The mistake that a lot of people make is that they think science is all about proving things.
In actuality, science done right is all about disproving things.
You can spend a lifetime tracking down all the white swans to “prove” that “all swans are white”, but you need to find only one black swan - as the British did when they reached Australia - to disprove that hypothesis.
Science is about disproving things, as it is by far the easier path - and frequently, the only possible path - to take. And by disproving things, we push back the darkness more and more, until what little remains must contain the truth.
And when science “changes it’s mind”, it’s simply science obtaining more data that points better towards that truth, more of the darkness has been pushed back and the old position was eliminated by the new evidence.
> Calhoun’s big takeaway involved status. Again, the males who lost the fights for dominance couldn’t leave to start over elsewhere. As he saw it, they were stuck in pathetic, humiliating roles and lacked a meaningful place in society.
Sounds like most younger modern men that reached adulthood in the last 20-30 years: forced by women to uphold all the patriarchal requirements that benefit women - breadwinner, good career, good social status, pay for everything, take all the physical and emotional risks, etc. - yet are increasingly denied the very tools needed to achieve these goals… instead, they are faced with a myriad of barriers that they cannot control and are not permitted to object to, such as preferential education support for women, preferential hiring of women, preferential career advancement for women, disrespected status in society, becoming the default “villain” for anything that nerfs a woman, etc..
Not only does this underlie the societal conditions that many researchers are saying gives rise to 1ncels, but this is also the very reasoning why many men are giving up and “going their own way” -- they are being crushed between a rock and a hard place, and are being simultaneously punished for failing to perform while being forcibly denied the very tools needed to achieve said performance. So they reject it all as an impossible task that is maliciously anti-male and directly harmful to their own physical health and mental health. They turn away from society and women’s demands of men to focus on what truly matters: themselves.
These MGTOW become “the beautiful ones”, rejecting female entanglements and (frequently even) sex in order to properly take care of themselves in a society that actively hates them for the gender that they were born with.
There are only three major features (aside from things like syntax highlighting and indent guides) that make me reach for an IDE:
1. Intellisense
2. Linters
3. Code analysis
All three of which help me improve my own skills, as I don’t just use them blindly. I consciously analyze why they were triggered so as to determine if their suggestions are valid in that use case, and to become familiar with what they are suggesting to remember it in the future.
It’s not that I hate steep learning curves. I just don’t like counterproductively difficult steep learning curves. Send me up the side of a metaphorical mountain, and I will be fine with that so long as I have the metaphorical ropes and carabiners and pitons and a harness and all the basic safety gear with which to gain experience with climbing rock faces. Imma not gonna free solo a cliff face the first time I go rock climbing.
Honestly, if something a lot simpler like Notepad++ came with these three tools, I would be very happy.
Not just an insect apocalypse, but a parallel bird apocalypse, a collapse of fisheries around the world, and finally global-scale climate change happening 10,000× faster than any prior historical shift, leaving ecosystems unable to migrate or adapt in time in order to survive.
We need renewables, yes, but we also need an almost-zero-pollutant power source that can be ramped up and down as needed when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
And yes, modern non-breeder reactors produce very little significantly radioactive waste. That even trends to zero when you recycle those leftovers through Thorium reactors - the waste from those reactors is only mildly radioactive for a few hundred years.
Let’s have solar and wind and hydro (where possible) first, sure, but an extensive network of nuclear power plants must be our well-implemented backup plan.
> If you need to install stalkerware on your partner’s device, just start the divorce process already.
This assumes good faith, and often that doesn’t reflect reality. I’ve helped a disturbing number of friends clean up their devices and accounts to free them from abusive partners whom they are already divorcing. Often these stalkerware apps are just one component of a web/pattern of behaviors which include every kind of stalking, property vandalism, and violence that you’d imagine.
Sometimes any phone record of them contacting me leads stalkers/harassers to start targeting me as well - these people often don’t limit the scope of their abuse.
People founding and working for stalkerware companies and other gray hat / blackhat enterprises seem to be willing to turn a blind eye to the widespread harm that their products and work facilitate - they are only focused on the income it generates. It’s a major reason I include pointed ethical questions about candidates work in our hiring pipeline; we work with sensitive data and there’s no room for people who don’t genuinely care about those who suffer the consequences.
> This assumes good faith, and often that doesn’t reflect reality. I’ve helped a disturbing number of friends clean up their devices and accounts to free them from abusive partners whom they are already divorcing.
You completely misread my statement.
I wasn’t talking to the victims, I was talking to the perps.
If you, as a suspicious person, is thinking about USING stalkerware, you have already lost the moral and ethical position and should bow out of the relationship. Failure to do so makes you a colossal arsehole and an abject failure of a person where healthy relationships are concerned.
About the only legitimate use case I could possibly think of is if the VICTIM of abuse used the software against their abuser to accumulate evidence of non-physical (texting, phoning, online stalking, etc.) abuse. And even this is thin ground, as IIRC most courts would not accept that data as evidence as it constitutes a crime in many jurisdictions.
It’s a bizarre statement, because anyone who is an abusive POS is definitely not going to care.
Because they are an abusive POS.
Any shits they give about moral high ground are purely performative, and were long before now - or they wouldn’t be an abusive POS.
It’s like saying ‘if you’re considering the best way to rob a bank, you’re already a bad person and should just stop.’.
Do you think anyone, ever, in the history of people like this would do that? Barring some random conversion to religion or whatever anyway.
It isn’t even preaching to the choir! It’s like, I don’t know, preaching in a brothel? Or at a crime scene? But more hopeless?
Also, evidence gathered by a private party in commission of a crime is almost always acceptable as evidence everywhere, albeit with the caveat that the person responsible may well be prosecuted for that crime. The evidence would just be used in both court cases.
The police (in some jurisdictions like the US) are the only ones typically restricted this way.
Example - burglar breaks into house, finds dead bodies. Tips the cops off. They aren’t going to just throw up their hands and say ‘nothing we can do about it!’ because the guy didn’t have a key.
And if the burglar saw someone run out, they’ll use the burglar to help identify the suspect too.
Albeit with the caveat they’ll of course investigate the burglar too, probably arrest him, and he’s definitely going to be raked over the coals by the defense. Since nothing says ‘impeachable witness’ like a known felon.
I read it correctly - I just wanted to allude to the fact that your advice to them was super incongruent with their psychology. These people are compelled to control their family members.
You’re right that they should bow out of any relationships, but it’s like trying to tell a bear not to eat meat. They don’t need to do it to survive, but their compulsion to do so cannot be overridden.
It’s quite right to frame it as a matter of psychology and controlling impulse. That’s exactly what it is.
In one respect this isn’t something that can be reasoned with. Not that change is necessarily impossible for all, but in these situations change isn’t likely, and relapsing to controlling behavior is common, as is escalation.
People on the other side of this abuse are best served by plotting a thoughtful (and assisted if possible) exit strategy for themselves and those that rely on them (children, pets, etc). Although where others are involved, taking legal advice is a very good idea.
This can be much different from the insecure and spy-minded snooping significant other who occasionally looks through their SO’s texts surreptitiously. Although I have a problem with that too, installing surveillance is absolutely next level.
Something along the lines of the third is really the only legitimate reason I can think of something like this.
Regarding a partner. Yeah that’s a clear problem with the relationship and it’s likely time to end it.
Regarding parents. I will never understand parents thinking that they somehow deserve to know every single thing their child is doing and saying beyond basic parental controls.
Kids should have a right to privacy so they can discover themselves and not feel like there is someone watching over their shoulder all the time.
This assumes that there isn’t something like someone’s parents kicking them out because they are gay.
I am forever grateful that the one time my mom considered software like this, she was easily talked out of it.
> I will never understand parents thinking that they somehow deserve to know every single thing their child is doing and saying beyond basic parental controls.
Parents have a responsibility to parent: at minimum, making sure that their child doesn't get into anything truly dangerous, exploitative, or criminal. This is easy to do in physical reality but quite difficult to do for online activities unless you are literally watching over the kid's shoulder. So I can easily see why a well-meaning and worried parent would be tempted to install some sort of spyware.
I can appreciate that there are some well intentioned parents looking at tools like this, however there is a massive amount of difference between built in parental control tools and tools like this one that (seemingly) gives complete access to everything.
A parent does not need to be able to read every message sent, every email, every photo, etc etc. You cannot convince me otherwise. Just like any sane parent would not put a wire on their kid so they can hear every conversation they have in person. I am sorry but when I hear a parent say "well I bought the device" or some stupid argument like that, well I hope you enjoy our kid not talking to you once they are an adult or always having an "at arms length" relationship.
Instead of taking a heavy hand and invading their child's privacy why not instead focus on education. Expose them to the dangerous parts of the internet and have conversations about it. Make your kid feel safe enough that when something does feel wrong, they can come to you without risk of judgement or punishment.
While I can agree that there are some well intentioned parents that may use a tool like this, it is the lazy option that will do more harm than good.
> A parent does not need to be able to read every message sent, every email, every photo, etc etc.
Sure - but a parent needs to be able to know the content of some non-zero fraction of the messages. (Just as in physical reality, a parent can get some gist of a child's conversations when within hearing range.) And even more important than the content, the parent wants be able to see who is sending the messages. A traditional sort of parental control which blocks "adult" (in reality - sometimes educationally useful) sites at the domain level is entirely useless for tackling the problem of creeps, crooks, and crazies sending your kid DMs in supposedly kid-appropriate games and apps.
As a software and web developer, I frequently need to keep my eye on several things at once, including the code, reference documentation and research, diffs, database tables/structure, you name it.
Four primary monitors in a row are ideal for me: two natively-vertical monitors (1536×2048) in the middle (yes, these do exist for medical applications, the trick is in finding them in colour and not B&W), and two landscape monitors (1920×1200) in the wings.
My fifth and sixth monitors are up above the first four, and are for less-frequent data that might need occasional but immediate referencing. I use those for long-running dashboards and such.
Now granted, if I was doing a lot simpler of a job - data entry or other office work - then sure. I could probably run with just two monitors or even one. Alt+tab isn’t frustrating if you only ever switch between two or three applications all day long. But for what I do? Naw, dog. I consider four to be the functional minimum.
I guess my only issue is that I frequently lose my mouse across all those screens, and my Kensington Expert Mouse is getting so old that it frequently sends the cursor skittering off in random directions even when the trackball hasn’t been touched. PowerToys has this awesome tool where the cursor can be highlighted with a CTRL double-tap, I only wish I could set it to activate whenever the cursor is physically moving, no keyboard press needed.
In actuality, science done right is all about disproving things.
You can spend a lifetime tracking down all the white swans to “prove” that “all swans are white”, but you need to find only one black swan - as the British did when they reached Australia - to disprove that hypothesis.
Science is about disproving things, as it is by far the easier path - and frequently, the only possible path - to take. And by disproving things, we push back the darkness more and more, until what little remains must contain the truth.
And when science “changes it’s mind”, it’s simply science obtaining more data that points better towards that truth, more of the darkness has been pushed back and the old position was eliminated by the new evidence.