There are a lot of things that would be “pretty cool” as long as we don’t worry about the suffering they inflict. I mean, in a sense, factory farms are pretty cool in their level of technical sophistication and efficiency of converting grain and energy into meat. The accomplishments of breeding to generate chickens with breasts so large they can’t stand up or procreate without intervention, and grow so fast their skeletons can’t keep up with their weight are amazing. The density of animals we can grow while keeping loses to disease acceptably low with antibiotics is also remarkable.

And yet, all of these things that are “pretty cool” are also horrendous on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. Raising an intelligent animal like a pig just to harvest its heart for a human might be an ethical trade-off you’re comfortable with - and given our treatment of animals for food I’ve no doubt that it’s one society at large is fine with. If my own parent needed a heart transplant, I would likely have a hard time saying no if this were available. But from a Rawlsian perspective, thinking in advance, I don’t think this is something we should be doing.

You know, it would also be pretty cool to have some kind of animal that could perform human-level tasks and ideally could understand human language. Maybe we could distinguish them from people based on some superficial physical characteristic like skin color 🤔

Well that’s an excessively low bar.

OpenSUSE for pried from my hands because the college I work for set up a Cisco proxy server / 2FA that I couldn’t get to work with openconnect, and Cisco’s AnyConnect won’t run on it.

After a few weeks on Rocky, I am desperate to go back.

I really understand this as a starting position, but it can definitely be taken too far. I feel like the details matter a lot.

A few years ago there was a big dust up in the Julia community when they wanted to add a small amount of telemetry to the package servers - basically the plan was to identify real users from things like CI runs, and to be able to identify the number of unique users , which matters a lot, especially for grant writing (and a lot of academics use Julia, so this would be a boon to the ecosystem).

The core devs were super up front about it, offered easy opt-out, and even were receptive to a plan that would switch from unique identifiers for downloaders to some scheme that would give an accurate count without the ability to trace a particular download to a particular user, but a couple of prominent members of the community were incensed.