5 ms·

Well, there are people who choose to stay away from social and technical progress. I totally respect that desire.

by tw1984 3y ago

badpun 3y ago
"Social progress" got us the holocaust and tens of millions killed by communism, though. It's perfectly reasonable to be wary of it.
- Maken 3y ago
  It also ended serfdom. Being wary of change is usually the excuse to perpetuate awful systems in both technology and society.
  - badpun 3y ago
    > Being wary of change is usually the excuse to perpetuate awful systems in both technology and society. Do you have any evidence to back that "usually" claim? I'm from a country that went through the horrors of malicious forced social change (under Communism), and most people who warm against it just don't want it ever to return.
    - tw1984 3y ago
      > I'm from a country that went through the horrors of malicious forced social change (under Communism) I call communism cancer, let's be crystal clear about that first. Because of such permanent hate towards communism, I am deeply concerned as more and more countries are developing into de facto communism. Huge amount of $ were handed out to the public during COVID-19, in normal days you also see nonsenses like public housing and so called free health care which are actually covered by other hard working average tax payers - they are forced to cover other people's problem. In the end, many people got brainwashed to believe that there is a state that looks after everyone. Such typical communist way of thinking is horrible at best. I'd willing to bet that your country is just one of the above described one. You should be very concerned. Communism isn't dead, it just got itself a slightly different skin.
      - badpun 3y ago
        What you're describing is socialism. It can be dangerous if goes too far, but it's nothing like communism. In practice, the biggest traits of communisms were (of the top of my head, I might be missing something): 1. No private property of the wealth-generating kind. The land, the companies - they can only be owned by the state. 2. No families. The whole country is one big commune, and there's no reason for a mother to favor her own child over some stranger in Novosibirsk 5000 miles from her. (This was too radical though - it turned out that even the greatest opression and terror cannot break the familial ties. The communists abandoned this idea within a dozen or so years of them seizing power). 3. No faith. Churches were demolished or turned into grain stores etc. The clergy was persecuted. 4. Independent thought is forbidden and can easily get you killed - either by shot in the head somewhere in the basement in e.g. NKWD HQ in Moscow, or in one of hundreds of Gulags across the Soviet Union. 5. A corollary to the above - any independent action is highly suspicious. If you and two neighbors start tending to the local garden together, it's already suspicious, because you're starting an "organization" - and all forms of organizing are strictly controlled and must be introduced in a top-down manner. The reason behind this is of course to keep people extremely atomized, so that they're powerless against the state and will never rebel. 5. The country is a police state. Czeka, later rebranded as NKWD, and later rebranded as KGB (the constant rebrandings were due to atrocities that those people were constantly committing) is the most powerful organization in the state. They have informers everywhere, likely among your family, and most likely among your colleagues at work or school. 6. Traditions are dangerous and must be destroyed. Soviet Union displaced many of its nations (yes, entire nations) within its borders, to uproot them and weaken them. Once people's ties with the land were gone, it was easier to make them into obedient workers in state's companies. 7. The state used people as fuel. Esp. during the 1920-1945 period, Russia had more people than other resources, so the authorities turned milions of people into slaves, who worked without compensation on their great industrial projects across the Gulag (building river canals in the arctic regions, building railways through Siberia, mining uranium in -60 degrees weather etc). To save money and accelerate the country's growth, the slaves were malnourished by design, receiving less than 50% of calories they need. This resulted in them slowly buring their own tissues, which resulted in grown men weighing as little as 80 pounds after a couple years of slave work. This was extremely similar to Auschwitz and other German concentration camps, with the exception that Soviet authorities were predominantly doing this to their own people. 8. Terror. During periods of intensified terror (which could last years), no one was safe. You could be arrested at any point under most frivolous pretense (e.g. not clapping long enough after a speech of a political leader), and many millions were. The arrest would most likely lead to you ending up in Gulag as a slave and fuel for the industrial machine. What's worse, your family, petrified with fear over their own lives, would distance from you - e.g. wives often denounced their arrested husbands, and broke all contact. Even if you survived the Gulags and your "sentence" was carried out and you were finally free, you were often still a pariah. Your biggest hope was for the current leader of the country to die, and the next one declare him an abuser, which in practice led to an official pardon of people sent go Gulag under the previous regime. 9. The totalitarian aspect of the state and its ideology. Every aspect of life had to either originate from the state or at least be mediated by it. It's still present in e.g. North Korea, where a grown person is allowed to go to work, go to the store, go the local party meetup (daily meetups after work are often mandatory), perhaps go to its immediate family - and that's it. If you go (as in, physical movement on the street) anywhere else, it's suspcious, and the police can stop and question you. The totalitarian aspect was also prevalent in intellectual life - if you were working on something that the state deemed politically benign and was hence permitted - let's say you were a university professor writing a biography of Michelangelo - you still had to write it through the lens of Marxism, or you'd be in trouble. Marxism had to explain events in Michelangelo's life, as well as the society around him. BTW, it's a great shame that this is not widely known across the Western world. This would motivate people to avoid the horrors that could be unleashed if we go to far towards the leftist utopian (in reality, dystopian) ideas. Unfortunately, the Western intellectual elites have decades of tradition of downplaying that, and being in favor radical leftism. Let's hope we won't see people Gulags in the US in XXI century.
    - Maken 3y ago
      I don't know what you mean by evidence, but "things have always being this way" is too often the excuse to avoid change. Social change is not necessarily always good, but rejecting novel policies just because they are not currently "the norm" is not a good principle. Following that line of thought, the Eastern Block from the 90s would have never abandoned Communism because it was "the default" for them.
  - account42 3y ago
    > It also ended serfdom. Hardly.
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      Are we really arguing over the word 'progress'. Yeah, we 'progressed' beyond serfdom. What is the objection?
PhilipRoman 3y ago
I have nothing against progress itself (although I'm not sure why you brought social progress into this), but not everything has to be everything. XML parsers are useful, but surely you wouldn't want one included in libstdc++. And I'm not saying there isn't room for improvement. There are lots of genuinely useful features C is missing, especially regarding static analysis. I would love to have a proof assistant that can integrate with a C/C++ compiler to prove equivalence of functions, so you could write an obvious version and then transform it step by step to an optimized version, which is guaranteed to have the same observable behaviour.

Well, there are people who choose to stay away from social and technical progress. I totally respect that desire.

by tw1984 3y ago

Well, there are people who choose to stay away from social and technical progress. I totally respect that desire.

"Social progress" got us the holocaust and tens of millions killed by communism, though. It's perfectly reasonable to be wary of it.

Maken 3y ago
It also ended serfdom. Being wary of change is usually the excuse to perpetuate awful systems in both technology and society.
- badpun 3y ago
  > Being wary of change is usually the excuse to perpetuate awful systems in both technology and society. Do you have any evidence to back that "usually" claim? I'm from a country that went through the horrors of malicious forced social change (under Communism), and most people who warm against it just don't want it ever to return.
  - tw1984 3y ago
    > I'm from a country that went through the horrors of malicious forced social change (under Communism) I call communism cancer, let's be crystal clear about that first. Because of such permanent hate towards communism, I am deeply concerned as more and more countries are developing into de facto communism. Huge amount of $ were handed out to the public during COVID-19, in normal days you also see nonsenses like public housing and so called free health care which are actually covered by other hard working average tax payers - they are forced to cover other people's problem. In the end, many people got brainwashed to believe that there is a state that looks after everyone. Such typical communist way of thinking is horrible at best. I'd willing to bet that your country is just one of the above described one. You should be very concerned. Communism isn't dead, it just got itself a slightly different skin.
    - badpun 3y ago
      What you're describing is socialism. It can be dangerous if goes too far, but it's nothing like communism. In practice, the biggest traits of communisms were (of the top of my head, I might be missing something): 1. No private property of the wealth-generating kind. The land, the companies - they can only be owned by the state. 2. No families. The whole country is one big commune, and there's no reason for a mother to favor her own child over some stranger in Novosibirsk 5000 miles from her. (This was too radical though - it turned out that even the greatest opression and terror cannot break the familial ties. The communists abandoned this idea within a dozen or so years of them seizing power). 3. No faith. Churches were demolished or turned into grain stores etc. The clergy was persecuted. 4. Independent thought is forbidden and can easily get you killed - either by shot in the head somewhere in the basement in e.g. NKWD HQ in Moscow, or in one of hundreds of Gulags across the Soviet Union. 5. A corollary to the above - any independent action is highly suspicious. If you and two neighbors start tending to the local garden together, it's already suspicious, because you're starting an "organization" - and all forms of organizing are strictly controlled and must be introduced in a top-down manner. The reason behind this is of course to keep people extremely atomized, so that they're powerless against the state and will never rebel. 5. The country is a police state. Czeka, later rebranded as NKWD, and later rebranded as KGB (the constant rebrandings were due to atrocities that those people were constantly committing) is the most powerful organization in the state. They have informers everywhere, likely among your family, and most likely among your colleagues at work or school. 6. Traditions are dangerous and must be destroyed. Soviet Union displaced many of its nations (yes, entire nations) within its borders, to uproot them and weaken them. Once people's ties with the land were gone, it was easier to make them into obedient workers in state's companies. 7. The state used people as fuel. Esp. during the 1920-1945 period, Russia had more people than other resources, so the authorities turned milions of people into slaves, who worked without compensation on their great industrial projects across the Gulag (building river canals in the arctic regions, building railways through Siberia, mining uranium in -60 degrees weather etc). To save money and accelerate the country's growth, the slaves were malnourished by design, receiving less than 50% of calories they need. This resulted in them slowly buring their own tissues, which resulted in grown men weighing as little as 80 pounds after a couple years of slave work. This was extremely similar to Auschwitz and other German concentration camps, with the exception that Soviet authorities were predominantly doing this to their own people. 8. Terror. During periods of intensified terror (which could last years), no one was safe. You could be arrested at any point under most frivolous pretense (e.g. not clapping long enough after a speech of a political leader), and many millions were. The arrest would most likely lead to you ending up in Gulag as a slave and fuel for the industrial machine. What's worse, your family, petrified with fear over their own lives, would distance from you - e.g. wives often denounced their arrested husbands, and broke all contact. Even if you survived the Gulags and your "sentence" was carried out and you were finally free, you were often still a pariah. Your biggest hope was for the current leader of the country to die, and the next one declare him an abuser, which in practice led to an official pardon of people sent go Gulag under the previous regime. 9. The totalitarian aspect of the state and its ideology. Every aspect of life had to either originate from the state or at least be mediated by it. It's still present in e.g. North Korea, where a grown person is allowed to go to work, go to the store, go the local party meetup (daily meetups after work are often mandatory), perhaps go to its immediate family - and that's it. If you go (as in, physical movement on the street) anywhere else, it's suspcious, and the police can stop and question you. The totalitarian aspect was also prevalent in intellectual life - if you were working on something that the state deemed politically benign and was hence permitted - let's say you were a university professor writing a biography of Michelangelo - you still had to write it through the lens of Marxism, or you'd be in trouble. Marxism had to explain events in Michelangelo's life, as well as the society around him. BTW, it's a great shame that this is not widely known across the Western world. This would motivate people to avoid the horrors that could be unleashed if we go to far towards the leftist utopian (in reality, dystopian) ideas. Unfortunately, the Western intellectual elites have decades of tradition of downplaying that, and being in favor radical leftism. Let's hope we won't see people Gulags in the US in XXI century.
  - Maken 3y ago
    I don't know what you mean by evidence, but "things have always being this way" is too often the excuse to avoid change. Social change is not necessarily always good, but rejecting novel policies just because they are not currently "the norm" is not a good principle. Following that line of thought, the Eastern Block from the 90s would have never abandoned Communism because it was "the default" for them.
- account42 3y ago
  > It also ended serfdom. Hardly.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Are we really arguing over the word 'progress'. Yeah, we 'progressed' beyond serfdom. What is the objection?

PhilipRoman 3y ago

I have nothing against progress itself (although I'm not sure why you brought social progress into this), but not everything has to be everything. XML parsers are useful, but surely you wouldn't want one included in libstdc++. And I'm not saying there isn't room for improvement. There are lots of genuinely useful features C is missing, especially regarding static analysis. I would love to have a proof assistant that can integrate with a C/C++ compiler to prove equivalence of functions, so you could write an obvious version and then transform it step by step to an optimized version, which is guaranteed to have the same observable behaviour.