Oh come on, I can recognize my common interest with other humans without mediating this through overly abstracted “values” and then arguing from that. Plus, you know, little kids and even many animals show empathy and they’re not doing any moral reasoning or have any concept of a moral value. It seems to me that, more often than not, moral reasoning is employed to rationalize away empathy.

It would also be nice if you could not imply that I’m a threat to humanity. My comment about shooting philosophers was clearly a joke as should be obvious from the rest of the comment, whereas yours strikes me as deadly serious.

Also you didn’t actually argue my points about how this benefits existing authorities, nor about how this incentivizes motivated reasoning.

Yeah that’s not what I was thinking about.

The way moral reasoning works is this: You have something you want, be it is your material interest or it is due to your belief or feelings. If this is to become a norm or law or widely adopted in some way, you’re not supposed to argue that way though. You have to do a whole derivation down from Universal Values™, meaning you’re now not arguing from your own POV, but from some common good, and, in practice, especially the interest of the ruling order that you want to adopt your position. This means you’re already inclined to compromise your position before you’ve even voiced it.

This is why ruling institutions encourage moral reasoning, they teach it in school, on TV etc. It makes you argue from their POV–that of the nation, the state, the existing order–instead of your own.

It also means that your moral argument is sophistry–motivated reasoning–if you have constructed it for a position you hold for a completely different reason, which is not conducive to clear thinking.

I think all moral reasoning should be outlawed and philosophers should be shot.

This will lead to a significant increase in life, prosperity, happiness and/or bring about the messiah. Either way it’s the right thing to do.

On Linux/Unix (not sure about other platforms), you can configure a “Compose key” (people usually use something like the Menu key, or the right Alt key).

You can then hit that Compose key, followed by multiple other keys and they will be combined into a character, usually roughly relating to the shapes.

• Compose L / gives Ł
• Compose + - gives ±
• Compose 1 2 gives ½
• Compose C = gives €
• Compose - - - gives —
• Compose c s gives š

etc. There’s a big table somewhere where all these are defined.

On android keyboards you can hold down the letter and get a list of “alternative” letters (seems to depend on the keyboard and keyboard layout configured what you get), you can also configure multiple languages/keyboards and then switch between them, by holding the spacebar.

Bill Gates is a monopoly capitalist with zero scruples. He screwed over so many people, vacuumed up so much wealth from all other sectors of the world economy. He has zero qualms about doing this either: There’s video of his depositions in the anti-trust case against Microsoft, and the whole fucking time he just argues semantics in response to the questions, and when pressed after five minutes of defining every fucking word in a sentence, almost always claims he doesn’t know or recall. Obviously a guy that thinks being as dishonest as it is possible to get away with is perfectly good business. And he does that despite whatever the outcome of the case, he’d be richer than billions of humans collectively. What pathology is this?

There’s so much more shit, like the incessant lobbying for medical patents worldwide, or how, according to Melinda, Gates loved hanging out with Epstein.

Now, why would anyone want to have their picture taken with that guy? Torvalds is such an unprincipled lib.

Edit: Listened to some of the deposition in the background. Here Gates is being extremely annoying for example: The interviewer reads back an email from Gates saying something like “browser share is a very, very important goal for this company”, and then asks what other companies he’s comparing browser share with. Gates goes several minutes arguing he’s not talking about any other companies, since literally there are no other companies mentioned in that very sentence, obviously pretending like he doesn’t understand the question. If you listen to all the shit before, they have to go over whether “browser share” means “market share” (Gates says no), whether “very, very important” and “important” have different meanings (Gates says not necessarily, could be hyperbole), and that sort of stuff for minutes on end. Like seriously listen to this, I cannot even describe how stupid it is.

About what?

Anyone who has never even used a computer before can go to one of these websites, follow the instructions on the screen in front of them, and get it done. Zero experience or skills required.

No they don’t. People who have never used a computer before have trouble even using the mouse. They don’t know what a file is, they don’t know what a filetype is, they don’t know that you can convert one type of file to another, they don’t know even to look for a file conversion website, they don’t know how to upload a file to a website, they don’t know how to find a file in the file dialogue, and on and on. Seriously what are you on about?

Overall fair enough I guess. I didn’t say it was simple though, i said it was not more complicated. Your experience using GUIs and web interfaces probably spans years. It’s not like you’re born with GUI skills.

Making a GUI is more work than making a CLI tool. GUIs are not cross-platform, a pure CLI is more portable. You can code a CLI with any programming language you like, while there are many restrictions on what kind of GUI is available on what programming languages and platforms.

The GUI code is tedious and boring to write. That code can become outdated and broken and might need fixing to run on newer platforms. The CLI has essentially no extra dependencies and the interface hasn’t changed much since like the 70s.

The sort of person who develops free software usually knows and likely prefers to use the CLI. They’re not doing it for users like you, first and foremost. They’re doing it themselves, or because they need it for their job. The CLI tool might be exactly what they want, because the file conversion is part of some backend stuff, something that’s run from a script, so you can automatically run it on all the files.

Anybody with basic web dev skills can then take these tools, slap together web fronted and try and make some quick bucks. They’re basically incentivized to not care about security, privacy or anything like that. Of course that space attracts scammers.

The incentives just aren’t there for it to be any other way. You can either learn the CLI commands, written by people who care about their reputations and professional pride and want to share their tools. Or you can trust anonymous internet randos wanting to make a quick buck. And while I sympathize not wanting to have to learn new shit, I swear using a shell isn’t actually more complicated than using a web browser, you’re just not used to it.

Oh yeah that’s where I was getting at, but I didn’t have time to write that out earlier. I agree that OP probably pulled out the usb stick before buffers were flushed. I imagine that direct I/O would mitigate this problem a lot because presumably whatever buffers still exist (there would some hardware buffers and I think Linux kernel I/O buffers) will be minimal compared to the potentially large amount of dirty pages one might accumulate using normal cached writes. So I imagine those buffers would be empty very shortly (less than one second maybe?) after dd finishes, whereas I’ve seen regular dd finish tens of seconds before my usb stick stopped blinking it’s LED. Still if you wait for that long the result will be the same.

I don’t think oflags=direct has any influence on the result. Apparently that’s about disabling the page cache in the kernel, which can avoid a situation in which the system slows down due to buildup yet-to-write pages.

trustworthy AI

Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral

What

They’re not the good guys browser wise, they’re just slightly less shitty than Google, which was (still is probably?) their biggest customer.

Are you talking about the claim that he endangered CIA agents? That was just some bullshit they cooked up to get him on, and I don’t think anybody even claimed that somebody actually died.

Imagine thinking exposing the CIA should be a crime, because the poor small beans CIA agents need protection. Who wouldn’t want to protect imperial blackmailers, hit men, weapons smugglers and death squad commanders?

You are the traitor for siding with the oppressor.

So that’s just a clearly factually inaccurate statement right there, makes me question the validity of the entire thing if they can’t get something that simple correct.

It is not. The article is from 2013. Back then, that linked worked and shows exactly what the article is saying: he’s the only staff member listed. That was 8 years after the founding btw.

And since the guy is clearly rich and has lots of political connections, you’d figure he’d have sued EF by now if there was anything incorrect in that article.

Oh you launched into a whole defense of working with the far-right. Figures.

Believe it or not, people on the “far right” can care about human rights too

Yeah they care about human rights when they can weaponize them to pressure or topple governments that resist exploitation. Which is what the Oslo Freedom Forum is all about.

Hmm… I wonder if living under an autocrat might have made him care about human rights and free expression.

That or he’s pissed that they took his father’s Telco empire, and now he wants to topple the Venezuelan government and get his “birthright” back. We may never know.

Also you avoided the whole part of in the article about what he was up to before the HRF. That guy was clearly an activist conservative bigot at the very least, and so he naturally evolved into a Mr. Human Rights Guy. He doesn’t just take money from far-right dipshits, he himself is a reactionary.

https://electronicintifada.net/content/oslo-freedom-forum-founders-ties-islamophobes-who-inspired-mass-killer-anders-breivik/12451

Who is Halvorssen? He is best known as the founder and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, where he is listed as the lone staff member. The Oslo Freedom Forum is his brainchild, a confab he has sought to brand as “a Davos for human rights.”

Founder and only staff member is this son of a Venezuelan oligarch. Sounds like a completely normal human rights group.

The Electronic Intifada has obtained Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 990 forms filed by the Human Rights Foundation that include previously undisclosed information about its donors.

The forms show that the Human Rights Foundation received approximately $600,000 in donations from the Donors Capital Fund from 2007 through 2011. Based in Northern Virginia, Donors Capital Fund is essentially a slush fund for the cadre of rightist donors who bankroll the conservative movement.

Don’t disclose all their big donors. Kinda sus.

“Since the fund handles money from multiple donors and donors names aren’t disclosed, contributions made through the Donors Capital Fund are difficult to trace,” the Center for American Progress noted in its 2011 landmark report “Fear, Inc.” “Potential donors are required to open a minimum $1 million account to utilize the fund’s services.”

In 2009, Donors Capital Fund channeled $60 million to various conservative causes and from 2009 through 2011 a whopping $21,318,600 “to groups promoting Islamophobia,” according to the Center for American Progress.

Peter Thiel is also one of the big donors.

But a look at the early stages of Halvorssen’s career, which he spent as a conservative operative combating gay rights initiatives, feminism and multiculturalism on US college campuses, suggests otherwise.

That checks out.

The guy that organizes this is a rich Venezuelan gusano, and he gets donations from the far-right. This is not about “Challenging Power” or “Freedom”, but to further US imperialism.

The US has the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which is actually stricter. The “Russian law” shit is just framing. Countries have a right to know who’s meddling in their shit, in fact meddling is illegal under international law. The fact that they feel this threatened by a mere transparency law speaks volumes.

How would you like it if some politicans from other countries (let’s pretend it’s Russia since you seem very concerned about them) came to your capital and threatened “severe consequences” for even daring to want to monitor foreign influence. These protestors are basically demanding to surrender all sovereignty to EU/US/billionaire funded NGOs.

Imagine living in country where core government functions, like writing laws, regulation, and social services are provided by NGOs which are beholden to foreign donors. No oversight by any local authority and definitely not beholden to the people. This is about as far from democracy as you can get, this will ruin a place.

EU politicians at the protests in Tbilisi threatening “severe consequences” for daring to curb foreign influence. Wow.

Not even curb really, just make transparent when NGOs are getting foreign funding.

What a shithole country

Well that’s not very nice.

Russia, formally knows as Muscovy, was culturally defined by the mongol horde

Do you think Mongols are bad?

Muscovy wanted to align itself more with the west and was envy [I assume this is supposed to say envious] of the more modern and more sophisticated culture of the Kievan Rus in todays Ukraine

I guess they must be since “western” Kiev was more modern and sophisticated.

From your other comment:

They apply the asian concept of “never talking about weakness” as russia is the brackish gradient to asian society.

Yeah well your racism is showing. “Brackish gradient to asian society”??? Like do you come up with this yourself or is there some race theorist you’re reading? Is it called Pop Psychology for the Sophisticated Bigot by Dr. A. Whitey?