The American working class doesn't like to acknowledge its own existence or assert its self-worth. There's no real self identity for that class in America.
In fact, a huge number of the people that are in that class would resent you for classifying them in this way. And the same is true for those in the upper middle class, or elites.
Secondly, trying to scope the xenophobia problem to just the working class is itself a bit of a misdirection. Plenty of that comes from the swaths of upper middle class white collar folks. And plenty of it comes from second gen immigrants who are eager to be counted among the natives.
The xenophobia _is_ the substitute American culture provides as a filler for the vacuum left by the lack of any sort of class identity. Everybody falls over themselves demonstrating how they can be "more American" in one way or the other. Who is a "real" American, what their qualities are, whether this particular thing or that particular thing is more or less American, etc. etc.
It's an alternate focus to direct all that shame the culture demands from the poor.
A considerable part of this is the fact that in a society where utilizing these programs is stigmatized to the degree that the USA does, people who see themselves as honest tend to avoid utilizing them.
And even those who are less than honest, but have a sense of propriety, would understand that the correct, culturally approved time to engage in these activities is AFTER one acquires a significant amount of wealth, when entitlements are knighted to become "economic incentives".
I really don't understand what any of this has to do with "trust", especially of the project or code. If anything people who want to gain undeserved trust would be incentivized to appear to follow a higher standard of norms publically. The public comments would be nice and polite and gregarious and professional, and the behaviour that didn't meet that standard would be private.
FWIW I've never programmed a line of code in zig and I don't know who this developer is.
All I got from it was "seems like GitHub is starting to deteriorate pretty hard and this guy's fed up and moving his project and leaving some snark behind".
I think there's still a category theoretic expression of this, but it's not necessarily easy to capture in language type systems.
The notion of `f` producing a lazy sequence of values, `g` consuming them, and possibly that construct getting built up into some closed set of structures - (e.g. sequences, or trees, or if you like dags).
I've only read a smattering of Pi theory, but if I remember correctly it concerns itself more with the behaviour of `f` and `g`, and more generally bridging between local behavioural descriptions of components like `f` and `g` and the global behaviour of a heterogeneous system that is composed of some arbitrary graph of those sending messages to each other.
I'm getting a bit beyond my depth here, but it feels like Pi theory leans more towards operational semantics for reasoning about asynchronicity and something like category theory / monads / arrows and related concepts lean more towards reasoning about combinatorial algebras of computational models.
You'd want to have the alteration reference existing guides to the current implementation.
I haven't jumped in headfirst to the "AI revolution", but I have been systematically evaluating the tooling against various use cases.
The approach that tends to have the best result for me combines a collection of `RFI` (request for implementation) markdown documents to describe the work to be done, as well as "guide" documents.
The guide documents need to keep getting updated as the code changes. I do this manually but probably the more enthusiastic AI workflow users would make this an automated part of their AI workflow.
It's important to keep the guides brief. If they get too long they eat context for no good reason. When LLMs write for humans, they tend to be very descriptive. When generating the guide documents, I always add an instruction to tell the LLM to "be succinct and terse", followed by "don't be verbose". This makes the guides into valuable high-density context documents.
The RFIs are then used in a process. For complex problems, I first get the LLM to generate a design doc, then an implementation plan from that design doc, then finally I ask it to implement it while referencing the RFI, design doc, impl doc, and relevant guide docs as context.
If you're altering the spec, you wouldn't ask it to regen from scratch, but use the guide documents to compute the changes needed to implement the alteration.
Yes, but that is usually more relating to pay/benefits. At google (from what I heard) contractors are put on the bad projects, maintenance work or support functions. As in there is a big separation between work done by full-time employees and contractors in most teams.
I think FTE is mostly used as a 'unit'. E.g. if two people work on something 50% of the time, you get one "FTE-equivalent", as there is roughly one full-time employee of effort put in.
Though in this context it just seems to be the number of people working on the code on a consistent basis.
* “Full Time Employee” (which can itself mean “not a part-timer” in a place that employs both, or “not a temp/contractor” [in which case the “full-time” really means “regular/permanent”]) or
* “Full Time Equivalent” (a budgeting unit equal to either a full time worker or a combination of part time workers with the same aggregate [usually weekly] hours as constitute the standard for full-time in the system being used.)
In a society where having a job is, for that vast majority not in the non-gilded classes, the only mechanism by which a person can secure their core needs.. losing a job is indeed a pitiable situation for most.
If we've built a society that when it "pivots" leaves swathes of people smeared out as residual waste, I'd argue we should feel bad.
We've certainly reached a point of technological advancement where many of these consequences at the individual level are avoidable. If they're still happening, it's because we've chosen this outcome - perhaps passively. But the clear implication of would be that we're collectively failing ourselves, as a species that tends to put some degree of pride in our intelligence.
And we should feel bad about that failure. It's OK to feel bad about that failure. We tend not to improve things we don't feel bad about.
Unfortunately the practical effect of whatever policy that comes out of this theorycrafting has left your media landscape an absurd and abject failure. Where the idea of objective truth being open to the highest bidder and allowed to change on a week by week, or day by day basis without challenge.. is a reality Americans now live every day.
If the theory is "sensible", who cares? At some point you do want to connect it to reality and outcomes, no?
Unfortunately it isn’t that simple. The opposite of our media landscape is countries that think they have free speech but really don’t, like most of Europe.
I’ll take having all the information in the world (true or false, purposefully curated for propaganda or organically reported) over any society that locks people up for social media posts deemed “fake”.
I have faith both in the marketplace of ideas leading to the best outcomes, and that the ability to lock people up over false speech will be weaponized eventually.
The American media landscape is the only possible result of true freedom of speech combined with the internet. It’s faaaaar from perfect but I do believe it’ll be the best in the end.
But right now America is factually less free than either Europe or my own country. You simply do not have due process anymore. Most of the protections of your constitution have been interpreted away to nothingness.
I just don't see how these so called valuable principles have actually materially served your people in being able to protect or defend the values you claim to hold.
Faith is fine, but you do need to evaluate ground truth at the end of the day. Outcomes matter.
That’s just propaganda. If we didn’t have due process, Donald Trump would be in jail. Or, if you think he’s the reason we lost it, half the Biden administration would. The idea that the legal system has somehow melted down in the last nine months is just scaremongering.
Norms are being violated, for sure, and the courts are being pushed to determine the bounds of the law. I won’t say I’m a fan of most of it, but it’s a far cry from lack of freedom.
I don’t know what your country is, so I can’t respond, but if you can be locked up over a social media post (assuming reasonable exemptions like direct incitement to violence) you’re not free. You just have been told you are.
The keystone freedom is free speech and almost nowhere else truly has it. It’s a spectrum for sure, and Europe is a lot closer than, say, China, but we’re the far extreme.
Any good outcomes also come from that same freedom of speech. It’s a double-edged sword, for sure. You have to take your anti-vax movement along with your Wikipedia.
> That’s just propaganda. If we didn’t have due process, Donald Trump would be in jail.
Well your country does still offer its protections for the wealthy and powerful. It's just regular people have less of it than we do in freer countries.
> Or, if you think he’s the reason we lost it, half the Biden administration would. The idea that the legal system has somehow melted down in the last nine months is just scaremongering.
I see this as coping, to be honest. Americans simply have been told that they are the vanguard of freedom for so long that they cannot imagine a world where their freedom is somehow lesser than others.
But as someone who grew up in America and emigrated out, I can tell you for a fact that Americans are less free than Canadians.
On average, the Canadian government gives itself less of a leeway to abuse people.
If you insult a police officer in America, that officer can abuse you and take away your rights and the probability of consequences for that officer is far lower than the probability in my country.
My country doesn't have a constitution that protects me from unreasonable searches and seizures, but yet, Americans have less protections from unreasonable search and seizure despite their constitution - due the loophole of civil forfeiture.
In your country, your government can pass a law to criminalize you, and then that makes it legal for the government to turn you into a slave. That's not allowed in my country.
Speedy trials in your country are only reserved for the rich.
Americans simply have less freedom than the rest of the first world. It's extremely hard for them to accept because of the propaganda they've been subject to.
But as someone who grew up all over America, and has seen and lived and experienced more of it than most Americans, I know for a fact that they are wrong.
If you don't have the money to pay for freedoms in America, you have far fewer than someone from my country does.
Yeah again, this is all a cartoon. Cops everywhere now have body cameras on nearly all the time. Freedom of speech gives us the right to video them and they can barely do anything in public anymore without five people doing so. Contempt of cop beatings still exist sometimes I’m sure, everywhere, but it’s hardly a thing most people are exposed to. If we were having this discussion in 1975 I’d grant you this point, it’s dramatically reduced now.
I was prosecuted for a misdemeanor when I was 18 and broke. I got a free lawyer (as the constitution says) who did a great job and the whole thing was over in a month. I was not rich. I don’t know what TV shows make you think our government is just locking people up willy nilly, it isn’t. (Our drug laws lock a lot of people up, but they aren’t that different or more draconian than most places, just the number of people who do drugs is, and there are countries that execute people for drug offenses that are misdemeanors here.)
The government cannot pass a law to criminalize you, criminalizing things is never retroactive. I assume by the slavery thing you mean prison labor. That actually is in the constitution, and is crazy. We’re working on it. Same with asset forfeiture.
The idea that because we have some areas in which we are less free than other countries we are less free in total is ridiculous. The fact that you say things like “Americans don’t have due process” is a strong indicator of internalized propaganda.
And I’m not some flag waving patriot American Exceptionalist by any means, I’ve traveled quite a bit more than most. But the one thing we do best is individual liberties. It’s why we’re where we are in the grand scheme of human history and Canada is basically just our suburb enjoying all of the benefits (national security with next to no defense budget, unlimited free trade a short truck ride away) while avoiding the cost.
Although we are disagreeing, I hope that this is not in an antagonistic sense - I do find this conversation interesting because it's not often the opportunity arises to discuss this topic.
As someone who was raised American, went to American schools, lived and breathed American culture for over the decade I went from child to adult.. moving away and living and breathing Canadian culture has been an enlightening experience.
Getting back to the topic..
These rebuttals really fall flat to my ears. They sound like technicalities that are constructed to paper over the underlying reality. My feelings on this topic aren't from propaganda, but from having experienced how people feel, act, and behave when I was growing up in America.
It's only after I moved to Canada that I realized that most Americans have to live in fear of police. Police are able to break laws at whim, and abuse people's rights, and the mechanism for resource is so inaccessible to the average person that it might as well not exist. I thought this was normal and didn't detract from "freedom" when I was growing up.
Now, this happens in Canada too, but on average they are _less_ able to abuse people. They still do, but the government and society does a better job of ensuring consequences in more of those situations.
The institutionalized pipeline to slavery that exists in America doesn't exist in Canada. Now, this one is something that affected me less on a personal level, because that institutionalized pipeline is targeted largely at black people, and I'm not black.
That said, if I was black, and in America.. the processed plant flower I'm lighting up and enjoying this saturday in my basement would be very much a direct threat to my freedoms. That would be enough, in many parts of America, to brand me as a dangerous threat to society. And it would be enough for my freedoms to be taken away by the state, and then for my labour to be rented out to private companies against my will.
This is not a hypothetical circumstance. This is a reality that tens of thousands of Americans live. This is on the ground reality.
But really for me, the emotional aspect is how people just live in less fear of the government here. Their government, on average, abuses them less. It's less capricious. It's less mean to them. It doesn't step on them as much as the American government steps on Americans.
But you do have to live and breathe it to understand the change in mentality.
> But the one thing we do best is individual liberties
This is a cultural mythology. An earnest review of the evidence shows that America is, in real terms of delivering liberties to its people, at the back of the pack of the cohort of first world nations.
> It’s why we’re where we are in the grand scheme of human history and Canada is basically just our suburb enjoying all of the benefits (national security with next to no defense budget, unlimited free trade a short truck ride away) while avoiding the cost.
I'm not too concerned about the place of Canada in "human history". The human suffering it seems to entail to gain that acclaim seems not really worth it.
You're entirely right about your other points though. Canada has benefited greatly from the US's economic engine. In fact, I think part of the reason Canadians enjoy more freedom than Americans is because of this.
It's adjacent to the American market, but segregated enough to make it a much smaller market. This has historically made it less interesting for powerful commercial interests to come meddle in Canadian political affairs and laws, and over time that means Canada has been able to protect its individual liberties better.
That pressure to undermine freedoms through loopholes, creative interpretation, and just straight up ignoring some of them.. that hasn't been as high in Canada, and that's definitely a circumstantial reality having to do with its proximity to the USA.
I tend to agree with this sentiment, but my takeaway is slightly different.
People who would describe themselves as supporters of "capitalism", as well as supporters of "communism" or "socialism", are not able to admit that their belief systems are actually religious in structure. Not spiritual perhaps, but effectively "secular religions".
Both capitalism and its nemesis arose in the mid 1900s, when humanity was obsessed with modernist thinking about "solving problems once and for all". And in that context, the people fell in love with these two "clean systems". A more perfect set of rules.
Sure, capitalism doesn't claim to be the most powerful god. But in surrogacy, it claims to be "the least imperfect system". Which is structurally the same claim: declaring the scripture to be some apex that is not surpassable.
The main difference between communism and capitalism was how it was implemented. The USSR went full-tilt ideologically rigid, and collapsed very quickly. The US didn't go full-tilt capitalism. It implemented a hybrid system with a high marginal tax, welfare programs, subsidies, labour unions, public works projects, along with a market system, and that hybrid non-ideologically rigid model served it well.
Around the time it was clear the USSR was collapsing, the USA went hard tilt in favour of ideological purity in capitalism. Systematic series of clawbacks in the tax regime, privatization, elimination of labour unions.
As they leaned into the religion, it was used against them, much like the communist religion was used against the people of the USSR. And now they have been robbed of their prosperity, of the value of their efforts, much like the people in the USSR were robbed.
Nice read but we also have democracy to prevent things but it still feels effectively hi-jacked by such fictional constructs like capitalism and the lobbying power
Theoretically we should be able to think of the majorities or ourselves and we can have a good system
but we also feel like a lack of choice I suppose, the elections feel between just two parties with choosing the lesser evil (I think zohran is cool tho in the democratic party and maybe he could signify some good things I guess)
Personally I feel like we need to focus more on the incentives and competency of people more than anything and try to vote it on that and not what they speak I suppose.
We don't have democracy because the people with the most money can use a century of learning how to manipulate people through mass propaganda, advertising, pr, spin to get the results they want. People don't form political opinions in a vacuum, they are formed by the messages they receive.
'Both capitalism and its nemesis arose in the mid 1900s, when humanity was obsessed with modernist thinking about "solving problems once and for all". And in that context, the people fell in love with these two "clean systems". A more perfect set of rules.'
All of this is junk. Karl Polanyi famously puts the birth of capitalism very late compared to other important thinkers, in 1834, by defining it as characterised by markets of fictitious commodities, i.e. stuff like labour, land, money. More mainstream would be to point to the Renaissance or british 16th century.
The idea that capitalism and communism would be dependent on an art movement of the early 20th century is quite bizarre, the Communist Manifesto was published in 1848 and by the late 19th century when modernism started to form unions and communist parties were already common.
Actually, modernism is a reaction to the apparent stalling of 'progress', WWI and nostalgia for the optimism of the early modern period. I.e. from 1500 to late 1800s. In part it was also a reaction to what is usually called modern physics, i.e. things like newtonianism and ether hypotheses breaking down in due to Michelson-Morley and early study of quantum phenomena, relativity and so on.
> All of this is junk. Karl Polanyi famously puts the birth of capitalism very late compared to other important thinkers, in 1834, by defining it as characterised by markets of fictitious commodities, i.e. stuff like labour, land, money. More mainstream would be to point to the Renaissance or british 16th century.
Once again, I'm not referring to theorycraft here. I'm talking about the pragmatics of it.
"Capitalism" as an ideological polemic that stood opposed to "Communism" was a concept that society adopted in the mid 1900s.
What you're talking about is some labeling of some social and economic mechanisms.
Marx might have described communism. But when the USSR came to power, the specific brand of communist _ideology_ that was adopted by the government was its own thing, its own creature and entity.
Likewise, many theorists might have described a loose economic structure as "capitalism", but the "Capitalism, Freedom, and American Pie", as an ideological fixpoint that was sold to society as something to aspire to was something entirely different from the academic theorycraft you're referring to.
another absurd ahistorical comment on HN, where capitalism apparently arose in the mid 20th century despite the long-standing pre-existence of stock issuing multinationals, wage laborers, currency-mediated trade, reserve banking, etc.
The American ideological fixture of Capitalism certainly did arise then. I'm not talking about the general descriptive academic theory that labels certain loose economic and social models as capitalism. I'm talking about the capital C capitalism, standing opposite to capital C communism. The USA vs USSR, the grand battle of ideologies.
We remember that right?
The ideology was born in the mid 1900s, in the middle of modernist fervour where humanity believed itself to be on the cusp of some sort of transformation into a kind of godhood. We had invented flight, we had harness light itself, we had controlled temperature, we had learned how to build buildings of any shape and size. And likewise we turned our attention to a machine for people.
Set up the right rules, and everything else will follow, the ideologies posit.
One thing that's worthwhile to understand, but very difficult to mentally reconcile, is the way in which Americans have the ability to redefine words to meet the need of branding.
In a very real and genuine sense, to most Americans "democracy and freedom" is simply whatever the USA does. This sentiment is then, after the fact, stitched into acceptability by these sorts of intellectual deflections.
It is understandable. The Netherlands is democracy to comes closest to ancient Athens. Twenty different political parties represented in parliament. A people who for 500 years have never agreed upon anything.
> Americans want a strong leader. It is understandable.
Is it? It seems incredibly stupid to me. It's putting 'strength', or intensity and effectiveness of action, above whether the action is a good idea or even makes sense. It seems to make competence secondary.
If Athens is legitimately a democracy then I am confused how you can come to the conclusion "one thing is for certain, a democracy can't be authoritarian by definition."
Athens killed Socrates using an authoritarian law after all.
I think we're using two different meaning of authoritarianism. It means both "undemocratic/rule of the few" (my statement) and tyrannical (your position).
Any state, democracy included, can be a tyrant (i.e. cruel and oppressive) against its perceived enemies.
In fact, a huge number of the people that are in that class would resent you for classifying them in this way. And the same is true for those in the upper middle class, or elites.
Secondly, trying to scope the xenophobia problem to just the working class is itself a bit of a misdirection. Plenty of that comes from the swaths of upper middle class white collar folks. And plenty of it comes from second gen immigrants who are eager to be counted among the natives.
The xenophobia _is_ the substitute American culture provides as a filler for the vacuum left by the lack of any sort of class identity. Everybody falls over themselves demonstrating how they can be "more American" in one way or the other. Who is a "real" American, what their qualities are, whether this particular thing or that particular thing is more or less American, etc. etc.
It's an alternate focus to direct all that shame the culture demands from the poor.