pyrex

Oh look, another person saying "I know nothing, explain it to me" again and again and again while strongly advocating a specific position.

New developments -- someone proposes "OK, what if we're in irreconcilable difference with the racists?" and two people pile on to say (respectively) "Well, we'll have to find (vaguely specified) 'workarounds'" and "Well, we can't kick them out, that would be a disaster."

A third person points out that some of the people in the thread are opposed to quotas but implied they would support quotas if we made an applicant list first (and allowed for the possibility that only white men would appear on the list, rendering the quota system moot) -- so we should do that.

Specifically -- nat418 sez:

I believe that we live in a society in which some classes of people are exploited by others, and that the acknowledgement of this reality—let alone measures to remediate it—are often percieved as "unfair" or "conflictual" by members of the exploiting classes. I think the real conflict is already ongoing, we are enmeshed within it, and that if we want to live as honorable and dignfied persons we must take up the cause of justice and the common good.

nim65s:

I personally agree with @nat-418 here, but I acknowledge some others do not, and I don't think one side could convince the other. I also don't think we can compromise: this is a boolean question. Therefore, to find a consensus, I think we should explore workarounds.

nat418 sez:

What workarounds? Seems like if we can't agree on basic matters like "marginalized groups should be represented" then we should simply part ways.

tmarkov:

This is a very non-obvious statement.

The goal of the mix community is ultimately to make nix and NisOS as good as possible.

Parting ways is a huge negative for the ecosystem overall. If it is unavoidable, I guess I'll personally leave all other consideration aside and advocate for whatever would cause the least amount of people splitting off whatever it might be.

Colin:

i'm not confident that's pinpointing a hard disagreement. my read of this thread is:

1. marginalized individuals should be represented.
2. representation is better maximized by composing a diverse assembly from available applicants, rather than within the process by which we obtain applicants.
3. uncertainty around how "hard" this requirement is; how critical is representation within assembly composition to ensuring representation in its downstream processes; hypotheticals in what to do if there aren't enough applicants with which to form a diverse assembly.

Aaron notably doesn't comment on governance. "Some marginalized people attended some meetings of the group" implies to him that the system is inclusive.

My personal opinions. Note that I'm not on the NixOS zulip, or a user of NixOS:

• Of course some people are going to be excluded from the committee: it's 5 people.
• I've seen some groups become surprisingly diverse by accident but the groups were generally still run by white men.
• The minorities in groups I was in usually ended up in positions where they had to do emotional labor or damage control for the white men who made the decisions.
• The white men in groups I've been in usually behaved in ways that, to me, implied massive affinity bias. It was possible to shake them from that without dehumanizing them or being rude, but I had to actually be in the room.
• That doesn't make them inherently bad people. Or maybe it kind of does, but only in a conditional sense -- that is, if integrating the group they're in suddenly makes them stop being bad people, then it is a really good idea to do that.

With regard to this specific proposal:

• OK, with a quota of 2, you have three seats that white men are allowed to have.
• If you really need there to be 5 white men, increase the size of the committee to 7. Now you have 5 white male seats, the same as you would if this proposal were not adopted.
• If this is still objectionable to you, then your apparent problem with the quota system is not that it excludes white men.

I am possibly being unfair -- it seems like what Aaron wants is "there should be 5 people on the committee, not all of them should be white men, but that should happen by accident without needing to be set in stone on the Zulip."

This seems vacuous to me: the whole purpose of the Zulip is not to create a selection process -- it's to select a committee one time and then hand over power to that committee. There's, therefore, little distinction between "deciding to vote for X" and "setting a quota limiting the outcomes." There is no process external to the Zulip by which an outcome could happen by accident.

And to say the obvious: I think it's very unlikely a group consisting of 5 white men would have been selected on merit alone. So I would personally be likely to veto any such group based on that. Saying it's a quota offers a fig leaf to people with implicitly biased selection criteria -- mentally I am saying "of course you picked five fucking clones of yourself. Denied."

Show HN: I'm 16 and building an AI based startup called Factful with friends

In which the Orange Site is a very bad influence on some minors:

How do you evaluate “factuality” without knowing all the facts, though? That’s the downfall of all such services - eventually (or even immediately) they begin to just push their preferred agenda because it’s easier and more profitable.

Hi there, thank you for your feedback! I think we could potentially go down the route of a web3 approach where we get the public consensus on the facts.

...

Your first meta-problem to solve is to get people to care about the facts, and to accept them when they’re wrong. There is an astonishing gap between knowing the truth and acting accordingly.

Yea, that's why we also added in an grammar checker, even if they dont care about facts, they can get something better than gram marly that checks for way more for way less.

Holy fuck! That man does not sound like an engineer. Why is he the CTO of anything?

The fascists have been incredibly effective at diverting people to all the conversations that don't matter. It's the same strategy as always -- "be loudly wrong about an insignificant issue and watch the leftists jump to correct you."

Anduril is mentioned once in the NixOS thread and zero times in the aux.computer thread. So let's say I'm not hopeful.

Apparently, if you want to get away with crimes, you should find someone you can rat on and commit them in a way that makes that person highly complicit.

My opinion is that Jesse Lyu is lying about making any significant changes. (Because otherwise the demo wouldn't have worked)

I don't want bad things for him personally, but I want bad things to happen to people who lie in public.

The code is open source with licensing requirements, so I'm therefore hoping someone Jesse has already made a statement to can write him with these requests:

• For GPL2 licensed components such as Linux: Give me your changes in source form.
• For Apache-licensed components such as Android: What files did you change?

I can imagine him responding in three ways:

• "Sure, here is another lie" -- and then he's locked into an answer which will probably make him look clueless as hell
• "We don't think we have to do that" -- and now the Open Source Reply Guy Brigade instantly hates him.
• -- and now, given that a conversation has actually occurred, he looks evasive.

I read a few of the guy's other blog posts and they follow a general theme:

• He's pretty resourceful! Surprisingly often, when he's feeling comfortable, he resorts to sensible troubleshooting steps.
• Despite that, when confronted with code, it seems like he often just kind of guesses at what things mean without verifying it.
• When he's decided he doesn't understand a thing, he WILL NOT DIG INTO THE THING.

He seems totally hireable as a junior, but he absolutely needs the adult supervision.

The LLM Revolution seems really really bad for this guy specifically -- it promises that he can keep working in this ineffective way without changing anything.

Every rationalist I've met has been nice and smart and deserved better. These are nerds and not in a bad way, but in a way that gets them bullied and shamed and gaslit. And in practice I can come to agreement with them on lots of issues.

On this issue I can never pin them down -- responding with what I think are reasonable questions gets me shut down with what I believe is thought-stopping behavior. They rarely state the actual reasons and the actual reasons are always slippier when they have to verbalize them to people who don't agree.

No doubt if you're a cynical manipulator, "having your followers lie about what you believe" works for you. But a lot of these are going to be nice normal guys who are tired of being laughed at and, worryingly, tired of being made to think.

In this respect they have a lot in common with, say, high school kids who became communists in part to piss off their parents. I'm not saying that to mock those kids, because I was one of them -- and I think there's a huge part of this that they're not wrong about and they're entitled to demand to be taken seriously, and precious few people do take nerds seriously. And for that matter, there's philosophically sophisticated people doing the same work as them.

I don't know how we get them into spaces where something is actually done -- if not for humanity or whatever, for people very close to them who actually need it -- and where the seduction of ego and money isn't like, so readily and constantly available.

Is there an amount of testosterone that will turn me into a lizardman