a true claim about a summary statistic of a thing does not imply a true claim about the thing itself. 1/
for example, that average wages have risen faster than CPI inflation does not imply a claim "wages have risen faster than inflation" is also true.
the latter claim may be require further definition in order to evaluate at all. (do we mean median wages? your wages or mine? what measure or concept of inflation?)
but if you are supercilliating the claim is true and that your interlocutor is naive or mistaken, well, we are all usually guilty of the sins we accuse of others. /fin
@zens @akkartik @avi @loup@treehouse.systems Thanks all a ton for the advice! Kafka seems a bit buzzy, so I was curious whether I might have an excuse to play with it, but for my rather trivial application I'll see if I can't try out the pub/sub style while keeping to simpler infrastructure. Thanks again.
@akkartik right. that’s kind of the sense i’m getting.
it’s a pretty trivial thing, notice when RSS items or collections of items “finalize” in feeds (whatever that means, i have a meaning) then notify subscribers. initially that was e-mail, but i’m like, well activitypub bridges would be cool too, what if i just let finalization be an “event” and hang off kafka different kinds of responders to those? nice it’d break things into simple pieces, but kafka’s kafkaesqueness might overwhelm that.
are there examples where #kafka is used and make sense for smallish, self-hosted projects, or is it really best tailored for larger enterprise-ish applications?
I try to avoid Amazon links, but I'm really excited that my sister #AdelleWaldman's new book is now available there for pre-order. https://a.co/d/bE3hNVr
we ask "why did we leave that place?" when we mean "why did we leave that time?"
i just realized who santa is an anagram of. or vice versa.
@akkartik you say it is not in emacs. but emacs is in it.
the revolution contains and is contained by many modes.
whatever everybody thinks of as the revolution is always just public relations.
i increasingly think the inchoate heart of the true revolution are people quietly building an alternative future in elisp.
the revolution lives not in cells, but in buffers.
there’s nothing more eternal than an instant.
@WataruTenkawa automatic A+ on that exam i think.
a pretty good distillation of where i am on israel/palestine too, from #KevinDrum https://jabberwocking.com/israel-and-its-enemies/
Text: As I've said before, I envy people who have total certainty in their views of Israel and Gaza. I have nothing close. Israel has endured decades of various Arab coalitions trying to destroy them, and it's hard to understand how anyone can blame them for their deep and abiding desire for self defense and retaliation. At the same time, their treatment of Palestinians over the past couple of decades has been so gratuitously revolting that it's hard to understand how anyone can blame them for cheering on even a grotesque terrorist group like Hamas. Both sides have an endless and frequently legitimate list of grievances. How can anyone not see that? And how do you get past it? Both sides really and truly want to destroy the other at this point. It's not a facade or false consciousness or anything like that. It's how they really feel. Even in theory, is there any answer?
life will be the death of me.
#RonDesantis political career has been cursed basically from the moment he put his grubby paws on #NewCollege.
why advertise on x if gab is cheaper?
American businesses are pretty efficient, in the sense of ensuring the ratio of dollars devoted to production relative to quantity and quality of goods produced is very low. They are also efficient in the sense of ensuring the ratio btw dollars customers pay and quantity of goods and services produced is high.
From a business perspective both of these are efficiencies. But from a social perspective the 2nd one is not. We can't afford to get anything done, because our businesses are so efficient
@LouisIngenthron yes, i’m sure about it. in racial discrimination law, there’s unusually the idea of liability for disparate impact, as opposed to discriminatory intent, so you might have a chance. but that’s the exception, not the rule. 1/
@LouisIngenthron before the mcdonalds lady could famously win a settlement for getting burned by coffee, she had to present extraordinary evidence that mcdonalds was superheating water in ways likely to produce unusual burns and that mcdonalds had experienced this before. if it had been an unforeseeable outcome of an ordinary business process (as the public was misled to believe), there would have been no liability. 2/
@LouisIngenthron there are already large industries building tools to predict inmate recidivism, or purporting to measure teacher’s “value add” by black-box algorithms independent analysts are deeply skeptical of. (see Cathy O’Neill’s Weapons of Math Destruction.) people spend years in jail or lose their jobs because of these tools. no one is accountable for their processes. 3/
@LouisIngenthron when a self-driving car maker or operator injures or kills in ways that are deemed the “car’s” error, firms might be fined, but a fine as @pluralistic puts it is a price, just a cost of doing business. the level of accountability we apply to decisionmakers at these firms is incredibly attenuated compared to the level of accountability’s — often criminal — that we impose for similar infractions by human drivers. 4/
@LouisIngenthron @pluralistic we do this on purpose, pretty knowingly. the argument is “if we imposed strict liability on decisionmakers at these industries, so their liability would be comparable to that of an unmediated individual making the same choice and causing the same harm, we would strangle all progress, because firms and managers simply would not take the necessary risks.” and that’s not ridiculous! maybe we accept that some eggs need to be broken to make our solar punk omelette. 5/
@LouisIngenthron @pluralistic but we should at least acknowledge it for what it is, an informaly sociaized subsidy to those businesses in the form of tolerating means of neutralizing accountability that more traditional actors would have faced. if you pretend there’s nothing new here, just the same accountability shifted to different relevant decisionmakers, you are mistaken. /fin
@LouisIngenthron that would be an affirmative normative and ultimately legal choice that we could make, and should make. but we haven’t yet. we have not clearly stated that an identified party must accept responsibility and strict liability for outcomes that were arguably “unforeseeable” as a consequence of delegating decisionmaking to some automated system. we should do that, but we have not. yet.