There is no hypocrisy here though. That’s the whole point. Buying an imperfect product, or contributing to an imperfect system does not invalidate anyone’s right to argue that things should be better.
Driving a car while complaining that roads are congested does not make you a hypocrite. It just makes you a driver (who is part of the problem) that is aware that there is a problem that should be fixed.
I try to live by a similar “always try to interpret peoples actions in the most positive possible way”. This means that if someone says something hurtful, they probably didn’t mean it, either something came out wrong or you misinterpreted them. Spend a couple seconds thinking about what they could have meant, and suddenly you’re choosing to interpret them in a way that makes your day better instead of worse.
Same goes for actions. If someone does something you don’t like, you can very often choose to figure out what a good reason for their actions are. Trying my best to think like this has made me a lot happier and more easy-going.
reject all forms of advertising
Yes. If I need something, I’ll go looking for it. If your product is a decent solution to my problem, I’ll find it and buy it when I need it. If you want visibility and/or publicity, you can advertise on your own platform, or do reviews, beta-testing, or press-releases in relevant channels.
There is literally no reason that you should ever shove your product in my face. The people whose job it is to do the shoving should be fired, and replaced by people that actually contribute to solving real problems. We have more than enough of those.
There is quite literally exactly zero evolutionary pressure to “evolve past it”, since any gene that makes its carrier more likely to care for others children than to have their own will quite quickly be removed from the gene pool.
You would be correct if the “far right nationalist party” was anything comparable to actual fascists.
Sure, our rightmost mainstream party just had its second best election ever (≈20 %). The thing is that this party has been a decent part of parliament (8-17 %) since the 1980s. They were part of a government coalition with three other parties from 2017-2021.
Frankly, they’re nowhere near being an actual far-right nationalist party. On a global scale, they’re more of a “far-right” populist party for people that want to complain about all the other parties. They’re basically immigrant-loving democratic communists compared to pretty much anyone but Bernie Sanders over in the US.
I think part of the problem in the US right now is that your Overton window is shifted so far to the right that pushing back against authoritarianism is no longer a given. So while Europe is definitely seeing a worrying surge of far-right nationalism, the pushback here is much stronger. Also, a European far-right party doing terrifyingly well and becoming the biggest party in parliament typically amounts to something like 20-30 % of the vote. When no other party will touch them with a fire poker, 30 % doesn’t really give that much real power, so there’s a decent protection in the multi-party system as well.
tøøthbrush
FFS. its spelled “tuuthbrøsh”
Chinese government: Blatantly lies about any and everything.
Everyone else: …
Absolutely everyone: …
Chinese government: THESE ARE BASELESS ACCUSATIONS AND UNFRIENDLY PROPAGANDA!
I can never help but be put off by the trivial “as my 30 year life cycle comes to an end…” when I read this comic. I wonder if we’ll ever be at a stage where we produce/program biological “robots” that are capable of having this kind of relationship to their own existence.
Once you actively enable a fascist government you are complicit in the crimes it commits.
Nowhere did I state that anyone is guilty by association simply by existing. I said anyone that actively enables a fascist government is complicit, and that laying low, turning a blind eye, or otherwise passively accepting that government doesn’t completely absolve you.
It’s absurd to paint someone with crimes committed before they were born, but it’s even more absurd that you were able to read that out of the comment you replied to.
Applying the same logic to slavery leads you to the conclusion that anyone who actively worked to enable slavery is complicit, and that anyone who silently accepted it is also partially accountable. There is literally nothing in my previous comment that places blame on people either too young, old or incapacitated to have real agency. Even less so unborn people or people resisting a fascist government, either loudly and publicly or silently in private.
Oh, I definitely meant far future. While the differences are far too big today, I can see gradually increasing cooperation between e.g. the EU and African Union at some point culminating in the construction of a governmental body that has some regulatory power over them both.
Once such a body exists, I can imagine that it over time accumulates power, bringing the two unions even closer together. The EU started out as a relatively small organ, and has grown gradually to what it is today over many decades. My point was that if some “global government” ever forms, I think that kind of gradual process is how it will happen. Starting out with trade agreements, and then gradually regulating more aspects of government.
These don’t need to be mutually exclusive though. A lot of the progress in Europe the past 80 years is a result of the improved cooperation brought by the EU.
The EU isn’t like the UN, where everyone is equally represented (sans veto powers), but is a democratically elected super-national body with opposing super-national political factions. I can see a concept like that working on a global scale some time in the (relatively far) future.
I think something like this is the most reasonable, and we’re already closer to it than at any previous point in history. We have the EU, the African Union (AU), and I think there’s a South American union as well (?) there’s also the US, which is a bit between a union and a single state (US states have more autonomy than regional municipalities most other places, but far less than any full-fledged county).
I think that if a “global government” ever develops, it will be due to these unions forming an overarching union. The major hurdle is that we’re a very far way off anybody wanting to concede any governing power to an organisation above the “continental union” level. Even holding the EU together is non-trivial, because a lot of people feel that too much power is concentrated far away in Brussels.
Regarding judicial systems and military forces, the UN has showed that it’s possible to have a kind of global system for this, but it’s still a far stretch from anything that could be called a “global judicial system with enforcement powers”.
The majority of Germans in the late 1930’s weren’t members of the Nazi party either. The majority of Germans in fact claimed being either unaware or opposed to what the Nazi regime did. Did the tell the truth? I’m inclined to believe so. Does being unaware/laying low absolve them of any and all crimes committed by the Nazi government? That’s more of an open question.
Actively voting for a government that commits crimes because you don’t care sufficiently about politics does not absolve you of responsibility for those crimes. Once you actively enable a fascist government you are complicit in the crimes it commits.
The fundamental difference to me, which makes me not see “a website with extensive docs and a download button” as marketing, is whether you need to seek it out or not.
If I need to seek it out myself, it’s not marketing, it’s simply “providing solid information” and “making your product accessible”, which is a whole different ballgame from “shoving your shit into peoples face in the hope that they’ll give you money”.
I think there’s a substantial difference between “supplying information about a product without shoving it in people’s face”, and what most people associate with “marketing”.
If a company putting up neutral, verifiable information about their product on their own webpage where I can find it by searching for something I’m looking for after reflexively scrolling past the ads counts as marketing, then yes, I “fall for marketing” all the time. However, what I typically associate with “marketing” involves me somehow being fed information about a product without seeking it out. Usually when that happens, I’ll actively look somewhere else.
Similarly, what would you gain by saying uint32_t const* x = my_var.get<uint32_t>();
To be frank: You gain the information that MyConcreteType::get<uint32_t> returns a uint32_t, which I otherwise couldn’t infer from the docs. Of course, I could assume it, based on the template parameter, but I don’t want to go around assuming a bunch of stuff in order to read docs.
Take an example like auto x = my_var.to_reduced_form(), it’s very clear that x is the “reduced form” of my_var, which could be meaningful in itself, but what type is it? I need to know that if I want to do anything with x. Can I do x += 1? If I do, will that modify my_var? Let’s say I want to make a vector of whatever to_reduced_form returns… and so on.
All these questions are very easily answered by MyConcreteType x = my_var.to_reduced_form(). Now I immediately know that everything I can do with my_var, I can also do with x. This makes me happy, because I need to do less digging, and the code becomes clearer to read.
Thanks, that was a good read :)
However, my impression is that he’s largely using the existence of templates and polymorphism as arguments that “we don’t really care about type”. I disagree: A template is essentially a generic type description that says something about what types are acceptable. When working with something polymorphic, I’ll prefer ParentClass&, to indicate what kind of interface I’m working with.
Sure, it can be very useful to hide exact type information in order to generalise the code, but I think that’s a weak argument for hiding all type information by default, which is what auto does.
I really like C++ (I know, shoot me), and I think auto should be avoided at (almost) all costs.
One of the things I love about a language like C++ is that I can take one glance at the code and immediately know what types I’m working with. auto takes that away while adding almost no benefit outside of a little convenience while writing.
If I’m working with some very big template type that I don’t want to write out, 99/100 times I’ll just have a using somewhere to make it more concise. Hell, I’ll have using vectord = std::vector<double> if I’m using a lot of them, because I think it makes the code more readable. Just don’t throw auto at me.
Of course, the worst thing ever (which I’ve seen far too often) is the use of auto in examples in documentation. Fucking hell! I’m reading the docs because I don’t know the library well! When you first bother to write examples, at least let me know the return type without needing to dig through your source code!
Complaining about congested roads while driving doesn’t make you a hypocrite, even if there are other options available. Hypocrisy would be to argue that people use public transport to reduce road congestion while refusing to do so yourself.
In the example above, the person would be a hypocrite if they themselves also under-paid their employees and over-charged their customers while at the same time complaining that apple does the same. There’s nothing hypocritical about buying an imperfect product and pointing out/complaining that it’s imperfect. That just makes you an aware consumer.