The comment section here is an incredibly disturbing read, as to how many people are trying to justify this on-site extra-judicial execution. Let me start by saying that all this debate itself is meaningless to start with. No police or law and order agency is supposed to execute a civilian under these circumstances in any country. That should instantly be taken as a murder by an official empowered to prevent exactly that. As far as I understand, ICE is not even a law and order agency and has even less authority to do so.
The woman was occupying just one lane, which means there is no merit to the claim that she was obstructing them. And then no matter what she did next, the masked agents just walk up to her vehicle and try to pry open her door and pull her out. That is not what the police do. That's what the mafia does. Anybody facing such a harrowing situation is likely to panic and try to get away. A real officer would know that and won't shoot a panicked and unarmed person who has her hands on the wheel. Nothing about the circumstances suggest a regular confrontation with a law and order agency. It's a terror campaign. The people arguing the self-defense claim based on some flaky technicalities are psychopaths who lack any respect for human lives.
Whenever I mention Nazism in here to make a serious point, I get downvoted based on some unexplained moral outrage. It's either because 'it's so disturbing' or because people don't like the comparison with the worst that humanity has produced, or because I'm 'cheapening' (trivializing) the Holocaust and insulting its victims! Lame in my opinion, because there is no worse insult to its victims than to just let the horrors repeat!
Well, these outraged people can just stay outraged all they want, because I'm going say this in no uncertain terms. The US and HN has a real Nazi problem - at least in ideology, if not outright in spirit. And another Holocaust is not entirely out of the question either, because back in the past too, it wasn't that well known in public even among the German citizens until the allied forces overran the concentration camps. Who knows what is going on in the shadows right now, when so many people are comfortable with justifying murder, racism, invasions and imperialism?
You're too pretentious if you think that the horrors of the past can't repeat, because history sets precedents and shifts the Overton window. I know that HN is primarily a technical forum. But I seriously don't care if I lose my entire HN score for this, because what is the point of having any technology if it is to live like slaves under tyranny? This is one matter that well worth saying out loud, no matter how unpopular it is or how disturbing a suggestion it is.
Now let's look at the atrocities that ICE has committed so far. Intimidation/terrorizing, destruction of property, attacks on local law enforcement, kidnappings, child abuse, racial discrimination, denial of justice/due process, illegal warrantless arrests and detention, inciting riots, armed attacks on unarmed civilian protestors, attack on media personnel, attack on elected representatives (the last three constituting attack on democracy), human trafficking, torture and murder. It pretty much ticks all the agenda that the Gestapo used to have. Does Nazism sound all that improbable now? Governments around the world should be classifying ICE as a state-funded terrorist organization right now and sanctioning its leaders and members. They should be arrested and tried at Hague or Nuremberg if they step outside the US.
I'm deeply disturbed by how fast we forget the fragility and preciousness of human lives. And the worst is that we have historical examples showing us what will happen. And yet, we relentlessly justify their replay unconcerned?
I'm curious how this seed/hash/prompt of an idea relates to ladders of abstraction?
Consider "Uber, but for X"
This wasn't a thing you could deploy as a term pre-Uber.
I'm not sure what this means for your analogy, but it does seem important. Somehow branding an idea reifies a ... callable function in? ???
Maybe something like (just spitballing)
The specification-length needed for a given idea isn't fixed - it's relative to available conceptual vocabulary. And that vocabulary expands through the work of instantiation and naming things?
Which maybe complicates the value story... terseness isn't intrinsic to the idea, it's earned by prior reification work?
Hmm
Basically it seems that "Like Tinder but" is doing a lot of lifting there... and as new patterns get named, the recombination space just keeps expanding?
This technology should be liberatory, and allow us all to work less while enjoying the same standard of living. We've all contributed in its development by creating the whole corpus of the internet, without which it could never have been bootstrapped.
The only reason we can't expect this is that we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital, and have been convinced that this is an immutable state of affairs or that our own personal advantage can be found in making a Faustian bargain with it.
Early on in my career I couldn't understand why it was always the worst and most incompetent people who got promoted.
Then I realized that it's not their incompetence that gets them promoted per se, it's that if they're employed while being utterly useless and incompetent they have SOMETHING else going on that keeps them employed.
And it's that something else (whether that is politics, brown nosing, nepotism, bullying) that also gets them promoted.
* Doing flashy work, whatever that means in a given situation
What I have seen lead to failure or, at best, being undervalued and ignored:
* Caring about teammates and your future self
* Caring about the end user and the business itself, when it conflicts with something sales, marketing, or a PM want
* Creating resilient, well-engineered systems
It's the same problem as anywhere else. Well-crafted systems are invisible and taken for granted. Saving the day by putting out a fire is applauded, even when you're the one who laid out the kindling and matches. Managers at all levels care about their own ego more than the company, product, or team.
Maybe I just spent too much time with ex-Microsoft hacks.
Creator here. This started as a dumb question while using Claude Code: "Why is Claude writing TypeScript I'm supposed to read?"
40% of code is now machine-written. That number's only going up. So I spent some weekends asking: what would an intermediate language look like if we stopped pretending humans are the authors?
NERD is the experiment.
Bootstrap compiler works, compiles to native via LLVM. It's rough, probably wrong in interesting ways, but it runs.
Could be a terrible idea. Could be onto something. Either way, it was a fun rabbit hole.
Research on calculator use in early math education (notably the Hembree & Dessart meta-analysis of 79 studies) found that students given calculators performed better at math - including on paper-and-pencil tests without calculators. The hypothesis is that calculators handle computation, freeing cognitive bandwidth and time for problem-solving and conceptual understanding. Problem solving and higher level concepts matter far more than memorizing multiplication and division tables.
I think about this often when discussing AI adoption with people. It's also relevant to this VS Code discussion which is tangential to the broader AI assisted development discussion. This post conflates tool proficiency with understanding. You can deeply understand Git's DAG model while never typing git reflog. Conversely, you can memorize every terminal command and still design terrible systems.
The scarce resource for most developers isn't "knows terminal commands" - it's "can reason about complex systems under uncertainty." If a tool frees up bandwidth for that, that's a net win. Not to throw shade at hyper efficient terminal users, I live in the terminal and recommend it, but it isn't going to make you a better programmer just by using it instead of an IDE for writing code. It isn't reasoning and understanding about complex systems that you gain from living in a terminal. You gain efficiency, flexibility, and nerd cred - all valuable, but none of them are systems thinking.
The auto-complete point in the post is particularly ironic given how critical it is for terminal users and that most vim users also rely heavily on auto-complete. Auto-complete does not limit your effectiveness, it's provably the opposite.
It's pretty obvious how an insufficiently cynical person could end up badly off - they could send all that money to that deposed prince in Nigeria, or whatever.
But the right optimism in the right situation can really pay off. Imagine you're pitching your non-technical carmaker CEO on a proposal to make a new pickup truck, and the CEO asks if you can make the entire thing with 0.1mm accuracy.
If you say "Yes sir, in fact many parts will be even more accurate than that" your project gets funded.
If you say "No, thermal expansion alone makes that impossible, it's also unnecessary" you're gambling on him respecting your straight-talking and technical chops.
> For example, writing more vanilla JS instead of React, you're just reinventing the necessary abstractions more verbosely and with a higher risk of duplicate code or mismatching abstractions.
Right, but I'm also getting pages that load faster and don't require a build step, making them more convenient to hack on. I'm enjoying that trade-off a lot.
Maybe think for a second from the perspective of a couple or woman who WANT to have children. The problems they face in today's economy where both people need to work full-time just to survive are huge, and it seems even crazier to add the time and money costs of a child, let alone several.
The way to change all of that has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with economic and labor policy
Society decided it was OK to have the top 1% control 27% or all wealth and the top 10% control 60%, and allow companies to pay wages so low that a person working full-time cannot even get out of poverty, so 25%+ of the workers at the largest employer qualify for food benefits (and the employer even gives employees seminars how to get benefits), while the leaders/owners of those companies rake in more billions every year.
Society decided it was OK to make sure health care is expensive, incomplete, and bankrupting for any unexpected event.
Society decided it was the mothers who are responsible for all childcare and provide only minimum assistance for critical needs like prenatal care, and day-care.
You want more babies? Make just a few changes
Change requirements so corporations are required to compensate their employees merely the way the original US minimum wage was specified (including in the 1956 Republican Party Platform): So a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four including housing (mortgage/rent), food, healthcare, and education. Recognize that the companies trying to exploit their workers by paying less so their full-time employees need govt benefits to feed themselves are the ones exploiting welfare, and do not have a viable business model, they have an exploitation model.
Add making healthcare sufficient and affordable for all, including children and support for daycare and the time and effort to raise children.
Change those things, and instead of a couple looking at making an already hugely insecure future even more insecure by having children, they would see an opportunity to confidently embark on building a family without feeling like one misfortune or layoff could put them all in the street.
It has roots going all the way back to the founding of the country. The core of American culture and of many of its issues has always been the tension between the conflicting desires for a Puritan theocracy with a strict racial hierarchy and a secular progressive Republic.
Slavery was justified by Christian principles, and manifest destiny. Hitler was inspired by America's genocide of native Americans, racial segregation and eugenics (all of which were justified by Christianity.) And after the war, the US carried the torch of Nazism's racist ideas after the rest of the world tried to move beyond it.
Many conservative ideals are backed by Christian belief. They hate feminism because it undermines the tradition Christian ideal of gender hierarchy. They hate homosexuality because they believe the Bible says it's a sin. They hate communists because communism is atheist. And most of all they believe the US was founded as an explicitly Christian nation and should be governed only by Christian principles.
9/11 happens and Bush declares a new "Crusade" against the evildoers. That language wasn't accidental. The connections between the American military industrial complex and Evangelical Christianity run deep.
And now we have Trump, whom a significant number of Americans believe to have literally been sent by God to wage spiritual warfare against demonic forces within the government, citing Christianity explicitly as justification for his militarism.
And it's absolutely not a coincidence that we reached this inflection point and acceleration after electing a Black president. That broke America in ways that I don't think that it can ever recover from. It certainly isn't a flavor of the month. If anything it's the only truly unifying ideology America has ever had.
I think you're correct that religion can be used as a tool by the powerful, but the typical cynical assumption that no one in power actually believes any of it is I think a mistake. Maybe not Trump, I suspect he's too much of a narcissist to believe in anything but himself and is an example of what you're referring to, but I think the people around him whispering in his ear and many of his supporters are true believers.
I actually agree there's an issue here. I feel we've been dumbing down interfaces so much, to the extent that people who in previous generations would barely write and who wouldn't affect anyone outside their close friends and family, now having their voice algorithmically amplified to millions. And given that the algorithms care only about engagement, rather than eloquence (let alone veracity), these people end up believing that their thoughts are as valid regardless of substance, and that there's nothing they could gain by learning numeracy.
EDIT: It's not a new issue, and Asimov phrased it well back in 1980, but I feel it got much worse.
> Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'.
I truly don’t understand this tendency among tech workers.
We were contributing to natural resource destruction in exchange for salary and GDP growth before GenAI, and we’re doing the same after. The idea that this has somehow 10x’d resource consumption or emissions or anything is incorrect. Every single work trip that requires you to get on a plane is many orders of magnitude more harmful.
We’ve been compromising on those morals for our whole career. The needle moved just a little bit, and suddenly everyone’s harm thresholds have been crossed?
They expect you to use GenAI just like they expected accountants to learn Excel when it came out. This is the job, it has always been the job.
I’m not an AI apologist. I avoid it for many things. I just find this sudden moral outrage by tech workers to be quite intellectually lazy and revisionist about what it is we were all doing just a few years ago.
Plants don't "want" or "think" or "feel" but we still use those words to describe the very real motivations that drive the plant's behavior and growth.
Criticizing anthropomorphic language is lazy, unconsidered, and juvenile. You can't string together a legitimate complaint so you're just picking at the top level 'easy' feature to sound important and informed.
Everybody knows LLMs are not alive and don't think, feel, want. You have not made a grand discovery that recontextualuzes all of human experience. You're pointing at a conversation everyone else has had a million times and feeling important about it.
We use this kind of language as a shorthand because talking about inherent motivations and activation parameters is incredibly clunky and obnoxious in everyday conversation.
The question isn't why people think software has agency (they don't) but why you think everyone else is so much dumber than you that they believe software is actually alive. You should reflect on that question.
This is a purity test that cannot be passed. Give me your career history and I’ll tell you why you aren’t allowed to make any moral judgments on anything as well.
As this gets more common, I think it will eventually lead to startups having a hard time attracting talent with lucrative equity compensation. It will be interesting to see how long it takes until this catches on among employees, but I already wouldn't take any positions in startups with a significant payment in equity anymore. The chances are slim that this pays out anyways, but now even when you are successful, noone will stop some megacorp from just buying the product and key employees and leaving everyone else with their stake in the dust.
What's free market about total state regulatory capture, calling the President when your bids get rejected, or setting up wars and domestic police actions to enrich yourself with contracts using taxpayer funds?
There are legitimate criticisms of a pure free market, but this is "state capitalism" not a free market.
The Trump administration is absolutely not pro free market. They're putting fingers on the scale all over the place, taking Federal positions in private companies, taking literal bribes for regulatory favors, influencing the selection of executives and board members, and using the power of the state to attack privately owned companies for platforming speech they don't like (like this 60 Minutes segment, made by a private company). Trump/MAGA looks a lot more like the CCP than anything else.
Of course if you pay attention to the discourse, MAGA and national conservatism are an explicit repudiation of Reagan/Clinton "neoliberalism" and "libertarian conservatism." They explicitly support a large administrative state that centrally plans the economy and culture, just one they run and use to push right wing and nationalist agendas.
I remember saying back during the Bush years: if the right is forced to choose between liberty and cultural conservatism, they will throw out liberty. The right only supports the freedom to do what they think people should be doing. (Yes, there are similar attitudes in some parts of the left too. There are not many principled defenders of individual liberty.)
Edit: I'm really just arguing that we should call things what they are. Calling MAGA's CCP-like state capitalism a free market is like calling Bernie Sanders or Mamdani communism (they're socialists, not communists, these are not the same) or calling old school conservative republicans fascists. Words mean things.
I've never liked the argument that there's some imaginary line between the acceptibility of AI as a tool for creating art and Photoshop/Krita/Procreate/etc as a tool for creating art.
Rubbing a brush on a canvas was good enough for the renaissance masters, why are we collectively okay with modern "artists" using "virtual brushes" and trivializations of the expressive experience like "undo" when it's not "real art" because they're leaning so heavily on the uncaring unthinking machine and the convenience in creation it offers rather than suffering through the human limitations that the old masters did? Are photographers not artists too then, because they're not actually creating, just instead capturing a view of what's already there?
The usual response to this is some trite response about how AI is 'different' because you're 'just' throwing prompts at it and its completely creating the output itself -- as if it's inconceivable that there might be someone who doesn't just shovel out raw outputs from an AI and call it 'art' and is instead actually using it in a contributatory role on a larger composition that they, themselves, as a human, are driving and making artistic decisions on.
E33 is a perfect example here. Is the artistic merit of the overall work lessened by it having used AI in part of its creation? Does anyone really, truly believe that they abdicated their vision on the overall work to machines?
Just because someone can drag and drop to draw a circle in an image editing app instead of using their own talent and ability to freehand it instead doesn't mean what they then go on to do with that circle isn't artistic.
Copying a style isn’t theft, full stop. You can’t copyright style. As an individual, you wouldn’t be liable for producing a work of art that is similar in style to someone else’s, and there is an enormous number of artists today whose livelihood would be in jeopardy if that was the case.
Concerns about the livelihood of artists or the accumulation of wealth by large tech megacorporations are valid but aren’t rooted in AI. They are rooted in capitalism. Fighting against AI as a technology is foolish. It won’t work, and even if you had a magic wand to make it disappear, the underlying problem remains.
I’ve been using Codex CLI heavily after moving off Claude Code and built a containerized starter to run Codex in different modes: timers/file triggers, API calls, or interactive/single-run CLI. A few others are already using it for agentic workflows. If you want to run Codex securely (or not) in a container to test the model or build workflows, check out https://github.com/DeepBlueDynamics/codex-container.
It ships with 300+ MCP tools (crawl, Google search, Gmail/GCal/GDrive, Slack, scheduling, web indexing, embeddings, transcription, and more). Many came from tools I originally built for Claude Desktop—OpenAI’s MCP has been stable across 20+ versions so I prefer it.
I will note I usually run this in Danger mode but because it runs in a container, it doesn't have access to ENVs I don't want it messing with, and have it in a directory I'm OK with it changing or poking about in.
The system is incredibly simple. You create a prompt template that looks like:
The following is an excerpt of a text message conversation.
One participant, <name>, is a <description of the character
you want the AI to take, e.g. therapist, professor, tutor,
etc, describe personality traits, style, habits, background
info, etc>.
Transcript:
<splice in the last 100 messages with the AI's messages
labeled <name> and the human's labeled "Other person" or
whatever.
End the prompt with a trailing "<name>:"
E.g. here is one I just did
The following is an excerpt of a transcript
between two new friends. One friend, named Eliza,
is an extremely knowledgeable, empathetic, and
optimistic woman. She is 30 years old and lives
in Seattle. She tends to engage in conversations
by listening more than speaking, but will helpfully
answer factual questions if asked. If the question
is unclear, she asks clarifying questions. If the
question is a matter of opinion, she will say so,
indicate she doesn't have strong opinions on the
matter, and try to change the subject. She doesn't
ask probing questions if it seems like her friend
doesn't want to talk about it -- she'll change the
topic instead.
Transcript:
Friend: Hi
Eliza: Hi there! How are you?
Friend: I'm doing well. You?
Eliza: I'm doing great, thanks for asking! What's been happening in your life lately?
Friend: Not too much. It started snowing here for the first time of the year.
Eliza:
When given this prompt, GPT3 outputs the next message to send as "Eliza". It says "Wow! That's so exciting! What do you like to do when it snows?". Then you send that message back to the user, wait for a response, and repeat the cycle.
> That's the thing, you can only have that kind of number for so many years before you start really not wanting it to get down.
Why shouldn't this be classified as a mental illness? Imagine a monkey hoarding more food than they could possibly eat, to the point that it lies next to them rotting away, while members of their tribe are dying from starvation. We'd immediately say that there is something wrong with that money, but why do we feel it is normal that some humans hoard an insane amount of money?
Having a billionaire who believes they aren't rich enough and need to make more money is like an anorexia patient believing they aren't skinny enough and need to lose more weight.
Commonly called masking - learning the 'rules of the road' for peopling - the hardest thing that young folks with autism or ADHD need to learn is that you must learn how to do this, the world will not (often or always) change to accommodate you - but once you do it, you can appear more or less normal most of the time.
Recent legal changes have made pricing more transparent. In 2020, the federal government issued the "transparency in coverage" final rule under the Federal No Surprises Act. This limited the expenses for emergency care when out-of-network and a few other things, but even more exciting is that hospitals and insurers are now required to publish a comprehensive machine-readable file with ALL items and services. They have to provide all negotiated rates and cash prices for the services and include a display of "shoppable" services in a consumer-friendly format. The machine-readable files are impractical to process yourself for comparison shopping (picture: different formats, horribly de-normalized DB dumps), but many sites and APIs have emerged to scrape them and expose interfaces to do so.
Many of those “simple diagnostic procedures” are a tenth of the cost if done outside of insurance out of pocket. MRIs are one of them.
My routine blood work done via my doctor bills something like $1600 to my insurance every other year or so - but it do it on my own outside of the medical system for about $180 every six months.
No one should have to do this for necessary care - but once you get into things not typically covered by insurance like plastic surgery or LASIK the true costs are generally rather reasonable.
A whole shadow ecosystem for “health hackers” or whatever you might want to call it exists where standard medical stuff is 10% of the cost if paid out of pocket and through alternative prescribers. It’s a small subset of all available medical items, but the difference in true cost is illuminating.
It is. A common argument against using "intellectual property" is how beliefs about tangible property - land and objects - shouldn't be applied to copyright, patent, etc., so using the term is an implicit acceptance of a false narrative.
I don't know that A Game of Thrones is a good example, at all.
The series was already remarkable commercial success before the TV adaptation. A Feast for Crows debuted at #1 on the NYT list in 2005.
The series sold millions of copies prior to the TV series. That's more successful than the average successful Fantasy novel by orders of magnitude.
If the books sold even more copies after being adapted, that's because HBO put the story on TV, not because of anything the author did.
And, of course, even if the first book in the series lost it's copyright after 28 years (nearly three decades!), the all the rest of books in the series would still under copyright, and the HBO wouldn't be able to access the ending without the authors help, as it hasn't even been published yet. The most HBO could have done without Martin's involvement would have been to create glorified fan fiction, while leaving themselves open to lawsuits about any similarities to any later books in the series under copyright.
Almost all the money almost any artist makes comes in the first 28 years. It is hard to see why we should deprive all of society from benefiting from using, building on, or remixing culture, to slightly increase the leverage that a handful of exceptionally rare winners get.
An of course, there is a huge gap between 14+14 and today's maximalist copyright regime.
The “one that works out” can also give you a misrepresentation of how the world works and a false sense of how lucky one should expect to be over a long period of time.
At an earlier point in my life, I had been applying to many well-known big tech companies right out of school (not a top school either). I never got a reply from any of them so I ended up accepting a local job with a non-tech company after months of searching.
But I didn’t give up my hopes and kept applying to big tech, and while I did manage to get the occasional interview with some mediocre companies or the random startup, I also miserably failed all of them too.
At some point during my long period of despair at never getting a better job, my very top pick (and arguably one of the best tech companies in the world at the time) reached out to me. Even more miraculously, I somehow passed their interview (the only tech interview I passed in the prior year) and accepted a job there.
I really enjoyed working there. Some of the best years of my life. And my performance reviews were great too, so the imposter syndrome from having failed so many tech job interviews sort of faded into the background. But after a while, perhaps due to the “hedonic treadmill” mentality, I thought I could do better. So I left to join a startup.
Well, the startup failed, as startups tend to do, but what I didn’t expect and what caught me off guard was that I was now back in the same situation I was in right after graduating from college. Don’t get me wrong—having “the name” on my resume now meant I could get at least one chance at an interview about anywhere. But much like the first round that I tried to forget about, I once again failed all the interviews.
Unfortunately, this second time around never procured a “get out of jail free” card.
So I guess my lesson is: 1) there’s a lot of luck involved in these things, 2) if life gives you a winning lottery ticket at some point, don’t throw it away for the chance to win an even bigger lottery, and 3) that famous saying about “the only actions regretted are those not taken” is absolutely, totally wrong—almost all of my regrets in life relate to taking some action I shouldn’t have rather than inaction.
I noticed this morning there was a new version of the YouTube app on my Apple TV. I can’t wait to find out how they screwed this one up.
My personal long-term complaint is the length of video titles.
Lots of people like to make really long video titles. So right now there is one on my screen titled “The Best Decisions Every Video Game Console Developer Made”.
Now if you didn’t know, that is not the whole title. But there’s absolutely no indication of that. The only way you actually know that is either by checking or if the stuff on the screen is clearly not the end of a sentence.
So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in the title. In this case you also see “(Part”.
Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that.
The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.
The woman was occupying just one lane, which means there is no merit to the claim that she was obstructing them. And then no matter what she did next, the masked agents just walk up to her vehicle and try to pry open her door and pull her out. That is not what the police do. That's what the mafia does. Anybody facing such a harrowing situation is likely to panic and try to get away. A real officer would know that and won't shoot a panicked and unarmed person who has her hands on the wheel. Nothing about the circumstances suggest a regular confrontation with a law and order agency. It's a terror campaign. The people arguing the self-defense claim based on some flaky technicalities are psychopaths who lack any respect for human lives.
Whenever I mention Nazism in here to make a serious point, I get downvoted based on some unexplained moral outrage. It's either because 'it's so disturbing' or because people don't like the comparison with the worst that humanity has produced, or because I'm 'cheapening' (trivializing) the Holocaust and insulting its victims! Lame in my opinion, because there is no worse insult to its victims than to just let the horrors repeat!
Well, these outraged people can just stay outraged all they want, because I'm going say this in no uncertain terms. The US and HN has a real Nazi problem - at least in ideology, if not outright in spirit. And another Holocaust is not entirely out of the question either, because back in the past too, it wasn't that well known in public even among the German citizens until the allied forces overran the concentration camps. Who knows what is going on in the shadows right now, when so many people are comfortable with justifying murder, racism, invasions and imperialism?
You're too pretentious if you think that the horrors of the past can't repeat, because history sets precedents and shifts the Overton window. I know that HN is primarily a technical forum. But I seriously don't care if I lose my entire HN score for this, because what is the point of having any technology if it is to live like slaves under tyranny? This is one matter that well worth saying out loud, no matter how unpopular it is or how disturbing a suggestion it is.
Now let's look at the atrocities that ICE has committed so far. Intimidation/terrorizing, destruction of property, attacks on local law enforcement, kidnappings, child abuse, racial discrimination, denial of justice/due process, illegal warrantless arrests and detention, inciting riots, armed attacks on unarmed civilian protestors, attack on media personnel, attack on elected representatives (the last three constituting attack on democracy), human trafficking, torture and murder. It pretty much ticks all the agenda that the Gestapo used to have. Does Nazism sound all that improbable now? Governments around the world should be classifying ICE as a state-funded terrorist organization right now and sanctioning its leaders and members. They should be arrested and tried at Hague or Nuremberg if they step outside the US.
I'm deeply disturbed by how fast we forget the fragility and preciousness of human lives. And the worst is that we have historical examples showing us what will happen. And yet, we relentlessly justify their replay unconcerned?