The Confederates' common folks tried to burn the USA to the ground to save their inalienable right to own slaves.
Who will listen to the "perception and needs" of the racist, misogynistic common folks who want to impose their religious liberty (by banning abortion) and and elevate their financial situation (by pushing downward brown and black people)? (The GOP, that's who.)
And don't you tell me it's a minority, when less than a week after the Supreme Court made the VRA null in practice, half a dozen states are rushing to eliminate any black representation. The whole GOP in those states (who already found a way to practice slavery through their carceral system - yes, there are black people picking cotton under the guard of armed white people on horses right now, today) is unanimous in erasing any power from black people. It is their first and foremost priority right now, despite everything else going on.
> Confederates' common folks tried to burn the USA to the ground to save their inalienable right to own slaves
Something I learned at The Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston [1] is that Southern slaveowners were almost all terifically leveraged. Slaves were purchased predominantly with borrowed money (from, I might add, the North). And slaves were expensive, making up a significant if not dominating fraction of estates' assets.
For Southern elites, therefore, abolition was an existential question. It meant bankruptcy and poverty, with insult added to injury in their creditors being Northerners. To my knowledge (and I'm no expert in this) the question of abolition paired with debt forgiveness was never seriously discussed by the Union.
So yes, Confederate racism absolutely condemns its common folk. But even a moderately well-read Southern commoner would understand that abolition meant financial crisis, taking out their communities' largest tax payers, donors, consumers and employers in one swoop.
I didn't walk away from the Museum sympathetic to slavery. But I did become more sympathetic to the South; in particular, to their bewildering decisions to continue prosecuting a war they were so very obviously, from a history textbook's perspective, losing. (To be clear, slavery is wrong. The South seceding was stupid. Not suing for peace after Gettysburg and Vicksburg stupider still.)
We need to finish Reconstruction. That sounds idealistic, even pie in the sky unrealistic. But we could certainly measure progress in that direction: US incarceration rates are insanely high, and the prison industrial complex is modern slavery. We would know victory when we put fewer people in prison than China, for example.
That's not the only symptom, or the only measure of progress. But it would be a good start.
Are you equating sone teenage students shouting during a conference by some bozo on tour with every middle-aged political representatives from a single party rewriting the law to kneecap the fundamental civil rights of a third of their population?
The way "coal miners" are discussed would also likely be something that puzzles historians. There are approximately 45,000 coal miners in the US, that's roughly equivalent to the combined enrollment of Harvard and MIT. There are more university students in the relatively small city of Cambridge, Massachusetts than there are people mining coal in the US and yet we have to pretend the latter are a constituency worth considering.
But supporting industry of coal mining/coal power plants gets money to tilt or buy senators and their votes - college students are too sparsely distributed to have an equivalent effect in USA. It only took one senator to give us an completely unregulated supplements industry.
I feel like that's the big misunderstanding between working class libs & working class conservatives.
I'm (working class liberal who went to college) not the one oppressing you (working class conservative). We make basically the same money and hold the same power, lol.
Clever of the (actual) conservative elites (1%, billionaires) to shift the blame to the intellectual class, when we don't own shit. We just piss you (working class conservatives) off at Thanksgiving with "new ideas" so we're an easy target.
There is historical precedent for uprisings. Those are usually messy and do not tend to leave most people doing the uprising better off.
Much more precedent for new elites putting themselves into a position of power while purporting to be channeling a popular uprising on behalf and for the benefit of the "common folk", who again do not end up better off for it, often quite the opposite.
It's sad and frustrating to see this play out again and again. As you say, you don't need hindsight to see how it aligns with history.
Thanks! I kind of stole the concept from the Takedown.com site that was set up to document how Kevin Mitnick was caught. Looks like the telnet servers are up again: telnet://kevin-on-demand.takedown.com:4001/ is an example of the original that made me think “it sure would be cool to be able to make custom recordings like that and play them back, but over SSH instead of telnet because who even has telnet installed anymore?”
Ah I think you posted on HN before. Good to see you again. I haven't gotten around to testing smol yet but the DirtyFrag / CopyFail stuff peeked my interest in it again.
The author of FizzBee reached out to me about a year ago on LinkedIn actually, because I gave a talk on TLA+ a few years ago.
I haven't really played with it yet (outside of the few examples on their site) because I'm already pretty entrenched in the TLA+/PlusCal world, but it is very likely that FizzBee might be a better fit for software engineering circles; the incremental testing is pretty neat, to a point where I kind of want to steal the that and port it over to TLA+/TLC. Probabilistic testing seems pretty cool too.
If I were getting into Formal Methods today for the first time, I would almost certainly be using FizzBee and/or Alloy.
I have knowledge of FM primarily from HackerNews posts about it.
As someone lacking your academic background in it could you give me some advice on a good starting point, or perhaps papers/materials that are absolutely unskippable/foundational to understanding it, maybe a good learning exercise for utilizing FM?
I found this book to be fairly easy to read through, and gives you a rundown of a lot of the notation and concepts that pretty much all formal methods systems require.
I don't know what aspect of Formal Methods that you want to focus on; most of what I've done is with distributed systems stuff, but TLA+ can and has been used for low level things like circuit modeling. I can't tell you where to learn about that.
Both of those resources are more PlusCal focused. PlusCal is a C/Pascal-like language that compiles to "raw" TLA+. A lot of people like it more, I go back and forth.
If you care more about the more theoretical aspects of TLA+, Ron Pressler's "TLA+ in Practice and Theory" blog series is great: https://pron.github.io/tlaplus
If you go deep into that, I recommend looking at the extension "tock-CSP" that adds timing semantics.
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If you're interested in the most theoretical aspects of formal methods, the only one I've done with any kind of intimate detail is Isabelle.
Isabelle is much more of a "math proof" thing than a "computer science" proof thing, but there are plenty of computer science things for it too. If you want to get started with the Isabelle/HOL language, the Concrete Semantics book is the normal recommended starting point: http://concrete-semantics.org/
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This is mostly my history, there are many other paths but I can't really speak to those with any confidence. Hope this helped!
ETA:
Just to add, while I did go to school later for formal methods, I actually started learning this stuff while I was still a dropout from my undergrad. I eventually got my bachelors and masters and then entered a PhD program, but for TLA+ in particular I was learning it without any completed education, so this stuff is definitely approachable even without a ton of letters after your name.
I shared earlier in the thread about the learning app I'm working on. I already have a learning path created in it for Formal Methods. I will be taking each of your points and tracking my progress to completing them.
Just wanted you to know your effort won't be unappreciated.
I like your idea. I didn't have the time to fully build mine out but I also was hankering for something with better readability and implementation than SaltStack (server/client similar to Puppet).
Yes the pub/sub model gets way faster than the Ansible push model, especially at scale : When you start having a few hundreds of servers, you'll see that you just spend so much time waiting for the playbook to run.
It's also heavily bound to network connectivity, if your server your reaching has 100ms of latency, every time Ansible does something, you will feel those 100ms.
In the case of Peekl, it's easy : The server will read the content from the local disk (depending on what roles you have, your groups, and also load the variables.) And simply sends the "compiled catalog" to your agent who will go through all of it and performs actions as needed.
I had my problem in the calisthenic app space as well. Rowing, cycling, biking, calisthenics. Each sport has such specifics I wish there was an open standard on the data for better interop.
Yes, also happening more or less continually instead of waiting for the context to bloat up.
You also have some control over it. You can say something like "prune away the work we did on the UI. Make sure to remember that users can upload multiple images now"
I'd imagine every great(in scale/importance) uprising/political tumult had some aspect of "but they're ruining everything!"
Everything for intellectuals and people with ties to the system that was functioning for that minority.
Coal miners don't care that international students aren't coming to the US anymore. That's not an important factor for them.
Edit: My point here is that you don't need hindsight to see how this aligns with historic precedent.