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Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

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Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#171

Post by busterarm »

girvo wrote: post #156
busterarm wrote: post #46

I guess tech has grown too large and fractured and maybe most working software engineers are too young to be familiar with phk and his points of view. He's been a strong privacy and FOSS advocate for decades and has more credibility on both of these topics than nearly anyone on this board. He also has an account and comments frequently. phkamp. I suggest reading some of his comments before making judgment. So many kn…

I’m mostly seeing people disagree with the substance of his argument, though. Your argument through authority is weak.

Really? I'm overwhelmingly seeing people just complain and call him a crank without really making any arguments. There are some arguments but it isn't the majority of the comments, or even what I was responding to.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#172

Post by busterarm »

tommydee wrote: post #168
sph wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ever heard of Meredith Whittaker? The fact that you name one makes her very rare indeed.

- Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the EFF - Eva Galperin, Director of Cybersecurity at the EFF - Runa Sandvik, formerly of Tor Project - Yan Zhu, EFF Fellow and CISO at Brave And many, many more. It rankled me more than a bit that the author apparently looked around his bubble in Denmark and the FOSS community, saw no "tech sister" privacy advocates, and decided to paint with the widest brush possible and assume th…

Like half this list + Meredith are lawyers/policy people. Add in computer security specialists/operators. They use software as a tool to achieve political ends.

"tech bros" in context of the article is pretty much referring to builders of software. The tech sisters who have built significant projects are indeed mythically rare.

Names like Radia Perlman might be a better choice.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#173

Post by hinkley »

busterarm wrote: post #169
hinkley wrote: post #146

A bit of an aside, but after someone introduced me to the notion of Reversible Decisions, it quickly became apparent to me that the solution to the bikeshed problem is to throw money at it before the roosters can start preening about which color the shed should be. Decisions that are reversible should just go with the instinctive answer of whoever volunteers to work on it. I've been in many meeting rooms where, becau…

This often massively discounts the cost of reversing decisions. People often work to build things without any thought given to those who have to maintain it afterwards. Especially when it's not them. I worked at a large, publicly-traded multinational where decades prior and they were still just a 4 man startup they decided the database server and all timestamps should be in the local timezone. They are still using ES…

When you first introduce the idea you'll find a bunch of people think decisions are Reversible which are not, as you say. And the flip side of Reversible decisions is the Last Responsible Moment, which runs afoul of Hofstadter's Law, and people wait until halfway past the last responsible moment.

The key to reversing a decision is getting over Sunk Cost, to start thinking of some code as scaffolding. Scaffolding allows you to get on to other work and then remove it after, because it's either not needed or the 'real' solution has been installed. People get defensive when you propose to rip out their code. Hey that code made us $250k at a time when we were about to miss payroll. Yes. It did. Thank you for your service. But now it's costing us $30k a month and that shit needs to go.

Getting people to figure out that if a decision is important, making it later is actually the sane thing to do, is a challenge. Because many people's intuition is that we should put energy into this now while it's fresh and we have abundant energy. We can 'solve' it and not have it dangling over our heads. But we don't know the right answer yet. We don't know the strength of our tools or the expertise of our coworkers.

The product roadmap is now and has ever been complete bullshit. Refactoring teaches that you amortize rework across all new stories. That's just how it goes.

(And everything should be in GMT unless you can literally point me to a several hundred page treatise on why another time zone is the correct one. Yeah I've worked west coast places that got bought by NY or Chicago companies and it's a clusterfuck if you both didn't use GMT)

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#175

Post by sfRattan »

antonvs wrote: post #170
sfRattan wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The attitute expressed in the quote, "until mothers no longer are forced to have 'the talk' when their daughters get their first mobile phone," is both wrong in its assumptions and dangerous for its well-known consequence: the enabling of petty tyranny. Forced, indeed. There will never be a world populated by humans in which you do not need to have numerous talks with your children about the nature of humans, especia…

Well put. But the problem is, those same forces you're describing are employed to fool people into believing the fictions that support these regressive movements. The real danger we should be focusing on is "won't someone think of the impressionable adults".

Long term, I think we need computer age fables. As in: stories children can listen to and read growing up to acquire effective instincts about computers and the digital, networked world, rather than trying to apply instincts about the analog world to computers. Inter-human societal complexity has long outstripped our genetically developed instincts, but we've already solved that problem with storytelling and cultural transmission/cultivation of instincts. That solution is as ancient as spoken language.

When humans come to these deeply flawed conclusions about computers, networks, and governments, it's a new case of an old problem. Maybe the old problem is screaming toward us at a new velocity and intensity. But I think we can improve the existing humane cultural solution with new stories for our children, rather than surrendering to the supposed inevitability of government mandates to lock down and restrict general purpose computing to only well identified citizens in good standing. The restriction to "in good standing" almost inevitablty follows from the "well identified."

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#176

Post by andix »

imhoguy wrote: post #162
andix wrote: post #23

I don't think age restriction will impact FOSS in the long term. If there are some regulations that threaten FOSS now, they are going to be adopted in the long term. Regulations for age restriction are understandable. A lot of modern technology is harming kids (and I don't mean dirty videos, social media seems to be much more harmful). A sensible regulator would leave some responsibility to the parents, but require r…

It is already happening. E.g. soon F-Droid and any unattested open source Android app distribution will be gone, due in Sep 2026. Same with GitHub and similar, we have CLAs for a while now for licensing. But I see project maintainers are frustrated with AI generated slop PRs and bad actor contributions. The ecosystem will be closing. You will be able to read code, but forget creating PR without some ID verification (…

> soon F-Droid and any unattested open source Android app distribution will be gone

This is not connected to age restrictions. It might've been used as an excuse.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#177

Post by fragmede »

leftyspook wrote: post #105
andix wrote: post #23

I don't think age restriction will impact FOSS in the long term. If there are some regulations that threaten FOSS now, they are going to be adopted in the long term. Regulations for age restriction are understandable. A lot of modern technology is harming kids (and I don't mean dirty videos, social media seems to be much more harmful). A sensible regulator would leave some responsibility to the parents, but require r…

The sensible regulation would be aiming at socially harmful features of tech, not forcing people to provide proof of identity to a third party in order to continue harming themselves with the same exact features. Imagine if such an approach was taken to, for example, food safety? Instead of closing down a restaurant that has poor hygiene, you'd be instead horce the restaurant to hire a private security contractor to…

Except we do that for venue that serve poison aka bars, so if you put it that way, it doesn't seem totally absurd.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#178

Post by andix »

leftyspook wrote: post #105
andix wrote: post #23

I don't think age restriction will impact FOSS in the long term. If there are some regulations that threaten FOSS now, they are going to be adopted in the long term. Regulations for age restriction are understandable. A lot of modern technology is harming kids (and I don't mean dirty videos, social media seems to be much more harmful). A sensible regulator would leave some responsibility to the parents, but require r…

The sensible regulation would be aiming at socially harmful features of tech, not forcing people to provide proof of identity to a third party in order to continue harming themselves with the same exact features. Imagine if such an approach was taken to, for example, food safety? Instead of closing down a restaurant that has poor hygiene, you'd be instead horce the restaurant to hire a private security contractor to…

Sadly a lot of tech is potentially harmful for kids. And also adults, but they should be able to handle it better.

But it extends to many other common items. Kitchen knifes, cars, lawn mowers, ...

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#179

Post by fragmede »

jubilanti wrote: post #114
ai_critic wrote: post #35

First read of this pissed me off, but subsequent reads gave a much different opinion. Do yourself a favor and read this, a few times, and take a moment to actually try and see what the author's getting at.

I detest this writing style, where you assert arguments you don't actually believe in and know are in bad faith, in that sniveling "prove me wrong" tone, to provoke some kind of reaction. Well, mission accomplished, reaction provoked. I'm not going to read this multiple times. I'm going to fire off this comment and remove it from my brain forever.

Not a fan of Cunningham's law, I see.

https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/cunninghams-law/

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#180

Post by shepherdjerred »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #159
hinkley wrote: post #146

A bit of an aside, but after someone introduced me to the notion of Reversible Decisions, it quickly became apparent to me that the solution to the bikeshed problem is to throw money at it before the roosters can start preening about which color the shed should be. Decisions that are reversible should just go with the instinctive answer of whoever volunteers to work on it. I've been in many meeting rooms where, becau…

+1! I've fallen in love with many of Amazon's in-group concepts, and maybe I'm just drinking the koolaide, but they have the concept of a "two-way door", which is exactly this -- a decision that can be made, unmade, remade, etc relatively cheaply. If you can identify that a choice isn't very dangerous, you can focus on the things that really are instead.

Amazon's leadership principles are fantastic. They are applicable to anyone doing any job at any level.
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