That's assuming that the population has any power, which in pretty much all countries in the world is not true. "Democracy" isn't just a value to behold, if the population has no power, it has no power and a country can't be called as such out of nowhere. Now, the people might have no actual power, but it's in their hands to get it.
True, there is usually the caveat of the electoral college and gerrymandering. That can excuse the impotence of Congress, but Trump won the popular vote. By any measure, it is a democratic result.
> Western-style billionaires do the former, as their wealth is created by providing services to people
I'm sorry but this is just not based on reality. Wealth has always been formed by taking away from those who produce value. No one asked for 1000 new phone models every year, no one asked for 1000 new car models every year, no one asked for a million new kind of clothes every year. Services aren't provided, they are forced on people who just are not allowed to function without them and must work with and in those services, while billionaires don't produce anything, don't do anything yet get all the money.
I'm sorry but this is just too naive. There is no honesty in most people working for a wage that is barely enough to survive, while capital owners don't actually do anything and still receive an inconsiderate amount of money. There is no trading here, just a good old theft of all the produced value with just enough redistribution to buy back the stolen value. No billionaire ever became billionaire by trading anything only by stealing other's work.
What are we doing here? Are you going around calling people naive for not believing in Marxian economics? None of what you describe applies broadly to today's diverse forms of wealths. Your Germinal view of capitalism is not a groundbreaking discovery, if I may.
> No one asked for 1000 new phone models every year, no one asked for 1000 new car models every year, no one asked for a million new kind of clothes every year.
I'm pretty sure that, except a few off-the-grid hermits, everyone, including the fancy communists at an indie café, is constantly asking for a million new kind of clothes. Denying this reality (and other unpleasant ones?) is perhaps what leads you to untrue conclusions.
> Ahead of the International Women's Day, a UNESCO study revealed worrying tendencies in Large Language models (LLM) to produce gender bias, as well as homophobia and racial stereotyping. Women were described as working in domestic roles far more often than men ¬– four times as often by one model – and were frequently associated with words like “home”, “family” and “children”, while male names were linked to “business”, “executive”, “salary”, and “career”.
> Our analysis proves that bias in LLMs is not an unintended flaw but a systematic result of their rational processing, which tends to preserve and amplify existing societal biases encoded in training data. Drawing on existentialist theory, we argue that LLM-generated bias reflects entrenched societal structures and highlights the limitations of purely technical debiasing methods.
> We find that the portrayals generated
by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 contain higher rates
of racial stereotypes than human-written por-
trayals using the same prompts. The words
distinguishing personas of marked (non-white,
non-male) groups reflect patterns of othering
and exoticizing these demographics. An inter-
sectional lens further reveals tropes that domi-
nate portrayals of marginalized groups, such as
tropicalism and the hypersexualization of mi-
noritized women. These representational harms
have concerning implications for downstream
applications like story generation.
The question is whether these LLM summaries disproportionately "impact" women, not whether LLMs describe women as more often working in domestic roles.
The internet and the web were, and still are, made by and for white rich men. It's not about who can be a prick, everyone can. It's about what the ecosystem pushes towards, and it's not the safety and general good life of women, black people, handicapped people, etc...
I disagree that it's bad, it's a choice. You can't protect against everything. The team made calculations and decided that the cost to protect against this very low probability is not worth it. If all the nodes lose power you may have a bigger problem than that
It's downright stupid if you build a system that loses all existing data when all nodes go down uncleanly, not even simultaneously but just overlapping. What if you just happen to input a shutdown command the wrong way?
I really hope they meant to just say the write buffer gets lost.
That's why you need to go to other regions, not remain in the same area. Putting all your eggs in one basket (single area) _is_ stupid. Having a single shutdown command for the whole cluster _is_ stupid. Still accepting writes when the system is in a degraded state _is_ stupid. Don't make it sound worse than it actually is just to prove your point.
> Still accepting writes when the system is in a degraded state _is_ stupid.
Again, I'm not concerned for new writes, I'm concerned for all existing data from the previous months and years.
And getting in this situation only takes one out of a wide outage or a bad push that takes down the cluster. Even if that's stupid, it's a common enough stupid that you should never risk your data on the certainty you won't make that mistake.
You can't protect against everything, but you should definitely protect against unclean shutdown.
If it's a common enough occurrence to have _all_ your nodes down at the same time maybe you should reevaluate your deployment choices. The whole point of multi-nodes clustering is that _some_ of the nodes will always be up and running otherwise what you're doing is useless.
Also, garage gives you the possibility to automatically snapshot the metadata, advices on how to do the snapshotting at the filesystem level and to restore that.
All nodes going down doesn't have to be common to make that much data loss a terrible design. It just has to be reasonably possible. And it is. Thinking your nodes will never go down together is hubris. Admitting the risk is being realistic, not something that makes the system useless.
How do filesystem level snapshots work if nodes might get corrupted by power loss? Booting from a snapshot looks exactly the same to a node as booting from a power loss event. Are you implying that it does always recover from power loss and you're defending a flaw it doesn't even have?
I don't understand this article and It's like the author doesn't really know what they're talking about. They don't want eventual consistency, they want read-your-writes, a consistency level that's stronger than EC yet still not strong.
Read-your-writes is indeed useful because it makes code easier to write: every process can behave as if it was the only one in the world, devs can write synchronous code, that's great ! But you don't need strong consistency.
I hope developers learn a little bit more about the domain before going to strong consistency.
I am not an expert, but from the examples in the article I think the author is looking for a bit more than read-your-writes.
E.g. They mention reading a list of attachements and want to ensure they get all currently created attachements, which includes the ones created by other processes.
So they want to have "read-all-writes" or something like that.
Read-your-writes is a client guarantee, that requires stickiness (i.e. a definition of “your”) to be meaningful. It’s not a level of consistency I love, because it raises all kinds of edge-case questions. For example, if I have to reconnect, am I still the same “your”? This isn’t even the some rare edge case! If I’m automating around a CLI, for example, how is the server meant to know that the next CLI invocation from the same script (a different process) is the same “your”? Sure, I can fix that with some kind of token, but then I’ve made the API more complicated.
Linearizability, as a global guarantee, is much nicer because it avoids all those edge cases.
> When you run a business, you can’t realistically perform background checks on every partner or contributor
You can, and that depends on whether you want to or not. No one forces you to run a business. You're not absolved of the chore of having a look at your supply chain just because you're disinterested in it
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