Er. IIRC, Spolsky was involved in creating VBA for Excel. Which was arguably orders of magnitude more popular (and still more widely deployed and world-supporting) than Java.
In the 90s, as a program manager. And it's a big difference between building an application and a platform (I've done both) when it comes to API design.
There are dozens of equally "bad" regimes out there. The point is that invading them and/or killing a ton of their people is not the solution. Iraq: made things worse. Lybia: made things worse. Afghanistan: didn't make things any better. And this even before we discuss whether working inside a framework of agreed rules for international relations, instead of just doing whatever we feel like, is a good thing even for the "alpha nation".
Iran is obviously not innocent (nobody is), but their population is currently being hit for no particular reason beyond "Israeli vibes". That's not a broken clock being right, that's a broken clock telling the wrong time.
I think you're trying very hard to look for reasons to condemn people who think this war is stupid and illegal, under the pretension of gatekeeping what one can reasonably be opposed to what.
The main point remains: this war is stupid, illegal, and immoral. End of story.
Your response highlights how some are unable to live with the nuance of reality, and require black and white, binary viewpoints of the world.
I have said that Iran is a murderous, evil regime, while simultaneously saying war is not right here. I have said that my issue is with people trying to claim that Iran is a poor, innocent actor, instead of simply saying they do not agree with this war.
From this you infer weird things, simply because I presume you need Iran to be good, innocent, for the war to be wrong, bad.
Opus Dei is an issue but it's not the only 'cult within a cult' in the Catholic Church, not even the first. They just happen to be the most recent fashion. Popes have always had to balance the power and influence of this or that organization - franciscans, dominicans, benedictines, any one of these (and more) had to be contained at some point.
I don't think technical features were the key to git's success. What really made the difference was:
1. it was free;
2. it was sponsored by the most fashionable project of the time (Linux);
3. it did not require a server;
4. because it was FOSS, people could extend it without asking anyone's permission; and...
5. ...once GitHub appeared, simplifying the PR process, the network effect did its thing.
Git was hard to use and to understand. It did not win on technical features alone, as you said there were plenty of alternatives. It won because of community and network effects.
To the degree that it emphasizes communication between individuals over being a dumb database, yes, a bugtracker can be a social network. Bugzilla is a bit too close to the "database" side of the spectrum, whereas GitHub is at the other end; Jira sits somewhat in the middle.
Insane, stupid, and likely to ask Claude "how do i mog the Pope"
They can be both stupid and unhinged. The power they wield is worth taking seriously but that doesn't necessitate pretending that these are serious people
The president can threaten to wipe out a civilization without any meaningful repercussions. I'm calling them idiots, which they are. No doubt if they thought it wouldn't cause excessive embarrassment anxiety in the president they'd try to murder the pope.
No, they, especially one of them has EXTREME anxiety about his image, just not in the way that normal people do. He's got the psychology of an anxious child wanting to please a neglectful father. This is why TACO. And why every third word is some ridiculous boast about something nonsensical. This is insecurity driven politics and its WHY HE GOT ELECTED. Fear and insecurity electing what they imagine strength to be.
What would the stupidest, most insecure, adult child think is the pinnacle of strength? ... yup.
And the attention economy is being set up to exploit this demographic because it's the lowest common denominator and it WORKS.
Evolutionarily it's some kind of mechanism to weed out the weaknesses in a population by exaggerating them so it's easier for natural selection to weed them out? Or punishing the rest of us for not doing enough about it before it got so bad... something like that.
Trump is susceptible to narcissistic injury, but I don't know if you could call it 'embarrassment.' The latter implies some sense of regret or shame, and he appears incapable of either. You might as well expect Alex Honnold to exhibit a fear of heights.
Since whatever happens to Trump is always somebody else's fault, why should embarrassment come into the picture? They're the ones who should be embarrassed! And so on.
Trump's followers are also utterly shameless, and they're the ones that matter since they vote in such large numbers. Just like their leader, if they could be embarrassed, they would be, but they're not.
I think we're confusing outward display of "shame" and "embarrassment" or whatever else in that general genre and inner experience. These people are DRIVEN by the internal experience and anxiety about fear, embarrassment, shame, inadequacy, etc. and it explains all of their actions very well.
They're blustery cowards. This is how that kind of person acts.
They're not shameless, they're overflowing with shame and acting out because of it. Leaders and supporters.
Staccato, which is Italian for "detached, separated".
When I see simple Italian words used as technical terms in music or art, I think "oh, this must be what English speakers feel when they work in tech - a lot of common words becoming specific concepts in that particular field".
The various treaties about freedom of passage exist precisely because, before the last 200 years, everyone did whatever they wanted with straits and other natural chokepoints, including closing them at will. Freedom of navigation is not an obviously natural right nor one universally accepted, before colonial powers effectively invented it and enforced it with guns. If somebody shows up with bigger guns, it might well disappear again.
Also, I wish the expression "close but no cigar" could be banned on the internet. Unless you're a professor of international relations at a renowned university, you simply don't get to gatekeep what reality is - particularly when making up arbitrary principles like these.
“In both Roman law and Islamic law, notions of a commonality of the seas were firmly established” (Id.). (It’s also weird to describe a custom of commons as colonial. European colonialism was about the opposite, turning historic commons into private rights.)
As a normative concept, you’re right, it’s new. But the notion that a great power would protect sea access for a variety of groups is old. More as a practical matter, granted—it’s hard to project enough power onto an ocean to control it.
Roman and Islamic law were also pretty much "colonial", even though the term is used of modern European empires, Rome was also an Empire, and the Arab Empires were also aggressively imperialist and maritime traders.
> The notion of the commonality of the seas is firmly established in Roman law, which formed the foundation of early modern European discussions on the right of navigation. A series of passages from the Corpus iuris civilis state that the sea, like the air, should be considered, by the law of nature, a res communis – a thing common to all, which cannot be claimed or usurped by anyone for exclusive use. Islamic law, which had a wide impact from the early modern Mediterranean to Southeast Asia, also considers the sea a boundless entity that is common to all mankind and not subject to private appropriation.
> Roman and Islamic law were also pretty much "colonial", even though the term is used of modern European empires, Rome was also an Empire, and the Arab Empires were also aggressively imperialist and maritime traders.
The difference between European empires and Islamic/Roman ones would be what JumpCrissCross advanced + the extent to which the conquered inhabitants are incorporated into the state, no?
Thanks for the quote and source. I believe Corpus Juris Civilis was based on existing law so the concept goes back much further, and I would guess was incorporated into Islamic empire's came from Roman.
> The difference between European empires and Islamic/Roman ones would be what JumpCrissCross advanced + the extent to which the conquered inhabitants are incorporated into the state, no?
Is it not rather more complex than that? The Roman Empire eventually granted citizenship to conquered people's but after centuries and gradually - all free men getting citizenship was 3rd century. When initially conquered a lot of people were incorporated into the state as slaves. AFAIK the Islamic empires were similar, and the price of being treated equally was to adopt the conquerors culture and religion.
The European Empire I am most familiar with (the British) only wanted the ruling class of its colonies to adopt its culture (with consequences such as speaking fluent/native English being a class marker that last to this day). It also (at least later on) gave colonies increasing autonomy.
> I would guess was incorporated into Islamic empire's came from Roman.
I'm uneducated on Corpus Juris Civilis and have a basic familiarity with Islamic law/history but I'm inclined to think that any similarities between the two would be less a product of diffusion than the result of the tangential relationship between Christianity as understood by the Romans of the time and Islam as understood by classical Muslim jurists.
> Is it not rather more complex than that?
Ha! For sure.
I need to do more thinking about this part, re: colonialism/imperialism.
What I had in mind was the distinction between
a) A state/power that conquers a land without integrating the land and its peoples into it
b) A state/power that conquers a land and integrates the land and its people into it
The Islamic empires I'm most familiar with implemented the second form of conquest.
The concept of equality is an interesting one to think about because I'm not sure whether how we envision it today was common anywhere in the pre-modern world. But non-Muslim subjects were afforded their own set of rights and were not incorporated into the state as slaves (the practice of slavery not withstanding, my point is that it wasn't the same case as how you've described Roman civil integration). Additionally, the land was subsumed into the Islamic state.
But I think we are splitting the main argument into two separate (very engaging!) discussions.
The original argument alleged that "colonial powers effectively invented [freedom of passage] and enforced it with guns". Freedom of navigation in the seas was common to both Roman and Islamic law. Whether Roman and/or Islamic empires qualify as "colonial" or "imperialist" is one thing, but they cannot be the colonial powers that the user who made that argument had in mind.
> weird to describe a custom of commons as colonial
When you point at a resource under my control and force me to share it (or else), it's not "a custom of commons" - it's a classic colonial appropriation.
Which is also how Rome and (initially) the Islamic kingdoms saw the sea when they were upstarters - Rome was very much not a naval power to begin with (or ever, really) and Islamic kings resorted to piracy to match Italian and Spanish powers.
Beyond lofty words, when they finally ended up controlling the straits, both empires definitely treated them like personal possession ("mare nostrum", Ottomans closing the Bosphorous...). Like everyone else, in practice.
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