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patrickcollison.com

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Re: Questions

#281

Post by erikpukinskis »

jalfresi wrote: post #265
kryogen1c wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Better safe than sorry” is rising belief. I think this is a cowardly and inaccurate belief and agree it is what it driving changes across all areas. It is the institutional flaw of democracies and free markets. People (demand) are capable of acting irrationally and emotionally leading to a reduction of individual and public good.

"I think this is a cowardly and inaccurate belief" Throughout history you find the people who believe this are not the ones who's safety is sacrificed in pursuit of some grand project...

You’re assuming a lot.

I’m assuming your OP thinks “better safe than sorry” is stupid because it doesn’t actually help you make decisions.

I would much rather drive on a bridge of someone whose motto is “do it right.”

This isn’t the Apollo program. We know how to make safe bridges. It’s not a matter of being cautious and talking to every stakeholder. It’s a matter of hiring actual engineers,* letting them work, believing them, and then giving them the resources to monitor construction properly.

It means sometimes rejecting a lot of bad material and holding the project up for 8 months.

It does not mean “lean safe” and cross your fingers.

* meaning licensed engineers. The word engineer has I guess been made meaningless by thousands of people writing code and calling it “engineering”. It used to mean someone had completed training as an engineer.

Re: Questions

#282

Post by Koshkin »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #79
JepZ wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are very few people who want to read many books that are 1000 years old. The few books that interest more people can be converted to newer formats, the few people that want to read all old books will have to use extra tools to do so. That said, I am not a particular fan of books. They take a lot of physical space, are heavy and age. So as long as we stick to reasonable formats (e.g., text-based, non-binary), it…

The Bible and the Koran would easily be on the world's best seller lists if they weren't excluded by default. You might argue - and I would agree - that this is not necessarily a good thing as far as content goes. But the point is that putting something into writing snd giving it a tangible form on paper gives it an inherent stability and authority missing from digital media. We tend of think of digital media as temp…

In the modern world, a physical book is nothing more than a mere printout of a PDF file or a photocopy of an old edition. People print web pages all the time, but nobody in their right mind would think much about these printouts, let alone philosophize about their tangibility, endurance etc.

On the other hand, old books, with their high-quality paper, binding and letter-press print do seem have some kind of personality...

Re: Questions

#283

Post by sdenton4 »

_ea1k wrote: post #256
XorNot wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this the argument you want to plant your stake in the ground on as absurd? Because the modern debate in the tech community is "should people be allowed to operate motor vehicles at all?"

lol, I hear people frame the self driving car discussion that way regularly, but it is just wrong. Noone is going to be making human driven vehicles illegal. They may be more like classic cars than regular vehicles at some point, though.

Nah, you'll just see the insurance cost spike to the point where driving is a weekend activity for rich weirdos. Give it a generation and it will be as strange and morally suspect as smoking.

Re: Questions

#284

Post by aglionby »

scandox wrote: post #49

> It seems that the returns to entrepreneurialism in cities remain high: Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, and others, have improved the lives of millions of people and appear much more contingent than inevitable. I’m interested in this as a bald assertion. Have they improved the lives of millions of people? I wasn’t aware of that. Can someone give me a quick before and after?

I was also curious about this. There are high levels of disparity in all three of those places. Hong Kong has both some of the most expensive property in the world and people living in cage homes.

Re: Questions

#285

Post by jacques_chester »

bachbach wrote: post #171
jacques_chester wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There needs to be a club of people focusing on these sorts of questions consistently. They're called "universities".

I can't believe this is still a middle class meme, some ideas die hard. Universities have been sliding downhill for a long time and they know why because they operate the nightclub protocol for entry. Geography and formal education not what links the people I mentioned. Correlation, causation, you know the mantra.

I didn't say anything about formal education or credentialling.

The original and still key purpose of universities is to gather academics together.

Teaching was a by-product of that origin. Would-be students flocked to the cities where scholars had clustered and eventually, folks started to organise.

The word "university" means "of one", or "guild", or "group". That reflects its origin as a club for academics.

Literally people whose reason for being at university is to be in a club of people focusing on these sorts of questions consistently.

The closest alternative are the many and various think-tanks, most of which are intertwined with academia.

Re: Questions

#286

Post by [deleted] »

gameswithgo wrote: post #277
JauntTrooper wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is rational. We should live in a society where the expected human sacrifice of a construction project should be 0. Pure utilitarianism leads to outcomes that are clearly out of step with almost everyone's moral codes. For example you could kill someone and take their organs to save the lives of 4-5 people. Is it rational that we're not allowed to do that? Why do some people get to keep 2 kidneys when there ar…

> We should live in a society where the expected human sacrifice of a construction project should be 0. No, but that should be the ideal which you should strive to move towards, when practicable. But you can't ever actually get there, and shouldn't try infinitely hard either.

[deleted]

Re: Questions

#287

Post by booleandilemma »

Why can't I connect my editor to a running program and hover over values to see what they last were?...Why can't I debug a function without restarting my program?

When he learns about Visual Studio his mind is going to be blown.

Re: Questions

#289

Post by erikpukinskis »

raldi wrote: post #242
JauntTrooper wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is rational. We should live in a society where the expected human sacrifice of a construction project should be 0. Pure utilitarianism leads to outcomes that are clearly out of step with almost everyone's moral codes. For example you could kill someone and take their organs to save the lives of 4-5 people. Is it rational that we're not allowed to do that? Why do some people get to keep 2 kidneys when there ar…

Do you believe we should make the national speed limit 25? If not, you're accepting that people will die needlessly, and that the value of a human life is not, in fact, infinite.

Has this been tried? I would expect more speeding and maybe even more fatalities.

Re: Questions

#290

Post by cuspycode »

chucky wrote: post #35

> Why are there so many successful startups in Stockholm? Several reasons. First, you need to recognize that any Sweden-based startup will, when it gets to be known internationally, have a Stockholm-based office. So it's not about a city of 1 million inhabitants, it's a country of 10 million that's the true number here. As an example, I believe Spotify opened their original offices in both Stockholm and Göteborg more…

Also, Sweden was the first European country that was connected to the U.S. Internet, or more specifically to NSFNET [1][2]. This was because the adoption of TCP/IP protocols for wide area networks came earlier in Sweden than in other parts of Europe, for various serendipitous reasons. A funny anecdote is that Switzerland could have beat Sweden to be connected first, but they were delayed because they had to renumber all their networks at CERN that were already using TCP/IP.

Initially it was just non-commercial Internet for academic institutions, but lots of students were exposed to the technology and the infrastructure early on.

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

[2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#History

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