Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Growing Up Alyssa

rosenzweig.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 100 posts

Re: Growing Up Alyssa

#61

Post by tombert »

sublinear wrote: post #60
shrimp_emoji wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Whenever I see "republicans and democrats are the same", I know I'm talking to someone not directly affected by the policy differences (so someone likely cis, white, straight, and/or middle-class or higher).

I don't think you've ever lived in the south. Texas in particular is absolutely full of people who equally dislike the democrats and the republicans. There's a third situation: being directly affected by the stupid policies of both parties all the time.

Not the person you're responding to, but I did grow up in the south (Florida) and lived in Texas for three years immediately afterward. My criticism about people equivocating democrats and republicans still stand.

Re: Growing Up Alyssa

#62

Post by notacoward »

dragonwriter wrote: post #50
notacoward wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no reason whatsoever why random people... Having "random people" participate is a cornerstone of democracy. As others have pointed out, it's what separates democracy from elitist technocracy - and, ultimately, oligarchy. The problem is that another cornerstone is the public's responsibility to educate themselves. Nobody seems to do that any more, including here. This is the foundation that's failing. Fix th…

I think that you are both right on different levels and possibly talking past each other. Yes, on the level of franchise, it is good that everyone is involved. Its bad, on the other hand, that the form of the debate in this concrete instance has been directed to trying to make decisions on specific medical procedures as electoral politics issues. Belief in democratic franchise does not imply belief that all democrati…

I do believe that the details should be left to people who have some understanding (preferably not because they're in the pockets of those their decisions affect). It's why I support the idea of a regulatory state, despite some concerns about non-legislative bodies making rules with the force of law. But that didn't seem to be what my interlocutor was talking about.

> There's no reason whatsoever why random people like my mom

I very much doubt that their mom is a legislator, or on any regulatory agency's board, where these decisions are actually made. They were sneering at the common voter, suggesting there's "no reason whatsoever" for them to participate even at that level. I happen to believe that high barriers to participation for voters or even legislators undermine democracy, and I believe so quite strongly, hence the equally strong response.

Re: Growing Up Alyssa

#63

Post by School-Cotton »

dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #19
bsaul wrote: post #13

« I’m on the board overseeing Linux graphics. Half of us are trans » From a purely statistical POV, this is absurdly bizarre.

It's not a random pick from the population, or the 95% male ratio in engineering would also be somewhat weird. They have a small team: https://asahilinux.org/about/ People like to team up with others like them, so the fact that they're more likely to collaborate with other trans people is not weird at all.

I don't think she was referring to Asahi there.

Re: Growing Up Alyssa

#64

Post by antisthenes »

notacoward wrote: post #45
antisthenes wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As others have pointed out, it's what separates democracy from elitist technocracy - and, ultimately, oligarchy. Having "random people" (or people without specific domain knowledge) in a democracy doesn't really do anything to prevent oligarchy, it's tangential at best and orthogonal realistically. > The problem is that another cornerstone is the public's responsibility to educate themselves. That seems like a tall…

Please don't use "realistically" to privilege your own opinion beyond its merit. My opinion is just as reality-based as yours. Time after time after time, leaders within any elite have accumulated personal power and turned it into an instrument of that power (as opposed to its original purpose). When that elite is ruling society, those leaders therefore are too, and we have a word for that: oligarchs. We probably can…

> My opinion is just as reality-based as yours.

Only assuming you can process information from the real world correctly, which isn't a given. Not a judgment on you personally.

> We probably can't fix the organizational dynamics that lead to this accretion of power, but we can prevent it from being our basis of government by keeping the franchise broad.

Is there any evidence that keeping the franchise broad is the most effective strategy of running a country over multiple generations, where knowledge of organizational dynamics gets lost over time? That's a very strong claim, without much supporting it.

> Limiting franchise has always been a favorite tool of dictators, oligarchs, and supremacists - not of people who actually believe in democracy.

I don't particularly believe in democracy (one of the reasons being an extremely broad, misused catch-all term for whatever the speaker means themselves), but I do believe in strong institutions and separation of powers to the degree that it's possible.

But again, that's kind of orthogonal to whether this is an effective way to enact change by the broad franchise.

Re: Growing Up Alyssa

#65

Post by School-Cotton »

dale_glass wrote: post #21
bsaul wrote: post #13

« I’m on the board overseeing Linux graphics. Half of us are trans » From a purely statistical POV, this is absurdly bizarre.

Not really. Statistically there will be weird coincidences completely naturally. It's also quite arbitrary which we see as meaningful. If say, Linux networking has unusually many people called "John" that probably will be unnoticed because nobody pays that much attention to common, unremarkable names. If they all randomly turn out to have green eyes, then that's more visible. It's completely subjective which of those…

It is not just a random coincidence. It's a phenomenon more broadly across programming, especially very low-level/hardware stuff.

Re: Growing Up Alyssa

#66

Post by antisthenes »

notacoward wrote: post #45
antisthenes wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As others have pointed out, it's what separates democracy from elitist technocracy - and, ultimately, oligarchy. Having "random people" (or people without specific domain knowledge) in a democracy doesn't really do anything to prevent oligarchy, it's tangential at best and orthogonal realistically. > The problem is that another cornerstone is the public's responsibility to educate themselves. That seems like a tall…

Please don't use "realistically" to privilege your own opinion beyond its merit. My opinion is just as reality-based as yours. Time after time after time, leaders within any elite have accumulated personal power and turned it into an instrument of that power (as opposed to its original purpose). When that elite is ruling society, those leaders therefore are too, and we have a word for that: oligarchs. We probably can…

> Please don't use "realistically" to privilege your own opinion beyond its merit. My opinion is just as reality-based as yours.

Just to make a note about this separately.

I will privilege my opinion in discussions, because I generally tend to give concepts a lot more thought than the average person. It is also my prerogative to defend what I believe in and I try to do that with evidence and astute observation.

To ask someone not to do this is absolutely ridiculous.

Re: Growing Up Alyssa

#67

Post by dj_mc_merlin »

School-Cotton wrote: post #63
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a random pick from the population, or the 95% male ratio in engineering would also be somewhat weird. They have a small team: https://asahilinux.org/about/ People like to team up with others like them, so the fact that they're more likely to collaborate with other trans people is not weird at all.

I don't think she was referring to Asahi there.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/maintainers.h...

The only graphical subystem she is on the list for is the Panfrost driver. I don't think that counts as "on the board overseeing Linux graphics", not at all. This is one GPU driver. She is on the board overseeing the general graphics for Linux for the Asahi project, so I think that's what she was referring to.

Re: Growing Up Alyssa

#68

Post by ryandrake »

tombert wrote: post #42
shrimp_emoji wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Whenever I see "republicans and democrats are the same", I know I'm talking to someone not directly affected by the policy differences (so someone likely cis, white, straight, and/or middle-class or higher).

I just think that "enlightened centrism" is sort of intellectually lazy at this point. Obviously you don't have to agree with everything that a side does, but I think it's extremely easy to just throw your hands up in the air and say "both sides are bad!" and then turn your brain off. It is the facsimile of an enlightened opinion, but you didn't actually do anything to earn it. There are plenty of things that the Ame…

"Both sides are bad" simply provides cover/defense for the side that's actually worse. There are degrees of badness and "both sides" ignores that degree.

Re: Growing Up Alyssa

#69

Post by dj_mc_merlin »

antisthenes wrote: post #64
notacoward wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't use "realistically" to privilege your own opinion beyond its merit. My opinion is just as reality-based as yours. Time after time after time, leaders within any elite have accumulated personal power and turned it into an instrument of that power (as opposed to its original purpose). When that elite is ruling society, those leaders therefore are too, and we have a word for that: oligarchs. We probably can…

> My opinion is just as reality-based as yours. Only assuming you can process information from the real world correctly, which isn't a given. Not a judgment on you personally. > We probably can't fix the organizational dynamics that lead to this accretion of power, but we can prevent it from being our basis of government by keeping the franchise broad. Is there any evidence that keeping the franchise broad is the mos…

> Only assuming you can process information from the real world correctly, which isn't a given. Not a judgment on you personally.

You realize this claim can be made about you too, right? You might believe you process information correctly, but that's a very strong claim, without much supporting it.

Re: Growing Up Alyssa

#70

Post by chomp »

hersko wrote: post #27
uneekname wrote: post #23

c'mon HN, don't flag this. it's a perspective piece about being a trans developer in a harsh political landscape. we upvote and discuss this stuff quite often.

It's someones political manifesto. Not sure why it's relevant to HN.

It's a blog post from a prominent person in the tech community sharing their pain and perspective. That's relevant. Human rights for people who work on our software is important.
Post reply on HN