EarthBlues (u/EarthBlues)

EarthBlues commented on Why Linux is not ready for the desktop, the final edition itvision.altervista.org/w... · Posted by u/itvision

actuallyalys · a year ago

There’s truth in broad strokes (e.g., the lack of a stable ABI is a genuine problem) that I wish people would acknowledge. I think your attitude is a healthy one! However, I don’t think this article is written very charitably. It seems unfair to Linux developers to suggest that they spend “very little to no time” testing their changes for regressions, for example. And while AppImage, snaps, and flatpacks are imperfect, I’m not sure they deserve to be dismissed as just “virtual lightweight machines.” (I’m not sure how accurate that even is for AppImage.)

Linux users can be defensive or even toxic about their operating system so I hardly blame the author for being impatient or frustrated. Still, I don’t blame people for being frustrated in turn at that tone.

EarthBlues · a year ago

This is a good example of a positive, necessary conversation that was almost thwarted by an engagement-optimized article. It only happened (three quarters of the way down the HN comment section) because a few users were mature enough to not take the bait and actually discuss the issues at hand. Good stuff from both you and the parent poster.

EarthBlues commented on There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012) benrady.com/2012/11/there... · Posted by u/pbrowne011

johnfn · a year ago

I'm not sure I follow. So you failed to measure software productivity in lines of code, therefore it follows that "There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity"? Don't you think that giving up after n=1 attempts at measuring software productivity might be a tad too fast to draw a generalized claim of impossibility? I might argue the real lesson learned is "Lines of Code are Not a Measure of Productivity in an Isolated, Toy Example".

I suspect this sort of thing gets promulgated because it kind of massages our ego, like yes, they can measure other sorts of productivity, but not ours, oh no, we're too complex and intelligent, there's no way to measure the deep sorts of work that we do! Which, yes, OK, we're not exactly bricklayers, but surely, if you had to, you could do better.

EarthBlues · a year ago

I think people get hung up on wanting to collapse developer productivity into a single dimension, usually for stack-ranking purposes. This, I think, is always going to punish good engineers and reward bad ones to some degree.

Measuring developer productivity should, in my opinion, have one dimension for speed, one for quality, and one for user impact. LOC can be fine as a measurement for speed, you just don’t want to look at it in isolation. You would want to also measure, for example, escape rate and usage for the features the developer worked on, and be willing to change or refine these if circumstances require it.

You also need to look for different profiles based on the developer’s level of seniority. A senior dev probably shouldn’t be writing as much code as a contributor, but their user impact should be high, and escape rate low. Analyzing differences between teams is important, as well. A team that has a lot of escapes or little user impact probably has issues that need management attention, and may not have anything at all to do with individual developer productivity or ability.

In brief, the numbers are there to help you make better management decisions, not to relieve you of having to make them.

EarthBlues commented on The age of average (2023) alexmurrell.co.uk/article... · Posted by u/synergy20

DiscourseFan · a year ago

There has been discussion on this topic for about 100 years, but the most prominent is in the books Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno or One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse. They are a bit heavier than this article but they go into the problem with far more depth.

The Frankfurt school in general deals with this problematic of Capitalism losing its revolutionary potential and becoming a stagnant, homogenous, unchanging system. Walter Benjamin, the spiritual father of both the above authors, in fact did extensive work attempting to uncover the wondrous possibilities of early high capitalism before it collapsed under the rule of Louis Bonaparte, which was the subject of Marx’s quite famous article The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Disagree with Marx if you want but he did believe that capitalism, if left to run wild, would produce a new form of hypermobile, freely associating society, but when that gets close to happening in times of crisis a certain section of elite seize power for themselves and prevent the revolutionary social changes from occuring, thus producing this endless mediocrity.

EarthBlues · a year ago

Even before them, in Guénon and Vico.

While it’s mostly a laugh (a shock?) to read Guénon and Marcuse side by side, I think Vico is really misunderstood and under-appreciated in our present cultural moment and I think a lot of good could come from a revival of his thought. He’s influenced a diverse array of characters, from Marx to Rosmini-Serbati, and I see a lot of his thought in Horkheimer and Habermas (I.e., the side of the Frankfurt school that rediscovered the big questions in a non-reactionary, non-nostalgic way).

EarthBlues commented on The world of Dante's Divine Comedy lithub.com/a-riveting-tim... · Posted by u/lermontov

nataliste · a year ago

Stating that diversity of thought existed in the effectively autocephalous European Church from the 5th through the mid-10th century conflates accidental diversity with intentional. It’s true that the Church was more decentralized in this period, but this diversity arose from a lack of centralized control, not from a deliberate policy of tolerance or openness.

Before the Gregorian Reform in the 11th century, the Papacy’s direct influence on 'frontier' archbishoprics was relatively negligible. However, as the centralization of Rome, the Roman Rite, and ecclesiastical subordination to the Papacy took full form, the Church’s suppression of divergent practices and beliefs became systematic. This period saw the emergence of many of the 'truly bad' features often associated with the Church, such as uniform enforcement of orthodoxy and suppression of dissent. See R. I. Moore's The Formation of the Persecuting Society for a full treatment.

Your argument is like claiming that Red Hat in the 2000s promoted diversity because independent Linux distributions existed. In reality, Red Hat itself has always been monolithic. The existence of an independent Linux ecosystem that preceded Red Hat does not make Red Hat a promoter of diversity. Similarly, the diversity of regional practices in early medieval Christendom was not a feature of the Church but a byproduct of decentralization, which later reforms actively sought to eliminate. Diversity arising from a lack of control is not the same as cultivating it within an institution.

Moreover, reliance on orthodoxy is a feature, not a bug, of the Roman Catholic Church. This reliance has historically been central to the Church's identity and governance. Attempts to portray the Church as inherently diverse prior to the Counter-Reformation overlook its systematic suppression of autochthonous rites and regional practices as centralization took hold. Rather than prevaricating, Catholics need to embrace this reliance on orthodoxy as central to the Church’s unity instead of this kind of revisionism.

EarthBlues · a year ago

I think the parent posters are misstating an argument made by Kaplan[0]. Kaplan argues that religious persecutions accelerated from 1550 onwards. He nowhere argues that the medieval European society was proto-liberal or wasn’t intensely allergic to heresy.

There was no liberal freedom or value of toleration as we understand it prior to the resolution of the wars of religion. There was, however, a variegated patchwork of ad hoc arrangements based on custom, convenience, common interest, charity, forbearance (notably NOT liberal freedom or toleration) that allowed people with different religious beliefs, practices, and levels of commitment to live together in relative peace over long periods of time.

He also gives material evidence of how the reformation, counter-reformation, wars of religion, and the emergent nation state systematically destroyed these intricate arrangements.

[0]https://books.google.com/books?id=wGJjSvehY5MC

EarthBlues commented on The Surprisingly Sunny Origins of the Frankfurt School newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/Caiero

EarthBlues · a year ago

Horkheimer and Habermas, especially their later stuff, are actually pretty great and I think a lot of conservatives (especially religious types) could actually get into it. I wish the New Left had gone with that side of the Frankfurt school rather than the Reich/Marcuse side. Things might not be so divided right now.

EarthBlues commented on A slave narrative resurfaces after nearly 170 years nytimes.com/2024/05/23/ar... · Posted by u/cocacola1

taeric · a year ago

This is not actually held together that well, sadly.

Your first point, I suspect, is almost certainly not true. The concepts of racial or familial lineage with divine connotations is pretty old. The entire "divine right of kings" and related hierarchies have long been there. I /think/ you are trying to say that it was a scientifically supported hierarchy and it was bad for that reason. I think that is defendable?

Not clear what point 2 has to do with US slavery? Similar existed in the Barbary area, where it was just a different religion being preferenced.

Your third point is the most amusing of them to hold against slavery as it existed in the US, though. Yes, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was unprecedented. With the majority of those enslaved not going to north america...

I think I said this in another thread, but worth repeating. There is nothing at all "well actually" in what I'm saying. Slavery is bad. Period. I wish people didn't plaster over how bad it was elsewhere in a rush to attack the US, though.

EarthBlues · a year ago

I don’t think you’re defending slavery and I think the US is a good country. I dislike the contemporary progressive account of history. It’s the same genre of justificatory political manga as the Whig history it seeks to upend.

That said, I stand by every word of my argument.

I used the word natural as in naturalism, the intellectual movement that emerged in Europe in the Renaissance and came to fruition in the Enlightenment. Naturalistic racism was indeed new. I can point you to the texts where it was developed. It was accepted as cutting-edge science among enlightenment figures like Voltaire and Kant. I object strongly to the term, “scientifically-supported” racial hierarchy. Science in the post-baconian sense cannot support a concept of a racial hierarchy. Such a concept is a value judgement. Values are and can only be extrinsic to modern, empirical science (another lesson of history our progressive friends have failed to learn).

When it comes to the nature of this value judgement, I do think it makes things worse that the western slavers should have known better. Christian society had been agonizing over slavery for more than a millennium; what does this mean for our own seemingly invincible moral convictions that it all melted away so quickly? I don’t think our contemporary political discourse, left or right, can handle serious answers to the question.

As to the exceptional evil of the US system, there was nowhere else that the hereditary and permanent racial chattel system was implemented and enforced so thoroughly (I could maybe grant Haiti as a possible exception). Spanish and Portuguese slavers used religious justifications carried over from suspicions of Jewish and North African converts after the reconquista. This was disgusting, but it also meant that the slaves’ status was impermanent and mutable. Manumission was vastly more common, and social-racial boundaries were much more permeable. This is reflected today, where racial relations are far less damaged in Latin America than in the North.

EarthBlues commented on A slave narrative resurfaces after nearly 170 years nytimes.com/2024/05/23/ar... · Posted by u/cocacola1

wakawaka28 · a year ago

Nevermind that the US gets an unfair share of criticism for slavery. It is almost always portrayed as whites versus the world when it was really the case that seemingly anyone who could take slaves would do it. Africa was full of slaves, many of them being white. Certainly the Roman slaves were almost 100% white.

How many people know about this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War or the Barbary slaves in general?

Or this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufferings_in_Africa

EarthBlues · a year ago

It’s true that slavery was practiced by many civilizations throughout history, and it continues today. I’m also not a fan of the contemporary, “critical” approach, or at least the way it has unfolded in mainstream public life in the US (happy to elaborate as to why). That said, chattel slavery as it existed in the US really was exceptionally bad for a lot of reasons.

(1) slavery and treating people of other ethnicities badly wasn’t a new thing, but the ideology of there being a natural hierarchy of races was a new idea and it led to new cruelties.

(2) In the European Middle Ages, there had been a taboo against Christians holding other Christians as slaves. The western slavers knowingly took advantage of the chaos in early modern Europe and did it anyway, over opposition, constructing the above ideology to justify it.

(3) the scale of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was unprecedented. It dwarfed the Barbary and Indian slave trade. Maybe Rome or the golden age Islamic slave network were on a comparable scale when various factors are accounted for, but neither were chattel systems, and they lacked the whole racial dimension.

EarthBlues commented on California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones latimes.com/opinion/story... · Posted by u/tafda

EarthBlues · a year ago

I really think most of the education debate in elides the central issue, which is that there is no coherent vision of what education is for. We’re going to keep changing things with no progress until that’s settled.

To paraphrase Einstein, the challenge of our age is the greatest proliferation of means paired with the greatest confusion of ends.

EarthBlues commented on The myth of the loneliness epidemic asteriskmag.com/issues/08... · Posted by u/Luc

Der_Einzige · a year ago

The primary "Loneliness" epidemic that gets talked about today is basically just the mainstreamification of incel/4chan talking points. "Loneliness" is really trying to figure out why young men/women aren't dating, partying, doing drugs, etc.

This article explicitly targets only "friends", rather than what the media is actually talking about today.

EarthBlues · a year ago

Inceldom, along with most of the recent rise in extremism, is a negative, damaging manifestation of a complex process of social disintegration that is quite real. One can acknowledge the it without approving of its consequences.

EarthBlues commented on Who Pays for the Arts? esquire.com/entertainment... · Posted by u/Caiero

piltdownman · a year ago

"...In modern classical music..."

Stravinsky should probably be the start of your argument, and someone like Cage/Reich as your midpoint and Glass as your populist revisionism endgame/full circle. Gould on Igor Stravinsky, followed by Bernstein/Gershwin/Copeland, if you want to get deeper into the new world bastardisation of the genre.

"only interaction that classical music has with the culture at large is through movies and video games"

You mean the two dominant forms of funded and marketed media in the contemporary age? What argument are you tryin to make exactly?

"jazz is publicly perceived as a novelty genre at this point"

I mean there's so much to unpack and address there it's hard to even know where to start - so I'll talk about my own direct experience in the European Domestic market. Jazz accounts for about 1% of streamed music (about the same for Classical) but accounts for closer to 5% of ticketed live music in Ireland and the UK.

There's also a huge cross-pollination in the UK Jazz/Hip-Hop scene - with particular emphasis on Grammy award winner Venna and his collaborations with the likes of Knucks etc... The South London jazz scene is also similarly dominated by the likes of drummer Yussef Dayes and keyboardist Kamaal Williams, who do a huge amount of collaborations and released the seminal 'Black Focus' album, as well as featuring on cultural touchpoints like Boiler Room etc...

London Jazz Festival pulls in 100,000 people alone annually. 2023 Guinness Cork Jazz Festival attracted over 100,000 visitors in a Metro area of 300,000.

EarthBlues · a year ago

Yeah, as I said I’m not an expert, but I did choose Wagner instead of Stravinsky to be provocative ;). It’s an important point, often missed, that the decline of classical music from public relevance to background music begins in the excesses of Romanticism. Wagner really did think his audiences and most of his composer contemporaries were a bunch of drooling morons. While he is now considered “canonical, but a bit of a Nazi,” in his time much of his music was received as the insult he intended. Stravinsky was more good-natured, had his whole neo-classical thing (which is very underrated imho), and really, I think, just wanted to establish his independence from Rimsky-Korsakov.

As for jazz, I love and play jazz music. I don’t disagree that there are excellent and innovative jazz musicians, and I think the acceptance by jazz musicians of rap music is a positive, if overdue development. That said, I read your words, and I see described exactly what I meant: a genre with a peripheral cultural presence, that means nothing in the lives of anyone outside of a small, dedicated fan base. Certainly nothing approaching it’s time as a cultural protagonist, which remains indisputably in the past (but may it rise again).