Edman274 (u/Edman274)

Edman274 commented on Sig Sauer citing national security to keep documents from public practicalshootinginsights... · Posted by u/eoskx

IlikeKitties · a day ago

It's so weird that SIG didn't just mandate a recall on this issue and dealt with it. So many other gun manufacturers had recalls for less serious issues than this and just dealt with it. How does SIG somehow deal worse with this situation than fucking taurus? This has got to be some kind of fucking ego trip by someone inside, this kind of response just doesn't make any rational sense otherwise.

Edman274 · a day ago

It may shock you to learn that the top level executives of arms manufacturers have a somewhat different attitude towards human life and protecting revenue than you or I do. Such a person may be puzzled by the outrage and actually lack the insight to understand that a single accidental death because of the flawed design would be enough to imperil contracts, because the ratio of intentional fatalities to accidental fatalities is still like 100000 to 1.

Edman274 commented on Random selection is necessary to create stable meritocratic institutions assemblingamerica.substac... · Posted by u/namlem

Supermancho · 2 months ago

> Does a jury of peers also scare the heck out of you?

Those are screened.

Someone like https://youtu.be/00q5cax96yU?t=60 could be selected without some additional constraints than plain sortition. Ofc then those constraints are politicized.

Edman274 · a month ago

okay, well that guy won an election so clearly it's possible even without sortition. If people are picked at random then the likelihood of getting some wacko is lower rather than higher, because wackos are more highly motivated to try to act on their wackadoo policies and because of the way voting is implemented, that wouldn't really be a problem for them because it no longer appears to be disqualification for a politician to be crazy, and the crazy ones are the ones who run. On the flip side, the actual rate of totally crazy people across the entire population is likely to be smaller than you expect and random selection would represent the underlying rate of wackos in the public. If it turns out that the rate of wackos is so high that like, 51 percent of your legislature is hearing voices in their head and living like Diogenes, then representative democracy isn't going to help you either.

Edman274 commented on Why walking is the most underrated form of exercise (2017) nbcnews.com/better/health... · Posted by u/Tomte

Swizec · 3 months ago

> knees /../ I would not run for this reason

Studies increasingly show that running is not bad for your knees and runners in fact have some of the strongest healthiest knees around. User proper form, replace your shoes regularly, don’t train for the olympics, and running will be just fine for your joints.

> Studies have shown that recreational runners have a knee and hip osteoarthritis (OA) prevalence that is three times lower than that of sedentary non-runners. Competitive runners showed an even more impressive four-fold reduction in knee and hip OA prevalence. These results are due to the fact that regular running strengthens the muscles around the knee joint and supports overall joint health. Running also plays a vital role in maintaining healthy cartilage and bone density, which are crucial for knee function.

https://longevity.stanford.edu/lifestyle/2023/08/29/is-runni...

Edman274 · 3 months ago

Is it your contention that if an obese, not-runner who views walking as a form of exercise were to start running, the immediate effect would not be knee injury, but actually strengthened knees, on the evidence of a study comparing recreational runners to people who are obese and don't move at all?

Edman274 commented on Ground control to Major Trial virtualize.sh/blog/ground... · Posted by u/plam503711

threeseed · 3 months ago

> Threatening legal action costs nothing

It costs your reputation as a vendor which is permanent.

You don't threaten legal action against companies before calmly advising them of the situation.

Edman274 · 3 months ago

There's no obligation to publicly reveal the threat of a lawsuit to a party that is abusing your license. In fact, if you don't reveal the existence of the lawsuit, the only way then that you'd gain that reputation is if the threatened party then publishes their threat, which they won't do if they straight up know that they're in the wrong, because then that damages their reputation. Why would a big company publish a blog about a small company suing them for blatantly violating their software license? They want that crap to go away. Get the money. Shaming a company doesn't make anyone any money unless they decide to voluntarily comply, which is what is being asked here. They're being asked to voluntarily do the right thing. If they were likely to voluntarily do the right thing, they would've done that first.

Edman274 commented on Ground control to Major Trial virtualize.sh/blog/ground... · Posted by u/plam503711

plam503711 · 3 months ago

I’m actually considering reaching out directly to the CEO and telling the full story. But honestly? There’s a good chance he’s fully aware — and totally fine with it. That’s part of what makes it so disappointing.

We’re not rushing into legal action — it’s not worth the energy for now — but publicly calling out the behavior felt necessary. It also sends a message to others in the ecosystem about the kind of nonsense OSS maintainers sometimes face.

And yes, while I’m still holding off on naming the company directly… I haven’t ruled it out.

Edman274 · 3 months ago

If you don't do anything legally threatening, then you make it that much harder for every single OSS vendor to make money, because the precedent is getting established that there is no penalty for breaking the rules.

When I was a teenager I would do super cut-rate work on computers for people, and my father did helpfully point out that undercharging for valuable work just makes it harder for people whose day job is to do the same work, because then they have to compete with a naive teenager. You're the kind hearted OSS / freemium vendor in this case. Threatening legal action costs nothing. Punishment is meant as a deterrent for antisocial behavior. Failing to even threaten them will result in less money going to people who deliver a public good.

Edman274 commented on It's Not the Incentives (2018) talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/... · Posted by u/godelski

jgeada · 4 months ago

It is the incentives.

Maybe you're moral and keep to the straight and narrow. However, the system hires all types and the ones that just follow the incentives will do better. They get promoted, have more power, hire more people like them. Eventually the moral types will just be the exception and no longer affect the average.

Incentives exist because they change the behavior of the whole; they work as intended. Just that what is intended isn't always desirable or even a good idea.

Edman274 · 4 months ago

People try to maximize the good and minimize the bad consequences of their actions. They might not do it using utils or with actual quantification but they are doing it. And definitionally, there's no way to get rid of an incentive to defect, because getting rid of it creates a new incentive to defect in a different way. Like, for the purposes of talking about this article, "incentive" could be shorthand for "any reason you could come up with to do something wrong to get ahead" but it could also more broadly be defined as "the expected good results of a choice". As an example, as long as money is important in society, there is always going to exist an "incentive" to rob a bank. That can't be removed. What we can do is make it harder to rob a bank, and force reputational damage and jail to thieves. Creating a society where money doesn't matter might be possible, but then there'd be no bank. By the same token, there will always be an incentive to fake data. We can make it harder to fake data and force reputational damage to people who fake data, but that incentive to fake will exist. The only way that it wouldn't exist would be if we made it so that the outcomes of research didn't matter at all, but it would be hard to imagine a society functioning where any research would be happening if no outcomes mattered. If that were the case, then high school dropouts would try to get research grants for baking soda and vinegar volcanoes. The only way to prevent that would be to create a system where people have to justify their research without caring about the results, but then you've reintroduced "incentives", just different ones that can still be cheated again.

By arguing that it's the moral character of people that's the problem and not the mere incentives, one key disincentive is reintroduced which is the reputational damage thing I alluded to earlier. Most people don't rob banks not because there's no incentive, but because the disincentive (jail, reputational damage) is so high as to make that course of action seem stupid. But if you argue that it's incentives and not moral character to blame, you remove the disincentive of making defectors suffer reputational damage. You can't remove an incentive entirely. You can only change them, and add disincentives. Reputational harm is one of those disincentives, and so is forcing things like pre-registering experiments, open access journals, etc.

Edman274 commented on I Cannot Be Technical fightforthehuman.com/why-... · Posted by u/mooreds

azeirah · 4 months ago

That is not what this is about. It's about being treated as non-technical because you happen to be a woman in tech.

The reality of being a woman in tech comes with serious problems, and how we're treated is one of the biggest contributors to those problems.

Edman274 · 4 months ago

This point is so obvious and self-evident that I'm really amazed that anybody is acting as if that's not the central thesis of the essay. One of the first links is to a PDF with a title by Mar Hicks called "Sexism is a feature, not a bug." Every single time someone argues sincerely or otherwise that sexism is no longer a problem in software development communities, please think back to the time that all these self described hackers couldn't read an essay spelling out in detail that the "technical" designation is socially constructed by everyone else without your permission and often is along gendered lines - they all read that, missing the point, and said "sure you can!" How many of these same commenters have described and will go on to describe a colleague with more mathematical, statistical, and scientific rigor than they and be like "oh, she's not that technical"? Will it be all of them?

Edman274 commented on A university president makes a case against cowardice newyorker.com/news/q-and-... · Posted by u/pseudolus

vkou · 5 months ago

If the past decade is any indication, nothing has stopped the long list of cancelled right wing grifters, racists, and various other flavors of fools and bigots from finding gainful employment and signal boosting and platforming among like-minded people who do exercise their right to associate with them, despite their behavior.

For (allegedly) being so persecuted and silenced, it's weird how so many of them have so much more power, reach, and wealth than ever before.

Perhaps getting booed at in the last college campus they held a rally at is not quite the yellow star, or the mark of Cain that they convinced you it is.

Edman274 · 5 months ago

If the argument is that it's not a big deal because it doesn't even work, then why collectively are we even bothering? Either it works and is something for reactionaries to fear and is effective social pressure, or it's a bunch of ineffective sound and fury that gives cover to your right wing aunt to tell stories about how "someone she knows" got fired for telling a joke. If it works, then let's own it completely, with all its flaws. If it doesn't work, then why bother at all? If it doesn't even work, then why try to defend the practice? Do we want it to work? Do we want it to be an effective form of social control?

Edman274 commented on The long-awaited Friend Compound laws in California supernuclear.substack.com... · Posted by u/simonebrunozzi

Workaccount2 · 5 months ago

The more popular mass transit becomes, the better the proposition of driving a car becomes.

You cannot escape that as transit drives down traffic and frees up parking, cars become much more enjoyable to use.

Edman274 · 5 months ago

It is taken as flatly impossible that parking would be reclaimed for other uses?

Edman274 commented on AI-Generated Voice Evidence Poses Dangers in Court lawfaremedia.org/article/... · Posted by u/hn_acker

AnthonyMouse · 6 months ago

Thieves are planning an inside job. They forge the surveillance video ahead of time, do the theft and submit the forgery to be timestamped while it's happening.

Also, a lot of surveillance systems are purposely kept offline to prevent them from being compromised, but your system doesn't allow that because they would need external connectivity to get signatures.

Edman274 · 6 months ago

This technique is known as an Ella Fitzgerald to those in the heisting industry, as popularized in the documentary Oceans 11.