lobsters score: 3 · tags: historical, web
The format makes the page difficult to read and the page feels annoyingly machine-generated (apologies if it is not), but the point is solid. Fortunately, there is a link at the beginning to read the whole thing in one go.
Loadsharers was esr’s attempt to address the problem from the 2019/2020 time period. Interestingly, his list of recommended folks to support includes Paul Eggert (mentioned in this page). Sadly, Dave Täht’s list is offline following his death, but it is archived.
score 1 · canonical
what was the point? I had to skim, couldn’t even handle reading the single page mode.
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About 1/4 the way through this stopped rendering correctly for me and all I could then see was a large amount of empty black space.
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I felt that this was well pitched towards non-experts, and your average crustacean here might find it too simplistic. For me, the scroll worked well, and it helped the story along. Examples of packages from these maintainers likely on my system were helpful, too.
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Using passive voice to describe a prison sentence for killing a woman really took me out of it for some reason.
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Don’t you have to be a little detached, considering the casual way in which Russia treats human life? I hear their soldiers survive the front lines for 30 minutes on average. I don’t have all the information to pass moral judgement on the 3am events of that night. Even if I had all the information available, I still don’t know how I would pass judgement on his life (so far). He seems to spend his time consumed by a thankless, endless task. Is it penance now? Was it some kind of penance before? Can people even/ever be redeemed?
How do we keep dreaming about a future worth fighting for when so much bad stuff has happened, stuff that must be the foundation on which we build?
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In 2019 he was working on core-js full time without pay, living in Russia because it was cheaper. By his own account, three weeks after a big release he was driving home at 3 a.m. when two young women on a dark road ended up under his car, and one of them died. The families asked for about $80,000, and the prosecutor asked for seven years.
He added a message that appeared in the terminal every time anyone installed core-js, asking for help or a job. Millions of developers saw it, and many of them complained about the message. He went to prison in January 2020 and was released early, about ten months later.
I am bad at passive and active. Would you explain in-context please?
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Passive voice:
he was driving home at 3 a.m. when two young women on a dark road ended up under his car, and one of them died
Active voice:
he ran two young women over with his car and killed one of them while driving home at 3 a.m.
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That’s not even passive vs active, that’s saying two completely different things.
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How do two people end up under a car that’s being driven, unless he ran them over? If someone died because of the consequences of his actions, how could it be construed that he didn’t kill them?
Active and passive is just that - passive voice absolves responsibility by detaching what happened from who did it.
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I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Active vs passive is just two bits of grammar in English and other languages. One thing you can do with the passive voice is to not say who did something, yes, but the sentences above are simply communicating different things. One is not the passive version of the other.
There are many ways to obscure blame without using the passive voice. “ended up under” and “died” are both active, not passive.
Saying Hailey’s version in the passive would look like
Two young women were ran over [by him], and one was killed [by him].
It would be hard to add the detail about this being related to him driving home without the blame being very obvious, so the passive voice doesn’t work for obscuring blame in this case. So the author chose the active voice with a different choice of framing and different verb choices to obscure the blame instead.
It’s bad! I recoiled when reading it. It’s just that it’s bad for reasons unrelated to the passive voice.
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I’ve heard of this as the exonerative voice before: tends to get used a lot when talking about police action, in that someone “ends up injured after being in an area where police were also present” while not mentioning that police caused the injury.
You’re correct that it’s not strictly the passive voice, it’s further down the road than passive.
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This is pretty interesting and made a good point but the in-text ads are a real put-off.
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Scrollytelling
I am disappointed in myself that I have not encountered this word until today and it seems to have been coined somewhere around 2012ish. It is, however, an excellent description.
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100% Pages like this make me miss the constraints of plain text mailing lists and usenet.
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I got nauseous trying to read this on my phone, from the weirdness of it stopping page scroll when doing progress through graphs.
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