If that were true, every startup would be successful.

> Funny enough, in the middle of that question, my internet died and interrupted the call for the first time in the six months I lived in that house. Odd. It came back ten minutes later, and I dialed back into the conference line, but the mood of the call pretty much 180’d.

I find that when strange things happen like this, they’re hardly coincidence. Did you run a traceroute after the disconnect anywhere? Did you see an IP address change? If so, was it a significant change in the CIDR block it was within?

1. Geographic locales have linguistic norms that silently help in-group association. Adjusting rhetoric to these terms make people more pliable.

2. Context-aware sentiment is more impactful than general sentiment analysis. Someone may not have been a Trump supporter, but they didn’t like Hillary. This became another fulcrum.

3. Social leaders had the biggest impact, but social leaders can be made. This was leveraging a thought experiment conducted by DARPA, published in a paper titled, “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity“ (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf)

These and a few other factors lead to my prediction of polling trajectories delivering a win for Trump in 2016 (the lecture was in August).

While my excessively paranoid self is inclined to agree, I am curious as to the author’s reasoning here.

No it isn’t. From Merriam-Webster:

Definition of abuse

1 : a corrupt practice or custom — the buying of votes and other election abuses 2 : improper or excessive use or treatment : misuse — drug abuse 3 : language that condemns or vilifies usually unjustly, intemperately, and angrily — verbal abuse a term of abuse 4 : physical maltreatment —child abuse sexual abuse 5 obsolete : a deceitful act : deception

They explicitly said they were upfront with their peers about how criticism is delivered. Whether that is true is beyond the scope of discussion; what has been said is nowhere near gaslighting or other forms of abuse. I don’t understand what has happened as of late, but the western world has taken a very strange turn in redefining terms to make the smallest of infraction or abrasiveness a great harm. Criticism does not need to be laced with praise to be useful, and justified critique does not equal abuse. That’s complete nonsense. Delivering it in private rather than publicly, if anything, seems more in consideration of the recipient’s feelings anyway.

With respect to the topic of this discussion, I will refrain from passing a judgment on Torvalds’ change of heart until we see quantitative data on how this has impacted the kernel.