I see no reason not to be empathetic. The frustration is fair, but it's aimed at the wrong layer. These people were guided into this spot by bootcamps and curricula that start at React and never go down the stack.
My experience was the reverse. I learned HTML and CSS first, then Rails in college to serve templated pages. I understood the client/server boundary fine as a concept, what I couldn't see was where it actually sat in a web context. I sort of knew JavaScript ran in the browser, but then I'd see ERB templates stamping values directly into script tags, so the server was writing the JavaScript that ran on the client, and my mental model fell apart. Where does my code actually execute? Why does this variable exist here but not there? Why does the page have data the network tab never fetched? Nobody ever sat me down and explained the request/response lifecycle as its own thing. I had to assemble it from fragments over years. This was around 2017 for context.
How you learn something shapes how you keep learning. If your mental model is misaligned, everything downstream is friction. The thing that finally made it click for me was reading the actual HTTP RFCs, which is apparently a weird thing to do, because HTTP itself is absent from nearly every guide and curriculum. Tutorials teach you the framework, maybe the language, and just assume the protocol underneath. These days I make newbies read the MDN docs like a book and skim the HTTP wiki page, learn the history of the protocol. It's short! It's not even a book! That gives you a firm foundation. But if your foundation starts at React, drilling down is like digging past bedrock. People don't know where to start, and Googling only shows them wrong answers because they don't yet know how to ask the question.
Are you sympathetic to a doctor who specialized in surgery and now always recommends surgery, even for a common cold? Or would you say they are in the wrong job, if they are anywhere but surgery?
Ridiculous example that does nothing to argue the original, fair point. Obviously health interventions demand more finely tuned solutions than information technology
FWIW, maintaining at least a moderate degree of empathy even in systemically frustrating situations is good for the empathizer and thus in one’s interest
You can agree or disagree with the consequences, but the voting rights act never had any explicit provisions about districting, this was something conjured entirely by the courts. It was even framed as a temporary measure at the time of the original ruling.
So not exactly bewildering, I personally saw it as closer to inevitable. The Supreme Court never had the power to legislate, it can only interpret, and a shaky interpretation always has an expiration date no matter how popular it is.
Friends who give ultimatums like this are usually toxic and worth ditching. Your friend would be better off cutting you off now, regardless of what they decide about the job, than continuing to associate with someone who'd emotionally manipulate them over a career choice. Healthy relationships simply don't look like this, and dressing it up as principle doesn't change what it actually is.
The fact that this feels like a normal thing to say to a friend tells on you a bit. Get out more, spend time with people who don't already share your priors, and the certainty starts to sand down on its own. Threatening your friendships over someone else's career is not the moral high ground, it's just an ugly way to treat people. Humility is understanding you can be wrong about things even when you're certain you're correct.
This is why I believe we should only listen to amateur opinions on everything, experts simply lack historical credibility. For example I've recently purchased a healing crystal (half off) for only $5000 dollars! It cleared up the imbalanced energies my street guru told me about right away.
I would never have been made aware about the consequences of imbalanced energies in the first place if I had asked an expert instead. They probably wouldn't even suggest an immediate solution to the problem like my reliable street guru always does! Something to consider.
Ironically the street guru hucksters might have a better track record than the dangerous products mentioned above.
Less charitably, it's a mistake to imply that simply being a bigger corporation makes you go from street guru to "expert". Bigger company trying to make money off of you at any risk to you is just the same bucket at a different scale. In this context the other side is probably "expert consumer advocate" since that fits the idea above of these dangerous products advertised as cure alls.
It can be worse in terms of justice. You might be able to charge or win in court against a street hustler. Most people can't beat a big company in court. They usually won't even try.
I honestly agree with you in many respects, I'm simply spinning in some nuance to a topic I keep seeing.
The snake oil salesmen is productive precisely because the actual effects of the snake oil they are selling is unknown to the consumer they are introducing it to. There isn't easy answers to this, it's just a fact of life that we can try our best mitigate.
And apparently fish oil actually does help your brain. Weird world we live in.
So I think the focus on "experts" is actually a consequence of declining institutional credentialism. You didn't trust them for claiming to be experts, you trusted the institutions who called them experts and said you should trust them for that reason. But expertise implies competence not trust. Not everyone operates with good intentions even with the right credentials, including many institutions themselves.
I want to say upfront that I'm absolutely not trying to say Spain should or even needs to join this silly war.
But the US not being allowed to use the bases it pays and maintains for Spain makes it questionable why it does so in the first place. Iran is in fact a threat relevant to NATO considering most of it is/was within ballistic missile range. It's also a simple fact that Iran's manufacturing base has been supporting Russia's war machine, which has been a key contributing factor in the Ukrainian stalemate. There is some genuine strategic overlap.
Restricting air space on top of that, makes me, originally a more sympathetic American NATO supporter, question the dynamics here. Why should the US help Spain when it's in need in a future conflict?
I don't want Isreal dragging us into wars for it's personal benefit. But this whole conflict has really got me realizing I don't want Europe dragging us into any wars either. The only transactional benefit to those air bases is that they power American global logistics. If this becomes a pattern then I think NATO will likely become nothing more than a nuclear umbrella, even after Trump leaves office. And only as a hedge against nuclear proliferation.
People take for granted that Biden was technically the most Pro-NATO president we have ever had, and likely ever will.
The base is not some favor to Spain. Who does Spain even need defending from? It is a means of regional power projection for the US, granted to them for free as a favor. They've been very ungracious guests lately.
"Granted to them for free"? The US has been paying Spain for base access since 1953. Hundreds of millions per renewal cycle in military aid, economic assistance, and direct spending. It was never free and it was never a favor. Spain negotiated compensation every time.
"Who does Spain need defending from?" Nobody, because of the security architecture my tax dollars built. That's not evidence the bases are a favor to us. That's evidence they worked. You're welcome. And if they can't be used when it matters, I won't lose any sleep if they get closed.
No, specifically, which of their neighbors do they need protecting from.
France? Portugal? Andorra??
The bases are a remnant of American imperialism, they serve no purpose but to further American interest. Any pretension they do anything else can only be explained as late imperial delusion of grandeur.
The fact the Spanish don't let you use them to engage in your unforced act of historic self harm can be seen as yet another favor.
Spain had the largest empire in the Western Hemisphere. Extracted silver, enslaved entire populations, and lost it when we kicked their teeth in during 1898. That's imperialism. Paying someone hundreds of millions to let you park planes on their runway is not. And "which neighbor do they need defending from" is a question that tells on itself. If you still think wars are about neighboring countries you haven't been paying attention to anything happening in the world right now.
> But the US not being allowed to use the bases it pays and maintains for Spain makes it questionable why it does so in the first place.
Why lie like this? I linked the agreement; the US doesn't maintain everything.
"Each Party shall bear the costs of operation and maintenance of services and installations, or parts thereof, referred to in paragraph 1 of this Article which it uses exclusively, as well as the identifiable direct costs for its use of jointly used installations and general services of the base."
"The bases listed in Annex 2 of this Agreement shall be under Spanish command... Consistent with the provisions of Article Sixteen, the security of each base shall be the responsibility of the Commander of the each base... The functioning and maintenance of general services and installations of the base, and the management of provisioning for these services and installations shall be the responsibility of the Commander of the base, who shall assure to the United States forces the availability-of these services and installations under conditions which guarantee the operations of United States units. To discharge this responsibility and promptly and effectively resolve any contingency, the Commander of the base will seek the collaboration of the United States forces. The general services and installations of a base are those which characterize it as such and are essential to the operability of the units."
> Restricting air space on top of that, makes me, originally a more sympathetic American NATO supporter, question the dynamics here. Why should the US help Spain when it's in need in a future conflict?
> After the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Allies invoked Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, the collective-defense clause, for the first time in NATO's history.
No LLM needed, nor used. Direct from the US State Department!
> Even as a joint contributor I see no reason for the US to pay for bases it's never going to be allowed to use.
It continues to be able to use them. It has never been allowed to use them for things Spain finds objectionable.
Glad we are on the same page, because yes, as you pointed out, it literally says here in plaintext that it was NATO Allies that activated it, not the United States.
I'm not clear on how a semantic quibble that amounts to "Spain and the rest of Europe proactively affirmed their Article 5 obligations to the US" helps your case here. You have, if anything, effectively demonstrated Spain's commitment to the agreement.
If we're gonna go to that level of splitting hairs, then I'd suggest "NATO - including Spain - did it without us even having to ask" is quite supportive of my position.
> I see no reason for the US to pay for bases it's never going to be allowed to use.
Which isn't the situation being imposed by Spain. They're being told they can't use the airspace for one specific military action. They maintain use of their bases in other ways (training, presumably ship refueling, maintenance, etc). They may be able to use the airspace for _other_ military actions in the future.
Salespeople are the easiest to sell to. Con artists are the easiest to swindle. The people who believe they're immune to being tricked are always the ones who get tricked the most.
I get maintainers have their own issues to deal with, and respect that they are trying to keep the project clean. At work I have had many times where I spent more of my day reviewing MRs than actually writing code, and sometimes my cold blunt replies can unintentionally rub people the wrong way.
Still, I feel like they were pretty rude to this guy for no real reason. I don't think I'd want to work with them.
If we focus only on the impact on linguistics, I predict things will go something like this:
As LLM use normalizes for essay writing (email, documentation, social media, etc), a pattern emerges where everyone uses an LLM as an editor. People only create rough drafts and then have their "editor" make it coherent.
Interestingly, people might start using said editor prompts to express themselves, causing an increased range in distinct writing styles. Despite this, vocabulary and semantics as a whole become more uniform. Spelling errors and typos become increasingly rare.
In parallel, people start using LLMs to summarize content in a style they prefer.
Both sides of this gradually converge. Content gets explicitly written in a way that is optimized for consumption by an LLM, perhaps a return to something like the semantic web. Authors write content in a way that encourages a summarizing LLM to summarize as the author intends for certain explicit areas.
Human languages start to evolve in a direction that could be considered more coherent than before, and perhaps less ambiguous. Language is the primary interface an LLM uses with humans, so even if LLM use becomes baseline for many things, if information is not being communicated effectively then an LLM would be failing at its job. I'm personifying LLMs a bit here but I just mean it in a game theory / incentive structure way.
> people might start using said editor prompts to express themselves, causing an increased range in distinct writing styles
We're already seeing people use AI to express themselves in several contexts, but it doesn't lead to an increased range of styles. It leads to one style, the now-ubiquitous upbeat LinkedIn tone.
Theoretically we could see diversification here, with different tools prompting towards different voices, but at the moment the trend is the opposite.
>People only create rough drafts and then have their "editor" make it coherent.
While sometimes I do dump a bunch of scratch work and ask for it to be transformed into organized though, more often I find that I use LLM output the opposite way.
Give a prompt. Save the text. Reroll. Save the text. Change the prompt, reroll. Then going through the heap of vomit to find the diamonds. Sort of a modern version of "write drunk, edit sober" with the LLM being the alcohol in the drunk half of me. It can work as a brainstorming step to turn fragments of though into a bunch of drafts of thought, then to be edited down into elegant thought. Asking the LLM to synthesize its drafts usually discards the best nuggets for lesser variants.
My experience was the reverse. I learned HTML and CSS first, then Rails in college to serve templated pages. I understood the client/server boundary fine as a concept, what I couldn't see was where it actually sat in a web context. I sort of knew JavaScript ran in the browser, but then I'd see ERB templates stamping values directly into script tags, so the server was writing the JavaScript that ran on the client, and my mental model fell apart. Where does my code actually execute? Why does this variable exist here but not there? Why does the page have data the network tab never fetched? Nobody ever sat me down and explained the request/response lifecycle as its own thing. I had to assemble it from fragments over years. This was around 2017 for context.
How you learn something shapes how you keep learning. If your mental model is misaligned, everything downstream is friction. The thing that finally made it click for me was reading the actual HTTP RFCs, which is apparently a weird thing to do, because HTTP itself is absent from nearly every guide and curriculum. Tutorials teach you the framework, maybe the language, and just assume the protocol underneath. These days I make newbies read the MDN docs like a book and skim the HTTP wiki page, learn the history of the protocol. It's short! It's not even a book! That gives you a firm foundation. But if your foundation starts at React, drilling down is like digging past bedrock. People don't know where to start, and Googling only shows them wrong answers because they don't yet know how to ask the question.
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