Also while 73°C is a proper sauna, there are plenty of hotter ones. 90°C is closer to what I'm used to at my apartment building's common sauna. I do take two breaks when I'm there for 30 mims though.
It's a sauna so humidity depends on how much water I feel like throwing on the stones ("kiuas"). I throw at about once per minute, but I have no idea what that would mean in humidity.
For context, a statement from the legal experts who monitored the trial.
> It is our collective assessment that the jury verdict against Greenpeace in North Dakota reflects a deeply flawed trial with multiple due process violations that denied Greenpeace the ability to present anything close to a full defense.
I can't speak to the institution but the only public statements on their website relate to this particular trial. It could be this is the first ever trial they have monitored in this way; it might also be a group that will only ever monitor this one trial.
I guess I was expecting a Matt Levine-style breakdown of why the trial was run improperly and why an appellate court would be expected to strike it down. Instead we have vague statements that could have come from an elected’s staff.
Yeah we're dealing with a mud fight between two highly resourced adversaries who are practiced in bullshit underhanded tactics and influence operations.
Nah, its one source of funding. The oil giants pump there money in bonkers oppossition- one Greta Thunberg glueing herself to a public street does more damage to that cause then the whole of counter propaganda ever could. And it prevents the debate about resonable measures like free public transport.
related topic -- "Judge shopping" refers to the practice of litigants strategically filing lawsuits in court districts or divisions where they are likely to be assigned to a judge sympathetic to their cause, often exploiting structural quirks in the judiciary
Most state courts randomly assign you a judge so it's not that simple, in some cases you can target certain districts in certain states where there are less judges (like the Texas patent judge). This is a trial in North Dakota because that's where the protests happened. I doubt they had many options in a single jurisdiction. The fallback for this stuff is of course a circuit court appeal.
Oil companies have been suppressing climate change research for decades to keep cooking the earth for profits. Is that not corruption? I suppose if you are economically exposed to these gains, don’t believe in climate change, and/or won’t be here for the bad times from this, the facts may not matter to your mental model. The facts remain that climate change is real and oil companies are doing their best to extract every bit of profit they can until we’re off of oil, regardless of the negative trajectories and outcomes from this.
Oil companies have a definite history of punching people and then suing them for running into their fist. But I should also point out that Greenpeace is the kind of shitty activist company that also does those kind of tactics, so an oil company suing Greenpeace leaves my priors as "I don't know which side is more likely right in this scenario."
You know, it's possible for these oil companies to have done all this bad stuff, and for Greenpeace to be a pretty shitty organization. And for the person to have a different mindset than all the strawman assumptions you just made.
Oil companies have done worse than that, but we're not talking about them right now we're talking about Trial Monitors Dot Org, the real authoritative source on this trial that has done literally nothing else.
Oil companies haven't done a damn thing. We are the cause of global warming. Every time we pump gas into our car, buy anything that came from far away, or use any technology dependent on oil. Blaming oil companies is childish garbage people do to avoid recognizing their personal share of the responsibility.
You know the carbon footprint concept was literally created by BP marketing, to place the blame for climate change on society, and distract from all the evil stuff they did to promote more fossil fuel consumption and sabotage climate science.
The blame is 100% on society, so BP is correct to place it there. If we wanted to reduce our CO2 output to near zero we could do that easily. But it turns out that we would rather have all of our modern conveniences, so this is 100% our fault. Blaming it on oil companies is like a murderer blaming Smith and Wesson.
You’re sadly making this a simpler issue than it actually is. There are countless industries that have used immoral tactics to make more money. That includes tobacco companies (lying about health benefits & consequences to smoking), gambling companies (misleading people about how much money they can expect to make), and, of course, oil companies (lying about how harmful gas is to the environment).
Using gas is not actually necessary to have all our modern conveniences. In fact, it is fucking stupid to rely on continuous resource extraction, deleting our fuel supply to create energy, when we can get it continuously for free from the environment with a minor up-front investment.
It is not 100% our fault. This is only like blaming it on Smith & Wesson if Smith & Wesson had created “pacifist guns” that allegedly solved societal violence, or if Smith & Wesson spent huge amounts of money trying to convince people that guns are not actually dangerous objects.
Blaming oil companies for the extremely well documented history of suppression of research and action into the impact of climate change is not childish.
Yes, and cigarettes, asbestos, lead in gasoline, and a few others, too. Clearly there is a place for education and coordinated action among the common people.
You are literally avoiding the topic (Greenpeace intentionally created a misleading authoritative-looking entity) to say "Oil bad! Boo oil companies!".
The facts remain that Greenpeace did in fact attempt to slander (legal definition) the big oil corp.
Maybe you support "win at all costs" in this fight, but don't pretend one side is pure and honest.
Well, let's not get into this left-right thing because that could go back and forth forever. Especially in the current environment.
eg - "As an outsider, why is [the jury and judge] a credible institution over the monitors?"
We should all just give the legal experts time to look over the records of what happened, and assess why. From there, a consensus will likely emerge as to what happened during and before the trial. And the justice or injustice of the matter will present itself.
But you can't have a judge say one thing and some other single expert say another, and from those pieces of information decide anything of an authoritative nature. Our institutions just don't have that type of credibility any longer. This is the consequence of credibility crises for any society's steward classes.
It was a long slide getting here, decades actually. But I think we are firmly now at the point of the "credibility collapse" portion of the "credibility crisis".
Witness as GP transfers out any remaining assets through crypto (we got hacked !), declares bankruptcy, and comes back with a new name, and Big Oil gets HOSED.
. . . She apparently will not go to jail because she is old, and it would be “sentencing her to die within the state prison system.” And hey, while she is accused of moving millions of dollars and various properties she owns to third parties to avoid financial penalties -- this Green Peace story the same take as the "70M Boomer" title below . . .
Why should I care what they think? Seriously, I'm so tired of seeing XYZ totally real and credentialed expert non government organization pop up in weird appeals to authority. They couldn't even be bothered to monitor any other trials for this one, this looks to be the only thing they've ever done.
It's a great story that documents the shifting winds of legal systems across continents.
My takeaway: there is zero consistency or absolute truth in any legal system.
"Human rights campaigners called Chevron's actions an example of a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP)"
"Chevron requested that the case be tried in Ecuador and, in 2002, the US court dismissed the plaintiffs case based on forum non conveniens and ruled that Ecuador had jurisdiction. The US court exacted a promise from Chevron that it would accept the decision of the Ecuadorian courts."
"A provincial Ecuadorean court found Chevron guilty in 2011 and awarded the plaintiffs $18 billion in damages. The decision was affirmed by three appellate courts including Ecuador's highest court, the National Court of Justice, although the damages were reduced to $9.5 billion."
But now, *Ecuador must pay Chevron* for damages:
"In 2018, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that the $9.5 billion judgment in Ecuador was marked by fraud and corruption and "should not be recognised or enforced by the courts of other States." The amount Ecuador must pay to Chevron to compensate for damages is yet to be determined. The panel also stated that the corruption was limited to one judge, not the entire Ecuadorean legal system."
I'm not sure that's an accurate description. Are "Human Rights" inherently left-wing? Is environmental protection inherently left-wing? Is political corruption inherently right wing?
This is of legal experts each with 30+ years of experience in the fields with which this trial is concerned (environmentalism, corruption, humans rights abuses).
Perhaps anti-oil activists would have been a better term. That seems more plainly true to me.
They might or might not have had more valid cases in their respective pasts. But it doesn't seem right to me to term themselves "trial monitors" when they seem pretty plainly biased for one side of the trial. It would be more okay if they had some pro-oil attorneys on their board too, or called themselves "Greenpeace Defenders" or something.
I know, it's hardly the first or the most egregious case of deceptive naming out there. But it's still worth calling out in my opinion, especially when it it still, at the time of this writing, on the top of the HN thread about this, described as if they were unbiased legal experts.
> But it doesn't seem right to me to term themselves "trial monitors" when they seem pretty plainly biased for one side of the trial
We don't say that "human rights monitors" need to draft a few brutal dictators in order to provide a balanced take on genocide...
I'm not sure why "trial monitors" would suggest such a lack of bias either. Monitoring organisations are explicitly setup to ensure that a minority group under threat from a superior power are getting a fair shake.
The whole notion of the "tragedy of the commons" needs to be put to rest. It's an armchair thought experiment that was disproven at the latest in the 90s by Elinor Ostrom with actual empirical evidence of commons.
The "tragedy", if you absolutely need to find one, is only for unrestricted, free-for-all commons, which is obviously a bad idea.
A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario. Participants feel obligations to the community, and misusing the commons actually does have real downsides for the individual because there are social feedback mechanisms. The classic examples like people grazing sheep or cutting wood are bad examples that don't really work.
But that doesn't mean the tragedy of the commons can't happen in other scenarios. If we define commons a bit more generously it does happen very frequently on the internet. It's also not difficult to find cases of it happening in larger cities, or in environments where cutthroat behavior has been normalized
> A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario. Participants feel obligations to the community, and misusing the commons actually does have real downsides for the individual because there are social feedback mechanisms.
That works while the size of the community is ~100-200 people, when everyone knows everyone else personally. It breaks down rapidly after that. We compensate for that with hierarchies of governance, which give rise to written laws and bureaucracy.
New tribes break off old tribes, form alliances, which form larger alliances, and eventually you end up with countries and counties and vovoidships and cities and districts and villages, in hierarchies that gain a level per ~100x population increase.
This is sociopolitical history of the world in a nutshell.
"and eventually you end up with countries and counties and vovoidships and cities and districts and villages, in hierarchies that gain a level per ~100x population increase."
You say it like this is a law set in stone, because this is what happened im history, but I would argue it happened under different conditions.
Mainly, the main advantage of an empire over small villages/tribes is not at all that they have more power than the villages combined, but that they can concentrate their power where it is needed. One village did not stand a chance against the empire - and the villages were not coordinated enough.
But today we would have the internet for better communication and coordination, enabling the small entieties to coordinate a defense.
Well, in theory of course. Because we do not really have autonomous small states, but are dominated by the big players. And the small states have mowtly the choice which block to align with, or get crushed. But the trend might go towards small again.
(See also cheap drones destroying expensive tanks, battleships etc.)
Internet is working exactly the opposite way to what your describing - it's making everything more centralized.
Once we had several big media companies in each country and in each big city. Now we have Google and Facebook and tik tok and twitter and then the "whatevers".
Yes, but there is a difference between having the choice of joining FB or not having a choice at all when the empire comes to claim you (like in Ukraine).
FB is part of the empire though, and it is coming for us.
canadians need an anti-imperial radio-canada run alternative. we arent gonna be able to coordinate against the empire when the empire has the main control over the internet.
when the americans come a knocking, we're gonna wish we had chinese radios
> That works while the size of the community is ~100-200 people,
Yet we regularly observe that working with millions of people; we take care of our young, we organize, when we see that some action hurt our environment we tend to limit its use.
It's not obvious why some societies break down early and some go on working.
> Yet we regularly observe that working with millions of people; we take care of our young, we organize, when we see that some action hurt our environment we tend to limit its use.
That's more like human universals. These behaviors generally manifest to smaller or larger degree, depending on how secure people feel. But those are extremely local behaviors. And in fact, one of them is exactly the thing I'm talking about:
> we organize
We organize. We organize for many reasons, "general living" is the main one but we're mostly born into it today (few got the chance to be among the founding people of a new village, city or country). But the same patterns show up in every other organizations people create, from companies to charities, from political interests groups to rural housewives' circles -- groups that grow past ~100 people split up. Sometimes into independent groups, sometimes into levels of hierarchies. Observe how companies have regional HQs and departments and areas and teams; religious groups have circuits and congregations, etc. Independent organizations end up creating joint ventures and partnerships, or merge together (and immediately split into a more complex internal structure).
The key factor here is, IMO, for everyone in a given group to be in regular contact with everyone else. Humans are well evolved for living in such small groups - we come with built-in hardware and software to navigate complex interpersonal situations. Alignment around shared goals and implicit rules is natural at this scale. There's no space for cheaters and free-loaders to thrive, because everyone knows everyone else - including the cheater and their victims. However, once the group crosses this "we're all a big family, in it together" size, coordinating everyone becomes hard, and free-loaders proliferate. That's where explicit laws come into play.
This pattern repeats daily, in organizations people create even today.
I get the feeling it's the combination of Schelling points and surplus. If everyone else is being pro-social, i.e. there is a culture of it, and the people aren't so hard up that they can reasonably afford to do the same, then that's what happens, either by itself (Hofstadter's theory of superrationality) or via anything so much as light social pressure.
But if a significant fraction of the population is barely scraping by then they're not willing to be "good" if it means not making ends meet, and when other people see widespread defection, they start to feel like they're the only one holding up their end of the deal and then the whole thing collapses.
This is why the tendency for people to propose rent-seeking middlemen as a "solution" to the tragedy of the commons is such a diabolical scourge. It extracts the surplus that would allow things to work more efficiently in their absence.
I’ve heard stories from communist villages where everyone knew everyone. Communal parks and property was not respected and frequently vandalized or otherwise neglected because it didn’t have an owner and it was treated as something for someone else to solve.
It’s easier to explain in those terms than assumptions about how things work in a tribe.
Even here, the state is the steward of the common good. It is a mistaken notion that the state only exists because people are bad. Even if people were perfectly conscientious and concerned about the common good, you still need a steward. It simply wouldn’t be a steward who would need to use aggressive means to protect the common good from malice or abuse.
> A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario.
No it does not. This sentiment, which many people have, is based on a fictional and idealistic notion of what small communities are like having never lived in such communities.
Empirically, even in high-trust small villages and hamlets where everyone knows everyone, the same incentives exist and the same outcomes happen. Every single time. I lived in several and I can't think of a counter-example. People are highly adaptive to these situations and their basic nature doesn't change because of them.
While an earlier poster is over stating Ostrom’s Nobel prize winning work — it is regularly shown that averting the tragedy of the commons is not as insurmountable as the original coining of the phrase implied.
Ostrom showed that it wasn't necessarily a tragedy, if tight groups involved decided to cooperate. This common in what we call "trust-based societies", which aren't universal.
Nonetheless, the concept is still alive, and anthropic global warming is here to remind you about this.
She not “disprove” the existence of the tragedy of the commons. What she established was that controlling the commons can be done communally rather than through privatization or through government ownership.
Communal management of a resource is still government, though. It just isn’t central government.
The thesis of the tragedy of the commons is that an uncontrolled resource will be abused. The answer is governance at some level, whether individual, collective, or government ownership.
> The "tragedy", if you absolutely need to find one, is only for unrestricted, free-for-all commons, which is obviously a bad idea.
Right. And that’s what people are usually talking about when they say “tragedy of the commons”.
People invoke the tragedy of the commons in bad faith to argue for privatization because “the alternative is communism”. i.e. Either an individual or the government has to own the resource.
This is of course a false dichotomy because governance can be done at any level.
It also seems to omit the possibility that the thing could be privately operated but not for profit.
Let's Encrypt is a solid example of something you could reasonably model as "tragedy of the commons" (who is going to maintain all this certificate verification and issuance infrastructure?) but then it turns out the value of having it is a million times more than the cost of operating it, so it's quite sustainable given a modicum of donations.
Free software licenses are another example in this category. Software frequently has a much higher value than development cost and incremental improvements decentralize well, so a license that lets you use it for free but requires you to contribute back improvements tends to work well because then people see something that would work for them except for this one thing, and it's cheaper to add that themselves or pay someone to than to pay someone who has to develop the whole thing from scratch.
Seconded. I tried hard to use Bazel in a polyglot repo because I really wanted just one builder.
Unfortunately, the amount of work you need to just maintain the build across language and bazel version upgrades is incredibly high. Let alone adding new build steps, or going even slightly off the well-trodded path.
I feel like Bazel would need at least 5 more full-time engineers to eventually turn it into an actually usable build tool outside Big Tech. Right now many critical open source Bazel rules get a random PR every now and then from people who don't actually (have time to) care about the open source community.
My go-to now is to use mise + just to glue together build artifacts from every language's standard build tools. It's not great but at least I get to spend time on programming instead of fixing the build.
Yes, each of the big techs has teams that just work on the build systems, however it should also be noted that none of the big tech use the open source Bazel, Google uses Blaze internally which is what Bazel is derived from, Amazon uses Brazil which has nothing to do with Bazel and Meta uses Buck, which I know nothing of so I won't comment on it.
The major issue I found when trying to use Bazel was that its essentially a build system without specific rules for each language, hence rules support for each specific language is dependant on each language's specific community, most of which are quite tiny, and mostly maintained by upstreaming changes from their individual companies, servicing their own needs, hence a lot of work is required to make it work for your own company's needs.
Notice the phrase "from a moral standpoint". You can't argue against a moral stance by stating solely what is, because the question for them is what ought to be.
Really depends what the moral objection is. If it's "no machine may speak my glorious tongue", then there's little to be said; if it's "AI is theft", then you can maybe make an argument about hypothetical models trained on public domain text using solar power and reinforced by willing volunteers; if it's "AI is a bubble and I don't want to defraud investors", then you can indeed argue the object-level facts.
Indeed, facts are part of the moral discussion in ways you outlined. My objection was that just listing some facts/opinions about what AI can do right now is not enough for that discussion.
I wanted to make this point here explicitly because lately I've seen this complete erasure of the moral dimension from AI and tech, and to me that's a very scary development.
> because lately I've seen this complete erasure of the moral dimension from AI and tech, and to me that's a very scary development.
But that is exactly what the "is ought problem" manifests, or? If morals are "oughts", then oughts are goal-dependent, i.e. they depend on personally-defined goals. To you it's scary, to others it is the way it should be.
Looking at these comments, it's painfully apparent how many think that being polite in your communication is more important than actually doing something.
I agree it would have been nicer if the message was more polite. But if you compare that to having the backbone follow through with meaningful long-term changes against a corporation you don't trust or respect, there shouldn't even be a discussion.
And don't even get me started with the people who come in here just to point out that Codeberg isn't perfect either.
> I agree it would have been nicer if the message was more polite. But if you compare that to having the backbone follow through with meaningful long-term changes against a corporation you don't trust or respect, there shouldn't even be a discussion.
You’re framing it as either/or when it isn’t. You can push for real change and communicate like an adult. The two aren’t in conflict; often they reinforce each other.
> The two aren’t in conflict; often they reinforce each other
I’d think they _are_ inherently in conflict. Every person has 24 hours per day, and they can spend them on researching and doing what’s right or on reaching consensus. There is some mutual reinforcement to some extent (as it’s usually right to have a reasonable consensus on what’s the right choice), but beyond some basic level there’s always tradeoff.
And for programming language designers, I really appreciate when they make the right long-term choices even if I don’t understand initially why they were made.
The fetish for "manners" has stood in the way of every single positive societal change. It's exactly what MLK meant with the white moderate favoring a negative peace over positive change:
the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"
MLK was, of course, famous for hurling vitriolic personal insults at people he disagreed with.
You should really take a step back and consider if MLK’s struggle for racial equality is an appropriate point of comparison for an open source project deciding to change to a different CI provider.
> You should really take a step back and consider if MLK’s struggle for racial equality is an appropriate point of comparison for an open source project deciding to change to a different CI provider.
To the type of nerds who crash out about a git hosting provider and publicly insult other developers, moving off GitHub might even be more meaningful than whatever MLK did.
> it's painfully apparent how many think that being polite in your communication is more important than actually doing something.
The zig maintainers think that, too, thus the presence of a Code of Conduct on their website. But, as always, it's a "rules for thee, but not for me" situation - if the author was called a "monkey" by someone else, I can guarantee he would invoke the CoC to call them out, but when he does it, it's fine.
Nobody thinks that. They just don't think that "doing something" gives you an excuse to be an arsehole. Especially if you are hypocritically violating your own CoC.
Yes, it does. Given the choice of having a coworker that's a very nice 0.1x engineer and having a bloody annoying one that's a 10x I'll work with the 10x any day.
The internet has evolved such a Newspeak, censor-driven culture, it's sad to see. I want people to be able to tell each other "I think this is shit and here's why".
Politeness is free and easy, it's not a big ask and it's certainly not an either-or.
I wouldn't even call it politeness, it's more like basic human decency. Would Andrew Kelly appreciate it if the LLVM guys publicly wrote a blog post calling the Zig maintainers losers and monkeys? Just screams of immaturity, which isn't surprising seeing their political views.
Just the fact of someone migrating a project to another platform during the last week of November suggests that last straws were involved. That’s more of a January or a June thing than November/December.
Fury can be a powerful motivator to commit to doing something you’ve been putting off. It also means your community announcement is going to be pretty spicy, unless you let someone else write it.
> it's painfully apparent how many think that being polite in your communication is more important than actually doing something
I absolutely agree, but people in charge of large projects/groups, in any context, should know better than to put their personal feelings and opinion on topics into the "corporate" messages they are putting out. I am guilty of this myself, no one is holier than thou, but still. AK should know better.
This. The round & slimy language is what big corps do. I don't like how this post is written – but what really matters here is that they are doing a good job moving away from GitHub. I hope more OSS does this.
> the moment I can get a project up on its legs, to where I can interact with some substantial part of its functionality and refine it, I'm off to the races. [...] This is the part where I simply don't understand the objections people have to coding agents.
That's what's valuable to you. For me the zero to one part is the most rewarding and fun part, because that's when the possibilities are near endless, and you get to create something truly original and new. I feel I'd lose a lot of that if I let an AI model prime me into one direction.
It's not FUN building all the scaffolding and setting up build scripts and all the main functions and directory structures.
Nor do I want to use some kind of initialiser or skeleton project, they always overdo things in my opinion, adding too much and too little at the same time.
With AI I can have it whip up an MVP-level happy-paths-only skeleton project in minutes and then I can start iterating with the fun bits of the project.
> I can build anything, but often struggle with getting bogged down with all the basic work. I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the good parts.
I'm in the same boat (granted, 10 years less) but can't really relate with this. By the time any part becomes boring, I start to automate/generalize it, which is very challenging to do well. That leaves me so little boring work that I speed run through it faster by typing it myself than I could prompt it.
The parts in the middle – non-trivial but not big picture – in my experience are the parts where writing the code myself constantly uncovers better ways to improve both the big picture and the automation/generalization. Because of that, there are almost no lines of code that I write that I feel I want to offload. Almost every line of code either improves the future of the software or my skills as a developer.
But perhaps I've been lucky enough to work in the same place for long. If I couldn't bring my code with me and had to constantly start from scratch, I might have a different opinion.
> By the time any part becomes boring, I start to automate/generalize it, which is very challenging to do well. That leaves me so little boring work that I speed run through it faster by typing it myself than I could prompt it.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. You can use AI to build your tooling. (Unless it's of sufficient complexity or value that you need to do the work yourself)
The time spent on the tooling is very low. Using AI for that would be like renting a flamethrower because couple of times a year I like to go camping and light a fire. I'd rather just use a lighter.
https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-73-btrfs