You’re right. I incorrectly believed that hexa had signed based on their comments elsewhere, but I was wrong.

The original signers include members of the infrastructure and moderation teams. You can find about half of them on Mastodon. They’re all well-established community members who hold real responsibility and roles within the NixOS Foundation ecosystem.

Also note that Eelco isn’t “a maintainer” but the original author and designer, as well as a de facto founder of Determinate Systems. He’s a BDFL. Look at this like the other dethronings of former BDFLs in the D, Python, Perl, Rails, or Scala communities; there’s going to be lots of drama and possibly a fork.

This is part of why I never got into mining BTC. Even if I have a decent business plan and I can afford all of the externalities, I’d still be profiting almost entirely from the bad choices of retail investors. (And isn’t “retail investor” such a nasty euphemism?)

I hear what you’re saying, but I think it’s sort of a motte-and-bailey setup:

Motte: Many functions can be probably approximately learned, even some uncomputable functions

Bailey: Consciousness, appreciation for art, useful laboring, and careful argumentation are learnable functions

Go for it! I don’t have any active HN accounts and I don’t want to make one.

That’s a real possibility. At risk of going NSFW, HN seems to have a very predictable reaction to links to (English) WP; their comments are always tangents based on personal experiences. For example:

• An article about a book gets book reviews
• An article about modern slang gets whippersnapper discourse
• An article about a UNIX command gets examples of how they like to use it

But (at risk of invoking the shape-rotator stereotype) it seems like it’s hard for HN’s denizens to imagine a time when they personally were experiencing a memetic effect because memes are patterns rather than concretions. For analogy, an HN full of fish would not leave a single comment on the Fish WP article, “Water.” Edit: A fairer example would be an article like “Properties of Water”, because memetics is the study of memes, and memes are like water. (“Hydrodynamics” isn’t a standalone article, but it would be another good candidate.)

Is it still a scam if the only applicants are scammers?

That sounds like a great way to get assaulted, perhaps battered too. I guess it’s cold comfort to know “hah, got 'em, they’re so easily triggered” while sitting in a hospital bed recovering from a head injury, but it just sounds stupid to me.

Exactly! Quoting myself from the conversation I linked above:

With [HN] in mind, I don’t really want to give Dan G. any benefit of the doubt. He’s had years to decide whether to open-source the forum, add features like a moderation log, switch the forum to invite-only mode, add reputation tracking, etc. It’s his website, and he chooses to leave these comments up.

At this point, reporting bad posts only serves to let Dan G. and his buddies sweep the fascists under the rug.

I’m reminded of this conversation from last autumn, where HN moderators deleted posts only after they were used as receipts. It is a maddening sort of gaslighting to be told that HN isn’t that bad while the moderators only take action in order to make HN look good.

I scrolled too far up and motherfucking Lemmy ate my fucking comment. Fuck this Web 2.0 garbage. You get a shorter reply, yay. Also I’m not re-linking everything; search Wikipedia for anything confusing, like “futures market” or “spot market” or “basket of goods.”

A commodity futures ETF is a way to improve the arbitrage that an individual investor experiences, while also reducing their exposure to spot markets. In particular, an investor only holds shares in a fund, and the fund does the actual trading; also, the fund only trades futures, although they do typically have a “basket” which holds physical commodities at a secure location.

For example, I hold shares of precious-metals ETFs. This means that, unlike e.g. somebody who has gold coins in their safe at home, I have to trust that the ETF managers will still exist tomorrow and that the financial system will still honor their contracts; this is technically increased risk. But in exchange, I don’t have to physically receive and store any precious metals, and also I get theoretically better returns due to the implicit arbitrage in futures markets.

Fun fact: BTC is overpriced, mostly from grifters and miners pumping and hyping the market. However, arbitrage sees overpriced commodities as an opportunity, and a futures ETF can produce value for its investors merely by insisting that the commodity should be valued less. This is also why the spot ETFs were not approved by SEC; the spot market for BTC is quite volatile and it’s not clear that a BTC spot trader would produce value for investors.

It’s not at all like Carlin’s work. Remember that Carlin was a master of rhetoric, and his presentations were meant to persuade the audience to agree with him. Sarcasm was not typically one of his tools, because he knew that sarcastic statements would be taken at face value. Carlin would not have sarcastically talked about billionaires as a product of everyday consumerism, but he did talk about how consumerism is produced by billionaires as part of their overarching societal influence.

Your punishment is to relisten to Carlin’s “big club” rant.

My “I am not a prophet, do not follow me, this is not a religion” shirt sure does get a lot of questions.

Their mistake is not grokking contrition. An apology ought either to be contrite or to justify why contrition is impossible.

To be explicit, contrition is the part of an apology where the apologizing party promises to change something. Without contrition, apologies are worthless, since they do not amend any social contract.

What the author proposes instead is indeed “Machiavellian” and “hacking social APIs;” we should recognize it as a form of deceit or lie. They are clearly more interested in appearing to be decent than in improving society, and should be marked as confidence scammers.

BJ vague-tweeted about having his heart broken by a girl in a way that, unfortunately for him, is subject to peer review. The particular peer here is the girl in question.

On one hand, this would be mortifying; on the other hand, BJ should be mortified.

Your position is also inconsistent. For example, coyotes have meat-based diets and are not capitalist; I think that coyotes also don’t use cryptocurrency, although I have no evidence either way. Naturalistic appeals are usually fallacies since they involve special pleading for humans in an otherwise-natural holistic existence.

That said, I upvoted you for approaching the concept of obligate capitalism, the idea that the only choices presented to humans within a capitalist society are to own capital, labor, or starve. We should be less keen to criticize each other merely for choosing to live.

Yes, although the veracity of the quote is uncertain; see here for discussion. This is the commonly-cited form that you’ll find all over the Internet:

Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man wants to make a million dollars, then the best way would be to start his own religion.~ Lafayette Ron Hubbard

I guess not everybody’s strong enough to resist the urge to form a cult.

I’m a little surprised that people feel like Discord does a good job of (4) and (5). On (4), Discord’s ToS used to permit Discord to resell your personal data in bulk (and still might allow it; haven’t read the ToS in a while), all guilds are co-located in a single database, and rumor is that three-letter agencies are allowed to make relatively complex queries against that database. On (5), Discord is well-known to ban alternative clients, hacked clients, API clients, extensions, addons, and even chatbots, without any due process or recourse.

Like, yes, it’s a nice service, but is it really that much nicer than Mumble or IRC?

The paragraph about gullibility resonates strongly with me. One of the first things in organic chemistry (a course I repeatedly failed) is that carbon doesn’t behave like the ions which we normally manipulate in undergraduate chemistry laboratories. Instead, carbon is like a Lego brick or K’Nex connector, with four ports which clip together in a variety of configurations. This is used to explain many quirks of biology, like why diamond or nanotubes can’t be easily produced by enzymatic processes; as you explain, carbon’s bonding process makes it very difficult to put into place atomically, and instead we need some sort of external force like immense pressure or heat to reconfigure large masses of carbon into carbon-only structures.