The person in the picture asked that people stop using it, a few years ago, but female CS students have been complaining about it forever. The “ideological statement” they are making is fuck your feelings, especially if you’re female. So yes, it is inherently offensive.
“Being confronted with the Lenna image made me very aware that I was one of the only women in the room.”
I wrote the first two PNG image decoders for Java. The first was done as part of an IP swap between Sun Microsystems and NCSA. That was a straight wrapper of the C library. The second was a pure Java implementation I wrote on my own time the following Christmas when I was stuck overseas.
When I wrote the first, Lenna was part of the corpus I was handed to prove I had it working. I felt weird about it at the time, and my sexual politics were decent but not great. What’s their excuse? It didn’t really help me with getting the implementation right either. It was a picture of a curved road and thatched roofs in a village somewhere in the British Isles that helped me fix a memory corruption error that held up calling it done. And the color test patterns hosted on the libpng homepage helped me get the rest.
> the “ideological statement” they are making is fuck your feelings
Everyone thinks his opponent’s ideology is just spite and hate while his own ideology isn’t an ideology at all and is just ‘the way things should be’. I’m not debating the merits of the ideologies at issue. That is discouraged on HN.
Because 4/5ths of the tech sector has been built on the back of absurdly low interest rates and gesturing to the future, shrugging your shoulders and saying "monetizing user data"?
I realize these are public spaces we're talking about but to what extent are we willing to have our bodies and behaviors amplified, stored, copied, and otherwise scrutinized before we're allowed to feel some inherent right to personal privacy has been violated
If all the things to worry in the world, even in the narrow subsection of data privacy which feels like a 1st world human right, this particular case is not the one to worry about. Worry about how much Meta and Alphabet know about you, worry about the governments, but not the roadsign. Feels like a distraction
If they employed someone with a clicker to count the number of passers by would you feel that your privacy had been violated? What if they used a light beam that counted every time someone passed through it?
>Changing people's habits in favor of public transit
If that is what this is about then why dont they spend money making the public transit options better? There are dozens of unbuilt subway lines, areas with poor or no public transit and large amounts of crime all of which making a car a far superior choice. Taxing the car until people put up with an inferior transit service is not an improvement.
They're dramatically over-served. Cars are a luxury. They've been afforded free roads, free parking and free externalities for like a hundred years. Free ride's over.
Living in a poor or lower middle class outer suburb and commuting by car is slower and hundreds of dollars a month more expensive than living in the urban core and taking public transportation. I have no idea what on Earth you are talking about. Do you think everyone lives in a low density suburban sprawl where public transportation is completely impractical?
> Living in a poor or lower middle class outer suburb and commuting by car is slower and hundreds of dollars a month more expensive than living in the urban core and taking public transportation.
Totally. Because it's wildly inefficient for everyone to own an average 0.8 $35,000 blocks of metal that are in motion an average of 1.02 hours per day (idle almost 96% of the time). That requires roads, lights, signs, police, fire trucks, ambulances, gas stations/charging ports, insurance, parking, registration and tracking, maintenance, etc. That's before we get to externalities.
Yes it's hundreds of dollars more expensive to have a car, but it should be thousands. It's incredibly subsidized. Car owners have been massively over-served, and it's time they directly paid the actual cost of their choices.
Car ownership should be a luxury, not a requirement to exist. Especially in lower-middle-class suburbs. All our investments into roads and highways should be redirected towards avoiding it. All parking should be for-pay. Road costs should be born by road users. And yeah, people who make inefficient choices about their transportation should be penalized by usage charges.
What makes you think road users have been underserved relative to the literally zero investment in transit made in the US since Eisenhower?
Why shouldn't the cost of a dramatically less efficient transportation choice be much higher than a much more efficient transportation choice?
Are you saying that scrappers and thieving and muggings is just “Black culture” rit large? That’s an incredibly fatalistic mentality to put it politely.
Yeah, the framing you need to have to understand the comment is dark. How is one to "know" that one ought not to do this, unless the facts about cultural behavior are communicated? Yet those facts themselves, about regions and risks, are extremely contentious. It doesn't seem fair to have it both ways - either every group should be free to move to, try to make a life, do business an lots of US regions without worrying much, or we should spread stereotypes and warnings about how groups are likely to behave, which would look a lot like racism.
The points about not knowing anybody are fair, but still, the obvious implication is that the comment, while coming from the left, is also suggesting that the MC should have privately been told the racial realities of that area. But the right to speak about that, too, is under attack. Is it or is it not okay to mention that majority black, southern, low income towns are likely to be extremely dangerous, and that poverty is a proxy for it, but that other methods of stereotyping are likely even more effective?
Every alternative voting system I’ve seen promoted my mainstream sources would make the current system worse by keeping winner-takes-all single-seat districts and making it even easier for triangulating ‘centrist’ politicians to defeat challengers. (such as Single Transferable Vote, Instant Runoff etc.)
The actual way you break the grip of the center right and center left parties fear mongering about each other to keep them both in power is with a proportional party list. “parties make lists of candidates to be elected, and seats are distributed by elections authorities to each party in proportion to the number of votes the party receives”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party-list_proportional_repr...
So it will never happen because the current centrist parties want to keep their power. Oh well lol
“The conservatives in several states, after crushing the liberal revolutions of 1848-1849, introduced industrial regulations to resurrect the traditional rights of craftsmen.”
This section confused me. I thought it was illiberal conservatives that were teamed up with big business and capital against the small time craftsmen. What does defeating the liberals have to do with pushing back against capital?
Author here. I'm by no means an expert on 1848 politics, but I got this information from the cited source (Hamerow, "Restoration, Revolution, Reaction"). Quoting 191-192:
"In industry conservatism could afford to do more than merely outliberalize the liberals. It bid boldly for the support of the urban proletariat by reintroducing corporate regulation of production. Through the association of an economic with a political reaction it hoped to create a mass following for the policy of counterrevolution. Hence the royalist victory in Prussia was followed by the promulgation of the two emergency measures of February 9 revitalizing the atrophied guild system." (etc., it goes on to cite similar post-1848 regulations imposed by other German states.)
Above: Syria's Al Qaeda-linked al-Nusra. Top US officials coordinated with the jihadist franchise in an effort to topple the Syrian regime – while claiming they backed only the "moderate opposition."
A lot of information is collected automatically as part of normal operation often called ‘diagnostics’ or ‘telemetry’ and once that data is sent to a foreign country where the manufacturer is based there is absolutely no conceivable way to tell if that country’s government has made a copy for itself or not.
