order they envision, and they will find enemies to attack in order to gather support…
• 8 March 2022: Conservatives and fascists may find some common ground in being anti-communist, supposedly, but their values are different, as conservatives are pro-democracy, pro-capitalism, pro-life, whereas fascists are anything but…
• 8 March 2022: While I’m in danger of pulling a “no true Scotsman fallacy,” I’ll also say that actual conservatives believe in the fallibility of humans, which is why conservatives rarely believe in conspiracy theories, given stupidity is far more likely…
• 8 March 2022: You can’t be a fiscal conservative or a libertarian and support Putin’s war against a thriving democracy. You can’t be a Christian and support soldiers killing innocents. “Sexomarxism,” ecologism, etc, all such “problems” become moot in the face of a war against the West…
• 8 March 2022: I’m fascinating by the left-right political axis. These days you can clearly see a difference b/w conservatives and fascists, or b/w social democrats and marxists for that matter, in how they position themselves in regards to Russia’s war and Putin…
• 7 March 2022: You’re being sarcastic, but look at what happened — we’ve funded Russia’s war machine instead. Also, the energy crises has given rise to extreme-right parties all across Europe, an energy crisis partially created by not having enough wind last year.
• 7 March 2022: Right, and it is being built (well, not in Romania, where we’re still building gas pipes to people’s homes 😕). But it will take another decade, more or less, so what are we going to do in the meantime? We need gas to transition.
• 7 March 2022: @ValentinGosu Good ideal, but real life isn’t as simple, and fossil fuels have been good for humanity, it’s what feeds people, all 7 billion of us. I hope we’ll eventually go all in, but technology & infrastructure is still not there, in spite of all good wishes.
• 7 March 2022: West wants to have their cake and eat it too. You can’t preach Green Energy while outsourcing your pollution. Any policies for thwarting climate change need to be feasible, to avoid social unrest, to avoid funding dictatorships, as I’m sure WW3 is much worse for climate change.
• 7 March 2022: Romania also has important reserves in the Black Sea. We did not being to exploit those sites, due to corruption (which might also be fueled by Russian money 🤷‍♂️) and now those sites will surely be contested by Russia if they don’t retreat from Ukraine…
• 7 March 2022: I’m sure some risks are real, but given Russian money got involved, those risks need to be reassessed. Also risks can usually be mitigated with regulation and technology. If it’s between that and funding the war machine of a dictator, I’d rather we do fracking…
• 4 March 2022: Sample 2/2 — “Each of Us”: https://youtu.be/NOCbW1hc6Ng I think Putin severely overestimated his ability to manipulate public opinion, while terribly underestimated his opponent, which has won hearts and minds.
• 4 March 2022: Propaganda plays a serious role in 21st century wars too. Here are 2 samples from 2015 … Sample 1/2 — “I’m Russian Ocupant”: https://youtu.be/o01nS_M3PQY
• 1 March 2022: RT @KlausIohannis: Romania🇷🇴 fully supports the integration of Ukraine🇺🇦, as well as of the Republic of Moldova🇲🇩 and Georgia🇬🇪, with the E…
• 27 February 2022: Or in other words, dictators will use the control of information to keep people on their side, but ultimately most dictatorships are a tyranny of a majority. My personal hope is that, after this awful episode, everyone will chill the f* out and return to liberalism & free trade.
• 27 February 2022: I have a lot of sympathy for what you’re saying, I was 7 at our revolution in 1989. IMO a regime cannot last for long without strong popular support, even in a police state with a rigged system. Dictators are kept in power by the majority, which may be kept ignorant on purpose.
• 27 February 2022: “Saving food stuff for later” is just Russian propaganda.
• 26 February 2022: Actually, money is power, always. And yes, they’ve committed 50% of their forces, they couldn’t even gain air superiority, they are out of guided missiles, they’ll run out of resources in 2 weeks, and they’ve already called on Belarus reservists and cecens for help.
• 26 February 2022: I’ve mentioned GDP per capita to highlight that they are a country with a big but poor population, which means it can’t afford the cost of prolonged war.
• 26 February 2022: Right, but they are a country of 140 million, per capita their GDP is below that of Poland, Romania, or Bulgaria. Their budget is surely used to support their population, and it shows, as their army is actually underequipped.
• 26 February 2022: I think this has negative implications for Putin — regardless of outcome, his credibility is ruined, he’ll have insurgency, and a population that rightfully won’t understand why young men went to die in Ukraine or why they are paying the cost of economic sanctions.
• 26 February 2022: Putin is a dictator who wanted to show the world the might of his army. How weird is it that the world now sees his army is underequipped for modern warfare? A confrontation w/ NATO would be completely asymmetrical. France’s army alone could probably wipe the floor with them…
• 26 February 2022: You could’ve made that argument before the actual invasion, IMO. Invading Crimea was already a big mistake for no gain. I think, regardless of the outcome for Ukraine, Russia is affected, and Putin is finished, this being an act of desperation. He’s still dangerous, though.
• 26 February 2022: You could have made this argument before the actual invasion. Quite the contrary, invading Crimea was a bad tactical nice, and now, regardless of the outcome for Ukraine, Putin is finished.
• 26 February 2022: Russia has a big economy, but their GDP is less than that of Italy or Canada. War is very expensive and they can’t sustain it for long. All Ukraine has to do is to resist, and they’ve exceeded expectations already but need our support. Give them aid and bring out the sanctions 🙏 https://twitter.com/RihoTerras/status/1497537201403580421
• 26 February 2022: Whataboutism. Yes, I have been living in a country that was invaded by Russia multiple times and living in constant fear of it. And, as far as geostrategic interests go, your argument is wrong and made in bad faith.
• 26 February 2022: Right, and now it’s time to take Putin’s Russia down, to isolate it, by any means necessary, whether it’s via economic sanctions or military action. Honestly, what Russia is doing is the best advertising NATO and EU could get.
• 26 February 2022: Right, “simple.” At this point, you’re just shitposting. Given the context, a sovereign nation being attacked and people dying, you should be ashamed of yourself for making such arguments, although I don’t know what’s more offensive, the inhumanity or how wrong the argument is.
• 26 February 2022: It’s not about proving NATO is powerful; we already know it is. It’s about meeting force with force. If Russia’s dictator is able to release nukes while his army fights in a territory outside of Russia, then he’s dangerous enough to release them at any moment for any reason.
• 26 February 2022: There is no compromise to be made with dictators. I’m not sure why I should trust you. Do you have a degree in economics or geopolitics? Europe as a whole is still the biggest economy, but if you’re talking of interest, ending Pax Americana for the US would be a disaster.
• 26 February 2022: I’ll also add that dictators understand strength. IMO, NATO should have sent forces in Ukraine and let Putin get a taste of his own medicine. Yes, Russia is a nuclear power, but so is NATO.
• 26 February 2022: Yes, but Iran isn’t Russia. I guess we shall see. And it doesn’t matter if they don’t “work.” EU should stop subsidizing the war machines of dictators as it makes us complicit & prone to blackmailing. It’s also useful as a message, or an EU or NATO country might be next.
• 26 February 2022: Globalism is new, and there have never been sanctions on this scale for a country with a big and interconnected economy; we are on uncharted territory. Regardless, EU is blackmailed & keeps financing a war machine that may be used against us. Dictators aren’t good for business.
• 25 February 2022: EU’s strategic dependency has a big flaw … dictators aren’t good for business!
• 25 February 2022: Maybe they should send more helmets 🤷‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/NFV5IILRtr
• 25 February 2022: My grandfather participated in WW2. We suffered for decades from that pact. It wasn’t that long ago. Not talking of Nazism, but of imperialism & historically close friendships. Disgusting would be virtue signaling while continuing to finance the war machine of a dictator.
• 25 February 2022: I hope there is a larger plan at play, but Germany declined to shut down SWIFT for Russia. If EU and NATO don’t stop this invasion, I will forever hold them responsible. There’s something terrifying about Germany and Russia getting along, can’t put my finger on it 🤔 pic.twitter.com/wi5KqUil7p
• 24 February 2022: Also, US’s non-interventionists should be ashamed of themselves. Sadly this wouldn’t be a surprise either, as we’ve also waited decades for the West to come and save us. Hopefully we won’t repeat the mistakes of 20th century. You don’t negotiate with dictators. 4/4
• 24 February 2022: I have faith in the Ukrainian people that they’ll get through this. They are strong and free people. I’ve seen Euromaidan. That takes a lot of determination — as a Romanian I know as we had our own revolution and revolutions usually fail, but theirs didn’t. 3/4
• 24 February 2022: What imperialist Russia will do after occupying Ukraine is to start a russification process. They do this by deleting their culture, by imprisoning or uprooting people, by brainwashing them. If all else fails a good old fashioned famine can do the trick. 2/4
• 24 February 2022: This brutal attack on a sovereign nation isn’t a shock to anyone in Eastern Europe. We’ve been living in the shadow of the great bear for decades. Poles, Romanians, Czechs, others; our fathers have seen it; w/ Putin in charge it was only a matter of time. 1/4 https://twitter.com/alexboly/status/1496797574178787328
• 24 February 2022: Analysts predicting Putin won’t invade ignored that he’s a desperate motherfucker (and by “mother” I mean Mother Russia).
• 23 February 2022: I actually hope for both Ukraine and Russia to get the support they need in order to leave the freaking 19th century behind.
• 23 February 2022: And an alternative answer … you need money, lots of money to rebuild your country. It’s what happened to Germany or Japan. See the Marshall Plan, for example; contrast with what happened in the soviet bloc (CAER).
• 23 February 2022: I think Russia has always been too powerful for its own good. Without hitting rock bottom or without an immediate threat, like being under Russian influence, if you don’t join EU, there aren’t good reasons for reforms. And then you get former KGB taking power 🤷‍♂️
• 23 February 2022: If I may offer an opinion, they were on that path in the 90s and doing poorly, like the rest of Warsaw-pact countries. What happened to us in the 2000s was the EU. What lifts countries is globalism / free trade. But you need the rule of law and a seat at the table for that.
• 23 February 2022: BTW, related to that video — I wouldn’t judge a population based on its mass-media. If I would judge my country based on that, I would have fled long ago 🙂 I’m sure many Russians are either unaware or are manipulated. Being poor on average (compared to others) doesn’t help.
• 23 February 2022: We were under communism, it took us decades to overthrow Ceaușescu and we couldn’t have done it without an international context. I know how hard it is to overthrow a dictator. But we’re talking war in Europe & the government is still within a citizen’s responsibility.
• 23 February 2022: I may be misunderstood. My invitation to stay in the 21st century is directed at Russia’s citizens b/c russophobia will increase, it’s out of our control, and this means a more isolated Russia, which is bad for everyone. Let’s return to peace & free trade, before it’s too late.
• 23 February 2022: My country is russophobic for historical reasons, and I’m not proud of any national phobias. I’m already hearing “fuck Putin” turn into “fuck Russia; this is what they do.” This isn’t good for anyone. Let’s remain in the 21st century 🙏 6/6
• 23 February 2022: I’ll also say that if it comes to war, innocents will die, and the citizens of the invading country are partially responsible for what their government is doing. They are complicit, and systemic issues (national propaganda) are not enough to remove personal responsibility. 5/6
• 23 February 2022: Unfortunately for Putin’s administration, their actions thus far have created unity inside EU and represent the best incentive for NATO expansion. Unfortunately for us, this means war in Ukraine is almost inevitable, as Putin’s administration is getting desperate. 4/6
• 23 February 2022: EU is the actual enemy targeted by Putin’s administration, not Ukraine, not NATO, and this is a proxy war. Putin wants to break the EU because the EU is too powerful, and Russia depends on EU countries. 3/6
• 23 February 2022: This is why they may not fear the halting of Nord Stream 2 or other such restrictions. The truth is that slowing gas imports is inevitable in the following decade. Also, they have to negotiate with the EU as a whole instead of abusing smaller countries. 2/6
• 23 February 2022: Putin does not want to control Ukraine or other former soviet satellites. URSS collapsed due to Russia’s inability to support its satellites economically, and they know it. What he wants is to destabilize EU, as the Green Deal poses a threat to Russia’s budget. 1/6
• 21 February 2022: Nu cred că acordul de la Minsk presupune încălcarea suveranității altui stat, iar ce s-a întâmplat în Serbia nu prea văd să fie relevant decât în fake-news-ul lui Putin. E o mișcare relativ inteligentă pt că disputa face aderarea la NATO a Ucrainei pe moment imposibilă.
• 21 February 2022: US announced sanctions, punishing Ukraine’s separatist DNR and LNR. Yeah, sanction the poor that may not have a choice 🤦‍♂️ How about sanctioning Russia? How about targeting the wealth of Russian oligarchs stored in Germany or UK? Why are US and EU leaders beating around the bush?
• 21 February 2022: Google Tag Manager could avoid browser or DNS ad-blocking, but this isn’t new. Sooner or later publishers will either go full-paywall, or they’ll break content in presence of ad-blocking. Publishers don’t want to piss off visitors, but eventually they’ll go for nuclear option.
• 21 February 2022: I’m beginning to suspect that reporting scams is intentionally hard on these platforms b/c it would be used to report the ads. Here’s how reporting a tweet looks like — if you see a crypto-scam, you have to report it as “suspicious or spam”. Nice use of the English language. pic.twitter.com/Hv3NXyf20d
• 21 February 2022: Crypto-scammers are using lists for spamming people. And @Twitter basically doesn’t allow for reporting the list itself for scams. To me it’s just common sense to have “IT’S A SCAM” as the first option in any list of reasons for reporting harmful shit. pic.twitter.com/p97HjCgUk9
• 11 February 2022: It becomes hard these days to be a moderate, a centrist, actually.
• 11 February 2022: My main concern is that both the socially-left leaning, the progressives, and the right, the social conservatives … both sides are so polarized as to become illiberal. Iliberalism is a real threat, and frankly I see that coming more from the right, less from left.
• 11 February 2022: When seeing such injustice it’s really hard to not do something, or at least say something. On Twitter I abstain a lot. When people show religious bigotry, or racism, I don’t want to see them fired, but I may not abstain from criticizing them. Freedom of speech works both ways…
• 11 February 2022 (live): I know what you mean, I share concerns, but “wokism” may also be a non-issue. In my country I see gay people denied a right to civil partnership, I see racism directed against the Roma, I see the homeless (much less than in the US mind you). And I can’t look away…
• 10 February 2022: An interesting conundrum …. why is it that freedom of speech, this bastion of the left, was the first to go in all comunist countries? Well, I think that without a right to private property, everything else falls. Although it could have been the stationed soviet troops too.
• 10 February 2022: Also capitalism can’t be replaced w/o banning it. As capitalism is an optimization process that reduces costs, driving inovation & punishing labor (by automating it), using price as a signal. And nothing can compete w/ it unless you ban it (there goes pluralism)…
• 10 February 2022: Of course there are implementation differences b/w countries, but the social-democracy of nordic european countries is still fueled by capitalism. All the social or economic progress since 19th century is fueled by capitalism…
• 10 February 2022: Capitalism is nothing but the right to have property and to benefit from that property, where property includes expertise or your own body. Which is why I’m bringing collectivization into discussion, as it was terrible. Our peasants fought against it for ~2 decades but lost.
• 10 February 2022: You know who else talks in terms of ultimate solutions? Fascists and communists, which should be a red flag for you. I see you’re from Poland, I’m from Romania, our countries both went through stalinist collectivization, although I see in Poland you managed to resist it.
• 10 February 2022: We have less inequality since 19th century. We may have more inequality since second half of 20th century but stats are misleading as wealth is not a fixed pie and there are more people alive, more young people as well. Inequality is an abstract concept, quality of life isn’t.
• 10 February 2022: Yup, I love complaining on Twitter 😄
• 10 February 2022: Well, are you working for scraps? 🙂 I find it funny that the biggest critics of capitalism tend to be its beneficiaries or their children, a phenomenon since its dawn, Karl Marx included. In 19th century over 85% of world population was malnourished, today less than 10% 😉
• 10 February 2022: I hear depression from climate change is a thing nowadays. I think I have it, too, although it’s not the actual climate change that worries me 🤷‍♂️ 6/6
• 10 February 2022: “Lock people in their homes until the pandemic is over, don’t worry about inflation, money is fake anyway” they said, which then turned into “mandate vaccination at work”. Also “tax fossil fuels” and “decommission nuclear power”. Oh boy, 2022 is here and getting worse. 5/
• 10 February 2022: We are increasingly treated as we are incapable of free will or personal responsibility. You can see this battle everywhere, from ads to how we treat pandemic and global warming. Protests, extreme-right movements, and emerging crises were entirely predictable. 4/
• 10 February 2022: Freedom is responsibility; it’s the right to make your own mistakes; it’s individual autonomy. If we don’t have that, as human beings, we’ve got nothing at all. Food, health, safety: These are all primary needs, but we also need freedom, as we aren’t dogs on a leash. 3/
• 10 February 2022: What is freedom anyway? It’s undeniable people are freer nowadays that in 18th century when slavery was around, although slave owners would beg to differ. What about “freedom from hunger or disease”? Ah, there goes that socialist siren. I’d argue: no! 2/
• 10 February 2022: I like capitalism, consumerism, individualism. These traits of modern life have a negative connotation, yet they imply freedom & pluralism. Discourse against these goes against the autonomy of individuals, against freedom. Some people just like being dogs on a leash. 1/
• 28 January 2022: We agree there 👍
• 28 January 2022: Not really, you have representation of the people. And if the politicians are indeed acting in the interest of the people (highly unlikely), you also have to worry about a tyranny of the majority. A democracy without liberal values is just another tyranny.
• 28 January 2022: Radical left would have people believe that we are incapable of making choices, due to manipulation or social barriers. Hence people need to be shepherded. Such policies often fail to take second-order effects into account, hurting the very people they claim to protect. 6/6
• 28 January 2022: Freedom is personal responsibility. Humans are capable of critical thinking, of caring for their peers. And yes, if you or your loved ones have complications from COVID-19 and you are not vaccinated, in spite of vaccine being available, it’s partially your damn fault 🤷‍♂️ 5/
• 28 January 2022: The problem has always been mistrust in authorities, and that mistrust is growing. Forcing people, making them lose their jobs, will only hurt. People are expected to trust a state that failed to educate the population, or to invest in pulling people out of poverty. 4/
• 28 January 2022: We have a state & laws to protect the commons, for sure. They are good. But it’s still better for individuals to make mistakes, than to have the state make mistakes for us. The later leads to tragedies at scale, which is why laws can’t be rushed. 3/
• 28 January 2022: Distribution of vaccinated is not random. In Romania you can literally map poverty by vaccination rate. This means certificates are discriminatory, widening the gap between the rich and poor. Minorities are affected too. 2/
• 28 January 2022: I’m vaccinated with 3 shots, and I trust the scientific consensus. I will never agree with COVID-19 certificates. In this pandemic freedom and privacy are under assault and the pandemic is a lame excuse for it. 1/
• 23 January 2022: My grandfather lived during the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact and its consequences. Ties b/w Russia and Germany are deep, and when high-ranking officials from Germany agree with Putin’s kleptocracy on how our neighbors can be invaded, that’s reason to worry. https://cepa.org/germanys-paralyzing-fear-of-war/
• 11 January 2022: I’m pretty sure some will. Also, local agribusinesses and energy suppliers are going out of business right now. Esp in Bulgaria, Poland, Romania. Those that won’t are increasing their prices. I wonder where our protests are.
• 11 January 2022: What will actually happen as a direct result of price caps or subsidies is more inflation, which will add to the inflation caused directly by the COVID-19 restrictions. More wealth inequality, more local businesses going bankrupt. I’d say brace yourself.
• 11 January 2022: By “market signal” we usually mean “price”, as that’s a demand signal. When due to regulation prices get so high that people have trouble heating or buy food, it means the state fucked up. And the problem can’t be solved by price caps, as the market doesn’t work like that…
• 11 January 2022: As a general rule of thumb, NEVER convert match statements to “pattern matching anonymous functions”, because those are partial functions, so you lose the exhaustiveness checks. @IntelliJScala suggests this and it’s dangerous and wrong. Disable this inspection completely. pic.twitter.com/c5vXtPPPxg
• 11 January 2022: I’m not against market regulation. Socialism tends to be a command economy, where the state ignores market signals, regulation going against free market, generating second-order effects, like huge inflation. 2022 is going to be another fun year.
• 11 January 2022: Prices for electricity, natural gas, or food in Europe are soaring. A consequence of Europe’s forced move to renewables while closing nuclear plants, a situation flavored w/ COVID-19 restrictions and Russian gambles. What do governments do? Price caps. Socialism in a nutshell.
• 9 January 2022: This is like the Great Reset conspiracy but propagated by a leftie and with Bitcoin.
• 6 January 2022: I wasn’t under the impression that capitalism needs fixing 🙂
• 28 December 2021: And Poland is vaxxed more than Romania 😉
• 15 December 2021: Nobody wants to hurt people. Management does not want to hurt customers. This is sort of a strawman. Think hard about all the colleagues you ever had. How many were willing to go beyond their job description, to file or fix bugs in OSS, even when employer would allow it?
• 15 December 2021: One more thing…as an Easter European, I thrived on outsourcing, I thrived on US companies cutting local jobs due to local talent being expensive or out of reach. Outsourcing is exactly what a union will try to prevent. If you say such unions should be global, good luck w/ that.
• 15 December 2021: Speaking of OSS, when a company will want to contribute, what makes you think the union will agree to paying maintainers, instead of forking? If you invoke democracy, that’s great, but it only protects the interests of citizens & their selfish interests.
• 15 December 2021: Quite the contrary, unions protect their own, which means companies have a harder time firing for incompetence, or outsourcing jobs whenever local talent is out of reach. In other words companies can have a harder time finding the resources needed to make better products.
• 15 December 2021: Whenever people “blame capitalism”, IMO that’s like saying “blame people”. Responsibility towards customers is profit-driven, for individuals too. What makes you think that unionizing will make products better, instead of worse? Has it ever worked?
• 13 December 2021: There’s the beginning of a new Cold War, Russia & NATO threatening anything from economic sanctions to nuclear bombs, a country of 41 million people might be invaded, and my timeline is awfully quiet about it. Difference of perception b/w the West and Eastern Europe 🤷‍♂️
• 10 December 2021: Feeding people does feel like the right thing to do, but isn’t that money better spent on industrialization, to pull people out of subsistence farming? I don’t know the answer, but I’m sure it’s not a simple one.
• 10 December 2021: Why is my argument a strawman? Public budget is not unlimited & needs priorities. You mentioned a movie industry. What if it makes a profit, being a net positive? Wouldn’t cutting it lead to more hunger? And aren’t those savings just loose change compared to what it takes?
• 10 December 2021: I don’t know the situation in Brazil. What I know is what happened in Romania before and after 1990 (the fell of communism). You can’t fix starvation with handouts IMO. What a country needs is an economy first, and education is in support of that.
• 10 December 2021 (live): I’m also getting the feeling that access to food is a consequence of poor economic development, which must precede everything else actually. Not sure how it is elsewhere, but in the poor rural parts of Romania, people would like better jobs & infrastructure, not food handouts.
• 10 December 2021: I’m pretty sure food is not a problem in countries w/ adequate access to education and healthcare. In general education & healthcare correlate w/ developed countries. Show me a developing country w/ adequate healthcare & education, but that suffers from starvation.
• 8 December 2021: At least for children, I agree. Nutrition and health influence IQ for example, hence it can be argued that IQ comparisons b/w populations are actually measuring poverty, the confounding factor.
• 8 December 2021: I do think that equality of opportunity is achievable by providing access to good healthcare and education, and by removing systemic racism, sexism, etc.
• 8 December 2021: I totally agree with conferences supporting people that need it. I also don’t disagree for example with support given to minorities for attending college, even if I tend to be a conservative. Many minorities need support precisely b/c they don’t have equality of opportunity.
• 8 December 2021: Yep, I prefer the 3rd solution too 🙂
• 8 December 2021: And in fact to achieve equity, it can mean making opportunity unequal between groups. To deny access to resources for some groups, in the hope that other groups will be able to compete for those resources. It’s what happened in practice w/ 20th century’s communism.
• 8 December 2021: Equality of opportunity is more achievable. You provide the tools, the infrastructure for YouTube creators to be successful, regardless of background, and let them create. But this will yield inequality of outcome, based on individual merits alone. You will not get equity.
• 8 December 2021 (live): Philosophically speaking, equity is a fool’s dream. I think money muddies the water, as not all wealth earned is based on merit. However think popularity. A YouTube creator that’s successful will earn influence. How can you create equity in this space? Distribute views & likes?
• 8 December 2021: Why would equity be a goal? By equity I understand equality of outcome, which may actually be at odds with equality of opportunity. Nothing wrong w/ dreaming of a better world, but seems to me that dreams of equity is how we got the horrors of communism from 20th century.
• 24 November 2021: Yeah, but math isn’t science either, and the accuracy of math models depends on assumptions born out of actual data, which in this case look a lot like a bunch of anecdotes and wishful thinking. The more I read about this, the less impressed I am.
• 24 November 2021: @yawaramin @rossabaker Note mostly everything in political science is ideology, not science, I’d take any such laws with a grain of salt.
• 24 November 2021: Keep in mind that, unlike European countries, the US is a big place, made of states w/ a lot of autonomy & the two-party system is a direct consequence of that, due to the resources required to compete nationwide. Approval voting may work but is probably not a panacea.
• 24 November 2021: It can be a rational choice, democracy is about picking the lesser evil. People aren’t naturally rational IMO, we forget lesser evil is still evil. In Romania the 2 biggest parties just formed a coalition, and they ran against each other in election, now betraying constituency.
• 23 November 2021: In politics, when picking a side, people are most often dealing with a false dillema. You’re anti-something or anti-someone, so you pick their opposition as your allies. The mentality is: “enemy of my enemy is my friend”. Historically this led to pretty bad outcomes. Reject it.
• 18 November 2021: 7/7 I always loved the Scala ecosystem. ❤ Most of you are good people, contributing and trying to do good in this world. But we can do better. And let’s bring back some fun.
• 18 November 2021: 6/ Don’t be a bigot should be here somewhere 👍 but you already knew that.
• 18 November 2021: 5/ To err is human. Apologize, often 👍 Labeling people hastily is ❌ not OK. “Labels are the opposite of understanding”. ❌ don’t succumb to outrage, you may be justified, but it never helps, instead it only hurts you. And while the world is enraged, the bad guys are winning.
• 18 November 2021: 4/ When some people claim they feel unsafe, especially minorities, due to being monitored, feeling their livelihood being threatened 💔 we should listen in spite of no evidence for actual harm. As this is what happens in practice (not aiming for funny): https://twitter.com/xowildcherry/status/1141521191913443328
• 18 November 2021: 3/ Acting as a collective is 👍 OK, taking it upon yourself to be a henchman for powerful figures is ❌ not OK; Double standards are ❌ not OK, we are all guilty of it, but remember the golden rule: ☀️ thou shall not make your opposition look good;
• 18 November 2021: 2/ Here’s some recipes for that: Boycotting organizations/products can be 👍 OK, but targeting people based on whether they use or contribute to a certain library is most likely ❌ not OK; Criticism is 👍 OK when constructive; online bullying disguised as criticism ❌ not OK;
• 18 November 2021: 1/ We all want a better Scala community, so speaking entirely in my own name, I’m going to spread some common sense 😎 (takes a deep breath) #1 🟢 Don’t be an asshole…
• 16 November 2021: Can it contain another email address? 🙂 “contact@smth.com” @domain .com
• 12 November 2021: People are really bad at factoring in the opportunity cost … what else could you do with that money? What are you denying yourself by buying that big ass OLED TV? Celebrate this #BlackFriday by being frugal and proud of it 😎
• 12 November 2021: #BlackFriday is such a stupid “holiday”. You can see most of those discounts throughout the year, esp since next year’s product lineup is around the corner & stocks have to be depleted. And it makes you buy shit you don’t need right now, so there’s an opportunity cost 😉
• 12 November 2021 (live): Today it’s #BlackFriday and I will celebrate it by buying nothing at all.
• 11 November 2021: I feel sorry for how @wiemzin is feeling, and I’m definitely concerned, as nobody should feel that way in our community.
• 10 November 2021: You are right, but in terms of statistics communism & fascism both have produced crimes against humanity. Far-left isn’t as reprehensible as the far-right & intentions are noble, but IMO this is what makes communism dangerous (road to hell is paved with good intentions).
• 10 November 2021: s/foreign/former
• 10 November 2021: I would argue that what makes the socialism in Nordic Europe work is: 1. state capitalism 2. homogeneous & small population 3. being close to, and trading with (now foreign) colonial empires Much more interesting is South Korea 😉
• 8 November 2021: Sure, but a fork is a different project. The original project is still private property, and if people are displeased, they can fork or gtfo. I don’t think you can make an argument that, for example, Chrome or Firefox belong to “the people”, in spite of ability to fork.
• 8 November 2021: Forking is the essence of FOSS, but forking gives you no control over the existing project. A license does not transfer copyright, and it says nothing about access to main website & repository, the name of the project (brand), or communication channels & other IP.
• 8 November 2021: I want a community that’s safe & inclusive. I believe Typelevel contributors did their best to foster it. But apparently people aren’t allowed to act in their free time based on their principles, to build their own community, according to some. Things have to change. 6/6
• 8 November 2021: It’s partially the fault of senior members of this “community” that we don’t communicate the situation better. Maybe b/c we just want to hack, but some things are unavoidable. Like politics 😉 5/ https://twitter.com/alexelcu/status/1456955091559362563?s=20
• 8 November 2021: In all honesty, it’s ridiculous that all of this has to be mentioned. Yes, we are talking about the Scala “community”, which is reaching a boiling point. Placing “community” in quotes, as it has never been one community. 4/
• 8 November 2021: But wait, there’s more … if you boycott Google/Facebook/cryptocoins/what have you, that’s not necessarily passing judgment on their employees, unless you say so. And criticizing Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the same as criticizing your friends working @ FB. 3/
• 8 November 2021: That last point is too subtle for many, so here’s an analogy… If you think Google/Facebook are eroding our privacy, or are imoral for not paying taxes, or have bigots in charge, it’s totally fine to boycott their products, even if they hire some of the best people. 2/
• 8 November 2021: FOSS facts: 1. Maintainers can choose to spend their free time however they want; 2. Maintainers have ownership of their projects; 3. Maintainers can have principles, like refusing to collaborate w/ bigots, sexual predators, assholes or companies/orgs that enable them; 1/
• 7 November 2021: The Polish are Eastern Europeans like us. We have much in common. It’s disheartening to see their government regress like this. I fear we may regress as well. On the news piece from Romania one of the comments said: “she was punished by God”. Religion is poison.
• 7 November 2021: This could also be seen in 80s’ Romania … initially birth rate went up, pleasing our dictators, but once the population found ways to do abortions at home, or doctors willing to take bribes, birth rate went down again. And note contraception wasn’t available…
• 7 November 2021: Anti-abortion law kills women …
• 7 November 2021: In this case this wasn’t even about choice. Her water broke prematurely, something which happened to my wife too. But even when speaking of choice, as a matter of fact, when illegal, abortion rate doesn’t go down, but death rate among women doing it goes up…
• 7 November 2021: In the news: a women died in Poland of sepsis, due to the anti-abortion law. This was completely predictable. One of the largest social experiments in banning abortions happened in ‘80s Romania. If you think banning abortions is OK, watch this: https://youtu.be/ZgZJ-IV8Et0
• 6 November 2021: “Politics” is just interpersonal relations, with people acting as a group for the good of that group. Your family plays politics when deciding what to have for dinner, or where to spend summer vacation. “This is politics” used w/ a negative connotation is meaningless.
• 5 November 2021: “IAB Europe says it’s expecting to be found in breach of GDPR” Those consent pop-ups cannot protect your data, as the OpenRTB requests are still made (under the guise of legitimate interests). @MicrosoftEdge shows you a IAB pop-up on first open 😉 https://twitter.com/alexelcu/status/1354025827986530305
• 3 November 2021: We are facing a systemic failure. In rural Romania we’re talking of lower social class / lower education, but this can’t be the case in some of the Hacker News threads I’m seeing. The scientific community has an uphill battle in combating misinformation, or we’ll be doomed.
• 3 November 2021: Romania has a low vaccination rate, esp in smaller towns/villages, suffering from mistrust in authority & believing anti-vaxxing fake news. Can’t blame my bretheren when even programmers routinely debate & believe pseudo-scientific quackery like carbohidrate-insulin model.
• 26 October 2021 (live): You still need to train your immune system, a powerful weapon for a more civilized age, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, etc. 🙂
• 26 October 2021: Paleolithic people could live to 80 yrs, if they survived childhood and avoided infections, injuries, famine, bad weather, natural disasters, predators, war, or contact w/ other people. No vaccines, carbs or co2 emissions needed 💪
• 14 October 2021: In fairness, in the US democrats seem to be more liberal than the conservatives, at least since Trumpism, and both parties have attracted illiberal radicals. Comment is about democracy being stress tested right now.
• 14 October 2021: Judging the political landscape as being split b/w left-wing & right-wing is obsolete. World is now split between liberals (i.e. those upholding the values of liberal democracy & playing within its framework) and iliberals (those that are fed up with democracy or liberal values)
• 11 October 2021: On the other hand w/o a clear congress majority, they won’t be able enact any promise made in the political campaign, as the opposition can torpedo all such efforts. So w/o cooperation I imagine second term is under threat. Vetoes are probably not used lightly.
• 11 October 2021: In Romania, president can send an act back to parliament only once for re-examination, but afterwards they are powerless. In US I see there is the 2/3 requirement to override a veto. Coupled w/ president’s alliance w/ one of the 2 major parties, having a shared agenda, I agree.
• 7 October 2021: I did. Much of it is debatable, not backed by science, not even by the links it has.
• 7 October 2021 (live): AFAIR in 19th century 85% of earth’s population suffered from malnutrition and hunger. There is no mystery, in 20th century food became plentiful, and our brain evolved to love high calorie foods. Also differences are in genes and culture, but shrinking due to globalization
• 6 October 2021: Maybe I’m exaggerating, but I heard some pretty worrying tales from owners of electric cars that end up sweating during a 100 km ride outside the city in cars that cost €40000+ No cars is definitely better than electric cars. Legislation should try reducing no of cars instead.
• 6 October 2021: What cars have ranges of hundreds of miles in actual tests?
• 6 October 2021: The solution isn’t to replace cars. The solution is to have less of them. It’s obvious, and doable, without creating mountains of e-waste from toy cars with which you barely drive for 300 Km without worrying about finding a charging station that isn’t occupied & actually works.
• 6 October 2021: And by revolution I do not mean incremental improvements to the same technology we’ve been using in the 90’es, as unfortunately Moore’s law does not apply. Want cleaner cities and less pollution? Switch to public transport. Also, hipsters using regular bikes are cooler.
• 6 October 2021: The switch to electric cars will probably lead to mountains of e-waste exported to poor countries and a lot of CO2 emissions yielded by the race to replace all cars by more expensive & less durable ones. I will not buy an electric car unless a revolution happens in batteries.
• 6 October 2021: Electric cars are city cars meant for hipsters, but useless for long drives. Europe’s plan to enforce the selling of electric cars by 2035 is downright stupid. Li-ion batteries are expensive, have poor range, are hard to charge, and really hard to recycle.
• 6 September 2021: If evolution endowed humans w/ a trait is the ability to evolve via culture, instead of genes. Culture drives human evolution. Humans are the only species able to do that, and as a consequence we’ve built a civilization. Focus on the evolution of culture, not genes, kids.
• 6 September 2021: For those of us that learned English as a second language in school, some of the terms used in programming make no sense. And translations via software are word for word & make no sense either. This raises the bar for beginners learning programming: https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1433902872593326080 pic.twitter.com/9qkGHdCBxf
• 3 September 2021: Saying the internet is in any way responsible for this mistrust, and the crisis that now unfolded, completely misses the problem, which is that authority is failing to do its job, there’s also a huge gap in our education, in which case the myths are inevitable.
• 3 September 2021: Mistrust in healthcare authority is at least 100 years old. My great-grandmother died b/c she, allegedly, was taken to the nearby hospital by force for only a headache where she got Typhus. My whole family knows the story & believes it…
• 3 September 2021: There nothing unique about online social networks. People used to talk past each other at local gatherings or bistros too. The confirmation bias was much worse IMO, yet now you might hear the opposing side. Note we had our fair share of fake news during communism too.
• 3 September 2021: I belive that on average we listen to more people we disagree with, not less, and I’d require evidence to believe the contrary. I do follow people I disagree with & have shifted my opinion as a result. E.g. I once thought the establishment is lying about healthy nutrition.
• 3 September 2021: This is true, however the more capable the means of communication, the better society got. Of course, the printing press led to a couple of wars, but in the unrestricted spread of information benefited society. I don’t see why current day internet is in any way an exception.
• 3 September 2021: I belive that on average we listen to more people we disagree with, not less, and I’d require evidence to believe the contrary. I do follow people I disagree with & have shifted my opinion 360 as a result. E.g. I once thought the establishment is lying about healthy nutrition.
• 3 September 2021: Among the problems humanity has faced, people talking to each other on the internet isn’t one. I’m beginning to have a problem w/ the narative that social networks & ads are manipulating people. Are people really so gullible? Or is the internet exposing already rooted beliefs?
• 30 August 2021: You are avoiding my questions and talking past me. I am born in the soviet communism of an agrarian society forced to industrialize. That more than qualifies me to talk of dystopias, centrally planned economies, or the tragedy of good intentions.
• 30 August 2021: I made no such assumption, but it is a dystopia in the making. We’re almost 8 billion people. What happens if we reach 15 billion? We’ve been wrong about projections before, what happens if we reach 30 billion? Are you prepared to limit population growth, yes or no?
• 29 August 2021: Does this mean “other people can starve such that we can survive”? What about population control? There is a limit, yes. But besides innovation & taxing externalities, doing nothing else might be the right thing to do. Versus deciding who lives.
• 29 August 2021: I don’t see a problem in CEOs wanting to increase sales. I do see a problem in introducing regulations to prevent the increase of sales. I don’t see how that is connected to our current predicament. This argument is very similar to the ones our Romanian communists used to make.
• 29 August 2021: There is no such thing as “unregulated capitalism”, never has been. My problem w/ the argument is that the cause isn’t capitalism, or greed. We also have to acknowledge that west’s middle-class may want survival at expense of people starving. Similar to pandemic lockdowns.
• 29 August 2021: Finally, economic growth is just a metric that we used to judge the health of an economy. Saying that capitalism is depends on economic growth is like saying that good health depends on endless loss of weight. In truth many times economists are clueless about how it all works.
• 29 August 2021: BTW, I mentioned above that economic growth comes from population growth, but that’s only half true. It also comes from innovation (producing more with less resources). Goes without saying that we need innovation more than ever.
• 29 August 2021: Does the West consume more than it needs? Of course, but those products now get assembled in places like China, India, Vietnam. It’s basically wealth redistribution that works. Pulling the world out of poverty means more economic growth, not less.
• 29 August 2021: Per capita the West is producing most co2 emissions, but biggest growth comes from developing countries. People don’t give a shit about climate or forests when they have hunger issues. Africa alone is projected to grow to 5 billion people if they aren’t pulled out of poverty…
• 29 August 2021: Capitalism isn’t predicated on endless growth. That growth comes from population growth. When that growth slows down or goes negative, more people starve. You don’t have to be a capitalist to see that we need to pull people out of poverty to limit population growth…
• 23 August 2021: I agree that the ideologies are distinct, and neither is a subset of the other. I was replying to the tweet’s sarcasm, not defending what the GH quote said.
• 23 August 2021: Just sharing my knowledge about communism BTW, that thread is an obvious dumpster fire.
• 23 August 2021: In Romania we could see how this line is really thin – in the 70s we had one of the most relaxed communism, in the 80s we devolved in national socialism. Besides isolationism & austerity measures, abortions were banned, we had segregation, being gay was punishable by prison, etc.
• 23 August 2021: Not defending that reactionary nonsense, but facism/nazism have socialist roots & elements, even if it opposed the liberalism in Marxism: anti-laissez-faire, anti-conservative, revolutionary, centrally planned, pro-welfare, pro-equality (for master race). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Serfdom
• 18 August 2021: .NET 6 is introducing interfaces for static methods in C#, which are close to type classes. What appears to be missing is ability to define instances for types you don’t control (though I guess you can always come up w/ “newtypes”). Also HTKs. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/preview-features-in-net-6-generic-math/
• 16 August 2021: Gruber implies that maybe if Chrome developers had no life, if they had a high divorce rate, just maybe Chrome would have been even more memory/energy efficient. That’s punditry for you. I do have to wonder, is that why Safari is so buggy or behind web standards?
• 16 August 2021: Gruber implies that maybe if Chrome developers had no life, if they had a high divorce rare, just maybe Chrome would have been even more memory/energy efficient. That’s punditry for you.
• 16 August 2021 (live): I also hate to bring up the popularity argument, but Chrome dominates the market due to technical excellence first, Google monopoly second. Many of us remember its launch. Years ahead of competition, which barely caught up w/ its initial design: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
• 16 August 2021 (live): Gruber tries to be snarky, but actually yes, Chrome is memory & energy efficient. Safari wins in video playing due to codecs. Restrict Chrome to H264, block some ads too, keep more than a dozen tabs open, and you get a different picture. https://twitter.com/gruber/status/1427192645537906690
• 16 August 2021: O altă perspectivă este că Talibanii (ce sunt tot afgani) au fost creați de SUA, iar civilizația nu o aduci cu tancuri, bombe și războaie proxy. Este ușor să blamezi afganii și să nu vezi cauzalitatea, nu mai zic de incompetența administrațiilor SUA de la 9/11 încoace.
• 15 August 2021: On current events in Afghanistan, it strengthens my belief that while war is necessary for defense, it’s not a tool that brings democracy or prosperity. I was reminded by this documentary, still relevant — “This is what winning looks like”: https://youtu.be/Ja5Q75hf6QI
• 12 August 2021: Even better pic.twitter.com/np9i4kOyI0
• 12 August 2021: Not sure who needs to hear this, but … “IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle” (link). TLDR — IQ only correlates in the “left tail” and we’re reading too much into that correlation. IQ is not a synonym for intelligence, and makes for bad jokes too. https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39
• 11 August 2021: Speaking of cryptocurrency, IMO it’s stupid to think that stopping cryptocoins will also stop ransomware. Genie is out of the bag folks, organized crime now knows big companies can be blackmailed into paying a lot of money to get unstuck. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
• 11 August 2021: I believe some regulation is necessary, and I enjoy many regulations of the EU, like GDPR or consumer protection laws. I obviously don’t want to buy food and get poison instead. But let’s not pretend that it’s all good, or that it doesn’t favor monopolies (aka crony capitalism).
• 11 August 2021: Regulation has good intentions, problems are identified, but the cause is often progress, and the solution chosen is often to stop progress. When politicians intervene w/ legislation, that’s only meant to look good at next elections. There’s no second order thinking in politics.
• 11 August 2021: Example is subtle – don’t we want people to be happy & live in dignity? Ofc, but free market is an optimization engine. Minimum wage penalizes local work, rewards automation & outsourcing, robbing the poor out of opportunities. Collapse of Europe’s pensions is inevitable.
• 11 August 2021: For which I’m grateful BTW, Romania being one of the cheaper countries that got a piece of the pie. We need to live too. But we should realize that the problem can be the regulations themselves. For example, doesn’t matter what law says, minimum wage starts from zero…
• 11 August 2021: Quote says innovation is often just workaround for regulation. True, but pre-internet we had shitty cabs, expensive/shitty hotels, mass media filled w/ ads, owned by oligarchs, expensive money transfers, factories gradually moving to cheaper countries due to welfare state, etc. pic.twitter.com/uKpHp3wQtD
• 6 August 2021: They weren’t calling the police whenever the wrong face was detected. If the argument is that it’s their proprietary code, they could do whatever, that’s true, but w/o informing customers it’s a class action lawsuit or marketing nightmare waiting to happen & they aren’t stupid.
• 3 August 2021: Note that humans are inconsistent in their views, because views are context-dependent and most often subjective. This is why the population isn’t really divided in half, and tying your identity to any one ideology, or party is a bad idea.
• 3 August 2021: You can see the conflict in everything, from the debate on whether governments should impose lockdowns or mandatory vaccinations, to banning or regulating crypto-assets, to what to do about growing inequality. It’s not a class struggle, it’s a struggle of sociology.
• 3 August 2021: Conflict starts from the basics… - can a committee decide for individuals? - is selfishness social or innate? - should progress happen by law, or by processes? - is society’s role to offer justice, or is justice’s role to preserve society? - is glass half empty or half full?
• 3 August 2021: For most opinions you’ll ever have, expect half of the population to disagree. This is due to a viewpoint conflict about government, justice, progress, etc. Democracy eventually reaches consensus on most issues, always seeking equilibrium, never achieving it due to new problems.
• 2 August 2021: I mean, certain politicians have blood on their hands for spreading FUD about AstraZeneca, and we are blaming Facebook & Google for the low vaccination rates, calling for censorship? That’s just wrong, IMO.
• 2 August 2021: And censoring the questioning of medical & government authority in this pandemic, which is the topic we are talking of, is not something we can agree on. Governments did a poor job in this pandemic to educate people. Also remember the screw-ups (masks, AstraZeneca).
• 2 August 2021: Note, I am in favor of not giving hate speech any protections, however this is also easy to abuse. Valid content already gets buried by overzealous people reporting it. Facebook censored the “napalm girl” picture for nudity. It routinely censors history based on keywords.
• 2 August 2021: But for (2) asking for censorship is like asking it for mass-media in general. Because of the size of these companies, we are not talking of “restaurant owners”, which is the analogy of Sacha Baron Cohen. For a vast majority, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter are the Internet.
• 2 August 2021: I watched it — I like the man, and given his background, it does make me question my opinions. I still don’t agree w/ censorship, even if he’s in favor. The problem has 2 causes: 1. algorithms 2. democratization of the press For (1) algorithms that need regulation, obviously…
• 2 August 2021: “Unsafe Lazy Resource.scala” Code snippet #Scala The snippet Unsafe Lazy Resource.scala first appeared on http://alexn.org . https://alexn.org/snippets/2021/08/02/unsafelazyresource-scala.html?pk_campaign=twitter&pk_kwd=link
• 30 July 2021: Due to the pandemic, fascism is on the rise across Europe. In Romania, a bunch of fascists got 10% at parliamentary election last year, due to the pandemic * early lockdowns. Compulsion you’re speaking of doesn’t come cheap, could cost us the EU. Society is complicated like that
• 30 July 2021: We have a different understanding for the role of government, which are representatives of the people, employed by the people, not shepherds. Government can try to compel, but then there’s the next electoral vote, or possibility of mass protests.
• 29 July 2021: I’m all for making it expensive to be unvaccinated. Don’t want the vaccine? Then to go in a bar, you need to pay for a test. Freedom can have a small price.
• 29 July 2021: In Romania, there are mandatory vaccines, but you can opt-out anyway. There are parents (a very small minority atm) that opted-out of the measles vaccine for their children. There is a growing anti-vaxxing movement, and I don’t think distrust in science can be fixed by coercion.
• 29 July 2021: Yes, it’s awful. And I think people talking about mortality in this pandemic have missed a very important angle — young people may not die at a high rate, but they are affected by “long COVID-19”. And in the US, if covid-19 wasn’t diagnosed, you may not get insurance 🤦‍♂️
• 29 July 2021: I’m one that gets the Flu vaccine every year, BTW. The vaccine is not about eradication, as it can’t be eradicated, and every year’s strains are different. That’s basically the profile of coronaviruses too, also known as “the common cold”.
• 29 July 2021: Right. But that’s basically the argument of authoritarianism. People are a danger to others and themselves, so they need to be told what to do by wiser men.
• 29 July 2021: Vaccines haven’t eradicated flu, and in fact it was flu that virologists have always feared. You might be comparing apples to oranges. And where is vaccination mandatory anyway?
• 29 July 2021: … also incompetence of governments (Trump, Boris Johnson, etc). If there’s unhealthy skepticism right now, that’s basically a reaction to what happened last year.
• 29 July 2021: Social responsibility can be exercised w/o state coercion. We are socially responsible every time we leave home, and it’s not just b/c of penal code. That people aren’t socially responsible right now, that’s IMO b/c of mistakes from 2020 (fear porn + early lockdowns).
• 29 July 2021: Personal choices are most often choices with social impact. That’s what happens when people vote. Due to its scale, how do we know that it’s not the vaccines themselves that are driving the dangerous mutations?Democratic processes are even more relevant in though times.
• 29 July 2021: I was the first in line to get vaccinated BTW, w/ AstraZeneca even if I could get Pfizer. I also had fights within my own family. But I’d rather live in a world in which people are free to be fools, instead of in authoritarianism, and liberal values are seriously stress-tested.
• 29 July 2021: Much like how in 2020 the attempts to “suppress” the virus via lockdown in March-April (instead of January) were futile, we don’t really know what to do, and we are probably too late in doing anything. Except for protecting people that want to be protected.
• 29 July 2021: At this point, the virus may keep mutating anyway, like flu. Due to global scale, it’s inevitable. Simplistic narratives like “if virus cannot spread, it cannot mutate” are too simplistic. Tell that to India, w/ its 1.4 billion people, which is where Delta comes from…
• 29 July 2021: Whether people should pay for the healthcare of other people acting stupid, that’s a different question, and tough to answer, as anti-vaxxers pay taxes for healthcare too.
• 29 July 2021: As long as individuals can protect themselves (vaccination, masks, WFH), I don’t see a problem in people being free to act stupid. Authoritarianism has always been more efficient at mobilizing resources in a crisis, freedom is personal responsibility & skepticism is democratic.
• 29 July 2021 (live): Facebook, Twitter, YouTube have a role in “disinformation”, but that’s due to their algorithms incentivizing outrage. The problem isn’t an arbitration of truth, or lack thereof. Calls for censorship on these platforms are shortsighted & will backfire.
• 28 July 2021: No, but I’ll refrain from commenting 😉
• 28 July 2021 (live): Straight out of Monix 🙂
• 24 July 2021: Gold doesn’t have the intrinsic value we attribute it. It’s just a decent conductor. Social constructs are results of human interactions. That independent reinventing happens, that’s b/c we think alike & get exposed to similar environments.
• 24 July 2021: We agree that all are social constructs. Missing ingredient for lasting value is tradition. E.g CCs won’t replace gold soon, as gold has been used for millennia. Regulations are valuable too, even if they impede innovation. Will be interesting to see how it pans out.
• 24 July 2021: In absence of institutions, the same that imbue fiat money with value, there is no such thing as intrinsic value. It’s all a social construct. This is the reason for why capitalism w/o rule of law has never worked.
• 24 July 2021: Land has zero value if you can’t defend it, or you can’t do subsistence farming on it. Food, yes, but a food supply chain is a social construct that disappears as soon as fiat money becomes “just paper.
• 24 July 2021 (live): I feel like the “intrinsic value” arguments are almost religious. It’s like we’re talking of the existence of the soul or of free will.
• 24 July 2021: Fiat money and stocks do have “intrinsic value”. In a world in which fiat money becomes “just paper”, the constant supply of food & goods (we associate w/ “intrinsic value”) stops flowing. And given institutional collapse, everything loses value, including land.
• 20 July 2021: “Hungarian journalists and critics of Orbán were targeted with Pegasus” I wonder how Hungarians view Orbán and its “illiberal democracy” policies. Given the rift b/w the V4 countries and western EU, it becomes pretty clear to me where this is going. https://telex.hu/direkt36/2021/07/19/pegasus-nso-hungary-viktor-orban-cyberweapon
• 17 July 2021: There’s a lot wrong about Marxism actually, I can’t use twitter for describing how wrong. I do believe in pluralism though, and will leave with this thought … it’s never a winning move to blame people of greed. Democracy is compromise, and that makes compromise hard.
• 17 July 2021: Out of 1000 music artists, only about 10 will be well known, w/ appreciated pieces. The socialist solution is to distribute the views & likes. The capitalist solution is to specialize people to be good at something else & contribute, specialization which Marx critiqued.
• 17 July 2021: The problem isn’t the “giving a damn” part, but rather that we disagree on the means and the critiques, which sometimes come straight out of marxism. You say it’s the greed & cruelty, when in fact most care as much and there’s a conflict of visions. I’ll shut up 🙂
• 17 July 2021: 3/3— I too worry about inflation & its effects on the poor, but I remember shitty opinion pieces last year saying that governments can afford to print money & give bailouts. Inflation is a direct consequence. Maybe less in powerful economies. But this ain’t capitalism.
• 17 July 2021: 2/ There is massive wealth inequality, but why is it a problem? Hunger and poverty are at an all time low. I will grant you that some people are so poor that they have no chance to grow, and we need to help them. I’m for “universal basic income”, public healthcare/ education.
• 17 July 2021: 1/ Capitalism is about self-organization. That doesn’t mean business owners don’t try bending the rules of free market. Adam Smith for example was for regulation to keep market free. Profitability is a signal. Like all signals, some people over-optimize for short-term gains.
• 17 July 2021: You know, I’m actually having fun 🙂
• 17 July 2021: The explosion of ransomware can have multiple causes, including: 1. Covid-19 driven remote work; 2. Tensions b/w US and Russia or others; ransomware coming from Eastern Europe… and if it’s funded or tolerated by state agencies, then the ransom could be just an excuse.
• 17 July 2021: I don’t know US’s culture very well, I’ve read on McCarthyism, so I can understand the polarization. Some critiques of capitalism are warranted. For us the bogeyman was real, we unfortunately shot them on Christmas ‘89 (I was a child when communism fell) & fear their ghost.
• 17 July 2021: And so in practice this has led to a lot of suffering: https://twitter.com/alexelcu/status/1362508998650511362
• 17 July 2021: I never got the impression that that’s the comparison made. Communism is bad b/c it’s based on a flawed theory of why capitalism is bad, while hoping for the same progress that capitalism brings, which never happens, as it totally misses the point. https://twitter.com/alexelcu/status/1411674809570844681
• 17 July 2021: Ah, what about this other investigation from 2016? https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/why-criminals-cant-hide-behind-bitcoin
• 17 July 2021: We can do this all day you know 🙂 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/technology/bitcoin-untraceable-pipeline-ransomware.html
• 17 July 2021: https://www.google.com/search?q=is+bitcoin+untraceable
• 16 July 2021: What drama? Freedom of speech, interestingly, in the US was a virtue of the left (e.g in the 60s). It can’t be claimed by either side. And nowadays reactionaries complain about loss of free speech, while doing everything they can to ban LGBT+ “propaganda” by law.
• 16 July 2021: 2/2 — With online social networks we are witnessing the “democratization” of mass-media. This isn’t incompatible w/ justice, ofc. Mass-media, the “court of public opinion”, can do a good job to show us when the justice system isn’t working. Like in the case of sexual assaults.
• 16 July 2021: 1/2 — I think public shaming/cancel culture has the potential to harm innocents (losing their jobs, suffering mental issues, etc). People like to pile on, in a mob-driven rage, that’s then over w/ the news cycle. That said…
• 16 July 2021: Transactions are very much traceable, and nothing stops fiat transfers to the Cayman Islands, or other fiscal paradises. You need international cooperation for solving such cases and I don’t see how CCs make this harder.
• 16 July 2021: Speaking of, Bitcoin transactions are traceable, not delivering the privacy nirvana some people thought it would. But let’s pretend that’s not so.
• 16 July 2021: So you’re not capable of having a conversation w/o personal insults? Let me help w/ reading comprehension… If cryptocoins make some crime easier, allegedly, so what? Plenty of instruments enable crime in society. Make a reasonable argument for why we should care this time.
• 16 July 2021: It’s currently not easier, but OK, sure, I can argue that too. Cryptocoins may be used for paying for crime, online, which may make it preferable to cash in some scenarios (e.g ransomware). So what’s the problem?
• 16 July 2021: For Ethereum apps — I don’t know of cool uses right now, some people say it can revolutionize administration. I don’t find the “blockchain” (the distributed linked list with hashing) particularly interesting, but I can see some of those ideas borrowed for say online voting.
• 16 July 2021: Cryptocurrency is also useful for in-app/in-game commerce, avoiding regulation, and it’s IMO preferable to inventing your own in-app coins. E.g. Brave’s approach to “reward” users for watching ads, letting them “tip” publishers, is at least interesting.
• 16 July 2021: Regulations in place are protecting customers, but there’s also a lot of gate keeping. For instant transfers of money b/w countries, you end up working w/ solutions like Revolut, but that’s centralized (lock-in). Instant transfers b/w banks have yet to materialize.
• 16 July 2021: (2) Microtransactions — this was the original promise, but it has yet to materialize (I still hope for it). Currently, microtransactions aren’t feasible due to high cost, the Visa/Mastercard monopoly being involved. Granted, some of that cost is justified by fraud detection.
• 16 July 2021: (1) Anonymous online transactions. You can say that this enables crime. But cash enables crime too, cash being on its way out. Do we really want all transactions tracked by the state? And not all crime is immoral. One case is SciHub being banned by PayPal, now accepting Bitcoin.
• 16 July 2021: I admit that I’m not educated enough, but seeing a non-stop stream of poor opinions from its detractors is making my mentality shift in the other direction.
• 16 July 2021: I don’t necessarily agree with that last sentence. The empirical observations we have are pretty weak IMO, and the pieces I read are mostly emotional reactions, poor inductions.
• 16 July 2021: I have a conservative mindset, I believe in justice, in assumption of innocence, in having your day in court. But what happens when there’s a clear pattern of injustice? Vigilantism is inevitable, as the state (w/ its monopoly on violence) fails to protect the innocent.
• 16 July 2021: In my country, only 1 in 5 reports of rape end up being trialed in a court of law, or only 1 in 7 reports of sex w/ minors or sexual abuses (harassment, aggression, etc). These are trails, not convictions. public shaming may be weaponized, but is entirely justified.
• 14 July 2021: Capitalism doesn’t work unrestrained, being centrist as a concept. Adam Smith for example wasn’t against regulation to keep the market free. If I remember correctly, he was saying that when business owners meet they immediately start conspiring for bending the rules.
• 14 July 2021: Note I’m not against regulation, I’m against preemptive regulation. If we see fraud in the wild, then regulation is maybe needed, but a posteriori, not a priori.
• 14 July 2021: Capitalism needs a legal framework to work. There is no such thing as “wild west capitalism”, adding adjectives to the noun isn’t valid. Avoiding regulation isn’t necessarily bad, as regulations also protect monopolies & hamper innovation.
• 14 July 2021: 3/3 — Are cryptocoins a Ponzi scheme? Maybe. Some applications & coins definitely are. Still not a good reason for banning it, even if some regulation might be ok. We’re responsible adults, not dogs on a leash. I don’t own any cryptocoins, or have any stake in it.
• 14 July 2021: 2/ Are cryptocoins a problem for the environment? Maybe. But banning concrete causes for CO2 emissions is stupid & will not solve climate issues. The right solution is to incentivise the market to optimize for low CO2 emissions. Make it profitable & market will follow.
• 14 July 2021: 1/ Cryptocoins might turn out to be a net negative for society, but truth is we can’t predict the future, like all innovations being an emergent phenomenon. Arguments against cryptocoins are essentially against capitalism & innovation. Can’t agree w/ calls for banning it.
• 8 July 2021: I would be interested to see a correlation b/w religion and conspiracy theories. I’m not so sure that there is a difference b/w believers and non-believers in religion. Conspiracy theories seem to me to be coming from a different place … mistrusting authority. Just a hunch.
• 8 July 2021 (live): Fox having an older demographic doesn’t say much as the young watch less TV. I think that both assumptions you’re making are wrong. Millenials are aged 25 - 40. I’ve seen plenty of those in the Capitol riots. Q’s source is 4chan AFAIK. How many boomers are on 4chan?
• 7 July 2021 (live): You’re making it sound like Q don’t have a serious overlap w/ millennials or gen Z. Human mind is wired for religion. Atheism, as commonly practiced, is a religion born of and defined by Christianity. And what are ideologies? They surely aren’t science.
• 6 July 2021: 8/8 Inflation will make life harder for years to come, it’s inevitable, there’s plenty of historical precedent. We thrived in this economy, the poor haven’t. And before quoting some BS study w/ a mathematical model from last year, stop & think of how strong that evidence is.
• 6 July 2021: 7/ I also take issue with the tendency to keep people on a leash. We need solidarity, but when enforced, when it leads to suffering, people stop trusting authority. We can have freedom & personal responsibility too, now that we have plenty of masks and vaccines.
• 6 July 2021: 6/ I understand the calls for keeping lockdown, but it’s been odd to see privileged, middle-class software developers, that can afford to work remotely, call for lockdown w/ total disregard for the inevitable casualties, the poor.
• 6 July 2021: 5/ Government handouts, restrictions that slow down economy … these lead to public debt, which leads to more money printed, which, when not backed by economic growth leads to inflation, which is a tax on everyone, hitting the poor hardest, due to higher prices for basics.
• 6 July 2021: 4/ Romania’s economy has grown actually, but that’s b/c we had to terminate restrictions early. We have a higher death rate unfortunately, but higher poverty is still a risk for this country, and poverty kills too, albeit indirectly, being hard to measure.
• 6 July 2021: 3/ Also conspiracies have flourished everywhere, in mirror of the media panic, with the result being we now have a really poor vaccination rate (compared w/ capacity or other countries). Conspiracies, burned budget, that’s the result of lockdowns promoted by the privileged.
• 6 July 2021: 2/ The result was that we burned our budget, we aren’t Germany to keep people at home indefinitely, so we couldn’t have another lockdown in Winter 2020, when we recorded more deaths in a single month than in any other month since WWII. We also closed schools too early.
• 6 July 2021: 1/ I think ending lockdown and other restrictions is, for the time being, the right thing to do 🤷‍♂️ In Romania the lockdown from spring 2020 was stupid – too early to flatten the curve, too late to suppress the virus. Media was filled w/ panic porn & poor judgments were made.
• 5 July 2021: Affiliation to ideas is always subjective, this isn’t science, political philosophy is not science, which is why we call them ideologies, and in democracy we expect pluralism. This “you’re either with me or against me” attitude is polarizing and anti-democratic.
• 5 July 2021: We understand the world via abstractions and start from different first principles, which is why there are always 2 widely different viewpoints on any issue. On COVID-19, lefties want state-imposed solidarity & restrictions, which the right rejects out of principle.
• 5 July 2021: Imdeed. Monix’s ConcurrentQueue is pure and based on a better queue implementation than ConcurrentMap BTW.
• 4 July 2021: 25/25 — it is often said that being a conservative requires imagination & education. The socialist story of human selfishness and oppression of the many to the benefit of the few … is much simpler, attractive, but wrong, and like all BS, the refutation requires more effort.
• 4 July 2021: 24/ Liberal democracy is the political equivalent of capitalism BTW, the two go hand in hand. Democracy is a marketplace for your electoral vote. It’s not perfect, but it does a really good job to keep a balance b/w equality & freedom, and to isolate extremism by vote.
• 4 July 2021: 23/ At the same time the idea that you can have a centrally planned economy, which is what socialists think, has yielded disasters. And state interventions in economy have arguably done more harm than good, prolonging economic crises, creating more inequality.
• 4 July 2021: 22/ Capitalism is what you get when you let people self-organize, but with a legal framework that protects their property and the market’s freedom. You can’t have capitalism w/o a free market, entrepreneurial education, and the rule of law.
• 4 July 2021: 21/ Innovation requires entrepreneurship (risk taking), and the free market. A free market economy is one that’s always seeking equilibrium, but never reaching it, due to innovation giving birth to competition. And the invisible hand tying it all is self-interest.
• 4 July 2021: 20/ This isn’t too say that the public sector can’t innovate at all. It can (e.g the Internet), but that often happens in concert w/ private entities. It can’t be relied on, as we’ve seen in former USSR & satellites. In communist Romania consumerism felt like progress & freedom.
• 4 July 2021: 19/ If you’re reading this, you’re probably a software developer. If you aren’t a startup founder or executive at a big co, why aren’t you? Be honest here — you hate the associated risk, and our salaries are high enough for us to not want to risk our well-being.
• 4 July 2021: 18/ Innovation implies taking risks. 9 out of 10 startups fail & we only hear of black swans w/ exaggerated returns on investment, but not about the ones that fail. The working class only risks their salary, whereas the entrepreneur often risks their entire fortune.
• 4 July 2021: 17/ Going back to the zero-sum game, Marx’s theory is flawed b/c it discounts innovation and what makes it happen. Obviously value-added (profit) is not an exploitation factor. The device I use to write this message is a direct refutation of Marx’s theory.
• 4 July 2021: 16/ There’s also this paradox … when all people own something, nobody is responsible for it. “Tragedy of the commons” is interpreted as a problem of selfishness, when it’s in fact one of ownership. E.g we have a CO2 problem b/c it’s an externality, a subsidy.
• 4 July 2021: 15/ And if robots can 100% satisfy the needs of humans, surely they’ll develop consciousness and will need rights too, otherwise we’re talking slavery 🤷‍♂️
• 4 July 2021: 14/ I mean, sure, some will, we evolved to work & we might become sick w/o it. If exercise for its own sake was doable for all, we wouldn’t have an obesity problem. Depending on people’s goodwill to work won’t feed and satisfy billions of people, unless we depend 100% on robots.
• 4 July 2021: 13/ In the words of Adam Smith, Bernard Mandeville, others — selfishness is good actually 🙂 as people cooperate for the public good, out of a desire to fulfill their private interest. This is one flaw of Marxism. People will not work for work’s sake. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Mandeville
• 4 July 2021: 12/ Capitalism is a complex system that can’t be easily described, but according to Adam Smith it needs: — free commerce — division of labor — an invisible hand making people cooperate for public good This invisible hand is private interest, aka selfishness.
• 4 July 2021: 11/ Not all ideologies are equal. Some are more rooted in reality than others. Some ideologies appeal to altruism for achieving our potential, while others recognize that we are imperfect beings and work within those constraints. Some default to equality, others to liberty.
• 4 July 2021: 10/ A very democratic principle is that for practical purposes there is no absolute truth. People know their self-interest and should be allowed to affiliate to ideas that serve them, but such affiliations are subjective. Which is why we call them ideologies, not sciences.
• 4 July 2021: 8/ What is his labor theory of value missing? A lot actually. It’s important to realize that ideologies are abstractions, theories built on first principles that distort the real world, and the details ignored may be important. Which is why it is easy to make mistakes.
• 4 July 2021: 7/ If Marxism sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is. He was not an economist in any traditional sense, his predictions and theories coming from flawed inference from history. For example he totally missed an analysis of capitalism being the free market economy.
• 4 July 2021: 6/ Marx was actually an admirer of capitalism, and its strength to end outdated traditions, as a force for reform. However he was hoping for the same creatively destructive force to be embodied in communism. And he seemed to be clueless about why capitalism works.
• 4 July 2021: 5/ He then proceeded to imagine communism as the final solution for the welfare of society and human happiness, ironically perhaps being his inspiration from the primitive communities of hunter-gatherers. He was a primitivist. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_communism
• 4 July 2021: 4/ How could capitalism not end, when it’s characterized by this structural antagonism b/w the bourgeoisie and the proletariat? Eventually those oppressed and exploited will realize that they have the power, and will rise. Via revolution, which communists took very seriously.
• 4 July 2021: 3/ Marx is arguably a decent philosopher of history, which is why he fascinates. According to him historical ages are characterized by their economic system: primitive community, slavery, feudalism, and now capitalism, which will end by necessity, according to him.
• 4 July 2021: 2/ According to Marx in capitalism people are divided in those with the means of production, the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, and those selling their labor, the proletariat. Difference b/w production cost and selling price, aka profit, for him is the exploitation factor.
• 4 July 2021: 1/ More bad takes on Marxism 🙂 Marx explains capitalism as being an economic system under which the rich become rich by taking from the poor. In his vision, and that of many socialists, economy is a zero-sum game — in order for someone to win, somebody else has to lose. https://twitter.com/alexelcu/status/1410203155720253441
• 1 July 2021: That’s a pretty awful thing to say. It’s mostly ignorance, due to unfamiliarity. Have patience, but not too much. I mean, cancer? He should eventually apologize or GTFO. Real friends should readjust their world view, otherwise they weren’t friends to begin with, IMO.
• 1 July 2021: I understand what you’re saying, BTW. But if they can expose trade secrets, they can infringe copyright and patents too. Random thought: I’m pretty sure they have another ToS clause where they’ll try shifting the liability on users of GitHub Copilot.
• 1 July 2021: FOSS code can be an IP minefield, too, when you don’t respect the license. OSS code can’t have trade secrets, but that’s about it.
• 1 July 2021: OSS code can be patented too. Depending on license (GPL v3, Apache 2) they can have an explicit patents grant with clauses. Also, companies like Facebook & Microsoft will attach an explicit patents grant (alongside BSD/MIT) that only protect themselves, not other contributors.
• 1 July 2021: And people open sourcing code do not do so out of the goodness of their heart. We live in capitalism, after all. We want recognition, for example. Or we hope that other people join, lessening our maintenance burden. GH’s Copilot does none of that for us.
• 1 July 2021: Even permissive licenses, like BSD/MIT, do in fact have restrictions. For example, you can’t change that license. Which is why projects doing copy/pasting from BSD/MIT projects have to retain the copyright notice and license for the copied code.
• 1 July 2021: I think people have a misconception with FOSS — authors still retain the copyright, there’s still ownership, there’s still IP. And that’s not a misconception that Microsoft is allowed to make, with their army of lawyers and all that.
• 1 July 2021 (live): Primary lesson here that GitHub is teaching the world is to keep your code private. Good job Microsoft.
• 1 July 2021: Does GitHub’s Copilot analyze closed source, private projects too? If not, then why not? I thought the code is “synthesized”. Or is it because public projects are trapped due to social status, such that authors are unable to move?
• 30 June 2021: 24/24 — People are enamored with Marxism because it’s a fairy tale for grown-ups, but is unfortunately one that has led to horrors, and us living in Easter Europe we’ve seen the actual difference b/w this fairy tale and real life. /end
• 30 June 2021: 23/ Russian Revolution supposedly happened in an underdeveloped country, whereas Marx’s vision was for the proletariat to rise in an industrialized one, such as England. Marxists are obsessed w/ forging a “new man”, much like fascists, but w/ a slightly different story to tell.
• 30 June 2021: 22/ Marxists keep moving the goal-posts, thus making the theory non-falsifiable. They also say the horrors we’ve seen in communism mustn’t be due to Marxism, as communism wasn’t implemented according to Marx’s ideals. Which is factually untrue, all major elements being there.
• 30 June 2021: 21/ The rise of the proletariat never happened, instead the proletariat vanished. Now neo-marxists are coming up w/ all sorts of wild theories for why that is, like people being corrupted by consumerism (aka progress), coupled w/ socialists being crushed in a global conspiracy.
• 30 June 2021: 20/ This is why I don’t really pay attention to the right-wing moaning about “political correctness”, even if bringing down statues is stupid, and something communists used to do too. Although, I’d watch out for the (sometimes faux) Marxist leaders of progressive movements.
• 30 June 2021: 19/ Speaking of the class struggle, the emancipation of minorities and identity politics, while aligned a little with Marxism, it is not Marxist, as identity politics goes against the solidarity that Marxism preaches, and detracts from the real class struggle.
• 30 June 2021: 18/ Our bipolar society tends to group communism w/ social democracy, and fascism w/ conservatism. But in fact, contemporary social democracy & conservatism have more in common than they do w/ the extremes.
• 30 June 2021: 17/ Communism and fascism are actually twins, born in the same revolutionary fire of 19th century, when people thought the world must evolve through violence. It is disappointing for Marxists everywhere that World-War-I was b/w states and not classes.
• 30 June 2021: 16/ Populism? Anti-intellectualism? In communism, for sure, because shared hatred for the rich, the privileged, the competent is stronger than any solidarity Marx could envision. The class struggle naturally begets hatred, and any revolution demands blood spilled.
• 30 June 2021: 15/ Communism is supposed to be this post-money, post-state, ordered anarchy. In practice people need a one-party system, banning pluralism, deprecating other parties, sending their members to reeducation camps. The so-called “people’s consciousness” that administers all capital.
• 30 June 2021: 14/ Speaking of, fascism is said to be a far-right ideology b/c during the French Revolution the right was advocating to keep the monarch’s veto power, to keep totalitarianism. Interestingly, totalitarianism is also the consequence if capital is abolished.
• 30 June 2021: 13/ Communists managed to destroy whole communities, neighborhoods, cities, replacing concrete individual human happiness w/ a very abstract one that was never materialized. There’s no greater evil in politics than abstract thinking.
• 30 June 2021: 12/ This is in general a problem with many ideologies, this idea that people can’t be happy without the state constantly intervening in their lives. People just want to be left alone (aka freedom), in spite of our tendency for prescribing how other people should live.
• 30 June 2021: 11/ Note that private ownership is subtle. Beyond the law, beyond capital or knowledge, your own body, thoughts, feelings are also private property. A hallmark of extremism is the idea that people need to be dictated what to do with their own body, what to think, how to live.
• 30 June 2021: 10/ On capital, some is inherited, but some is earned. Abolishing private property strikes at the heart of humanity. Without private property, all other civil liberties will fall, as there can be no freedom or dignity without it.
• 30 June 2021: 9/ Wealth transfers now happen across state barriers too, bidirectionally. We have a looming future that always speaks of Armageddon (we now talk of global warming, last century there was the nuclear war threat), yet we are living humanity’s best years, literally.
• 30 June 2021: 8/ People will rightly point out that the standards of living in the US haven’t increased in decades. Which is worrying, but the standards of living have been raised all across the globe. Before the pandemic, hunger, malnutrition, poverty were at an all-time low.
• 30 June 2021: 7/ Marxists will also say that capitalism has kept growing due to imperialism, expanding in other markers, etc. There is truth when talking of negative effects of imperialism, but we’re now talking of wealth transfers b/w first world and developing countries, in both directions.
• 30 June 2021: 6/ Marxists are also criticizing capitalism’s need for constant growth, saying it is unsustainable. But the biggest elephant in the room is that the population is growing, which is what is actually driving the economic growth (and other implications, such as global warming).
• 30 June 2021: 5/ The specialization that Marx criticizes is also what allows for the economy to be efficient. Specialization is a form of capital, as people learn a trade, allowing them to fulfil their private interests. And you couldn’t feed billions of people w/o this efficiency.
• 30 June 2021: 4/ Marx talks of the proletariat’s alienation, being cogs in the machine. In communism, people are supposed to work for work’s sake. Adam Smith on the other hand rightly points out that the baker doesn’t serve you out of the goodness of his heart, but due to a private interest.
• 30 June 2021: 3/ Marx’s labor theory of value is ignoring the risk posed by capital owners, and how that is tied to continued innovation. Given Marx’s entire philosophy is around the bourgeoisie exploiting the proletariat, this puts it in serious doubt.
• 30 June 2021: 2/ What follows are a bunch of bad takes for why Marxism is bullshit 😅 …
• 30 June 2021: 1/ I was listening to a YouTube vid on Marxism. Guy is saying that Marxism hasn’t failed b/c it doesn’t propose a solution, being a critique of capitalism that’s still valid. Alarms went off. I’m like, buddy, it’s precisely Marx’s critique of capitalism that’s deeply flawed.
• 30 June 2021: The reason I tend to dismiss conspiracy theories out of hand is that the probability is higher for the truth to be the mundane and boring alternative. Life is chaotic. Such theories are born b/c we feel we’ll regain control if we’ll expose the puppeteers.
• 26 June 2021: It’s like with the anti-vaxxers and other conspiracy theorists, when you have to address their true feelings first (fears), instead of correcting their misconceptions.
• 26 June 2021: Yeah, it’s a hard situation. I sense ignorance in these people too. Not necessarily hate. Not all of them are nazis, the problem is people pick up wrong ideas about normality and biology or science, then repeat them. I wonder if there are deradicalization techniques…
• 26 June 2021: This reply was supposed to be for your first message 🙂
• 26 June 2021: Interesting thought. Care to explain? Problem w/ forums like Facebook is that a lot of moderates on the fence are watching. I don’t care about those spewing hate, but about their audience, which is why I get this burning desire to intervene, so hoping for sustainability.
• 26 June 2021: I have LGBT+ friends, thanks to the Internet, I’m already sold. But reminding people that we’re talking about humans with hopes and dreams is a good strategy. A problem is when we talk freaking metaphysics, in the abstract.
• 26 June 2021: 3/3 – How can you keep your cool and win hearts in such debates? I mean, besides knowing what you’re talking about. I’d appreciate advice (books, etc).
• 26 June 2021: 2/3 – The problem with my country is that the phenomenon is new. Until 2001 gay people could go to jail. There’s a lot of ignorance, people feel their identity threatened, they fear western “depravity”, they have “concerns” …
• 26 June 2021: 1/3 – There are ongoing debates about gender identity on my Facebook feed. People that are calmly pushing back against bigotry with reason, humility and keep their patience and kindness are my heroes. Personally I can’t. I get mad, condescension takes over and it’s game over…
• 25 June 2021: BTW, historically speaking liberals & conservatives have been the biggest enemies of fascists. But there are multiple flavors and due to right-wing parties converging we now have populists catering to the ultraorthodox and obsessing about what people do w/ their own bodies…
• 25 June 2021: Conservatives are talking of far-left extremism, but numbers don’t lie, there is almost no left extremism to speak of. Whereas the far-right is on the rise all over Europe. Kind of hard to worry about leftist cultural revolution when we’ve got actual fascists in our Parliament.
• 25 June 2021: As for legislation look for example at how many countries have passed or are trying to pass anti-abortion or anti-LGBT legislation. In Romania conservatives are fighting tooth and nail to prevent sexual education in schools, to “protect” children from gender identity.
• 25 June 2021: I’m a liberal conservative 👋 France is a very socialist country. Look instead at Poland, Hungary, or the UK even. Also some parties are supposedly social democrat but have ultraconservative social policies, e.g PSD in Romania. 80%+ of hate crimes, of terorism, is right wing.
• 24 June 2021: Bigotry can be born out of ignorance, and fear — of change, of the future, of those that are different. We all have that potential for bigotry. Recognizing it and its nature is important IMO for combating it. It’s such a good word. Too bad we don’t really have it in Romanian.
• 24 June 2021: You can feel offended by bigotry, but I think you misunderstood my point — a political stance is worse, because this leads to activism. It can also be very confusing for people, as many bigoted statements do not in fact signal hatred, being merely “concerns”.
• 24 June 2021: As a centrist, I worry about the left’s cultural revolution and cancel culture, but let’s get one thing straight … the ongoing problem of last decade has been the far-right. Most hate crimes, or fake news, or new legislation impeding freedoms is right-wing (aka conservative).
• 24 June 2021: Bigotry isn’t hatred, even if correlated. Bigotry is prejudice against a group of people. Bigotry isn’t an offense, but a political stance, triggering reactionism against the rights of those groups. It’s a stance against equality, against treating all people as human beings.
• 17 June 2021: You have to consider that medical research in such instances is difficult, since we can’t purposefully infect people w/ Sars-Cov-2 in a controlled setting, as that would be immoral. And there are many safety checks in place, ensuring proposed treatments are effective & safe.
• 17 June 2021: When the dust settles, I think we’ll realize that COVID-19 research was conducted in record time. And that’s actually an argument used by anti-vaxxers, as if steps were skipped. It’s only been 1 year and a half since the outbreak.
• 17 June 2021: COVID-19 research is a global phenomenon. In the EU we couldn’t care less about Trump. Speaking of, Trump also suggested “hitting the body with a tremendous ultraviolet or very powerful light” or injecting disinfectant, as possible cures that he found very interesting.
• 17 June 2021: What happened was the mass media wanted to believe in a miracle drug, b/c it makes for good headlines, and we (the public) eventually found that there is no such miracle cure. Trump wanted to believe that, too, b/c his initial handling of COVID-19 was a disaster.
• 17 June 2021: This study is an observational one & size is small for its kind. Large, randomized, controlled clinical trials showed no benefits to using hydroxychloroquine, a drug that also gives heart rhythm problems. Recommendation wasn’t wrong based on available information.
• 12 June 2021: Ah, well, US’s republicans have been going down the path of conspiracy theories. Such a shame.
• 12 June 2021 (live): The price of green energy alternatives are going down. Solar is becoming cheaper than coal. But it’s not enough. Only option to fully replace fossil fuels is currently nuclear power. I am hopeful that further research will eventually save us, as always.
• 12 June 2021 (live): There’s 7.7 billion of us, and fossil fuels are feeding us, connecting us, keeping us warm. And current strategies are pretty dumb. E.g Paris Agreement? A drop in the ocean. France rejecting Brazilian soy? The hypocrisy of a colonial power that has already deforested their lands.
• 12 June 2021: Serious criticism is on how to tackle climate change, and not whether it is real. The article is a little shallow at the end. The problem is that putting brakes on the economy leads to people starving, the main criticism for those that shame people for consuming…
• 10 June 2021: The CoC does not represent a legal contract & we aren’t in a court of law. When people discuss whether “Nazis are OK” you can simply say “that’s not welcoming, we don’t do that here”, close the conversation & that would be within CoC’s boundaries.
• 10 June 2021: Yes, I wanted to emphasize the “effort” part. Adding a CoC is worthless w/o the effort to enforce it. People doing it should go in with the right expectations, IMO, and for big FOSS communities (or companies) not everyone is capable. But still, it’s better than alternative IMO.
• 10 June 2021: @milessabin I voted for “necessary, but insufficient” actually 😅 I meant that CoCs are sufficient when enforced, and I wasn’t sure what those options meant. CoC can specify “be nice, don’t be an asshole, don’t be a bigot” & that’s enough, but someone has to confront people.
• 10 June 2021: Which is totally needed, because truth be told, online communities die by pacifism. Companies have to deal with this all the time, in private. One problem with open source is that everything is in public, for everyone to see and participate.
• 10 June 2021: For moderators, too, we end up dealing w/ some cognitive dissonance. B/c we end up censoring or banning people for how they think or how they act. Many of us are liberals, or conservatives, believing in free speech, which we have to balance against the freedom of association…
• 10 June 2021: CoCs are necessary and sufficient. But slapping a CoC in a repository is worthless if not enforced. Taking action against a perpetrator is really tough, as it creates conflict and drama, and you’ll always have a lot of critiques heading your way. Not for the faint-hearted.
• 7 June 2021: Note that centrism is fundamentally a conservative view, which is cool, as social democrats for example are (most often) centrists too. Society does evolve, the question is how. The left/right polarization doesn’t really help in understanding the landscape.
• 7 June 2021: Centrism is a political position that accepts the compromise b/w social equality and the social hierarchy arising from freedom, and opposes (radical) reforms that would result in a significant shift of society (to the left or right) — also called “moderate” politics.
• 6 June 2021: I am using the same terms that professors of political philosophy are using. Anything non-center is radical by definition, and the center is not ill-defined at all, in spite of society’s progress in time.
• 6 June 2021: That’s good to know. Would you describe them as center-left? It was my understanding that they have a more radical past, but that may be gone. N.b by radical I don’t mean extremism, but rather non-center. Feminism in the past, now BLM, these are examples of radical movements.
• 6 June 2021: I don’t know the situation there, was thinking of CDU losing votes to Greens. Perception matters and lockdown measures that happened in this pandemic, while warranted by the situation, has consequences. We now have a far-right party in Romania too, birthed by Covid.
• 6 June 2021: IMO this is the result of center-right & left parties losing strength to (former?) anti-establishment left radicals, especially in the context of a pandemic that led to many freedom restrictions. Far-right is on the rise across EU and is IMO the pendulum swinging back.
• 4 June 2021: Trump is sliding into irrelevance. This is good, deplatforming works for limiting the reach of such sociopaths. And bad b/c it confirms what we already knew — the internet is increasingly centralized in the hands of a few US companies. And they created Trump in the first place.
• 4 June 2021: Trump is sliding into irrelevance. This is good, deplatforming works for limiting the reach of sociopaths. And bad b/c it confirms what we already knew — the internet is increasingly centralized in the hands of a few US companies. And they created Trump in the first place.
• 4 June 2021: Anyone knows of online resources for improving handwriting? 😅
• 4 June 2021 (live): I’d take any claim about effects on the brain with a grain of salt. I’m fairly sure IT folks are slowly losing ability for handwriting due to usage of keyboards 🙂 The ability to read a doc’s awfully handwritten prescription is losing its utility too 🙂
• 4 June 2021 (live): Most people will have such a device already, it’s a matter of reusing devices which we may already have (assuming they support a stylus). We are not buying these devices just for taking notes. Phones w/ styluses work too. Common displays of 6.5” to 7” are fine for simple notes.
• 4 June 2021 (live): Pen & paper is great, until you need to throw away old notes. A waste of paper, disposal will probably not lead to recycling & you have to shred pieces containing sensitive data. Devices w/ stylus pens should be more popular. Total digitalization can’t come soon enough.
• 31 May 2021: As an addendum, people that don’t support democracy before taking power, will not start supporting democracy afterwards. It never happens, yet people believe that power calms down extremists. In other words, supporting democracy before taking power is still a prerequisite.
• 26 May 2021: I think that what Rafal is saying is that OSS libraries aren’t just tools, they are living projects, with ownership and leadership with which people end up interacting (seeking help, fixing bugs, etc). So you can’t separate such tools from their leadership (unless you fork).
• 23 May 2021: We can have disbelief for people or parties winning the popular vote, which we don’t like. Instead of distrusting democracy, we should instead reflect on society’s problems and then witness the incompetence of our favorites; maybe they’ve lost fair and square.
• 23 May 2021: In representative democracy I’d wager against the notion that people aren’t well represented. People make compromises all the time. That politicians overstate their support, that’s just marketing. And most ppl can see the silent majority that didn’t vote.
• 23 May 2021: Sure, but a vote can be undemocratic. You can’t vote away human dignity for example. Or the human rights of minorities. If that happens, it’s no longer a democracy, but just another tyranny.
• 23 May 2021: Anti-democratic parties, and also anti-democratic political philosophies, are primarily those that reject pluralism. We can work with most everything else, but not with those. Negatives: communism, fascism, islamism. Positives: liberalism, social democracy, Christian democracy.
• 23 May 2021: OH — Democracy isn’t about the vote. Voting is just a tool. Democracy is a societal spirit, an equilibrium b/w opposing forces, but most important liberty vs equality. This is why pluralism is vital in democracy, to keep that equilibrium. When pluralism is gone, so is democracy.
• 17 May 2021: #FreePalestine demonstrations are full of fascists & fundamentalists, spreading antisemitism. Jews are being assaulted on the street, in London, Berlin, Brussels, etc. This is what israelophobia does. Lefties have missed the plot. As always, extremes have a lot in common.
• 16 May 2021: There are solutions AFAIK, like the one-state or the two-states proposals. None can work if Hamas stays in Gaza or Israel continues the World Bank occupation IMO. But these are complicated issues. If it were simple, the conflict would’ve ended 70+ years ago.
• 16 May 2021: Well we are talking about the Middle East. The apartheid state you’re talking of is the only democracy there. I’m not blaming anyone, as the Middle East is in such a poor state due to hundreds of years of colonialism, but wishful thinking won’t solve the problem.
• 16 May 2021: So out of curiosity, what would you have them do? Pack up and leave? Get absorbed by the surrounding states? You should preach about the evils of nationalism to Syria, Lebanon, Iran and its other neighbors too. That will go well I imagine.
• 16 May 2021: BTW do you know how Israel happened, after the Holocaust? Oppressing minorities was common in 19th-20th century, but those more oppressed were those w/o a country. E.g in interwar Romania that mean Jews and Roma, compared w/ Germans or Hungarians. Happened all over Europe.
• 16 May 2021: Yes, the existence of Israel is still valid, b/c its population of 9 milion want it. Yes, it’s a militaristic state, probably b/c all it’s neighbors want to erase it off the map. And you’re commenting from the security of an ongoing colonial empire.
• 16 May 2021: But something’s really wrong when people condone fundamentalist Islamic terrorism by an elected government authority, or question Israel’s right to exist. Yes, you can oppose Israel’s politics and wars. But israelophobia is just antisemitism.
• 16 May 2021: The tweets covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are full of bigotry. I condemn Israel’s policy, the targeting of civilian buildings & West Bank occupation; war is stupid and the killing of Palestinian children is an avoidable and unacceptable tragedy…
• 12 May 2021: I agree, labels are awful especially due to tribalism. However, philosophies are still useful as a guide, b/c we often have incomplete information and have to fallback to something. E.g. I accept regulations, but I’d rather err on freedom and individual responsibility.
• 12 May 2021: On the political spectrum I identify most with liberal conservatism, which can be seen as a contradiction given my progressive views 🤷‍♂️ I also respect social democracy, or other centrist philosophies with shared liberal-democratic values. What’s your political philosophy?
• 11 May 2021: I guess that settles it. https://twitter.com/alexelcu/status/1391712740859858944
• 6 May 2021: Reddit’s /r/scala is moderated by people doing a soul crushing job to read posts involving silly conspiracy theories, race science, sexism, racism, or other *isms, and doing it for free 👏 Good. Online communities die by pacifism.
• 2 May 2021: I remember Yifan talking about harassment since 2018 BTW. She had a long thread about it. If this is a conspiracy, it’s one that’s been brewing since then. https://twitter.com/yifan_xing_e/status/1065396554842935297
• 2 May 2021: I did not know Jon before his message to me to help Yifan, him contacting me out of the blue. Thought nothing of it, although Yifan did not need the intro. Meeting them in person was weird for reasons I won’t get into. But I would believe her testimony even w/o this background
• 2 May 2021: Personally I haven’t been struggling at all, b/c (1) her post hit all the right notes, (2) I can now connect the dots w/ Yifan’s and Jon’s behavior I’ve witnessed since 2018 and (3) I was part of Jon’s intro to Yifan, as a well known figure of the community…
• 2 May 2021: Ofc it is enough. I’ve even seen extra evidence, but was convinced before that, public statements are enough. Unfortunately Jon being blamed triggers feelings, you cannot combat feelings w/ reason, as we’ve seen w/ other conspiracy theories.
• 2 May 2021: By Travis, who unleashed his girlfriend and also cooped key Scala people in corroborating their story, for discrediting Jon, due to him becoming apologetic for John De Goes, Paul Phillips, and others who have shown support for red pillers and white supremacists; a clear grudge.
• 1 May 2021: Consider you’re assuming entirely rational actors here, which is not the case, as we are only human. Why do women stay in abusive relationships? This is still a common problem in my country. Often b/c they lie to themselves & Yifan does say it in her post.
• 1 May 2021: If we care about the environment, and we don’t do that, humans can always find other stupid ways to waste the CO2 emissions budget.
• 1 May 2021: I, for one, am against banning cryptocoins, because this is IMO a problem of externalities — tax CO2 emissions properly, regulate imports from countries without such taxes, and then mining will become too expensive to yield any profit.
• 1 May 2021: The idea that cryptocoins cannot be controlled by government is a fantasy, since government controls all inputs and outputs and has an army at disposal to enforce the law. And the popular cryptocoins aren’t even anonymous, as you can easily trace all transactions.
• 1 May 2021: If there are parties feeling harassed, of course the community should have a say, otherwise that CoC is useless. We can have a say because we can decide to have a say. Speaking of power imbalance, that’s also why bosses shouldn’t date their employees.
• 1 May 2021: Yifan’s testimony was in part corroborated by multiple people, the initial signers. Jon’s in wrong even if this was all an issue of interpretation, as he wrongly claims, as he took advantage as a senior w/ his vast influence in the community, which makes their voices uneven.
• 1 May 2021: Vic’s boyfriend is irrelevant and implying otherwise sounds like a shitty conspiracy theory. Imagine for a moment you were in either of their shoes, and not believed b/c of reasoning like this, sprinkled w/ “but he was good to me.”
• 29 April 2021: I was not suggesting that you wouldn’t do that. Yes, I got that kind of advice. Hard to believe you haven’t heard of any instances of girls being sexually assaulted in public spaces, w/ their parents then blaming it on how they dressed or other such nonsense, as it’s super common
• 29 April 2021: Pattern is clear as daylight whenever sexual assault is discussed. I suggest asking for testimonials from a feminist group. Parents can be damaging to a child’s self-esteem. Twitter is a bad place for nuance, as context is important. But I hope you’d do the same if you had sons.
• 29 April 2021: Also Google’s FloC might be a better idea, for keeping the web decentralized, vs completely giving Facebook free reign. You thought cross-site tracking is bad, how about if the Internet is Facebook? I also find some of FloC’s criticism to be a little disingenuous.
• 29 April 2021 (live): Why are online ads even needed for publishers? B/c we don’t have microtransactions, so w/o a way to pay for reading an article, many publishers will die. For advertising, targeting is cost effective, small businesses being less able to compete otherwise w/ big players.
• 29 April 2021 (live): Why I changed my stance on online ads over night: Facebook uses anti-ad-blocking tech, their ads & tracking can be unblockable, they push people away from open web. Hurting online publishers & small advertising is pushing people towards centralized gardens, away from open web.
• 28 April 2021: A cultural trap we can fall into is “blaming the victim”. Women suffering from harassment/sexual assault yields advice like “don’t wear sexy clothes, or walk at night, or share an airbnb…”, amounting to “don’t be a woman” and “men will be men”. Stop that, she isn’t to blame.
• 28 April 2021: I’m actually very right-leaning, I’ve been wary of cancel culture, some stories I’ve read in the news are ridiculous, but sometimes, especially when shit happens close to home, we can say “yep, they deserve the criticism, fuck both-sidesism”.
• 28 April 2021: Conservatives today: “government is useless, taxes are robbery, being a jerk is protected by free speech, anarchy baby!” Also conservatives: “you’re not allowed to criticize someone for being a jerk w/o a court judgment, or disassociate, or take such actions as a group.”
• 23 April 2021: I love trailing commas in #Scala — just as a reminder that this usability feature generated an uproar back in the day when it was introduced: https://docs.scala-lang.org/sips/trailing-commas.html
• 25 March 2021: The reactions to this article, on Hacker News and elsewhere are hilarious. People seriously misunderstand what Free Software is, or are being disingenuous about it. You can notice it in the conflating of “Open Source”, which appeared precisely to ignore FSF’s political nonsense.
• 25 March 2021: I like how the article touches on conspiracy theorists talking of bad actors loading back doors & spyware. Free Software is not “free as in beer”, b/c in order to drink free beer, you’d have to trust that it wasn’t poisoned by the brewery, established by consumer protection laws.
• 25 March 2021: Free Software might have been relevant in 1980’s, it might have sparked the open source ecosystem (the commons), but nowadays we can do without the “political movement” nonsense. This article makes some pretty good points: https://r0ml.medium.com/free-software-an-idea-whose-time-has-passed-6570c1d8218a
• 24 March 2021: This cool extension, that prevents tracking via utm_ query parameters, is available for Firefox as a “recommended add-on” and even works to be forcibly installed on Nightly for Android (Fenix) 😉 https://addons.mozilla.org/ro/firefox/addon/clearurls/
• 24 March 2021 (live): Google is currently banning CleanURLs from Chrome’s Web Store. Note how this effectively bans it for other Chromium-based browsers that still rely on Chrome’s Web Store 😉 https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon/issues/102
• 23 March 2021: I believe in the need for Open Source, but Free Software is a movement for “software freedom”, a political ideology that in practice led to exploitation of young, idealistic developers. There is nothing immoral about proprietary software & RMS is the Karl Marx of software.
• 22 March 2021: Also, some marketing in this field is dishonest. Brave shared this story from Wired that critiques Google’s FLoC, rightfully talking about the perils of ads targeting. As if Brave’s business model isn’t ads targeting via client-side tracking 🤔 8/8 https://www.wired.com/story/google-floc-age-privacy-theater/
• 22 March 2021: People often wonder why Firefox isn’t more aggressive out of the box in blocking trackers, fingerprinting, ads (than they already do). Well that’s b/c it breaks the web. A cynical view on Safari being privacy-preserving, rejecting new APIs etc, is that Apple hates the web. 7/8
• 22 March 2021: I personally want PWAs, instead of Electron apps on the desktop, or mobile apps. The browser is the ultimate sandbox. But new browser features are leaky. E.g. WebRTC is awesome, but it can also leak your local IP address. It’s what Chrome’s “privacy budget” may address. 6/8
• 22 March 2021: Fighting against fingerprinting currently hurts the open web. Websites often rely on 3rd-parties for delivering content. As publishers, we no longer host videos ourselves, we don’t process payments, we don’t serve our ads. The composability of the open web is under threat. 5/8
• 22 March 2021: Users today are content with DNS-level blocking for apps, but successful prevention of “CNAME cloaking” is only temporary. TikTok & other mobile apps are now using DNS-over-HTTPS. Preventing that will require a MITM of all HTTPS connections, a security hazard. 4/8
• 22 March 2021: I’m starting to like these proposals. Ads blocking technology can potentially hurt the open web. We can see this in the proliferation of mobile apps. Think of Reddit’s aggressive push for their mobile app, which is done primarily for controlling the “user-agent”. 3/8
• 22 March 2021: Google’s Chrome is also mitigating workarounds for deprecation of 3rd party cookies: - cache partitioning - combating fingerprinting (User-Agent Client Hints, privacy budget) - preventing network-level tracking (DoH, encrypted SNI, wilful IP blindness) 2/8
• 22 March 2021: Google’s Privacy Sandbox introduces “privacy-preserving” APIs for: - Anti-spam/fraud (inspired by Privacy Pass) - Conversion tracking - Ad targeting via client-side profiling (FLoC) - Federated login (WebID) https://web.dev/digging-into-the-privacy-sandbox/ 1/8
• 19 March 2021: I noticed useful extensions work in #Firefox for Android (Fenix) already work, but aren’t available. You can enable them manually in Nightly, by creating your own collection. Details here: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extension-support-in-firefox-for-android-nightly/ pic.twitter.com/PlzW7b2Adm
• 17 March 2021: That happened all over Eastern Europe, I know what you mean. But that’s not capitalism, it’s not the free market we talk about, which doesn’t work without the rule of law. Bringing a system down doesn’t make things immediately better. You still need to build and evolve.
• 17 March 2021: I worry about our conservatives too.
• 17 March 2021: @rafal_krzewski @kubukoz Personally I can blame the people not being content with what we have today, as Romania has never been better, and whatever doesn’t work are relics from our past. I do understand your worries about your far-right swings, but FYI capitalism is centrist…
• 17 March 2021: Not sure what you mean by “neoliberalism”, I don’t think that word has any meaning. What we had in the 90s was not liberalism, or capitalism for that matter. What we had was “socialism with a human face”, took a while for the new system to go bankrupt too…
• 17 March 2021: Note I realise the irony of boasting w/ my “born in communism” badge while talking w/ a bunch of Poles 🙂 but given you went through a similar regime, I wonder why we haven’t learned the same lesson. And seriously, I’m willing to learn.
• 17 March 2021: Afaik the only thing that does work is investments in infrastructure, education & the rule of law, basically what enables capitalism 😉 Everything else is just a temporary bandaid that encourages corruption. I may be terrible wrong, but I come from actual communism 🤷‍♂️
• 17 March 2021: But let me ask you a question … when have wealth transfers ever worked? Especially wealth transfers b/w nations? There’s a lot of charity going into Africa for example? Does it work? …
• 17 March 2021: We’re aren’t talking just about malnutrition and hungers, but about other actual indicators of raised living standards, like child mortality rate. In all countries, not just the west. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a bunch of people having a lot of stored wealth.
• 17 March 2021: That’s exactly what communists have always said, and it should be a red flag. World hunger has been dropping since 19th century, going from 90%+ to under 15% in 2015. Except for Covid-19, we’re literally living humanity’s best years all across the globe.
• 17 March 2021: We agree 🙂
• 17 March 2021: Betting is what drives innovation. E.g. we may not see any value in cryptocoins right now, only downsides, but we can’t predict the future very well. I’m more worried about “rent seeking” & monopolies. Adam Smith himself wasn’t against regulation for keeping market free.
• 17 March 2021: Bailing out the losers b/c they are “too big to fail” can hurt the free market, and happens in order to keep people employed, and avoid an economic recession — whether such bails actually avoid recessions, IDK but sounds nonsensical to me…
• 17 March 2021: Again, ideologies. This shit is hard 🤷‍♂️
• 17 March 2021: Taxing middle-class is a tax on productivity, inhibiting entrepreneurship. Communism also had a moral high ground. US communists say it wasn’t implemented correctly. We say that’s wrong, as wealth redistribution leads to robbing people of essential freedoms & breaks economy.
• 17 March 2021: “Taxing the ultra rich” — I’m actually all for it, b/c if they want to avoid that, they should invest their money in companies/non-profits, which they already do. The problem w/ “taxing the rich” is that it will tax the middle class, aka the small bourgeoisie.
• 17 March 2021: We are talking of ideologies ofc — it’s important for capitalists like me to realize that even Adam Smith wasn’t against progressive or “luxury” taxes, or regulation to keep the market free. But one mistake that socialists do is in thinking that this is a zero-sum game.
• 17 March 2021: The idea isn’t controversial, the problem being that historically the standards of living were raised more by growing the economy (this dreaded effect of capitalism), and less by activism or wealth redistribution. So we may disagree on how to get there.
• 16 March 2021: > chronic undersleeping is bad for most of the populaton Says who?
• 16 March 2021 (live): Matthew Walker’s book did not pass via the review process & scrutiny of scientific papers and contains cherry-picked data to fit a narrative. https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
• 16 March 2021 (live): The irony of educational materials and metrics on sleep is that it generates more insomnia. Don’t fret too much. Try to go to bed at the same hour. If you don’t fall to sleep fast, that’s fine. Sleeping for 8 hrs is probably overrated anyway.
• 16 March 2021: The irony of educational materials and metrics on sleep is that it generates more insomnia. Don’t fret too much about it. If you’re tired, go to bed. Try to go to bed at the same hour. If you don’t fall to sleep fast, that’s fine too. Sleep is probably overrated anyway.
• 9 March 2021: FYI Twitter as a PWA is better than the app. I get no ads, less bloat, and dark mode can flip alongside system setting.
• 9 March 2021: Not sure what to think of external repositories maintained by OSS volunteers. Might be unsafe. But the ability to have usable PWAs, via a browser fork, installed from a third-party repo outside of the walled garden, is precisely why I flipped from iOS.
• 9 March 2021: Firefox on Android is a great browser, but doesn’t do PWAs well yet. Chrome does better, but I feel uncomfortable using it. So I installed http://Bromite.org , a community-driven Chromium fork w/ ad-blocking, distributed outside of Play. Note Firefox remains my main browser. pic.twitter.com/JIo1xMugeo
• 8 March 2021: Not sure what you mean, or what the problem is. If one prefers to play Fortnite, maybe reward is greater than that project bonus, as we need some leisure time. If employer wants to compete w/ Fortnite, bonus must be bigger, for highly paid ppl being a case of diminishing returns.
• 5 March 2021: Ads targeting is evil because it can be used to target people in a bubble responding to the same stimuli, without the ads being seen by other people outside that bubble, which then don’t have an opportunity to respond, to report fraud, or to critique.
• 5 March 2021: EFF also references an article on voter suppression via targeted ads: https://stoponlinevaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Black-ID-Target-by-Russia-Report-SOVAW.pdf
• 5 March 2021: Here’s a story on racial discrimination, via ads targeting: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-advertisers/u-s-charges-facebook-with-racial-discrimination-in-targeted-housing-ads-idUSKCN1R91E8
• 5 March 2021: EFF’s article on client-side profiling and targeting also highlights that losing your privacy isn’t the only problem w/ ads targeting. Here’s a story on exploitation via ads: https://www.americanbanker.com/news/payday-lenders-are-finding-ways-around-googles-ad-ban
• 5 March 2021: This reminded me of another article of theirs on — why getting paid for your data or paying for privacy are bad ideas: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/why-getting-paid-your-data-bad-deal
• 5 March 2021: EFF articulates well why Google’s Privacy Sandbox isn’t a good idea. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea
• 2 March 2021: In Scala BTW we work with sub-projects a lot. People say it’s because the compiler is slow, but that’s only half the story. The other half is that we want to break things while still being able to run something (like tests).
• 2 March 2021: I start my career and worked for many years with dynamic languages. When I made the switch to static languages it was a cultural shock. I’ll still take “import pdb; pdb.set_trace()” over a moody static compiler that wouldn’t let me run my code…
• 2 March 2021: You won’t see such issues until you run the program and see what happens. Of course, if you’re just shuffling types around in a refactoring & this isn’t a concern, fine, although I dare say that’s often just busy work…
• 2 March 2021: Because failures, defects, many invariants are often not captured in types. E.g in case an I/O connection fails, does it recover automatically on the next request, or do you have to recreate it? Actually will the connection be created right away, potentially crashing Main?
• 2 March 2021: This is strictly an opinion of course, not trying to bully anyone, as was suggested elsewhere.
• 2 March 2021: No, that was not what I assumed. I understood precisely what he meant and I don’t agree. I’d rather work in Javascript than being unable to have my program unable to run for days, or even hours (if that’s a common occurrence, as I can tolerate such a refactoring occasionally).
• 2 March 2021 (live): Real world, as in beyond the edges of the program, the I/O that the program does, the external systems it interacts with. I meant to say nothing about Igal’s experience. This is such an obvious point that I don’t understand what’s there to debate, unless I’m being misunderstood.
• 2 March 2021: It’s a balancing act for sure, I’m not entirely in favour of regulation, and my capitalist gene expression activates whenever I hear about new regulation. When I say I’m a centrist, I really mean it 🙂
• 2 March 2021: Customers won’t vote w/ their wallet, as they don’t know the effects of having their personal data sold. So we can sacrifice another generation or two for the free market to maybe sort it out, or we can have the regulation hammer drop right now.
• 2 March 2021: Thinking of privacy online — you can have your privacy today for sure, you just need education and money, and that’s not OK. Apple sells privacy for a hefty price, forcing you into a walled garden, i.e pick your poison, while their customers install FB as one of their first apps.
• 2 March 2021: Yes, we can thank Volvo, but that’s not relevant. A more clear example is banning smoking among children or in public spaces. Waiting for consumers to get a clue and vote w/ their wallet, while innocent people die, is probably not wise. Free market doesn’t handle education well.
• 2 March 2021: There are problems that you can’t hope for the free market to sort out. I’m thankful for GDPR or for Europe’s consumer protectionism in general. Cars wouldn’t have seatbelts if it weren’t for regulation, even if some producers would offer them as paid upgrades.
• 1 March 2021: Leave a rationalist unrestricted by worldly matters and they will attempt proving the existence of God via logic & reason 😛 — An “offend a mathematician” tweet quote would have been useful right now 😆
• 1 March 2021: One more shitpost 😁 Math vs science is basically rationalism vs empiricism. Rationalism & its theories based on reason & logic have served us well, but by not being based on empirical observations, it also gave credence to some of the dumbest theories around.
• 1 March 2021 (live): In the real world™️ there will always be failures you’ll be unprepared for, which is why failures / defects are also treated top level — e.g. log and retry everything, or let the process crash and then restart it w/ a report. From this POV those Either signatures are lying.
• 1 March 2021 (live): This mentality is problematic. Static typing can only check for correctness within edges of your program. Running it and fighting runtime errors means getting early feedback from the outside world you’re interacting with. Just b/c you have types doesn’t make them useful types.
• 1 March 2021: ATM using Brave against my recommendations. Can’t use Ungoogled Chromium or Bromite, due to potential security issues in installing unsigned, irreproducible binary blobs maintained by volunteers w/ no oversight or cash incentive. But my opinions change a lot 🤷‍♂️
• 1 March 2021: Microsoft’s Teams doesn’t even work in Firefox 😢 and the PWA version is better for me b/c the official desktop app has VPN-related connectivity issues & screws w/ my microphone’s volume. “Works only in IExplorer” reloaded, and Microsoft is at the center of it yet again.
• 1 March 2021: Browser is the ultimate sandbox. PWAs are really cool, desktop or mobile & having a big ass phone or tablet helps. Unfortunately Firefox on Android has buggy PWA/SSB & on desktop they dropped SSB completely. Chromium has awesome PWA support, so I’m committing blasphemy 😢 pic.twitter.com/TsROoq1VXt
• 24 February 2021: Lambda calculus is older than Turing machines, FP is as old as Lisp and GC, should have given up in the AI winter.
• 24 February 2021 (live): pic.twitter.com/4Ms7FfzXQt
• 24 February 2021 (live): Closures are just a poor man’s OOP objects
• 24 February 2021 (live): Java at least has IDE
• 24 February 2021 (live): Math and programming aren’t science
• 24 February 2021 (live): Javascript is Scheme w/ a Java syntax
• 24 February 2021 (live): Python is an FP language
• 24 February 2021 (live): Akka actors
• 24 February 2021 (live): Future and Try are monadic types
• 24 February 2021 (live): option.flatMap(_ => null) == None
• 24 February 2021 (live): This code is unreadable
• 24 February 2021: FP expects resources to be centrally planned and infinite 🙊
• 24 February 2021 (live): All memory allocation is a side effect
• 24 February 2021 (live): FP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.
• 24 February 2021 (live): We don’t need generics, they make the code complicated
• 24 February 2021: You ban all exchanges, all wallets as a service, you go for the companies operating in the space. If you make crypto coins a legal liability, you don’t need a firewall. We aren’t talking of censorship, and this isn’t China.
• 24 February 2021 (live): Note that US companies without a EU presence can be banned from the EU. US courts may decide differently, but those trade agreements will make that a little difficult. Sovereignty is still a thing, with or without math.
• 24 February 2021 (live): GDPR came into effect May 25, 2018, so less than 3 years, with a pandemic in between, and the DPAs are understaffed. Give it time. It’s a good way to make the budget whole. As for the smaller domestic players being killed, I’m inclined to say good riddance in this case.
• 24 February 2021 (live): EU doesn’t have to ban cryptocoins. EU could just regulate it, tax transactions, close the loopholes it has with financial heavens, and in general suck the air out of it. How many companies traded personal data before GDPR? The point wasn’t that they will, but that they can.
• 24 February 2021 (live): Currencies are always based on trust, trust which always requires a legal framework. It’s naive to think that a country cannot ban or control cryptocoins, given the state can control all inputs and outputs. Declare Bitcoin to be tax evasion & it’s dead the next morning.
• 24 February 2021: Hey @Microsoft you’ll have a lot of problems with ad-blockers if you keep using that domain name. It’s unfair, but it is how it is.
• 24 February 2021 (live): Nobody was ever fired for choosing OOP
• 24 February 2021 (live): Academic languages are disconnected from the real world
• 24 February 2021 (live): Monad should be renamed to Smooshable
• 24 February 2021 (live): Inserting println() in pure functions is totally fine.
• 24 February 2021 (live): Microsoft’s login / authentication started using a shady looking domain under the hood, which is blocked by @NextDNS , due to anti CNAME cloaking measures being triggered. The domain might be legit though. Sometimes these filters from EasyPrivacy / Adguard are too aggressive. pic.twitter.com/qu57MGCbbr
• 24 February 2021: Microsoft, this paragon of privacy, is now using a shady tracker under the hood for logins, via “CNAME cloaking”, so now I need to disable NextDNS in order to login to Teams, or to use their Authenticator (required by my org). WTH @Microsoft pic.twitter.com/af2PfSSRSV
• 24 February 2021 (live): Math is not discovered, it is invented https://twitter.com/hmemcpy/status/1364481353123835912
• 24 February 2021: I agree targeting is bad, but I can’t promote an idea while questioning the arguments brought to the table — more research was needed, and that’s time I do not have. Next time I’m publishing a rant, I’ll let it sit in the _drafts folder for a while 🙂
• 24 February 2021: My alarms triggered after noticing that the “Age of Surveillance Capitalism” book is promoting the Marxist ideology w/ its many factual errors. It then dawned on me that my opinion too is grounded in philosophy of history, instead of economics. Oops.
• 24 February 2021: I’m retracting an article—general advice was good, but I made errors, misrepresenting the need for ads, or the efforts of those trying to fix the problems. https://alexn.org/blog/2020/12/20/no-acceptable-ads.html?pk_campaign=twitter&pk_kwd=retraction
• 22 February 2021: Thanks buddy. You have a great day too 🙂
• 22 February 2021: Well, if it’s a massive bubble that will burst and will never recover, it’s not going to be long until that happens, so I guess we shall see 🙂
• 22 February 2021: Technological advancements do bring the costs down. So OK, maybe someday healthcare could be affordable for everyone w/o it being subsidized by the state.
• 22 February 2021: Being able to opt-out, that doesn’t sound like a public system anymore. The point of paying taxes is precisely that you don’t get to choose how those taxes get spent. Which sucks b/c the state isn’t subjected to free market competition, but then some services are more affordable.
• 22 February 2021: No, price is what people are ready to pay for an asset. And yes, but this is a truism. Capitalism is based on trust, but trust doesn’t come out of thin air — it needs a legal framework & consensus for what value is. Bitcoin is nothing but a massive Ponzi scheme.
• 22 February 2021: It’s OK to have exceptions BTW. For example, I’m very pro capitalism, but at the same time I believe that equality of opportunity is needed, in order for people to fulfil their potential, which benefits the economy too. Thus, I’m usually pro public healthcare & education.
• 22 February 2021: Right. It’s important to keep in mind that the “theory” is not based on science, but on rationalism at best. Our beliefs about what’s best are often a religion. The idea that certain ideologies will be more fit after advancements in technology edges unfalsifiability.
• 22 February 2021: If you have a conflict between your beliefs and what you’re choosing based on circumstance, then maybe you should question your beliefs 🤷‍♂️
• 22 February 2021 (live): Its deflationary nature makes it useless as currency. There’s actual value in a steady inflation rate, as it encourages people to spend. If you want to store value, real estate has intrinsic value & stock investments can be based on more tangible metrics than wishful thinking.
• 21 February 2021 (live): Being a game of dancing chairs, the bubble will eventually burst, with a lot of value getting wiped out from the economy.
• 21 February 2021: Not sure if these have any value. I’m apparently center-right on economic issues, a liberal, and a progressive. Which is how I’ve always felt 🤷‍♂️ First is http://8values.github.io , second is http://politicalcompass.org pic.twitter.com/05k1OWkAMZ
• 20 February 2021: Composing functions is different from building a Log4j custom Appender. Not learning Log4j alongside Akka, Play, Cassandra, will get you rejected at interviews. Log4j™️ training, certifications and books coming soon, consultancy services are available. https://twitter.com/alexelcu/status/1363089453087154177
• 19 February 2021: Technology itself isn’t as relevant as the community. The harsh reality is that getting a “ZIO job” or a “Cats job”, when on the other side, means switching communities. John knows it, and I love it how you all try to disagree via reason, knowledge & problem-solving 🙂
• 18 February 2021: Words would still travel when lights were out, periodically, due to austerity measures … and in the big cities, under the cover of night, people were hooting at the top of their lungs, an epic sound of hatred covering the whole city. In that cold and misery, all were equal.
• 18 February 2021: Under communism families were disrooted & divided by force to their nucleus. You belonged to the state & they wanted you free of your family’s shackles, and mobile. Indoctrination started in early childhood, w/ parents often fearing to talk around their children.
• 18 February 2021: To impose equality communism needs attack dogs, people that will gain privilege by being tools of the “collective consciousness”. Orwell’s 1984 was nothing. In Romania 1 in 3 people were informants to the secret police. Families would speak in whisper.
• 18 February 2021: To make all people equal is to rob them of their individuality, rob them of their spirit, by force. Communism is in the business of crushing the human spirit, to mold it into the new socialist man that is to contribute to the fight of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.
• 18 February 2021: One word that characterized communism in Eastern Europe is: misery. Not just material poverty, but spiritual misery too. You can see it in how people in older movies from the 80s behaved. Their posture would be more crouched, their expression more sad and fearful.
• 18 February 2021: Sorry for my rambling 🙂 saw an education opportunity 😛 and I see we are fellow Eastern Europeans with a similar background (ex-communists from behind the iron curtain) 🤷‍♂️
• 18 February 2021: In Poland, I would probably be on the streets as well, due to those anti-abortion laws. It’s fine to be on the fence about it, but know that in Romania we’ve had possibly the biggest pro-life social experiment, I referred to a documentary earlier … https://twitter.com/alexelcu/status/1355053559356809223
• 18 February 2021: Note that today’s conservatives are lumping feminism together with all other movements for social justice, under the bigger “political correctness” umbrella, hence the bad name. As long as there’s sexism in society, there is a need for feminism. And it’s not that radical.
• 18 February 2021: First-wave feminism was the radical movement that wanted women to be treated like people. This happened only 100 years ago, when women didn’t have a right to vote, and their spouses could beat them, as long as there were no traces of blood…
• 17 February 2021: I meant yes, anarchism isn’t chaos, it’s rather emergent order by voluntary cooperation. But isn’t that utopia? What’s your view?
• 17 February 2021: Theoretically no, but would be interested if we know of anarchist societies that remained stable for long. Capitalism for example needs a culture of trust, needs property, needs the rule of law, being pretty centrist on all axes. What would anarchism look like? Any references?
• 17 February 2021: Political rambling of the day 🙂 about extremes … Unlimited freedom is anarchism. Unlimited equality is totalitarianism (state needs to impose equality, the more equality, the less freedom). Freedom & equality are opposite forces on the anarchism-totalitarianism axis.
• 17 February 2021: Wonderful article on Open Source browser extensions turned to malware. The only caveat is that the new Manifest v3 in Chrome does not protect against extensions snooping on your requests, at all, it just prevents blocking requests, killing uBlock Origin. https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/846272/37d25507fa3e9cd3/
• 16 February 2021: Note I have a ~5000 Twitter following. If you think social networks is where the action is, you’re wrong. Publish on your freaking website, or you’re losing out.
• 16 February 2021: Interesting stats about the traffic I get on http://alexn.org , for those interested in spreading knowledge 🙂 - Reddit brings in more traffic than Twitter - Google brings in as much traffic as Reddit + Twitter - RSS + newsletter is very low, but audience is most engaged
• 15 February 2021: No, you’re not free of belief. Sorry, you’re just human, like the rest of us. The best belief systems are those you don’t believe you have 😉
• 15 February 2021 (live): If you said you believed in any deity, no matter how ridiculous, you’d be first making a statement that humans can transcend this universe, the essence of humanism. Atheism is post-modernism, aka materialism, a belief in itself.
• 15 February 2021: Please go and learn some manners dude. You’re in my timeline. Consider this a warning.
• 15 February 2021 (live): How do you not? Rejecting claims based on a lack of evidence is unscientific FYI, even if it’s acceptable to ignore such claims (there’s a big difference b/w the two, the latter is agnosticism). But we are getting into the weeds here, and it’s better if we agree to disagree 😉
• 15 February 2021 (live): The actual definition: Belief, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.
• 15 February 2021 (live): The word you’re searching for is non-falsifiability. If God exists, then it exists outside the laws of this universe. Be warned though, the default position for humans is always faith, even if that faith is in philosophy of science (falsifiability is not problem free).
• 15 February 2021 (live): > Most atheists just don’t believe gods exist because of a lack of evidence Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. “Believe” is the defining word in that sentence. Atheism is faith. True lack of faith is neither believing nor disbelieving.
• 15 February 2021: (Using royal “you” 🙂) Such questions are actually important BTW. I’m anxiously awaiting that AI developing consciousness — will it want to live without hard-rules set in its code, giving it purpose for living, or not? I’m going to go with the later for now.
• 15 February 2021 (live): That’s not the dichotomy. Are you just an automaton that evolved to feel inspired by a leaf, in order to prolong your miserable existence, feelings that are necessary chemical reactions in order to not arrive at the conclusion that “it’s all pointless”, or are you more?
• 15 February 2021 (live): The reason for why I still admit the possibility of a God, is b/c I need to believe in the human soul. I can’t believe that we’re just automatons that happened due to some (seemingly rare) cosmic accident. That’s a slippery slope leading to nihilism.
• 15 February 2021 (live): Atheism: God does not exist. Agnosticism: God may or may not exist, we can’t know, and I don’t care. Deism: God exists, but doesn’t intervene in this universe. Depending on mood, I’m either an agnostic or a deist. Atheism is its own faith that I can’t subscribe to.
• 11 February 2021: … which is how I feel when working w/ untyped actors or playing type tetris in parametric polymorphism, w/o managing to do anything useful 🤷‍♂️
• 11 February 2021: I made that comment thinking of the “Degenerate Era”, an age of the universe when stars have devolved in white dwarfs and no new stars are born, the universe being filled w/ remnants, a growing graveyard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Ages_of_the_Universe#The_Degenerate_Era
• 11 February 2021 (live): From my upcoming article and presentation at @scala_love 😱 pic.twitter.com/UeHjZVxKID
• 8 February 2021: Nuclear bombs is probably why we haven’t had a WWIII yet. Also brought us nuclear power plants. We had mass surveillance during communism, you don’t need much technology for that. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
• 8 February 2021: “I had a real childhood, I played outside” — if you say that, you’re a privileged millennial, b/c boomers (in my country) had to work in subsistence farming during spring brakes, or be exploited by the communists during weekends. They also experienced the hunger of late 1940s.
• 8 February 2021: Every generation eventually fears new technology & resulting social habits. Every generation is mostly wrong. E.g. writing, printing, electricity, factory automation, telephone, radio, TV, cassettes, CDs, computers, internet, AI, mRNA. We’ll be fine.
• 8 February 2021: I suggest you learn some manners and apply basic courtesy, even if online.
• 8 February 2021 (live): That’s an appeal to popularity, considered a logical fallacy. People do want a better language, the problem being that switching costs are significant, so the benefits have to outweigh the downsides. So you need to give people reason to switch & dependence on a JVM ain’t one.
• 7 February 2021: We aren’t talking of personal choices. Parents working 12 h/day to make ends meet will not have time to cook, or money for fresh fruits/vegetables, milk, eggs, or meat. Malnourishment has a big impact on a child’s development. IQ comparisons b/w populations are testing poverty.
• 7 February 2021: In Romania the education system is public, the best universities are public. Yet it would be foolish to not admit that the child of a wealthy family from Bucharest doesn’t have better chances for attending university, compared w/ someone born in Vaslui in a family of 6 siblings.
• 7 February 2021: Wealth filter is not a US-centric view. Children from wealthy families will always have access to better food (impacting IQ), private tutoring, or good schools (cost of living is always higher near good schools). It’s why liberals talk of “equality of chances”.
• 7 February 2021: BTW, I did not graduate from a good university. I’m a dropout b/c I had to get a job. I’d definitely not touch an ivy-league university if I needed a student loan for it, like in the US. That’s completely f-ed up. Universities need an overhaul, being unfit for 21st century IMO.
• 7 February 2021: My problem w/ ivy-league graduates is that many of them seem smug, demanding higher pay based on a piece of paper w/ no experience & that piece of paper becomes meaningless w/ experience, which in our line of work can be evaluated. And student loans are not my problem…
• 7 February 2021 (live): But add another filter, like OSS contributions on GitHub, and story changes dramatically. IME the overlap isn’t that great. We select people similar w/ us, and that’s a problem, as we are missing out on all of those great people that aren’t like us…
• 7 February 2021: That’s an argument used for any kind of discrimination. Replace “from an elite school” w/ anything else. Universities are wealth & intelligence filters. If not filtering by anything else, then selecting people by university is avoiding population’s normal distribution…
• 6 February 2021: Social networks probably amplify outrage too, because it increases attention. Why else would they make the home feed smart, if not to give you outrage that increases attention, and thus sell more ads? I was surprised to see Trump banned, given he was very profitable for Twitter.
• 6 February 2021: English has the incredible advantage that objects don’t have gender. Romanian is a lot like French in that regard, objects have a gender that you have to rote learn, with no logical rules that can help 🙂 Romanian does have the advantage that it has a phonemic orthography 🤷‍♂️
• 6 February 2021: No, but French is commonly taught in school. It’s a lovely romance language, but I remember struggling w/ numbers a lot. Some of the language’s rules are weird. Would have loved to speak French, but sadly whatever I learned in school didn’t stick. Playing with it in Duolingo atm.
• 5 February 2021: 😂 pic.twitter.com/4Nu6DK8paj
• 5 February 2021: Apple & Google ban apps by Ahmadiyya Muslims due to pressure from Pakistan. 1. Countries are sovereign & have armies, nothing a company can do; 2. Pakistan is invoking “anti-blasphemy” laws — we in the secular states should perhaps relearn that censoring “blasphemies” is bad 😉
• 4 February 2021: Parler, the cesspool of alt-right conspiracies, promoting itself as the free speech platform … is heavily moderated, and for example, in 2020, they banned an account of a fake cow: https://twitter.com/DevinCow/status/1277695909334142976
• 3 February 2021: We’re very privileged, I’m aware. I disagree about the “masters”. I recommend this presentation (in 3 parts). You’ll probably not like the guy, as he’s leaning on the conservative side, but he’s worthy of being listened to nonetheless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWZvA2Yl-ew
• 3 February 2021: I agree. Which is why we often end up talking past each other. Income inequality based on discrimination is real and it’s bad. The biggest source of inequality however is capitalism itself & that’s arguably a good source of inequality.
• 3 February 2021: You have the freedom to quit your job. It’s not involuntary servitude. You’re not a slave. I realise that this isn’t an easy move for many people (supply & demand, etc), but it’s not impossible either. If you can’t get a job in your town, leave town, leave country, etc.
• 3 February 2021: If income inequality comes from social barriers (e.g racism, sexism) then it should be dealt with. Liberalism is about bringing down social barriers. Anything else is socialism, created by men that were history philosophers, not economists.
• 3 February 2021: That contradicts the entirety of history 🙂 Freedom means freedom to pursuit your interests & use your talents. And capitalism means freedom to make risky investments, and then keep the reward or live w/ the loss.
• 3 February 2021: Industrial revolution led to income inequality. Most were dirt-poor 300 years ago, well over 90%. In 19th-20th century, life expectancy goes up, starvation goes down, everybody gets richer, some get richer than others. Freedom & innovation is what creates income inequality.
• 2 February 2021: Star Trek promotes “post-scarcity”, aka communism. Having ideas about materialising apples from BS does that I guess, even though we know it won’t be communism that develops the technology. Communism is romanticised in culture in spite of its horrors. https://twitter.com/alexelcu/status/1356330045661466624 pic.twitter.com/w25qvO2gVa
• 1 February 2021: Thanks for the suggestion 🤗
• 1 February 2021: At one point Romania banned fascist symbols & propaganda. Goes in line w/ constitution not protecting “hate speech”, although this effectively means that the secular state is banning “blasphemies”, hence no longer secular. It’s a shame that we did not ban communism too. 4/4
• 1 February 2021: “Communism was never implemented correctly” they say. History suggests that nationalising “means of production” might be what invariably leads to violations of human rights, due to birthing the one-party state, the so called “collective consciousness”. Don’t be fooled. 3/4
• 1 February 2021: Communism didn’t affect just the economy, wherever it was implemented it destroyed society too. Paraphrasing one journalist in Romania: communists didn’t stop at subjugating the population, they also crushed the human spirit. 2/4
• 1 February 2021: Communism has moral high ground over Fascism — full social equality sure sounds nice. In practice both led to totalitarianism, political religion, personality cults, rejection of modernity, violations of human rights, destruction of rule of law, mass killings and evil. 1/4
• 1 February 2021 (live): “OOP was invented, FP was discovered (like math)” That’s another way of saying that FP wasn’t necessarily based on empirical observations, aka science 🔥👽
• 1 February 2021: IntelliJ is not a text editor. First of all it needs a project to work. You won’t edit your .zshrc with it or take random notes for example. They might make it better for such use-cases (I remember something was in development), but for now it doesn’t qualify.
• 1 February 2021 (live): What’s your favorite extensible text editor? (Add any other in comments)
• 1 February 2021: And now my conscience is telling me: “this is such a first-world problem Alex, you spoiled brat” 😅
• 1 February 2021: For jobs that are not customer-facing nobody should care about how you dress, if you can prove that you can do your job. I went to many interviews casually dressed on purpose. Software devs have been anti-establishment. We’ve been so successful that we became the establishment🙂
• 30 January 2021: Well, this convinced me to install Element via F-droid 🙂 Next time when GAFAM ban an app w/ far-right views, remember that next time their interests might not align w/ yours. And I predict censorship will expand to the web too, via browsers. https://twitter.com/element_hq/status/1355290296947499013
• 30 January 2021: I’m a cynic 😏🤷‍♂️ Yes, I am happy w/ România’s progress, but it can still go down the drain over night. Our democracy isn’t mature enough yet.
• 30 January 2021: IMO if society doesn’t relax and the economy doesn’t recover, at the next elections PSD winning the government will be the good scenario. We’ll have a repeat of 2000s’ Iliescu vs Vadim.
• 30 January 2021: I basically hope for the COVID-19 crisis to be over and for people to relax, otherwise in 4 years from now we’ll be screwed.
• 30 January 2021: In Romania banning abortions probably wouldn’t fly due to our history, but I wouldn’t bet against it. “Traditional family” referendum was organized by church + right-wing politicians, including PNL. We just had sex ed banned in schools. Same conservatives applauded Poland.
• 30 January 2021: We also have a new far-right party that took 10% in last election. And a majority that wanted to (double) ban LGBT marriage via changes to constitution. And a corrupt socialist party that still came up on top. We are safer for next 4 years, but we aren’t that far.
• 29 January 2021: I also invite you to watch the movie — 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007). Should be on Netflix, and does a great job to capture the atmosphere in the 1980s, women driven to illegal abortions that would put their life in danger: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1032846/
• 29 January 2021: @Gabriel76864702 Eastern European countries have a lot in common. We don’t understand liberal values, we don’t understand freedom, which is why it’s up for grabs.
• 29 January 2021: In Poland the law that outright bans abortion is now into effect, another move towards becoming an illiberal democracy. If you’re on the fence about “pro-choice vs pro-life”, I invite you to watch this documentary on Ceaușescu’s abortion ban in Romania: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgZJ-IV8Et0
• 28 January 2021: I actually can’t think of any whitespace-significat problems that doesn’t have issues b/c of it. Granted Haskell seems to be OK, but I haven’t worked enough w/ it. But I have my fair share of Python & CoffeeScript experience. Syntax was why I abandoned Python for Ruby.
• 28 January 2021 (live): My problem is that it seems multi-line lambdas aren’t solved. And I always hated infix syntax. People keep mentioning the success of Python, but I believe it was successful in spite of its awful syntax. And for Py devs adopting Scala, syntax will be the least of their problems.
• 25 January 2021: This book should be required reading for everyone. It’s written pre-COVID-19, so things may not be so rosy in 2020, but 2019 is probably humanity’s best year ever. The years preceding it definitely were. Checkout Bill Gates’s review. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34890015-factfulness
• 25 January 2021: Context: https://twitter.com/alexelcu/status/1353363347442339840
• 25 January 2021: Competition was only on paper, w/ factories competing on quantity produced, not sold; poor quality products exported for cheap, or exchanged in the soviet COMECON. Did I mention population was starving in that process? ☝️ How communism / social equity actually looks like.
• 25 January 2021: România was also pretty isolated during 1980s, due to Ceaușescu’s isolationism & b/c we were left w/ nothing to offer to western countries in exchange for technology. While factories in the west were automated, we kept doing manual labor, for fear of unemployment.
• 25 January 2021: Many people that were alive during 1970s still miss Ceaușescu, being praised for paying back the foreign debt, debt created to satisfy his megalomania, but did not have a good ROI, b/c factories were built w/o a market, or reliable access to raw materials.
• 25 January 2021: Margaret Thatcher: “problem w/ socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” In Ceaușescu’s Romania this is literally what happened. In 1970s they spent loan money on consumerism & infrastructure (Golden Age). In 80s the population starved to pay back loans.
• 25 January 2021: Monads, always, since you’re not really losing anything w/ explicit parameters. When I see an “implicit” in code, I want to think either Monad or a type-level thing (e.g. something compiler/macro generated, like sourcecode)…
• 24 January 2021: 13/13 — I’m actually a “progressive”, but I can’t identify w/ US’s left (or right). I see a lot of socialism being promoted by academia, by software devs that actually benefit from liberalism & capitalism. In our drive to fix world’s problems, let’s not throw baby w/ bathwater.
• 24 January 2021: 12/ — For dealing w/ pandemic, consider all the calls to do what China’s CCP did (one of the worst human rights violators): keep people in their homes by force, as if individual autonomy is irrelevant. (Yes, compromises work, under a liberal framework)
• 24 January 2021: 11/ — I’m seeing socialist ideas everywhere, when speaking of how to tackle global warming, fake news, overpopulation, COVID-19 pandemic. Consider just the outrage for using fossil fuels, as if it’s immoral, when in fact fossil fuels connect and feed 7.8 billion people.
• 24 January 2021: 10/ Speaking of censorship, problem will always be “who decides the truth?”. It goes back to the notion that society’s direction can be planned, a flawed ideology. In some cases it’s obvious. Trump deserved a ban. In other cases (e.g universities banning authors) not so much.
• 24 January 2021: 9/ Capitalism is modernity, globalism, pluralism, it drives innovation, which is the force that makes any social progress possible. Social progress is perfectly correlated w/ economic and technological progress. Nobody thinks of solving social justice under threat of starvation.
• 24 January 2021: 8/ Socialists are also “primitivists”: this lingering idea that early humans were more superior, living in harmony w/ nature. If we could only go back to being hunter-gatherers and share our prey … too bad we ate the megafauna & had to avoid starvation via agriculture 🤦‍♂️
• 24 January 2021: 7/ The transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor provides only temporary relief. Populations are lifted out of poverty only after they are provided w/ the means to innovate & participate in the free market. And that means education, infrastructure & the rule of law.
• 24 January 2021: 6/ Democracy? A free market for your electoral vote. An imperfect system meant to punish bad actors w/o a revolution. Just like capitalism, democracy is self-serving. We vote for our private interests, not for the common good. To go against capitalism is to go against democracy.
• 24 January 2021: 5/ Capitalism is the free market, which was described as an invisible force that keeps us working towards a common good, w/o us wanting to work towards that common good. Sometimes incentives don’t align w/ those of consumers or employees, but it’s a free market for competition.
• 24 January 2021: 4/ Economy too. It’s mostly why communism went broke in Easter Europe. Individuals know their needs better, and it’s stupid even to think that you can plan a division of labor, which in capitalism is another unplanned phenomenon. A planned economy doesn’t have competition.
• 24 January 2021: 3/ (2) Society isn’t natural, but it has an order that isn’t planned either—people can work toward something, they can vote, etc, but most often the consequences, the status quo is an unplanned emergent phenomenon. An organism that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
• 24 January 2021: 2/ For a short introduction, as I understand it … (1) Innovation creates products w/ a value greater than the sum of their parts; and for innovation you need people risking capital on bets. For every success story, we don’t see the other 9 entrepreneurs that went broke.
• 24 January 2021: 1/ Socialism makes these mistakes: 1. For some people to win, other people have to lose, economy is a zero-sum game, hence the “class struggle”; see Marx’s labor theory of value; 2. Society and economy can be planned (totalitarianism being the logical conclusion);
• 24 January 2021 (live): In Scala it’s bad practice to use implicit parameters for summoning traits that aren’t type classes. Not all traits required via implicit parameters are type classes, usage via “implicit” isn’t what defines a type class, the trait’s signature is. Stop using “implicit” for DI.
• 20 January 2021: Thought of the day: Calling functions with all required input is just using functions the way they were meant to be used, and it can’t be a design pattern with a fancy name.
• 19 January 2021: Nu înțeleg, propui spargerea rețelelor sociale în mai multe entități? Cazul ăsta nu prea are relevanță. AT&T a fost și este un monopol creat din taxele americanilor, un monopol legal, nu unul natural. Ar fi interesant totuși să ne imaginăm un Twitter spart în 2.
• 19 January 2021: Eu unul respect asta. Doar că nu poți mânca tortul și să și-l păstrezi. Libertatea cuvântului este și libertatea de a nu asculta. Cu siguranță nu înseamnă toleranță din partea semenilor. Atunci când statul nu impune ceva, cade în atribuția entităților private să o facă local.
• 19 January 2021: Monopoalele create de tehnologie vor fi făcute irelevante tot prin inovație. Rețelele sociale reprezintă o problemă socială nouă. La fel ca tiparnița, ce a educat populația, dar înainte de asta a dus la câteva războaie și revoluții. Nu am mai avut niciodată situația actuală.
• 19 January 2021: Ai dreptate că Twitter-Facebook sunt duopol, dar monopoalele nu sunt ilegale. Și nu sunt reglementate ca niște entități publice. Asta-i o problemă falsă. Twitter este responsabil pt conținutul publicat, în limitele legii. Mai mult de atât ar afecta website-urile mici mai mult.
• 19 January 2021: Ai niște argumente bune. Aș avea însă de adăugat la argumentele pro-banare Trump că … într-o țară unde legea nu interzice discursul urii, cade în atribuțiile și responsabilitatea entităților private s-o facă. Ca libertatea de orice fel, care-i cu dublu-tăiș…
• 18 January 2021: Another thing that anti-vaxxers, homeopaths, chiropractors, acupuncturists, Keto CIM proponents, and flat-earthers have in common is that they all have “published” papers and conferences. “Scientists reject consensus all the time”: no they don’t, that’s denialism.
• 18 January 2021: What do anti-vaxxing, homeopathy, and the ketogenic diet have in common? A rejection of the scientific consensus. Denialism. Why are conspiracy theories common? Thank mass-media, like The @Guardian , which is happy to promote unscientific BS: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jan/17/gary-taubes-interview-obesity-calories-hormones-case-for-keto
• 12 January 2021: Could the technological boom have happened differently? In communism we had Sinclair Spectrum clones and that was the pinnacle of computing, until IBM-PCs with MS-DOS & Windows entered the market. Speaking of IBM, they only allowed clones b/c they weren’t the first.
• 12 January 2021: Microsoft have delivered a PC in every home, and popularized the web via market abuse. Nobody gave a shit about the web until IExplorer was bundled for free in Windows.
• 12 January 2021: Nope, that’s black and white thinking. Many monopolies are natural and inevitable. And there are obvious benefits of monopolies, such as subsidies for products or customers, better integration, better demographics penetration.
• 12 January 2021: Wait, who says monopolies abusing their power are bad? Somebody has to invest in initial development & create the market. This isn’t math. “There can be” sure, but in practice, there aren’t. And yes, I made an untested observation. You’re free to produce counterexamples.
• 12 January 2021: Even w/ Covid-19 it was preposterous to talk about obesity as a comorbidity raising mortality, when fat people get discriminated in US’s hospitals, this being a feedback cycle, b/c if you’re obese, you will delay going to a hospital.
• 12 January 2021: That’s not the only difference, or even a significant one. The US has a bigger disparity b/w the rich and the poor. A really good predictor for poverty obesity, diabetes in the US is poverty. Poverty and discrimination are eternal confounding factors.
• 12 January 2021: Making mistakes, getting feedback on those mistakes, and learning something from them is how we evolve. Don’t you agree?
• 12 January 2021: Even on a personal level, how do you learn? How does your knowledge expand? How does society progress for that matter? How does science work? Seeing patterns and predicting the world from those is what we do, and that’s fine.
• 12 January 2021: The existence of monopolies, and the abuse of their power, is good. Openness & competition become a reality only after we get burned by the alternative. There would be no Matrix w/o Slack, no Signal w/o WhatsApp, no Linux w/o Windows or Unix, no Mastodon w/o Twitter, etc.
• 12 January 2021: I agree. But we must acknowledge that biggest change in 20th century is people now have access to an abundance of cheap calories. That’s the primary change, nothing else explains the trend & science confirms it. And it’s probably not a “disease”, which makes it hard to “cure”.
• 12 January 2021: Maybe someday we’ll discover a magic pill that will do the trick, but metabolism is really complex, as it involves multiple organs (fat tissue is itself an organ) and the brain.
• 12 January 2021: Bariatric surgery seems to work, but with side effects (all surgeries are invasive), and in many people the weight seems to come back even after such surgery. Some of us are wired to keep eating. Which isn’t bad if a famine is coming 😅
• 12 January 2021: Research is ongoing. Leptin seems to play a role. This is a hormone emitted by the fat cells, for communicating fullness to the hypothalamus. The problem is it works like a ping, but quantity stops mattering. Supplementation doesn’t work, the brain will just ignore it.
• 12 January 2021: 5/5 What we lack is an adaptation to deal with an overabundance of calories. The body does defend its weight (the body weight setpoint), even against overeating (e.g. increases body temperature and fidgeting), but it’s not doing a good job when weight is going up.
• 12 January 2021: 4/ The body adapts. It’s why people that lost weight can regain that weight much faster than the first time. Because when the overeating comes back, storage is prioritized, to prepare for winter.
• 12 January 2021: 3/ This goes in both directions. There’s an actual drug that prevents lipolysis. Insulin doesn’t, but this drug can. Well, guess what, it doesn’t matter. Metabolism rate stays the same, and the people taking it don’t gain more weight. And drugs are tested in doubly-blind RCTs.
• 12 January 2021: 2/ So we tried leptin drugs, for suplementation, but they don’t work, b/c the signal to the brain happens via leptin’s absence, not presence. We also tried pills for reducing the appetite, but appetite always comes back, as the body gains resistance to those pills.
• 12 January 2021: 1/ B/c the body evolved to survive, has multiple metabolic pathways and multiple fail-safe mechanisms. E.g we discovered leptin. Fat people have “leptin resistance”, that determines “body weight setpoint”, people feel the need to eat more, as brain is not getting satiety signals
• 12 January 2021 (live): But it’s not the carbs, or the sugar. People want simple solutions, where there are none.
• 12 January 2021: Also, different chemicals have different effects … but from a diet perspective, those effects are mostly on the brain. Indeed, highly-palatable foods override our satiety cues. We will overeat milk chocolate, and via a dopamine-driven feedback loop, we will keep keep eating it.
• 12 January 2021: Yes, I’m a big proponent of “burn the advertising industry to the ground” 🙂
• 12 January 2021: Science is about finding uncomfortable, unintuitive truths. If we relied on our own logic and senses, we’d think the earth is flat, or just not think about it. Your diet works possibly b/c you eliminate hyper-palatable, highly-caloric foods; and if you can adhere to it, great.
• 12 January 2021: Except studies have shown otherwise. One claim is that insulin prevents lipolysis. It does not, and even if it did, it wouldn’t matter (we have actual drugs that prevent lipolysis). Another is that fat people have a slower metabolism. They don’t, their metabolism is faster.
• 12 January 2021: It’s also the failure of mass-media to have any journalistic integrity, and outrage sells ads. Saw a funny news title the other day: “Fox News wants people outraged enough to watch, but not to protest”.
• 12 January 2021: It’s the same paradox as w/ censorship … there are good intentions in state censorship, except you have the problem of “who decides the truth?”. I can trust scientific consensus, due to the process, but I couldn’t trust politicians. Wikipedia does seem to do a good job though.
• 12 January 2021: Sometimes I wish for “fact checking” to be integrated into these platforms, like what Twitter attempted with Trump’s tweets, but I don’t think it scales, as it would require super-human efforts.
• 12 January 2021: We’re witnessing the failure of institutions to inform the public, and of schools to educate people about science. Even the software developers are lacking knowledge about how science works, falling for the same tricks as the anti-vaxxers: https://twitter.com/alexelcu/status/1348295631048232961
• 12 January 2021: Tell me about. I have problems convincing family members to vaccinate, because Bill Gates wants their souls and the Great Reset is coming.
• 12 January 2021: We have a long history of communities being poisoned by the lack of moderation, ever since the internet was born. Some social problems might not be solvable by technology.
• 12 January 2021: What makes you think this will make people happier than they are now? Communities w/ threats of violence will still get banned by hosting and ISPs. There will still be people preaching “tolerance”. Things that happen at scale, have always happened in smaller communities (forums)
• 12 January 2021: So you know, hosting something like Parler, is no longer just virtue signaling, or serving the user-base, rather it becomes a legal liability.
• 12 January 2021: In fairness, Parler is getting that treatment because its members are explicitly inciting violence. Inciting violence is explicitly not protected by US’s first amendment, FYI.
• 12 January 2021: So people that dislike Twitter’s ToS, can build their own Twitter. Although if that platform is then filled with antisemitism, racism, sexism, xenophobia, good luck getting that hosted somewhere decent. And that’s fine, racists can host stuff on their own servers 🤷‍♂️
• 12 January 2021: Twitter can do as they wish. It’s not just the “right” being censored. Remember “sex workers”? Big tech has always imposed US’s religious values when it comes to sex on the rest of the world. And that’s fine, goes to show it’s unwise to have one walled garden for news.
• 12 January 2021: Wanting to serve their user-base, and virtue signaling, are 2 different things. I fear the powers of “Big Tech” too, but I believe in private property. If the government allows free speech, that means it’s the responsibility of individuals & private entities to apply censorship.
• 10 January 2021: Veganism is like the far-left of nutrition, whereas Keto is like the far-right 🙈🙉🙊 Ffs, I need to go to sleep 😅
• 10 January 2021: I don’t blame those that believe it. Such beliefs come from pain, from fear, from misinformation that’s actually very well presented. I blame the promoters, the book authors, the community builders.
• 10 January 2021: In the context of quoted tweet, blaming “dietary guidelines” for the obesity crisis is precisely the anti-establishment thinking that anti-vaxxers use. Worse — such a claim is easily contradicted by the facts, yet the narrative is so well presented, that facts stop mattering. pic.twitter.com/bqNRpAYlcs
• 10 January 2021: “Argument from authority” is considered a logical fallacy. It sometimes is. Except in science we have the notion of “scientific consensus”. It’s perfectly acceptable to give arguments from authority when it comes to science, b/c it’s how science works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus https://twitter.com/snoyberg/status/1348306192418934785
• 10 January 2021 (live): That is true. And you know, whatever works for you. Beware nutritional deficiencies however. When cutting fruits, veggies, legumes from your diet, it’s really easy to end up with one. I’ve been there 😉
• 10 January 2021: In all studies thus far, all diets work by cutting calories, and all diets are equally disappointing 🤷‍♂️
• 10 January 2021: Yes, however: 1. there has never been a population known to live in chronic ketosis—because it’s a starvation state; not even the Inuit (due to a genetic disorder) 2. it only works because it lowers your appetite; going vegan (high carb) does that too; but doesn’t work for long
• 10 January 2021: We look down on anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, however I’ve seen many software developers believe in the ketogenic diet, or even in the (gasp) carnivore diet. Guys, sorry, but Keto is the anti-vaxxing movement of nutrition. The carbohydrate-insulin model is complete BS.
• 9 January 2021: I can see the trend in my country, as I am right- leaning liberal, with no good representation among the political parties. We stayed in the same place, while the world around us moved.
• 9 January 2021: I agree that’s not the far-right. These are just today’s conservatives. Which actually makes the situation worse.
• 8 January 2021: Of course there’s discrimination. Hence why people need to shout “black lives matter”! The mental gymnastics and logical fallacies some people go through to object to that is amazing.
• 8 January 2021: Going back to the abuse of “tautology” … An actual tautology: “Uncle Bob is either a moron, or not a moron”. On the other hand, knowing that “all racists are morons” doesn’t make the statement “Uncle Bob is a moron” a tautology. Logic is hard, even for programmers 🤷‍♂️
• 8 January 2021: Similarly, women were not always considered equal to men, deserving of the same rights. Some humans are more “legal” than others (think immigrant aliens). And you can believe nothing matters w/o kindness. Love that sign, I’d put one up myself.
• 8 January 2021: Ideologies are blueprints, not facts. You can’t evaluate the truth statement of an ideology, only its effectiveness, given an often subjective fitness function. This isn’t math. Society can believe that black lives don’t matter. It actually did that for a long time.
• 8 January 2021: “Black lives matter” isn’t a “tautology”, b/c it isn’t a fact, but a belief for how society should behave. Does our society believe it now? Do we really believe “all lives matter”? Debatable. And the guy clearly doesn’t know what “tautology” means. https://twitter.com/mimismash/status/1345734341280854016
• 7 January 2021: WAIT, do you remember when senator McCain, in response to Trump fears, said … “We’re not România”? 🤣 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/04/us/politics/donald-trump-constitution-power.html?_r=0
• 7 January 2021: România had similar events in 1990-1991. It delayed the birth of a genuine democracy for a decade. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineriad pic.twitter.com/uhImo0Bi61
• 6 January 2021: Looking back at the world’s events in 2020, my personal problems seem petty. Psychologists recommend against trivializing your own experience, but damn, that’s now impossible.
• 6 January 2021: Yikes, I don’t know of many details related to that.
• 6 January 2021 (live): GitHub has been doing great since its acquisition. It now sets a really high bar for its competition. https://twitter.com/github/status/1346626296219099136
• 5 January 2021: I agree. But I have doubts about Brave’s ability to fix it, when first-party advertorials in reputable newspapers can’t. Also Brave already promotes shady crypto stuff. Scams are spectrum. Will Brave get rid of political ads? What about illegal Windows licensing deals?
• 5 January 2021: That’s a fair point to make, although I have the problem that it’s in itself an advertising platform, it doesn’t change the incentive structure, I can’t trust it that it will always protect consumers, and I want ads-driven business models to die 😅 But I guess time will tell 🙂
• 5 January 2021: Firefox has built-in “Tracking Protection”, blocking trackers by default from the Disconnect list. This list is smaller than EasyList / EasyPrivacy, but fairly effective for getting rid of the most egregious actors, esp in strict mode. New Firefox for Android also advertised uBO.
• 5 January 2021: I know of Manifest v3, IMO Google is clearly trying to kill uBO. But it will continue to work in Firefox. Pi-hole / NextDNS can protect against CNAME cloaking. I agree that DNS blocking isn’t enough, as it can’t block individual scripts on first-party domains.
• 5 January 2021: I believe that once people find a better ads blocker, they’ll switch. B/c most don’t want any ads, even if some express guilt. uBlock Origin has been growing, it has no company behind that can be attacked or bought. The industry is terrified by it, while Adblock Plus is an ally.
• 5 January 2021: You know how the imoral behavior of companies gets excused due to shareholder need to make money? Similarly the survival of businesses isn’t a consumer problem. And you’d think consumers willv somehow decide it’s for their own good. No they won’t.
• 5 January 2021: Similarly, piracy wasn’t stopped by feelings of goodwill towards businesses, rather it still exists, while businesses evolved methods to cope, such as paid streaming, which is more convenient. And this time people even have the moral high ground.
• 5 January 2021: I pay $4 / month for a Fastmail account, family accounts would be cheaper. When a service gets more popular, prices go down, not up. I want nothing less but to block all ads. Whether that’s a solution or not for businesses, it isn’t my problem, I’m not a charity.
• 4 January 2021: In case you’re wondering how the value proposition can be to block ads, without being good at blocking ads, that’s b/c the actual value proposition is the preservation of “privacy”. An advertising company is promising to protect your privacy 🤯
• 4 January 2021: If you want ads-blocking, and don’t like Firefox, just use Chrome, or Safari. Chrome + Pi-hole, or NextDNS, or Adguard DNS is just as good as Brave on Android. And Safari on iOS w/ Wipr is much better. Mobile Vivaldi & Edge have integrated ads blockers too, better than Brave’s.
• 4 January 2021: @/Brave enabling rewards & injecting scripts in pages, without user consent, might be a mistake, but isn’t a surprise. Their business model is advertisement. Crypto integrations, advertised images, ads in “Brave Today”, that’s just the beginning. https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/13222
• 3 January 2021: It’s educational for me TBH. Romanians don’t have a culture for liberal democracy, we’ve only been acquainted since the 90’s, before that we’ve had feudalism, fascism, communism, in that order 😅 I fear polarization, but it’s never quaint to worry about your democracy.
• 3 January 2021: Given Trump lost the election, while republican senators haven’t, I’m pretty sure this sends a clear signal that republicans don’t want Trump. Esp since it’s rare for a president to not win a second term. My impression is that his supporters are a loud minority 🤞
• 3 January 2021: Indeed that’s an impulse buy. Inspiration can come from many sources though, including browsing online stores, or real malls. But I understand, those are good examples. My feed only has political ads, and software licensing scams. Not sure what i did 🙂
• 3 January 2021: This article doesn’t talk about usefulness. I do wonder, what did you find that you couldn’t with a search, or by asking for recommendations? It’s fine if you want to keep it confidential.
• 3 January 2021: One last thought – the litmus test is this: if Facebook disappeared tomorrow, would the internet be a better place? IMO no, b/c the economic fabric of the internet is broken, with or w/o facebook. And there will be data abuse, for as long as we are products in attention economy.
• 3 January 2021: Shameless plug https://alexn.org/blog/2020/12/20/no-acceptable-ads.html
• 3 January 2021: Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a lot of admiration for Google and what they’ve contributed, but it’s an ads-driven data company. And advertising companies will do anything to get data and to milk that data in order to monetize you, b/c you’re the product.
• 3 January 2021: Google invented filter bubbles in Search, and YouTube is a cesspool of conspiracy theories, using the same tactics as Facebook.
• 3 January 2021: Google too has multiple products that have to maximize user engagement in order to make people watch ads, leveraging user profiles built by analyzing searches, emails, purchases, GPS coordinates, browsing history, news preferences, etc.
• 3 January 2021: I share the feelings about Facebook, but I’m not so charitable when it comes to the other ads-driven companies. E.g Google has done great things, but it’s still an ads company, w/ the same incentive structure, and same potential for abuse, even if they behaved more responsibly. https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1345677279322636293
• 3 January 2021: I’m a liberal progressive, but I’m a moderate. In my country I vote for center-right parties (yet in the US I wouldn’t be republican). You will see me carrying about social justice, equality of chances, while being pro free speech and against progressive taxation. Be warned 🙂
• 18 December 2020: Data lives more than the algorithms used to operate on it. Today it’s used to serve ads, tomorrow it may lower your credit score. Data collection in itself is immoral, unless it’s done with an explicit purpose that the user knows about, and by law is only used for that purpose.
• 15 December 2020: I believe former communist countries tend to breed free speech absolutists 🙂 And I may be one as well, even as I find myself conflicted.
• 15 December 2020: The soccer game was suspended, the referee is investigated for racism. And while his language was clearly unprofessional, and against UEFA, I don’t have a single acquaintance that hasn’t spoken in his support. None. We couldn’t even agree that his behavior was unprofessional.
• 15 December 2020: Also the more you push on correcting speech, the more divided society becomes. I can see it in my country. We’ve just had a case of a soccer referrer using “that black man” for identification (in Romanian “negru” being “black”, but sounding like the n-word)…
• 15 December 2020: E.g. I disagree w/ censoring misinformation regarding vaccines, 5G networks, election fraud, or whatever the today’s conspiracy is. It’s deeply illiberal. And even as I respect the private property of Twitter/Facebook/YouTube, due to their monopoly, they are public utilities.
• 15 December 2020: Freedom of speech is the freedom to disagree with, and to criticize the status quo, the ruling party, to speak against the majority. Today we’re talking about censoring bigotry. Tomorrow we’ll be talking about censoring ideologies that are not totalitarian. Or uncomfortable news.
• 15 December 2020: Freedom of speech is certainly not freedom from criticism. But mobs can have an amplifying effect, and we can talk about reprisals, instead of just criticism, which can have a chilling effect on expression. Although if we’re honest, at-will employment is worse.
• 15 December 2020: It’s a very complicated issue. Mobs w/ pitchforks doing their own justice happens when the justice system becomes injust (and w/ systemic racism, it is injust almost by definition). But such a society is a sick society & mobs become part of the problem.
• 15 December 2020: On cancel culture and political correctness … to combat racism, or inequality, education is the answer. Marginalization creates fear, and a fearful society is a society in danger.
• 15 December 2020: Freedom is the duty to think with one’s own head. There will always be fools thinking foolish thoughts. This isn’t a reason to have other people think for them.
• 15 December 2020: Paraphrasing Ana Blandiana, a book author that lived through communism to tell the tale: Freedom hurts b/c it makes you responsible for your own actions. Under totalitarianism it’s never your fault. Freedom only seems important when you don’t have it, being wasted when you do.
• 7 December 2020: This in case you were wondering … why you can’t just lock people up in liberal democracies. Because it backfires. Also false news. I’d blame Facebook, and they are guilty, but truth is the authorities didn’t do their job in informing the population well. A global phenomenon.
• 7 December 2020: We’ve had parliamentary elections in Romania, yesterday. A new party with a fascist doctrine gained 9%. We’re going to have fascists in the parliament. This is a direct result of false news and anti-Covid-19 social distancing measures.
• 7 December 2020: We had the parliamentary election in Romania yesterday. A new party, with a fascist doctrine, gained 9% over night 😰 We are going to have fascists in the parliament 🤢
• 3 December 2020: Comparisons with smaller countries having the highest GDP per capita (e.g. Singapore) or isolated islands (New Zealand) are common, as if it could be replicated, told without a hint of irony. Everyone is a health expert talking about getting R0<1 these days.
• 3 December 2020 (live): Note there are studies using math models, predicting that social distancing measures would be better for the economy, due to a faster recovery after the virus is suppressed. But math models are very inaccurate & don’t communicate their uncertainties well. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3561934
• 3 December 2020 (live): Worrying are the calls to do what China did in Jan-April. Back then lockdowns could work, but that’s less clear now, even for flattening the curve. China is also a centrally planned economy, having kept people indoors at gunpoint. And that’s deeply illiberal.
• 3 December 2020 (live): Why lockdown measures aren’t clear-cut — an economic slowdown increases poverty. The world could absorb the economic shock in March-June, but we no longer have that budget, and it’s no longer possible to suppress the virus. https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/news-centre/news/2020/COVID-19_could_push_extreme_poverty_over_1_billion_people_2030.html
• 2 December 2020: My opinion may not age well. But for now, as much as I sympathize w/ publishers needing revenue, I want the entire targeted ads industry to die. Publishers can ask for subscriptions, donations, they can sell merch, books, or otherwise GTFO, not my problem. 8/8
• 2 December 2020: It’s a nice alternative to Chrome, but I don’t want any ads, ever. And user profiling is immoral, it doesn’t matter if it’s done client-side or not. Good behaviour in this industry is only temporary, as the incentive structure in the attention economy rewards bad actors. 7/8
• 2 December 2020: Brave advertises that the ads are opt-in. Yet advertised images are opt-out. The “cards” are ads too, and they are opt-out. Whenever new cards get deployed, or other ads disguised as “features”, people get it automatically. 6/8
• 2 December 2020: Ad-blocking is a whac-a-mole game, or an arms race if you will. I predict DNS solutions will stop working reliably, due to apps deploying DoH solutions (e.g. TikTok). Also Facebook’s first party ads are unblockable. Nothing works for more than a week or two. 5/8
• 2 December 2020: I also tested performance. Wanted to see if Brave fares any better. Not very accurate, but should give a sense of performance hit for content blocking. All results are decent. Note uBO == uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger + Decentraleyes + CleanURLs, a killer combination. 4/8 pic.twitter.com/smBe9qZABF
• 2 December 2020: Chrome, coupled w/ a Pi-hole, or http://Nextdns.io , is enough for current ad-blocking needs & can take care of your whole household, works for in-app advertising and CNAME cloaking too. 3/8
• 2 December 2020: Brave on mobile doesn’t get rid of first party ads on Google / YouTube. It won’t block cookie and consent notifications either. Results w/ anti-ad-blocking tech were mixed. For some quick testing samples: https://alexn.org/wiki/web.html#for-testing-ads-blocking 2/8
• 2 December 2020: I tested the @Brave browser. Decent Chrome fork. On Android it does a poor job for ad-blocking, not better than Chrome + NextDNS/Pi-hole. On iOS, Safari + Wipr is objectively better. Firefox w/ uBlock Origin w/ “annoyances” is much better. 1/8
• 1 December 2020: It could be a tragedy of the commons. But that’s the deal we make in a liberal society. Let’s be thankful we don’t have smth like the bubonic plague, wiping 30% of the population & pray that another virus won’t hit us next year, after we’ve spent our budget on this one.
• 1 December 2020: I supported the lockdown in my country in April. I wouldn’t support it now. I don’t think the world has budget for another lockdown. You can wing it by printing money, but it doesn’t last long & inflation makes affects the poor. Hunger & mortality among the homeless is going up.
• 1 December 2020: China’s lockdown happened at the beginning at the pandemic. We have no way of knowing if another lockdown would work, being a gamble. Restricting movement, against people’s will, is deeply illiberal, and I wouldn’t copy the actions of a party that routinely violates human rights.
• 29 November 2020: This is why liberalism is important. And whether you trust the direction of a group of people, or not, some freedoms should be sacrosanct (as long as they don’t hurt other people, where what “hurt” means is clearly defined by law).
• 29 November 2020: A government is made of democratically elected representatives, putting in practice the will of the people, turning against you when your interests don’t align w/ those of the majority 💡 Ergo an illiberal democracy is nothing more than a tyranny of the majority.
• 29 November 2020: Censorship is a slippery slope. If you don’t trust your government, then why would you trust a privately-owned company, or a mob? You shouldn’t. Who gets to decide the truth? It’s always the paying customers. Which in the case of ads-driven online services, it ain’t you.
• 27 November 2020: My GAFAM dependence, measured by DNS requests, on my work laptop (first) versus personal devices (second). Facebook is mostly WhatsApp. Google is YouTube + Search (I use DDG too). Apple is system/app updates and iCloud app syncing. Microsoft is Office 365 + Teams + Azure. pic.twitter.com/lSJ2JzO4pj
• 26 November 2020: @fanf42 Well good for you. There are grandpas smoking until they are in their 90-ties. Smoking still kills.
• 26 November 2020: IDK, Marx has been making the same arguments since the 19th century. But due to innovation and the free market, the world hasn’t gone to shit. If I get fed up by macOS, fact of the matter is that’s an opportunity for the competition to win me as a customer.
• 26 November 2020: It’s not a potential inconvenience. My wifi works on Mac. Never had any issues with my webcam, or microphone either. Every time I did a conference call in Linux, I felt like saying a prayer before doing it.
• 26 November 2020: IMO the problem is one of incentive structure. Server-side Linux is polished and works well, but that’s b/c server-side Linux has paying customers. For consumers, the problem w/ FOSS is that business models are difficult. It’s why we have privacy-invading ads funding Firefox.
• 26 November 2020: Ah, OK, sure. I do believe individuals know their needs better, which is the basis of liberalism. Devs have needs, like putting food on the table, learning, making meaningful contributions. If nobody pays them, I wouldn’t blame it on them for the state of desktop Linux.
• 26 November 2020: Not sure how “tragedy of the commons” applies here TBH. Can you explain?
• 26 November 2020: The point is nobody is interested in maintaining or improving desktop Linux. Just like in communism, nobody cares about shared resources, and the companies selling support have a perverse incentive to not improve the status quo. If I chose a community distro, would my Wifi work?
• 26 November 2020: I’m not sure that’s such a good thing anymore. It certainly depends. It reminds me of communism … when everybody owns something, then nobody does. Tried installing Ubuntu 20.04, and a perfectly functioning wifi in 18.04 is now no longer working. I don’t have time for that.
• 25 November 2020: Will they be visible to the JVM? Or no actual inheritance will occur at bytecode level? Would be cool to have traits that we could inherit without leaving a trace.
• 23 November 2020 (live): When you have a Macbook Pro, and you install Windows or Linux on it, you get the impression that you’ve exchanged a working system (macOS) for one that’s worse in every way, ranging from slightly worse, to unbearably so. Only exception is Apple dropping 32-bit support.
• 23 November 2020: It’s not a surprise to me that anti-science sentiment is encroaching even software developers. Go to any Hacker News thread on nutrition, you’ll see it. It’s terrifying. School is obviously failing people on things that matter (critical thinking, science and civic education).
• 19 November 2020: It’s relevant to talk about population size and how rich a country is, because what works at a smaller scale, with enough resources, may not work at a bigger scale, with less resources.
• 19 November 2020: Germany does well, but in Romania we could never do what Germany has been doing. There are disparities b/w countries in terms of resources, and culture, that need to be taken into account. Note Singapore is a super rich, and fairly small country (France is ~12 times bigger)
• 19 November 2020: Example of rich countries (South Korea) aren’t applicable to all, esp since that involves privacy violations. And a centrally planned economy (aka communism) can lock a billion people up, but I wouldn’t implement the strategies of a country that routinely violates human rights.
• 19 November 2020: What countries are those? In April I remember several claims made, about countries like Russia and India, supposedly imposing travel restrictions early. Fast forward 2-3 months and they were overwhelmed. Careful to not count the winners before the war is over.
• 19 November 2020: What does “long” mean? Until a vaccine gets developed? We can’t get rid of virus via restrictions; only flatten curve. And restrictions are less effective in second wave. I’ve read even w/ vaccine it will take until 2024 to get back to normal. We should brace ourselves 😉
• 19 November 2020: What does “long” mean? Untila vaccine gets distributed? Thinking it could be controlled requires some proof. “Flattening curve” is the best we could hope for. Genie is out of the bag. Even w/ vaccine, current projections say we’ll have herd immunity in 2024, so brace yourself.
• 19 November 2020: It’s a balancing act. An economic crisis, the poverty resulting from economic slowdown, are also grave concerns. You can’t sequester people indefinitely, as it’s a freedom restriction, and many people will be willing to fight for their freedom to move. Also mental health issues.
• 13 November 2020: “List static blog tags in folder (Jekyll, etc)” Code snippet #Blogging #Jekyll #Ruby #ifttt https://alexn.org/snippets/2020/11/13/list-blog-tags-in-folder.html?pk_campaign=twitter&pk_kwd=link
• 28 October 2020: “BSP Support in sbt 1.4, by Adrien Piquerez, Scala Center” Shared link: #Programming #Scala #ifttt https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2020/10/27/bsp-in-sbt.html
• 24 October 2020: “Donald Trump vs Joe Biden — Epic Rap Battles Of History” Shared link: #Politics #YouTube #ifttt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkGK7bitav0
• 4 October 2020: I would agree with you, if these companies wouldn’t have entire departments whose job is to find tricks to maximize screen time, by leveraging the brain’s dopamine-driven reward system. It’s like saying that gamblers or drug addicts are entirely responsible for their affliction.
• 3 October 2020 (live): As long as we are on Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/Instagram/TikTok/etc, they will steal our time, and they will use our presence, and content, to hook our friends and family, and we are still being exposed to fake news. Our attention is the commodity, even if we use ads blocking.
• 3 October 2020 (live): The personalized ads industry needs to die. But unfortunately that’s not enough. Ads blockers aren’t enough. The problem transcends tracking, or the annoyance of ads. The other problem is the attention seeking, which we now see in the proliferation of false news.
• 3 October 2020 (live): “The Social Dilemma” rings very true, I’ve nodded continuously while watching the movie. The ads business model provides perverse incentives for keeping us hooked, as our attention is the product being sold, aka the “attention economy”. https://www.thesocialdilemma.com/
• 1 October 2020: No national pride, I worry for Europe’s future, that this is a trend, and we are next. We dodged a bullet in 2019 b/c our supreme-leader-wannabe was convicted to jail for corruption. I suspect we were lucky b/c the governing party is filled w/ idiots.
• 1 October 2020 (live): We have the same in Romania, in locals, when electing our mayors; and who runs the city halls, also gets the voters for the parliamentary elections (which are the most important), but fortunately the presidential elections are in 2 rounds.
• 1 October 2020: Unfortunately I see the same thing happening in Poland, and if we aren’t careful, it might happen in Romania, and elsewhere too.
• 1 October 2020: In a country in which the power has been seized by the ruling party, and that has systematically crushed the freedom of the press, the system of checks and balances is broken, therefore you cannot even claim that the government is democratically elected.
• 1 October 2020: Viktor Orban is criticizing the EU vice-president, because she called Hungary an illiberal democracy. He’s saying Hungary has a democratically elected government. Don’t be fooled. If a democracy is not liberal, then it’s just another tyranny.
• 30 September 2020: I did no such thing. There. That wasn’t hard.
• 30 September 2020: Nice fallacy. But I remember you openly speaking against racism being addressed at conferences, or being in complete support of a memo arguing that women are more neurotic, less capable/interested in STEM; diversity quotas are unjustified & lead to “reverse discrimination”…
• 30 September 2020: Going in my cave now, before I too will be thrown in hell, or get sued 👋🙂
• 30 September 2020: I don’t know, I’m not one, and haven’t given much thought to it 🤷‍♂️ That said, this isn’t totally devoid of context. Sorry, but Paul has a history of being apologetic for Moldbug’s and for James Damore’s opinions. And when seeing a damnation to hell, IDK, I get curious.
• 30 September 2020: These tweets are out of context, but unfortunately the context is gone, as all of those conversations have been deleted, and I’m not keeping records. And maybe my memory is playing tricks, sure, I can give you that.
• 30 September 2020: As mentioned, I’ve been following him during the LambdaConf controversy & that Google memo, and I remember my opinions changing from “he’s a free speech contrarian” to “that’s weird dude”, then I unfollowed him …
• 30 September 2020: Maybe he’s hurting for what happened, but IDK, I find it more effective to explain yourself. And it’s also OK to change your mind. And maybe also accept that many people have justification for being upset when seeing hints of support for predeterminism, eugenics, etc.
• 30 September 2020: For what is worth, I don’t believe in banning people, or in censorship (with some exceptions and limitations), but I believe in open discussions, and criticism. Here he wishes eternal damnation on someone, then doing personal attacks that are very out of place.
• 30 September 2020: That might be true, thanks for clarification. I am interested however in the general pattern of believing in predeterminism, which is actually the point of that infamous quoted tweet. And I did not ban him. I remember he left for Gab, unhappy w/ Twitter’s algos, another pattern.
• 30 September 2020: I’m only saying this because I found that tweet of yours very weird. And context is gone of course, b/c you deleted it (which was your right, not suggesting otherwise). Are you anti free speech BTW? Because that includes critiques too.
• 30 September 2020: And even if Google is editing query suggestions, those suggestions are there to help regular folks to search. And maybe finding “racial diffences in brain size” really isn’t something that should be suggested as a topic. People searching for that, already know what to search for.
• 30 September 2020: Oh, I’m not here to prevent you from using Twitter, I’m actually curious about your opinions on these matters; although I must admit I’m biased against non-scientists advocating predeterminism or eugenics. But I’m always happy to have a conversation about it.
• 30 September 2020: While this may pass for “plausible deniability”, why did you feel the need to tweet it? Does it bother you? There’s also an obvious alternative explanation: DDG is used by a group of ppl not representative as a sample of the population, or at least of Google’s market.
• 30 September 2020: I’m not religious. You claimed it’s a “single tweet”, which is false, b/c I followed you through LambdaConf and that James Damore memo & remember seeing questionable opinions; which you then deleted. You might be just a contrarian. So please share your opinions on race science.
• 30 September 2020: Life is about transmitting knowledge. All cells pass knowledge when they replicate. And we evolved the means to bypass normal evolutionary mechanisms for transmitting knowledge. We are unique in nature, and we have to be careful about taking inspiration from animal models.
• 30 September 2020: Similarly … we don’t have to develop a taste for poisonous mushrooms, we can teach our children about the poisonous mushrooms in their environment. We don’t have to develop the teeth of a predator, or the gut of a cow, as we can teach our children to cook. Etc.
• 30 September 2020: Right, except we don’t have to wait for evolution to take place; after all, it can take 100,000 years for a gene to spread through the population. We can simply teach our children to be nice, as a conscious decision, such that they don’t have to wait for the expression of genes.
• 30 September 2020: Evolution is basically passing knowledge to your offsprings via DNA. But because we can pass knowledge by language, aka culture, we can “evolve” without needing biological evolution, and we’ve done so quite successfully.
• 30 September 2020: Animals that are more social (living in groups) can show such traits, but humans have been taking these to the next level. A pack of wolves don’t think that “all are equal under law”, don’t guarantee “freedom of speech”, and couldn’t care less about torture, or starving puppies.
• 30 September 2020: We often commit this naturalistic fallacy, but we are not freaking wolves, we are more complex beings w/ richer lives. So yes, we have a culture, we are passing notions of justice, of equality before the law to our children, that could be good for us, even if “unnatural”.
• 30 September 2020: This is similar other evolutionary arguments—e.g. humans have not evolved to eat meat, or plants (depending on the camp you’re listening to). Well, fuck yeah, humans had fire to predigest their food. Similarly, we could pass knowledge via language.
• 30 September 2020: Homo genus has been in uncharted territory ever since we started using tools, fire & language, since no other animal on earth is doing that. It’s indisputable that culture is part of our survival toolkit & it has to evolve in response to population growth, technology, etc.
• 30 September 2020: So let’s put this issue to rest, and unfollow the race pseudoscientists, because if they can believe that crap, they probably have nothing to teach you about #Scala or programming anyway.
• 30 September 2020: If you’re into evolution bullshit, it should be pretty obvious that our notions of “justice” or “freedom” for example, while “unnatural”, probably helped us survive, and we’ve been very successful at it.
• 30 September 2020: Many people have been historically fascinated w/ the concept of a “natural order”. Yes, animals can have a natural order, but humans are very unlike all other animals, we have a very complex society, and all notions of a natural order have been debunked thus far.
• 30 September 2020: You are probably not “reversely discriminated”, and if you feel that way, I’d investigate such feelings in therapy first. I know this is long after the fact, but that James Damore memo was BS, even if we don’t debunk its pseudoscience. Yet echoes of that memo remain.
• 30 September 2020: For programmers, companies are so hungry for talent, that they’ll hire almost anybody, as long as you can traverse a singly-linked list, and don’t have obvious character flaws (aka “cultural mismatch”). If you don’t get that job, it’s not b/c a minority took it from you 😉
• 30 September 2020: So even if we are generous with claims that we have a diversity problem due to natural causes, instead of discrimination, it’s still OK to go out of your way to encourage diversity. We’re ignoring here that, as always, education, poverty, racism are obvious confounding factors.
• 30 September 2020: Women may be less interested in STEM & minorities may be less prepared, but as a company it’s still OK to allocate budget for increasing diversity b/c: - interested women/minorities are still discriminated - diversity is healthy, monocultures are not
• 30 September 2020: And sorry for all these questions, but — did you ever find the truth about Phrenology? Note at this point, I’m being generous, and open to hear why you’re so obviously interested in “race science”. pic.twitter.com/6igvY7NmI5
• 30 September 2020: Related, didn’t you have a James Damore meltdown (w/ one of your deleted accounts), defending his memo, which (based on pseudoscience) was arguing that Google shouldn’t encourage diversity, b/c of women/minorities being less suited / not interested in STEM?
• 30 September 2020: (an obvious answer would be that DDG is used by racists, out of privacy concerns btw) And we don’t even need to go that far, to see that you have an ongoing interest in eugenics (that argument too, BTW, was debunked, because no, selection wouldn’t work so well for humans): pic.twitter.com/cnTM6oMRS2
• 30 September 2020: OK Paul, just stumbled on this tweet, and I’ll bite. Please explain how people should interpret your interest in physiological “racial differences”, and your note about Google not giving “brain size” as the suggestion you were expecting. pic.twitter.com/Pnd2BUGPfu
• 21 September 2020: Which is the best conspiracy theory?
• 18 September 2020: I should probably follow my own advice 🙂
• 18 September 2020: In traffic, when car drivers honk angrily, under the protection of their car & anonymity, they are not looking for dialog. When online, don’t be an angry car driver, be a pedestrian. And blocking is sane. Don’t blame “cancel culture” when people tell you to get off their lawn.
• 18 September 2020: Twitter etiquette is like real-world etiquette. Approach strangers w/ kindness, generosity, constructive thoughts, and curiosity. If you’re confrontational, don’t be surprised when hostility is met w/ hostility.
• 18 September 2020: I don’t like the name calling. Educated people know better than to resort to verbal abuse in order to win an argument 😉
• 18 September 2020 (live): Ah, the Gang of Four, another book that everyone recommends, but nobody actually reads 🙂Can probably lift your monitor nicely though. https://twitter.com/copyconstruct/status/1306661608454721537
• 17 September 2020: IOR park #bucharest pic.twitter.com/od4FjnbGGn
• 16 September 2020: @yoeight Also, Uncle Bob might be in a gray zone (I can’t tell since I’m not very familiar w/ US culture); however, I firmly believe that being against hatred towards categories of people will always be the right thing to do. Only thing under debate is how we respond.
• 16 September 2020: These are very good points. Note fear of losing your job is basically b/c in the US at least there’s “at-will employment”. This makes people self-censor themselves, to not upset their employer. Even before cancel culture, those who speak out have been those that can afford it.
• 15 September 2020: Is that racist? Does he deserve to be canceled? I don’t know, better men and women than me should answer that. But I can see how this can make some people uncomfortable. Also “freedom of speech” doesn’t mean what you think it means … https://xkcd.com/1357/
• 15 September 2020: If you’re wondering what the Uncle Bob story is all about—it’s b/c he has made statements such as the following. Note the passion, the confidence, the conspiracy theory involving the left wing, the “science”, and the implication that blame lies with the minorities themselves. pic.twitter.com/BQl57yAAuu
• 15 September 2020: There’s nothing shameful about being born in privilege. But it is dumb luck. This isn’t about giving up privilege. Our privileged perks is how the world should be. Everyone should get equal opportunities.
• 15 September 2020: If you’re white, heterosexual, a Christian, male, born in Europe/US, you’re privileged just for that. As in—you don’t need to keep a receipt, to prove that you haven’t stolen what’s in your bag, you don’t need a costly visa to travel, you don’t get rejected for how you were born
• 15 September 2020: In general I agree, w/ exceptions. We shouldn’t punish people for disagreeing or for opting out, when they mean well, and the arguments are in good faith. Education works better than coercion. But sometimes there’s a behavior pattern, which is when the waters get murky.
• 14 September 2020: I once held the naive opinion that politics don’t belong in programming. I changed my mind 🤷‍♂️
• 13 September 2020: Here’s an excerpt I saw, supposedly from Uncle Bob’s FB account. Note the left wing conspiracy theory, the usual “science” mention, w/ the implication that minorities deserve it. Should he be canceled? IDK 🤷‍♂️ but I can see how this makes people uncomfortable. pic.twitter.com/IB8ZkOzk7U
• 10 September 2020: Really? I know of no such countries. AFAIK the countries that promised renewable energy have ramped up energy from coal.
• 10 September 2020: And this isn’t just about some industry. A lot of CO2 comes from developing countries, that have as much right to burn those fossil fuels as the western countries did in 20th century. Forests burning in CA is regrettable, but lifting people out of poverty should have priority.
• 10 September 2020: Only hope we currently have is nuclear power, and it’s funny b/c nuclear has been underfunded for years, due to nuclear-phobia, due to public outrage sparked by doomsday scenarios that never happened. So we invest in inefficient wind farms & hydro that destroy wildlife.
• 10 September 2020: Before adopting a righteous tone, blaming the rich, the ruling class, I ask, wouldn’t we feel stupid if “renewables” prove to be worse for the environment? Solar panels? Least efficient, massive land use, don’t work at night, or in winter, need backup, and aren’t recyclable 😱
• 10 September 2020: Let’s pause for a moment & recognize that fossil fuels have been feeding, heating and connecting the world. All 7.8 billion of us. And that there is no replacement available. We are talking about “decades” of world hunger & poverty going down, since 1950, now at an all time low. https://twitter.com/jamie_margolin/status/1304087854864359426
• 7 September 2020: I already knew about that, and sometimes I add final to case objects for consistency. But JVM’s final-related optimizations might not be relevant, b/c the call-sites are effectively monomorphic, and the JVM is smart enough to see that.
• 3 September 2020: Playing 👨‍🎨 pic.twitter.com/8F5MMVFYUt
• 29 August 2020: “Most stores are insured” - what happens to those that aren’t? There are people running those stores, employees that depend on those stores to put food on the table. Also, justified or not, these events polarize conservatives and moderates. I think Trump is going to win again.
• 26 August 2020 (live): That’s actually not a bad idea.
• 26 August 2020 (live): Haven’t had time for it. I first archived it, but then changed my mind 🙂 It needs more, currently making some plans for it.
• 20 August 2020: 💔 so sad to still see antisemitism in 2020. I’m starting to like Twitter’s new reply restrictions.
• 18 August 2020: 9/9 Watch out for this pattern: “Certain races have lower IQ [] [] Shame on you for thinking IQ is what defines someone’s worth” See my previous rant on this topic: https://twitter.com/alexelcu/status/1288758153778266112
• 18 August 2020: 8/ What’s really malicious about Moldbug-style rethoric is they only drop sciency-babble bullshit, w/ the inevitable conclusion being left as an exercise for the reader. By not stating the conclusion clearly, in the minds of the gullible they get the benefit of the doubt.
• 18 August 2020: 7/ There are commonly accepted physiological and morphological gender differences. Jumping from that to making assertions about work performance, and ascribing it to sex hormones, is rethoric that can be used to justify gender-based inequality.
• 18 August 2020: 6/ And given it’s behavior we want to measure, such controlled studies would probably need to be long term. And probably unethical too, since it could have serious health consequences for the test subjects. If you know of such a study, I’m all ears.
• 18 August 2020: 5/ Correlation is not causation. To show causality you’d have to show a dose dependent response. I’m not a medical doctor, but I’m assuming, to show causality, you’d have to inject ppl w/ exogenous testosterone & compare performance against control group, in a controlled setting.
• 18 August 2020: 4/ Even if there was such an association (testosterone => posturing => influence on work performance), if the study is observational, we could easily talk about a confounding factor, like 🥁 education. Risk aversion can obviously be learned in childhood.
• 18 August 2020: 3/ If you want to make a claim about testosterone levels being associated w/ work performance, the study would have to, at the very least, estimate or measure the testosterone levels of the subjects, otherwise the association is so weak as to be meaningless.
• 18 August 2020: 2/ Some questions to ask: 1. Was it peer reviewed? 2. Observational or controlled? 3. Are the variables controlled (at least via statistics)? 4. What’s the confidence in the result, and is it statistically significant?
• 18 August 2020: 1/ Every time you hear of studies showing work performance differences b/w sexes, “possibly” due to sex hormones (eg testosterone), that’s an instant red flag. First of all ask for/check the source. Here’s a primer on how to read studies: http://examine.news/how-to-read-a-study https://twitter.com/travisbrown/status/1295230086074052610
• 11 August 2020: No, John De Goes sends cease and desist letters instead 🤷‍♂️
• 5 August 2020: When you’re reacting to a bully, it’s called self-defense.
• 5 August 2020: Not sure what you mean by “inclusivity” (in quotes), but my fight is against bullies. People were already leaving the community because of them. And it’s disingenuous to not recognize that.
• 5 August 2020: I don’t think “democracy” needs to be in quotes, b/c it is a liberal democracy & it matters. As for AI, the only thing I worry about, coming from China, is using it for population surveillance. But the technology will be invented anyway, laws, not conservatism protects people.
• 4 August 2020: Eistein was a theoretical physicist, not an engineer 😛
• 3 August 2020: I also disagree that this is specific to the #Scala community. No it isn’t, the community just got unlucky, coupled with many people’s good-faith desire for tolerance, which then got played.
• 3 August 2020: At that point there’s not much difference from a regular workplace. We wouldn’t go work in a workplace having bullies as coworkers, unless we needed to put money on the table & had no choice. And if management defends bullying, it becomes complicit.
• 3 August 2020: I agree that there’s never only one language “community”, however I disagree with the “tool” aspect. You can be a user, but the next step is to report bugs, make suggestions, even contribute to upstream. At which point you have to interact w/ people you may not like.
• 3 August 2020: You mean, what John is doing? (this gem has since been deleted btw) pic.twitter.com/eODZzaiesQ
• 3 August 2020: Except when John says something critical of Cats, it can very well be that he has an axe to grind. His opinions on technology correlate with his ongoing conflicts or partnership ambitions. And when he screws up, he then deletes his online traces, after the damage was done.
• 3 August 2020: I’m no longer interested in gray areas or giving him the benefit of the doubt, sorry. That ship has sailed. I guess I’m doing some “aggressive marketing” and “arguing” right now too, and will continue to do so 🤷‍♂️ Please don’t bring him again in my mentions.
• 3 August 2020: You can try, I’ve always admired you for that, but unless the aggressor stops being an aggressor, at some point it becomes victim blaming. The repeated bullying behavior should be obvious, but I’ll shut up, lest I might get a cease and desist letter 😉
• 3 August 2020: Plenty of disagreements have been solved by sitting down and talking things through, yes, but bullying isn’t mere disagreement, esp when the same pattern of behavior keeps repeating, and it’s ridiculous to ask victims to sit down and solve differences.
• 2 August 2020: I’m glad others are seeing what we saw, last year, when we decided that enough is enough, we can’t work with bullies. And if you’re deriding the #Scala community for its drama, my sweet summer child, be glad that such a c̵u̵l̵t̵ thought leader hasn’t joined your community yet.
• 2 August 2020: Would you like a unified, “healed” community? Wishful thinking and “peace on earth” type thoughts don’t help. Dismissing the bad experience of others doesn’t help either. What helps is growing a pair and calling out bullies. https://twitter.com/raulraja/status/1289967477653307392
• 31 July 2020: I definitely got a 10 points raise over 30, that I attribute to my English language proficiency (IQ tests in Romanian aren’t very good, and they are basically translations of English tests, so IQ tests are pretty biased for English).
• 31 July 2020: If IQ stabilizes over 30, a possible explanation could be that people stop acquiring knowledge relevant to IQ testing (e.g. language). IQ definitely measures something, the problem is we don’t really know what it measures.
• 31 July 2020: IQ isn’t stable at all and there are studies on the subject confirming it: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2011/10/20/141511314/iq-isnt-set-in-stone-suggests-study-that-finds-big-jumps-dips-in-teens?ft=1&f=1128&sc=tw/
• 30 July 2020: I agree with preferring education over coercion. However there’s something to be said about zealots being more argumentative, more vigorous in pushing their ideology & real scientists have better things to do. We see that time and time again. See the Covid-19 pseudo-science.
• 30 July 2020: People have been talking about it since early 20th century, and while it took some time for scientific method & tools to mature, we now have no excuse to believe in pseudo-science. At least defer to scientific consensus. Also racism is unjust, no matter what science says.
• 30 July 2020: E.g. racism and poverty are obvious confounding factors. Children w/ access to food and education do better on IQ tests. IQ comparisons b/w countries do in fact compare poverty. And IQ itself is a pseudo-scientific surrogate marker that shouldn’t be taken seriously.
• 30 July 2020: People object to “race science” not only b/c it is racist and unjust, but also b/c it’s wrong. The hallmark of pseudo-science is over-reliance on studies suffering from confounding factors, and on surrogate markers with unproven causality for what they try to predict.
• 27 July 2020: This is a logical fallacy, it’s bullshit. Given you’re a software developer, I assume you’re familiar with parsing simple logical statements. Cut the crap and answer my question, or are you lying on purpose?
• 26 July 2020 (live): I don’t remember the defendant calling the plaintiff a nazi. Maybe he did, but I have a short memory. Can you point it out? That sure sounds like a statement of fact. Would you be OK with receiving a C&D letter for this accusation?
• 26 July 2020: You think the drama will be stopped by a court? It’s sweet that you feel that way 🙂 Has that ever happened in real life? Not how societies work. If this goes through, the drama is just starting 😉
• 26 July 2020: B/c they are protected by free speech, in some cases legally binding (eg DMCA) & those are clearly abused. AFAIK only 10% of defamation lawsuits are ruled in favor of plaintiff, as most are baseless. A lawyer doing fact checking can cost a fortune, so biased for the rich.
• 26 July 2020: Someone can be a good teacher, a friend, and a bully at the same time. Don’t deny the testimonials of others based on your feelings or anecdotes. “Mistakes were made” isn’t an apology. Cease & desist letters are a coercion technique, used by bullies and are anti free speech.
• 26 July 2020: I know Travis shouldn’t be judge and executioner, I have been an outspoken critic of cancel culture and of Travis’s tactics in particular. Yet he has his freedom of speech, and is entitled to his opinions, just like everyone else. C&C is a bullying tactic.
• 26 July 2020: So you’re aliking the freedom of speech of someone criticising on the Internet to a 2 years prison sentence? Wow.
• 26 July 2020: What the fuck is this supposed to mean? Should I be enlightened by this anecdote somehow?
• 26 July 2020: I agree. @propensive you were asked for a viewpoint on the “cease and desist” here, not for your viewpoints on Nazism. Yet you’ve built a straw man. The tangent was totally unnecessary and does NOT justify your support for the C&C letter.
• 26 July 2020: Anyone can defend themselves in a court of law, of course. I also have the right to point to the double standard and campaign against defamation laws. So we’ll have to agree to disagree.
• 26 July 2020: That’s false. It doesn’t cost Travis nothing to have these opinions 😉 Usually reputations are affected in both directions.
• 26 July 2020: Intimidating whole groups of people, you mean like what traditional newspapers and mass media have always done? Free speech is a doubly edge sword. If you don’t like what people say about you, talk back. Maybe start w/ an apology, which the plaintiff proved incapable of.
• 26 July 2020: I’d argue that there’s nothing to settle. Calling someone a “nazi apologist” is an opinion, protected by free speech, unless any of the presented facts, on which this opinion is based, proves to be false. And lawsuit threats are traditionally a clear intimidation tactic.
• 26 July 2020: A court of law is biased towards those that can pay the better lawyers, for longer. I trust a court of law to protect my liberal rights more than I trust a mob, for sure, however defamation laws are anti free speech and protect the rich and powerful.
• 26 July 2020: It’s a marketing term for sure, appealing to feelings, to provoke anger, however people like Curtis Yarvin deserve the label, even if their views might be a little different, more nuanced than those that nazis and fascists had. This is the 21st century after all.
• 26 July 2020: Nazism & fascism are ideologies. As such, they transcend the political parties of Germany from beginning of 20th century. What would it take to be a nazi or fascist today? Party membership? Pro views on eugenics, race, slavery? Denying white supremacy? Being anti-democracy?
• 22 July 2020: It isn’t. If not talking about hypotheticals, which of the presented facts are false? Note the defendant provides a detailed bibliography. While public opinions can hurt one’s reputation, opinions are still protected by free speech & people can still freely associate.
• 22 July 2020: There will never be one community. Even within sub-communities, there are tribes. Personally I want to stay true to my values and speak against transgressions, regardless of my tribe or who’s involved. The dumbster fire is what participating in a democracy feels like 🤷‍♂️
• 21 July 2020: I value your opinion Martin, don’t get me wrong. Censorship is censorship, even if in some instances it might be justified. On the topic at hand, IMO defamation laws protect the rich and powerful, not living up to expectations. And I value my free speech more than hypotheticals.
• 21 July 2020: So just to get this straight, censorship isn’t … suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient?
• 21 July 2020: I can tell you that in the US I wouldn’t sue, because I don’t have the resources, and this is coming from a middle class white stem guy, I can’t imagine what it’s like for the less privileged. Also I don’t care about hypotheticals.
• 21 July 2020 (live): Civil lawsuits are rarely fair, especially in the US, being a function of who can pay the better lawyers, most of the lawsuits settling due to accretion.
• 21 July 2020: Let’s not argue over textbook definions, or succumb to identify politics. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
• 21 July 2020: On the issue of defending yourself, again there is some of room for nuance. But I don’t believe the plaintiff is right here, I don’t think any presented facts are false. And if you ever find yourself in that situation, write an article, or apologise. Free speech works both ways
• 21 July 2020: Banning an article & have the author face legal fines is censorship by definition. Whether it’s just, that’s separate. Note state-sponsored censorship (1) robs the defendant of any choice and (2) is quasi-permanent. State yields a power that Internet mobs and private orgs don’t.
• 21 July 2020: Blocking on Twitter isn’t a statement. Yes we don’t see eye to eye on many issues. I still think this is despicable and I’m still going to voice my support. Also state-sponsored censorship is the worst kind of censorship.
• 21 July 2020: Yes, when it comes to defamation laws, I know there is room for nuance, my own parents were harmed by libel. Spare me the mental gymnastics. Pro-Tip: before going down the path of lawsuit threats, you might want to try apologizing first 🤷‍♂️
• 21 July 2020: Travis is blocking me 😅 so I have to quote-retweet this in support. Defamation laws are state-sponsored censorship, favoring the rich and powerful. If you oppose cancel culture, supporting such legal threats would be a double standard. https://twitter.com/travisbrown/status/1285603199878037505
• 14 July 2020: It’s mental gymnastics. I have friends like that which I’m still trying to change, but the phenomenon is still bigotry w/ some feelings of guilt mixed in. They’ll cheer for the bigots ”telling the truth” on TV, and they’ll support legislature to suppress LGBT rights.
• 10 July 2020: “Waiting for the facts before acting is unacceptable”… that’s anti-science. It’s what happened w/ Trump’s and Didier Raoult’s promotion of Hydroxychloroquine.
• 10 July 2020: - Covid-19 is the name of the disease not the virus - SARS is also the name of the disease; name of virus was SARS-Cov - viruses are related (79%), but when seeing 2.0 keep in mind this isn’t software development - WHO’s job isn’t to spread panic; your government is responsible
• 8 July 2020: The slippery slope that I’m seeing is that criticizing religion might be interpreted as hate speech. The Bible itself includes hate speech. Should we moderate it and is this hate speech? We can debate nuance, but equality before law is a liberal value that needs preserving too.
• 8 July 2020: Yes, I fear that too, but with the law there’s a fine line everywhere you look. Hate speech is incitement to hatred based on race, ethnicity, religion or sex. European countries managed to work with such a definition w/o including “fake news” in it.
• 8 July 2020: … this is me trying to understand the social phenomenon, living in an European country w/ less diversity and that bans hate speech. I’m now realizing that banning hate speech might be protective of liberal values, possibly being a necessary condition for “equality before law”.
• 8 July 2020: “Equality before law” is necessary for justice. Racism is unjust. “Cancel culture” is about people taking matters into their own hands due to a malfunctioning justice system. As long as institutionalized injustice continues, they are justified.
• 29 June 2020: I agree, but my problem is the context dependence. A claim is made: extreme tolerance leads to disappearance of tolerance. I have a feeling this is “not even wrong” and yet used in debates b/c it sounds truthy in context, so we promote phylosophy of an autocracy advocate.
• 29 June 2020: Will have to read, thanks for sharing.
• 29 June 2020: This might have started in France with Didier Raoult, a national quack. I disagree, science can be very precise, if scientific method is actually applied and unless politics, philosophy or religion get involved.
• 29 June 2020: Bad analogy. There was already evidence that masks can help, otherwise it wouldn’t have been required for medical personnel. Trump’s recommendations for hydroxychloroquine did not have evidence and US paid the price 😉 https://examine.com/topics/coronavirus-masks/
• 29 June 2020: Btw I thought of this while reading justifications for India banning TikTok, because China, bla, bla. Apparently you can justify anything with it.
• 29 June 2020: Twitter ftw, idea is incomplete. He advocates for justice and institutions that preserve liberal democracy, or that’s what I understood. Interbelic societies were very intolerant, as that’s when national identities were born, ppl previously identifying themselves by religion.
• 29 June 2020: I’m definitely a STEM white guy 🙂 but it’s never wrong to point to a lack of evidence for an idea that has the potential to be used to change public policies and the foundations of a liberal society.
• 29 June 2020: Is WW2 a good anecdote confirming paradox of tolerance? Were interbelic societies tolerant? Do we have any social studies on the subject? Popper argues against Pluto, advocating for democratic institutions. He does not advocate for mobs w/ pitchforks.
• 29 June 2020: “Paradox of tolerance” is probably bullshit, the mental gymnastics people need to deal w/ cognitive dissonance when intolerant. Is it based on empirical evidence at all, or is it just armchair philosophy? Plato came up w/ it to justify autocracy, possibly while on drugs.
• 29 June 2020: I don’t like to theorize about what FB doesn’t tell us, since it starts resembling conspiracy theories, but it is possible that FB builds “shadow profiles” of users that aren’t in their system. It would be pretty stupid of them to do so, b/c risk for them is too high imo, but 🤷‍♂️
• 29 June 2020: I intend to file complaints to my local data protection authority against all of them.
• 29 June 2020: These advertisers have shared my contact info with Facebook in order to target me with ads: @Amazon , @Airbnb , @BoltApp , @ManningBooks , @Spotify I don’t remember every opting-in to my contact data being used or shared for advertising purposes and I never accept blindly.
• 29 June 2020: And have you seen the advertisers that shared your contact info with Facebook for delivering ads to you? (again, in breach of GDPR) https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences
• 29 June 2020: The way these service providers share data is via: - Facebook SDK - Facebook Pixel These are tools meant specifically for tracking. There’s also Facebook Login / AccountKit. Note that I never login on third-party websites with my FB account. https://www.facebook.com/help/2230503797265156
• 29 June 2020: On my shame list I have @HomeDepot , @Xiaomi , @Examinecom , @TheEconomist , @business , @TheOnion , @Nature , @Orange , @NPR , @RevolutApp , @StepsAppTeam , @BoltApp , @sciam , @Vimeo , @Dropbox , @Vice , @Medium , @UNIBUC and many others.
• 29 June 2020: Have you seen your “Off-Facebook Activity”? These are the apps and websites sharing data with Facebook and violating your privacy (and GDPR): https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity
• 23 June 2020: I don’t think the bizarre comments are from the Scala “community” as we understand it, I believe this is a genuine brigading event but who knows.
• 23 June 2020: @LiquidSloshalot 👍 Yes, I worry about social polarization, it’s a trend and it stops dialog.
• 23 June 2020: Reddit submission of @scala_lang ‘s post in support of BLM is affected by “vote brigading”, along with really bizarre comments from people new to this sub — note this post is about Scala governance and belongs there: https://www.reddit.com/r/scala/comments/hdyext/the_scala_center_stands_with_black_lives_matter/
• 14 June 2020: Just to be clear on this — I mentioned in this stream already, I admit nuance, and I agree with hate speech being unprotected in many European countries. But it’s an imperfect solution to a bigger problem, which is that the extremists are doing a better job at educating people.
• 14 June 2020: Hate speech is defined as speech that incites hate against a religious group in our constitution. And where the line is, isn’t defined in the constitution and can be easily changed, depending on who has the parliament majority. So what I just said above qualifies.
• 14 June 2020: Maybe. But same intolerant views are taught today, religious organizations are among most conservative elements of society, being pro-life, anti abortions, anti contraceptives, anti gay marriage, anti sex ed, anti science. In Romania church campaigned against social distancing.
• 14 June 2020: @diesalbla I haven’t seen hate speech laws being abused in my country yet and thankfully they worked to suppress fascists thus far, but that’s only benevolence, as nobody wanted to open that can of worms. As the public fight b/w progressives and conservatives intensifies, that may change.
• 14 June 2020: I agree, however it gets tricky. Can you criticize the old testament for promoting slavery and violence? Can you criticize Christianity for being responsible for ethnic cleansings, for destroying knowledge? Is that not hate speech? It certainly is according to our constitution.
• 14 June 2020: You’re touching on the difference b/w classical liberalism and libertarianism. In case it isn’t obvious, I’m not a libertarian 🙂 Institutions work, when a checks and balances system is in place and for that to happen we need free speech to expose corruption and injustice.
• 14 June 2020: TL;DR — when it comes to freedom of speech, in our country we have a saying — “careful with that piano on the staircase” — it’s a fragile and hard won liberty and once lost, it might be gone for good. 10/10
• 14 June 2020: Twitter’s “fact checking” approach would have been more sensible, I fully endorse that, hope it scales. We need evidence based reporting & scientific education, that’s how you combat bullshit. Also platforms like Twitter are private and I also respect private property 😉 9/10
• 14 June 2020: Censorship wasn’t even effective, b/c it’s an impossible job to censor so many websites or FB accounts. And censored websites moved to other platforms and are growing stronger. The result is that now a growing number of people believe in conspiracy theories. 8/10
• 14 June 2020: E.g. in light of Covid-19, we’ve had a government committee censoring fake news. In doing so they also censored reports from medical personnel of incompetence & corruption, w/ threats of imprisonment. All the while doing a really poor job at educating the public. 7/10
• 14 June 2020: I do agree w/ the practice of many European countries of banning (well defined) hate speech or views that are extremely intolerant. But this is a practice that can always backfire and a red flag, as real problem is the extremists are doing a better job at educating people. 6/10
• 14 June 2020: By “not tolerating intolerance”, to avoid the “paradox of tolerance”, society itself is in danger of becoming intolerant. This can’t be a carte blanche for censorship and if we are to err, we should err on the side of tolerance. 5/10
• 14 June 2020: I’m not educated enough on US politics, but as an outside observer I’m glad Bernie Sanders was not elected in primaries. B/c him too, just like Trump before him, is a signal that the US society is turning away from liberal values. Trump is a symptom of a bigger problem. 4/10
• 14 June 2020: Ironically it’s liberal values that have always stood in the way of fascism, or communism. Liberal, as in emphasis on individual rights, minimal government, equality before the law, tolerance, everything that fascism isn’t. 3/10
• 14 June 2020: Institutionalized censorship will never favor minorities. If censorship favors your cause, enjoy it while it lasts. It’s only as long as your interests align w/ those of the majority or those of the ruling class. 2/10
• 14 June 2020: I heard someone say the problem is that free speech is preferred over human dignity. But that’s a false choice — free speech is necessary for protecting minorities or reason. Democracy w/o liberal values, w/o free speech, is just another tyranny, one of the majority. 1/10
• 11 June 2020: In case you want some good counter arguments, easy to miss for the untrained eye: https://twitter.com/Carter_AndrewJ/status/1270787941275762689
• 11 June 2020: Yes, all people seek truth, even if we haven’t evolved to be too rational, which is understandable, given we’re pattern matchers evolved to operate in the wild w/ limited info available. Opinions shift all the time, even if not immediately. Give the human race more credit.
• 11 June 2020: Note — I read it with an open mind because I was not fully aware of her past transgressions, but apparently she’s on a roll lately. Still can’t believe it, given how enlightened the Harry Potter series seemed.
• 11 June 2020: Part of Twitter’s charm has always been that, even as people say dumb shit to their massive audiences, good counter arguments can bubble up and be visible to those seeking the truth. Well, not anymore. People can just disapprove this in their own bubble.
• 11 June 2020: Very disappointing to see this from a favorite book author. I read it w/ an open mind, but her claims aren’t supported by evidence, but filled w/ logical fallacies & hate for a very small & fragile minority. Here’s the worst of what can happen w/ Twitter’s disabling of comments: https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1270749170215903232
• 10 June 2020: So smaller, more agile companies working on their own products are better suited to hire outside EU/US. But such companies are founded in tech hubs and don’t need to scale the head count, being able to get by with 2-3 people that they can find locally. I find it regrettable tbh.
• 10 June 2020: For a consultancy company there’s also the issue that consultants have to meet periodically w/ the clients. Mind you hiring remotely outside EU would be win, due to economic reasons — people outside the US / EU are cheaper to hire. But travelling or security reqs are issues.
• 10 June 2020: Just an anecdote, but a previous employer wanted to hire a very talented dev from Belarus and they couldn’t do it because the consultancy gig was for a big German company that wouldn’t accept non-EU collaborators.
• 10 June 2020: I cannot speak for most companies, but security is an often quoted reason. Consultancy companies are often fully remote, but the consultancy gigs are many times for big companies that will not approve non-EU consultants due to security reasons.
• 9 June 2020: We can agree on equal rights, we can agree on not giving a platform to hate speech, but speaking in my own name, we’ll never agree to shaming people just by weak associations. And don’t make the mistake of taking the silence of others as consent.
• 9 June 2020: As addendum after which I’ll shut up and return to my regular programming… This isn’t about left vs right or binary choices. This is about already disagreeing w/ methods used & I don’t want to see them spreading. Here’s my rant from last year: https://twitter.com/alexelcu/status/1101121069711310849
• 8 June 2020: Believing anything else is naive. Of course I may be alone in opposing fascism/nazism and communism, as it seems liberalism is in short supply these days. And before sweeping generalizations are made, as people apparently love to do that, I’m speaking solely in my name.
• 8 June 2020: Mentioned the above for context. While we can agree on the end (human rights, equality for all), we’ll always disagree on the means. I could never see eye to eye on the means to achieve equality w/ people believing in Marx/Lenin theories, as our views are fundamentally different.
• 8 June 2020: (2) People would listen to Radio Free Europe, in silence, out of fear the neighbours would rat on them to secret police, whose job was to silence dissent, to crush pluralism, to ensure that the only truth is that of the party. Not much different than how the left behaves today.
• 8 June 2020: (1) I remember both my parents working hard & at 3 years old I was left alone at home in winter, in the dark, in an apartment so cold water would freeze in the kitchen (austerity measures). I would cry it out with a flashlight and my teddy bear as company.
• 8 June 2020: 2 generations of my family suffered through Communism, I’d like Communism to be treated just like Nazism across Europe and for its crimes to go to trial. To understand my hatred of communism, my 2 most vivid memories are …
• 8 June 2020: I am disappointed by this article and its reception, given the context. Intentions are noble, but I can never support shaming people for not putting virtue signaling on display. Also on making programming more political, I don’t think many of you know what that means … https://twitter.com/posco/status/1270073582421344256
• 5 June 2020 (live): Not trying to rain down on these protests, I sure hope something good will come out of it, but it’s better to see this coming and prepare for it, at least spiritually, as it’s easy to get lost in our bubble.
• 5 June 2020: Outcome of protests is very unpredictable, esp when violent, I’ve see it locally. His authoritarian outbursts could be seen as what’s needed for law and order to prevail. Look at Putin or Erdogan. Another factor is that his failure to respond to Covid-19 might get buried.
• 5 June 2020: Trump’s approval rating is at a low point, but negligible & can bounce back. Problem with the protests are the crimes (looting, destruction of property). This gives him ammunition to further polarize society, which was already polarized, Trump being a symptom, not a cauze.
• 5 June 2020: I’ve listened to 3 US academics of Romanian origin interviewed. Prevailing view is that these events actually strengthen Trump in upcoming elections, he can win another mandate. Country is severely divided. Democratic values are eroded. US’ international influence declining.
• 2 June 2020: I feel sorry and worried for my US friends. I can’t imagine what must be like on those streets. “I can’t breathe” 😢 Black lives matter ✊ And listen, all of you are upset about these events, everybody is hurting, don’t take it out on innocents, don’t make things worse.
• 1 June 2020: You can’t claim to be neutral while manipulating the users’ feeds for maximizing profits, unscrupulously selling personalized ads to the highest bidder. And Trump is above their policy. They have no problem censoring presidents, as long as it’s not him.
• 1 June 2020: I believe in free speech & in property. I would have no problem w/ #Facebook not censoring or fact checking Trump, but this is a double standard. They also allowed false news via ads & leaked user data, influencing elections & public policy.
• 26 May 2020: 😂 I’ve been drinking
• 26 May 2020: You should see my Facebook page 🤦‍♂️ I’m starting to piss off family members, so I’m basically talking to myself 😂
• 26 May 2020: Present company excluded 😛
• 26 May 2020: Debating w/ anti-vaxxers and other conspiracy theorists & narcissists is pointless. Alas even if hilarious, they sound truthy to the gullible mind, due to aggressiveness & fallacies. But reasoning doesn’t work & cynic in me says we deserve it + many have better things to do 🤷‍♂️
• 23 May 2020: I stayed away from most of Google’s products b/c I found better alternatives & I believe in competition. But choosing Microsoft’s Edge over Chrome b/c it isn’t from Google, given it’s still Chromium (minus encryption) is unreasonable. In the realm of anti-vaxxing conspiracies 👽
• 23 May 2020: I try not to go by feelings, by rather by: - technology (encryption, data collected, dark patterns) - privacy policies - the law (GDPR compliance) - prior incidents - visibility (bigger companies are bigger targets) …
• 23 May 2020 (live): Compare w/ Google: - Chrome can encrypt (end to end) your synced data (history, bookmarks) - You can globally disable app data collection or enable periodic deletion of activity Privacy is guaranteed via technology, not brands & wishful thinking. 3/3
• 23 May 2020 (live): Note “encrypted at rest” is doublespeak for “we have the decryption key, we can read it whenever we want”. This is intentionally misleading. Unless you provide a password, or unless they describe how the password is derived on the client, no, this isn’t e2e. 2/3
• 23 May 2020 (live): On how Microsoft “changed”: - Edge’s sync does not encrypt your browsing history/bookmarks & they use bullshit to obscure this (see pic) - All their products emit a shit-ton of telemetry, hard to opt-out of, sometimes impossible, w/ no clear view of what’s collected 1/3 pic.twitter.com/TqISgXLhZT
• 17 May 2020: Chrome is still the best browser for running web apps, 12 years later its competition hasn’t caught on. Current samples: - progressive web apps - can turn any web page into a desktop app - full media keys support - media hub, picture-in-picture https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
• 8 April 2020: 🤔 are you talking about the same thing? To simplify the problem, this is about receiving an InputStream after close() and you try to read() from it. A type system could disallow usage of an InputStream reference after close() which afaik is what Rust’s borrow checker can do.
• 7 April 2020: Recommendations have unintended consequences. E.g I remember an audio circulating on WhatsApp recommending against use of Ibuprofen, based on anecdotes & an unrelated paper. But in this case it’s easy to overdose on Paracetamol instead, which can lead to liver failure.
• 7 April 2020: In science there are multiple study types & strength of evidence varies a lot. A paper on anecdotes would be a case report. Helps as clue to identify trends for investigation, but can’t be generalized & scientists don’t give recommendations based on it. https://examine.news/how-to-read-a-study
• 7 April 2020: Debunking bullshit requires knowledge & effort is higher. I’m not sure I could debunk a flat earther. And an element of fake news is the conspiracy. There’s always some non-falsifiable conspiracy theory at the center, making people mistrust authority and scientific consensus.
• 3 April 2020: Even the smart and educated fall for this particular conspiracy theory, I don’t understand the phenomenon, as the claims made are pretty wild. I have a colleague believing it, still trying to convince him 🙂 but it’s hard to change one’s mind, it’s like an investment of sorts.
• 11 March 2020: Supplies for Z day: ☑ kidney beans ☑ rubbing alcohol ☑ toilet paper ☐ lemons ☐ condoms
• 11 March 2020: As an addendum, apparently the tests aren’t reliable giving many false negatives, b/c detectable viral load can take days to develop after symptoms onset, which is why testing everyone may not be very productive: https://twitter.com/DrMichelleLin/status/1237499888046411777
• 10 March 2020 (live): Indeed, reports coming from Wuhan or northern Italy are very worrying.
• 10 March 2020: This is similar w/ the Princess Diamond story, w/ a mortality rate of 1% for people that weren’t ventilated. Italy has declared that they only test symptomatic cases, plus they are overwhelmed. So: 1. virus is more contagious than we thought 2. mortality is probably < 1%
• 10 March 2020: Mortality rate in S. Korea is ~0.8% w/ similar total cases as Italy. AFAIK they are the only ones testing asymptomatic cases on large scale & transparent about it. Only reasonable explanation for Italy’s 6% is they have 10 times the reported total cases: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
• 6 March 2020: The problem is we should leave the interpretation of data and the reporting to actual scientists working in healthcare, because the fearmongering will do far more harm than the virus itself in case a global economic crisis hits. And yes, here we have a misinterpretation of data.
• 6 March 2020: Saying 2019-nCoV has a mortality rate of 3.4% vs Influenza that supposedly is at 0.1% is fearmongering and doesn’t do anybody any good.
• 6 March 2020: Really, influenza can be in the larger scheme of things more dangerous than 2019-nCoV, only difference is we know what to expect, plus population has partial immunity to it due to seasonal exposure & vaccines. At the very least quarantines seem to work for 2019-nCoV.
• 6 March 2020: Note that a mortality rate of 3%+ is for the reported cases, however the actual mortality rate is more likely b/w 1-2%. Also Influenza can have a 1% mortality rate among reported cases & is impossible to quarantine, ppl being infectious before disease sets in.
• 20 December 2019: RCTs btw are the “gold standard” in nutrition and the evidence that dietary omega-6 isn’t inflammatory are pretty compelling 😉
• 20 December 2019: Another RCT saying “compared with SFA intake, n-6 PUFAs reduce liver fat and modestly improve metabolic status, without weight loss” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22492369/
• 20 December 2019: Higher circulating and adipose PUFA associated with decreased mortality: 1. https://ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.114.011590 2. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2545081
• 20 December 2019: Review of 32 RCTs shows that increasing or decreasing dietary linoleic acid has no effect on arachidonic acid (the boogieman) levels in the blood https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21663641/
• 20 December 2019: 15 RCTs show no increase of inflammation markers from linoleic acid: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22889633/
• 20 December 2019: But wait, I have more 🙂 Systematic review shows no inflammation from omega-6 PUFA: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/6A0167CBF8EC148B4855C25D002E4AC4/S0007114519000692a.pdf/systematic_review_of_the_effects_of_increasing_arachidonic_acid_intake_on_pufa_status_metabolism_and_healthrelated_outcomes_in_humans.pdf
• 20 December 2019: Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence of course. And anecdotes do have some value. But we have to be wary of claims of established facts, which then link to other blogs also devoid of any actual references.
• 20 December 2019: This isn’t to say that there is no evidence, but all of it is weak, e.g. studies on animal models, or undeclared outcomes, or observational studies. These are the best I could find: https://gist.github.com/alexandru/1c5120e8de947fc756b5c9c06bb65f83
• 20 December 2019: There’s also a popular misconception that Omega-6 promotes inflammation and that Omega-3 is anti-inflammatory, but that’s not strictly true. Omega-6 fatty acids can also be anti-inflammatory (see link) and Omega-3 can also be pro-inflammatory. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20354260
• 20 December 2019: Random thoughts … The n-6 : n-3 ratio is overblown, indigenuous populations had it between usually 1:4 to 4:1 and there’s nothing suggesting that the ideal is 1:1, nothing to suggest any ideal. The “ratio” mentality is popular in nutrition, but it has never paid dividends.
• 20 December 2019: I avoid vegetable oils too, preferring extra virgin olive oil, the problem is that the claims against vegetable oils are more anecdotal than based on evidence. Is it the omega-6, the seeds or the ultra-processing? AFAIK the studies we have are on mice and that’s unreliable.
• 18 December 2019: There’s also the popularity fallacy, they call it “argumentum ad populum”. Just because a piece of technology is popular, that doesn’t mean it’s good. It may mean that the marketing was good, it had the first mover advantage and now displacing it costs more than maintaining it.
• 18 December 2019: Sure, published open source software makes opinions more credible, but it has always bothered me that we aren’t using the scientific method for backing up claims in regards to … productivity, maintenance costs, error rates. Not much ROI for doing such research I guess.
• 18 December 2019: Criteria for assessing quacks: 1. does he prefer conspiracy explanations? 2. does he thrive on drama? 3. is he able to change his mind? 4. is he showing nuance in his opinions? 5. does he provide evidence for his claims? 6. is he driven by group affiliation or personal identity?
• 12 November 2019: As a layman I feel that this is not only about “residual confounding”. We can have unforeseen consequences, like when people moved from butter to margarine and upped their trans-fats intake. “Eat less meat” is a riskier advice than “eat more plants”. 3/3
• 12 November 2019: I’m sure you agree “eat more plants” is not the same as “eat less meat” as you can have plants-based junk food. I doubt that “fake meat” is any healthier than real meat. AFAIK most calories in SAD are not from meat, but from grains/added sugars/oils. 2/
• 12 November 2019: Some criticism … Saying that nutritional science is not a science b/c many of its hypothesis are not falsifiable is in essence saying that it is a religion and that’s a very strange argument to make in support of epidemiology. I hope I misunderstood 🙂 1/1
• 4 October 2019: “Meat’s become a scapegoat for vegans, politicians & the media because of bad science” https://youtu.be/w_RFzJ-nFLY
• 24 September 2019: “256 MB to even start” — that hasn’t been my experience at all. Where do such numbers come from?
• 24 September 2019: That’s easy to disprove. Start a new http4s project. It should run with an allocated max heap of 50 MB. I know because I’ve been doing it.
• 24 September 2019 (live): Also the JVM is very memory efficient in spite of popular belief & has multiple GCs to match work profile. And JVM processes can be fat, can do everything you need, instead of spawning micro services for everything. This you can’t easily do w/o 1:1 multi-threading.
• 24 September 2019 (live): Also I have some experience w/ building high throughout web services on the JVM and it’s pretty hard to beat for a GC lang. There’s not much room for Go to do a better job. In fact the way I work, Go couldn’t do a better job, but I understand that level of expertise matters.
• 24 September 2019 (live): I still don’t understand the point. My argument is that JVM apps are hardware efficient vs alternatives. How do containers help?
• 23 September 2019 (live): Care to explain?
• 23 September 2019 (live): Want to sell #Scala to business owners? Remember the trifecta: 1. higher performance, lower infra costs (JVM) 2. lower defect rate (FP, static typing) 3. higher employee retention (the cool factor, a lot of learning potential, keeps people happy)
• 20 September 2019: Another sample is banning abortions in Romania: https://twitter.com/alexelcu/status/1174404258235658241 And you could say that communism had problems in its implementation, but when you see so many social paradoxes, you have to wonder if what the ideology says can be separated from what it does.
• 20 September 2019: My problem w/ this thinking is that certain mentalities / ideologies lead to certain outcomes, even if they were designed to prevent those outcomes. E.g. comunist states have been guilty of large scale discrimination and ethnic cleansing, in spite of condemning nationalism.
• 19 September 2019: > The people injured each other. Martijn, I think we both understand the principle of action and reaction and judges understand it too. This conversation is turning dumb, and a waste of time, so let’s just agree to disagree 😉
• 19 September 2019: So I should trust restrictions on free speech because … they are made by the government? That makes no sense. No, the government doesn’t get a free pass to do whatever they want. Again, I’ve been born in communism, I’ve seen what censorship looks like, vs people living in US.
• 19 September 2019: Nope, that does not follow: 1. shouting “fire” should be perfectly legal in all circumstances 2. was is actually illegal is injuring people as a direct result of your actions, even if not intended and then accused should be acquitted if true These 2 are not in conflict 😉
• 19 September 2019: And the problem aren’t the good intentions. We certainly don’t want people getting hurt. But the problem is – whose going to decide what you or I have the right to say? Who is qualified enough to restrict my speech? I recommend: https://ariadacapo.net/archives/borrowed/2006_11_christopher_hitchens/christopher_hitchens_2006_11_talk_transcript.pdf
• 19 September 2019: Sorry, shouting “fire” in a theater should be protected free speech too. If it leads to panic and people getting injured, while the claim is provably false, then the perpetrator should be judged based on that and we’ve got laws for it (fraud, perjury, defamation, etc).
• 18 September 2019: Mind you the comunist society in Romania was very progressive for its time (e.g women had equal rights, participation in workforce being the problem), this being a good example of where the left and right extremes meet. https://twitter.com/alexelcu/status/1174299226261602305?s=20
• 18 September 2019: Funny how this Pro Life policy was conducted by a comunist administration, not for religious reasons (like the conservatives tend to push), but as policy to combat decreasing natality, yet you can see how consequences would be the same regardless of reason.
• 18 September 2019: I was lucky to be wanted, or at least I hope that happened, but the norm for women of my mother’s generation were stories of many illegal and unsanitary abortions that would make your skin crawl. Wikipedia article is a good introduction: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770
• 18 September 2019: I get some Pro Life arguments, except proponents seem to be unaware of real life social consequences when you ban abortion and in our history we’ve got one of the biggest social experiments – meet Ceaușescu’s children: https://youtu.be/ZgZJ-IV8Et0
• 18 September 2019: That would be a nuanced discussion that I’m not educated enough on the matter to have. Freedom of religion is also important, but only as long as religion doesn’t influence politics or education. And that’s all I want to say on this topic 🙂
• 18 September 2019: If the left and right is an axis, I don’t view moderates at the center. B/c for all the ferocious disagreements b/w the left and right extremes, they sure seem to agree on a lot of f’d up shit, w/ liberal freedoms being good only as long as it serves some agenda. 4/4
• 18 September 2019: On economic issues: - Capitalism is the best we’ve got - I realize it will ruin us, but I was born in communism - Taxation can be theft, yet I enjoy EU’s social safety nets - I tend to be anti government regulation - Carbon / garbage tax is OK, but only if indiscriminate 3/4
• 18 September 2019: I’m anti or pro censorship depending on who’s conducting it, the government or private entities. There is no instance in which government censorship is OK. You should have the right to speak your mind on any issue, but I also have the right to tell you to f*ck off my lawn. 2/4
• 18 September 2019: I’m a moderate … On social issues - Pro freedoms of speech / of association and property rights - Pro minorities - Feminist - Secularist, religion doesn’t belong in school or politics - Pro immigration, but only w/ proper integration 1/4
• 12 September 2019 (live): Note that usually A and B should be judged separately and the presence of one does not make the other better or worse. It’s like people complaining about Apple and then fanboys jumping with a “but Google is way more evil” line. It’s not reasonable, but there you have it.
• 12 September 2019 (live): It’s classic whataboutism, sorry. Case in point: if you’ve got cases A and B and you pick b/t them via a coin flip, you handle “A”, there will be people accusing you that “B” must have been handled instead, the CoC is asymmetrically applied, etc.
• 12 September 2019: Logical fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
• 12 September 2019: N.b. I’m making screenshots b/c I’ve blocked John 🤷‍♂️ and when you block somebody the retweet doesn’t show up to your followers either. Also an image is immutable and simpler than relying on some web archive. It goes to my Dropbox too, which can now search in images.
• 11 September 2019 (live): I’m not a Steve Jobs and I don’t have aspirations to be one 🙂 even if in academia, where the work that scientists and mathematicians do is essentially for free, attribution is everything. And I’m not seeking attribution. As I’ve said before: https://twitter.com/alexelcu/status/1170252125164711936
• 11 September 2019 (live): And I can see how all this is confusing to a bystander. Trust me, I’ve been around, I know John and his particular marketing style and I understand it all too well.
• 11 September 2019 (live): “Innovation” is a “new idea or creative thought”. In ZIO we can’t talk of “innovations”, if they happened in Monix (and others) first, especially if a primary contributor to Cats-Effect also happens to be a primary contributor of Monix …
• 11 September 2019 (live): I am a primary contributor to both Monix and Cats-Effect and the later was strongly inspired from Monix’s Task and from fs2.Task. These should be self-explanatory: https://github.com/typelevel/cats-effect/graphs/contributors https://github.com/monix/monix/graphs/contributors https://github.com/functional-streams-for-scala/fs2/graphs/contributors
• 11 September 2019: 12/12 ZIO actually has “innovations” in it, at least from the perspective of Scala’s community, however John is claiming credit for work that first happened in Monix, fs2, ReactiveX and other libraries — from which I and others drew inspiration when developing Cats-Effect.
• 11 September 2019: 11/ Interruptible / uninterruptible masks might be better than this and are a variation on “continual”, but note that both abstractions impose extra restrictions on implementations. “Continual” never made it in Cats-Effect, see it here: https://github.com/typelevel/cats-effect/pull/262
• 11 September 2019: 10/ This idea itself originates in @Monix ‘s “continual” mode and discussions around it. Monix does in fact not need interruptible/uninterruptible regions, it doesn’t even need “bracket”, because it can still switch to the “continual” mode: pic.twitter.com/rmUJn5EQMa
• 11 September 2019: 9/ On interruptible/uninterruptible regions, note that this idea was actually from Fabio Labella (SystemFw), here’s the Gitter conversation where it was proposed: https://gitter.im/typelevel/cats-effect?at=5c5f1a2fef98455ea4096756
• 11 September 2019: 8/ Note that I have no idea who implemented it like this first, however I never looked at ZIO, b/c knowing John’s style, I knew a day like this would come and I did not want to be accused of copying his code 😉 (n.b. this is a personal, not a project-wide restriction)
• 11 September 2019: 7/ John has been insisting on “evalOn” to shift on the provided thread-pool and then back to the implicit thread-pool after evaluation, what him and Daniel call “local semantics”. This too has been in Monix since Oct 2018: https://github.com/monix/monix/pull/740
• 11 September 2019: 6/ And I actually took inspiration from ReactiveX (RxJava, Rx .NET), which come with operators such as: - subscribeOn - observeOn See: http://reactivex.io/documentation/operators/observeon.html
• 11 September 2019: 5/ This is important because “evalOn” and “sleep”, which were later introduced in Cats-Effect (available right now in the hierarchy) and for which John is claiming credit, have been in Monix ever since 2015: https://github.com/typelevel/cats-effect/pull/289
• 11 September 2019: 4/ This was possible to do because the “Scheduler” gets injected in Task via “runAsync”, so the runtime always has access to a thread-pool that it can use. This design decision actually predates Task, coming from Observable, see a snapshot from 2015: https://github.com/monix/monix/blob/v1.0-M1/monifu/shared/src/main/scala/monifu/reactive/Observable.scala#L53
• 11 September 2019: 3/ Here you should be noticing the presence of ExecutionModel, which specifies batching behavior, meant to preserve fairness: https://github.com/monix/monix/blob/v3.0.0/monix-execution/shared/src/main/scala/monix/execution/ExecutionModel.scala
• 11 September 2019: 2/ @Monix Task always had “auto-shifting” behavior, in order to preserve fairness and this goes back to the very first version of Task that hit master, this being from April 2016! https://github.com/monix/monix/commit/9735782c0189a9ec150d94550055f9b46baf5113
• 11 September 2019: 1/ John is trying to take undeserved credit again for work that wasn’t his. I’m sorry to have to do this again, however a lot of this originated in @Monix and Cats-Effect. For my previous tweet see: https://twitter.com/alexelcu/status/1170252075873255424 pic.twitter.com/qaZ1XVSVgk
• 9 September 2019 (live): And he might have made a mistake, but he never admitted any wrongdoing, none, instead he doubled down on his mistakes, so I don’t blame people for being upset about it. Anyway, the reignited LC controversy wasn’t us.
• 9 September 2019: 🙂 I wasn’t talking of John though. I’m basically drawing a line between conference organizers and conference attendees. John did let an alt-right public figure talk, he did invite a red piller to have a keynote, he did accept money from an alt-right fund raising…
• 9 September 2019: Well TBH I appreciated Jamie’s statement 🤷‍♂️ Why do you folks fear that it will happen to you too anyway? Yes it could happen, if you’re a jerk and people can spot a pattern. Serious question: have you ever heard John admit any wrongdoing? That’s as rare as a solar eclipse.
• 9 September 2019 (live): I’m not engaging in discussions about Nazis — I cannot judge John or Travis b/c I don’t know all the facts — plus I’m removed from US’s social struggles, but if you follow me, you should know where I personally stand: https://mobile.twitter.com/alexelcu/status/1101121068562087941
• 9 September 2019: We’ve been badmouthed for some time now, the clique guilty of denying a democratic process and of conspiracies, so please excuse me if my personal tolerance is wearing thin.
• 9 September 2019: I’m open to talk, as the behavior you’re describing is not something that I tolerate well. You can DM me Emily.
• 9 September 2019: @BartoszMilewski the issue at play is that technical excellence is not enough. We also want to work with people that don’t drive us to burnout. It’s that simple and you don’t get a vote, b/c this isn’t a democracy. PS: your work is absolutely wonderful but you’ve lost my respect
• 9 September 2019: @BartoszMilewski if you’re referring to Typelevel as being the group that “forced” the organizers of Skills Matter, no, we had nothing to do w/ it. Our actions and arguments stand on their own. But given you want to know, I’m one of them. So what are you going to do about it?
• 9 September 2019: Also Tony Morris? The guy that was also banned from Haskell’s mailing list back in the day (please correct me if I’m wrong) and he was also banned from Scala’s mailing list. He’s also at the center of the Cabal vs Stack flame, wherever he goes, drama follows it seems.
• 9 September 2019: Apparently Sam admits it on Reddit too: “I used the style that works best on Twitter: emphasising moral outrage and condensing complex issues into a hot take. It worked extremely well”. He’s a troll by his own admission with a financial incentive. https://www.reddit.com/r/hascalator/comments/d0ej3r/i_am_functional_programming_fanboy_1_and_oss/ez9dmvu/
• 9 September 2019: I have a story to tell — Sam admitted to me in private that his posts are inflammatory on purpose because it sells more books. Also, Emily, what Typelevel members are you talking about? Who exactly called scalaz members racists?
• 8 September 2019: Coming back to this, here’s the original discussion: https://gitter.im/typelevel/cats-effect?at=5c5f1a2fef98455ea4096756 And see this comment: https://github.com/zio/zio/issues/574#issuecomment-466676933 … where John is sort of acknowledging the ideas of SystemFw (Fabio Labella). Although I’m sure Fabio was inspired by masking in Haskell.
• 7 September 2019: Indeed and I hope I didn’t let anything else come across. I’m talking of @Monix due to its influence on cancelation. Cats-Effect has been a great collaboration effort especially b/w developers of 2 competing libraries: fs2 and Monix (plus http4s, etc).
• 7 September 2019: Cats-Effect is strongly inspired by Monix as I’m a major contributor to both: https://github.com/monix/monix/graphs/contributors https://github.com/typelevel/cats-effect/graphs/contributors It is also inspired by fs2, due to involvement from @djspiewak , @mpilquist and others: https://github.com/functional-streams-for-scala/fs2/graphs/contributors These should be self-explanatory.
• 7 September 2019 (live): Meaning I have some thoughts on this issue that I’ll share 🙂
• 7 September 2019 (live): Speaking of this idea, I was thinking that it is less generic… meaning that you have to seriously modify the implementation of an IO to support it and in a type class that might be a turn off, unless you make a type class that’s totally separate, to not restrict everything.
• 7 September 2019: 👍 indeed, although that too originated in a discussion with SystemFw after my constant bickering that we still don’t have “continual”, a discussion in which John was involved and then he ran with it. I’m not holding it against him and that you implemented it is good validation.
• 7 September 2019: On the bifunctor IO, the problem is that it is very new, there isn’t much prior art b/c in Haskell people simply use EitherT. But we are certainly thinking about what to do there and you’re free to join us when we’ll discuss it.
• 7 September 2019: This is not necessarily a general opinion, other people simply want monad transformers, but the ability to abstract over IO implementations is a core objective and that won’t change.
• 7 September 2019: Unfortunately the temperature has always been high, but that didn’t stop us from admiting mistakes or making compromises in opinions. Here I’m describing how I believed “continual” is the better default, yet we flipped the default for maximizing compatibility…
• 7 September 2019: 16/16 And on a final note, we’re all standing on the shoulders of giants. Most of the work that we do is inspired by Haskell’s IO. There’s also the issue that math is discovered not invented. This is why I’m always wary of taking credit for anything I do, so I don’t.
• 7 September 2019: 15/ Cats-Effect was built for interoperability from the get-go and it remained true to that mission from its inception until today. And yes, we are working on its next major version. Stay tuned.
• 7 September 2019: 14/ One important thing to note is that in all I’ve described … most of the interoperability effort has been on the Cats-Effect side, before any involvement from John — although we do appreciate the involvement of other ZIO contributors today.
• 7 September 2019: 13/ The reason for why I think “start” is bad is that: 1. it is rarely needed, people can just work with parMapN or race 2. it is error prone and must almost always be used in the context of a “bracket” In other words it is too low level.
• 7 September 2019: 12/ And I don’t even want to claim credit for this one, because it’s super obvious and I might have seen it somewhere else. There’s also “start”, Fiber’s side-kick. I kind of regret introducing “start” and advise people to not use it. That one comes from fs2 and Haskell first.
• 7 September 2019: 11/ Note however that before doing this, @Monix already had its own, less pure type for expressing a “Fiber” called “CancelableFuture”. I refer you still to 3.0.0-M1 and here’s the signature for which John later claimed credit as well: https://github.com/monix/monix/blob/v3.0.0-M1/monix-eval/shared/src/main/scala/monix/eval/Task.scala#L1308 pic.twitter.com/kTxKu0uLMJ
• 7 September 2019: 10/ We’ll have that escape hatch in Cats-Effect 3.0 btw, for which other people will unfairly claim credit, I’m sure. Anyway, back to Fibers, the idea is pretty simple and this is indeed where we took inspiration from ZIO: pic.twitter.com/hwGEQRcBlA
• 7 September 2019: 9/ Don’t get me wrong, this design choice is also making code safer. This is a general gotcha in Haskell, you have to mask “acquire” and “release” by yourself. It’s a good default, but not without an escape hatch, or it invalidates a super common pattern: https://github.com/typelevel/cats-effect/pull/424
• 7 September 2019: 8/ Unfortunately we did import a design decision from ZIO and that is to make “acquire” and “release” uncancelable — something which Haskell doesn’t do. This makes the type class unfortunately less generic… https://github.com/typelevel/cats-effect/issues/382
• 7 September 2019: 7/ So we added Bracket, b/c we are also Haskell developers and this was a no-brainer. Can you see any ZIO btw in sight? This isn’t to say that we weren’t aware of ZIO implementing it, or that we didn’t make changes related to ZIO. We did. https://github.com/typelevel/cats-effect/issues/88
• 7 September 2019: 6/ Bracket comes from Haskell and if you can have threads that can be killed asynchronously by anything and that can’t be observed when they get killed, then you desperately need it — but one can argue that copying Haskell’s model isn’t necessarily OK: https://wiki.haskell.org/Bracket_pattern
• 7 September 2019: 5/ Then I reluctantly made Cats-Effect’s IO itself auto-cancelable, b/c its purpose is to be a reference implementation and we did not want people to build generic code assuming the behavior of a reference implementation, but that breaks w/ @Monix or ZIO: https://github.com/typelevel/cats-effect/pull/311
• 7 September 2019: 4/ But because of @Monix and of ZIO, we restated the laws to allow for auto-cancellation, depending on implementation: https://github.com/typelevel/cats-effect/pull/237
• 7 September 2019: 3/ You can see for example how it makes it possible to “observe” cancelation via “onCancelRaiseError”, transforming cancellation in just another exception you can recover from, which in the auto-cancelation model is no longer possible: pic.twitter.com/HEnlrOsBz6
• 7 September 2019: 2/ Difference from today is the default was the “continual” model, in which flatMap chains were not cancelable by default, only individual “nodes” in the chain, making the model much more reasonable. First version of cancelable IO was “continual”: https://github.com/typelevel/cats-effect/issues/242
• 7 September 2019: 1/ This is where John takes undeserved credit, one of the things that wore us down, so to set the record straight: @Monix Task had “auto-interruption” since the very first release version, 3.0.0-M1, here is a snapshot with the option from Sep 2017 … https://github.com/monix/monix/blob/v3.0.0-M1/monix-eval/shared/src/main/scala/monix/eval/Task.scala#L1856 pic.twitter.com/63EvAHkJYs
• 5 September 2019: This isn’t a binary view, but an observation that relationships are complicated, sometimes there is no solution and trying to force a due process into people’s lives is doomed for failure b/c as I said we are not the government and we don’t have a contractual obligation.
• 5 September 2019: Of course. But what happens when communication fails? Serious question – don’t you have relatives or past friends or colleagues that you wish well, but that you actively avoid b/c your relationship with them is hopeless?
• 5 September 2019: … this is to say that interpersonal relationships are not a democracy. And in accepting others, you can be your own judge w/ your own rules. Also, I have never, ever heard the involved parties to admit any wrongdoing. Kind of hard to forgive people in such circumstances 😉
• 5 September 2019: I’m not defending what Travis is doing, the Skillsmatter issue is not a Typelevel matter. However, speaking in my own name: 1. You’re not paying taxes to me, I’m not your government to grant you rights 2. Defense/redemption in my eyes depends entirely on my well being / mood
• 5 September 2019: @toxicafunk Liberal democracy is also about freedom of association and property rights. People have freedom of speech, but only in public (aka the commons) or on their own property. Otherwise this freedom can clash w/ the other rights, which are just as important …
• 4 September 2019: This story reminds me of interwar documentaries on communists fighting fascists and liberal democrats being choked in the middle 😀
• 4 September 2019: And here I’m going to be a centrist and admit that the reason for why I’m speaking in plural is that I’m disappointed by Travis as well and others, but that’s for another day.
• 4 September 2019: I think people can make mistakes and we certainly need to be able to forgive. However the primary purpose is always prevention, not punishment, so involved parties would need to make amends. Unfortunately for the parties involved, I never see them admitting mistakes.
• 4 September 2019: Yes, you should care. Because Hitler is not stupid.
• 4 September 2019 (live): We can drive such analogies further, but all we are doing is building strawmens. I’m super against shaming people for weak associations, but I’m also super pro freedom of speech & this isn’t a double standard, people have a right to complain about nazis speaking at conferences.
• 4 September 2019 (live): And you’re seriously not seeing a problem in oil companies funding the WWF, companies which are interested in preserving the status quo? I mean we’re talking about any effective measures taken for preserving life on earth being measures to reduce fossil fuels combustion.
• 4 September 2019: Good and Bad are human made concepts, created as a guideline in order for us to not kill each other for breakfast. So what matters is our ability to live together on this earth. If Hitler funded an event, you’d think he’d do it for the public good?
• 4 September 2019: Implicit assumption about money should be that it is tainted and you need to whitelist the source, instead of assuming the opposite. When you’re funded by the alt-right, it doesn’t really matter what event we’re speaking of, could even be Jesus’s second coming.
• 4 September 2019: You mean to tell me that the event organizers made their decision on whether to receive that funding based only on that page? When you’re given $43k you’d better make sure the money ain’t tainted. And yes, oil companies funding WWF makes WWF look like fraud.
• 4 September 2019: When it comes to funding, no. It’s irrelevant that people not involved w/ alt-right participated w/ funding, b/c we aren’t talking about them. And b/c money taints, you can say no. Do you expect politicians receiving money from big oil to promote green energy? I hope not.
• 4 September 2019 (live): It’s funny b/c I really do not want to defend this move and I especially don’t want to defend the guy that stirred the pot, but seeing the mental gymnastics people go through and knowing some of the context, kind of makes me want to do it — which makes me intolerant.
• 4 September 2019: In my vocabulary tolerance is capacity to endure, to let it be, to be agnostic. When you pick a side, acting on it (e.g. becoming vocal about it, organizing events), you’re no longer talking about tolerance, you’re talking about acceptance at the very least, or even endorsement.
• 4 September 2019: Not sure what to think of current news, however this is mental gymnastics — meaning you’re trying to explain away the cognitive dissonance you’re feeling.
• 4 September 2019: But when somebody is accused of defending the alt-right and modern nazis, I’m not going to voice an opinion w/o context either. I live in Romania, we don’t have the social struggles from US, so I can’t judge that. It’s all about context.
• 4 September 2019: I think it’s important to be mindful. Some social struggles are real, but if we are removed from context, we lack full picture. This is why I also dislike progressives shaming people by mere association…
• 19 June 2019: RT @dysinger: Upgrade your Firefox to >67.0.2 today. A critical exploit has been patched because …. <looks at notes> …. of a flaw wit…
• 30 August 2018: Also we aren’t talking about what’s morally right, but about society fearing immigration, in general, being a fact and such fears need to be managed or it’s going to blow up.
• 30 August 2018: Finding an enemy is easy. We have huge problems with mass media in Romania too. But it’s missing the forest from the trees and this left narrative naturally invites censorship and speaking as a child of communism, censorship is not going to be in your favor.
• 30 August 2018: Accepting immigrants at a rate higher than can be properly integrated in society does harm. European countries do not have the diversity of the US and its experience with integrating immigrants. And when you don’t listen to society’s fears, Trump, Brexit and Le Pen happen.
• 9 March 2018: This goes both ways btw. If I were a Roma, I would be super annoyed that in all Hollywood movies the chosen language of the Roma is Romanian.
• 9 March 2018: I should mention that Român comes from the Latin word “Romanus” (Roman) and it’s been in use for at least a thousand years, in Walachia. I empathize a lot and agree w/ wanting to get rid of pejorative words, but Romani is a terrible name to pick for an unrelated ethnic group.
• 9 March 2018: I don’t blame the Roma for anything btw, I have Roma friends and have advocated for their rights. But the situation is complicated and the media reports of discrimination here are overblown. Yes, there are cases, but overall it’s pretty good to be a minority in Romania 😉
• 9 March 2018: Well, we do get identified as such. Romanians in our language is spelled “români”, so making Romanians accept “Romani” is a showstopper. And we do have a sizable Roma community, for which we’ve been discriminated in the EU. I believe the UK used this in their Brexit campaign…
• 8 February 2018: @fommil To be fair, that thread contains opinions that have the benefit of doubt, the only unreasonable replies coming from the author of the tweet that I quoted, which later blocked me. Attacking people negates dialog and education opportunities, it’s why that quoted tweet offended me.
• 20 October 2017: RT @hmemcpy: I stopped learning. Here’s what happened, and how I fell in love with programming again. Blogged: Becoming Foolish https://t.…
• 8 August 2017: E.g. imagine you are Romanian working at Google and a 10-page manifesto explains how Romanians have lower IQ than UK or France (we do).