Hacker News: ConspiracyFact

New comment by ConspiracyFact in "The FOSS community acts like a cult and it's not helping the cause"

ConspiracyFact — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 09:26:21 +0000

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.

New comment by ConspiracyFact in "The FOSS community acts like a cult and it's not helping the cause"

ConspiracyFact — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 01:20:52 +0000

"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.

New comment by ConspiracyFact in "The FOSS community acts like a cult and it's not helping the cause"

ConspiracyFact — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 01:14:42 +0000

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.

New comment by ConspiracyFact in "Why Current AI Won't Displace Lawyers"

ConspiracyFact — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:37:49 +0000

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

New comment by ConspiracyFact in "DOJ Epstein Library Disclosures"

ConspiracyFact — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:36:28 +0000

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

New comment by ConspiracyFact in "Reddit seems down following release of Epstein Files"

ConspiracyFact — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:05:20 +0000

>release

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

New comment by ConspiracyFact in "'Ghost jobs' are on the rise – and so are calls to ban them"

ConspiracyFact — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 06:18:18 +0000

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.

New comment by ConspiracyFact in "Guess I'm a rationalist now"

ConspiracyFact — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 01:37:11 +0000

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

New comment by ConspiracyFact in "Guess I'm a rationalist now"

ConspiracyFact — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 00:50:30 +0000

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

New comment by ConspiracyFact in "Guess I'm a rationalist now"

ConspiracyFact — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 00:46:39 +0000

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.

New comment by ConspiracyFact in "Guess I'm a rationalist now"

ConspiracyFact — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 00:27:25 +0000

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.

New comment by ConspiracyFact in "Guess I'm a rationalist now"

ConspiracyFact — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 23:56:40 +0000

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.

New comment by ConspiracyFact in "100 years of Zermelo's axiom of choice: What was the problem with it? (2006)"

ConspiracyFact — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 02:04:15 +0000

I thought it was generally understood that Hilbert didn’t literally believe that. Do you seriously believe that he believed it?

New comment by ConspiracyFact in "Should Boys Start Kindergarten a Year Later Than Girls?"

ConspiracyFact — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 00:53:30 +0000

Sorry, but all I see here related to school are two ideas, namely that being put on the spot is uncomfortable and that college courses are too difficult, the latter perhaps part of an intentional scheme to make money. Neither of these comes anywhere close to what I would consider torture.

New comment by ConspiracyFact in "Should Boys Start Kindergarten a Year Later Than Girls?"

ConspiracyFact — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 18:57:02 +0000

This is all very vague and abstract. Can you provide some concrete examples? The only somewhat concrete example you gave is that students are graded in process in early math courses and then graded on results in later math courses. Any other examples? And how is this “torturous”?

New comment by ConspiracyFact in "Should Boys Start Kindergarten a Year Later Than Girls?"

ConspiracyFact — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 04:26:39 +0000

I will admit to a conspiratorial bias, but I curb it by asking basic feasibility questions, one of which I'll now ask you: how many people would need to be involved, and to what degree? If the education system is torturing children, doesn't that require a large degree of cooperation from many teachers? Why would these teachers willingly torture children?

New comment by ConspiracyFact in "The Gentle Singularity"

ConspiracyFact — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 08:48:44 +0000

>Largely, those who worked in factories did so because the benefits/costs exceeded that of farm work. If there were no incentives to change, everyone would have stayed on the farm, preserving the agrarian status quo.

This is true for the first generation of factory workers. After that the proletariat emerges, an urban underclass that can’t use the threat of going back to the farm as negotiating leverage, because they don’t know how to farm. I don’t think that the way that leftist governments went after farmers was fair or even humane, but the motivation for it was basically terror at being trapped under the thumb of the owner class.

New comment by ConspiracyFact in "AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms"

ConspiracyFact — Sat, 17 May 2025 07:12:54 +0000

>I'm pretty sure there is a slight widespread lack of respect for software engineers

I get the opposite impression. If anything software developers get more respect than they deserve.

New comment by ConspiracyFact in "FBI arrests judge accused of helping man evade immigration authorities"

ConspiracyFact — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 20:18:26 +0000

The judge wasn’t arrested for following procedure. Read the complaint.

New comment by ConspiracyFact in "FBI arrests judge accused of helping man evade immigration authorities"

ConspiracyFact — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 20:12:49 +0000

I just read the complaint. What’s the problem? Was the administrative warrant invalid? According to the complaint, the agents didn’t enter the courtroom, but rather waited in the hall, where they were approached by the judge. If the judge directed the defendant to a back door never used by defendants not in custody, that’s clearly obstruction.