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What's that quote about essential Liberty and temporary Safety again...

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Ben Franklin

But as we all know in context Franklin was talking about the Penn family wanting to literally purchase temporary safety from native American raids privately (rather than being taxed) and weakening the ability of the PA General Assembly to govern.

I'm guessing he'd probably be pro privacy, though.


My understanding of Franklin is that if he were alive today he’d probably spend most of his time on Onlyfans.

Keep quoting it and people will continue to ignore it

Look around.

99% of people couldn’t care less about privacy and are begging to give over their whole personal life data for (insert corporation) “points/rewards/discounts”


When you get a gun pointed at your face, or your home violated, or your car stolen, you tend to rebalance your principles a little. The cameras are a symptom of bigger problems.

This is the main issue. People aren't going by what may be the best solution long term, they are going by what they feel and experience in the moment. Right now people feel unsafe and they feel these systems increase their safety and seem unphased by the privacy ramifications. I personally still am not sure how I feel as I do value my privacy, but at the same time I also understand how this can be a useful tool. Many tools the police have also invade my privacy as well to some degree.

It's so hard to draw a line of what is good or bad, and it seems like the majority are okay with this technology. Which I think means the conversation should shift from should we allow these cameras at all, to instead, how can we allow them to be implemented in a way that minimizes privacy risk as much as possible while still remaining a valuable tool to solve crimes.


It's a bit of a protection racket isn't it? The police extort me for money and claim it will be used to protect me from the situations your present. Yet they do none of those things, because they can't be there in that moment. The police are not the solution. Spying on me is not the solution.

You also rebalance your principles when you rot your brain with vast quantities of fearmongering slop on your screens, and that’s way more common.

It’s a pretty unhelpful quite imho. You can use that quote to oppose anything beyond pure anarchy!

Yes the police can be abusive tyrants. But a society with no rules and no rule enforces is not a prosperous society. And yet if you lived in total anarchy you could oppose anything beyond pure rules and any rule enforcement with that quote.

Clearly the slope is very very very <breathe> very very slippery. And yet the ideal, dare I say necessary, point is not at the far end cap.


Can you show me the contract I signed that shows I agree to adhere to those rules? This is forced upon us with no choice by the individual other than to not participate and live in destitute conditions or in jail. The police are enforcers of rule, and for that I will always oppose them.

How would Knuth opine on consummate Vs, I wonder...


But where am I gonna run my eggdrop bot??


I noticed Guitar Center also using a TUI when I was in there last.


My dad recently retired but his company was still using Pick as of a year or two ago. They also had a one-dude maintenance plan. I wonder if it was the same dude.


My first job out of college was over 2 decades ago, and I was hired to work on a web app which was considered new technology. But an important application there that was used by hundreds of people around the country was written with Pick, and the owner of the company also had some local Houston businesses whose Pick applications he occasionally did maintenance work on. The owner had moved from Chicago to Houston at the beginning of the 80s because he was able to get a high-paying job with no degree, but when the oil bust happened he learned Pick programming from an older guy and did so well when he started his own business that he retired early.


So many of these systems were one man shops. It really speaks to how easy to develop pick systems was. It still very much is.


Just the fact that you can use the keyboard is brilliant. I teach high school and most of my computing tasks are in lowest-bidder web GUI messes (lousy UX, no hotkeys) and take so much longer than a keyboard interface would. Even taking roll takes a minute or two longer than it used to.


I teach at a summer camp once that had custom web app for roll such that it displayed one name at a time to call out and to mark it as present you had to type their given name in a box, otherwise click next with empty input for absent


Somebody needs to be fired for that sort of UI...

I've probably made that sort of UI without realizing it...


False absence, is better than false presence. Especially with kids.

The UX is optimizing for accuracy over ease of use, and in this case is likely intentionally difficult to use.


If I was faced with that, I would switch to paper. Somebody can type it in later.

Also I have no mental imagery of summer camp with networking much less internet. I can't comprehend dropping my kids off at a retail storefront or a church as "summer camp".


Ouch.

I remember my high school went big on Gradebusters software--text entry on the Apple IIe (80 column required!) of course that was all keyboard driven.

Tab tab down space down space down down down space.. that was taking attendance.

One problem with GUI is that pointer-warping is unnerving, we don't have facilities like "I clicked, now warp the pointer to the next target" but that's commonplace with text UI.

There's no TAB button on a mouse.


So much of my work as a software engineer is done in shitty web UIs: trello, github, google gsuite, jira, gmail, calendar.

They are. So. Slow. Each and every one of them. Its awful


In Florida, condominium associations (COA) and homeowners associations (HOA) are not legally the same thing, but in discussions like this people often refer to them interchangeably. There is a big difference between an HOA requiring mowed lawns and paint colors and a COA that maintains roofs, pools, playgrounds, common elements, etc. People will refer to Surfside as a reason HOAs are important but the Champlain Towers was a condo.


If McBroken.com can stay up...


I've been using IRC for almost 30 years. We communicate pretty easily


*** Ja mata!


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