Regarding your later edit:

> PS. It's amazing to me, and worrying, the anger and vituperation this position is provoking. It was once almost consensus. To take the obvious parallel, buying a newspaper did not imply agreement with the reactionary press baron who owned it.

It really shouldn't surprise you that if you express something that's a bit of a hot take that you'll get a reaction to it. You shouldn't draw any more of an inference from it then "people are passionate about this and some of them disagree with me." Whether people do so amicably or not has at least as much to do with the problems with the Internet as a means of communication as the issue itself.

Regardless, this status quo you refer to was mostly imagined. How much pressure people exert to boycott some platform or another waxes and wanes, because the underlying disagreements wax and wane in relevance. That doesn't really make it a new thing, just a new phase in the same unfolding history.

That's why you refer to the press barons in the era of yellow journalism - the past is not an undifferentiated mass where everyone held some set of values that have fallen from favor. To the people who were alive at the time, things were contentious and in flux and the future was uncertain.

We have a tendency to flatten the past and imagine it as a straightforward narrative where we necessarily arrived at where we are today because of the inevitable interaction of historical forces, and similarly to flatten the people who lived at the time as being caricatures who reliably held a certain set of values. But they disagreed with each other, viewed the future as up for grabs like we do, and they changed their minds as history unfolded.

This was the comment I was referring to, as well as a vibe/through line in the rest of your comments. If I misinterpreted you I apologize.

Regarding your flagged comment, I am a human being for whatever that's worth. I don't really know what to tell you about your world view other than that it's deeply mistaken and seems to be informed more by paranoia than evidence.

Entertain for me the idea that you are mistaken. If you have built a worldview that interprets disconfirming evidence as a further layer of conspiracy and people who disagree as professional propogandists - how would you ever change your mind?

Any belief which functions as a ratchet and gets tighter and tighter without any mechanism to change your mind will eventually strangle your ability to understand the world.

My usage was ironic. I don't think those fit my meaning because I think the situation would be largely the same without the licencing dispute.

Or rather, you can, but it seems like being closer to the truth is an important value to you. And if that's the case I think you are doing yourself a great disservice.

But I've enjoyed our conversation and I wish you well.

Regardless, it is grimly interesting to watch the next chapter of tech companies becoming increasingly significant in geopolitics.

Yes, I studied the evidence and came to a conclusion. You've come to a different conclusion. That's not because you're smarter or less gullible. It seems to it's because you are cynical and, to be frank, over indexing on dubious evidence. If you're scrutinizing people's facial expressions to determine whether a gigantic physical event has taken place, you've taken a be wrong turn. Facial expressions are about the lowest quality evidence I can imagine to answer a question about spaceflight. It's way too far removed and there are way too many alternative explanations.

If there's significant scale at the bottom it's possible it's making your kettle materially less efficient. If you put in like a cup of vinegar and a cup of water (you could probably dilute it more than that), heat it up and swish it around (it doesn't need to be boiling), it should all come off.

> People are easily convinced by lies, as you have demonstrated just now.

You can't have known this but there was a time in my life I was very open to these theories and eventually came to the conclusion they didn't comport with the evidence. You seem to be assuming my position is reflexive rather than considered.

Cynicism, contrarianism, the assumption opposing positions are unconsidered - that is not what "free thinking" looks like. That's just being dependent on the "mainstream narrative" in reverse. If you can't imagine someone examining the evidence and coming to a different conclusion than you, you are engaging in the dogmatism you criticize.

It also does not make you less gullible. Cynicism is the dual of naivete. Both are equally exploitable. Cynicism can feel rational and rigorous because it has a hard edge to it, and because it feels like legitimate skepticism. But that's merely aesthetic. People can and do pull the wool over cynical eyes by tailoring lies to that aesthetic; instead of saying, "experts say X is true, and you can trust them" they say "experts say X is false, and you can't trust them" and the outcome is the same.

Propaganda and lies are real, you aren't wrong to protect yourself from them, but I genuinely think this mechanism does not.

The main disadvantage is strong coupling. The shared state inside the static makes it more difficult to test your code. There are ways to reduce this coupling, the most obvious being that you push as much logic as possible into functions that accept a reference rather than use your static directly. Then you minimize the size of the code which is difficult to test, and cover it with end to end testing.

The OnceLock does impose 1 atomic operation of overhead, whereas an Arc imposes 2 (in this case, it can be more if weak references are used). However neither are likely to be important when you consider the overhead of the Mutex; the Mutex is likely to involve system calls and so will dominate the overhead. (If there's little to no contention then the Mutex is a lot like an Arc.)

Your alternative would be to use `Box::leak()` as the parent comment describes, which would force you to pass a reference around (resulting in better coupling) and eliminate overhead from OnceLock. However, it's unlikely to result in any material performance benefit, and you could reduce coupling without departing from your current approach, so I don't think either approach is clearly or overwhelmingly better.

I don't see how "they got caught doing X" is more complicated than "they got caught doing Y", but at any rate think it's worth being correct and precise in order to reason from accurate premises. If you absorb a lot of false information you'll start coming to incorrect conclusions and it'll be difficult to understand why. It took me years to unlearn all the bullshit I absorbed from when I used to spent a lot of time watching History channel documentaries.

> What for or how they got caught, does not matter.

So if they were ejected for jaywalking or for murder, that's all the same to you?

Scroll down a little and you'll see a huge block of posts dated March 31st

I don't know who this person is or whether they are legit but it doesn't surprise me that someone would do this.