I’ve heard people (admittedly only online) advocating for surgery for trans minors, the main argument being that puberty has such a big impact that an earlier surgery often means a much more effective result.

(This is just from memory, I might be getting stuff wrong)

From twitter or like, from the human species?

But again it wasn’t the team, and it wasn’t " throwing shade" it was one guy, who listed it as one reason against AI. Power consumption is also a valid reason against using gentoo. People are able, and indeed should be aware of potential problems and downside of things, even if they are involved in other things which also has those issues. I am sure most of the gentoo team would readily acknowledge that energy consumption is a downside of gentoo compared to other distros.

You really went looking for something to hate on there didn’t you. That is the only sentence in the whole article that even mentions power consumption, all the other arguments both fit and against are for a variety of other topics.

It seems to be that you are more likely caught up in some kind of movement if one argument from one person is enough for you to label everyone there luddites

Sometimes people want to be generally helped, and sometimes people just want an answer to their question. If the answer is “it’s impossible” then that’s a valid answer, but if the answer is “I’m not going to tell you, instead I’m going to assume that what you actually want is me to teach you why you were wrong to ask the question in the first place” then theres a good chance that actually they just wanted an answer, and you deciding for them what they need comes across as patronising.

I think the talking down aspect comes from phrases like “you shouldn’t be doing X”, especially when these statements are made as absolutes, rather than contextualised with actual reasons.

Running GUI programs as root might cause security problems, or it might cause software problems. And while you might find these issues important, others might not.

In my opinion, saying something like “it’s not a good idea if you care about security” or “doing so might make your PC burst into flames” gives helpful warnings for OP and future readers without talking down to them by making decisions for them what they should and should not do.

I’m not sure the sugar argument holds, plenty of animals naturally eat foods with sugar, and do not brush their teeth. Of course they don’t eat nearly as much sugar as a typical human, but that doesn’t mean that sugar should always be avoided.

For cats specifically though I am not sure, maybe all sugar is bad, but I don’t think it’s because of teeth brushing.

I think where the difference lies is that you are interpreting “cost X lives” to mean “cost X lifetimes of Human experience” while the interpretation I, and articles use is more like “cost X people their status of being alive”

That is not what costing something means. Cost is to lose something which you have, it does not mean to lose the potential to something you don’t have. If an apple costs a dollar, it means you had that dollar, and now you don’t. The impact of the apple was for the number of dollars you have to decrease by one. If you buy it with 100 dollars it obviously doesn’t cost 100 dollars because you get 99 dollars back.

When talking about lives, we don’t get them back. People have lives, and if something causes them to lose them, it means costs them a life.

If I own a car, then after ten years of owning and driving it, I trade it to buy something else, that thing still cost me a car. The amount of car I have does not decrease over time but through use. It’s quality might, but the count does not care about quality. Same with life. People who are middle-aged do not only have half a life, they are still fully alive.

How is the language extreme? For something to “cost lives” means exactly for those lives to be cut short, there is no other meaningful definition. The language used is exactly as extreme as the scenario it describes, by definition.

Do you apply your same logic to other scenarios too? Like would rather that “the tsunami cost the lives of 55 people” be reworded as “the tsunami shortened the lives of 55 people”?

You could say this about anything though. A serial killer isn’t taking lives, merely shortening them. Suicide isn’t ending a life it’s just shortening one. Literally all death can be seen as merely the shortening of an otherwise longer life, which makes your distinction pointless.

Ah I love Factor! So many cool aspects of that language.