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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • You’d be surprised how genuinely nice racists can be towards ladder pullers. It’s important to remember that racism isn’t really about genetics or appearance at the end of the day but about structures of power and oppression. A black person that helps to reinforce that structure is invaluable and will be treated as such (even if they’re never actually seen as an equal or as anything more than a tool to manipulate).



  • Campaigning these days is not about convincing anyone to vote for one candidate or the other. Everyone who might conceivably vote will have known who they’d vote for before the campaign season even began.

    The campaign is about convincing the people who would vote for you that they actually should show up to vote instead of staying home or just going about their day. As a bonus if you make your opponent look like a big enough clown, maybe you can demoralize the opposition’s voting base so they don’t bother showing up to vote.

    This is a big part of why Republicans always want to make it as hard as possible to vote: The people who tend to vote Republican have perverse incentives (lower taxes, ban abortion, etc) so they’re generally much more motivated to get out and vote despite barriers than the typical Democratic voter who just wants a sane government but probably feels like sanity is never delivered on no matter who wins.



  • I don’t know what got your goat but you’re projecting an enormous amount of non sequitur into my very innocuous remark.

    I was pointing out one itty bitty silver lining of an effort that’s doomed to fail. I never suggested that we should be satisfied with that silver lining and call it a day.

    I’m fully supportive of all actions, including those outside the realm of politics, to defend against fascism. But that’s no reason to stop taking political actions, even those which we estimate to be doomed.

    Porque no los dos?



  • I think a lot of our collective notions around “merit” need to be challenged in general. How is merit really measured? A person’s achievements? Who decides what qualifies as an achievement? If a person has the deck stacked against them (e.g. coming from a low income household, not as much access to quality education) and manages to get a college degree then it’s easy to say they’ve “achieved” more than someone who grew up privileged and obtained the same degree with similar grades.

    But how should these things be weighed? If someone grew up privileged but is also exceptionally skilled, have they achieved more or less than someone who grew up underprivileged and obtained above average skills? Who has more merit? Who deserves greater recognition? And who decides if one skill or another is even meritous? Is the merit of a skillet ultimately just decided by how much the job market is willing to pay for those skills?

    These aren’t meant to be leading questions; I genuinely don’t think there are any good answers here. When I’m in a position of making hiring decisions for my company, I make a point of not thinking in terms of merit. Instead I think about these factors:

    • Alignment: Will the candidate be interested and motivated in the work that we have available for them?
    • Qualification: Do I have good reason to believe the candidate will be able to competently handle the role we’re hiring for after a reasonable ramping on period? They don’t need to immediately have all the skills required, but I should see evidence that they have a good foundation to build off of and a willingness to learn what’s needed.
    • Perspective: Does this candidate bring and new and potentially valuable perspective to the role? This perspective could come from past work experiences and/or their personal life experiences. I don’t want a team that’s totally homogenous because that will fall too easily into groupthink and miss valuable opportunities to improve.

    I think when people talk about merit they fixate on qualifications, but I genuinely believe that alignment and perspective are equally important. I would much rather take someone who is highly motivated but less qualified on paper than someone with amazing credentials who won’t really care about what our team is trying to do. I would also rather have someone who is going to challenge our team’s assumptions and bring insights from other fields and experiences than someone who will very competently agree with our status quo.

    I think people who complain about DEI are totally missing the value of diverse perspectives, to say nothing of the moral concern of systematically reinforcing social divisions and the inequity that naturally follows from that.



  • As someone that has never had soda my entire life (my parents were normal soda-drinking people, I’m just weird and was never interested in trying it), maybe I don’t know what I’m missing out on, but water is soooo gooood. It’s so refreshing and delicious if you’re thirsty. I don’t comprehend why these drinks even exist.

    If you live almost anywhere in America or another developed nation, you get dirt-cheap clean water delivered right to your home constantly, and it’s so great. Why does anyone spend money on garbage that’s going to give them diabetes? And then the people who are sensible enough to try to avoid the diabetes just drink some other garbage and complain about the taste…??

    WATER IS DELICIOUS YOU FOOLS








  • I don’t doubt that in this case it’s both silly and unacceptable that their driver was having this catastrophic failure, and it was probably caused by systemic failure at the company, likely driven by hubris and/or cost-cutting measures.

    Although I wouldn’t take it as a given that the system should be allowed to continue if the anti-virus doesn’t load properly more generally.

    For an enterprise business system, it’s entirely plausible that if a crucial anti-virus driver can’t load properly then the system itself may be compromised by malware, or at the very least the system may be unacceptably vulnerable to malware if it’s allowed to finish booting. At that point the risk of harm that may come from allowing the system to continue booting could outweigh the cost of demanding manual intervention.

    In this specific case, given the scale and fallout of the failure, it probably would’ve been preferable to let the system continue booting to a point where it could receive a new update, but all I’m saying is that I’m not surprised more generally that an OS just goes ahead and treats an anti-virus driver failure at BSOD worthy.



  • When talking about the driver level, you can’t always just proceed to the next thing when an error happens.

    Imagine if you went in for open heart surgery but the doctor forgot to put in the new valve while he was in there. He can’t just stitch you up and tell you to get on with it, you’ll be bleeding away inside.

    In this specific case we’re talking about security for business devices and critical infrastructure. If a security driver is compromised, in a lot of cases it may legitimately be better for the computer to not run at all, because a security compromise could mean it’s open season for hackers on your sensitive device. We’ve seen hospitals held random, we’ve seen customer data swiped from major businesses. A day of downtime is arguably better than those outcomes.

    The real answer here is crowdstrike needs a more reliable CI/CD pipeline. A failure of this magnitude is inexcusable and represents a major systemic failure in their development process. But the OS crashing as a result of that systemic failure may actually be the most reasonable desirable outcome compared to any other possible outcome.