throwaway_egbs

> I wonder what people like this would do if faced with a real lifelong challenge?

Rethink this.

Same here, and I’ve worked at everything from mom-and-pops to a couple of household names. IME this (seemingly endless) discussion about how to manage commit history is the tabs-versus-spaces of source control.

The claim I was responding to is, "In a democracy, there is no reason to hide behind anonymity while fighting for a just cause."

What I'm saying is that there absolutely are reasons.

This is also not a binary proposition. In a group of activists you can have some people working anonymously and some people working out in the open.

Just when I thought tweetstorms couldn't get any worse, here's one where every tweet is a quote-tweet of the author. I don't even understand how I'm supposed to read this.

> Copyright has concluded that reading by robots doesn’t count. Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use.

Surely there's a limit to this. If I use a machine to produce something that just happens to exactly match a copyrighted work, now it's not infringement because of the method I used to produce it? That seems nonsensical, but maybe there's precedent for this too? (I have no idea what I'm talking about.)

The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled repeatedly that anonymity is protected by the First Amendment, specifically because anonymity enables free speech. A person who does not speak because they've been cowed into silence is deprived of their rights. "Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. … It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation … at the hand of an intolerant society." (McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission.)

Ah, I see what you were saying now. It was a little confusing for me in the context of a discussion about police.

I've seen a lot of people lately making the "you’re made out of animal parts, so eat animals" argument, which is reasonable on its face. But there's a pretty serious problem with it: those animals get everything they need from plants. And now we're in very murky territory, because now you have to prove—not just hypothesize, but prove—that the human animal is different from other animals in some very specific ways, or you have to weaken the initial claim to the point where it doesn't really say anything at all.