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100 years of whatever this will be

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Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#381

Post by Animats »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #288
robotresearcher wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins. Gay marriage, the fall of communism, civil rights, universal health care (in every rich country but one), women's rights. Don't forget about the very important real progress being made.

I've never understood the reason we even have marriage defined in government at all, and thusly would include "gay" marriage (all marriage is marriage if it's undefined)... We don't have a government definition of prayer or baptism, but for some reason we have have codified that one religious practice into our government? Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Also why do they get varyingly get tax incentives or disincen…

I've never understood the reason we even have marriage defined in government at all

Some countries handle marriage as a religious thing. Israel works that way, and it's really complicated.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#382

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

davidw wrote: post #254
beambot wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But we do need rules like if I give you money for something and then you tell me to get lost... That would be "larceny", and there are lots of rules prohibiting it & court systems to recoup damages. Credit card companies (for example) are just a more-rapid arbitration mechanism.

That's part of the point of the article. Those rules are not some kind of distributed system. They are centralized.

One person can hit another person over the head without any centralized authority being involved. So I don't think your claim is correct at all. Assuming if somebody breaks an agreement, you just hit them over the head with a stick.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#383

Post by jimsimmons »

jspaetzel wrote: post #306

All of this is just pessimistic complaining. Flip this and be optimistic and you'll find life isn't all that bad. Think about the last hundred years... * Rich people are still rich and poor people have access to more food, medicine, and opportunity then any time in human history. * Families have and always should lookout for themselves first. That's the way things work and should work. * Society is able to support mo…

Than anytime in human history is such a dumb way to characterize it. I mean, do we really expect the world to go backwards? It has happened in the past for sure, but regressions have not been a thing in the modern world for quite a while. So “than anytime in human history” has, is and will likely be true and that makes the characterization pointless.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#384

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

thumbellina wrote: post #352
jspaetzel wrote: post #306

All of this is just pessimistic complaining. Flip this and be optimistic and you'll find life isn't all that bad. Think about the last hundred years... * Rich people are still rich and poor people have access to more food, medicine, and opportunity then any time in human history. * Families have and always should lookout for themselves first. That's the way things work and should work. * Society is able to support mo…

Perhaps the continual raising awareness of problems is a key part of progress.

No, technical progress is key part of progress. Most innovators are not driven by the constant complaints of other people.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#385

Post by moffkalast »

k__ wrote: post #265
zackmorris wrote: post #218

I've been thinking a lot lately about first principles. For example, the Golden Rule is great, but the concept of reincarnation transcends it, making it self-evident. The Book of Genesis probably started "in a beginning", not "in the beginning". And so on. When I look around at the state of the world today, it just makes me so tired. Everyone's running around on autopilot and not questioning the basic assumptions. It…

Every time I questioned basic assumptions, my life got better. Not suddendly, but in the long run.

Interesting, I just got more depressed every time.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#386

Post by winternett »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #229
notpachet wrote: post #49

All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so…

The difference here is that the existing codebase isn't just broken, it's structurally resistant to being fixed. Fixing your old legacy software takes time, but probably less time than starting over from scratch. Fixing the legacy financial system doesn't just take the time to fix that system; first you have to fix the system of politics and corruption that makes that system what it is. And fight all of the people wi…

>The difference here is that the existing codebase isn't just broken, it's structurally resistant to being fixed.

The key point here then is that the engineers and maintainers of that original (legacy) system probably did not properly take scalability and structure into consideration. Maybe the system was pre-SDLC, which is an important consideration, but each system is usually a different case, and some tech is often labeled as "legacy" because it's simply not part of a "bright and shiny new money-making solution" marketing plan... ehem.

It's important to not create the same issues in redevelopment, and reducing complexity is a key step in ensuring future compatibility.

Some systems are not as "legacy" as others. This is also a vital point to the discussion.

Most clients aren't concerned with overall cost and lifetime of service on solutions from what I've observed; Most clients are people working towards raises and their retirement and just concerned about not exceeding their max budget and not generating embarrassment for themselves or for their company.

This is why one of the first questions I ask of my customers is how long they intend for the system to be in service for.

There are several factors of why a proper solutions architect is necessary throughout the development process of major and mission-critical systems, but too many PMs decide to just use the tech stack a team agrees upon, or what's cobbled together and patched to work, or what worked as an MVP during early demos.

We suffer from environmental factors, because budgets are under-cut, deadlines are always too short, and because people only care enough to prevent their own headaches. This does not meet a mark for vital systems though. As we ignorantly rush towards more and more software dependent operations, the failures will become more and more amplified in all aspects (cost, loss, recoverability, technical debt... you name it).

Keeping everything as simple as possible is now, and always has been, the better ideal.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#387

Post by AnimalMuppet »

beebmam wrote: post #227
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conservatives want to change rules to get back to their view of what was good about the past. Liberals want to change the rules according to their view of what should be good about the future.

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect" https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/12/frank-wilhoit-the-tr...

That is not the definition or description of "conservativism". That is a strawman.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#388

Post by munificent »

delusional wrote: post #102
notpachet wrote: post #49

All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so…

I don't think the argument is that transferrable. As a developer you don't really live within the legacy systems. At most you're a politician negotiating between the different component parts. Society is different. I don't like DeFi, but I get what they're feeling. It feels like society has left us behind. Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins. You…

I 100% sympathize with this feeling too. But the pattern I see over and over again is:

1. Society is getting worse.

2. I'm really good at writing software.

3. Therefore the solution is to write software to fix society.

That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large:

A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".

It doesn't matter how good you are at software if you don't have a software problem. Many problems cannot effectively be transformed into software problems. Instead of continuing to search for our keys where the light is, we should be bringing the light to where we lost our keys. That means accepting that we have to get outside of our comfort zone and improve our non-software skills. (This does not mean immediately thinking "I'll write software to bring the light to where I lost my keys!")

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#389

Post by moffkalast »

jimsimmons wrote: post #383
jspaetzel wrote: post #306

All of this is just pessimistic complaining. Flip this and be optimistic and you'll find life isn't all that bad. Think about the last hundred years... * Rich people are still rich and poor people have access to more food, medicine, and opportunity then any time in human history. * Families have and always should lookout for themselves first. That's the way things work and should work. * Society is able to support mo…

Than anytime in human history is such a dumb way to characterize it. I mean, do we really expect the world to go backwards? It has happened in the past for sure, but regressions have not been a thing in the modern world for quite a while. So “than anytime in human history” has, is and will likely be true and that makes the characterization pointless.

Also "at least we're not in WW3, life is good!" is such a crap argument I can't even.

A guy writes a blog post on important issues to focus on and what this guy comes up with is: "shut up, be happy".

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#390

Post by preseinger »

moistrobot wrote: post #332
soco wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm a person who has money but is in bad standing with the banks, maybe I shouldn't be able to do financial transactions at all. It's that, or I'm imagining the wrong reasons why a person with money would have trouble with banks.

Totally agree, as long as the reasons the banks have are valid. The problem is that that decision is made by people. Standards of conduct are not universal. What if political affiliation or COVID vaccination status affects your ability to transact with a bank, even though those things have nothing to do with buying or selling real estate

It is I think vastly better for people to make those decisions than for them to be made by smart contract. The institutions we discuss now are at their core social systems.
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