201–210 of 421 posts
Does the person who wrote this article think that a custom disk image == a custom logo? A mistake only possible from someone with extremely poor subject matter expertise, or by text predictive AI? Or, am I totally out of whack and have no idea what the author is writing about?
Increasingly, I suspect the real value of type systems is that they force slower, "more correct" development, allowing you to "win the argument" with Management over taking the time to Do Things Right. They put a floor on code quality (albeit, IMHO, a pretty low one - you can also royally fuck up a type system) - preventing the worst excesses of rushed development.
If your neighbour is using a type less language and is making more profit than you, then your boss will question the choice of language. Development pace is set by the competition. Edit: and if there is no competition, the longer it takes, the longer it will take to be profitable.
Like a desk, you get one layer of crap and clutter. More than that and everything begins to teeter and fall.
That said - you definitely have to ask yourself (as a developer) or your engineers (as management) "is there a simpler way?". But "simpler" is not the same as "rushed", even if both are "faster" - it's just a question of "on what timeline". Faster today? This week? This month? This quarter? This year?
If your solution would work except for some reason, then you don’t actually have a solution . A drill that works in space except for all that vacuum and radiation isn’t actually a space drill. It’s a space drill for some alternate reality, meaning the one you’re not actually in. You haven’t solved the problem. You’re not as good of a problem solver as you think you are, sorry. Stop acting like you’ve solved it. You h…
I hear your point - if humans are part of the problem then an effective solution has to allow for humans in the loop. I'd extend that thought to be more narrow though. Local human political and economic factors need to be allowed for. So, for example, a medical solution will be different in a country that practices medicine for profit over those places where medicine is non profit. Equally the "can't build nuclear en…
There are some differences, but doctors still need to eat, equipment needs to be purchased, etc. Making medicine non profit isn't going to cure cancer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Subject engineers to licensure That'd be great. It can also finally define a standard for things like clean code, development cycles and and design patterns. Companies keep claiming to promote these things but it seems to be just a lot of equivocations.
Because licensing is working so well in other disciplines? Magic fairy dust! Look at some civil engineering disasters: licensing doesn't prevent disasters.
I'd suggest that you are judging the effectiveness on the wrong criteria here. It's impossible to foresee all distasters - the goal is to enact mechanisms to mitigate the human cost of distasters, and even more importantly, prevent the second and third occurrences of the same distaster... (which we seem decently good at)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because, unlike what classical-liberal economic theory stipulates, human beings aren't inherently selfish. People can succeed under a system and still acknowledge it is a bad one for a big part of the population.
Economics doesn't stipulate selfishness anymore than physics requires cows to be spherical creatures that live in a vacuum.
> What they don’t tell you is that we already have solutions for a lot of problems, we just don’t use them. Sometimes this is because the solution is too expensive, but usually it’s because competing interests create a tragedy of the commons. If you have a solution that can't be used because it costs too much money or other societal concerns, then you don't have a solution. Part of making a solution is finding someth…
“costs too much money or other societal concerns“ Uhh you coupled these together which is a little odd, since societal concerns might be more addressable than the basic fact of resource scarcity is.
I agree, factually, with almost all the content of this article, although I find its tone a little grating. There's a joke online - "nobody speaks more confidently than a 15 year old who has smoked weed twice explaining how to smoke weed to a 15 year old who hasn't smoked weed before" - nobody writes an angrier blog post than someone who has watched two YouTube videos about a subject. Doing the work to improve societ…
There's a default assumption that progress is inevitably slow, but I don't think it's obvious that it has to remain that way. I think it's worth challenging our assumptions and really trying to dig in and figure out why certain processes are slow, and if it's possible to do anything to improve upon them. Lately I've been asking researchers why progress in their field seems so slow from the outside, and if they could…
If your solution would work except for some reason, then you don’t actually have a solution . A drill that works in space except for all that vacuum and radiation isn’t actually a space drill. It’s a space drill for some alternate reality, meaning the one you’re not actually in. You haven’t solved the problem. You’re not as good of a problem solver as you think you are, sorry. Stop acting like you’ve solved it. You h…
The author almost, but not quite, reached the point where they realize they contradict themselves: Claiming that socialized healthcare would cure cancer, but not explaining how to move the US to socialized healthcare (nevermind that countries with socialized healthcare haven't cured cancer either). Claiming that we could lay fiber cable to every house, but not how to actually do it. Claiming that an alternative votin…
The former is a very twentieth century notion. The identification of government with society (“we”) went hand in hand with the idea that government should have power in every domain of human life and co-opt or liquidate every competing authority like academia or media or church. Here, it’s that “we” the government should take over healthcare (although regulatory approval of a cancer treatment was cited as one obstacle) and fiber-laying instead of leaving those to non-governmental authorities. Carl Schmitt in the early twentieth century had a great term for such a totalizing government: the Totalstaat. It’s not clear, however, that a Totalstaat is actually a good idea. Governments have never solved many problems at all—-homelessness comes to mind—-and it’s not clear that a government seeking to expand its power into previously non-governmental domains will serve its own interests best by solving problems rather than by providing treatments that abate problems without solving them. Treating a problem expands a state’s authority while preserving the problem as a reason for further government action; solving a problem would end that authority by ending the reason for it. Winning a war, for example, used to remove the need for a standing army until the twentieth century saw the invention of a “cold war” and “war on terror” and a perpetual standing army to treat the unsolved problem of a lingering threat. It’s not clear that this increase in government power was a good thing.
Secondly, the idea that “we” (government) “know” the answers is hubris. The author claims that “we” know it would be good to send everyone to college for free, but is that actually best for everyone? Or does that just turn college to more high school, lower the quality of education, waste a lot of people’s time, slow down the creation of families and negatively impinge on demographic trends, etc? “Knowing” the solution presupposes knowledge of second-order effects, and people are generally very bad at that. Thinking that a total state “knows” the best solutions to problems is a good way to impose lots of (potentially negative) second-order effects without much recourse to do anything about it, since this total state has all the authority and no longer has competing authorities to check its hubris.
For a lot of things the problem is essentially a problem of scale. Those "ancient human tribes" who did so much better were tribes of 100-200 people, and it's actually not that hard to "do the right thing" with a relatively small group of people. Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly sim…
> For a lot of things the problem is essentially a problem of scale. Those "ancient human tribes" who did so much better were tribes of 100-200 people, and it's actually not that hard to "do the right thing" with a relatively small group of people. And yet other societies in the present do the right things in a lot of areas even with comparable groups of people. Not to mention today we have tools like the fast text,…
The author mentions, for example, that we know “providing free college to everyone would be a good idea”. But we don’t know this, and there are many other rich countries that don’t do it; in some, college is entirely unavailable to people who don’t enroll in the appropriate high school track.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given current events, I don't understand how you can hold this view? We've recently seen a truly horrifying terrorist attack, and the response was as brutal as you would expect. Surely the people who planned and executed it knew that better than we do, since presumably it's their business to know such things. Surely that's a constructive proof that this notion is mistaken?
> We've recently seen a truly horrifying terrorist attack, and the response was as brutal as you would expect. Indeed. And the reason why such an attack happened is because the people who did the attack were the ruling government body of 2 million people for almost 2 decades, and were left to their own devices to build up a large scale attack, involving 1 thousand+ combatants. And in a few months, those combatants an…
Along with everything else, constituting a bigger crime than this is claimed to be an attempt to prevent.
https://twitter.com/muhammadshehad2/status/17317722618482647...
https://www.ipcinfo.org/ipcinfo-website/alerts-archive/issue...
https://twitter.com/jocelynhurndall/status/17330649265606495...