If you dive into the graffiti scene a bit you will start to appreciate all those graffitis. The story behind some of them is super interesting. There is a lot of "competition", "collaboration", and group dynamics involved. It is truly fascinating. I was living in Cologne (Ehrenfeld) for a while in a place with awesome graffiti and every weekend there were people taking pictures "collecting" and documenting the graffiti.
The thing about a big city is it's not just about the people who own the stuff you look at, it's about all the other people who have to look at it. I'll take graffiti over advertising any day. At least graffiti isn't trying to sell me anything or make me depressed or addicted or whatever.
Maybe it just boils down to the right to property and having your own stuff just the (legal) way you want it.
It's all great until your stuff gets destroyed because someone thinks it's better a different way. And when the graffiti is truly spectacular you can find some consolation in the result, maybe truly appreciate it. But that's not the case 99.99% of the time. Most graffiti is just trash, some rando spraying their name somewhere. Takes 10 seconds and 0 talent. It causes extra expense for people or the city to clean up, or it stays there as an eye sore for everyone.
It's usually on public property, or sometimes on corporate property. I don't think I've seen much graffiti on some private individual's property. It's not on the front of people's houses.
> Most graffiti is just trash
People say that about modern art, and about that crazy 'rock'n'roll'!
Which gets cleaned up with public money that could be used elsewhere, or stays there as an eyesore.
> It’s not on the front of people’s houses.
Sometimes the sides too.
> people say that about modern art, and about that crazy 'rock'n'roll'!
Did you just compare modern art and rock and roll to the few letter “tag” sprayed in 10 seconds again and again hundreds of time throughout a city? Because that’s what 99.99% of graffiti is, simple tags and doodles [0][1] anyone can make.
Charitably I’ll say you just didn’t pay attention to tagging’s aesthetic effect on a city. The less charitable alternative seeing the “tag = modern art + rock and roll” opinion is that you’re one of the “artist”.
Maybe I just have a different perspective than you; it's not a mistake to disagree with you - or vice versa. Unless we're interested in the world outside our perspecitve, how will we learn anything new?
> Did you just compare modern art and rock and roll to the few letter “tag” sprayed in 10 seconds again and again hundreds of time throughout a city?
Yes! That's what rock'n'roll is at its core, three chords (or fewer) and the truth, and that's how it was characterized - artless noise, etc.
People try to put us d-down
Just because we get around
Things they do look awful c-c-cold
I hope I die before I get old
Much modern art is constantly ridiculed - 'I could do that myself!'
> Because that’s what 99.99% of graffiti is, simple tags and doodles [0][1] anyone can make.
This isn’t about “things I don't like or understand suck”. I don't get the “completely white painting” but can say “original idea”. If the artist keeps coming out with white paintings everyone will say it’s junk.
Same for EDM, maybe it’s just noise to you but you can at least appreciate some effort went into it and every song is different. You don’t like it but you also can’t do it yourself in a way anyone likes.
Most graffiti is plain text tagging like in the pictures I showed above. Tagging is repetitive, same tag again and again, and literally anyone can do it because there’s close to zero effort or creativity involved. Take a spray can, spray a couple of letters, you got a tag. I can replicate all of the tags in those pictures, like a real artist. So I know what I’m talking about. :)
You make it sound like anything is art, “you just don’t understand it”. The problem with that view is that if everything is art, nothing is art. Me taking a breath is art. You just don’t get it.
Apples to oranges. The issue with graffiti is not that there are too many, it’s that they’re illegal. I doubt you’d admire an unrequested graffiti war over every wall and window of your house.
People do lots of illegal things. When some tech titan does it, many on HN decry the laws, the government, etc. Painting graffiti is relatively, completely, harmless.
Unfortunately, life is not black and white. Even without knowing anything about graffiti culture, there is a border between defacing and improving. And graffiti artists are moving over that border back and forth.
Some of the most beautiful art I have seen are graffiti
What a strange argument that seems to romanticise this "border" called "the law".
It is black and white: someone is defacing something that doesn't belong to them. You can call the result whatever you want ("art","expression" etc) but the fundamental issue doesn't change.
Would you be happy to wake up and see your car covered in paint? What about the windows on your house? Would you see this as an "improvement" too?
> What a strange argument that seems to romanticise this "border" called "the law"
Just because something is illegal, does not make it immoral or unethical by itself.
I do understand the argument against graffiti, but there’s also something to be said about any kind of expression that’s inherently rebellious and counter-culture.
> Would you be happy to wake up and see your car covered in paint? What about the windows on your house? Would you see this as an "improvement" too?
Correct me if I’m wrong but the vast majority of graffiti is on public walls and facades, and not on houses or cars. At least here in the Netherlands that’s what I’ve seen.
Graffiti tends to appear on every surface which is not actively guarded. Including beautiful historical buildings, and including private properties. "Public" walls are just a visible example of a property which nobody cares about strong enough, and nobody is held responsible for (compared to a private owner who often can be fined for keeping vandalized facade as it is).
You apparently read only part of what I wrote really. You see it in places which are not guarded, or cleaned. So if there are not a lot of them - kudos to you city administration, and businesses. It's not because grafffiti is inherently benign. It isn't, and cost if keeping public spaces tidy is higher because of it
An ugly beton brut building defaces the landscape and the view that should belong to everyone. A beautiful graffiti can improve that view and landscape. Under those circumstances, a graffiti can be legally wrong but morally right.
However only very few graffiti "artists" rise above the skill level where their work could be considered beautiful. Usually it's just plain old dick measuring contests like spraying political slogans and overspraying the opposition's, putting your name on as many places as possible or proving their "worth" in the danger of getting caught, with no aesthetically relevant outcome whatsoever.
Basically, in my ideal world, whoever builds an ugly enough building should be liable to remove it or improve it if it is deemed too ugly by a majority.
Graffiti is (partially) just the consequence of not living in that ideal world, but because of all the other problems with graffiti, I'd rather just treat it as the vandalism it usually is in all cases. No sense holding an election before every prosecution or clean and paint job.
> Basically, in my ideal world, whoever builds an ugly enough building should be liable to remove it or improve it if it is deemed too ugly by a majority
This sounds like the words of a “community oversight” committee obstructing the construction of housing, and we already know the effects of that on the housing market. Society has swung too far into allowing other people to tell someone what to do with their property already.
In a way you are just debating who gets the power, and saying the people you like should have it. The fact that you or I like someone isn't a reason to give them power.
The buildings have a lot more impact then the graffiti, and arguably should have more community voices involved.
I think I’d be relatively happy if I woke up one day and saw a banksy or an invader mosaic on my wall.
I’ve seen graffiti art that definitely improved grey ugly walls and barriers. I’ve also seen ugly tags that are nothing more than letters. It’s relative
It only emphasizes the problem. There's only one Banksy, and millions prolific wall-defacers. You are unlikely to get the former, and almost guaranteed - the latter
Let me just put it this way, do I get to just move into your home and take it over simply because I believe that I can make it a better home than you can? Do I get to steal your car/property because I believe I can make better use of it?
Stop rationalizing narcissistic behavior and people trying to impose themselves on others. It’s not relative at all. You or the narcissistic graffiti vandals have no right to impose themselves on others.
The nice thing is that in democracies you can influence what is done against graffitis. Don't like graffitis? try to push your local representatives etc to be stricter on them or move to a country that has no graffiti like Singapore. One of the most sterile, boring city in the world.
For whatever reasons, Germany is rather lenient towards graffiti artists which, in my eyes, makes Berlin more enjoyable than it would be otherwise.
I've lived in a lot of places and I've learned that I hate grey boring walls a lot, I much prefer it when they're covered by colorful graffitis. It seems I'm not the only one so some localities tend to be rather lenient towards graffiti artists and even invite them, other places are much stricter and so you can enjoy bleak concrete walls unblemished by any graffitis.
As to your example about homes, well, in France and in some other European countries, in the 90s there was a bit of a left leaning political push for "right to lodgings". This movement made squatting much easier (in France, it was extremely difficult to get rid of squatters if they moved in past 48 hours). I've always personally thought those laws were stupid and they were eventually repealed and amended recently. But that's the way it is with governments, you don't get to agree with all the decisions made. If it's a democracy you have some measures of influence.
>or move to a country that has no graffiti like Singapore. One of the most sterile, boring city in the world.
People who pretend to make art on walls are absolute minority compared to those who'd prefer to keep walls clean, or painted, or whatever (there are plenty of options between gray, and wannabe artists spraying smileys). But somehow you offer the majority to leave. I don't think that's how it can work really
I don't offer the majority to leave. Like it or not, currently in most European countries, the law and application of laws is done so as to either encourage or at least not discourage graffitis. A lot of cities even give space to graffiti artists to paint and try to entice them.
If the actual majority wanted to get rid of this problem, then it would be stopped, I'm not the one making the laws or deciding whether to apply them.
As for grey walls, there are plenty of gray boring walls in any city in the world, usually those tend to be painted on, in my experience, not colorful walls nor brick walls nor older buildings.
Well, no offence, but you idea of how society works is not particulatly correct. Both individuals, and institutions have to prioritize thousands of issues against limited resources. Because of that majority opinions doesn't necessary become policies. Only those urgent/emotional/tribal enough to become election fuel. Apparently, graffiti cannot compete with plenty of pains citizens experience now.
>A lot of cities even give space to graffiti
Try researching where it came from, and you'll see it's an attempt to civilize behavior cities found impossible to control.
So reality is that graffitists are active, and numerous to extent it's hard to fought them off the walls so to say, and while majority doesn't like it, it's not ready to re-allocate resources from other issues. This leads to equilibrium we are in at the time.
>plenty of gray boring
It makes a good excuse in the internet discussion, but it doesn't correspond to street reality. I'm in a nice medieval quarter now, and see lots of graffity across buildings which neither gray, nor boring. It is as if people who do that don't care about beauty, other humans, and all those good things usually claimed to legitimize the phenomenon
> I'm in a nice medieval quarter now, and see lots of graffity across buildings which neither gray, nor boring
Ok, point to you there, that would infuriate me. To be fair, I haven't traveled back to Europe since Covid (moved to Asia 20ish years ago) and I don't know if the situation has deteriorated. I didn't experience graffitis as much in places that are actually nice but I've liked them in places that are gray and drab and I remember enjoying them in Berlin and in Bruxels.
I live in Hong Kong and here quite a few people express disagreement over the government removing the works of invader and other graffiti artist (the "King of Kowloon") but to be fair, graffitis are really limited to exactly the type of places where not many would complain.
> Well, no offence, but you idea of how society works is not particulatly correct. Both individuals, and institutions have to prioritize thousands of issues against limited resources. Because of that majority opinions doesn't necessary become policies. Only those urgent/emotional/tribal enough to become election fuel. Apparently, graffiti cannot compete with plenty of pains citizens experience now.
I think it's not only limited resources, it's a political wish to be lenient against petty crime, there are plenty of countries with the same resource in term of police that are much stricter against petty crime with much more success. There's more policemen per capita in European countries like Germany, France, Spain than in Singapore, Malaysia or Japan (I was surprised looking at Wikipedia that Hong Kong as more but that makes sense given the response to the protests before COVID) [1]. They could absolutely enforce fines but they don't. Whenever I traveled back to Europe, I've not been as bothered by graffitis nearly as much as I was bothered by dog feces and littering which is absolutely everywhere and never fined.
People tend to apply such hard-core legal standards to those they don't like. As the corrupt dictator says, 'For my enemies, the law! For my friends, everything!' Law-and-order leaders almost exclusively mean it for people they dislike.
Let's apply some strict law-and-order to the wealthy and powerful, to corporations, to government officials. Then to all adults. Then I think it would be reasonable for kids with spray cans.
Life would be meaningless if it was just black and white. Fortunately there are times that we're reminded that people do live in cities and do stuff other than just minding their own.
I really wish people minded their own more, then my ears wouldn’t be assaulted by boomboxes on the subway and I wouldn’t be accosted at an atm vestibule
Some areas had, if not fully formally, dedicated areas for graffiti.
As in, "we will leave this unadorned wall, and we won't clean up the graffiti unless it's truly an eyesore, and we won't chase you for it". The wall I most recall was close to quite utilized road, so yes it was very "public facing".
The end result was that it was the one place where I would see actually impressive graffiti, with competition to make better stuff, instead of random vandal tags.
I grant Banksy that he has some technical competency and is able to do something somewhat visually interesting (his use of color works quite well and makes his pieces stand out within the medium), but I really hate him as an artist.
There is basically no one who makes greater kitsch than him. Everything he makes is steeped in the middle class, liberal, mediocrity of someone who points out that things, which everyone agrees are bad, actually are bad. It seriously is something of the worst "art" I have ever seen and actually makes me quite sympathetic to the post modernists whose movement is a reaction to people like him.
The middle schooler, scribbling on canvas, is at least not trying desperately to impress the most bourgeois group of people the world has ever seen. That alone puts everything he does a serious step above Banksy.
Of course you can find stuff that's high quality, but that is rare. Rather than looking at outliers, it might be more sensible to look at the average and the reality is that the average graffiti does not have any artistic value.
Of course it’s graffiti and it’s still imposing on others against their will, regardless of whether it’s peak narcissist Banksy or someone else. Is very much about transgression and imposition and sadistic domination for personalities like Banksy and graffiti artists in general; it’s precisely why they put their “art” in other people’s things against their will.
So if I graffiti your car because I believe it improves your car; would that be ok with you? It’s art. You should be happy, right?
>Are you an art major to be able to judge objectively?
There is precisely nothing about "being an art major" that gives you any more or less right to an opinion. Especially if you actually had read anything about current philosophy of art you would realize how dumb that sounds in this context. Since "postmodern" theories of art focus on the inner expression of the artist, contrasted with the subjective experience of the art by the viewer.
I am the one who has to suffer through this every day in the train. How am I not entitled to an opinion about that "art"?
Are you suggesting most people enjoy graffiti? Because I don't know anyone irl who does so I'm a bit surprised by this perspective. I've personally always viewed it as equivalent to littering and assumed the ones doing it were just thrill seekers up until now...
I do. When I first moved to Berlin I was thinking the same, but now I prefer it when modern concrete buildings are touched up with graffity no matter if commissioned or "illegal" - the important part is to give the eyes something to stumble over.
Historical buildings is a different matter of course.
There are two types of graffiti: actual art, and tags which are akin to the forum signatures of yore.
The actual art is often a bit strange but can be beautiful, and is more interesting than a bare concrete wall or train hull. But I agree with you that virtually all tags are ugly. And not only that, tags represent an extreme concept of ego, where you subsume the art, spending your entire canvas on your signature.
Yes, I used to view it like that as well, until a host of grafittis offering a different perspective appeared in my city. It turned out that the author was an art student and a neighbour of mine from the lower floor. Not Banksy level but still good. Sadly he moved or who knows but his grafittis are gone and the awful football related vandalism tags are here to stay.
It’s always a struggle for me to accept that many people actually like graffiti. Maybe graffiti can add flavour to a city if it’s really drab and ugly (although I’m not too sure about this), but it only defiles cities which are aesthetically pleasing and beautiful. The technicality of graffiti has little to do with its appeal or it’s appropriateness. Something can be hard to make but still be garbage and/or misplaced w.r.t it’s surroundings.
Fr. Its so wierd for me when people get super mad about graffiti like they own any of these walls and could choose what was on them. If the graffiti wasn't there it would just be an ad, but I guess we're okay with that because consumerism is good because the our overlords tell us to like it.
Most graffitis I've seen are on empty walls or buildings with no ads. Brick wall looks way better without them. And to me it looks more like it's the graffiti maker that thinks that they own the wall and can choose what should be on it.
Property that is used by the public should be owned by the public. By that logic, graffiti artists as regular people who use public infrastructure in the area should as much right to paint on the wall as you do to paint the wall in your house. And you can paint over it if you hate it so much. But its all down to the community. It should not be a crime enforced by a ruling class who nominally owns the wall but doesn't use it, so is totally not actually inconvenienced by it being painted. You are part of the community. So is the artist. The person who owns the wall is mostly likely not. Stop pretending you're on the same side because you think you may also become a millionare by osmosis.
I'm not thinking that I'm on some side or defending some class. As you said, I'm part of the community, the public. Why should the right to have wall painted override the right to have the wall as it is? I'm betting most would want it without graffitis, but apparently one person can decide themselves how it should look. It's a simple conflict of opposing tastes.
Again, they have the right to have that taste and you have the right to hate it. You both should have equal ownership over the wall. Therefore you should also have the right to paint something they don't like on the wall. Or paint over their art. Or paint a different wall in a way you like. Nobody should be prosecuting anyone for the case of a minor disagreement over personal artistic taste.
What if I'm not skilled enough to paint it back to how it was? Or don't want to break the law. Or some other barrier. My point is that if given equal rights, it isn't clear cut if you should paint at all. For example, on dedicated graffiti walls the situation is different since people generally agree how they should be used. Sure, one way to solve a conflict is to let everyone do what they want and see what happens, but it's just a version of "might makes right", imo.
If we decided on all public use of space collectively, then yeah sure that would probably be better since it would be fairer. Unfortunately, this is not the system we live under. Therefore graffiti is a legitimate way for the community to express themselves in the face of undemocratic rule.
Yeah this seems on-brand. Graffiti artist imagines himself as the hero in some epic class struggle, anyone who opposes him must be an enemy sympathizer!
In reality we just want to live in a city that doesn’t have ugly graffiti all over it.
It’s OK, when you grow up you’ll understand. Walking little kids past a wall that reads FUCK because “the community” (aka a single edgy teen) decided it should is not a comfortable experience.
I have nieces and nephews and if I walked past a wall with them that reads FUCK i'd probably laugh and tell them its a bad word and move on with my life.
Would it still be funny if it was a swastika? Or the n-word? Is that also a part of your glorious fight against evil capitalists? If not, why is it any less legitimate? Clearly the “community” must want it there if it was left up.
If it was a swastika or the n-word I would be very concerned about the nature of the community in that neighbourhood and if I'm in danger. But in terms of how i'd deal with kids seeing it, I'd take it as a teachable moment. I don't have to hide my kids from everything I don't believe in (besides they probably see crazy shit online anyway), I just need to teach them how to deal with it. Anyway, theres a wall near where i live where someone has made a massive mural making a political statement. People keep defacing it with the opposite opinion, and people keep painting back over that. If you really need the authorities to tell your community that swastika graffiti should make them angry and call them to action, then your community is screwed already. Either way, yeah just as we have laws to deal with incitement to violence and hatespeech we can have that with walls if you'd prefer, it just has to be sth actually extreme and targeted.
A “teachable moment” like this is not how childless people imagine it to be, with the parent didactically educating the child with words of wisdom. Instead, the kid absorbs what they see or hear and it appears later on in their drawings or what they say on the playground. Children understand the power of transgression and all ideas are eligible for them to play with.
Bro I knew what a swastika and the nword was at that age. And yeah, probably I took them too lightly sometimes because I was a kid and its a learning process. But I knew they were wrong. Because my parents taught me right and wrong. How stupid do you think kids are? I used to pray for the victims of ww2 when they told us to pray in assembly. I wasn't a 6 year old neo-nazi because I knew what a swastika looked like.
> If it was a swastika or the n-word I would be very concerned about the nature of the community in that neighbourhood and if I'm in danger.
If you lived in a large city like NY or London and you saw a random swastika, your immediate reaction would be to blame your neighbors? How do you know it wasn’t someone from somewhere else?
> If you really need the authorities to tell your community that swastika graffiti should make them angry and call them to action, then your community is screwed already.
Hopefully nobody needs the authorities to tell them things, but they do need authorities to help them enforce already agreed-upon laws. I can’t spent my time running around cleaning up all the graffiti.
Do you think it should be the duty of citizens to stop bank robbers, too?
> Either way, yeah just as we have laws to deal with incitement to violence and hatespeech we can have that with walls if you'd prefer, it just has to be sth actually extreme and targeted.
We literally already have this which is why vandalism is ILLEGAL, but your previous comments were completely dismissive of this!
—-
Seriously, this is like Basic Empathy and Human Emotions 101. Imagine yourself seeing the n-word written several times around your city. Contemplate the anger that you would feel, the desire for someone to do something about it, the realization that even if you dedicated all your free time to finding and stopping these people you probably couldn’t do it yourself. Now replace “n-word” with something someone else finds deeply offensive and imagine yourself as them. Do you STILL think graffiti is totally harmless, or justified as long as you’re vandalizing a megacorp?
> It’s always a struggle for me to accept that many people actually like graffiti.
It's a struggle for everyone to accept different perspectives on art and aesthetics, but we need to accept that others' perspectives exist and are as legitimate as our own.
As someone with an art degree (with no great admiration for street art per sé) I have to ask one question:
Could you imagine that one person's "defaced" is another person's "finally some colors"?
The destruction of property, trespassing etc. is obviously on the wrong side of the law, but on purely aesthetical terms this could be argued either way making it for that narrow category a subjective thing. Proponents of graffiti could argue you cannot deface a faceless thing, opponents would argue they like their lawn short, their fence white, the sky blue. One persons order is another persons prison.
Note that I tried to look at the aesthetic question while ignoring the legal question — mainly because you made an aesthetic argument. For many people the two would be entangled however: Something being illegal makes them look at the result unfavourable, even if a similar legal wall mural would strike them as aesthetically superior to the 10 years weathered white wall that it was before.
As an art person I really see truly good graffiti, yet I have to notice that heavily graffitied parts of my city are tourist magnets — so many people tend to like those "defaced" walls.
Let's be honest, 99.999% of graffiti is smeared black lines barely recognizable as tags, over more smeared tags and curse words and just dirt. If that is aesthetic, we might have a very different definition of aesthetic than the art schools you mention. Do I see sometimes street art? Yes, but almost never on such places - the real street art is one done on commission (I assume) on some private house walls, while the rest is at best ignored. There's a reason you never see trains stations on Instagram.
I am not sure what you think the word aesthetic means. Aesthetic as a concept is about the style and the visual makeup of a thing — this means the aesthetic of a thing can also be ugly, dirty, distorted, weird, childish, funny, fucked up, silly, as many things in the canon of art history have been. Aesthetic as an adjective as it is used in daily life is somewhat linked to the idea of beauty, but the ideas of what is beautiful vary wildy not only throughout history, but between individuals as well. But I did not use the latter. Everything has an aesthetic. Yeah even cheap, consumerist, trash nobody seems to like.
I am not arguing I personally think tag smeared walls are aesthetical, but I argue that there are people who do indeed do. But most noise-protection-wall-graffiti where I live isn't tagged smearing. If we go by area easily 80% are big colorful motives.
Having known people who do these things I also know that for them the "where" is sometimes more important than the precise what and while the aesthetics won't convince me personally I can't say that I never asked myself the question: "How the hell did they manage to paint this thing in that location?"
And I don't see train stations on instagram, because I don't follow people who post them. But I also don't see couples posting their vacation photos or influencers selfies for the same reason. If I did follow them I would see them.
There is a word missing in the English language that confuses this discussion. Graffiti has come to mean air brush, whether it's art or vandalism. Other languages have separate words for these things.
>Could you imagine that one person's "defaced" is another person's "finally some colors"?
No. The graffiti I have seen in my life was clearly put there as narcissistic self expression by (usually criminal, if only by trespassing) youths, very rarely I have seen something which comes close to presenting an attempt at improving the environment.
I grant you that I can emphazwith the idea of clearing withering concrete slab with anything at all. But the few times I have seen it be an improvement were when it was a commissioned piece. But even then it was a small improvement at best.
Was the graffiti made with approval of the owner of the building? Does it fit general aesthetics of the city? Yes and yes - it's finally some colors. Otherwise it's a vandalism.
If it's a public building - it's vandalism, unless it was decided by all people living there.
> As an art person I really see truly good graffiti, yet I have to notice that heavily graffitied parts of my city are tourist magnets — so many people tend to like those "defaced" walls.
Yeah, way to make life hell for residents of the neighborhood.
Many cities here also have walls dedicated for graffiti and such to give street artists some space and bring some color. Some small infra-related buildings also have street art done on commission and they look great! But shitty tags and graffitis still exist and my impression has always been that the maker probably wasn't thinking about art or anything deeper for that matter...
This is pretty ironic to read on a forum called "Hacker" News, which also originated as a counter-culture that considered itself creative but was regarded as criminal by the general public.
Fr. God you have to be so boring and pro-authoritarian to really be offended by buildings you don't own and will never have the power to own, being drawn on by the public. Sometimes I think graffiti is nice looking. Sometimes I think its ugly as shit. I would never begrudge someone doing it though, since I appreciate the spirit of reclaiming public spaces by the people who actually live there, who will often never be able to own spaces of their own. I am not offended for the ruling classes when their property, that they do not use, gets some paint on it. That's some crazy bootlicking behaviour.
I know it's commonplace, but let's consider whether extreme expression has any rational substance to it, whether it's somehow more meaningful than an argument with actual reasons.
Outrage is a weapon. Do we want it to be? I think (apologies to the parent comment) it should be disqualifying, shunned, excluded. It's a demonstration that they have no reasoned basis and will not contribute.
Berlin is colorful, live with it. If you place a gray wall somewhere, it will first be sprayed by some noobie. Then later by a better artist and a few years later, no one even dares to cross it because someone put a beautiful piece there.
Every shitty graffiti is about to be replaced by a better one!
Berlin is also trying to improve it's standard of living, social structure, economic outlook and overall cleanliness. Graffiti vandalism will have less and less of a place there, and have a lessening acceptance.
Bah, sorry, but most modern concrete buildings do indeed look better with graffity, no matter whether you see it as art or not. Every bit of color helps on those grey/dirty glass and concrete monstrosities.
(the OPs photo is actually a perfect example of that, without graffity it would just be a depressing grey wall, I much prefer the colorful "defaced" version)
Everything has been vandalized but we shouldn't blame the vandals. [They were] built by vandals and those who added the graffiti merely finished the job. - Scruton.
call it whataboutism (not directed towards your comment, but related): every time i'm in a discussion involving graffiti and people complain about it i ask about advertisements plastered though the city - people just shrug
I can also start a subculture about competing for the best type of bank robberies, doesn't make bank robberies a nice thing to do. But yeah fascinating
When graffiti is done on public owned objects or walls, it's impact is merely aesthetic. Not like a bank robbery.
And I'd rather see graffiti, even if I find some ugly, than ads all over. And there's way more public ads anywhere than graffiti. I think local urban expressions like stickers and graffiti is pretty cool. The mainstream prefers ads I guess.
For one thing, it can be costly to remove graffiti. And when it's on publicly owned property, who pays for that removal? The public, of course.
If, for example, a train is the target of graffiti, it will often need to be taken out of service. This, then, results in a degraded service to the travelling public.
Furthermore, graffiti artists often put themselves in dangerous situations. Numerous people have been seriously injured or killed when doing graffiti. That not only sucks for them, but also has various knock-on effects.
Some graffiti art can look really nice, whereas others have little artistic value. Regardless, the negative impacts of graffiti should not be overlooked.
We're talking about public property here. Many authorities have a 'no tolerance' approach to graffiti. Even if it looks nice, it will be removed. There is a belief that removing graffiti quickly discourages it. If graffiti artists find that their work won't last long, they may be discouraged from doing it in the first place. Aesthetics doesn't really come into it.
> There is a belief that removing graffiti quickly discourages it. If graffiti artists find that their work won't last long, they may be discouraged from doing it in the first place.
Ephemerality is known, understood, accepted, and even leveraged in art. I don't think this is an efficient deterrent, or even a deterrent at all.
I'll have to disagree... the goal is to stop encouragement, rather than to start discouragement - stopping acceleration is not the same as starting deceleration.
When it comes to acceleration, it's possible to define 0 acceleration. So we can define acceleration and deceleration in relation to that 0 acceleration.
What is 0 encouragement/discouragement? It's not obviously easy to define. One definition is doing nothing = 0 encouragement and 0 discouragement. By that definition, not removing graffiti (aka doing nothing) is not encouragement, it's simply doing nothing: a lack of encouragement and a lack of discouragement.
Because we haven't agreed on a definition of 0 encouragement and 0 discouragement, saying "decreasing encouragement" and "increasing discouragement" mean basically the same thing.
To add a bit.. the gist of the broken windows theory is that the world (environment) evolves even without you or me. A broken window is an action demanding a reaction. If no reaction is taken, "doing nothing" will be read as the reaction. I think that's fascinating!
There's also the same analogy to refactoring in software engineering. If a project is well maintained with every incoming feature, then a big refactor epic won't be necessary.
"The stop of encouragement will prevent the start of discouragement" doesn't mean that the reverse is true ("the start of discouragement will promote the stop of encouragement"). So it isn't stating basically the same thing.
The big irony in social studies with the broken windows theory is that discouragement often feels easier to practice than maintenance to an outsider. Or, in analogy to software engineering, a one time big refactor feels easier to do than continuous maintenance, as all the work actually included in a refactor (team syncing, product without features etc.) is mostly overlooked during the development if maintenance is not well practiced.
> By that definition, not removing graffiti (aka doing nothing) is not encouragement, [...]
"Doing nothing" results in encouragement in the broken windows theory:
Under the broken windows theory, an ordered and clean environment, one that is maintained, sends the signal that the area is monitored and that criminal behavior is not tolerated. Conversely, a disordered environment, one that is not maintained (broken windows, graffiti, excessive litter), sends the signal that the area is not monitored and that criminal behavior has little risk of detection.
In my understanding stopping encouragement is maintenance work, while starting discouragement is social work. And by doing the (simpler) maintenance work a (costlier) social work won't be necessary.
If I smash your car, is that violence or not? What if I take care to smash your car only so much that it will still be able carry you to work and back?
They definitely have a very hyper-capitalist definition of violence. It's sort of pathetic how much people somehow care about the property of the ruling classes that they will never own.
I never said anything like that so why are you implying that I am? Nice strawman bro, I'm not crying over things people say to me on the internet. Anyone who sees a mean comment on the internet that doesn't actually threaten or incite violence as violence is just as pathetic as people who think art they don't like on a wall is violence. Can you please argue against points I actually made, thank you.
I am not at all a hyper capitalist. I would even consider myself anti-capitalist.
But imposing your own preferred art on public commons is a (minor) form of violence, in any economic system. Especially when you do so with paints of questionable chemical composition, or with images/text that is likely to offend.
I would also say that doing the same thing even on your own property can be reprehensible, as long as it is visible to the public. Just because you own a house doesn't mean you should be able to make it look however you want on the outside, especially not in ways that are actively unpleasant to those of us that need to walk by it every day: we the public should have a say in how your private property looks. A most anti-capitalist position.
Think about it this way, if we all owned all public structures, then we all have equal rights to paint it just as much as you have the right to paint your own house. The graffiti artist has the right to paint it, you have the right to hate it. You have the right to paint something they hate, or paint over their stuff. Nobody should be being prosecuted by a higher power for a minor disagreement about artistic taste. Unless someone is full on painting swastika-ridden explicitly racist murals or sth of that nature, it's not violent. The only reason the ruling class wants you to think it's violent is because property is important to them as a source of power, and therefore must be god above all under this system.
No, this is completely wrong. If we own a public structure together, then neither of us has any right to change it except if we both agree to the change. You can't take individual actions on shared goods: you need a process of attaining the consensus of everyone involved (such as voting).
I wonder how you think this works in practice. Do you think the public structures we have and how they look are not just basically whatever aesthetic taste the people we elect have?
Sometimes councils put up several designs to be voted on by the public, but they will largely follow a bunch of design norms that will be whatever the architecture firms they hired think is trendy, for example.
And how many election programs even talk about artistic taste? That's not why we elect people, and making that an election point would be a distraction from real problems, so why not let society be and if people are more artistic in one area and make more public art, let them make it?
While I agree that public control of public buildings is relatively vague in modern times, it still exists to some extent. If a mayor wanted to tear down a beloved building and replaced with an ugly one (as judged by the esthetics of the public in the town), they would face significant backlash and may lose a future election based on that: people in certain places care a lot about the look of their town (and in others, only vaguely).
Even beyond electoral politics, many cities have public NGOs and other organizations that seek to shape this sort of thing from an early stage through various legal means (and sometimes even through civil disobedience, like tying themselves to a building to protect it). If they are broadly in line with the tastes of the people, they tend to thrive; if they are not, they will often die out.
And yes, in certain cities and towns, people actually like the way grafitti looks and are bothered when someone goes and whitewashes a beautifully painted wall. That's perfectly fine, and is a part of the culture and esthetics of that place (and here, destroying the art that people enjoy is an act of violence against the public and/or the artist). But it's also perfectly fine for other places to want neat walls with clean textures, and marring their beautiful walls with grafitti would be an act that goes against the public.
I concur that sounds really good. That's not how it works now though, which is why graffiti artists reclaim the space as the people that use it. Right now, the space is decided by people in power and with money. Rarely do we ever get real say about how it looks, and we never will. If we did own the public spaces and could make these decisions together, then I'd be down for that, and graffiti probably wouldn't be the same sort of subculture that it is.
not op but violence is traditionally defined as physical force to cause harm. but now there's financial violence and social media violence and here the message in the graffiti causes harm. eg die techy scum. it's not physically violent, but some think it's helpful to frame it as a non-physical violent act because of the expression of dislike for a particular community. it doesn't cause any grave harm, but everyone who walks by and sees it is affected by it.
Violence has always extended beyond pure physical force. Calling someone a slur to their face, or spitting in their food, or defacing their clothes or home (especially with hateful symbols) would be recognized as forms of violence at many times in history way before modern times. Holding someone at knife or gun point is also very clearly a violent act.
No, the owner or rather operator (if the carriage is publicly owned) might be legally obliged to remove it just for the carriage identification to be clearly visible, the windows to be clean etc.
This has got to be the most insane comment in this thread.
“Hey, I’m going to hold a gun to your head. If you don’t give me $100 I’ll shoot you. Remember though that the cost incurred here is a choice you’re going to make if you disagree with my actions. I can’t truly force you to do anything…”
I'm going to spray a can of paint on your car and explain to judge that "it's thuuuomas's problem now, since he disagrees with aesthetics of his new car color".
The "furthermore" and the "Regardless, the negative impacts of graffiti should not be overlooked" do feel a bit AI-esq these days, but it was only yesterday that I myself felt like I was writing like an LLM by responding to a "you misunderstood, I meant …" with an "ah, now I understand": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40380692
In a democratic society, if citizens are particularly concerned about the aesthetics of public property, they can make their views known to the relevant authorities and elected representatives, and it could even become an election issue. I think that's far better than citizens fighting with paint.
Sorry, I used the term incorrectly. I'm not suggesting that graffiti increases crime, only that the presence of graffiti encourages more graffiti.
I live in Japan which is usually free of litter, put a few empty beer cans on the floor and come back 24 hours after and you will have a trash pile. I don't need a paper to tell me that.
They're very cool until it's your apartment or commercial building, and you have to clean it up - because let's face it, for every clever graffiti, there are fifty that are just tags, swear words, or worse.
And your framing is odd - can you only dislike one of these things? Graffiti or ads? There are successful movements to rid cities and scenic areas of ads, or to tone them down.
in toronto it's embraced to the extent that in areas where it's common, there's funding by businesses and even residences or local gov commission it or permit it and nice work by local artists is less likely to get tagged or covered. there's at least some upside to cooperating when there's a culture to it (to some extent)
Right. That’s the point. In public spaces, the public has chosen what it believes to be beautiful. Illegal graffiti is one person forcing their aesthetics on everyone.
Plenty of cities have surfaces that are open to being grafitti’d. In those cases, the artists bothered to think about others before taking unilateral action.
Have you chosen what you think is beautiful for your city? Most city decorations are decided by direct action from the council without consultation from the public. Sometimes involving as little as one or two people.
For private property I agree with you, the owners have it how they want to have it.
> Have you chosen what you think is beautiful? Most city decorations are decided by direct action from the council without consultation from the public.
When it’s mattered, I’ve showed up. Or signed petitions saying something is ugly and would benefit from being replaced by just about anything else.
Plenty of communities embrace their mural and graffiti culture. Plenty don’t. Imagine if someone who doesn’t like murals went around whitewashing painted walls.
While I find this specific beautiful, retouched and over-saturated picture beautiful. I'm pretty sure it would look much better without the graffiti, trash and huge puddle in front of it.
I've normalized it all my life and will keep doing it, art should be around us and bring interestingness to public spaces. People like you would rather walk around in the equivalent of a hospital 24/7 and you currently have the law on your side but it doesn't mean you're right.
I hope this made you feel better. Good luck finding a new place to live or growing out of being upset from paint or it seems like you're going to be mad every couple of months until the rest of your days.
Most of the graffiti I see is on bridges over the freeway. This is distracting while driving, especially because freeway signs are also hung in that same place, so I look up there for relevant information and instead am distracted by various phrases that I don't understand. Often there's even graffiti on the freeway signs, sometimes covering up the text, making it unreadable. Yes, billboards have some similar problems, but that's somewhat mitigated because those are on the side of the road, not directly above it.
But you're right, certainly not as bad as a bank robbery.
This debate over graffiti aesthetics seems like it’s semantically adjacent to the rift between political left and right. And so: Have you seen Japanese graffiti? Compared to Japanese ads? Average tokyo ads/grafs are at least more aesthetic than the median in Western cities. With graffiti strangely better than ads by most measures. No , it’s not eye of the beholder, more like the soul of the despoiler.
EDIT, for the mods, artificial or not: Japanese spoliation aesthetics are a safe-ish counterexample for rightwingers as they localize the field of contention to the high local effort-high social payoff quadrant, where existing metrics are not questioned. You really want to constrain debate to the low local effort-high global payoff quadrant, which triggers all stripes, but are most relevant for humanity. Consider a GPT7 that requires only 10 dollars to train. Its worthwhile to think about but scares the bejeezus out of most folks.
Analogously, left wingers want to move the debate to low local effort-low global cost quadrant, because it seems straightforward to redefine cost metrics… moat and bailey dynamics really, quite curious.
The point of the post was that merely having a subculture attached to something doesn't make it good or bad. The addition of the bank robbing was to make that point obvious by attaching a subculture to something obviously bad. If you thought they were saying that graffiti is bad because it's like bank robbery (which is bad) then you misunderstood the point of the post.
Two of my replies just said that graffiti was worse than bank robberies. That's hilarious and crazy to me.
I get your point though, on reading the comment I replied to, after reading yours, it's clear to me that the equivalence implication is fairly weak. Your interpretation seems more accurate.
Dunno dude. If my bank is robbed there’s no real impact to me - all the money is insured. If someone graffitis my house then it looks horrible and I have to spend time and money cleaning it up.
I was thinking about societies in general. Bank robberies are absolutely worse.
They can involve multiple lives being at much greater risk and a large amount of resources allocated to criminals. The fact that it doesn't come from the bank but an insurance agency doesn't change anything. The money comes from somewhere.
The context was the graffiti subculture around the German rail system, although I didn't specify, that's what I was referring to. Of course graffiti on private residences is practically just vandalism. There aren't subcultures around that though, besides subcultures that just revolve around general vandalism.
In that vein, you should probably get graffiti insurance if that's a concern.
I actually wouldn't mind if the house would be covered in nice grafiti!
Get some cool artist and have him spray the front, i don't mind.
The bullshit tagging is just the worst and stupidest thing to do.
You're typing vandalism to make it seem like I also support breaking stuff or something? I have no problem with living in a building with stuff scribbled on it, and it sounds cool to have a customized building by the neighbours. Imagine all the kids that live in the building leave their name somewhere, it'd add to the history. Right now my building is white, and has bright orange metal bars. Is white with orange bars better? I don't know, it's just what it is and I didn't decide it either. I really don't see scribbles as counting as vandalism. I know it counts by law, but I don't have to agree to the law I just have to follow it, and out of all the laws that can be broken, it's one that never lost me any sleep when I see people doing it.
My university for example, in every single room, every single table is scribbled on and marked for years and years. When I arrived there as a fresh faced student I saw scribbles that were 30 years old. Some people left their names, some people said they didn't like professor X, some people left Maxwell's equations on there. I'm so glad the university didn't consider it vandalism. This could be applied to so many more things. It had zero negative impact on my education or experience in the classroom, so how can it be considered vandalism?
fr breaking things and making them not unfunctional is not the same as drawing on them. you make a great point. I really doubt that most of the people writing here have ever even painted the outside of the building they live in. We don't actually choose any of these things. But if we all DIY customised everything, we would actually have more agency. And I love seeing evidence of actual public interaction with things around me.
I am not sure I agree. You are making the life a little worse to hundred of thousands of people by making them feel like they live in a trash city every day.
I am for tough penalties on the authors of grafitis. At least make them pay the full cost of cleaning them up plus heavy fines.
I was thinking about this in the context of the graffiti subculture around the German rail system. It's pretty interesting and different from random tagging.
I somewhat agree with you if we are talking about low effort tagging, especially on homes.
However if I had to choose between some ambitious criminals being given a large amount of money or if some wall getting a bad piece of art on it, I would always choose the latter.
But in a bank robbery you’re taking someone else’s property no no no do not have a moral philosophy argument on HN in conclusion, that’s why a Georgist land value tax is one of the most economically efficient forms of taxation.
That's fair, but even interesting graffiti still won't let any sunshine come through. Also, I would rather look out the window [0] than appreciate artwork when riding on a train.
Considering the look of the train to the vast majority of people outside of it, I'm fine with not seeing anything - I'm staring at my book anyway for the most part, and there's another window on the other side. And I prefer it a lot over those ads that anyway otherwise contaminate the window with some random, probably sexist, racist, or otherwise shite nonsense.
My city is filled with horrible graffitis. Some types of ugly signatures, even on historical buildings. It takes only a few weeks after walls are cleaned up to see new graffitis reappearing. It's really sad.
It's not clear to me the profile of the people making these graffitis. At least some of them are made by left-wing anarchists given the slogan. Also, I suspect it's a very small number of people who are responsible for most of them: when paying attention, it's clear that a lot of these "signatures" refer to the same groups or persons.
So not sure community outreach would help with those.
I'm from a country where they once called up the fucking Interpol when someone vandalized a subway car and ran away. There are many things I complain about my country, but this isn't one of them.
You wouldn't admire it if you were in a coffee shop and someone decided to unload their artistic ejaculation on your MacBook. Public infrastructure belongs to the public, no single person is the owner, and you don't get to deface it just because you think it's pretty that way.
Cleanly maintained public infrastructure sends a message: that this is a place where people take these things seriously.
The kids painting street art have no power to consent or not consent to anything. If they had access to art supplies, a loft, and a gallery, they'd probably use them.
majority of ppl voted for some party, a party that gave consent to place/allow billboards, so indirectly, you gave consent. In the graffity's case - even the ruling party didn't gave consent, it's that they don't have resources to penalize and clean this mess
That implies that there was a party available that would ban billboards. There isn't, so graffiti is a way of actually taking back agency over our public spaces by underrepresented counterculture. Deal with it.
Most clasic graffiti to me look like trash left on the street, it doesn't convey the 'taking back of public space'. I like some graffiti concepts like in Berlin where ppl pay some artists to paint something over their building or some cool looking art on walls even when it's illegal/not approved (but would like to just go the approval way, or push for adding laws for such cases). But in the case of those random words/letters that maybe do have a meaning for some ppl - those are perceived by a lot of ppl just like trash, not a counterculture. Related to billboards- there are many places where cities do have a design code that basically forbids most of billboard types, esp in city center and it's not like you can't create your own party to push for this idea. If you don't gain votes, that means ppl are ok with billboards
Painting a wall is not violence. That is an extremely pro-authoritarian, hyper-capitalist viewpoint that is useful for the state and the property-owning ruling classes to enforce their rule. It has no basis in fact. Painting a wall does zero harm. If you own a massive building that is not your home, you can afford to paint over it. You don't need to though, because it is used by members of the public, not you, so it's actually meaningless to you. It's not the same as if graffiti artists painted over the front of your house as a middle class person. So there is no reason for you to be mad for uber-rich people who do not care about you. Walls that are used by the public should be owned by the public, and by that logic we all have the right to paint it whenever we want to. Just as you could paint a wall in your house.
Billboards are an ugly smear on the face of the urban environment, whose sole purpose is to enrich the owners of the billboard, and those that rent them.
The difference between billboards and graffiti is that one is “OK” and the other is not. But in neither case do we get a real choice.
I don’t think billboards have much political legitimacy at all, but there is lots of money behind them, so they’re probably here to stay.
In our city graffiti is allowed on a couple select bridge pillars and retaining walls. Those often have excellent artworks that anyone can appreciate.
Not that illegal graffiti can't produce great art too, and the illegality is a part of what fuels the culture. But I've come to the conclusion that if a place is likely to be "vandalized" by graffiti anyways you are better off just allowing it and see what people do without the time pressure of avoiding arrest.
If you dive into: [wine, jazz, modern art, craft beer, tennis, …] (pick one), you’d also appreciate it more.
Thing is, if I decide not to do that, the impact on my life is relatively minor. What gives graffiti artists the right to impose their personal predilection unto others?
In other words, given your reasoning, what’s stopping me from playing John Coltrane at 110dBA the whole day and night?
This entire sub-thread has me worried about society. People that thinks this way about the common good is why we can't have nice things. This is why it'll always be "50% vs 50%" and why we can't all get along and need to be separated.
If you only call graffiti the so-called "street art" then yeah but when most are bullshit tags from teenagers in the same cliche style with 0 creativity then it's trash.
And the problem is that 99% of the graffiti in the world is trash tags in stations/trains which has the direct impact of giving a rough feel to any well-meaning location.
So to me, that kind of graffiti is the result of a "me important" mentality which totally disregards the rest of the community who just loses in all fronts (including aesthetics and monetary).
Everybody can see the difference between graffiti art and graffiti vandalism. No need to look into the story behind it. Most people appreciate beautiful graffiti and hate the ugly tags and other untalented crap.
The “competition” associated with the MS13 “artwork” that covers up stop signs and street names in my neighborhood sure seems to involve a lot of guns and human rights violations.
I mean, if they appreciate the effort going into the keeping the infrastructure working, they can have some (un)written rules like not spraying identification numbers, street signs, transparent surfaces (like windows), I think many people will appreciate what they do and the story behind more.
I’m all for street art, but not fond of not being able to navigate because some group decided to let me they were here by making a road sign unintelligible.
That’s just not true. Several countries stopped using the vaccine until more data was available. For example in Germany. And then when the vaccine was used again it was only used on a subset of the population (older people because this risk was minimal in those cases). It was discussed at the highest level and all throughout the country.
I'm my experience, in California/USA there was strong political denial of anything possibly negative about the vaccines.
Public health authorities were proclaiming that there were no possible side effects, even as other countries were restricting demographics and discontinuing use.
> Public health authorities were proclaiming that there were no possible side effects, even as other countries were restricting demographics and discontinuing use.
If we're talking about the Astrazeneca vaccine in particular in this subthread, with its clotting side effects-- it's worth noting that it never received a US EUA. It's not surprising that US agencies never restricted its use, having never authorized its use in the first place.
"Reducing the length of your IDs can be nice, but you need to be careful and ensure your system is protected against ID collissions. Fortunately, this is pretty easy to do in your database layer. In our MySQL database we use IDs mostly as primary key and the database protects us from collisions. In case an ID exists already, we just generate a new one and try again. If our collision rate would go up significantly, we could simply increase the length of all future IDs and we’d be fine."
Strictly speaking you can't be sure that your UUIDv4 isn't (by pure luck) also in someone else's database, so it's not guaranteed to be universally unique. It's just very, very likely to be so.
For some value of "strictly speaking", this is true; but it's not a very relevant value. You can't be "sure" your counter never produces a duplicate, either--strictly speaking--in reality. The bug-free program or the computer that isn't affected by external factors is like the friction-free surface: sometimes useful to think about but not something that exists in reality. And the likelihood of a cosmic ray causing a bit flip or a race condition in the way your counter updates is a lot higher (as in, we see it happen all the time) than the theoretical likelihood of a collision on a sufficiently large and random key.
No, even that is not true. If all digital (and non-digital) storage media ever manufactured by humans - meaning all hard drives, tape drives, CDs, DVDs, BluRays etc. ever manufactured to date, and every book and word ever printed or written down. If those ALL were only filled in with UUIDv4s generated from a good random source .. you would still not see even one single collision!
UUID collisions are only possible with currently known human technology if your randomness source is not good enough. And it will remain so unless there are some astronomical leaps in digital information storage technology - at least 10 orders of magnitude more storage than currently exists.
EDIT: I thought of a way for programmers to mentally visualize how unlikely UUID collisions really are. Let's imagine that in some not-too-distant future, there are 10 billion people on Earth. Each of them are given one thousand CPUs. These CPUs have 1024 cores each, and they run at 10 GHz (clock cycles per second). The CPUs implement a hypothetical instruction that can generate a totally random UUID in one clock cycle.
As an experiment, all people on Earth one day decide to program all their thousand CPUs each to run a tight loop that will indefinitely generate UUIDs on all 1024 cores and then immediately discard them.
After continuing to run this experiment (whose electicity bill will make Bitcoin look like Earth Hour) all day, 24/7, for about 800 years, the likelihood of one UUID ever having been generated twice will have exceeded 50%.
I'm sorry to say that your analysis is wildly incorrect.
- 10 billion people =~ 2^33
- 1000 CPUs =~ 2^10
- 1024 cores =~ 2^10
- 10 GHz =~ 2^33
So: one second's computation by all of these people is 2^86 UUIDs generated. UUIDs are 128 bits. With probability essentially 1, there will be a collision within one second.
The reason is known as the birthday paradox. If you sample random values from a set of size k, after you've chosen about sqrt(k) values you will have chosen the same value twice with probability very close to 1/2. By 10*sqrt(k) samples you'll have found a collision with probability well over 90%.
In this case, after sampling 2^64 values you'll have a collision with probability 1/2. That happens in roughly 250 nanoseconds (2^-22 seconds) in your thought experiment.
2^64 sounds like a lot, but in many contexts it's not all that much. Every bitcoin block mined takes well in excess of 2^70 SHA evaluations. Obviously the miners are not dedicated to generating UUID collisions, but if they were they'd easily find thousands of them in the time it takes to mine one block (this neglects the fact that it is much easier to sample a UUID than to evaluate double-SHA256).
Came here to say the same thing. Qt is a C++ library and is widely used (for example in KDE) and is also used in embedded environments a lot. And its pretty mature.
Being not able to focus will cause you to jump from one thing to the next.
"Oh let me gather wood"
10 minutes later
"Oh look! I found flowers"
10 minutes later
"Those stones look amazing… what could we possibly do with them?"
10 minutes later
"Its getting cold. where is the wood"
Isolated this may seem like a disadvantage. But the negative consequences are reduced when one is acting in a bigger group. And this jumping from topic to topic make the person become a generalist which can be useful.
Without a license the default copyright law kicks in which means:
"The default copyright laws applies meaning that the autor retains all rights to the source code and no one may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from the work."
Wouldn't the grant given through section 5 of GitHub TOS [1] apply here?
That says "you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to use, display, and perform Your Content through the GitHub Service and to reproduce Your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub's functionality".
In other words, without an explicit license you can do whatever you like with publically viewable content as long as it runs via GitHub.
This is wrong in this case. Doom source code has previously been released under other licenses. In such situations in the open source world we can choose which of the licenses we want to follow.
The source code was released first under some custom non-profit license in 1997, then under the GPL in 1999. From what I can tell, those are the only licenses which the DOOM source code has been released under, and I can't even find any info on that non-profit license from 1997 release.
Are you referring to the license from 1997 here..? Or have there been other source code licenses which pages like Wikipedia and the DOOM wiki don't mention?
> The DSL is significantly more restrictive than the GNU GPL, and as such is incompatible with it. For example, any form of commercial exploitation is forbidden. Heavy restrictions apply to the distribution of copies of the source code; the license grants permission only for the distribution of portions of the code for "educational use". The DSL is not an Open Source license (under the Open Source Definition) or a Free Software license.
Surely that's not a very attractive alternative to the GPL?
I agree with you that it doesn’t really make much sense for someone to choose to use the DSL license instead of the GPL license. I was just pointing out the general principle that in cases like this one can choose which license one uses.
This is not really true. There are high speed trains operated by Italy that start in the center of Germany (Frankfurt) and end in Milano – crossing Switzerland. There are also trains that start in Germany end end in south France (Mannheim - Marseille). Super easy to purchase tickets.
Yes, but age discrimination is something we consider acceptable in most countries. There are specific kinds of age discrimination we consider unacceptable but by and large it’s legal.
In the US, for instance, Medicare only serves sufficiently old people.
By that logic, Jim Crow laws weren't discriminatory because they were laws. I wouldn't suggest relying on legal frameworks as a replacement for ethical ones.
Why stop there? Why not harp on the 21+ laws, or the 18 to vote or the or the or the? Then you can take the same logic and apply it to why do we have laws that restrict anything? Very soon, it's anarchy
Edit: Not "all of those" but "many of those"
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