MFLoon

Yea it's super neat. More journals/articles should have those to appeal to lay readers.

I agree that the world is a complex system, but I don't actually agree that all or most of my actions as a private individual have wide reaching consequences. If you're below a certain critical threshold of wealth, power, social influence or some combination thereof, it really just doesn't matter what you do, it's the law of large numbers. The butterfly effect is a rare exception in complex systems, not a regularity - COVID Patient 0, for example, took actions that had wide reaching consequences, but I wouldn't consider those actions to have been "fundamentally political". Both the impact and the opportunity cost of the vast majority of my actions or inactions, on the greater world, is close to zero. People trying to convince you that "you can make a difference" in your everyday life as a private citizen by voting, recycling, showing up at the protest, boycotting the right products, etc, are in fact lying - they can, potentially, make a difference by causing a wide enough cross-section of a population to change their behaviors, but you the individual are not acting with wide reaching consequences, you are simply shuffling between indifferent behavioral cohorts which will continue to exist in the same proportions regardless of your individual choices.

I used to be baffled at the use of "SJW" as a pejorative, but comments like this reveal it's aptness to me. It's not the fighting for justice that's negative, it's the adoption of the warrior mentality. Which, ironically, is a perfect reflection of the problem with American policing - viewing the world as a battlefield and anyone not with you as against you. There are no non-combatants in the streets, just as there are none in the ideological trenches. The struggle for order and/or social justice is a totalizing endeavor that demands complete obedience, to the point where non-compliance/apolitical intransigence is treated more harshly than some forms of law-breaking/ideological deviance.

It appears to be a literal troll account - "Peter Weyland" is the villain from the Alien cinematic universe.

Apologies for the somewhat pedantic aside, but I want to point out: "literal Nazi" is a borderline oxymoron. There is no Nazi party, nor is Nazism a coherent political ideology to which one can seriously ascribe. I suppose people who were active members when it still existed can still be considered "literal Nazis", in which case there's probably less than 50 left on earth. But saying that anyone else who claims adherence to Nazism or allegiance to the (completely defunct) Nazi party makes them a literal Nazi actually elevates their status from what it is, which is just a pathetic racist cosplayer.

Is it really? It seems like an enormous amount of effort for a prank. 18k commits on the main repo, tens of thousands of words of explanatory blog posts and documentation, etc.

I highly doubt, if they even had a dedicated "security team" at the time the platform was architected as such, that they would have told the rest of the company they "had best-of-breed security". They would have understood their shortcomings and communicated them up the chain of command. And firing them and hiring an outside team of "security experts" to re-architect their system wholesale would be a patently absurd course of action.

The form of responsibility taking you're demanding is actually just business as usual, reactionary scapegoating.

Mine are mostly offers for a pre-approved $250,000 loan, available in less than 48 hours, for my non-existent small business. Curious what stolen mailing list I'm on that makes scammers think I'm a small business owner. Flattering really, that they'd think I have the potential to become one.

> relatively minimal resources

Uh, they're the most well capitalized corporation in the world (or hovering in the top 3 plus or minus a few quarters). They have the resources to make it work if they wanted. There are undoubtedly thousands of engineers, hundreds of managers, and at least a handful of execs, working for Apple, lurking in this HN thread today, not because they're unaware of their ongoing sabotage of web standards on iOS, but because they're completely aware of it and want to take the temperature on how their latest kick to the shins of PWAs is going over.

Yea, the build quality is the biggest area it's lacking. I have Lemur from 3 years ago or so (and they still look more or less the same) - and the body is very uninspiring chunky black plastic, and feels flimsy/flexy. The keyboard is fine I suppose, generic chiclet keys which I don't mind at all. But the trackpad is quite mediocre compared to any Macbook.

Strange that App Academy was left out, considering it was one of the earliest (if not the first?) ISA bootcamps. Full disclosure: I attended in 2015, as did multiple friends in a +/- 1 year window around then. All of us had good experiences and were able to launch our careers as software engineers directly out of App Academy.

That's an inane take. Even in the absolute worst case scenario of 3% global mortality, how would that possibly result in a 50% global decrease in economic output?

There's a multitude of good reasons to close the dorms. People are sharing bedrooms, common areas, bathrooms and kitchens with far more people than they would be in the average private domicile. The network effect of communal living, combined with the generally more lax sanitary/hygenic standards of a younger population, makes any dorm highly at risk for becoming a hotspot, of any infectious disease (and indeed it's quite common for colds, flus and even more serious diseases to cause epidemics in college dormitories).

Here's the thing though, if I'm not already an effective political actor (i.e. someone with a lot of money, or a significant network of people who listen to me, or in a position of control over an institution with proxy access to either of those), the opportunity cost of doing nothing is basically zero.

The assertions that "inaction is a choice" or "political disengagement is a privilege" are coming from a place of naive idealism about the reality of affecting change in modern societies. There's an enormous threshold of activation energy one has to cross to be an efficacious actor against existing large scale power structures, and anything short of it is basically not going to make a difference.

The reality of scale in our world as currently configured is that one private individual could do all the conscientious things - boycott the right things, recycle the right things, vote for the right things - and nothing will change. Even a thousand or a million such individuals randomly distributed doing the exact same things, still wouldn't make a significant difference. Only by acting in coordinated networks would change come about, and it would be driven by the powerful individuals or organizations doing the coordinating, having expended enormous energy to do so. Most people aren't suited to or interested in expending that kind of energy to lead such efforts, and we shouldn't be made to feel guilty for just wanting to go about our lives without trying to "make a difference".