> What change was the person who shot him hoping to elicit?
This would be a relevant question in many nations, but it's a bit beside the point in the US. Violence is a deeply respected and loved core of the culture for its own sake. It's an end, not means. Nearly all the US's entertainment, culture and myths are built around a reverence for violence. Even political violence has been pretty much the norm through most of the US's history. Celebrated cases aside, there's been something of a lull since the mid 1970s, but if as now likely it increases again, this will be a boring old reversion to the US's norm.
Or to put it another way: a Pebble would cover more uses with a GPS. They're clearly not expensive nor necessarily profligate with battery. My now 5 year old Amazfit bip, which was cheap as chips, still gets 3 weeks of battery life with a daily gps-mapped run.
It reinforces ego. It's a common malady. An optional one (which isn't to say it's always easy to ditch given constant and insistent if irrational social reinforcement).
I’ve heard sentiments like this from most of the people I know who work helping the disadvantaged populations of our society. These are genuinely altruistic people, but they still get tired. For example, an addictions doctor was venting to me last week about how half of their patients don’t show up for appointments, and can’t even be located by the social workers who are employed to keep track of them.
Do you think those who optionally exercise the mental activity of making judgements of those behaviours are likely to suffer more or less burnout than those who choose not to? How useful an activity do you think making judgements of people you interact with is? Who is it useful to? The judge? The judged?
Not everyone exercises perfect control over the activities of their mind, and not every thought is carefully selected for optimum results before thinking it.
The point is just that even altruistic people, who one might presume are disinclined to such judgments, can find themselves making them after a time.
Besides, the doctor in my example was not even judging people, merely expressing exasperation at the inability for the resources expended to hit their intended targets. No one likes to feel like their work is meaningless, and getting paid (in public funds, no less) for patients who don’t show up might feel meaningless.
We agree on the empirical fact that many people generate suffering for themselves by encouraging an inner narrative of complaint about others' behavour.
If there's disagreement, it seems to be about whether or not this is necessary. I contend (along with thousands of wise narrators from just about every culture throughout human history) that it is not. This is just spiritual/ideological/psychological pragmatism (depending on your metaphysical orientation), and is intrinsically unrelated to altruism or perhaps ethics. Indeed someone holding a view that judgement of others is ethically or morally 'bad' merely shifts the target of the wasted mental judging-activity to their own putative ego.
It's the barstool economist argument style, on long-expired loan from medieval theology. Responding to clear empirical evidence that X occurs: "X can't happen because [insert 'rational' theory recapitulation]"
Your malevolent childs-ego-inflated-to-national 'winners vs losers' notion will inevitably, if not expunged, make losers of us all. My 'us' is of course unimaginable to your minuscule 'me'.
Someone once said something to the effect: "I'm not concerned that computers will become more like people, I am that people will learn to 'think' like computers".
A fortiori humans vs social media. You are faux-thinking in a series of tweets.
If this comment thread dropped to the level of twitter somewhere, it's the second level comment ("malevolent child"). I'm not sure what sort of vrai-thinking response you expect to that.
You're quite capable of seeing that a serious of ludicrously generalised ideological statements, entirely abstracted from reality, are as close to meaningless as human statements get (which is exactly why social media affords them). You are just blinkered by acculturation, and prefer it that why. Drama is so much more fun than reality.
All of the statements are fact, they are not meaningless.
> the EU is stagnating
True. Verifiable. Compare the value of the EU vs the US's or China's tech industry over time. The US's is now worth 20x the EU's.
A region's technological prowess lagging behind or even declining vs its peers is the very definition of stagnation.
> and definitely losing on the global stage.
The EU has a declining share of global GDP is increasingly becoming a less valuable market as companies opt to simply not deploy new products to the region.
> It has totally suffocated itself with regulation
Also correct. You can talk to essentially any EU small businessman - or even any of the (very few) AI companies in the EU. Mistral - the EU's most promising AI company - has been practically killed by the EU AI Act.
This isn't a hot take, nor is it overly general; the EU's regulatory industrial complex is a well-recognized problem.
> and is fading into irrelevancy with every passing day; soon, it won't be much more than a tourist spot for everyone else.
With the EU economy declining, and its share of global economic activity declining, and the EU preemptively locking itself out of a AI market worth trillions - one of the only major areas the EU remains strong is tourism.
> And they've gaslit themselves into thinking everything is fine, but no sane country would look at it as a model worth emulating.
References the common discourse from EU regulators where they pat themselves on the back for passing terrible regulation - e.g. passing the AI act and severely disadvantaging one of their best companies. Indeed, no one would want to emulate this.
These are just examples. Generalized statements are used because tens of examples can be provided for each example. It is more succinct to communicate the generalized example, with an understanding that anyone keeping up to date with events in this space (EU regulation, progress, technology) will understand what is being referred to.
> Turns out that the person who originally created the language doesn't like them either.
But it also turns out the very same isn't as neurotically attached to his 'likes' as most of us are:
> The Rust I Wanted probably had no future, or at least not one anywhere near as good as The Rust We Got. The fact that there was any path that achieved the level of success the language has seen so far is frankly miraculous. Don't jinx it by imagining I would have done any better!
He understands that his likes are just contingent facts about a single mammal, not truths. This is a hard-won understanding. Most people never reach it.
I think what you have to bear in mind is, with all sorts of caveats and exceptions, the HN crowd is at the centre of the current ecocidal empire, with most participants personally gaining from biosphere destruction. Participating here is much like being around public debate forums in 18thC Britain, where, yes, the slave traders inevitably dominated because they were at the centre of power, but abolitionists kept heads high and voices loud and eventually won. Of course we don't yet know whether or not we're going to win.
Being here can be interesting, but don't expect it to be sympatico. There can be no solidarity while exploitation dominates.
This would be a relevant question in many nations, but it's a bit beside the point in the US. Violence is a deeply respected and loved core of the culture for its own sake. It's an end, not means. Nearly all the US's entertainment, culture and myths are built around a reverence for violence. Even political violence has been pretty much the norm through most of the US's history. Celebrated cases aside, there's been something of a lull since the mid 1970s, but if as now likely it increases again, this will be a boring old reversion to the US's norm.