Even more so as the lesson of that story is perhaps the single most important one for people to learn in modern times.
Almost everybody in that book is an awful person, especially the most 'upstanding' of types. Even the protagonist is an awful person. The one and only exception is 'N* Jim' who is the only kind-hearted and genuinely decent person in the book. It's an entire story about how the appearances of people, and the reality of those people, are two very different things.
It being banned for using foul language, as educational outcomes continue to deteriorate, is just so perfectly ironic.
I don't support banning the book, but I think it is hard book to teach because it needs SO much context and a mature audience (lol good luck). Also, there are hundreds of other books from that era that are relevant even from Mark Twain's corpus so being obstinate about that book is a questionable position. I'm ambivalent honestly, but definitely not willing to die on that hill. (I graduated highschool in 1989 from a middle class suburb, we never read it.)
I mean, you gotta read it. I’m not normally a huge fan of the classics; I find Steinbeck dry and tedious, and Hemingway to be self-indulgent and repetitious. Even Twain’s other work isn’t exactly to my taste. But I’ve read Huckleberry Finn three times—in elementary school just for fun, in high school because it was assigned, and I recently listened to it on audiobook—and enjoyed the hell out of each time. Banning it simply because it uses a word that the entire book simply couldn’t exist without is a crime, and does a huge disservice to the very students they are supposedly trying to protect.
I have read it. I spent my 20s guiltily reading all of the books I was supposed to have read in high school but used Cliff's Notes instead. From my 20's perspective I found Finn insipid and hokey but that's because pop culture had recycled it hundreds of times since its first publication, however when I consider it from the period perspective I can see the satire and the pointed allegories that made Twain so formidable. (Funny you mention Hemingway. I loved his writing in my 20's, then went back and read some again in my 40's and was like "huh, this irritating and immature, no wonder i loved it in my 20's.")
Contact a known and trusted security researcher who can verify to the world that you did what you said you did, so everyone else can have as much time as possible to figure out exactly how fucked they are. Doing nothing isn’t an option; once someone figures something like that out, it signifies that conditions were ripe for the discovery to be made, and it’s only a matter of time before it’s discovered again independently.
> The one thing I really can't stand about macOS is "Secure Input". It won't let you use something like TE or KM to input a password.
It actually will. The problem is that when secure input is enabled, you can’t trigger a macro from the keyboard, because the daemon isn’t allowed to intercept keystrokes. But if you can trigger the macro some other way, like through a mouse button or a MIDI message, keystrokes can be sent just fine, even into a password field.
Those can be business decisions too though. It depends on whether or not the real / lucrative customers will notice, or maybe the noisy customers who will be all over twitter because a dev figured they'd make a big change like this on their own.
Throttling and tiering can definitely affect more people than you might suspect (like spiky services) and considering data and use are important.
I mean, to be fair, most people’s TVs have shown ads since forever. Granted, those ads were distributed by the broadcaster rather than the TV manufacturers, but the association between TV and ads goes back far enough that it’s just sort of part of the cultural consciousness. I’m not sure that means that people “don’t care about ads”, especially when they are appearing in their homes through channels other than television. It may be that people who normally wouldn’t accept having ads on their devices have a blind spot for TV ads, just because that’s how TV has always been.
As a general rule they will work anywhere, as long as the major version of the Marshal format is the same, and this hasn’t changed since Ruby 1.8. I expect if it ever did change (I can’t see any reason for it to ever do so though) there would probably be some sort of backwards compatibility available, as the Ruby community really hates making breaking changes between language versions, especially without offering some kind of relatively easy solution for making older code work.
> This company is profiting immensely off of your work
I wouldn’t say that’s exactly the case. Not to denigrate the author or anything, but this library is a relatively minor part of what Anthropic is doing. It’s a UI manipulation library, specifically one that simulates keyboard and mouse inputs. While something like that is certainly necessary for the project in question, it’s not anything that couldn’t be rewritten in-house without too much difficulty, especially since they’re only using a subset of the platforms supported by the library.
I’m sure that working on this project has provided the author with expertise in this area that Anthropic could benefit from, and so in that sense it’s still a shame that they wouldn’t give him an interview, but that’s really all that can be said about it.
> it’s not anything that couldn’t be rewritten in-house without too much difficulty
This is my experience, at every group I’ve been in. Extending the date a bit is much easier than involving legal for approving a new library.
The group I’m in now sunk a substantial amount of money into a lawsuit for a library that accidentally made its way in, so are now “No LGPL.” with some crazy loops and approvals required if there’s really no alternative (very rare). From their perspective, it’s cheaper and safer to rewrite than not be in compliance, unintentionally or not.
