Klassiker

Idiots participate in Bigger Idiot scheme, upset to find out they’re the Bigger Idiot.

Hard to predict.

This act broke the taboo against violence and shattered the perception of powerlessness. Turns out there is something you can do against these assholes, and it’s not as unpopular an option as you might have expected.

It may inspire imitation, emboldening other pissed victims. It may scare the other CEOs into treading more carefully. It might embolden progressive politicians to challenge the status quo, now that they see how popular that can be.

Or it might end up a big ball of hot air that doesn’t do anything. Like I said, hard to predict.

Like the fact that diversity kept it together and attempting to enforce unity of culture shattered it?

Or that a great way to win loyal allies is to generously reward them with citizenship benefits, while making treaties with barbarians to have them defeat your enemies and then snubbing them is a great way to suddenly have a bunch of new enemies you need to find new allies to fight?

Or that having the military meddle in the affairs of civil government tends to get quite expensive and end up quite ruinous?

Gosh, there really are a lot of things that went wrong. I guess lead pipes go on the pile too, and maybe “climate change can fuck shit up really badly”.

I once made a reddit comment in anger that was most certainly over the line. I don’t remember the context, but someone had my blood boiling quite badly, which I voiced by wishing pain on them. However, it was a support-oriented community, and my outburst was definitely not tone-appropriate for that environment - the last thing people seeking support need is a graphic description of pain. I got a two-day (I think?) temp ban from that sub, citing that reason. First I was pissed, then reflected, acknowledged my error and didn’t repeat that mistake.

In hindsight, I think that makes for a good moderation approach:

Lock an escalating thread, clean out comments that cross the line, hand out brief temporary bans to particularly excessive offenders or those continuing their venting spree in other threads after the first one was locked, give them an opportunity to step back and reflect.

Of course, there’s still the question of “what do the mods consider excessive?” But that’s a question you’d have either way.

One should note: When Hadrian first met him, Antinous was probably about 13 years old. On the other hand, the Historia Augusta describes that Hadrian “wept like a woman” for Antinous, so he probably was more than just a pretty boytoy for an Emperor to start ugly-crying over his loss.

I feel we’re arguing about definitions here, except that you’re just asserting the equivalence instead of proposing a definition that would lead to that conclusion.

I offered my distinction. What part do you disagree with?

I’m thankful I don’t do software dev (I did two years as a working student, that was enough), but working in Data Engineering / Analytics* doesn’t make things better. I’ll overengineer the database, ETL and reporting, define a dozen measures I’ll never use, prepare a dozen ways to slice and view the data I’ll never look at and build a whole data warehouse I’ll never look at.

Eventually I remember that it exists, realise that I’ve answered all my questions by directly querying the database, except for “What am I running out of?”, which I answer by looking in the cabinet because I never update my inventory anyway.

*I don’t even know where the line is anymore and how much of my responsibilities is on either side of it

“6 for the beer, 9 for the longdrink, 4.20 for the water… That’s a total of 694.20 please.”

He uses a pencil, paper and a mechanical calculator to tally up the bill, which I absolutely understand when your career is in IT.

When the alternative is either having to search, evaluate, compare, select and configure an application for that purpose that you’re never quite happy with, or to scope, design, develop, test, deploy, maintain, eternally find things you wish you’d done better, refactor, realise you’re spending your free time on doing more of your job, regret your life choices, resolve to only make this last improvement and then call it good enough, renege on that promise to yourself a week later, burn out, curse that damn app for ruining your hobby…

…yeah, using the most trivial low-tech solution possible does look rather sensible.

My new data structure:

Given a heuristic for determining data quality, it homogenises the quality of its contents. Data you write to it has pieces exchanged with other entries depending on its quality. The lower the quality, the higher the rate of exchange.

If you put only perfect data, nothing is exchanged. Put high quality, you’ll mostly get high quality too, but probably with some errors. Put in garbage, it starts poisoning the rest of the data. Garbage in, garbage out.

“Why would you want that”, you ask? Wrong question, buddy - how about “Do you want to be left behind when this new data quality management technology takes off?” And if that doesn’t convince you, let me dig around my buzzword budget to see if I can throw some “Make Investors Drool And Swoon”-skills your way to convince you I’ll turn your crap data into gold.

I think it’s a symptom of the age-old issue of missing QA: Without solid QA you have no figures on how often your human solutions get things wrong, how often your AI does and how it stacks up.

I’m not denying his hatred or crime. A massacre born from racist hatred is a pogrom, a hate crime, an atrocity. Anakin isn’t a good guy just because he only butchered one group, and I don’t think anyone is claiming otherwise.

I’m arguing whether the massacre of one group of their race constitutes genocide in terms of scale (local outburst of violence as opposed to a planet-wide persecution) and intent (revenge out of rage and hate born from topical pain as opposed to a persistent effort to eliminate an entire race).

Not every pogrom is genocide. We don’t need to reach for the most extreme terms to describe violence born from racism. In case it needs to be emphasised, Anakin committed a hate crime, incited by grief and rage, but likely fueled by preexisting prejudice.

There really is no need to stoop to insults and condescension about it either. If you have a contribution to make about the subject matter - perhaps because you think I’ve forgotten something - just contribute instead of prefacing and closing it with vitriol.

The thing I hate about Star Wars is how stuck-up and elitist some fans get. God forbid you get something wrong - if you haven’t consumed and intricately memorised every piece of canon (and “Legends”) lore, you’re trash. And because everyone gets something wrong at some point, they all suck and everyone that likes it is an idiot (except me of course, I know everything). Damn Star Wars Fans, they ruined Star Wars!

That isn’t the environment any fandom should foster. If you love something, help others love it too! If someone gets something wrong or doesn’t know something, share what you know. If someone holds a position you disagree with, talk to them and figure out where you disagree. Be part of the reason someone says “I fucking love Star Wars”. Let’s love it together.

It’s a common bait-and-switch joke. “I have Ligma” “What’s Ligma?” “Ligma Balls!” (The joke being that “Ligma” sounds like “Lick My”)

Maybe you’re familiar with a similar joke: “Hey, do you think it smells like updog in here?” “What’s updog” “Not much, what’s up with you?” (Here, the joke is that “What’s updog” sounds like “What’s up, dawg”)

Naja, in einem Punkt hat Mäurer vermutlich Recht: Ich bin durchaus gewillt ihm zu glauben, dass das BAMF den Antrag gestellt hat. Aber spätestens wenn sich hundert Leute der Polizei in den Weg stellen - noch dazu nachts - sollte man doch mal drüber nachdenken, zumindest eine Duldung auszusprechen.

Kürzt ihm meinetwegen die Sozialhilfe (falls er überhaupt welche bekommt), wenn ihr unbedingt eine Geste machen müsst, und fordert die protestierenden auf, sie sollten ihn dann unterstützen. Fordert sie auf, ihm bei der Integration zu helfen und schlagt vor, er könne dann irgendwann einen Antrag stellen um permanent zu bleiben, wenn die Bedingungen dafür gegeben sind. Und falls sie das irgendwann dann doch nicht mehr wollen steht die Möglichkeit des Rücktransports immernoch offen.

Man könnte auch einfach Lippenbekenntnis “sein Aufenthalt ist nicht offiziell genehmigt” machen, aber auch erklären, dass man den kommunalen Zusammenhalt respektiert, und dann stillschweigend nichts tun (sonst sind doch die Ämter auch so gut drin, ewig lang irgendwelche Fälle zu “bearbeiten” oder “prüfen”). Soll doch jemand anderes die politische Landmine testen, wenn er unbedingt will.

Wie viel von dem Vermögen ist in Wertpapieren? Die kann man bestimmt gut zum heizen verwenden.

You mean 30 years ago?

Oh look, someone is doing something eccentric online that doesn’t actually harm anyone!

Better extrapolate that to their real life, make assumptions about that life and leverage that to make fun of them. Gotta make sure people conform to my expectations of behaviour online, right?

Socialist ≠ Tankie

You can be in favour of dethroning capitalist oligarchs without licking dictator boots.

Science communicators that make complex things accessible for the general public are a critical component to building and maintaining public support for scientific institutions. If we want science to serve public interests rather than corporate ones, we need to establish public funding for it, which requires a public understanding of what they are doing and why it’s valuable.

A blog I very much like and keep recommending talks about both the importance of this and the differing viewpoints within academic culture (specifically about history, but many of the concepts apply to sciences in general). It also has cat pictures.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard about toxic culture in universities (Section “The Advisor”). Again, the entry is about graduate programs in the humanities, but it’s not just a humanities-specific issue.

I personally didn’t know about HowStuffWorks (I was under the misconception that it was just a YouTube format, which I generally don’t watch a whole lot), but checking it out now, I definitely missed out, and I think it fits the criteria of the field-to-public communication.

To drive such a valuable contributor to such despair they no longer want to live at all is a disservice to the public, a threat to what good their institution can do (which, for all its toxicity, probably also provided valuable research) and most of all a crime against that person. I hope they’re held accountable, but I also hope that public scrutiny can bring about improvements in academic culture so that his death might still do some good in the end.