But in a democracy, you at least have input! Google is also a coercive force with no real checks on its power, but it doesn't care about anything you have to say. That's the difference, that's it, right there. The answer to abuse of power is not to just unleash raw power, its to subordinate and restrict it. That's what government is for. When you find yourself arguing that power you participate in is bad and shouldn't restraint power you have 0 influence in, that's when it's time to wonder if they've gotten to you.
The amount of input we have is virtually zero. I have never had a candidate I felt represented me, I have never had a candidate who I voted for win an election, and I have never had a a party who the candidate voted for win an election. Thus my minuscule "input" had absolutely zero impact, both in elections and on my life as a whole.
The reason democracy is better than other forms of governance is that it provides incentives for those in power which are better aligned with the upholding of human rights and protection against abuse. Myself casting a vote every few years is de facto meaningless.
If you are in the US. Proportionate representation stopped completely with the Reapportionment Act of 1929.
Subsequently the tail end of the gilded age and enacted in June 18, only 5months before the crash of oct 1929.
Constitutionally the size of the US government was expected to scale proportionally with population and 3/5ths of slaves.
This is why your vote ‘feels’ meaningless. We have been under a state of corporate capture for coming up to 100years. Last time there was push back from congress we got the Powell memo. That memo reinforces and defends corporate power in American politics.
The 3/5 of slave population vote were given to the slaveholders. It was not proportional, it was giving structural advantage to pro-slavery side of it.
But you don’t have to use Google. That’s the critical difference and why people should be so much more skeptical of using the monopoly on violence to enforce things.
Millions of people live in the US and don’t use Google products or pay Google a dime.
Try not paying taxes because you don’t want to support the actions of the federal government and see how that works out.
Life without a smartphone increasingly challenging. You have to use either Google or Apple. I use a de googled Android lineage phone but this is always getting harder, as numerous threads on this site will attest. Plus literally every employer I've ever had has used Google services, plus lots of other sites I might have to use implement recaptcha or otherwise invisibly to me share my data or data about me with Google. Also, even if I do figure out a way to stay off Google's radar, they're a powerful force which shapes my world. They hire lobbyists to influence policy which affects me, build data centers which raise my cost of electricity, or sell killer robots to evil people.
I think where people go wrong is treating Google the way they treat their weird neighbor Bob. Bob's damage is limited. Google is an immense, powerful, alien entity, far beyond the control of any person, and with its own inscrutable goals which are the not goals of literally any person alive or dead.
I genuinely don't understand the desire to leave this entity unmoored to wreck what havoc it may.
On this side of the wall, you and your friends are strong and happy and free in your garden. On the other side, a hellscape filled with giant monsters debating how best to filet you. You will keep ceeding them ground, your garden gets ever smaller. The monsters ate Brian, oops, well that's the consequence of freedom! But you're next, isn't it completely obvious you're next? Why would you unilaterally disarm against the monsters? Why for the love of God why would you say "no the monsters are good actually!"
Strong agree. That passage seems to me to be decrying the friction of the real world, whereas it's become increasingly clear to me just how valuable friction is in the world, and how inextricably tied the tech companies war on friction to the bad outcomes technology seems to engender.
"I have a CD player in my home, a VCR in a closet. But I’m also inclined to think about the work that older devices demand of a person compared with the frictionless present day, when we are told that any and all content is at our fingertips (a myth, but a myth that sells.) And I can’t help but think of the reality that there are many significantly larger and more consequential inconveniences that Americans, plainly, do not have the heart or stomach for. One example might be the inconvenience caused by a mass political uprising, one that risks the security, safety, and comfort of its participants. I have seen glimpses of people’s threshold for that level of friction. "
Yeah this is a killer app for mcp servers. My puppy has food allergies and the vet asked me to track his eating and pooping. I ended up building an mcp server to do this data entry and now I track his activity and planning to track also his training progress. It's very different when you can just tell your model "he ate 2 cups of his kibble" or "we practiced stay for 5 minutes" vs doing tedious data entry. As a bonus this helps my partner and me coordinate dog care so we can have fewer conversations about the dog
A long time ago, I introduced dogstatsd at Airbnb. We had already been using vanilla statsd (with no tag support -- cardinality lived in the metric name!) and this was a low cost migration. More than a decade later, I'm assuming it was difficult to track down and refactor all the places that statsd calls were emitted and using OTLP was an easier route. This is a great example of how technical decisions compound over time.
Submodules work fine but yeah, it's frustrating that lfs is taking so long. But there seems to be some momentum recently https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/pull/9068
What "not supported" means with submodules specifically is that jj doesn't have commands to manage them. You can use git commands to manage them, and it does, in my understanding, work. There's just no native support yet.
This is sort of similar to how you can create lightweight tags with jj tag, but you need to push them with git push --tags.
I use submodules with jj, and jj saves and restores submodule hashes perfectly. What it doesn't do is manipulate the sub-repository from its parent. You can do that yourself using jj or git of course, which is what I ended up doing using a few scripts. The result ended up being more reliable than using git's submodule commands directly.
They can take all the time in the world to implement submodules as far as I'm concerned. jj's implementation of workspaces removes all of the hairs of git's worktrees. git submodule implementation has even more hairs than worktrees. If the jj developers need time to do as good a job on submodules as they did with workspaces, then I say give it to them.
I use vimium in Firefox and so my default key bindings are the plug-in ones. I push 't' to create a new tab, for instance. If I want to use the website key bindings I have to to into "insert mode" ('i'), or I opt into specific keys by site.
I do like when websites use ctrl-k -- it means nothing to my plug-in so websites always get it, plus it helps with key binding discovery.
Share your private thoughts and gratitude with your private group, plus the good people at grateful.so, their partners, their service providers, the processor of os notifications, anyone who buys the assets of grateful.so once it goes under, plus any script kiddie who cares to point an LLM at the vibe coded server base...
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