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Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

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Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#241
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. There are no kids in my household, and no one else ever uses my devices, so the idea that I need to prove that I'm not a kid for me to be able to pay bills or file taxes on a stock device is ridiculous.

Is anyone proposing age verification to file taxes? I'd hope you already have to provide some sort of stronger proof of identity to file a tax return anyway.

You don’t even need to be an adult to pay taxes, at least in some countries. I’ve been doing my own taxes since I was 14.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#242
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify: not MD5 itself. It was created in 1991 by Ron Rivest. (It is my experience that knowledge of these things isn't as widely distributed as one might hope.) I first came across it in 1995/1996: Wow, what a magical tool for backend web stuff! I used it for everything.

is the difference between MD5 and MD5crypt the same as between Java and Javascript or are they actually related somehow?

MD5crypt is a password hashing algorithm that uses the MD5 digest hashing algorithm. MD5crypt basically calls MD5 a bunch of times in order to make it computationally expensive.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s not exactly wrong either. The founders/executives of a tech startup I worked for spun off a completely unrelated E2EE chat app as a separate startup and didn’t market it to anyone. It’s only used by them and their buddies and basically only for OTR conversations related to their publicly traded company that would have put them in prison. Totally the “let’s defraud these investors and do industrial espionage” typ…

We can agree to disagree on this. Even on this example you gave, I'm not entirely sure it's harmful to society. Having worked in the corporate world, there are just so many regulations that — from what I've seen — there is pervasive non-compliance and the covering up of the non-compliance. I suspect that if every single corporate regulation was effectively enforced, a significant fraction of economic activity would g…

People often say the same thing about environmental regulation too...

I hope you realize what a poor argument (to lawmakers) that is, especially if your goal is to advocate for privacy.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#244
post #112

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 struggle with this because the author is lumping FOSS and "tech bros" together as taking the blame for what a handful of large corporations have done, and thinks that our punishment is what those large corps are lobbying for. It seems like an argument that this is a necessary evil to protect the kids - despite admitting that this is not the real reason for the laws - and then says that those of us who care about pr…

Individuals who genuinely care about privacy are absolutely mythical in the tech industry. If they were commonplace Google would find themselves under continuous seige by a combination of protestors and bizarrely well-funded FOSS projects aimed at every business niche they inhabit. Doubly true for Meta. Bitching online about proposed legislation while private industry maintains exquisitely detailed records of every aspect of your existence is at best performative.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#245
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I struggle with this because the author is lumping FOSS and "tech bros" together as taking the blame for what a handful of large corporations have done, and thinks that our punishment is what those large corps are lobbying for. It seems like an argument that this is a necessary evil to protect the kids - despite admitting that this is not the real reason for the laws - and then says that those of us who care about pr…

Individuals who genuinely care about privacy are absolutely mythical in the tech industry. If they were commonplace Google would find themselves under continuous seige by a combination of protestors and bizarrely well-funded FOSS projects aimed at every business niche they inhabit. Doubly true for Meta. Bitching online about proposed legislation while private industry maintains exquisitely detailed records of every a…

You don't get to come here and tell other people what is and isn't important to them.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you continue reading? His argument is exactly that, like all the previous model checkers, LLM's are going to give us some bugs for a while. Then that is going to stop. His argument is not that they aren't going to find any bugs, but rather that at some point those bugs will be fixed. At which point we will continue on as usual.

How would they stop? Are you insinuating they're going to have reviewed all code at some point, and that new code for them to review will just cease to exist? Or that they'll just decide to stop finding bugs they're finding now in new code when they review it? All the previous model checkers didn't stop giving us bugs to fix, which is why his premise is wrong; every big company is still running SonarQube because it s…

The author is talking about released bugs. The tools will then continue finding the bugs they find in new code, keeping those from being released. At least that was my reading of the article.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#247
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individuals who genuinely care about privacy are absolutely mythical in the tech industry. If they were commonplace Google would find themselves under continuous seige by a combination of protestors and bizarrely well-funded FOSS projects aimed at every business niche they inhabit. Doubly true for Meta. Bitching online about proposed legislation while private industry maintains exquisitely detailed records of every a…

You don't get to come here and tell other people what is and isn't important to them.

You're right, nor am I attempting to. I'm merely pointing out the kazoo-music-and-a-propeller-beanie slapstick levels of comedy that manifest when the tech industry writ large attempts to argue for online privacy with a straight face.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#248
post #183

I have met women in tech who have been privacy conscious and paranoid about state control. Or even a healthy stream of non-tech women worried that it will be used to attack their sex and to discriminate. I don't think the author is correct in his belief that there are not a considerable amount of women worried about privacy. And to make such a board claim, and in light of my experience, would indicate either hubris o…

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Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#249

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…

I sort of agree. But I kind of think it misses the point.

Bike shedding means no decision is made. That is the worst possible outcome as it provides absolutely zero value. Even a wrong decision provides at least some value even if it fails horribly. Maybe we paint the shed black and it burns down due to excessive heat, but it’s a bike shed so who actually cares if we need to rebuild the entire thing and paint it white this time.

And when it comes to bike shedding, getting it “wrong” is by definition already low stakes. It just doesn’t matter a whole lot.

Even the timezone example isn’t really that material IMO. Sure, it’s an extra annoyance to normalize timestamps to locale in every app/debugging query. But in the end it’s just not that big of a deal.

Worse would have been that early team arguing about it for 6mo without implementing anything. Then no one would be employed currently to curse those early developers to begin with.

Often times the only wrong decision is not making a decision. Very rarely are there decisions to be made that are not overtly obvious which are actually material. These exceedingly rare situations are where the winners from losers get sorted out - but that sort of decision in my experience so far happen a handful of times during an entire career.

As I moved up the ladder in my life I’ve often found my job is to basically flip a coin when a decision choice is presented to me. Very rarely is the topic worth me spending any material amount of mental energy on.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#250

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…

In accounting this is the concept of "materiality". If some asks "is this material?", they are asking if it's worth spending significant time looking at it or deciding.

Remember to * 3 when assessing. Choose wrong, and you do the job, undo it, and do it again.

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