Or survivorship bias: the major issues, that have been addressed, do not cause problems cause they were addressed. Some of the minor issues that are not addressed randomly do cause major issues.
To make it less ambiguous, you could let the user describe the diagram with what the software is supposed to do in some sort of more rigid unambiguous reduced English /s
> Celia Kirwan, a close friend of Orwell, who had just started working as Robert Conquest's assistant at the IRD, visited Orwell in March 1949, at a sanatorium where he was being treated for tuberculosis. Orwell wrote a list of names of people he considered sympathetic to Stalinism and therefore unsuitable as writers for the Department, and enclosed it in a letter to Kirwan.
This from a company that uses Ruby for their webapp and hosts probably one of the bigger CI build farms probably in the world. I have a very hard time crying because they have to run a beefy search cluster. I would guess that a very non-trivial portion of the horsepower for such a thing is about ingest of the constant updates moreso than the actual search part
I think we got very different reads here. I understand the comment on the author to be judgemental to be very gentle. Dillydog is a person who affords everyone a rich and deep hidden inner life, so much so, that assuming people are so shallow to be read by a glance makes them angry on their behalf. I think they are in a good place already, emphasizing deeply with others.
Indeed! But haven't we now hypothesized dillydog here to be "a person who affords everyone a rich and deep inner life"? Or more provocatively, haven't we made a character judgement?
In the same way that we perform root cause analysis via guesses and validations, I think it's natural, and perhaps unavoidable, that we also make guesses as to a person's personality.
Of course, we usually call someone judgemental for making negative assessments, but I think it's important to allow a person whatever possibilities, regardless of moral judgement.
My read of the article is that the author ascribes negative traits without judgement and just as easily as positive ones. Heck, as I see it, big part of empathizing with someone is recognizing how all their conditions and traits are natural and operate similarly inside ourselves to one degree or another.
None of us chose to be the way we are in the situation we're in. Like, 3+1 dimensions and mostly Euclidean space. Who ordered that? Modus ponens?! Glaciation periods! All these deeply affect our day to day experience, obviously or not and at the behest of no one.
Well, that character judgement (if you want to call it that) was based on dillydog's shared thoughts about a long article that itself reflects a very specific way of viewing people. To compare that conclusion to someone who purports to confidently extrapolate someone's self-worth, philosophy regarding how they view themselves and others, the 'narrowness' of their understanding or love for the world (what?), and more just by watching them stand around at a wedding for an afternoon seems strange. It's a much more solid base to draw that conclusion from, in my opinion. The character judgement is that they are "a person who affords everyone a rich and deep inner life," and the judgement comes from the fact that applying their perspective is impossible unless they afford everyone a rich and deep inner life. It's emergent from their stated philosophy in a way that the examples in the article are not.
> My read of the article is that the author ascribes negative traits without judgement and just as easily as positive ones
I don't think this is true at all? The 'negative traits' she assigns to people are things like desperation, self-hatred, 'hating the world (or having a very narrow understanding of it)', 'thinking they are better than everyone'. It's hard to call those categorizations anything but judgemental. She even goes as far as to say she has a 'favorite kind of person' by these categorizations. That she ascribes them as easily positive ones is meaningless. It's the ascribing that is the problem.
My take away is that the article is a small list of things that most people know (i.e. it's easy to tell if someone is actually interested in something or not) paired with a series of ways to judge someone based on some extremely surface-level traits, which slowly veers into a sort of prescriptive take on which combination of those traits makes a person identifiably good. It has a feel-good tone, but I found the article difficult to get through because it put me off so much.
> Heck, as I see it, big part of empathizing with someone is recognizing how all their conditions and traits are natural and operate similarly inside ourselves to one degree or another.
See, to me applying the 'insights' outlined in the article seems like the opposite of empathizing. It's couched in gentle phrasing, but it essentially boils down to "here's how you put someone into a box by looking at them."
> here's how you put someone into a box by looking at them
Heck yeah. If we're putting people in boxes, then I agree. That said, the author's characterizations sound much less absolute to me, like they're median estimates with implied wide error bars. That's similar to how I experience people, actually.
Does your intuition change if you assume that different framing?
My best interpretation of their comment would be that to ban owning ninja swords or rape does not prevent either from happening 100% of the time. But it's still the 'right' thing to do and prevents it some of the time.
Farms without immune pigs can still claim it. Do some sampling tests, culling etc and call the product "virus free". But calling modified pigs not modified is tougher, I think.
At least with the Venus probes they were only publicly announced when they were well on their way to Venus with failures either not getting published or getting assigned alibi mission goals (e.g. if they failed to leave earth's orbit) so failure modes were limited to the destination.
This is a question I've tried to answer to myself, and I think it's actually pretty hard to tell, if all your sources are Western media. I'll give you my impressions but I'm by no means an expert.
I tend to reject any narrative about the Soviets which makes them not sound like humans. They weren't all idiots or sociopaths: they understood, just like we do, that people make mistakes and that if you punish mistakes too harshly, people won't want to risk working with you. The Soviet government punished dissent harshly--but if you were working with them they weren't typically so foolish as to punish honest mistakes with a stay in the gulags. In fact, technical fields like their space program (and, for example, infrastructure programs) were safe havens for intelligentsia, where some criticism of government was tolerated because it was understood that criticism from people with technical knowhow was necessary to progress Soviet goals.
There are exceptions I've found, but I tend to think those are the result of a few people with too much power making bad decisions, rather than a pervasive cultural norm.
None of this should be perceived as a defense of Soviet totalitarianism. Stalin has the highest body count of any dictator by a wide margin, and that's totally reprehensible. All I'm saying is I think he killed political dissenters, mostly, not allies who made mistakes.
As a Russian I will explain my vision: one of the oldest Western traditions is to demonize Russia and Russian people. You can find plenty of examples in the Western literature from 100 years ago, from 400 years ago, and right now on CNN or Bloomberg or in any Hollywood movie.
E.g. movie Tenet starts from depicting a scene from "Russian life": under a low sun, in freezing cold, dirty hungry Russians are crawling in the dirt gathering "pieces of Uranium" with their bare hands.
Or you can open just about any publication/movie about Russia/Soviet Union from just about any period of time: there would be not a single good word. Western Media almost never publishes something like: "There's a new school/hospital/stadium/factory opened in Russia". Instead all you can see is "Russian corrupt government officials set a record of eating 100500 babies alive today.", "Weak Russian economy means that Russians will survive on a diet of two rotten potatoes a day in 2026", etc. etc.
It's just that Soviet period is demonized the most.
I spent three years on Africa, and it’s the same story there. Literally everyday millions of africans laugh and sing and cry with joy at weddings, parties, birth of children. New hospitals get built, life is rapidly improving.
Basically nobody in the west has any idea, and people always assume I was in a hell hole the entire time. It’s wild what propaganda will do for knowledge of a place.
So basically you are fine living in a imperialist, totalitarian dictatorship, where the slightest descent is punished by years in prison, because the boot on your neck is Russian made?
The rest of the world having to clean up the mess left by the Soviet Union (paying for the cleanup and decommissioning of nuclear submarines, Chernobyl, rebuilding eastern Europe) may have a lot to do with the anti-Soviet attitude.
Have you ever wondered if maybe that (and by extension your attitude to it) is part of the problem?
Russian soldiers stole radioactive materials with their bare hands in Chernobyl some years ago. When you steal thousands of children, keep invading neighbors, assassinate people all over europe, its not that weird that you don't have the best PR. The western world tried to get you to join the free world for almost 30 years, so this is all on yourself.
Honest question here. What is the Russian opinion about the quality of life in Russia, in Soviet times and post collapse? It seems to me as an observer from North America that the Russian people have had to ensure a lot of violence from their rulers for a long time.
> E.g. movie Tenet starts from depicting a scene from "Russian life": under a low sun, in freezing cold, dirty hungry Russians are crawling in the dirt gathering "pieces of Uranium" with their bare hands.
Your very own directors depict it this way, mainly Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev or Stalker.
Maybe if not for the majority of Russians actually supporting the brutal dictator ordering ongoing war crimes in Ukraine you could ask for some sympathy.
This isn't just oppressed society afraid to act. This is actual support for the actual killer of the babies. Despicable.
Some of it is also caused by the pervasive hostility to the values important to most humans, pervasive disinformation efforts, and aim to destroy the peace and integrity of the countries it perceives as a competition.
For now I'll just agree this is largely deserved, and I'll play the sad tune on the tiny violin.
The USA is the #1 supporter of baby killing in the world right now, by a huge margin. Everyone outside the USA’s imperial propaganda bubble can see it - Americans cannot.
Are all Americans bad guys because of what they are allowing to happen with their countries resources?
Rusofobia started in middle ages, long before Putin was born. And it never ended.
> Some of it is also caused by the pervasive hostility to the values important to most humans,
USA started with a genocide of a whole continent. Started more wars than any other nation/state in the human history. Probably killed more civilians than any other nation in history (Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, just to name a few countries with huge losses among civilians, not even counting those who died from hunger or illnesses caused by US wars and deliberate destruction of agriculture and infrastructure).
So what? Do you read every day that it is the most belligerent and aggressive state on Earth, although it really is?
> pervasive disinformation efforts
I've already wrote in the original message, how Russia is portrayed by the media and Hollywoold. Is it a really true information? Not propaganda and disinformation?
Since you brought him up: Stalin was also motivated by a truckload of paranoia, though, right? Hard to make rational decisions about who is dissenting if you think they’re all out to get you. The flimsiest accusations related by the least reliable people could be enough.
A classic feature of authoritarian governments: when their dumb plans fail, it's because of enemies of the state. Bonus points when the enemies of the state are the ones that warned of the negative effects that would happen (obviously they must have been saboteurs)
In general I think the issue is a lot of people equate Stalin with USSR. Things were substantially different both before and after him. And his reign was also from the 20s to the 50s in which there was the context of, amongst other major issues, WW2 where the Soviets lost tens of millions of people. As one can see in certain ongoing wars, exceptional loss of life seems to gradually push leaders towards having zero concern for life at all - let alone the liberties and values we hold to be desirable, even in authoritarian systems. When the "hard" decisions become quite easy, you're well on your way to dystopia.
The mass purges were deliberate, while the famine (polemically called the "Holodomor") was not. The famine was caused by Stalin's disastrous agricultural policy, but it wasn't a deliberate attempt to kill people.
>Broadly speaking, Russian historians are generally of the opinion that the Holodomor did not constitute a genocide. Among Ukrainian historians the general opinion is that it did constitute a genocide.
While I agree that one primary motive was to get more food, Communist atrocities generally start out with noble ideals, at least on paper. Pol Pot also intended to create an ideal society[1], at whatever cost.
Pol Pot actually intended to kill huge numbers of people and wipe out the cities. He had his own crazy philosophy about a peasant Utopia that had nothing to do with Marxism at all.
The Soviets wanted to increase agricultural yield, but the policies Stalin implemented caused the harvest in 1932 to fall by about 20%. In a country already just barely able to feed itself, that led to famine, not just in Ukraine but across the USSR.
> Neo-Nazis argue the same about the Holocaust, namely, that there is not a single piece of evidence showing that the highest level of the German government, in Hitler's person, ever ordered the extermination of Jews
We literally have the minutes of the Wannsee conference, in which the Nazis decided to kill all Jews.
The German state carried out a massive logistical operation of moving millions of people to specially built camps and gassing them to death. Comparing that to a famine is insane.
You're drawing an equivalence between patently absurd, factually false denialism about the Holocaust on the one hand, and the dominant scholarly view that the Soviet famine of the early 1930s was not a deliberate attempt to kill Ukrainians on the other hand.
Some of them do, but the difference is that their claim is complete and utter hogwash.
On the other side, pretty much everyone accepts that there was a major famine in the USSR in the early 1930s, mostly caused by Stalin's collectivization policy. That's just a fact.
The peak of Stalin's repression is somewhere in 1937-1939 - right before WW2, so you can't write it off to losses in the war. The reason is probably Stalin's paranoia and him seeing traitors everywhere, including his former comrades.
"I tend to reject any narrative about the Soviets which makes them not sound like humans."
Right, it's time we stopped this stereotyping and looked at this objectively. The Russian Empire and later the USSR has had many, many truly brilliant people over recent centuries. The list of names seems endless, here are few immediately to mind: Chebyshev, Cantor, Markov, Borodin, Köppen, Landau, Cherenkov, Mendeleyev, Tolstoy, Shostakovich, Gagarin, Prokudin-Gorsky, Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky. And here's just the Wiki list of Russian scientists:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_scientists. Now, there's much more, do the same again for physicists, mathematicians, chemists, composers, writers, novelist and so on. When one looks at the sheer numbers of people it's hard to believe that they all come from Russia.
Morever, it's hard to imagine where the world would be today without these brilliant people. It's almost inconceivable the world would be anywhere near the same without them.
I'd like to think most of us are smart enough to separate the majority of Russians from the small minority of ratbags, sociopaths and psychopathic, paranoid, sadistic monsters such as Stalin, Putin and Ivan the Terrible. There is no doubt that Russia has had a long and terrible history of tyrant rulers whose reign of tyranny has caused great harm to the Russian people. If anything we ought to feel some sympathy and compassion for the Russian population as a whole given the centuries-long turmoil Russia has endured.
Nevertheless, in spite of its long history of adversity Russia has still been able to produce this brilliant body of people and it's done so essentially consistently over recent centuries.
Stalin died in 1953, and these probes were launched much later, so there were no chance to get into a Gulag. However for people who worked earlier the possibility to get there was always nearby.
Sergei Korolev, a famous Russian rocket designer (who was later responsible for launching a first satellite and first human space flight), had to go through the prison and labour camp. In 1938 he was head of a laboratory for jet propulsion (mainly for development of weapon), and as jet engines were not well studied, experimental models often failed with explosions. After another failed test, several laboratory employees were arrested, and after they testified, Korolev. They were charged with sabotage - creating a secret anti-Soviet organization with the purpose of weakening Soviet defence. After series of interrogations, during which he had his jaw broken, he admitted the guilt and soon was sentenced to 10 years of work in labour camps [1]. The sentence was later reviewed and he was transferred to a prison where he was allowed to continue working on jet propulsion.
Another example is Andrey Tupolev - Soviet aircraft designer ("Tu" series of planes is named after him). He was also charged with sabotage (conspiracy to slow down aircraft development in USSR) and espionage during Stalin times and had to design his planes in a prison [2].
After Stalin death, both Korolev and Tupolev cases were reviewed and they were admitted not guilty.
After series of interrogations, during which he had his jaw broken
It was worse than that. He was beaten with rubber hose and wire harnesses, had needles pressed in the body, was urinated on. He then was sent to a gulag where he was left dying from hunger and scurvy. He was saved by a fellow imprisoned engineer who was fortunate to fight his way up though the inmate hierarchy.
The broken jaw, out of the many broken bones in his body is mostly mentioned because it was ultimately the cause of his death in 1960s.
