The guillotine wasn't for the super rich, but for the privileged by birth. The equivalent would be to guillotine the nepo babies (and the Ivy League administrators who rubber stamp their admission).
Or fix inheritance. And by fix I mean tax as hell.
The statistics cited in the article you cite talks about the Nobility/Clergy/Other classification. There is no wealth-related statistic. It's entirely possible that a good fraction of the "Others" category were wealthy bourgeois.
Even in the height of the revolution, the nobility largely retained it's control [0]. And at the end of the day, le Directorate, the Napoleon regime, the Louis Phillips regime, and the Napoleon III regime continued to maintain the power of the bourgeois.
If the bourgeois had been completely purged in the French Revolution, then the crackdown of the 1848 Revolution (and the subsequent exodus of French republicans and socialists), 18 Bumaire, the Bourbon Restoration, and other successful power grabs by the bourgeois following the French Revolution wouldn't have happened.
Heck, much of the Council of 500 were themselves either mid-level aristocrats or the children of ancien regime enforcers as was seen with Talleyrand, Barras, Duke of Parma, Lebrun, and the Bonaparte family, along with members of the Directorate like Carnot, Barras, and Merlin.
There's a reason Marx termed the French Revolution as a "bourgeois revolution", why Max Scheler classes the French Revolution as a revolution driven by ressentiment (the Nietzchean concept that underlies elite overproduction), and how Bourdieu came to his thesis on "cultural capital" (which can also help explain the contemporary rise of left- and right-leaning populism).
In essence, who is more elite - an L6 at Google earning $600K TC who graduated from UC Irvine and whose parents were union employees, a Senior Editor at the NYT earning $130K TC who graduated from Yale and whose parents were lawyers, or a Congressional Chief of Staff who graduated from UChicago and whose parents immigrated from Taiwan on an H1B to work at Intel?
The answer is they are all members of the elite. It was the exact same with the leadership of the French Revolution, and the subsequent regimes.
It's the same reason why Mao's dad was a rural landlord, why Lenin's dad was a State Councillor, why Ho Chi Minh's father was a Confucian scholar, why Pol Pot's father was a rural landlord with ties to nobility, and Che Guevara's father an Argentine engineer who immigrated from Ireland.
You're being beside the point. All I'm saying is: don't conflate "nobility" and "bourgeois" in your statistics and analysis. In the context of the French revolution, they're not the same.
Of course the bourgeois weren't purged in the revolution. It's them who took power through that revolution.
> The answer is they are all members of the elite. It was the exact same with the leadership of the French Revolution, and the subsequent regimes.
no. Bourgeois, prior to the revolution, were not part of the elite. It's difficult to imagine, but there was a time where there wasn't such a direct correlation as today between wealth and power.
> don't conflate "nobility" and "bourgeois" in your statistics and analysis
Yet it was mid-level aristocrats that were overrepresented in the Directorate and the Council of 500.
> no. Bourgeois, prior to the revolution, were not part of the elite. It's difficult to imagine, but there was a time where there wasn't such a direct correlation as today between wealth and power
Yes. I know, but the initial conversation is based on correcting the a revisionist meme that the French Revolution was a quasi-communist revolution, when in reality it was just a form of inter-elite fratricide - especially between mid-level aristocrats and the church and a subset of royalists.
All the revolution did was cleave the bourgeois from the third estate, and merge them along with the second and first estates.
> meme that the French Revolution was a quasi-communist revolution
It's not a meme. There's clearly a collectivist movement within the revolution, it's just that this force failed to take power. The "révolution de Février", in 1848 was precisely this: Paris going full collectivist, abolishing property and all, then small land owner from the provinces freaking out and all come to Paris to whoop them.
> There's clearly a collectivist movement within the revolution, it's just that this force failed to take power
And there was a much more powerful core of leaders who were the children of the various types of elites within the ancien regime.
Almost the entire history of France the century after the revolution was authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian rule with the collaboration of intellectual, economic, and religious elites.
And this is why Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, and other flavors of Communists take a dim view of the French Revolution.
If a revolution between the cultural elite and the capital elite just led to the pre-eminence of the capital elite and their co-opting of the cultural elite, that means the revolution basically had no positive impact for the overwhelming majority of the French subaltern of the 19th century.
And don't get me or my extended family started about French colonialism.
It's weird, I feel like we're arguing over saying the same thing. Sure, I agree, but please don't say it's a meme.
Sure, it didn't take power, sure, the bourgeois were stronger, but they still managed to overthrow the forces of Louis-Phillipe. Internet wasn't invented yet, memes couldn't depose kings.
> Most guillotined were commoners [0] - not the wealthy nor the intelligentsia.
The guillotine for everyone was itself an egalitarian idea (I am not saying it really was progress, because the death penalty in itself is atrocious, but...) The status quo before was that the nobles were decapitated with a sword or axe (quick and usually painless death), whilst the commoners were hanged (usually long and very painful). In that light, a quick and painless death for everyone was better.
Of course, amongst all the examples you could choose, you had to give a xenophobic example. There were no other example you could think of. You are seriously stating that the country who elected a sex offender (on top a being many other things like being a con man and an insurrectionist who tried to overturn a legitimate election and got away with it - hey, isn't that "offenses with "mitigating" cultural factors punished extremely lightly") should seriously screen foreign (very foreign) sex offenders who served their time.
I picked the example of under-sentencing (and early release) which most people accept is the most clearly applicable. The fact that you know exactly what I'm talking about based on a very general statement about sex offense, is strong evidence you know it's true.
In terms of rhetoric, you can argue that Donald Trump is bad for his alleged sex crimes, or you can argue that the US is wrong for vetting tourists, but you can't reasonably argue both at the same time, those contradict each other.
I was not really intending to lump civil trials into the discussion because of the lower evidential standard than criminal trials, but sure, I don't really care.
>As an aside, I'm surprised oral exams aren't possible at 36 students.
It depends on how frequent and how in-depth you want the exams to be. How much knowledge can you test in an oral exam that would be similar to a two-hour written exam? (Especially when I remember my own experience where I would have to sketch ideas for 3/4th of the time alloted before spending the last 1/4th writing frenetically the answer I found _in extremis_).
If I were a teacher, my experience would be to sample the students. Maybe bias the sample towards students who give wrong answers, but then it could start either a good feedback loop ("I'll study because I don't want to be interrogated again in front of the class") or a bad feedback loop ("I am being picked on, it is getting worse than I can improve, I hate this and I give up")
Just a teleprompter is already enough to cheat at these, even filmed. With a two-way mirror correctly placed, you can look directly into the camera and look perfectly normal while reading.
Next steps are bone conduction microphones, smart glasses, earrings...
And the weeding out of anyone both honest and with social anxiety.
I have been wondering if some of my students who demonstrated zero knowledge in class but ace in-class exams were doing something like this. I figured something like a hacked out google glasses would do the trick.
You are not "having a conversation". Stop anthropomorphizing. You are interacting with a machine which has its singular inhuman workings, developed and kept on a leash by a megacorporation.
Will it report me if I try to discuss "The anarchist's cookbook" with it? Will it try to convince me the "Protocols of the sages of Sion" is real? Will it encourage me to follow the example of the main character in "Lolita"? Will it cast in a bad light any gay or transsexual character because the megacorp behind it is forced to toe the anti-woke line of the US government in order to keep its lucrative military and anti-immigration contracts?
I'm interacting with a language model, using language and normal phrases. That is basically a conversation from my point of view, as is mostly indistinguishable from saying the same and getting similar answers that I could get from a real person that had read that book. No matter what is in the other side, because we are talking about the exchanged text and not the participants or what possibly they could had in their minds or chips.
If you’re against anthropomorphism of LLMs then how can it “encourage” you if you’re not having a conversation? How could it “convince” you of anything or cast something in a bad light without conversing?
Your point about censorship, however, I fully agree with.
Safety is a valid concern in general. But avoidance not the right way to approach it. Democratizing the access to such tools (and developing a somewhat open ecosystem around it) for researchers and the general public is the better way IMO. This way people with more knowledge (not necessarily technical. For example philosophers) can experiment and explore this space more and guide the development going forward.
Also, the base assumption of every prospering society is a population that cares about and values their freedom and rights. If the society drifts towards becoming averse to learning about these virtues ... well, there will be consequences (and yes, we are going this way. For example look at the current state of politics, wealth distribution, and labor rights in the US. People would have been a lot more resentful to this in the 1960s or 70s.)
The same is true about AI systems. If the general public (or at least a good percentage of the researchers) study it well enough, they will force this alignment with true human values. Contrary to this, censorship or less equitable / harder access and later evaluation is really detrimental to this process (more sophisticated and hazardous models will be developed without any feedback from the intellectuals / the society. Then those misaligned models can cause a lot of harm in the hands of a rogue actor).
You simply don't like any criticism of AI, as shown by your false assertions that Pike works at Google (he left), or the fact Google and others were trying to make their data centers emit less CO2 - and that effort is completely abandoned directly because of AI.
And you can't assert that AI is "revolutionary" and "a vague threat" at the same time. If it is the former, it can't be the latter. If it is the latter, it can't be the former.
> that effort is completely abandoned directly because of AI
That effort is completely abandoned because of the current US administration and POTUS a situation that big tech largely contributed to. It’s not AI that is responsible for the 180 zeitgeist change on environmental issues.
> It’s not AI that is responsible for the 180 zeitgeist change on environmental issues.
Yes, much like it's not the gun's fault when someone is killed by a gun. And, yet, it's pretty reasonable to want regulation around these tools that can be destructive in the wrong hands.
This is off topic, I’m talking about the environmental footprint of data centers. In the 2010s I remember when responding to RFPs I had to specify the carbon footprint of our servers. ESG was all the rage and every big tech company was trying to appear green. Fast forward to today where companies, investors, and obviously the administration are more than fine with data centers burning all the oil/gas/coal power that can be found.
Why should I be concerned with something that doesn't exist, will certainly never exist, and even if I were generous and entertained that something that breaks every physical law of the universe starting with entropy could exist, would result in "it" torturing a copy of myself to try to influence me in the past?
Nothing there makes sense at any level.
But people getting fired and electricity bills skyrocketing (as well as RAM etc.) are there right now.
>Every time I've used as a CAD GUI program I would get to this point where I would need to alter a single dimension by 0.25mm and realize that _all_ of my fastener holes, cutouts, etc have to be nudged with the keyboard or mouse to accommodate it.
What.
This makes no sense. This isn't PowerPoint; your holes and cutouts are supposed to be parameterized. How are they even supposed to be at the proper position in the first place?
As a CAD user, this is like e.g. a coder seeing someone write code with global variables everywhere.
I think I'm realizing that openscad was probably just the first time that parametric design options were given to me in a context where it made sense to me (in code). Maybe some of the software I've used has supported parametric positioning, but it wasn't made obvious to me. In OpenSCAD it's parametric by necessity. I said this in another comment, but the other programs I've worked with in GUI are most certainly not high end pieces of software: tinkercad, freecad, sketchup.
I'm not doing complex character model designs, I'm usually building functional prints like enclosures or cases. It certainly sounds like there are features of better CAD software that makes parametric the default?
I think I understand this — I mean, OpenSCAD was my brief gateway to parametric CAD, and then I got to FreeCAD via brief stepping stones of CadQuery and other packages.
But OpenSCAD isn't really parametric CAD. It's a programming language; it's parametric for that reason. But it's not really CAD, at another level, in the sense that it does nothing to "aid" your design work. It has no interim abstraction for generated geometry; everything must be explicitly described.
FreeCAD, though, is profoundly parametric, through and through, and really always has been. Indeed the parametric aspects are the main thing that made it workable before the TNP mitigations were added. It is not a limited CAD package, by any means. It's just a somewhat unfriendly one with a CAD kernel that has some limitations. Really it's almost better understood as a 3D IDE with some workflow affordances.
If you are stuck trying to get your head into how FreeCAD works, there are now three really good ways on Youtube: the Mango Jelly Solutions videos are incredible, the Shawn Hymnel/Digikey FreeCAD and 3D Printing course is good, and there are great recent videos by Deltahedra.
But what you will be able to make with it, once you get your head into it, is night and day different to what is possible with OpenSCAD. Because your parametric work in FreeCAD (or other CAD packages) can operate on the geometry of the result of previous operations.
Give it a try in the New Year with FreeCAD 1.1 when it is released.
If you want another stepping stone from OpenSCAD to FreeCAD or any other package, I really recommend you look at CadQuery/Build123D. This will give you a similar coding approach but it will introduce you to operations on the true faces, edges and vertexes of the output of other operations.
(FWIW I would not say that Sketchup is not high end, either. It's not to my tastes but it is quite powerful)
The one thing which I need to see in FreeCAD to be successful with it is an interface option which doesn't require a multi-button mouse, but which will work with a trackpad, or better still a tablet and stylus --- I spend 5 days a week essentially chained to a desk using a mouse (sometimes a Trackpoint) and evenings/weekends I prefer to sit somewhere more relaxing than a desk and to use a different sort of pointer.
Dune 3D seemed quite promising, but very limited --- is there a set of options for the UI in FreeCAD which will create a similar interface?
That mode works OK on touchscreens, in the sense that any app with tiny buttons to click does. I have tried using a tablet with a pen but it is a heavily modal UI so it feels a little bit like old fashioned light pen territory, as much CAD does. Not like an iPad app; they need designing differently.
Quite a lot of progress on macOS FreeCAD crashes because they changed an exception handling strategy for exceptions outside the Qt loop, if I remember right. Some crashing in 1.1RC that is being fixed. In general it crashes a whole lot less than it did in 0.20, say. But if you can reproduce them, definitely report them.
I didn’t like Dune3D; its interface is clumsy even if the 3D constraints thing is interesting.
(Which is not to say that I am not pleased to see more open source CAD packages taking different approaches. Dune3D is interesting, Blobfish's Cadseer is very interesting to a coder I'd have thought, and SALOME has obvious value)
The one small tweak I would suggest for FreeCAD is to use the tab bar workbench selector rather than the dropdown version. It’s such a small change but it helps flow between things in a way that feels like the various functions are more closely integrated. That, combined with custom panels if you want them, makes it more fluid.
(I am not making any particular claims for FreeCAD's usability; I do though think it is much better and much more learnable than the average HN perspective of it, which seems to often come across more as TUI-exceptionalism or "but I don't wannnnnaaa learn a guuuuuuuiiii". GUI CAD isn't intrinsically some inferior, imprecise, unformalised thing.)
> OpenSCAD isn't really parametric CAD. It's a programming language; it's parametric for that reason. But it's not really CAD
Maybe this is pedantic, but why wouldn't OpenSCAD qualify as CAD exactly? It's still "Computer-Aided Design"? Sure, the UI/UX is different, but is there some qualifier to CAD around the UI/UX?.
It's me being picky about the meaning of the word "aided".
CAD is software to help people make complex things without having to do complex geometry/trig/general maths.
OpenSCAD doesn't really "aid" you much with this. It's a 2D/3D shape generator with boolean operations, but because it doesn't let you do constraint operations on 2D geometry, and it doesn't let you do further operations on the fundamental geometry (faces, edges, vertices) of the generated 3D solids either, it never liberates you from most of the difficult work.
I'm not even sure how much it aids you with "design": it doesn't support chamfers or fillets, it offers no tools for adding drafts or making truly uniform thicknesses. And it only generates meshes.
OpenSCAD is useful. I'm not saying it's not. But it is useful mostly for drawing strongly geometric or mathematically-derived solids and producing a mesh from it.
FreeCAD is definitely parametric but I hear you that the interface doesn't make it obvious. It might be worth another look particularly since it's interoperable with OpenSCAD and can work on CSG trees within the interface
At least you've inspired me to try it and see if it's "worth writing home about"
If you're doing enclosures, check out Dune3d! Has been featured here as well (it's how I found it). It's pretty easy to use and feels intuitive for prints you'll only have to make once or twice. It's missing some things here or there but nothing fundamental (except trimming edges i.m.o.)
I often switch between FreeCad and Dune3d now, Freecad for things I know how to design properly and Dune when I'm in 'claying' mode. E.g. export a .step part when I get stuck in FreeCad, import it into Dune, make some progress and vice versa so I don't walk away from the project
Oh, it is not that software like freecad is not parametric by necessity; it is just that in a parametric design process, you don't set all the parameters at once. Why? Because a) you don't overconstraint a design, and b) your parameters rely on references (a point, a line, the side of another object, a tangent), and you may want to change which reference you choose.
For example, if you put a hole in a box, do you want to reference the center of the sides of the hole? And do you want to place them relative to the left side or right side, and front or back? You never say "it's x mm from the left and y mm from the right and my box is w mm wide" - because the relationship x+y=w is always here! You only define 2 out of 3. But it may happen that you picked the wrong 2 - and a parametric CAD makes it very easy to do so in a few clicks, while a programmatic CAD like OpenSCAD is a large rewrite with calculation you have to do yourself on the side.
My example is silly but start doing big designs, large assemblies, and you "chains of cotations" may need to be redone again and again - especially when tolerances begin to add up.
Or fix inheritance. And by fix I mean tax as hell.