The problem with the "Paradox of Tolerance" is that intolerance of the "intolerant" drive the "intolerant" underground. They may feel isolated for long periods of time, but when they realize that they are the majority, rather than the minority, power can shift dramatically. This is called a "preference cascade" and it's particularly common among totalitarian regimes.

The only way to prevent preference cascades is to have just enough tolerance of views you consider hateful that they don't get driven underground -- and you do this by rigorously debating anyone you find to be wrong, without going after their livelihoods (among other things).

And now that I think of it, the fear of AI resemble somewhat the fear of runaway nanobots -- the notion that we can create something that will just turn the entire world into grey goo -- which, in order to have this fear, among other things, you have to overlook the fact that we are already surrounded by nanobots! We just call them "bacteria".

Sometimes when we imagine a project, we think about how big it is, and get discouraged -- but this is a good reminder that some of the best projects are small, and thus, are less daunting and more easily tackled!

Too much emphasis is placed on government regulation and corporate environments to "make things right" when, in the end, they are all just rigid bureaucratic structures that trap people and force them into heirarchies.

For my entire life, I have mostly tried to conform to this -- albeit mostly focusing on startups because they are more likely to value individuals, and less likely to have rigid structure and tradition -- but I'm only just now realizing that my autistic and ADHD tendencies being pigeon-holed even this much is a recipe for the burnout I've experienced for most of my adult life. I need to try something different!

And if I lived in a more rigid society (all non-capitalist countries are far more rigid than capitalist ones -- pretty much by definition) my options for fleeing rigidity would be vanishingly small.

Then again, I now can't help but wonder if LLVM (or even GCC) would be fast, if you just turned off all the optimizations ...

(Of course, at this point, I can't help but think "you don't need to worry about the speed of compilation" in things like Common Lisp or Smalltalk, because everything is compiled incrementally and immediately, so you don't have to wait for the entire project to compile before you could test something ...)

If we want simple and fast, we can do that, but sometimes it doesn't cover the corner cases that the slow and complicated stuff does -- and as you fix those things, the "simple and fast" becomes "complicated and slow".

But, as others have observed about GCC vs LLVM (with LLVM having had a similar life cycle), the added competition forced GCC to step up their game, and both projects have benefited from that competition -- even if, as time goes on, they get more and more similar to what each can do.

I think all our efforts suffer from the effects of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: "You can't win. You can't break even. And it's the only game in town."

I cannot help but reflect on how my approach was a "hybrid" between both pencil-and-paper and modern-cli-and-ide -- we were coming out of the age of really simple home computers, but not yet in the age of super fast computers with large monitors.

While I haven't really been in forums debating the merits and perils of paired programming, I cannot help but be amused by this essay, that pretty much confirms this initial thought I had about paired programming!

(1) Many of these "defiant" people merely didn't trust credentials -- they were perfectly fine with authority who earned deference by virtue of proving they really do know what they are doing, and

(2) That the psychology/psychiatry profession in general, consisting of people who have their Masters and PhDs, have to "suck up" to a lot of credentialed authority, without question, to get their degrees -- and thus it's only natural for them to expect everyone to unconditionally respect credentials!

(For the record, I have a PhD, but it's in pure math, which is possibly simultaniously both the least practical and most practical thing you could possibly learn -- but as such, I'm tangential to engineering and physics -- and I'm pretty sure that all three of these fields have a certain "fine, you have a credential, but can you really walk the walk?" element to them.)

And even if those abstractions can't be 100% effective, we'd go a long way to achieving the desirable results of getting rid of it, if we just develop the mindset of avoiding it if at all possible, excepting for very rare instances where it's needed as a last resort.

Secondly, the riots in Washington DC on Trump's first inauguration are rather pretty, the way the fires of businesses glowed in the night.

I'm really tired of pretending that somehow the Republicans are the "uncivil" ones, while the Democrats are perfectly innocent, and wouldn't harm a fly.

Republicans on FaceBook in particular joked about being in FaceBook jail heavily -- observing "shadow bans", outright bans, and other ways they couldn't communicate with their fans and friends.

Indeed, when Twitter was bought out and the censorship was removed, many of these people were amazed at how much interaction they got afterward -- it was night and day. And we now know from the "Twitter Files" that the Government was behind these efforts all along, so it's not just a "company has the right to moderate content" issue, it's a "government is violating the 1st Amendment" issue.

She implicitly supported Biden. She was complicit in all the lies that were pushed about Biden, particularly those about his fitness for the position. She endorsed going after political enemies with the legal system -- and then had the gall to claim that Trump would do just that himself.

And then to go on and claim that if you supported a crappy candidate, then those people are crappy too, you have basically condemned the 95% or so who voted for one or the other -- for motivations that are well beyond either yours or my understanding -- this attitude right here is why politics is so toxic these days.

You cannot talk about Trump without putting him in context. The fact is, the reason why we have Trump for President again, is because the person who replaced him was so horrible, that Trump looked better in comparison.

And what's more, conisdering what I said -- and what you are responding to -- I have to bring up Biden, because my entire point is "both sides do it". If you want to bring back honor and decency to the White House, you have to do it with an honorable and decent person. Neither Biden nor Harris fit that bill.

Biden, as a person, is narcissistic, self centered, selfish, boorish, infantile, incurious, lustful, and greedy. He’s a despicable person and those who support him are terrible people.

Either that, or they are just ignorant -- because the mainstream press has worked hard to hide these kinds of things from us. It is why trust in them has plummeted over the last few years.

In the meantime, when people are lied to by every avenue of culture, they are convinced everyone else believes in the lies, so they feel alone and in the minority, even though they may very well be in the majority. So long as this spell can be maintaned, the dictator can hold his grip on power.

But what happens when that spell was broken? When something happens, and all of the sudden, everyone realizes they've been in the majority all along? This is how dictatorships topple -- and the toppling can happen very swiftly, as Ceausescu discovered in Romania.

Elon Musk acquiring Twitter and taking out the censorship is what initially cracked the spell this time; and when Trump was elected not just by Electoral College, but by the Popular Vote, the spell was broken completely. It's why we're seeing so much change now, and why it's so rapid.