kiln
6mo ago
Random nitpick. It may make sense to root a device to strip away tracking or privacy impacting features. Though some way argue that your attempt to do so itself may be fingerprintable.
For security... doubt it'd do much. If your device maker is releasing poorly secured software why would the hardware/firmware be any better.
kiln
6mo ago
With such a large and growing population,
I am not particularly informed about this topic, and nor am I American, but are these genuine cases?
Most "Native Americans" I come across on Social media are a bunch of functionally white women making noises about feeling under represented. I often find out that they have a a native great grandmother from a poor financial background who married a well off white man and had kids who were raised white.
So, based on what I said above it is no surprise that I find their claims weak and superficial, the tiny bits of Native American cultural practices they perform in the name of reconnecting with their roots more close to putting on the stereotypical feathered Native American costume than genuine practice. And I find it hard to believe anyone would believe the spin.
Now, I am biased by Social media which often platforms performative hacks over genuine products, so I may be way way off on this.
kiln
6mo ago
I would be interested to hear from someone more informed about the conflict whether there is any border other than "Free Palestine, from the river to the sea" that can be acceptable to a critical mass of Palestinians.
Progressive Hamas supporters speak as if Israel pulling back to 1967 borders and ending the Gaza blockade will bring eternal peace, but the average Palestinian on twitter or any video clip that ends up on Social media just seems happy as long of Jewish blood is spilled and regards every bit of Israel-Palestine as theirs.
My "It is nuanced" was more in reference to the rhetorical device used to downplay something you don't want to discuss. I think it is important for a civilization to unconditionally condemn acts that cross a line of barbarity. Being able to understand and empathize with the motivations of a murder should not stop one from condemning the act.
This is different from an emotional "let's turn Gaza into a parking lot" response which I consider as problematic as the "they had it coming" arguments.
Some folks even drew equivalence to condemning Hamas' brutality against Israeli civilians with "All Lives Matter".
The hard left is very much okay with 3rd World Nationalism by any means as long as it is from the "Oppressed". It is only a problem if it is a sentiment expressed by the outgroup.
I looked through the twitter likes of a few prominent Open Source Software developers. I lost any taste for writing Software outside of 9-5.
I don't know how much Social media furor translates over to the real world but I am seeing a lot of white collar (leftist) westerners finding their latent "It is nuanced" superpower in response to the Israeli girl with bloody pant bottoms.
EDIT: Forget "nuanced" most of them say they had it coming, as the posters up the chain mention. I find this horrifying despite regarding the creation of Israel deeply unfair for Palestinians (though they haven't given a good showing since then).
What is a "Hindu Nationalist" for someone on the Motte?
For the largely American/European population it is most likely an angry Twitter user of Indian origin they saw replying to Razib or an English speaking journalist reporting on India on twitter.
Indians do not really have any civilizational memory of Aryans like they have of Turks or the British and will react with skepticism. If we did not have genetic studies it would never have even become a topic of discussion. There are no physical imprints of that time.
Why are they so dead set against the idea of an Aryan invasion?
As I have mentioned in the past, India has innumerable ethnic fissures and this whole discussion of "Aryans" in India is often pushed by politicians trying to reap votes on the back of community tensions. Any discussion of Affirmative action that tilts away from "We need more affirmative action" is pushed back with "We have been oppressed for 3000 years. You think 70 years of Affirmative action is enough to fix this?". While there is some truth to this for some Indian communities, this is often pushed by influential land owning groups who want to claim oppression.
We currently have over 50% quotas for disadvantaged groups in most Indian Government institutions. Tamil Nadu, where this topic is the hottest has 67% quotas. There is no end date or benchmark given for when this will end given how useful this is for Indian politicians.
Most Indians on twitter have not really studied the scientific literature behind this issue and will pattern match any Western commentators wading into this issue to the above.
My opinions on this issue? (Notice that I call this opinion, I don't consider it relevant beyond Intellectual masturbation)
Even Razib acknowledges that the impact of the Aryans was far greater on culturally rather than genetically. And to be honest, the cultural footprint is also largely syncretic with prehistoric animistic traditions.
Except some populations in North-West India most Indians regardless of caste are largely "Not Aryan". South Indian Brahmins may have predominantly North Indian paternal ancestry, but North Indians are not "Aryan" either. Sure, some upper caste folks may have higher Steppe contributions but even then they are still largely "Not Aryan". We also have upper caste groups that do not have high Steppe ancestry.
https://twitter.com/ArainGang/status/1705319485178314918
If you compare this to ancestry studies of populations in South America you will find a lot of people are significantly European by ancestry and even more significantly European on the paternal side along with near complete Native-American ancestry on the maternal side. You will not find this even in Indian upper castes.
Now, sure you can say that most of the Steppe ancestry was passed down by men and bands of roving men in those times can hardly be pacifistic peace loving eccentrics. And perhaps, the only reason India is not fully "Aryan" is because there weren't enough Aryans to replace the pre-Aryan population, but given the ways things have played out I do not see any justification for any steep racial divide.
These days I mostly dive straight into the technical documentation or the source code of whatever I am reading up on.
In the past these would have been reference books. But freely published technical documentation is better since they can be easily updated.
I do feel this state of things is sad since it removes a straight forward source of monetization for good technical writers, despite being objectively better.
In the absence of good docs or easily readable source code I start looking up blogs. Now, depending on the domain you may end up with a lot of blogspam, but as long as you search via HN, lobste.rs or a relevant subreddit you can do fine.
Textbooks/Research papers still have their place for more theoretical topics that do not become outdated as fast, but it is less than it was in the past.
Indophilic rhetoric
I disagree. If you follow news from Western (mainly American) progressive news outlets, it is as far from Indophilic as it can get. Downright Indophobic is a better word.
Progressives have no love for India or its people. The rhetoric pushed by Progressive media already tries to frame relations with the country a la Saudi Arabia. A country America needs to partner out of great reluctance and needs to civilize, sanction wrongthink, fund Activism to teach Indians to vote the right way. Hell! why are we even partnering with this country? Do we even need them? They should be crushed under America's heel just like China.
I don't need to speak about Conservatives. I find their honesty (especially religious conservatives) at least as far as India goes admirable.
The Chinese hate us and even they don't have that bile that Progressives in the American political establishment have on a hair trigger. That the civilization at the core is considered to be irredeemable is only hidden beneath a thin veneer. Our plethora of ethnic fissures is a rich feast for those in search of nails to to wield their Oppressor/Oppressed hammer on.
I don't know what the US government thinks, but they seem to be onboard with the portrayal. Keeping public and political opinion of India under such tension gives the US significant leverage over the country. They can push or pull either way as needed which is harder to do with other "friendly" countries that they cannot give sermons to without being called out.
We're no saints. I am also not fully on board with the current administration. But, I can see the double standards.
Note: For brevity I used Progressives as a single grouping. Perhaps there is more diversity of opinion but in a discussion about Indian geopolitics, it makes sense to focus on the Progressives that are a part of the US Govt. geopolitical policy apparatus.
This is a very emotive piece. Such optimism is often hard to find in Indian Anglophilic elite who tend to judge progress as movement towards Western (more particularly American) cultural norms. They are not completely wrong as "Western" culture does have a lot going for it. But you also get weird positions such as the low divorce rate in India being a bad thing as it means a lot of people are in bad marriages.
A minor nitpick. If you go by India in pixels' TFR figures, the 2.0 TFR seems to be mostly due to Bihar and UP working "extra" hard. The other relatively developed states of India seem to be quickly moving towards the TFR of developed countries without attaining even a fraction of their wealth. This is not encouraging since UP and Bihar will also probably follow the same path once they develop more. I remember you or someone else framing this as India implementing Woke policies way before anyone else in world while we are far from an economy that can even support such welfarism. While not relevant in my lifetime, I do worry that India will move from a poor country with some economic significance due its large population to a somewhat poor country with not enough people or industry to be of any significance.
EDIT: The last point is mostly my reflexive pessimism speaking. Given our population we'll reach that point way after everyone else if we ever do.
kiln
7mo ago
If we can use the words of the Indian Political Commentariat (at least the ones who did not predict a landslide win for INC in 2019) as a proxy for what the Indian Government thinks.
Punjab is a border state. Even worse, on the other side lies Pakistan. Separatism in Punjab is believed to have received significant support from the Pakistani ISI as part of their sponsorship of cross border terrorism in India like in Kashmir. There have been seriously worrying flare ups regarding this issue in the past culminating to the assassination of a Prime Minister.
Punjab, while rich compared to many other Indian states has stagnated in recent decades. Unemployment among the youth, cross border drug and weapons trade. It is addicted to Environmentally damaging state subsidized agriculture that is not sustainable or scalable if you want to reach first world living standards and industrial capacity. But, the status quo is a pretty comfortable one for a few rich Punjabi landlords/middlemen leaching off the rest of the state. The system of state subsidy came into place due to governmental efforts to guard against potential food scarcity that's no longer an issue. They now produce too much rice or wheat.
Attempts by the Indian government to move away from this led to the 2020-2021 Farmer Protests. The state lies right next to Delhi, the Indian capital, which they blockaded for months. The proximity allows them to wield disproportionate influence on Indian politics. Us folks down South can't march to the Capital to protest on a whim.
Despite the protest starting for other reasons Separatists who had found refuge in Canada and other countries quickly found the discontent to be a useful lever to push their goals. The Dollar even Canadian goes a long way in a poor country like India. A middle class family in Canada or the US is filty rich in India and can gets disproportionate financial leverage.
The Indian Government squashed the bill despite the need for agricultural reforms to avoid it being used to inflame Separatism. We have had serious material and political consequences as a result of a bunch of Canadians still stuck in the 1980s.
And, as @self_made_human said Indian think tankers seem to be of the opinion "Doubtful that we did it, but good riddance".
I am South Indian (from Karnataka to be specific).
India and Bharat are both equally palatable to me or anyone else I know, though Bharat (or in Kannada Bharata) is rarely used out of formal contexts.
I suspect that in the South Indian context the name will only cause indigestion for Periyarists from Tamil Nadu. Others won't really care.
Edit: In Karnataka, the few people who do care, namely Kannada activists in the Old Mysore region only have the issue that Bharata as it is written in Sanskrit is a more accurate name with Bharat being a bastardization of the name by Hindi.
kiln
7mo ago
Is it that while travelling she doesn't have easy access to low-prep, decent tasting easily eatable food?
As a financially constrained student, if I wake up in the morning and don't have stuff prepped the previous night, I am going to gorge myself on milk, cheap chocolate and cereal.
kiln
8mo ago
I agree with the folks saying it's too easy to press the collapse comment icon without meaning to on mobile.
But, it's a useful feature that I use frequently enough to have trained my thumb to hit reliably despite the diffuculty.
I doubt anyone truely cares about the actual proportion of various ancestries. What they care about is ethnogenesis, how their people came to be.
For this purpose, Y and Mt DNA shed light in some aspects that autosomal DNA only cannot, such as the type of intermingling that gave birth to your ethnic group, power dynamics, etc.
For example almost all Latin Americans have y-haplogroups denoting European paternal descent but their Mt DNA shows near complete Native American ancestry for Maternal descent.
Hence we can infer that Latin Americans of today originate from European men and Native American women.
What about European maternal ancestry? The conquistadors were almost all men.
Native American paternal ancestry? You can guess.
This pattern of ancestry turns up in many other populations.
Most modern Europeans attribute their ethnogenesis to such asymmetric gender mixing.
kiln
11mo ago
Depends on what spaces you hang out at.
In the past, the folks I followed on twitter were mostly in the Software industry. It was not a fun experience to find out that most of the well known and influential folks in the industry who I once looked up to would unplatform me if I ever tried to add some nuance into the whole spiel.
I very much had to filter out any culture war relevant topics or keywords from my feed to restrict it to the technical content embedded between the rants and snide remarks.
Now most of them are off to Mastodon and my twitter feed is healthier for it.
kiln
11mo ago
neutered the Hinduism of wealthy British Hindus (even of high caste
Minor nitpick on the "even of high caste".
From my personal experience current gen urban/wealthy higher caste Hindus are among the most deracinated groups in India or the diaspora.
You will find more genuine faith or adherence to tradition among the middle caste Hindus or Christians/Muslims of all castes.
kiln
11mo ago
What do you mean?
The rare few times QQ comes up on SB it's just mentioned as the place where people write NSFW stuff.
kiln
11mo ago
Dayum!! I recognize all of these people except the first one.
"existing SNES emulators support 80% of the games, and the rest require game-specific hacks, I'll write an emulator that works exactly like a real SNES, so that it will run all games by definition" - a whole can of worms, let's go with non-binary
Their passing away triggered a hell lot of drama, if I remember correctly.
kiln
11mo ago
There are a lot of hobbies women have shown plenty of initiative and creativity in. It's just that the type of hobbies an average woman dedicates her leisure time to tends to be very different than that of men.
Most women seem to have a lower tolerance for hobbies that do not have some level of Social affirmation and interaction along the process. They are not as easily nerd sniped as men are.
I can blow a whole weekend, not speaking to a single soul, working on some obscure programming project like writing a TiddlyWiki launcher to reduce memory usage over the default Node.js launcher. A pointless investment of effort that will be of limited help for my employment prospects. No one else is going to use it or even see it. But it's fun though!
Women here make smarter choices. They demand more from their hobbies rather than just a short burst of satisfaction from solving some obscure problem. At the very least they expect it to have Social value. Though this may be changing with Social media addiction.
Footnote:
Reading what I wrote above, I realize, I have issues.
I think there is something to discuss regarding affirmation-seeking behaviour among trans women. I haven't seen as many suggestive selfies on the social media of cis women Software Engineers as I tend to do for trans women.
Though, I would oppose the use of "attention-seeking" since many of the blogs I am referring to are very much the opposite of low-effort and portray work that requires some serious technical chops and a high level of verbal skill to explain to a layman.
Another poster here attributed this to MtF transgenderism and interest in Computer Science being correlated with Autism spectrum disorders, which sounds convincing, though I haven't read into this much.
EDIT: @faul_sname, pointed out that if "autism" is the reason for the overrepresentation (by proportion) of trans folks among CS open source communities, then you would observe the same in other "autism" dominated hobbies like train lovers, which we don't.
Proportionally, do Trans women have greater visibility in the Open Source ecosystem as compared to Cis Women?
This is anecdotal, but I've often noticed that, I read a technical blog post by someone, end up following them, find that they are women (pronouns/name) and later find that they are trans.
At this point almost all women whose technical blogs I follow are Trans. So, this makes me wonder, are Cis women Software Engineers just not interested in Open Source or writing blogs? If there is some sort of discrimination involved then it should also effect Trans women since they are just another username on the screen, just like everyone else. In fact they may even face more discrimination than Cis women.
This very much looks like something progressives should be up in the arms about since Identarian politics and equality of outcome is very much their thing. But you only have strategic silence.
I think this is potentially evidence against the blank slatism that says systemic discrimination is the only possible reason for the lack of female representation in certain occupations. One issue you could poke in this argument is that Trans women were socialized as male, but I think all the young boys who are being socialized as girls today will soon prove them wrong.
I don't think my CS domain interests are too niche. They mostly lean towards Systems, Security, Programming languages (Go, Rust, C++, ...). I source technical content on these topics from HN, lobste.rs and some subreddits which themselves are not overly niche platforms in the Software industry. So I think there is something to think about here.
OR I am just falling prey to some sort of Sampling bias and the argument above is garbage.
Having said all this, I actually think a 50/50 gender distribution typically helps in creating a healthier work atmosphere, mitigating the worst excesses of either gender. Male dominated work environments can run you ragged and be outright abusive when under a lot of competition.
<rant>
But, I do not see any way to achieve this due to the asymmetry in the distribution of interest. When taken to its logical conclusion, average expendable (male) Software Engineers like me will be left hanging out to dry unlike average or below average women. And it galls me when my concerns get gaslighted as incompetent men who cannot handle the competition.
</rant>
kiln
11mo ago
True, that's the feeling I got from fanfiction.net or AO3, but there are fanfiction spaces that seem to have more men.
I can think of Spacebattles, Sufficient Velocity, fiction.live or Questionable Questing from the top of my mind. The last two especially, given the type of gratuitous smut you will find there.
I am not able to find the forum thread that did the poll, but you will feel the difference when reading works in these spaces vs AO3. Especially the way feelings are handled in the writing.
Of course, it is also possible that SB or SV just have better women writers and hence you don't experience the same uncanny valley feeling you get from reading a lot of AO3 authors writing men.
Do women on The Motte have any tells they use to predict whether a writer under a pseudonym is a man? Say by how they write women?
The colloquial dialect of Hindi and Urdu are very similar. But their more formal registers have sufficient differences in vocabulary to confuse a casual Hindi speaker a bit.
I remember stumbling on a news report in Urdu and finding that while I understood everything that was being said, I had to infer the meaning of quite a few unfamiliar Persian/Arabic origin words by context.
Possible reasons for a difference in opinion.
In the order of fluency, I can speak English, Kannada and Hindi with my grasp over Hindi primarily being through the Bookish register and some exposure to the colloquial one during undergrad. I also do not consume Bollywood movies/music which I've read tends to use Hindi that leans slightly more towards Urdu vocabulary.
While I cannot give any point in the support of "Men are funnier than Women" since that's not something I believe to be true.
I think I understand our point of difference better. You expect The Motte to be a forum for perfect rational debate. And I guess that's what many on themotte claim it to be.
But it's not that and that bugs you.
It doesn't bug me since I do not expect The Motte to be a forum for perfect rational debate. While folks here are better at stating and accounting for their biases than other spaces on the internet, I do think a lot of people end up venting their frustrations a bit. And that's fine.
I feel that mainstream progressive (and conservative) spaces impose binaries on topics and rule out discussion on domains that their binaries fail to explain.
The less restricted nature of The Motte helps to find arguments that may offer better explanations and would otherwise be banned. But of course you also get bad arguments that should have received more pushback. We all have our biases, I just see that as a part and parcel of the trying to model the world better.
2rafa calls them an honour based tribal culture.
Alongside the bigotry they have also been dealt debilitating losses in war, militarily and morally by Israel.
I suspect that even if we try to buy off each Palestinian with a billion dollars, many will spit on it since they place avenging their defeat over everything else, including their own prosperity.
I am a bit worried that Social media is biasing my opinions on Muslims given how the response of the vast majority of the Muslim diaspora has been extremely predictable with a small minority even being willing to concede that this looks really bad and perhaps there are lines that shouldn't be crossed.
I say this because I am good friends with a number of muslims (Indians) and I now sometimes wonder if the warmth only exists because I never discuss politics IRL.
---- A few minutes later ----
Now that the burst of angst has passed by and with a more clear mind I'd hope the general materialism that pervades middle class Indian thought also includes the Muslims since it is a much easier vice to control or justify.
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