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100 years of whatever this will be

apenwarr.ca

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Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#411

Post by CTmystery »

tinco wrote: post #363
padobson wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd ask you to check your basic assumption about science as an authority. Science is really good at transmitting information about deterministic processes, but is really bad at transmitting information about non-deterministic processes or even processes that are so complex that they appear non-deterministic e.g. human behavior. I don't believe in reincarnation, but it's not hard at all for me to see how it can be use…

> I'd ask you to check your basic assumption about science as an authority. Science is the only and ultimate final authority. It really is not a bad assumption. There literally can not be a higher authority than it by definition. > but is really bad at transmitting information about non-deterministic processes or even processes that are so complex that they appear non-deterministic e.g. human behavior. No it is not,…

> Science is the only and ultimate final authority

Junk science led to the American eugenics movement that included forced sterilization of 64k Americans in the early 1900s.

I love science, but calling it the only and ultimate authoritity leaves a lot of room to create a world we don't want to live in. This happens because scientists disagree themselves on almost everything. Recognizing the difference in science as an ideal versus science put in practice makes me not want to agree with your statement.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#412

Post by nemothekid »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #343
pydry wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the reason you got gay marriage but not universal healthcare is that gay marriage doesn't threaten corporate interests.

Universal Healthcare doesn't particularly threaten corporate interests either. Remember when centrist Obama tried to implement the Heritage foundation approved version and everyone went a little crazy for no obvious reason? It would be comforting to think that some evil geniuses were holding back universal healthcare for their own benefit, but it's mostly just lingering stupidity and racism that's holding America bac…

I think it's naive to call politicians stupid. It's clear it's the incentives, particularly the health insurance industry that blocks any effort for universal healthcare; and in the American system it's too easy for one senator to completely stonewall any legislation. For example, it was Joe Lieberman, a senate in Obama's own party, the completely gutted many of the socialized aspects of Obamacare.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#413

Post by leetcrew »

Vetch wrote: post #340
leetcrew wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a legacy codebase can be structurally resistant to being fixed. you're afraid to change things because there's no test coverage. okay let's add some automated tests. oops can't do that either because the whole thing is a tightly-coupled pile of spaghetti with no interface boundaries. so you start by refactoring. but because there are no tests, you don't realize you are breaking a bunch of important business functiona…

This captures the backwards compatibility and long range entangled dependencies aspect of change resistance. It misses the aspect of organizations that is agent like, capable of homeostasis. Unlike static code, when things change, such systems will actively seek policies and apply levers of control to maintain the present equilibrium. Like biological agents, I'd argue any persistent and stable organization of humans…

in a vacuum yes, the legacy system doesn't have any of those agent-driven issues. given enough time and freedom from interference, you can incrementally fix it or rewrite the whole thing from scratch. but if you leave out the context of users and management, it doesn't really matter how you choose to fix it or whether you do at all.

in reality, you have customers that are very upset about the sudden spike in observable defects, you have other teams mad because they are triaging a bunch of bugs introduced by your refactor, and you have management wondering why the fuck you have spent multiple months working on stuff that has no clear connection to a marketable feature. you might also have a couple of seniors/principals who actively oppose your efforts because they benefit from being the only people who really understand the mess you are trying to clean up. and of course, all of that messy people stuff is probably a large part of why the system is so tangled up to begin with.

I certainly don't think political systems are exactly like computer systems, but it seems like a lot of the high-level lessons are applicable to both.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#414

Post by ignoramous »

dirtshell wrote: post #302
jonstaab wrote: post #186

Great essay, but I think fundamentally wrong. There are some important distributed systems he overlooks: the ones found in nature. Gas Laws, photosynthesis, and radiant energy are pretty great, it means I always have air to breathe. No one is regulating that, and to do so would only make things much worse. The challenge is that humans suck at designing distributed systems. Nature is exquisitely designed (or, if you w…

What is a well designed system, especially in nature? What values does nature maximize for? Nature is just a bunch of distributed systems that have chaotically learned to work "together" in vicious harmony. Nature's "design" is brutal, and is not compatible with the comforts we have grown to expect in our modern lives. If nature had its way we would mostly die around 50 years old of a cold.

> Nature's "design" is brutal, and is not compatible with the comforts we have grown to expect in our modern lives.

Well, that's some human-centric view.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#415

Post by hotpotamus »

munificent wrote: post #388
delusional wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've heard the streetlight one before but I also like "when you're a hammer, then every problem is a nail". I hadn't thought of it this way though perhaps I had felt it. It feels like this is the dream for AR/VR - to create a software defined reality that you can escape to.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#416

Post by [deleted] »

pjkundert wrote: post #39

This article is profoundly insightful. I have been searching for patterns and insights in this field for 25 years. What apenwarr concludes is true: All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation. The problem is, everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus), which is literally impossible (see: CAP theor…

[deleted]

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#417

Post by pshc »

thumbellina wrote: post #345

> All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation. XMPP fits this definition. Bulk activity occurs via decentralized federation. Regulation occurs via yearly updated XMPP compliance suites. https://xmpp.org/about/compliance-suites/

The future will not be built on XML.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#418

Post by ignoramous »

jiveturkey wrote: post #299

> Let's build what we already know is right. There's no universally or commonly accepted view of what is "right".

That's a great way to stall any progress towards anything worthwhile. Everything in moderation. There's always a way. More often, it is right down the center.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#420

Post by histriosum »

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

Even within crypto/defi, it's still people making the decisions. People wrote the algorithms. The only advantage I see there is that, in theory, you should be able to see what rules are encoded in that algorithm, so it's slightly more transparent in that sense.

On the negative side, though, there's essentially no rule of law to prevent the people making the decisions in DeFi from doing things that are bad/illegal/invalid.

> 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

In the regulated finance world, these sorts of restrictions would be disallowed by the rule of law. You can sue them if they try to enforce those rules, and depending on your jurisdiction, you may win and indeed win damages. What's the equivalent in DeFi? Who do I sue? What court do I ask for relief?

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