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I find this article profoundly insightful. On a side note, the text reminds me the good old days of internet, where everybody shared useful information without strings attached. No attention seeking, no ads, no emotional drama. Just spot on perfect

The situation with Taiwan will explode because putinism is being normalized. Welcome to the dark era.

The prior art was that Austrian guy who just wanted to become a painter but was rejected from joining a school.

You are getting downvoted because people see their own reflection in that statement. And they don't like what they are seeing.

It is getting downvoted because it is a well known silly trope. Generally, success reinforces itself. That’s why there have been a bunch of countries that have had multi-generational streaks of repeated success. Eventually, this feedback look can fail, but it isn’t on some predictable four generation pattern.

> Eventually, this feedback look can fail, but it isn’t on some predictable four generation pattern.

Actually, it kind of is.

See The Fourth Turning and any other book based on the Strauss-Howe generational theory.

Is this theory air-tight and inviolable? No. Does it more or less support this “silly trope”? Yes. I think it’s safe to say that it is directionally correct.


I don’t think that book was well regarded by historians. It’s more of a pop-sociology thing, right?

It's most likely because people just assume it's a misogynist quote.

Thinking in memes isn’t going to lead us to a better world.

Least we can do is downvote it.


The thing itself speaks seemingly a truth though: growing up too coddled will risk a twisted perspective of what you deserve and what's a given.

Seemingly? Do you have any indication that this is a consistent pattern in the world outside of imagination?

Rich kids with inherited wealth are always perfectly fine and reasonable people?

They overwhelmingly do better than their poorer peers, yes. Anectdote vs statistics.

If you think that it's just an imagination, the universe will make you physically feel what it really is. Not all at once, but gradually, drop by drop. And then, you'll learn the true meaning of another "meme" word: ignorance.

Or you’ll find out that strong men thinking in memes create even worse times.

In any case, that's the beauty of life: we live the consequences. Both sweet and bitter, depending on choices of the past.

Most of what happens to us is by chance, not by choice. And when it's by choice, its often not our own choice.

This is what they want you to believe. You are useful and convenient when you are malleable (to someone's else agenda aka "their choice"). Ideally, you should not practice any discernment at all, raise no questions, silence any suspicions. As if it's all by sheer coincidence and predefined by external forces ("chance").

Straight out of "Manipulators' Handbook 101".


You're the one not raising questions about this nonsensical maxim. It seems neat to you so you accept it as truth uncritically.

It's not the truth. It's an observation, one of many. It does not look neat, it looks horrible. However, I am ok to give it a deeper nuanced appreciation than to just negate it right off the bat.

The annoying part is when I’ve got to live with the consequences of someone else’s choices.

Thinking in memes is exactly what the right is doing. It’s short, succinct and pretty much a termination point for all further thought on the matter.

He clearly has psychiatric involvement in his personality: NPD at least, psychopathic at worst. Both type of personalities are great manipulators who can deceive even the closest friends, more so the masses.

Suggesting Trump is psychopathic is just hilarious. Keep diluting the meaning of those words will ya?

1. Lack of empathy (check) 2. Emotional detachment (check) 3. Artificial charisma (check) 4. Self-centeredness (check) 5. Self-absorption (check) 6. Illusions of grandeur (check) 7. Recklessness (check)

psychopathic /ˌsʌɪkəˈpaθɪk/ adjective adjective: psychopathic

affected or marked by a persistent pattern of antisocial, impulsive, manipulative, and sometimes aggressive behaviour (not in current technical use). "a psychopathic disorder"

Psychopathy, or psychopathic personality,[1] is a personality construct[2][3] characterized by impaired empathy and remorse, persistent antisocial behavior,[4] along with bold, disinhibited, and egocentric traits. These traits are often masked by superficial charm and immunity to stress,[5] which create an outward appearance of normality.[6][7][8][9][10]

psy· cho· path ˈsī-kə-ˌpath ˈsī-kō- : a mentally unstable person especially : a person having an egocentric and antisocial personality marked by a lack of remorse for one's actions, an absence of empathy for others, and often criminal tendencies

----

Seems spot on to me. You'll find a dictionary is your friend.


It's not just a dictionary definition, there's a real threshold for what can be considered psychopathy in clinical terms.

You could say that about a lot of people you don't like.

I'm not saying there's some traits, but we could say that about many people. He's narcissistic for sure and charismatic, but again...

If you want something more likely, look up NPD:

Key Characteristics

Grandiosity: Exaggerated sense of self-importance, achievements, and talents.

Need for Admiration: Constant craving for attention and praise.

Lack of Empathy: Inability or unwillingness to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.

Sense of Entitlement: Unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment.

Exploitative Behavior: Taking advantage of others to achieve personal ends.

Envy: Often envious of others or believes others are envious of them.

Arrogance: Haughty, condescending attitudes or behaviors.

---

I'm just saying, clinical psychopathy is much more rare and extreme


Ok, fair enough, thanks. I can roll with that. But in summary: we have a problem.

That I can agree with. Especially now that he's aging and is displaying clear signs of cognitive decline.

I can see he's also being increasingly influenced by his circle like Miller, also for the fact that unlike in 2017, there was no huge line of people coming to the administration, but after his first term now we have all these guys orbiting him trying to use him as a vehicle to push their policy.

And it seems to be fairly easy, just stoke him a bit saying "they don't want you to do this because they think you're weak!!"

And you can see it with the whole excessive gifting by foreign leaders. It works. Myself I'd be insulted because it feels so fake, but he seems to be unaware.

The guy's ego has blown up like crazy this past decade.


It would be far stranger at this point if Trump wasn't seriously mentally ill.

They are free to do whatever they want, but please keep that crap out from paid plans.

Nowadays people complain about AI scrapers with the same vain as they complained about search indexers a way back when. Just a few years later, people had stopped caring too much about storage access and bandwidth, and started begging search engines to visit their websites. Every trick on the planet Earth, SEO optimization, etc.

Looking forward to the time when everybody suddenly starts to embrace AI indexers and welcome them. History does not repeat itself but it rhymes.


We already know the solution: One well-behaved, shared scraper could serve all of the AI companies simultaneously.

The problem is that they're not doing it.


This is an interesting approach. Archive.org could be such a solution, kind of. Not its cold storage as it's now, but a warm access layer. Sponsorship by AI companies would a good initiative for the project.

I can't imagine IA ever going for it. You'd need a separate org that just scrapes for AI training, because its bot is going to be blocked by anyone who is anti-AI. It wouldn't make sense for it to serve multiple purposes.

Common Crawl would be a better fit, but still might not want to serve in that capacity.


Bad take. Search engines send people to your site, LLMs don’t.

I visit sites and pages through links I get from an LLM plenty.

Search indexing historically has had several of orders less impact on bandwidth and processing costs to website maintainers.

My recommendation is to copy the text in this article and pass it LLM to summarize this article's key points, since it appears you missed the central complaint of the article.


Except robots.txt was the actual real solution to search indexing...

The problem with that software title is caused by a hostile licensing system it uses. It relies on an offline form of online activation where the activation key is tied to your installation ID, which in turn depends on OS/hardware identifier of your computer. This is an overkill IMO.

I cannot imagine people working with ceramic tiles cracking a static licensing system. Yes, they can overshare license keys but realistically this does not happen too often, and there are non-invasive ways to circumvent this.


I've worked on parts of a training platform for a specific professional group... There's literally been widespread hacks to bypass the need to watch mandated training material. You'd be surprised the efforts people will go through to get to/through something they need.


My personal bet is that traditional search engines face a -70% usage drop at the moment.


The problem with duplicate questions is that they weren't duplicates at all, and mods weren't competent enough to tell a difference.


Show me one that was closed by a moderator. Just one. And I will tell you exactly what happened.


I think the poster you're responding to is correct. I've seen it many times myself. And just so you know, asking for a piece of data and not getting it is not going to be proof that you're right.


No, but it will show, as someone else already responded, that they don't understand SO systems and processes at all. The question they linked [0] was closed by the asker themselves. It's literally one of the comments [1] on the question. Most questions aren't even closed by moderators, not even by user voting, but by the askers themselves [2], which can be seen on the table as community user. The community user gets attributed of all automated actions and whenever the user agrees with closure of their own question [3]. (The same user also gets attributed of bunch of other stuff [4]

This shows that critics of Stack Overflow don't understand how Stack Overflow works and start assigning things that SO users see normal and expected to some kind of malice or cabal. Now, if you learned how it works, and how long it has been working this way, you will see that cases of abuses are not only rare, they usually get resolved once they are known.

[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32711321/setting-element...

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32711321/setting-element...

[2]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658/2024-a-year-...

[3]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/250922/can-we-clari...

[4]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/19739/213575


I logged into my old account and found an old question I asked:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32711321/setting-element...


The linked answer seems like a valid guess for a relevant dupe. Like I said in my comment, "I understand a few eggs got cracked along the way to making this omelette" but I really don't think this was as widespread of a problem as people are making it out to be.

They also have Meta Stack Overflow to appeal if you think your question was unfairly marked as a dupe. From what I read, it seems that most mods back off readily


> From what I read, it seems that most mods back off readily

If a reasonable, policy-aware argument is presented, yes. In my experience, though, the large majority of requests are based in irrelevant differences, and OP often comes across and fundamentally opposed to the idea of marking duplicates at all.


That was not closed by a moderator. In fact, it was closed automatically by the system, when you agreed that the question was a duplicate. Because of my privilege level I can see that information in the close dialog:

> A community member has associated this post with a similar question. If you believe that the duplicate closure is incorrect, submit an edit to the question to clarify the difference and recommend the question be reopened.

> Closed 10 years ago by paradite, CommunityBot.

> (List of close voters is only viewable by users with the close/reopen votes privilege)

... Actually, your reputation should be sufficient to show you that, too.

Anyway, it seems to me that the linked duplicate does answer the question. You asked why the unit-less value "stopped working", which presumably means that it was interpreted by newer browsers as having a different unit from what you intended; the linked duplicate is asking for the rules that determine the implicit unit when none is specified.


You had me looking through my history. Here is an example from 12 years ago: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15626760/does-an-idle-my...

Granted when I look at that question today, it doesn't make much sense. But 12 years-back me didn't know much better. Let's just say the community was quite hostile to people trying to figure stuff out and learn.


Yeah I can definitely see why this might feel hostile to a newbie. But SO explicitly intended to highlight really good well-formed and specific questions. Stuff that other people would be asking and stuff that wouldn't meander too much. It's simply not meant to be a forum for these kinds of questions. I think Reddit would've been a better fit for you


That is a specific question.

Any more specific and I suspect it would have been closed as too specific to their environment / setup instead.


I don't really agree. Programming on our endless tech stack is meandering. And people come in all shapes, forms and level of expertise. I mean, sure, it's their platform, they can do whatever with it. But as an experience developer now, I still rather prefer an open/loose platform to a one that sets me to certain very strict guidelines. Also once you had negative experiences in SoF as a beginner, would you come back later? I didn't.


> Programming on our endless tech stack is meandering. And people come in all shapes, forms and level of expertise.

completely agree

> But as an experience developer now, I still rather prefer an open/loose platform to a one that sets me to certain very strict guidelines.

And that's also fine. It's just not what I think SO was trying to be. Reddit for those types of questions, HN for broader discussions and news, and SO for well-formed questions seems like a good state of things to me. (Not sure where discord fits in that)


> Let's just say the community was quite hostile to people trying to figure stuff out and learn.

I don't understand how there is supposedly any hostility on display there.


https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79530539/how-is-an-ssh-c...

Question: How is an SSH certificate added using the SSH agent protocol?

> Closed. This question is seeking recommendations for software libraries, tutorials, tools, books, or other off-site resources


> The community is reviewing whether to reopen this question as of 36 mins ago.

Asking where in the documentation is something is always tricky, specially because it usually means "I didn't read the documentation clearly". Also...

You went and deleted the question immediately after it was closed only to undelete it 2 hours ago (as the moment of writing)[0]. After it was closed, you had an opportunity to edit the question to have it looked at again but choose instead to delete it so that nobody will go hunting for that (once deleted, we presume that it was for a good reason). So, yeah, obviously you will be able to show that as example because you didn't give anyone the opportunity to look at it again.

[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/79530539/timeline


> Asking where in the documentation is something is always tricky, specially because it usually means "I didn't read the documentation clearly". Also...

It’s not asking for documentation, it’s quite literally asking how to do something. There are links to documentation to prove that I read all the documentation I could (to preemptively ward off the question getting closed).

Yes, I deleted it because I solved the question myself, no need for it to exist as a closed question. How can I “Edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations. You can edit the question or post a new one.”? The answer is quite literally facts (the message format) and citations which is what I was hoping to get from someone else answering.

I undeleted it so I could give this example.

> So, yeah, obviously you will be able to show that as example because you didn't give anyone the opportunity to look at it again.

What would looking at it again do? I had no idea it was being voted to close in the first place; I have no way to request a review; and the instructions for what to do to “fix” the questions make absolutely no sense so there’s nothing to change before it gets “looked at again”.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.


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