"Talk to any FOSS acolyte about something and the conversation will often go like this:

You: I'm having a problem with [proprietary software], I'm really frustrated.

Them: scoffs I don't have that problem because I use a custom rom dinglebop shitfuck linux distro that allows me to [technical jargon that you don't know or care about]

You: uhm, okay. Could you give me a recommendation that'll allow me to replicate my workflow in [proprietary program] ?

Them: Uhm yeah (sends you a program that is incredibly hard to set up and cannot replicate your workflow at all)

You: I don't really understand how this works? Them: okay well post in the discord

You: posts in discord Uhm people were just really rude to me and told me to just read the forums.... I watched some tutorials but they're all like 2 hours long and this is a lot of information."

The author doesn't come off well at all here, and that's while they're talking to a strawman. They sound like an entitled child.

This is barely a strawman in my eyes, it's a slightly exaggerated reality. Especially the part where the recommendation is something that doesn't actually solve your issue, and when you mention that you get told to just not do the thing you want to do.

I don't necessarily mean from maintainers, but from people who use and swear by OSS stuff.

Even if it's not a strawman, the only actual problem is the FOSS person saying that some program can replicate her workflow when they don't actually know if it can. And even that is not malice or callousness, it's just someone clumsily trying to help. Everything else is her demanding support from volunteers and then getting angry when it turns out that FOSS is often a lot harder to use than proprietary software. If the FOSS person instead said "Sorry, I'm not interested in troubleshooting that for you", I guarantee that that would be seen as a problem. So essentially what she's saying is fuck FOSS users because they don't provide perfect support for free.

I know that it strikes most people as faintly ridiculous if not outright dangerous to talk about anti-white-male sentiment, but can we at least stop kowtowing to it? Like, sure, "first-world problems", I get it. But there is constant vitriol spewing from certain (for lack of a better phrase) intellectual cliques, and it's gotten tiresome.

  > there is constant vitriol spewing from certain (for lack of a better phrase) intellectual cliques

its an unnecessary provocation imo; just causes people to turn their brains off

It's pretty clearly ragebait. I don't think the author is making a good-faith plea here.

Lawyers won't allow themselves to be replaced even if it makes sense to do so.

Another way lawyers can get displaced is if the rule of law breaks down. Then, whether you can get, say, regulatory approval for a deal, will depend more on if you can bribe someone than on carefully drafting and negotiating the terms.

This makes it in the lawyers' interest to stand their ground when established legal principles are under attack.

Every file that I've looked at (a dozen or so) is very heavily redacted. This is a joke.

>release

They weren't actually released. They're like 90%+ redacted. This is a slap in the face.

The other person who replied to you noted that this is not true in British English, but beyond that, it appears to me that my generation (Millennials) essentially all came to the same conclusion, which is that punctuation should only be included in the quotation if it's literally part of the text being quoted. (This probably has something to do with the programming mindset.) If you write

>The senator said that the bill was "bloated."

your sentence itself doesn't have a period. In order to give it a period you'd have to write:

>The senator said that the bill was "bloated.".

But then you're saying that the senator described the bill using the (non-)word consisting of the nine characters 'b', 'l', 'o', 'a', 't', 'e', 'd', 'PERIOD'. We've decided that this doesn't make sense.

Your point that this is a generational change is interesting and reminds me of boomers who still write double space after a period.

Just teasing here, but I presume you’re a social conservative…? ;)

Generally conservatives only want to conserve the way the world is as they grow up. Whether that involves respect for prior ideas and thought depends on their current ideas - hence the book burning.

There’s definitely a tension between having a low tolerance for crankery and being open to fresh perspectives. If I’m being charitable to the critics of Rationalism (big “r”), I suppose that they have encountered arguments from Rationalists that struck them as wrong specifically in a way that would have been avoided if the person making the argument had read any of the relevant literature.

Is the argument that we should try to do things that will benefit our theoretical and theoretically multitudinous descendants? Or is it that just taking action to make their existence more likely is a moral good? Because the latter is just brain dead.

Good question. I think it has to be the latter, given the immense time involved. You can make a connection between driving progress in certain areas today and increasing the odds that humanity eventually colonizes the stars. I don’t think you can make any connection with how well off those far-future humans will be.

If that's what's meant, it's a hilarious perversion of utilitarianism.

Perhaps part of it is that local action can often be an order of magnitude more impactful than the “equivalent” action at a distance. If you volunteer in your local community, you not only have fine-grained control over the benefit you bestow, you also know for a fact that you’re doing good. Giving to a charity that addresses an issue on the other side of the world doesn’t afford this level of control, nor this level of certainty. For all you know most of the donation is being embezzled.

I think another part of it is a sort of healthy nativism or in-group preference or whatever you want to call it. It rubs people the wrong way when you say that you care about someone in a different country as much as you care about your neighbors. That’s just…antisocial. Taken to its logical conclusion, a “rationalist” should not only donate all of their disposable income to global charities, they should also find a way to steal as much as possible from their neighbors and donate that, too. After all, those. Holden in Africa need the money much more than their pampered western neighbors.