• 1 Post
  • 771 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle


  • Eh, I think that sometimes one sets out in search of calm, and may learn, through meditation, that calm wasn’t what was needed.

    It reminds me of a concept/quote that I learned from a friend:

    " “A person should always be involved in Torah even she’lo lishmah, for from she’lo lishmah he will come to lishmah

    She’lo lishmah translates as “not for its own sake” and “lishmah” means for its own sake. So that line roughly means that “(even though you’d think that studying Torah is an intrinsically good thing (within a Jewish framework) that one should study it for its own sake), it’s actually okay to study Torah if you’re not doing it for its own sake (I.e as a means towards other, less noble ends), because being involved in Torah will inevitably transform the student into someone who appreciates it for its own sake”

    I’m not Jewish, but as someone who can be overly objective focussed, I really appreciate this way of thinking about things. It makes me reflect on what I think are intrinsically good things that have transformative potential even if one only acknowledges the superficial good parts of a thing. Meditation is probably the biggest example that comes to mind here


  • I do think you’re pissin in the wind, though.

    You may be right, but hope has gotten me much farther than defeatism has. And I’ve never been clinging so desperately to hope as now, when the US is being governed by such abominable lickspittles. (I confess that my previous comment about creativity in insults caused me to be a bit extra here).

    Besides, I’ve had plenty of times when I’ve been foolish and saying things that I didn’t realise were harmful. Humans are incredibly easily swayed by group norms, and this is often for the worse. However, I’ve found that there can be a huge impact from people saying “hey, not cool”. I don’t have to be someone who changes any minds, just someone who can feel like they tried, regardless of if the tides change in the direction I’m pushing.

    Plus, you’d actually be surprised at how many times I’ve had productive conversations on Lemmy from engaging earnestly with someone being aggressive. One of the reasons I like hanging out here is that I feel much more like I’m talking to people, in part because of how much more I see people apologising or being mature in dicey conversations. I certainly wouldn’t say that I have good results every time, but it’s often enough that it’s a key part of what I enjoy on this platform. Especially because I have enjoyed this wee conversation that you and I have had, independent of the person I was originally speaking to — you also count as one of the 'surprisingly pleasant" interactions that spring forth from challenging someone (especially as your first comment made me expect you to be far more adversarial than you have been).

    Small wins, but I’ll take them



  • Oh yeah, I can imagine; I feel like I would cringe if I rewatched those shows (especially as I was less visibly disabled back when I watched them the first time, and so hadn’t experienced random ableist slurs directed at me by strangers on the street).

    Whenever someone mentions that the 70s and 80s were 40-50 years ago, I usually feel uncomfortable at the inexorable passage of time and my place within it; however when I consider how far we’ve come since then though, across many different domains, I feel slightly heartened — when the reality is that progress happens a trickle at a time, I feel less small and overwhelmed at my own capacity to make change happen.


  • In the context of talking about people, that word has everything to do with the people who it has been used as a slur against, including, but not limited to “mentally handicapped”.

    OP was clearly using the phrase as a derogatory term for people, and the only dictionary sense that fits there is the one that has ableist allusions. If the context of use were different, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. For example, I wouldn’t have a problem with the phrase “The PCM responds by retarding ignition timing—either until the knock disappears, or until maximum spark retard is reached.” or “The Friar’s alibi finds him at the right place but always a moment in retard”.

    That you’re taking such a literal reading here makes me wonder whether your comment was made in bad faith such that I shouldn’t bother wasting my time, but I’m hoping that there could actually be some meaningful dialogue here (after all, there’s a reason why I didn’t just report OP and move on). It might not affect your opinion, but I have direct experience of the r-slur that has been directed at me (not infrequently) when I am people read visibly disabled. I’m not “mentally handicapped”, but as a word, it has grown far beyond it’s original context of use. I say this to give context on my original comment — I’m not just going about tone policing people for fun: I commented what I did because it hurts to see that word thrown at people when part of what makes it effective as an insult is its attachment to people like me.

    Once upon a time, the r-slur was actually considered one of the more appropriate words to describe people who are intellectually disabled. If I were alive in that era, I’d have likely been left to rot in an institution, and allowed only a fraction of the independence I’m able to have nowadays. But times change, and so does our understanding of the baggage that words pick up.

    To draw an analogy, it wouldn’t be appropriate to call a black person the n-word, on the basis that it derives from the Spanish word for “black”. That etymology isn’t wrong, but it’s still missing the forest for the trees.


  • Take your pick — There’s a whole world of insults that don’t involve punching down at marginalised groups. I realise that may sound hyperbolic, but I say it because I’m someone who is sometimes the recipient of that slur, and it’s jarring to see it in spaces like this. I know that in this case, it wasn’t at me, but a key part of why insults like this carry weight is because of the comparison it makes to people like me (even if only implicitly).

    My hope is that we might be more creative with our insults when solidarity is our best weapon against these assholes





  • I agree with much of what you say, but I was confused because the judge blocking the executive order isn’t the same as trying to make the administration do a thing; it’s more like telling the people at the NIH “ignore what that guy just said, business as usual (for now, at least)”. If that’s the case, I’m unclear on why things are still blocked up at the NIH. Because of this, I took the radical step of reading the linked article.

    In many ways, it didn’t help; I suppose it makes sense that one of the harms of someone willfully breaking the rules is that it becomes harder to discern what those rules actually are (were?). However, one of the lawyers quoted in the article suggests that the NIH officials who are currently carrying out the blocked order may be in contempt of court. This makes sense to me, based on the understanding I outlined above. But wait, there’s more.

    After the block continued to be de facto in place despite being blocked de jure, the judge issued another ruling to try to force the Trump administration to rescind the order. This is concerning because as you highlight, this Judge has no recourse to enforce this judgement. Whereas before, the blocking of the order was the Judge speaking to the NIH officials, those top officials have seemingly gone “no, we’re not listening to you, we’re listening to him”. As I have said, they may be in contempt of court by doing this, but that’s not relevant when we’re looking at urgently ensuring that years of research isn’t ruined by this. By issuing a new ruling to try to force Trump to rescind the order, the judge has been forced to step outside of normal procedure in a way where they’re doomed to fail; it’s fairly obvious that Trump will go “no, make me”, and then fuck knows what the judge is going to do.

    I think the judge knows this too, but what the fuck can they do (in their role as a judge) in this situation? Oh man, it’s so fucked.





  • The main reason I like vi/vim is that if you’re having to use multiple different computers (such as if one is a sysadmin, or in my case, does scientific computing), because if you’re running on Linux, you can be confident that vi/vim will be on it.

    For personal use, I’ve been using emacs, but I can’t recommend that without feeling like I’m suggesting you try some heroin. I enjoy emacs because of it’s complexity and how much power it gives me to modify it. It’s very easy to fall into feature creep and over complexity though. That’s why I can’t recommend it — it’s good for me because I am a chronic tinkerer, and having something to fuck around with is an outlet for that.

    I would recommend learning the basics of vim though. As you highlight, getting back to your current level of productivity would take a while, even if you loved vim and committed to it wholeheartedly. It is possible to try it out with little commitment though, for the perspective. If you’re on a machine that has vim installed already, try the vimtutor command, which will start the ~30 min long inbuilt tutorial for vim. I liked it for giving me perspective on what on earth vim even was.

    I know you don’t use it anymore, but I just want to fistbump you re: sublime text. I really loved that as a basic text editor that was, for me, just a slightly nicer notepad.




  • (n.b. I am neither a rust, nor C developer so I am writing outside my own direct experience)

    One of the arguments brought up on the kernel.org thread was that if there were changes to the C side of the API, how would this avoid breaking all the rust bindings? The reply to this was that like with any big change in the Linux kernel that affects multiple systems with multiple different teams involved, that it would require a coordinated and collaborative approach — i.e. it’s not like the rust side of things would only start working on responding to a breaking change once that change has broken the rust bindings. This response (and many of the responses to it) seemed reasonable to me.

    However, in order for that collaboration to work, there are going to have to be C developers speaking to rust developers, because the rust developers who need to repair the bindings will need to understand some of what’s being proposed, and thus they’ll need to understand some level of C, and vice versa. So in practice, it seems nigh on impossible for the long term, ongoing maintenance of this code to be entirely a task for the rust devs (but I think this is taking an abnormally flexible reading of “maintenance” — communicating with other people is just part and parcel of working on such a huge project, imo)

    Some people have an ideological opposition to there being two different programming languages in the Linux kernel full stop. This is part of why the main thing that rust has been used for so far are drivers, which are fairly self enclosed. Christoph Hellwig even used the word “cancer” to describe a slow creep towards a codebase of two languages. I get the sense that in his view, this change that’s being proposed could be the beginning of the end if it leads to continued prevalence of rust in Linux.

    I haven’t written enough production code to have much of an opinion, but my impression is that people who are concerned are valid (because I do have more than enough experience with messy, fragmented codebases), but that their opposition is too strong. A framework that comes to mind is how risk assessments (like are done for scientific research) outline risks that often cannot be fully eliminated but can be reduced and mitigated via discussing them in the context of a risk assessment. Using rust in Linux at all hasn’t been a decision taken lightly, and further use of it would need ongoing participation from multiple relevant parties, but that’s just the price of progress sometimes.