Eric S. Raymond

Yes, I *am* that ESR. Well, it's the question people usually ask.

Programmer, wandering philosopher, accidental anthropologist, troublemaker for liberty.

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@ShamashAran I'm saying I think she's likely to be individualistic about this, not necessarily wearing what she's expected to.

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@ShamashAran You are adorable, Sensurround. Also funny.

As for what the Malfoid would wear, given that personality I think the correct answer is WHATEVER THE FUCK SHE WANTS TO.

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@FatFergie766 @DaleCloudman Yes. Yes, it does.

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"It is impossible to overstate how wrong BLM and reform activists were on this count."

I have been a successful propagandist, and I have thoughts about this. Believing your own propaganda too much is risky even when it's true, and extremely dangerous when it's false.

This is a chronic problem with left-wing propaganda. In an ideal world, or at least an ideal world from the point of view of a left-wing organizer, propaganda would usefully deceive and demoralize everyone outside the movement while the movement itself remains in contact with reality.

But it doesn't work that way. Really skillful propaganda has the emotional hooks to deceive everybody, including your own people. This divorces them from reality and sets them up for rude shocks when the divorce is no longer deniable.

I never had this problem, because all of my propaganda was written to make the truth attractive to people who had previous incentives to reject it, rather than peddling a lie. Even so, I knew I had to remain skeptical of my own assertions in order to avoid veering off into cloud-cuckoo-land.

The American left doesn't have this luxury. It desperately needs people to believe that the US is a profoundly racist and unjust society in which cops regularly brutalize Black people for no reason. Which...isn't true. Cheap ubiquitous video has demonstrated this.

If propaganda worked out in the ideal way, leftists would successfully demoralize others by making them believe this, but retain the ability themselves to deal with the actual fact that Blacks stopped by cops become semi-psychotically violent with enough frequency to justify much more violence than the cops routinely exert.

It hasn't worked this way. Because "reform activists" get caught up in their own propaganda, many of them are now reduced to crying that police interactions should *not*? be recorded. Which is absolutely not a position that's going to convince anybody outside their own movement. That position looks like it's designed to give activists room to lie about the problem, and it looks that way because it is that way.

I repeat: never fully believe your own propaganda, even if it's nothing but an emotionally compelling presentation of the truth. For that way can lie madness.

[Town Moron @townmoron]

I used to review officer-involved shooting reports generated by a D.A. explaining the decision to exonerate officers, and recall often thinking “I mean, could that *really* be how it went down?” I suspected there may be some fog of war or selective memory or post-hoc justification to give the officer a rational justification and paint the victim in a negative, irrational light.

But with the post-2020 adoption of body cams, I now believe it all. There is no behavior too insane for a huge number of suspects when confronted with literally any command by an officer requesting some form of compliance.

Even I thought body cams would shine a light on some substantial percentage of clear officer abuse, but it’s clearly negligible, while dangerous and erratic behavior by suspects is widespread. It is impossible to overstate how wrong BLM and reform activists were on this count.

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@Softyyy_tweets @grok Grok's answer is good, but there's a term it probably should have used that it didn't. @grok, explain how evolutionary biologists use the term "spandrel" and where it came from.

[Alexs James @Alexs_jame]

🚨 A message to all French people 🚨

In the months ahead, you're going to see more and more propaganda about Elon Musk.

Send this to your loved ones. Not tomorrow. Now.

Elon Musk is dismantling, on a global scale, the oldest political lie of the century: the idea that only the State, intermediaries, and credentialed media have the right to say what is true, what is possible, and what is moral.

This lie has a familiar name. We call it socialism when it talks about justice. We call it "consensus" when it talks about science. We call it "protection" when it talks about speech. In all cases, the mechanism is the same: a caste positions itself between people and reality, then sells that position as a public service.

Musk is breaking it.

He has proven that you can launch rockets without Gosplan. Build cars without Detroit's blessing. Connect a village, a frontline, or a hospital from orbit, without asking permission from a ministry. He bought the public square and tore the monopoly away from those who decided who had the right to speak.

That's why the mainstream media, like a beast in its death throes, will try everything.

Not because they've uncovered a secret. Because the man slips through all their levers. You can't buy him with ad revenue. You can't rein him in with a news cycle. You can't quietly unplug him. At this level of power, he's probably the cleanest man in the world: he's put his own fortune on the line, he doesn't need their permission, and he didn't build his position by capturing the State.

They'll call him a Nazi. They'll call him crazy. They'll call him a danger to democracy. They'll trot out the same clip, the same historian from the right side, the same moral indecency.

This isn't information. It's a survival reflex.

The French need to know this before the wave hits.

Elon Musk isn't fighting for a party. He's fighting so that the people can face the machine head-on, build without asking forgiveness, and stop handing over their thinking to those who live off fear and narrative.

The truth is simple.

A builder who opens the game does more for people than a newsroom that recycles slander.

Pass this on. The months ahead will be noisy. The signal, though, won't change.

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@Varyag_Zest @BovrilG I've read it's only the western dialects of Ukraine that are Polonized. The Eastern ones Oregon was supposedly, quite Russified.

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@rovabtw You know, you're giving me the words to compose a rape joke.

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@maxshanly @NBCNews Unfortunately, open source is not a full solution in this situation. I wish it were, but the real problem is: how do you verify that the voting machine is running the clean software image that it should be running, rather than a dirty compromised one that someone inserted?

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@DaleCloudman No, all it takes is a sufficiently short planning horizon. Which is entailed in having a low IQ. This is not normally considered a mental health issue.

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@americannative_ Somehow I feel like this is connected to the fact that, for the John Wick movies, Reeves trained strenuously in tactical pistol and became real-life good at it.

The man is genuine. That's a rare thing in Hollywood.

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Speaking as the man who wrote down most of the theory of open source I'm having trouble understanding your objection.

Sure we can decompile binaries now - I've done this sort of thing myself. It's helpful but it's not entirely a substitute for having the original source code with its comments and variable and function names and other documentation of the programmer's intent.

My core goal for open source was to improve the reliability and reusability of software. Evaluate with that in mind.

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@StealerTime @grok Can you identify the source of this anecdote?

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@generalii69 I read about this somewhere. It's because that position facilitates very deep penetration - increases the odds of pain or injury.

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@EndWokeness Aaand this story will now disappear from the national news.

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@sadkatwt I'm in this picture, and I like it.

Yes, I'm the guy on the right.

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I'm not so sure you're right about this, Pascal.

Typical dialect clines even today often have the property that neighbors can understand each other across any nominal local dialect border, but people from opposite ends of the cline have serious mutual intelligibility problems.

So, for example, I would expect a Picard and a Norman have little trouble talking with each other, but to have trouble understanding a Gascon, and vice versa.

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Oh my sweet summer child. IPv6 isn't the future anymore, it's the present.

Most wireless carriers moved to it years ago because they had to; they present IPv4 for exterior access, but that's a mask over undderlying IPv6.

[Sush @2sush]

The internet ran out of IP addresses.

IPv4 supports around 4.3 billion addresses, but billions of devices need to connect.

IPv6 solves this with an almost unimaginable number of addresses...... the internet needed an upgrade. IPv6 is the future.

[Vladimir Sumarov @summeroff]

Hello world, my old friend.