“Y’all better pack up and back off that there border”

– Mother Fucking Army Statement

I’m perplexed: How do you go from someone saying “gender is a social construct” to them being trasphobic? I got the “spot the vegan” vibes that they were trying to suddenly make this about trans rights…

Well I guess that still has the same effect of removing anonymity, but if it gets more people voting it’s still a net positive. To my knowledge the US has a concerningly low turnout rate for elections, so anything that helps…

I guess what I’m most concerned about is a situation where people are forced to vote for a specific candidate, and it doesn’t really seem to me like there’s any mechanism in place to prevent that (?)

I wasn’t implying anything here, no need to be a dick about it. Like I said: I’m my country we don’t have this system.

The kind of possibilities I was thinking about were more along the lines of an abusive spouse forcing their partner to sign a ballot, someone stealing a neighbours ballot out of their mailbox and forging their signature, or some family member doing the same to other family members.

Signatures can be forged quite easily if you have access to other signatures from that person, so I was honestly wondering what kind of system they have in place to ensure the kind of things mentioned above don’t happen.

Also, I guess I was kind of assuming ballots weren’t signed, in order to protect the anonymity of the voters, and that there was some more sophisticated system in place.

Honest question: With this kind of system, how do you verify who filled in the ballot? In my country we have “mail in” voting, which consists of going to a polling station in some other district than the one your from, filling in a ballot in the normal way, and then they send it for you.

Also: I’ve seen people talking about how you have to vote in person on election day, don’t the polling stations open before that? I usually vote a couple days before election day, the polling stations open like two weeks before…

The US supreme court judges are appointed by politicians: They are political appointees. In a lot of other countries supreme court judges are selected by a non-political committee, like every other non-political appointee.

You may be joking, in which case: Fair game.

If not… come on. In what world do you write “(…) I’ll find you. Mark my words.” In that kind of context without being (at least humorously) threatening?

The way I understand this, the issue is that without reading it they cannot verify that it doesn’t contain sensitive information, so they can’t give it out. That sounds like a reasonable explanation to me.

I’ll be completely honest: I was on board the hype train. I thought it was awesome that someone was investing in EV’s and pushing them into the market. Hell, I was even fooled by the whole hyperloop thing…

I’m glad it’s not too late to admit that I was terribly wrong about the guy.

At the same time, I don’t blame those that were fooled back then, and I most definitely don’t blame anyone for having bought a Tesla and keeping it even though the guy turned out to be who he is. Some years ago he honestly looked like he was trying to do a lot of good, at least for those of us that didn’t look very closely.

-Wfatal-errors is my friend

I see a lot of strange takes around here, and honestly cannot understand where you are coming from. Like really: I’ve written several 100+ page documents with everything from basic tables, figures and equations, to various custom-formatted environments and programmatically generated sections, and I’ve never encountered even a third of these formatting issues people are talking about.

You literally just \documentclass[whatever]{my doc type}, \usepackage{stuff} and fire away. To be honest, I’ve seen some absolutely horrifying preambles and unnecessary style sheets, and feel the need to ask: How are you people making latex so hard?

Software is a tool. I develop stuff that i know is of interest to companies working with everything from nuclear energy to hydrogen electrolysis and CO2 storage. I honestly believe I can make a positive contribution to the world by releasing that software under a permissive licence such that companies can freely integrate it into their proprietary production code.

I’m also very aware that the exact same software is of interest to the petroleum industry and weapons manufacturers, and that I enable them by releasing it under a permissive licence.

The way I see it, withholding a tool that can help do a lot of good because it can also be used for bad things just doesn’t make much sense. If everybody thinks that way, how can we have positive progress? I don’t think I can think of any more or less fundamental technology that can’t be used for both. The same chemical process that has saved millions from starvation by introducing synthetic fertiliser has taken millions of lives by creating more and better explosives. If you ask those that were bombed, they would probably say they wish it was never invented, while if you ask those that were saved from the brink of starvation they likely praise the heavens for the technology. Today, that same chemical process is a promising candidate for developing zero-emission shipping.

I guess my point is this: For any sufficiently fundamental technology, it is impossible to foresee the uses it may have in the future. Withholding it because it may cause bad stuff is just holding technological development back, lively preventing just as much good as bad. I choose to focus on the positive impact my work can have.

Just knowing that these don’t shoot may be a huge advantage to infantry that are being advanced on by them, as it will probably make them far less hesitant to pop up and take the top of it with small arms fire. Seeing as they’re using it as a taxi with the infantry on top, a large volume of small arms fire is likely devastating to it: those metal sheets don’t look capable of stopping much, but seem to be intended primarily to make drones explode further away from the tank.

You are almost on point here, but seem to be missing the primary point of my work. I work as a researcher at a university, doing more-or-less fundamental research on topics that are relevant to industry.

As I wrote: We develop our libraries for in-house use, and release the to the public because we know that they are valuable to the industry. If what I do is to be considered “industry subsidies”, then all of higher education is industry subsidies. (You could make the argument that spending taxpayer money to educate skilled workers is effectively subsidising industry).

We respond to issues that are related either to bugs that we need to fix for our own use, or features that we ourselves want. We don’t spend time implementing features others want unless they give us funding for some project that we need to implement it for.

In short: I don’t work for industry, I work in research and education, and the libraries my group develops happen to be of interest to the industry. Most of my co-workers do not publish their code anywhere, because they aren’t interested in spending the time required to turn hacky academic code into a usable library. I do, because I’ve noticed how much time it saves me and my team in the long run to have production-quality libraries that we can build on.

You’re not seeing the whole picture: I’m paid by the government to do research, and in doing that research my group develops several libraries that can benefit not only other research groups, but also industry. We license these libraries under MIT, because otherwise industry would be far more hesitant to integrate our libraries with their proprietary production code.

I’m also an idealist of sorts. The way I see it, I’m developing publicly funded code that can be used by anyone, no strings attached, to boost productivity and make the world a better place. The fact that this gives us publicity and incentivises the industry to collaborate with us is just a plus. Calling it a self-imposed unpaid internship, when I’m literally hired full time to develop this and just happen to have the freedom to be able to give it out for free, is missing the mark.

Also, we develop these libraries primarily for our own in-house use, and see the adoption of the libraries by others as a great way to uncover flaws and improve robustness. Others creating closed-source derivatives does not harm us or anyone else in any way as far as I can see.

I do exactly this: Write code/frameworks that are used in academic research, which is useful to industry. Once we publish an article, we publish our models open-source under the MIT license. That is because companies that want to use it can then embed our models into their proprietary software, with essentially no strings attached. This gives them an incentive to support our research in terms of collaborative projects, because they see that our research results in stuff they can use.

If we had used the GPL, our main collaborators would probably not have been interested.

Oh, I definitely get that the major appeal of excel is a close to non-existent barrier to entry. I mean, an elementary school kid can learn the basics(1) of using excel within a day. And yes, there are definitely programs out there that have excel as their only interface :/ I was really referring to the case where you have the option to do something “from scratch”, i.e. not relying on previously developed programs in the excel sheet.

(1) I’m aware that you can do complex stuff in excel, the point is that the barrier to entry is ridiculously low, which is a compliment.

I just cannot imagine any task you can do in excel that isn’t easier to do with Python/Pandas. The simplest manipulations of an excel sheet pretty much require you to chain an ungodly list of arcane commands that are completely unreadable, and god forbid you need to work with data from several workbooks at the same time…

Lol, this is actually top-level trolling, you really know what buttons to push to keep people going.

You’re making arguments to attack positions I’m not trying to defend, and you seem completely unaware that you’re missing the mark.

I’ve repeatedly tried to clarify this for you, but the way you’re blatantly ignoring my actual position, and instead making up proxy opinions that you ascribe to me and find it easier to argue against makes me think you’re either a troll or a pigeon. Either way arguing with you is rather pointless when you’d rather make up what you think my opinion is, and argue against that, than try to assess a position I’m actually willing to defend.