What's colloquially called the Latin Mass is the Tridentine Mass, which among other things uses a different calendar, including different biblical readings each week (a smaller selection of biblical passages than the Novus Ordo uses). So it's not just a variation of the Novus Ordo, though the Novus Ordo could be performed in a way that satisfies the vast majority of traditional-minded parishioners. It's exasperating because certain ideologues behind the movement are elevating small changes into pseudo-doctrinal issues that have a tendency to lead to schism. The Orthodox churches have fractured over the centuries over calendar related issues, for example. It's fundamentally traditionalism for traditionalism's sake, which is a little ironic because in many respects the Novus Ordo reverts the mass to an older form more similar to the practices of the church over a millennia ago, as well as more similar in some respects to Orthodox masses.
If the Latin Mass advocates were serious, they'd engage with the Novus Ordo. For example, seek more uniformity--the Novus Ordo has too many optional variations, which means the mass might have different prayers in one geographic area than another, whereas the Tridentine Mass is more uniform. (See, e.g., https://lms.org.uk/missals) The fact they don't betrays some of the underlying motivations and dynamics.
Another aspect mostly unrelated to the mass itself was the Second Vatican Council deemphasisizing the role of clerics and religious--nuns, religious sisters, etc. That's a whole 'nother thing, but it's a significant factor behind the movement. It's far more understandable, but again can be addressed directly, without the subterfuge.
All institutional religions struggle with the tension between traditionalists and reformers; it's a form of politics. What has made the Roman Catholic church almost singularly unique has been it's ability to hold together so many people across diverse cultures and geographies. What's playing out now has played out many times before, though obviously the Roman Church has not always been successful at avoiding schism. Notably, though, it continues to keep in mind undoing previous schisms, and some choices made by the Second Vatican Council were focused on reconciliation, both with Protestant but also Orthodox churches. For example, the change in biblical readings seems to have been aimed at Protestantism--the readings in the US are coordinated through a group that includes representatives from, IIRC, Methodists and Episcopalians. Being less doctrinaire about some of the prayers in the Tridentine Mass was a way to affirm the validity of Orthodox rites.
It appears to take a folder of .opus music files and serve some kind of Opus live stream, and it is controllable via IRC (as in, you can tell it to queue or skip songs over IRC). Or at least that's my best guess based on the linked demo instance.
It would certainly benefit from a single line atop the README that clearly stated what this actually does. I certainly don't think of IRC when I think of Internet radio.
> I certainly don't think of IRC when I think of Internet radio.
Or you are certainly to young :)
Voting songs and the like on shoutcast/icecast stations via irc was not only common for gamers if my memory serves me well from the earliest 2000ths
Haha, I'm not too young for that, but I think that was a fairly fringe use case even then. Most people were never on IRC.
In the late 90s / early 2000s Internet radio would probably have made me think of RealPlayer, and shortly thereafter actual radio stations' own websites with embedded streams. Then I'd think of aggregators like the original iTunes, and now TuneIn.
> Something tells me you're not much of an ethicist.
Not at all.
Ethicists, in my experience, are hacks that cant actually do, but instead loudly pontificate and deride others who can. They basically run gish gallops and whataboutism to get the real creators to stop.
> "Who am I to refuse medical breakthroughs because they came from monstrous human experiments on prisoners of war? If it works it works!" /s
You can sarcasm-tag this all you want, but the medical experiments the Nazies did against Jews, Romani, Gay, mentally disabled, and others WERE used in this way for the US space and rocket initiatives and the creation of NASA. They were already dead, and the data collected. So yeah, we did use them. And we got further ahead by not having to run more experiments. And the data helped save our people.
Its not a great situation, sure. But whats done is done. No sense in whining and bemoaning "ethics" of corpses. Might as well get some good use out of their abject slaughter.
Russian is a nationality, not a race. You can say prejudiced, but not racist. In this case it's not even a person, but a product.
It's not prejudice when it's based on a post-facto assessment of the Russian government's mobilisation of their companies for obscene and evil goals like clamping down on free speech, persecuting LGBT people, or trying to destroy Ukraine.
"It's Russian and therefore it's out" is a valid stance in light of all the known consequences of using a Russian product. If Russian people do not like this, they are welcome to break their links to the Russian state by emigrating and founding companies elsewhere, or stay and overthrow their government. Either works for me.
Many Russians have learnt to keep quiet about politics so they can get ahead in Russia, and they seem to harbour some deep-seated delusion that everyone from abroad should play along with this for their own convenience and profit. They whisper 'no war' to one another, by which they mean Ukraine should surrender already, so that this whole unpleasantness (to them) blows over, and the rest of the world goes back to accepting their blood money. No.
Germany has been grappling with its own horrific genocide for a hundred years and still hasn't quite figured it out. Russia is, as of the time of writing, currently undertaking one. Come back in a hundred years, maybe we can talk about Russian products then.
Internal DEI initiatives are very helpful for an organisation trying to create a comprehensive knowledge base without falling to any group's bias. That requires diverse perspectives.
I don't care about internal DEI if the job is managing sewerage systems, but this is a perfect example of a context where fostering diverse engagement is both rational and improves the end product.
The perfect ought not be the enemy of the good - the question isn't whether Wikipedia has solved all prejudice, the question is whether it is doing better on that question than its peers. And I'd say it is, relatively speaking. I'm always happy for it to do better, though.
Spending money to get people into editing Wikipedia that would never otherwise have done so seems like a very worthy goal to me.
More broadly, I think it's "let's not hand over essential infrastructure to any foreign state". Friendly or not, it doesn't matter.
Private companies ought to have the freedom to do business with whomever they like, but for essential public services, better to assume essential public infrastructure simply must not be offshored at all.
I don't know about that. I don't think it'd have been a major issue in the country if it were a Belgian or German takeover. It may still not have been desirable, but I doubt the government would have stepped in like they did here.
Any question asked would be edited beyond recognition (and usually into brash rudeness). Half the answers were demanding ever increasing proof of work, and the other half told the OP that they shouldn't even be trying to do what they're doing. The only useful thing were opinion based posts from people with domain expertise, and SO kept trying to ban and remove those. It was the least helpful place online, but the most accessible, and it survived for lack of alternatives.
I'm no AI booster, but answering simple questions about well understood topics is a perfect fit for it. Good riddance to StackOverflow.
Yes. In the beginning they didn't ban opinion based posts (that's why you can still find some of them that were left up for "historical value").
I liked Joel on Software, I liked Coding Horror, and I liked the idea that two internet guys could just identify a problem like that, start a company and fix it.
There was a Goldilocks period of several years where contributing answers was fun. I joined in 2010 and was most active until about 2016. It felt good to help people and since it was in the open, it felt like a resume booster as well, like having an active GitHub profile.
Absolutely! It answered so many questions I had. I remember when it was relatively new, and I'd just heard about it, it profoundly changed how I found answers to programming questions. Suddenly I could find people having similar problems that I had, who had asked the question, and had actually gotten a useful answer from someone who knew!
It wasn't perfect, of course (nothing is), but it was orders of magnitude better sifting through crap blog posts and confusing reference material. (Not to mention sites like experts-exchange.)
Stack Overflow was a nice experience for me because I was able to hit 2k reputation fairly quickly, in just 30 days of posting and 6 weeks calendar time. That being said, it never had the community feel of places I spent during my formative years, which were more on forums and IRC.
Here's a conference talk I gave on how to gain Stack Overflow reputation from back in 2018, selected out of 5 submitted talks. It's amazing how fast times have changed from before, during, and now after.
I had a pretty good time asking a question about Prolog. It was a really interesting experience knowing that there's someone out there that high proficiency in a very niche language, patiently explaining to me an issue that they have probably heard a million times from yet another imperative programmer. They even have their own website advocating for Prolog, etc.
Now, I could imagine an LLM would be able to do the same. However, I understand that this is only possible because of people like them. I don't think the youngins that started with LLM directly would appreciate the humongous amount of data and discussions online that enables that. The internet is so much bigger than just Google, Facebook, Youtube and Twitter.
I did originally, when it collected a bunch of obscure knowledge and made it searchable and useful. It was fun and rewarding to put things you knew into the common knowledge pool, and everyone celebrated a successful competitor to Experts Exchange. The SO model had a few major flaws that became impossible to ignore after it was entrenched. First, the reward scheme rewards the exact opposite of what it should incentivise: common questions are hit by many users and therefore attract lots of upvotes while answering the really hard stuff often meant you didn't even get your answer marked as "accepted" (because the OP had given up and stopped checking the site). Second, the site deliberately cultivated an "editor caste" in the Wikipedia style before the failure modes of that model were well-known: well-intentioned newbies get shut down by miserable yet untouchable people who play (and sometimes help write) the site's rules. Third, the stated desire to identify canonical answers to questions had no clear way to handle the evolution of the software people were talking about. So you'd have highly upvoted answers that might have been referencing deprecated libraries, and it was very hard for the newer answer to gain traction via either internal or external search.
It was also unfortunately before the retro boom of the 2020s, so questions about older arcana were often vulnerable to being closed instead of answered.
It was good for finding answers. But as a community to actually participate it was horrible. You couldn't even answer questions, because if you didn't get enough likes they would block you from answering any more.
I was unable to post answers to the questions within my domain of knowledge, because I didn't post answers (and get likes) outside of my domain of knowledge.
There's a minimum threshold of likes ("reputation") necessary to post in many parts of that service.
No. No there's not. If you get lots of downvotes on answers you might get banned from answering further questions until you improve your reputation score, but there's nothing like what you describe.
I always thought it was a perfectly fine service for lookup. Asking a question though required a very specific confluence of circumstances to actually be a useful thing to do, so I only did that like 1-2 times in many years of reading it from google.
I thought StackOverflow was pretty great. This is an unpopular opinion but I think a lot of the questions that were closed really deserved to be closed. Otherwise it would have been a firehose of the same basic questions over and over again. For every person who posted a question and got mad that it was closed, there were probably 100 people who googled something and found a useful StackOverflow answer that was relevant and useful to them although they never posted their own question or even made an account on the site.
Yes. People forget it was a response to abominations such as Yahoo Answers, which quickly devolved into a cesspool of mouthbreathers, haha. Also expert-sexchange/quora which tried-to/often-did hide the answers.
Without its "tough love" Stack would have had a similar trajectory. Maybe a few policies here and there were problematic but overall it was and continues to be a huge benefit to the developer/IT community.
StackOverflow was great when I was a very junior dev working on JavaScript apps. Anytime I ran into a roadblock, there was often a relevant post there to help me. As I become more competent though, I realized that reading the documentation directly was usually a much better way to get answers to my questions, and I stopped visiting.
I was just thinking to my self the other day how it's nice I don't need to stop what I'm doing to make a question that's answerable by someone else. Ai can answer my question without me spending time recreating the problem and stripping out all of the irrelevant context
It was pretty dang useful when there was no alternative, and I’m sure that many people physically could not have performed their jobs without copy-pasting from it.
But yeah, I don’t know how anyone could have any affection or nostalgia for it, people were massive jerks and it was not a pleasant place.
I left it around 2014 and the graph does show that. I think what happened is that around d 2014, it gets so many people from search that it could simply abuse users left and right and still have tons of new questions everyday.
Yes, I liked it. When it debuted it was a massive improvement over expertsexchange, who had previously dominated the Google searches with bait and switch previews.
It may not have aged well but to say it was always crap is rewriting history.
I have found StackOverflow useful on rare occasion, but the friction, idiotic moderation culture, and high noise-to-signal ratio usually made it somewhere I didn't want to return to.
For me the main problem of SO isn't even the moderation or human interaction. Even if a question is answered successfully, the entries have a short shelf life because modern APIs move and break so quickly. For example, I tried learning Ansible only through books and SO, and it was just frustrating. ansible_sudo_pass was deprecated for ansible_become_pass, but there are still many books and SO questions that still reference ansible_sudo_pass.
In the Good Old Days (or my rose-tinted memories of them), Java/C books and answers will always work even if it's not idiomatic, and JS/Python material might break once in a decade over a major migration like Python 2 to 3. Now I look at Ansible or Zig, copy a simple toy program from SO or GH, and just find that it doesn't work, because `sudo` became `become` and `fs` became `io`. There is simply no way for books or SO to keep up.
Java and C are older languages which have either solidified (C) or are very careful about breaking compat (Java). Most languages nowadays are indeed in the "move fast and break things" mode.
Perhaps it would help if stdlibs were be versioned, with the chosen version declared in the project file. For existing languages, a lack of version would simply indicate the original stdlib, meaning nothing should break.
I definitely don't think stdlibs should be changed often, but it seems fairly damaging to a language when things may be added to a stdlib but never removed, no matter how broken or misconceived (see C++).
Rust is a great language, but the poor stdlib + overreliance on crates + explosion of unvetted transient dependencies makes it a hard sell for a lot of projects.
It's not. The US green card process takes years, and being forced to be outside the country while the process is ongoing makes it very hard to continue working for a US employer, which is how most people are actually sponsored for a GC in the first place.
If you're looking for some objective rationale for this change, you're not going to find one. This is simply designed to make GCs much, much harder to get and dissuade prospective immigrants. That's the only goal.
I think others are saying you just need to apply outside the country but you can return while the process is ongoing. So it seems to be some kind of clerical thing.
It's been interesting seeing the retrospective flattening of computer history. I suppose it's inevitable over time. I wonder how bad it will get.
"In the 1990s, 'hackers' would 'dial up' their flip phones to local BBSes (called 'phreaking'), where they played and exchanged small Flash games (the 'demo scene')." /s
(Genuine question, I'm sure I lack all context.)
reply