One important point is that many people die WITH cancer but not OF cancer. So even for the 1.8%, only a fraction of those people were going to die of the disease (or even suffer significant symptoms) - the rest were just going to die of natural causes anyway.
But now you've found it you pretty much have to remove it, which has significant quality of life implications.
Age is a big factor in the with/of cancer factor. If someone is 80 years old then there's good chance it won't be cancer that kills them (assuming they aren't already in a late stage).
But if you are 40 and you have cancer, there's a good chance you'll die of that cancer if it's left untreated.
I'm personally of the opinion that cancer screening should happen earlier for younger people and less frequently for older people. Like, if you hit 80, there's really basically no reason to screen for cancer.
It does, doesn't it! This is basically the reason scepticism in screening has risen (amongst scientists and medics, not the general population) - research seems to show that screening catches much more cancer but doesn't save many more people.
Rohin Francis does a good video on it, which you don't have to watch because it has references underneath you can click straight through to (the video is good though): https://youtu.be/yNzQ_sLGIuA
I am frustrated by this because it seems obvious to me that "more data == better" but I guess it makes sense if you think of the scans as having high amounts of noise, and us having a poor understanding of the system we're monitoring (this never happens in tech, of course :)).
If they think this is good/important then fine but what they've created is a grant programme, not a UBI.
Personally I would have thought this money would have been better spent getting people on the margins the stability to retrain into in-demand skilled careers (e.g. single, unskilled parents training as electricians or plumbers). That feels like it would be a more durable, multi-generational benefit.
Who said it is a UBI that this "rebuttal" even makes sense to appear here? The Irish government isn't calling it a UBI. The article doesn't call it a UBI. Even the FAQ for the program says it is not UBI:
>> Why this is not a Universal Basic Income
>> It is important to note that that the Basic Income for the Arts Pilot is not a Universal Basic Income. This is a sectoral intervention to support practicing artists and creative arts workers to focus on their creative practice. This policy is separate to the Universal Basic income as outlined in the Programme for Government.
Basic Income and UBI are colloquially synonyms, people use them interchangeably, and the Irish government are almost certainly using it to endear themselves to supporters of UBI and to get more coverage for their policy than media would give them if they just called it a grant.
This happens all the time. For example, in the UK there was a push for a "living wage" in the 2010s, which the government responded to by rebranding the minimum wage the "National Living Wage" and bumping it a little for over-25s.
Society needs art. Artists produce art. There a pantheon of greats that had no commercial success in their lives but moved our culture, we’d be so much more culturally impoverished if we’d insisted they become shit plumbers.
It is not a grant. It is UBI. People who advocated for UBI always said they will spend time creating art, etc. if they didn’t have to work for income. So here it is, the dream come true.
Ireland currently has a population of approximately 5,501,000 people. There is great news: Bono and the rest of his band have agreed to provide subsidies for the 5,499,000 citizens who aren't receiving the BIA funds, and they'll brand this supplemental program as U2BI.
The website will be established shortly as https://ww2.u2bi.ie:212/ as soon as the registrars can correct the typos.
> The whole post is a gish gallop of half truths and nonsense.
That is indeed true. OP fails to raise a single point that either makes sense or is grounded on reality. Sometimes I wonder where consuming propaganda stops and wilful ignorance starts.
I think the wisdom of "just fork it" is that in a project the power lies with the people who do the work (yes, that power is often rented out in exchange for a pay cheque), and in an open source project you have the right to do that work without kowtowing to the authority of other people who did the work before you ("just fork it").
The important point lost in many of these anti-fork posts is that forks usually aren't hostile, and "just fork it" isn't usually a dismissal of people's input - rather, it's an invitation to do the work and to stop looking for permission. Which is really the core value of open source - no need for permission, "just do it". Forks also don't generally split communities because forks live within the community (and good community leaders foster the tolerance of forks).
As an example, I have a fork going of someone else's open source project which I made to meet my client's needs. I've got an email thread going with the project owner, it's all very friendly, and one day the fork might merge back in again (probably in parts). I think this is how most forks work, with the exceptions making big headlines partly because they're juicy gossip but mostly because they are exactly that - exceptions.
Yes exactly. I've forked many a library to meet my own needs. Usually temporary, but not always. The fact that I can do this when I have to means I can use basically any library. The submitted post is written from the perspective of some kind of social network project. People saying "just fork it" in that perspective are clearly missing the bigger picture, hence the post. And the author of that post, didn't acknowledge that FOSS is much more varied than their particular project.
> Yes exactly. I've forked many a library to meet my own needs. Usually temporary,
This isn’t really what the article is about. Doing a temporary fork for your own needs is equivalent to maintaining some personal patches.
The article is talking about running a forked project as an active fork that other people are using. That comes with the social overhead and community complications.
There's absolutely a far right fediverse. Though they're mostly (back) on Twitter for obvious reasons.
Not sure why this split would be a problem? It's a very Big Social Media idea that everyone should use the same thing and expose themselves / be exposed to everything.
is this a common problem? are software maintainers in the east sufficiently committed to racial superiority that they can't work with people in the west?
If almost everybody thinks you're so insufferable that they don't want to interact with you, chances are, you are.
This has been a function of societies for as long as societies have existed, and addressing it requires honest reflection. In this case: "why is there such a huge overlap between people competent and willing to host federated social media servers, and people who don't want to be around me?"
Unfortunately there is a pervasive attitude amongst a certain personality type, that if someone criticizes them, then that someone must be wrong, and must be fought, no matter what. It's common enough to have ICD-10 diagnosis codes for it: Narcissistic Personality Disorder and/or Oppositional Defiant Disorder.
This is why I rarely try to change people's minds anymore unless they appear receptive to it: there's a good chance an overactive amygdala will see it as an attack and just make more work for me, wasting my time. It's easier to just talk to them about something else, or if they're being unnecessarily rude to people: not talk to them.
You might reflect upon your own short comment history (or your username) and judge for yourself what proportion is polite & respectful vs. rude & belligerent, and consequently whether the average person would want to try having a nice conversation with you.
> If almost everybody thinks you're so insufferable that they don't want to interact with you, chances are, you are.
Or they disagree with your views so intensely that they want you silenced.
That's what happened with https://spinster.xyz defederation. A group of male administrators of other Fediverse instances took umbrage at the women-centered, feminist discussion there and between them defederated hundreds of servers away from Spinster.
This was on top of misogynistic attacks and attempts to deplatform. Some unfortunately successful, like the removal of the Spinster app from the Google Play Store and F-Droid.
> Or they disagree with your views so intensely that they want you silenced. That's what happened with https://spinster.xyz defederation.
You're referring to an instance in which nobody was silenced, and all that happened was that some people chose not to interact with other people. That's totally okay! You don't have to interact with folks you think are insufferable.
> This was on top of misogynistic attacks
Unfortunately, most social networks are full of misogynists, racists, etc. As the size of the network grows, the probability of it including a jerk approaches 100%. In fact, this is one of the reasons someone might choose to run their own network in which they don't have to associate with said jerks. Based on a cursory search of your example, it looks like a lot of folks felt that spinster.xyz wasn't worth voluntarily associating with, perhaps because there was a high proportions of jerks.
the propensity for fediverse admins to act like tiny dictators is extremely worrying. i haven't seen a good solution to this sort of thing honestly. ultimately it also means that you have to walk on eggshells and force yourself into an impossible shape lest you offend someone's very special interest that you didn't even know you were lightly brushing up against (for example, you say "clanker" and therefore the owner of some instance immediately and without asking thinks you are against cyborgs, and they identify as a cyborg, therefore you are a bigot, and you get banned without warning and all your friendships are gone - didn't happen to me, but i've seen it happen to someone else). one of the worst things about this is that you can't have a really strong disagreement with people who are popular on some instance because social inner circles form very easily on tiny instances, and all of them are tiny, especially compared to non-federated, centralized networks where brushing up against inner circles that have connections to admins is much much less likely.
> you have the right to do that work without kowtowing to the authority of other people who did the work before you ("just fork it").
> The important point lost in many of these anti-fork posts is that forks usually aren't hostile, and "just fork it" isn't usually a dismissal of people's input
In my experience, forking a semi-active project can often be viewed as hostile by the maintainers. Some of those maintainers may turn it into a holy war where they try to throw their weight around to push back on the fork. I’ve seen claims of “trying to stealing our project” to mobilizing users of their Discord to warn people to avoid the fork across Reddit and other social media.
It doesn’t always go that way, as you experienced with the project you forked. The situation you described is about as non-threatening as it gets, though, because you forked for a single client and you don’t want to become a maintainer of a new project.
in 30+ years of software development i've never heard "just fork it" or "you're welcome to fork it" used as an encouragement and i've heard it as a dismissal countless times. the article is spot on, and your interpretation of the described real-life situation is a rosy-tinted hypothetical at best.
a project owner have the right to be dismissive about anything regarding their own project. This is why "just fork it" is both dismissive, but also power.
If you are simply asking a project owner to do somethings you wanted (often for free, i might add), then why shouldn't they be dismissive?
If you have an idea for said project that the owner is dismissive about, then you fork it - prove that the idea is good.
i disagree with that stance. an open source project is made up of contributions by dozens, maybe thousands of people, and they almost always only contributed to that one specific repository under that one specific person's control due to game theoretical processes that are mostly random, such as first-mover advantage, schelling points, etc. the collective effort of those people usually far outweighs what the controlling person usually contributed to ostensibly earn this sort of privilege. if talking about a FOSS repository, that person cannot be correctly described as "the owner" of that work, as the work is owned by the public, i.e. anyone who is provided access to the code. the person you are describing is merely the current maintainer of the project and the fact that most of the work they are maintaining is not theirs, but comes from the public, and is meant for the public, immediately puts a burden of responsibility on them of acting in a way that is much better than "a project owner have the right to be dismissive about anything regarding their own project" - a mode of operation which, if you pull in all the considerations i presented here, sounds childish. a much better way is to talk about this like you would about an old watch: you are merely maintaining it for future generations. that puts you in a more humble and less combative mindset.
The dictator could be benevolent - as is most, because it's the most beneficial to be one. However, there's no rules that says they must be. They could run it with an iron fist. The contributors do so knowing this - or at least, should have known this.
Look at wordpress's fiasco, for example.
You are under the illusion that the owner is doing the project for the betterment of the community. They _might_ be, but it's not a requirement.
I personally behave as if everyone is selfish, and will be out to screw you if given the opportunity and reason. Assume the worst and plan for that; if it turns out they are nice, then all the better.
It's dismissive because most of the requests open source developers get need to be dismissed.
"Where can I send some cash for your hard work" is much rarer than "Here's my very complex edge use case that I need to support ASAP, I think it's quite shameful you don't support this already must not take you more than 5 minutes, come on people do it already my clients are waiting".
It would be, if it were true. I'm not going to cast the entirety of a very large community in a single light, but there are great deal of people in the open source community who are afraid of money, or more specifically, that someone else might be making some, especially using open source code that they didn't personally hand write.
Another symptom is most projects don't have an easy way to donate money to them.
see, that's the problem, you immediately jump to a combative stance + assume the current maintainer is always right, which is exactly how the situations i presented happen in the first place
The current maintainer is always right by definition, has put in the hard work and is entitled to drag the project into whatever deranged fantasy they might have.
You just don't get a vote, there is no objective truth to settle disputes when it comes to someone else's work and projects. You can stop using the work or fork it, perhaps alongside other like minded users and contributors, crating a viable split.
Are competing search indexes (Bing, Ecosia/Qwant, etc) objectively worse in significant ways, or is Google just so entrenched that people don't want to "risk it" with another provider (and/or preferences and/or inertia).
I suppose I'm asking whether this is actually a _good thing_ in that it will stimulate competition in the space, or if it's just a case that Google's index is now too good for anyone to reasonably catch up at this point.
The beauty about Google Programmable Search across the entire web is that it's free and users can make money by linking it their Adsense account.
Bing charge per query for the average user. Ecosia and Qwant use Bing to power their results, probably under some type of license, which results in them paying much less per query than a normal user.
I can manage fine with other search indexes for English language searches; weather that is because others got better or google got worse i cannot tell, though I suspect the latter.
But for searching in more niche languages google is usually the only decent option and I have little hope that others will ever reach the scale where they could compete.
Bing's index is smaller than Google's, and anecdotally I get fewer relevant results when using it, particularly from sites like Reddit that have exclusive search deals with Google.
But now you've found it you pretty much have to remove it, which has significant quality of life implications.
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