I think there are effectively universal moral standards, which essentially nobody disagrees with.
A good example: “Do not torture babies for sport”
I don’t think anyone actually rejects that. And those who do tend to find themselves in prison or the grave pretty quickly, because violating that rule is something other humans have very little tolerance for.
On the other hand, this rule is kind of practically irrelevant, because almost everybody agrees with it and almost nobody has any interest in violating it. But it is a useful example of a moral rule nobody seriously questions.
What do you consider torture? and what do you consider sport?
During war in the Middle Ages? Ethnic cleansing? What did they consider at the time?
BTW: it’s a pretty American (or western) value that children are somehow more sacred than adults.
Eventually we will realize in 100 years or so, that direct human-computer implant devices work best when implanted in babies. People are going freak out. Some country will legalize it. Eventually it will become universal. Is it torture?
To make it current-day, is vaccinating babies torture? Or does the end (preventing uncomfortable/painful/deadly disease, which is a worse form of torture) justify the means?
(I'm not opposed to vaccination or whatever and don't want to make this a debate about that, but it's a good practical example of how it's a subject that you can't be absolute about, or being absolutist about e.g. not hurting babies does more harm to them)
If that were true, the europeans wouldn't have tried to colonise and dehumanise much of the population they thought were beneath them. So, it seems your universal moral standards would be maximally self-serving.
> I don’t think anyone actually rejects that. And those who do tend to find themselves in prison or the grave pretty quickly, because violating that rule is something other humans have very little tolerance for.
I have bad news for you about the extremely long list of historical atrocities over the millennia of recorded history, and how few of those involved saw any punishment for participating in them.
But those aren't actually counterexamples to my principle.
The Nazis murdered numerous babies in the Holocaust. But they weren't doing it "for sport". They claimed it was necessary to protect the Aryan race, or something like that; which is monstrously idiotic and evil – but not a counterexample to “Do not torture babies for sport”. They believed there were acceptable reasons to kill innocents–but mere sport was not among them.
In fact, the Nazis did not look kindly on Nazis who killed prisoners for personal reasons as opposed to the system's reasons. They executed SS-Standartenführer Karl-Otto Koch, the commandant of Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, for the crime (among others) of murdering prisoners. Of course, he'd overseen the murder of untold thousands of innocent prisoners, no doubt including babies – and his Nazi superiors were perfectly fine with that. But when he turned to murdering prisoners for his own personal reasons – to cover up the fact that he'd somehow contracted syphilis, very likely through raping female camp inmates – that was a capital crime, for which the SS executed him by firing squad at Buchenwald, a week before American soldiers liberated the camp.
Is it necessary to frame it in moral terms though? I feel like the moral framing here adds essentially nothing to our understanding and can easily be omitted. "You will be punished for torturing babies for sport in most cultures". "Most people aren't interested in torturing babies for sport and would have a strongly negative emotional reaction to such a practice".
Otherwise you're just outsourcing your critical thinking to other people. A system of just "You will be punished for X" without analysis becomes "Derp, just do things that I won't be punished for". Or more sinister, "just hand your identification papers over to the officer and you won't be punished, don't think about it". Rule of power is not a recipe for a functional system. This becomes a blend of sociology and philosophy, but on the sociology side, you don't want a fear-based or shame-based society anyways.
Your latter example ("Most people aren't interested in torturing babies for sport and would have a strongly negative emotional reaction to such a practice") is actually a good example of the core aspect of Hume's philosophy, so if you're trying to avoid the philosophical logic discussion, that's not gonna work either. If you follow the conclusions of that statement to its implications, you end up back at moral philosophy.
That's not a bad thing! That's like a chef asking "how do i cook X" and understanding the answer ("how the maillard reaction works") eventually goes to chemistry. That's just how the world is. Of course, you might be a bit frustrated if you're a chef who doesn't know chemistry, or a game theorist who doesn't know philosophy, but I assure you that it is correct direction to look for what you're interested at here.
You did not correctly understand what I said. I am not saying that hunting babies for sport is immoral because you will get punished for it. I am saying that there isn't any useful knowledge about the statement "hunting babies for sport is bad" that requires a moral framing. Morality is redundant. The fact that you will get punished for hunting babies for sport is just one of the reasons why hunting babies for sport is bad. This is why I gave another example, "Most people aren't interested in torturing babies for sport and would have a strongly negative emotional reaction to such a practice". It is likely that you value human lives and would find baby-hunting disgusting. Again, a moral framing wouldn't add anything here. Any other reason for why "hunting babies for sport is bad" that you will come up with using your critical thinking will work without a moral framing.
"there isn't any useful knowledge" "Morality is redundant."
I strongly dispute this statement, and honestly find it baffling that you would claim as such.
The fact that you will be punished for murdering babies is BECAUSE it is morally bad, not the other way around! We didn't write down the laws/punishment for fun, we wrote the laws to match our moral systems! Or do you believe that we design our moral systems based on our laws of punishment? That is... quite a claim.
Your argument has the same structure as saying: "We don't need germ theory. The fact that washing your hands prevents disease is just one reason why you should wash your hands. People socially also find dirty hands disgusting, and avoid you as social punishment. Any reason you come up with for hand-washing works without a germ theory framing."
But germ theory is precisely why hand-washing prevents disease and why we evolved disgust responses to filth. Calling it "redundant" because we can list its downstream effects without naming it doesn't make the underlying framework unnecessary. It just means you're describing consequences while ignoring their cause. You can't explain why those consequences hold together coherently without it; the justified true belief comes from germ theory! (And don't try to gettier problem me on the concept of knowledge, this applies even if you don't use JTB to define knowledge.)
Pretty much every serious philosopher agrees that “Do not torture babies for sport” is not a foundation of any ethical system, but merely a consequence of a system you choose. To say otherwise is like someone walking up to a mathematician and saying "you need to add 'triangles have angles that sum up to 180 degrees' to the 5 Euclidian axioms of geometry". The mathematician would roll their eyes and tell you it's already obvious and can be proven from the 5 base laws (axioms).
The problem with philosophy is that humans agree on like... 1-2 foundation level bottom tier (axiom) laws of ethics, and then the rest of the laws of ethics aren't actually universal and axiomatic, and so people argue over them all the time. There's no universal 5 laws, and 2 laws isn't enough (just like how 2 laws wouldn't be enough for geometry). It's like knowing "any 3 points define a plane" but then there's only 1-2 points that's clearly defined, with a couple of contenders for what the 3rd point could be, so people argue all day over what their favorite plane is.
That's philosophy of ethics in a nutshell. Basically 1 or 2 axioms everyone agrees on, a dozen axioms that nobody can agree on, and pretty much all of them can be used to prove a statement "don't torture babies for sport" so it's not exactly easy to distinguish them, and each one has pros and cons.
Anyways, Anthropic is using a version of Virtue Ethics for the claude constitution, which is a pretty good idea actually. If you REALLY want everything written down as rules, then you're probably thinking of Deontological Ethics, which also works as an ethical system, and has its own pros and cons.
And before you ask, yes, the version of Anthropic's virtue ethics that they are using excludes torturing babies as a permissible action.
Ironically, it's possible to create an ethical system where eating babies is a good thing. There's literally works of fiction about a different species [2], which explores this topic. So you can see the difficulty of such a problem- even something simple as as "don't kill your babies" can be not easily settled. Also, in real life, some animals will kill their babies if they think it helps the family survive.
> Pretty much every serious philosopher agrees that “Do not torture babies for sport” is not a foundation of any ethical system, but merely a consequence of a system you choose.
Almost everyone agrees that "1+1=2" is objective. There is far less agreement on how and why it is objective–but most would say we don't need to know how to answer deep questions in the philosophy of mathematics to know that "1+1=2" is objective.
And I don't see why ethics need be any different. We don't need to know which (if any) system of proposed ethical axioms is right, in order to know that "It is gravely unethical to torture babies for sport" is objectively true.
If disputes over whether and how that ethical proposition can be grounded axiomatically, are a valid reason to doubt its objective truth – why isn't that equally true for "1+1=2"? Are the disputes over whether and how "1+1=2" can be grounded axiomatically, a valid reason to doubt its objective truth?
You might recognise that I'm making here a variation on what is known in the literature as a "companion in the guilt" argument, see e.g. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12528
I was having a conversation about this with my father-a retired pharmaceutical industry executive-a few weeks back, about why certain generic prescription medication formulations were unavailable in Australia yet sold in New Zealand. He explained to me that the Australian pharmaceutical regulator (the TGA) and its New Zealand equivalent (Medsafe) had very different regulatory philosophies. Medsafe, if a major international regulator (such as the US FDA or the EU’s EMA) had already approved something, they’ll just approve it too (“if it is good enough for them it is good enough for us”); the TGA’s attitude was very different, just because the FDA or EMA had approved it didn’t mean they automatically would, they wanted to analyse the safety data for themselves and make up their own mind. For blockbuster patented drugs, the extra regulatory cost of Australia was worth it, but for the long tail of miscellaneous generic formulations, the extra cost of dealing with the TGA could make some of them financially nonviable.
I would think for a country like Australia a more moderate approach would be to approve things that were approved by other countries and have been in use for some amount of time - say, 5 years or so - apart from the things they directly approve.
The actual drug my father and I were discussing was clonidine.
In the UK and New Zealand, they sell 25 microgram clonidine tablets; in Australia, the smallest dose on sale is 100 micrograms.
Clonidine is a very old drug – it was released back in the 1960s. The risks involved are very well understood (arguably the biggest risk is fatal overdoses, but patient/parent education is the accepted mitigation strategy.)
The issue is, in Australia, it is only approved for treating high blood pressure in adults. Paediatricians and child psychiatrists commonly prescribe it for ADHD, and for anxiety, aggression and insomnia (particularly but not exclusively in the context of ASD); in adults, it is prescribed to treat menopausal hot flushes and migraines – but all those indications are off-label.
And this is the problem – given the doses involved, 25 microgram tablets only really make sense for those off-label indications, there isn't much demand for them for treating adult hypertension. So to get the TGA to approve 25 microgram clonidine tablets, you need to prove to them that clonidine is safe and effective for one of those currently off-label indications. And that will cost a lot of money, and given it is a generic medication long out of patent protection, it isn't worthwhile. Whereas Medsafe quite possibly just decided "the UK approved it for X so we will too".
As a parent, both of whose children are prescribed clonidine, this annoys me – cutting tablets in half is no fun, and cutting them into quarters is even worse. Or I can get them compounded into liquid by a compounding pharmacist, which makes it easier to measure out smaller doses (I always get 25 microgram/ml), but that adds expense and time (the nearest compounding pharmacy is 15 minutes drive one way). I just wish I could get 25 microgram tablets, but they can't legally be sold in Australia–possibly I could ask our child psychiatrist to apply for special permission to import them from New Zealand, but the amount of bureaucracy involved probably isn't worth it, there's no guarantee the request would be approved, and it would be expensive (it wouldn't be covered by our national prescription drug insurance).
People who are distinguishing them here are relying on peculiar definitions of these terms, which are largely peculiar to Americans-and I’d add, only some of them.
To an Australian or Briton or Canadian or New Zealander, “Republic” means not being a constitutional monarchy. I think it means something similar in a lot of other countries. Australia is a democracy but not a republic, because it has a King instead of a President. The US, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel (putting aside the Palestinian issue) are democratic republics, because they are democracies with Presidents instead of a King/Queen. China or North Korea are republics but not democracies; Saudi Arabia is neither a republic nor a democracy.
> The United States is a flawed system designed to protect the feudal, mostly southern property based system
A lot of the constitutional factors you object to - like smaller states having voting power out of proportion to their population, or the constitution being difficult to amend - are also shared by Australia, yet Australia never had race-based chattel slavery.
(Dispossession and maltreatment of indigenous people isn’t really comparable because (a) the US had that too and (b) to the extent that influenced the constitutional architecture, it didn’t really influence the aspects you are complaining about.)
What I’d like to see them do, is add more POSIX APIs to Win32 (not some separate environment like WSL is). It would make porting apps from Linux/macOS/etc to Win32 a lot easier, and remove the amount of code required in cross-platform apps/frameworks
I am an avid Linux user, but honestly I think Windows’ lack of POSIX is arguably a benefit.
I feel like POSIX has effectively codified mediocrity. It’s not “bad” but I don’t think it’s the be all end all either. Even NT 1 was arguably ahead of the POSIX standard.
You can have POSIX while having a radically different "not-POSIX" API. A good example of this is IBM's flagship mainframe operating system z/OS – it is a certified Unix, and recent releases have even added a big subset of the Linux namespaces API (to support Kubernetes), but that whole radically different mainframe world is all there too – and Unix processes have direct access to most of it.
The official Windows POSIX model – from the NT POSIX system, to Interix/SFU/SUA, through to WSL1/WSL2 – has always been that a process is either POSIX or Win32, never both at once. By contrast, the z/OS model is any mainframe process [0] can turn on POSIX mode ("POSIX(ON)"), gaining access to Unix APIs, but still able to call all the classic mainframe APIs.
This is also basically the Cygwin model. But the Cygwin team have to do all kinds of expensive and complex hacks to make it work, while Microsoft could provide the same functionality far more easily.
To give a real example – NT lacks an exec() system call, the ability to replace a process with another executable while keeping the same PID. So Cygwin fakes it by starting a child process, but then maintaining "Cygwin PIDs" separate from the NT/Win32 PIDs, and a child process started by exec() inherits the parent's Cygwin PID, so looks to POSIX code like the same process. Microsoft could just implement an exec() system call. Or if for some reason that's too hard, move this "two PIDs" thing into the OS kernel, where everyone would get it for free.
[0] not quite true, there are some special types of processes which operate in modes which are incompatible with the use of POSIX APIs; but your average/normal/run-of-the-mill process can.
Cygwin is literally what you describe - some companies (usually engineering firms who make high-end CAD software and the like) use to ship their Linux based tooling on Windows, you can use it, and most Linux CLI tools run on top of it.
It works well, if you mind the limitiations, but it has existed for a long time, and I don't think it's been a huge game changer.
Cygwin literally isn't what I describe, because it is an additional layer of code which isn't supported by Microsoft, doesn't come with Windows, and contains a lot of complex inefficient hacks to do things which Microsoft could do much more easily.
“X Subsystem for Y” vs “Y Subsystem for X”, where you own one of those trademarks but the other is somebody else’s, is the kind of thing that seems irrelevant to most developers, but pays the salaries of trademark lawyers
Some news outlets did report on it. However, in my experience after testing the patch applied on top of Wine 11.0, both the Creative Cloud and the Photoshop installer did not work.
I suppose that the thing that the patch fixes is the "offline" Photoshop installers, which are not provided anymore unless if you ask Adobe nicely... or if you get it from third party sources. The PR's creator did say that they didn't pay for Creative Cloud, so I think it is likely that this is what happened.
This made me wonder if anyone had actually tested the patches with a legit Creative Cloud/Photoshop installer, or if everyone just ran with the PR saying "look it works now!!!" but nobody bothered to actually test it. The creator did submit their own precompiled Wine version, however that version is meant to be run via Proton, so I wasn't able to make it work because I don't know how to run things via Proton outside of Steam.
I was able to get the Creative Cloud app in Wine (set to Windows 10 mode) by using some very dubious methods, as in, I asked Claude Code to implement the stub to see what would happen because if AI is sooo good as how people are saying, it should be able to fix things in Wine... right? And surprisingly, it did actually work.
However you aren't able to use Photoshop CC 2021 (the earliest Photoshop version you can install from Creative Cloud, newer versions crash during startup) because the activation popup does not render the input controls. The reason why I think it is trying to render something is because the activation popup background does have the same color as the Adobe website and, if my memory is correct, in Windows that popup is used to ask for your Adobe account credentials.
(Sadly the PR patch does not fix the activation screen)
Of course, if you bypass the activation using... alternatives means, Photoshop CC 2021 does work under Wine, which is why you can find a lot of "Photoshop CC 2021 in Wine!" repositories on GitHub.
You know what's weird? You being late by 3 days and not bothering to read the comments on reddit [0], then going ahead and trying a Wine 10 patch on Wine 11. Like, what exactly did you expect?
Edit: Even worse, other people are finding it easier to get creative cloud to run on older wine versions [1], meaning that there are regressions in Wine that aren't being spotted.
Edit 2: Worse yet, people aren't pirating Photoshop, they copy the files of a working activated Photoshop installation from Windows so they can run it under Wine [2].
> then going ahead and trying a Wine 10 patch on Wine 11. Like, what exactly did you expect?
You can copy the PR's diffs and apply it on Wine 11.0, it is not like it doesn't work or that OP patched functions that are only available in Proton.
Seeing that people actually got it to work gets me intrigued, sadly they didn't say if they actually used an official Creative Cloud license, or if they downloaded it from the web from third party sources. Because, as I said before, the installers that OP used are not the installers you normally get from Adobe. So, if you know where OP got the installers, please share. :)
Now, it could be that Proton somehow has something else that fixes the installers, or that there is a regression between Wine 10.0 and Wine 11.0 that breaks the creator's patch. But like I said in my own posts that I linked, I can't find the exact installers that OP is using. The only time I've seen similar installers was when I was downloading pirated Photoshop copies to test it out on Wine.
> Even worse, other people are finding it easier to get creative cloud to run on older wine versions [1], meaning that there are regressions in Wine that aren't being spotted.
I don't think it is a regression. Hear me out:
The user was installing Photoshop CC 2023 with a installer similar to OP's installer, so I suppose that the installer also installs an older Creative Cloud version.
Maybe that Creative Cloud version does not require the stubbed function, nor does it require WebView2.
To get the RECENT, downloaded right off Adobe's website Creative Cloud installer, you will need to install WebView2 on your Wine prefix and set "msedgewebview2.exe" to Windows 7 mode. This makes the Creative Cloud work up until it tries to start it, which makes it use the stubbed function.
To workaround that, you can set Creative Cloud to Windows 7 mode, because that forces a different code path in the app which does not use the stubbed function (SetThreadpoolTimerEx was only added in Windows 8). However, this makes all apps show that it is "incompatible on your system", so you can't actually install anything from it.
My own patch DOES fix Creative Cloud in Windows 10 mode, so you are able to install Photoshop directly from Wine.
However, the patch (nor OP nor my own patch) fixes Photoshop's activation. And let's not rule out that maybe it IS actually a regression.
> Worse yet, people aren't pirating Photoshop, they copy the files of a working activated Photoshop installation from Windows so they can run it under Wine [2].
I'm not sure why you think that linking MattKC's post is a "gotcha", when I explicitly linked that post on my Reddit post AND MattKC's post also says that you need to bypass activation with GenP. So you aren't activating the application in Wine, you are bypassing the activation altogether.
But maybe you didn't notice that because I've only noticed now that my markdown was broken, because I included "(archived link because MattKC's forum is down)" within the URL by mistake, so the link didn't actually work, whoops. I've fixed that now.
I never said that Photoshop doesn't work in Wine. I said that it does work as long as you bypass activation with external tools. If you are using a legitimate copy from a Windows machine, or if you installed it via CC on Wine, or if it is a pirated copy, it doesn't matter, you WILL need to bypass the activation somehow. Which is the point I made in my post.
> The guy who claimed to have fixed creative commons has posted an update
That update was made after my post, and the installers on the creator's post are STILL not the same installers that you can get downloading from Adobe.
Unless I'm missing something and these installers can ACTUALLY be downloaded from Adobe, because I couldn't find them anywhere and the ones that I get from Adobe's website are the ones that I shared the screenshots of on my Reddit post.
___
Now, if you want to prove me wrong, please go ahead and try the creator's patch and try installing the Creative Cloud app, downloaded directly from Adobe's website.
I really want to be proven wrong because it would be really cool if you could get the Creative Cloud app + Photoshop working in Wine without needing external activation tools.
To be SURE that I'm not "misrepresent basically everyone involved": Right now I tried the Proton build the PR creator made... and Photoshop still does not work. It shows the activation screen with "Loading..." written on it (sometimes it is just a blank box). https://i.imgur.com/QN2rxoO.png
You also aren't able to install Creative Cloud with that fork, the Creative Cloud installer gets stuck on a loading loop, so I needed to copy my Photoshop + Creative Cloud installation from my other Wine prefix.
This is not me throwing the PR's creator to the curb, it is impressive that they were able to fix the installers, even though they aren't the "main" installers, and I'm pretty sure that the PR creator could fix the activation screen too, because I think the issue is similar to the ones they are fixing, they probably just didn't do that yet because they don't know the activation screen is also borked.
Because I really want to be proved wrong, I tried using the patch creator's pre-compiled build with umu-launcher. However I couldn't get it work because umu-launcher kept complaining about a missing container runtime after I set the PROTONPATH to the pre-compiled build. It also did not work with umu's default Proton fork (it did run something, but even after I tried starting winecfg with umu, it just didn't do anything)
This is probably a skill issue on my part, so someone smarter than me could try getting it to work.
Because after using umu it sets up all of the override DLLs on my Wine prefix, I've tried running the Wine build directly, and I must say that the Photoshop GUI DOES render way better here, however the activation screen is still a empty white box (sometimes it does show "Loading..." in the box): https://i.imgur.com/Jxnga5W.png
But when doing this, the Creative Cloud app does not work anymore, it says that it needs to be repaired, but it fails to be repaired. https://i.imgur.com/jdQeU4t.png
This is very scuffed, maybe I should try Lutris and see what happens
Again, I really want to be proven wrong and it would be amazing if someone that ACTUALLY made it work with a PAID Creative Cloud license and used Photoshop CC 2021 WITHOUT bypassing its activation shows up and says "hey look, I got it to work and you are just stupid".
> Of course, if you bypass the activation using... alternatives means, Photoshop CC 2021 does work under Wine, which is why you can find a lot of "Photoshop CC 2021 in Wine!" repositories on GitHub.
> It's something we mostly take for granted today but was a real advancement over earlier, often text-based, programs that used simple text effects like highlighting or different colors to represent visual effects that were only fully realized when you printed your document.
I am tasked with maintaining documentation in Confluence and Notion-and I wasn’t enjoying it. Then I built a system with bidirectional sync between the two of them and a Git repo full of Markdown documents-and now I find the task to be much more pleasant.
> But the birthday date didn’t change so it shouldn’t move to a different day.
But it does. My brother moved to the US for a few years. So we’d send him birthday wishes on the day of his birthday (Australia time), and he’d get them the day before his birthday (his time). Now he’s moved back to Australia, the same thing happens in reverse-he gets birthday wishes from his American friends the day after his birthday.
My wife has lots of American friends on Facebook (none of whom she knows personally, all people she used to play Farmville with)-and she has them wishing her a happy birthday the day after her birthday too. Maybe she’s doing the same to them in reverse.
> I've seen many futurists claim that human innovation is dead and all future discoveries will be the results of AI.
I think there's a big difference between discoveries through AI-human synergy and discoveries through AI working in isolation.
It probably will be true soon (if it isn't already) that most innovation features some degree of AI input, but still with a human to steer the AI in the right direction.
I think an AI being able to discover something genuinely new all by itself, without any human steering, is a lot further off.
If AIs start producing significant quantities of genuine and useful innovation with minimal human input, maybe the singularitarians are about to be proven right.
A good example: “Do not torture babies for sport”
I don’t think anyone actually rejects that. And those who do tend to find themselves in prison or the grave pretty quickly, because violating that rule is something other humans have very little tolerance for.
On the other hand, this rule is kind of practically irrelevant, because almost everybody agrees with it and almost nobody has any interest in violating it. But it is a useful example of a moral rule nobody seriously questions.
reply