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Hiring people based on their race is immoral and framing this as moral is strange. That’s where classical liberals, centrists and the right are coming from when they say the left is obsessed with DEI. I understand you think they are obsessed with dismantling it and that’s a reasonable view too.

> the things that traditional Democrats supported in 1992 are largely the same things supported now.

No. See Bernie Sanders in 2015 talking about how America needs strong borders and illegal immigrants are used by big business to rip American workers off. See Obama’s speech on the same. See positions on trans identifying males in women’s sports. See open support for hiring based on sex and race. Many democrat positions from 20 years ago are now considered right wing.


Please find perspectives on each of those from 1992 (the OP mentions a handful of culture wars issues that I won’t reproduce).

You misinterpret my statement when you select hot-button issues of today that were not in the public discourse at that time- and almost none of the things you mention were in ANY public platform at that time.

My point is that the core political planks from then (healthcare for example, jobs for coal workers) are maintained in one political tradition and not another.


I don’t think the 1992 perspectives would have been different from the 2015 perspectives. Do you?

I live in a different western country but was old enough to watch the US news (Tom Brokaw) then. People did actually discuss these things. The consensus was: the border should exist. Tomboys were tomboys. Effeminate boys were effeminate boys. You can’t just have a policy of hiring someone based on their race because that’s silly and illegal.


> I live in a different western country but was old enough to watch the US news (Tom Brokaw) then. People did actually discuss these things. The consensus was: the border should exist. Tomboys were tomboys. Effeminate boys were effeminate boys. You can’t just have a policy of hiring someone based on their race because that’s silly and illegal.

I'm very curious about this if you're able to find records on this sort of thing.

From the top:

- I don't think the words we use on news these days were even allowed back then (rapists, Small Hands Rubio), so I don't think "these things" were discussed.

- "You can’t just have a policy of hiring someone based on their race because that’s silly and illegal." You said you're not American, so you may not understand that the current ethos of 'reverse racism' was not how this question was viewed in the 90's

- "the border should exist" This hasn't changed. I'm not sure why people are so ready to parrot this point, when Obama deported more people than any previous president, and Biden continued that. If anything, there has been a monotonic increase in this (but nevermind that many large businesses rely on undocumented labor)

- "Effeminate boys" I am sure that was never on the news in the 90s, and definitely not in a party platform. Gay people have always existed and it's a credit to our current era that we have finally started acknowledging that this isn't a 'wrong' way of living


First time I heard ‘small hands Rubio’ but yes totally agreed politics seems dirtier now.

Anyone with enough exposure to American culture to realise the reasons given for stopping anti black racism are now thrown out, and left wing activists are openly discriminating against Asians, Europeans and Jewish people.

“the border should exist” is now controversial. People think “defending migrants” (which I am) means defending illegal migration. There are suburban mom vigilantes taking on LEOs.

I am talking about sterilising and giving cosmetic surgery to effeminate boys and tomboy girls. We used to acknowledge they existed. Now we tell them their bodies are wrong. Which is not a credit to our current era.

All these positions are remarkably different from the 1990s. Asides from present day politicians having different views in older recordings, Bill Maher also talks about this very frequently.


> People think “defending migrants” (which I am)

I hate to bring up all the actions taken against American citizens and legal migrants.

> Bill Maher also talks about this very frequently.

I would not take his talking points to reflect Democratic Party orthodoxy. However, I would challenge you to compare his 1990s recordings to the more recent ones to see how things have changed.


> all the actions taken against American citizens and legal migrants.

Yes, for example this guy. He was indeed an american citizen, and anti-ICE activists framed it has him being kidnapped and driven around for two hours. The wider story is much more interesting: https://x.com/TriciaOhio/status/2013317071342317918

> I would not take his talking points to reflect Democratic Party orthodoxy.

Yes, agreed. That's the point. Bill Maher's views haven't changed much compared to 15 years ago, the Democratic Party's views have.

Also 'talking points' is a silly word for things people say. I write things, you write things. You don't have 'talking points' an I don't have 'talking points'.


But he didn’t. Trump didn’t sieze control of the military, there was no column of tanks moving towards Washington, just some angry fans rioting against his wishes (see the BBC lawsuit for manipulating trump’s speech of you think otherwise).

I think otherwise. [0]

The deck across the board is consistently stacked in Trumps favor in terms of domestic adjudication, often times by people he appointed, the system is hopelessly corrupt.

- [0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/31/jack-smith-h...


> Then we expect uses to know better than e.g. to trust links to .sh style installers some FOSS suggests...

I don't know anyone that inspects every binary yet we apparently we should not trust shell scripts?


I know many who only use binaries from trusted sources, that do monitoring, provide certificates and checksums, and so on - and run them in an OS sandbox too when they install them.

So there's that


Don't all modern OS's have sandboxing? We don't need a full VM (eg, kernel running on virtualized hardware) and the complexity that entails, we just need Claude Code running in the sandbox.

(Maybe I should be asking Claude this)

Edit: someone already built this: https://github.com/neko-kai/claude-code-sandbox


That’s not an example of what you’re claiming.


I am on X professionally as a developer relations engineer and I haven’t seen a single instance of this on X.

Meanwhile the people making a fuss about it are the same people that voted against investigating the recent child abuse scandal in the UK.


That’s not part of the open source definition.

You can claim the open source code isn’t Windows 11, but you can’t complain the code isn’t open source.


  > you can’t complain the code isn’t open source
(unless, of course, the code isn't licensed under an OSI-approved license. Parent didn't actually specify which license the hypothetical not-windows-11 was being "open sourced" under, so we can't actually say for sure whether this hypothetical release is open source or not)

</pedantry>


Yes that’s correct. I’m imagining it’s the Apache license like the X code, which is indeed an open source license.

> I feel like we need more awareness on what is open-source and how does it work. This is NOT open source.

This is open source. The license is the Apache license that meets the open source definition:

https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm/blob/main/LICENSE


By license sure, it is. But having a look at https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en#four-freedoms I kind of doubt it really is.

Freedom 1 is dubiously fulfilled. I can modify it, sure, but I can't modify it when the program runs on my data for me. Freedom 0 isn't fulfilled. I don't have the necessary input data to run the program myself.

(Of course the free software definition wasn't written for today's world, and the clarification below goes somewhat against my argument for Freedom 0. Feel free to pick this apart.)


That's a fair point, but I don't think anyone was stating it's free software. It doesn't need to meet the four freedoms to be open source, just the open source definition.

> Clearly it’s filed with abandoned accounts and bots. Musk promised a purge of abandoned accounts when he first took over, and auctioning off usernames, but that went nowhere.

Fascinating my anecdotal experience is the opposite. I’ve also been using Twitter for the last 17 years and I’ve finally got the opportunity to purchase the dead username I want.


>I’ve finally got the opportunity to purchase the dead username I want

Good luck with that. You didn't really buy it, you're temporarily renting it from Musk. If you stop paying, you'll also lose your username.


Payment is one time, it doesn’t renew. They won’t sell it unless it’s inactive. It won’t be inactive.

For now. Although I doubt this would happen, they legally could write to you tomorrow demanding $100/mo because they want to.

Well any company could legally do that at any point so I'm not sure how this is any different.

The difference is not the company so much as the conviction of the person I am responding to. Although X has snagged names they want for their own use away from users

I’m convinced they’d remove an active username someone paid money for as much as any other proprietary platform would.

Me too. That's a fair statement.

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