I understand that the “GNU” is a series of commands and not an acronym, but is there any sort of connection with FSF GNU? Or is it just an interesting coincidence?
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Terry Pratchett, is in fact, GNU Terry Pratchett, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Terry Pratchett.
I think it's too specific an acronym to be a coincidence, and if you read "Going Postal", it's a pretty clear love letter to the hacker culture, so in my mind officially recognized or not, the connection with FSF is there
He obviously meant it, all his books are full of references like this.
The Annotated Pratchett File is a longrunning effort to document these references, though I'm not sure if it is really being maintained any more -- the Going Postal page is empty.
Right, because the measure of how much we should talk about injustice is how much we've talked about injustice, rather than how much injustice there actually is. Because ignoring problems is always how to solve them.
No one is making an argument in favor of ignoring one specific problem. On the contrary, the complaint that all the books getting pulitzer prizes are about the same topic, is not against that topic, but about other problems being ignored.
This “same topic” is: how people and groups of people feel about and relate to themselves and each-other. Which is so broad as to encompass basically anything having to do with people.
the topic as defined by the post making the complaint was "an ethnicity issue / exploring identity issues". You generalize it to "identity" and your critique is true for the definition you make, but you may be missing the point the complaint was about: that the books don't just feature this topic, they resolve around it.
The post i commented on described the topic as "injustice" and argued that making the complaint is akin to asking to ignore injustice, and therefor morally wrong. I find that an eristic argument and engage it with logic, because i strongly dislike such arguments.
Please note that i have no strong opinion whether the complaint is objectively true, complete nonsense, or only the subjective understanding of the person making the complaint. I do not have such an opinion, because i have not read any one of the winning books and will not make any argument about their content or major themes based on one sentence summaries.
The books in question almost certainly don’t all revolve around group identity, though some might. Some of them mention it in their short blurb because someone in the marketing department thought it would help sell more books. Others don’t mention it explicitly in their blurbs, but touch on related subjects and the top-level poster here is guessing the subject will be featured (before having read the books). The only way to make a solid claim about this is to actually carefully read the prizewinning books, which no one here has done.
People constantly worried they might be exposed to “identity” are even more annoying than those who won’t stop talking about the subject. I have seen several children’s novels where the characters tangentially discussed their ancestors’ origins or took part in cultural traditions, or the book incidentally featured a disabled character or a gay character or a homeless character, and then random Amazon reviewers with a chip on their shoulder will complain about how this is all too “woke” for them.
Please note that i have no strong opinion whether the complaint is objectively true, complete nonsense, or only the subjective understanding of the person making the complaint. I do not have such an opinion, because i have not read any one of the winning books and will not make any argument about their content or major themes based on one sentence summaries.
Also, i don't particularly care about "People", you may say you have seen them, but they could all be made of straw as far as i know. If you think you can convince me by denouncing the top poster, you must have missed my entire point about eristic. I do however agree that people on all sides of every discussion can be stupefyingly annoying.
And i agree that the absolute claim seems unlikely. When looking for a counter example I would pick up the history winner about Cuba, but again i would prefer to read it first before talking about it. In a debate we could ask the one making the argument to provide detailed reviews of all the books, however we would still need to read them to verify the answer. And that doesn't work well in internet debates where it is normal for people to shout bold claims and leave.
As someone who doesn't have a dog in this fight, the Hunter Biden laptop story represents a far stronger embrace of journalistic ethics in the face of adversity than any of the stories that were actually awarded. For a publication to stand by a story while facing extreme financial repercussions and censorship is impressive.
The Hunter Biden laptop story was a fake scandal made up by political hack “journalists” to (try to) swing an election, dropped on the electorate with no corroboration and no expert analysis, handed to them by people directly working for the president’s campaign who had a history of promoting Russian propaganda. Reputable media outlets tried to corroborate the story, could not, and decided not to publish anything about it until after they could do their routine due diligence. The NY Post – not a reputable media outlet – instead jumped at the chance to score political points without concern for corroboration.
The supposed “scandal” is that the candidate’s son tried to set up a meeting between his boss and his father, which meeting either never happened or was no more than a few minutes long, and never demonstrated any whiff of illegality or even unethical behavior by the candidate. That is hinted at by some (apparently real) emails which were obtained by an unknown method [but note the company had been hacked by Russian military intelligence in the recent past] and then placed on a hard drive by unknown actors for unknown reasons, along with a highly suspicious (and now impossible to validate, because the hard drive was handled so sloppily) story about a laptop abandoned to a legally blind repair shop owner. This hard drive eventually found its way to Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani.
“Unqualified relative of a powerful/famous person with mediocre talent/skills talks up his importance and connections to get a fancy job” is an everyday occurrence in the USA (and around the world). As an obvious example, look at George W. Bush’s entire pre-presidential career (or thousands of family/friends of Governors, Senators, CEOs, ...). It’s a bummer that we can’t all have a famous dad to put on our resumés, but unless some actual corrupt dealing happens, there’s nothing unusual or scandalous about this. But despite there being no serious story here, it has been repeated ad nauseam by every hack propaganda rag for the past year and a half to the point that millions of faithful conspiracy theorists are convinced of its significance.
Meanwhile the (now former) president’s son in law was having his bankrupt family business bailed out by oil sheikhs to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars (and more recently has been put in charge of a $2 billion investment fund) as direct payback for altering US government policy to help those patrons, and nobody involved in this laptop story batted an eye. (Not to mention, the former president himself spent his whole term in office shaking down everyone he could for cash and political favors, including the US federal government and various foreign leaders.) What a joke.
Dropped on the electorate? I distinctly remember major news outlets outright saying they weren't going to cover it and dismissed it as Russian propaganda right after the story came out. I also distinctly remember the insinuation that it was totally fake, somehow forged, or pure disinformation. By all accounts it should have been an October Surprise but it wasn't because it was starved of attention. Turns out, though, it was real and the contents on the drive have been reported on after the election - and even then not with the level of detail and urgency that one would expect of an unbiased media.
> Thousands of emails purportedly from the laptop computer of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, are authentic communications that can be verified through cryptographic signatures from Google and other technology companies, say two security experts who examined the data at the request of The Washington Post. ¶ The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post. Neither found clear evidence of tampering in their examinations, but some of the records that might have helped verify contents were not available for analysis, they said.[...] ¶ Among the reasons for the inconclusive findings was sloppy handling of the data, which damaged some records. The experts found the data had been repeatedly accessed and copied by people other than Hunter Biden over nearly three years.
How those emails (and other materials) were originally obtained and how they made their way onto the hard drive in question is impossible to determine.
Because there isn’t really much story or scandal in the emails themselves (similar to the Blumenthal and Podesta hacked email leaks from 2016), the whole “conspiracy coverup” angle has been played up endlessly by breathless propagandists.
But even if you take a leap and assume that the laptop story is true precisely as claimed, the better explanation for the media reaction is: serious media outlets who were repeatedly burned by credulously reprinting Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon’s (later proven false) claims wised up and decided to be a bit more careful this time.
> the better explanation for the media reaction is: serious media outlets who were repeatedly burned by credulously reprinting Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon’s (later proven false) claims wised up and decided to be a bit more careful this time.
Come on man, we all know the reason the story [1] was suppressed [2] is that the establishment, rightly or not, was afraid of another four years of Trump. Then, they made up all kinds of post-facto reasons for it (policy against hacked material, etc.).
[1]: Which, as you correctly mentioned earlier, was intended to swing votes.
[2]: Not only from the mainstream media, but also from social media, to the extent you couldn't send it in DMs to others.
Interesting seeing the right losing their collective minds over this Hunter Biden laptop story but completely dismissing all of Trump’s kids getting in trouble with the law. Trump’s kids, who were all given cushy government jobs.
Per the wikipedia article on the topic, the author of the article refused to put his name on that article due to concerns about its veracity, and the main allegation in it (that Biden Sr met with a Burisma board member at his son's request) turned out to be false.
What are the implications of positive/negative answers to these questions, and/or what else aside from "because it's there" motivates answering these questions?
Who knows? Answers to these questions might spur discussion on connections between cellular automata and other computational constructions. I think that's Wolfram's angle -- justify the cellular-automata-is-everything tack that he's been on the past 20-30 years.
"If one can show that a system is universal, however, then this does have implications that are closer to our rule 30 problem. In particular, if a system is universal, then there’ll be questions (like the halting problem) about its infinite-time behavior that will be undecidable, and which no guaranteed-finite-time computation can answer."
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Thank you for this great article. I appreciate the efforts made by people to look past themselves and the "obvious" reasons for things. Isn't that what makes good engineers good?
