tynpeddler (u/tynpeddler)

tynpeddler commented on FBI improperly used 702 surveillance powers on US senator thehill.com/homenews/admi... · Posted by u/ramblenode

pseudo0 · 2 years ago

According to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court [0] and the FBI IG [1].

And an FBI lawyer pleaded guilty to a felony for forging an email used as justification for the wiretapping [2].

[0] - https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fisa-court-confirms-two-...

[1] - https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ig-report-details-signif...

[2] - https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/ex-fbi-lawyer-agree...

tynpeddler · 2 years ago

You're confusing a single wiretap warrant that was a small part of a large investigation with the investigation itself.

tynpeddler commented on Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions latimes.com/politics/stor... · Posted by u/rbrown

concordDance · 2 years ago

> And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right.

Here's where your thinking goes askew, you can't simply draw a boundary around a subset of people and declare that an agentic thing. Groups of people don't have guilt or automatic responsibility, only individuals do.

Thinking of very diverse groups of people as single entities is how you get sentiments like "Muslims did 9/11 and they must pay" without considering that the tendency-towards-9/11-ness might not carry over to the entire set of "Muslims". Less than half of Americans were even alive in 1971 and no one is alive from the days of US slavery.

Thinking "those who have inherited benefits due to negative treatment of African Americans should transfer wealth to the descendents of those African Americans" is a separate idea to race based affirmative action. Race based AA would see the children of a pair of Ukrainian immigrants put below the children of a pair of Ethiopian immigrants, even though neither group has anything to do with slavery.

tynpeddler · 2 years ago

> Groups of people don't have guilt or automatic responsibility, only individuals do.

This is not exactly correct. Governments are composed of groups of people and governments maintain continuity of responsibility even when all the people in that government are different. Black Americans were discriminated against as a matter of state and federal policy and thus both state and federal government is at fault for the treatment of Black American. There is clear precedent in American law that in such cases, harmed individuals and groups are due financial compensation. Precedent for financial compensation due to government abuse of power is an incredibly old precedent and the only reason Black Americans haven't been compensated for the discrimination they've suffered is because the continuation of racism, the tradition of discrimination and the sheer size of the problem have turned what should be a fairly straightforward legal case into a complicated political question.

tynpeddler commented on Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions latimes.com/politics/stor... · Posted by u/rbrown

mcv · 2 years ago

I'm not talking about guilt, I'm talking about getting hurt. Black Americans were quite clearly discriminated against as a group.

Your examples are all about punishment, I'm talking about lifting them up, correcting the wrongs, reimbursing the damage done. It's not about benefits they inherited, but obstacles they inherited, opportunities that were denied to them, unjust punishment that they received. This has been structural for a ridiculously long time, and it's still not gone. Black people still receive more severe punishment for the same crimes, are still often denied opportunities that are available to white people (months ago there was an article here about how black founders couldn't get funding if they didn't get a white co-founder who was then assumed by VCs to be the real CEO). Even if they are technically equal before the law, that still doesn't mean that they're treated as equal in practice.

tynpeddler · 2 years ago

> Black Americans were quite clearly discriminated against as a group.

This is clearly true, but it also reduces the impact of what really happened. Black Americans were discriminated against on an individual level. Ruby Bridges is still alive for goodness sake! She's only 68 years old. It isn't hard to estimate financial damages due to the Jim Crow era and it's extremely easy to figure out who was harmed due to explicit government policy.

tynpeddler commented on Is ORM still an anti-pattern? github.com/getlago/lago/w... · Posted by u/AnhTho_FR

javajosh · 2 years ago

I've been doing ORM on Java since Hibernate was new, and it has always sucked. One of the selling points, which is now understood to be garbage, is that you can use different databases. But no-one uses different databases. Another selling point which is "you don't need to know SQL", is also garbage. Every non-trivial long-lived application will require tweaks to individual queries at the string level. The proper way to build a data layer is one query at a time, as a string, with string interpolation. The closer you are to raw JDBC the better.

Oh yeah, another bad reason for ORM: to support the "Domain Model". Which is always, and I mean always, devoid of any logic. The so-called "anemic domain model" anti-pattern. How many man-hours have been wasted on ORM, XML, annotations, debugging generated SQL, and so on? It makes me cry.

tynpeddler · 2 years ago

I've done many database migrations from db2 to MySQL. It's a thing that happens quite a lot. ORMs and Java's usage of database access layers over the underlying sql drivers vastly simplified the process.

tynpeddler commented on UN chief says fossil fuels 'incompatible with human survival,' apnews.com/article/climat... · Posted by u/voisin

tynpeddler · 2 years ago

If misleading statements was the problem, then people would be a lot angrier about the blatant lies and propaganda large oil companies pushed for decades.

Dishonesty is the problem, but not in the way you suggest.

tynpeddler commented on GPT-3.5 passed yet another Theory of Mind test twitter.com/michalkosinsk... · Posted by u/izzygonzalez

blep_ · 3 years ago

From the linked tweet:

> we use bespoke items to ascertain that it didn't see them before

tynpeddler · 3 years ago

Except the whole pregnancy scenario is incredibly common example of a social faux pas.

tynpeddler commented on Objection to ORM Hatred (2019) jakso.me/blog/objection-t... · Posted by u/thunderbong

monero-xmr · 3 years ago

My problems with ORMs can be reduced to:

- SQL is so easy and so useful that being a professional engineer that can code but can't learn SQL is absurd

- You will never switch databases, so abstracting away the DB for some hypothetical "I might want to switch DBs one day!" scenario is absurd

- If you ever get enough scale to require optimization the ORM will be your enemy

In summation, anything related to ORMs and SQL is immediately invalid, other than questions like "Help! I joined a company where they mandate ORMs and I hate my life!"

tynpeddler · 3 years ago

I was lead on migrating several systems from traditional deployment to a cloud provider for a major company. Part of the migration was switching a microsoft DB to MySQL. The java ecosystem and ORMs makes this so easy it's barely worth talking about. And that wasn't the only time db migrations have some up.

Not sure if that's enough to justify ORMs, but DB migration is a real use case and there are things you can do ahead of time to greatly simplify the process.

tynpeddler commented on Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/s... · Posted by u/alsodumb

forgotpwd16 · 3 years ago

>It's about a separate personal desire to regulate supposedly risky research.

Referring to: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787

So a paper on a lab-made coronavirus related to SARS that can infect human cells from Wuhan on topic about the origins of a coronavirus related to SARS that can infect human cells that caused the pandemic from Wuhan, is a separate personal desire?

>It's about a completely different study that didn't result in any pandemic.

Because after the article was published, Wuhan stopped working on this, right? Or is expected China (or any other country) publishes everything related to something delicate as this?

Seriously this "rebuttal" is anything but excellent. The ironic answers to good remarks makes it even worse. Sounds more like trying to evade the ~~points made~~ info given rather answering them.

As for the papers, origins of pandemic and origins of virus are distinct things. So, yes, we can all agree that evidence shows that pandemic started in the market, and as virus can infect animals sold there, this points towards that virus came from animals. But genetically is there anything that can distinguish a natural from a lab-made virus?

tynpeddler · 3 years ago

What is often missed is that chimeric viruses are easy to detect. The viral genome will show clear evidence of manipulation from random base insertions and clear homology with all the ancestral viruses. Hiding the signs of manipulation would either require vast amounts of time and resources (the expense and man power would make it very difficult to hide) or straight up science fiction technology. The chimeric origin hypothesis is not a plausible explanation for the origin of sars-cov2, which means the nature link is not relevant.

The other lab leak hypothesis is that a specimen collected and cultured by scientists, infected a lab employee and this patient zero then transmitted the virus to others. This is a plausible option, and it is being researched. However it is less plausible than wild transmission based on a simple numbers game. What is more likely, a breakout infection cause by a dozen scientists specifically trained and equipped against this possibility, or a transmission to one of the millions of other people who routinely interact with these bat populations? Both are possible, but one is much more likely. Before covid19, WIV had published research indicating that novel coronaviruses routinely jump from bats to humans in that part of the world. Most of these viruses aren't don't last in human hosts, but it's clear that it was only a matter time before something nasty got through. After all, it's already happened once before.

The real nail in the coffin is that research[0] has shown that there were at least two, independent transmissions of sars-cov2 to humans. For this to happen as part of a lab leak it would require WIV to have found and cultivated 2 different strains of sars-cov2, and then each of those strains would have to escape the lab.

[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715

tynpeddler commented on Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship bbc.com/news/world-us-can... · Posted by u/koolba

tynpeddler · 3 years ago

According to the article, the desired outcome of the election was a free and fair election. Not a particularly terrifying conspiracy.

tynpeddler commented on Severance is the workplace thriller we’ve needed readpassage.com/severance... · Posted by u/texaslonghorn5

texaslonghorn5 · 3 years ago

> The whole marxist obsession with "alienation" is a perfect example. They are largely delusional about the plight of the working class in non-capitalist systems.

You make two claims here. You provide some examples of the second claim in the second paragraph; for the first one, do you have any justification for why obsessing over alienation is bad?

More precisely, do you agree or disagree with the premise that alienation exists (in some form) in the capitalist system? If you agree, do you think workers would be better off if they were not alienated?

If you don't agree that alienation exists, how would you describe/judge modern IP rights and corporate hierarchy structures?

Would you say it's a good or bad thing that all of an employee's work product (during and outside of office hours) belongs to the company (assuming you accept my premise that this is enforced)?

tynpeddler · 3 years ago

I'm concerned that you've selectively ignored parts of my comment and have read meaning out of it that I did not put into it.

>do you have any justification for why obsessing over alienation is bad?

Obsessing over alienation is bad for Marxists (and good for capitalists). As I said, Marxists are not being serious (maybe credible is a better word here) when using alienation to critique capitalism. Of the economic systems in discussion, capitalism has the least alienation. Marxist solutions are either pure fantasy, or have been tried and lead to worse outcomes and other socio-economic systems sfrom history are also worse than capitalism. In other words, Marxist concerns with alienation are hypocritical.

>do you think workers would be better off if they were not alienated?

Again, I'm discussing the Marxist use of alienation and how they undercut themselves when discussing it.

> Would you say it's a good or bad thing that all of an employee's work product (during and outside of office hours) belongs to the company (assuming you accept my premise that this is enforced)?

Nothing in my comment can be taken as arguing one way or another on this topic. However, given that you've decided to focus on the goodness/badness of alienation, it sounds like it's important to you. How do you feel about alienation?