Saying being a programmer is about writing code is a bit like saying being an artist is about drawing lines on a canvas.
Yeah technically drawing lines on canvases may be an very important part of being a painter, but it is hardly the core of what makes or breaks great art.
When there is drama as far as I can tell he always had pretty solid reasons to be dramatic. It isn't drama when you have real reasons. Drama implies making shit up. Point to the shit he made up. Go ahead. Be specific.
Your accusation there makes it sound like he makes up some minor personal issues and blows them up as rage bait. As if the lock in and enshittification he advocates against are just his personal opinion. They are not. The vast majority (last time I checked >80%) of the public shares the opinion that you should own the equipment you buy and that it should be repairable.
If you happen to be a person that tries to establish neo-feudalism at the cost of everybody else, a public figure successfully making that an issue, might be problematic for your goals, sure. But then your goals may just be beneath contempt anyways and you should working on becoming a productive member of society instead.
If you think it is a shtick because you haven't really looked into it that much and you have a contrarian reflex, maybe try to bring the receipts next time. You know, like:" Louis Rossmann is a drama queen because remember when he said X about Y? Remember when he said Y about Z? It turned out to be Q and Louis had to know it was Q" etc.
Rossmann turned his YouTube fame into political advocacy for a popular topic, that he politically represents. Don't like that topic? Don't watch his content. People change and so does the focus of their life.
I run an university electronics workshop and the issues he mentioned are the issues I have to deal with every week, be it some shitty vendor lock-in on some gear or equipment where just the part that dies first is proprietary and service-hostile.
My brother had a heavy knee injury during his youth. His doctor said he can forget doing sport. Last year he ran a mountainman (full marathon with a descent of 1200m).
He read more into the topic and figured that it is mostly a question of training. Since in my family many do sports, I have seen this many times: have an issue with some joint, back, whatever? Unless you broke a bone or have an open wound that typically means you need to find the right training to get over it.
Being slow at times is a good thing and a freedom everybody should give themselves at times.
That being said, some people don't like being too slow. I have a collegue who is clearly too slow for health reasons (overweight/unfit). When we are walking to lunch too fast for him, his excuse sounds a lot like what you said, while clearly out of his breath, because of a lack of stamina. So he frames it as a choice where we are wrong, while he is out of breath on a medium tempo walk after 100m. When I know from personal talks with him, that he dislikes being the slow one.
The human body is built to move. A lot more than most modern people move during their typical days. Not moving it, or moving it in ways that avoid effort has serious health effects. That doesn't mean we have to move fast always, but if your reason for not moving fast is an inability to do so, that is bad both for your body and for your mental capacity.
Moving slowly can be very exhausting. Try holding out you arm in front of you for a minute. So for many this isn't about moving slowly, it is about moving lazily.
Talking about responding too fast: Yes listening is a key skill many people fail to deploy. Yet effective communication sometimes works way differently than just listening to the words someone said. Here I have to think about another friend of mine. She talks very slowly and has the habbit of talking in circles. Meaning if you won't eventually interrupt her, you will hear variations of the same thought that has been expressed in the first 10 seconds spread out over minutes. This happens even with things where the first thing she said was a yes/no question you could answer in a second. A surprising amount of people will just talk until you interrupt them. In fact they want you to interrupt them, it stresses them out if you leave them hanging to fill more time. Those people would just have to get to the point, but they seem to have an inability to do so.
Effective communication after the sender/message/receiver model happens if the receiver can quickly decode the original thought encoded into the message (=words) by the sender. Old couples for example will not have to say many words in order for the other to understand what they feel and want to express. It is like they read each others mind, because communication isn't about reading the message and interpreting the words objectively, it is about decoding the thoughts, feelings and intentions encoded in the message made in the circumstances it was made.
That can lead to complications, if person A understands person B quickly, but person B doesn't trust person A to do so. Then person B needlessly insists on elaborating until the point is reached where sufficient information has been packed into the message to get the thought across. That means person B has a mental model of how person A may understand certain words that is way to pessimistic. For bad communicators that mental model is overly broad and unpersonalized ("throw words at the other side at some point they will understand"), while good communicators can quickly form and refine their understanding of how the other side receives messages. In the best case that works like with the old couple. In the worst case someone convinced themselves they can read minds, while all they do is guess and interrupt.
That means being interrupted can mean a person thinks they understood what you were saying. If this happens often and the person opposite gets it right, that is a sign they understand you well. If it happens often and the person opposite gets you wrong, either your thoughts feel more complex to you than they are or you need to work on the way you encode the thoughts into words (e.g. lead with the least obvious thought to avoid them hooking onto the first thing).
Using a male TRS 3.5mm audio connector is something you should do with care. When you hotplug that connector the plug's tip (T) may first make contact with the sleeve (S) of the receptible, then briefly hit the ring (R) until it finally lands on the tip connector. Same goes for the plug ring (R) which may have contact with the sleeve (S) of the receptible.
So expected are:
T → T
R → R
S → S
and what can happen briefly is:
T → S
T → R
R → S
Depending on what you're using the connector for, that can ruin your day. Likely this isn't an issue on serial connections, but I have seen people use that connector for power..
On audio systems this is typically not an issue, since tip and ring carry signals that on any gear worth anything should have an output stage that can easily handle a connection to ground.
If you find yourself holding opinions of the kind: "If it can't be made perfect, it shouldn't be changed at all?" you may want to consider that most things that work well today were incrementally improved.
Reproducable builds are not solving all issues as you rightly observed, but they can be a stepping stone (or even a pre-condition) for further measures.
Which is why I think AI assisted writing is better then just letting it write the full text (if you care about the quality of the result). The act of writing isn't just the production of text, it is about wrangling a topic, rotating it in your mind and finding the perfect expression for a thought you have and that you want to convey to others. Some of those things can't be known by the LLM since you don't know them yourself by the point you started out.
Often that thinking bit itself provides value to the person doing it, beyond the text itself. By letting a LLM do it for you, you rob yourself of the change of thought and the new findings you may encounter.
Working with LLMs just makes it quicker to get going, bit you need to be a ruthless editor.
IMO it depends very much on how those positions are being forced on those attending. Since this is about permacomputing I suspect not all that much.
In my experience these self-given-labels just express the views of some founding members and are often used to clarify who they do not want (capitalist, misogynist authoritarians) and who is welcome (left leaning people, women, people who know how to treat women, people who can respect flat hierarchies).
I find it a bit edgy to self label an encouraging like that, instead of explaining the meat of it (we are anticapitalist, because..., we are feminist, so women are welcome, we are anarchist, so our organization is structured with a flat hierarchy). Since it is an anarchist space, that is anti-authoritarian you probably won't find much indoctrination.
> In my experience these self-given-labels just express the views of some founding members and are often used to clarify who they do not want [...] and who is welcome [...]
This is where I think the problem is.
Once you start appending political identifiers then the purpose of an organization becomes more than just about X, but X according to certain values to the exclusion of others. There's nothing wrong with that but I could see how it can be viewed as disingenuous when it's insinuated that the organization is more open/general than it is apparent.
Yes of course. But as I said the exclusion of misogynistic, capitalist authoritarians is seen as a feature not as a bug by most groups that self-label like that. If it is your private group you can decide freely which audience you want to target. Most groups do this in some way or another, be it with self-labeling or other less explicit ways.
And quite frankly, as someone teaching at the university level, I think people with these traits (misogynistic, capitalistic, authoritarian) are not the best to have in a group anyways if your goal is to cultivate a curious learning environment. Not because of ideological reasons, but if there are women in a group, having a misogynist in there is toxic and doesn't add any value. Capitalists would have the opposite goal of a permacomputing group (extracting wealth from their environment), so having them there is questionable. Authoritarians generally have problems with going new paths and like to hate on the minority their specific flavor of authoritarianism chose as the excuse for their bad behavior, that also doesn't add to a great learning environment.
That doesn't mean I would label my courses as anarchist or anticapitalist and it doesn't mean I select the participants of my courses based on their ideology (I am not even sure how I could do that). But if it was my afterwork book club maybe I'd like to keep people away that take more in society than they give.
I work at a German university. We had pro Palestinian protests 4 times a year for a while now and there has not been a single arrest. In fact there has not been a single police officer present over the past 4 years that would have even carried out an arrest. The only reason for a police officer to typically enter university grounds are noise complaints.
The case you quoted did happen, but it is one of a few crazy outliers. In the meantime you have literal university police bashing in on protesters, border police looking into peoples smart phones and policing their social media, students being expelled for pro palestinian positions, ...
I'm not saying that you can't protest in Germany, just that european free speech/defamation protection tends to lean a bit more against defamation.
You call that a crazy outlier, but under the previous administration some retiree had police knock on his door and confiscate his tablet (!) because he posted a meme calling a member of the green party an "idiot" (Schwachkopf).
Meanwhile, all the counterexamples that people bring up here are strictly tied to the Trump administration.
Yeah technically drawing lines on canvases may be an very important part of being a painter, but it is hardly the core of what makes or breaks great art.
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