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The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

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Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#281

Post by inglor_cz »

dmbche wrote: post #280
inglor_cz wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your first sentence, only I would replace the word "cynicism" with "skepticism". And I think it is actually useful. People will try to manipulate other people through emotions, and mobs are easy to manipulate. One should have fairly high barriers before joining a street mob, because its potential destructive power is enormous, and it also tends to elevate unsavory characters to positions of power. I am n…

So free association is less than ideal is what you're getting at?

If you abstract away enough, you will always get to "X is less than ideal".

Food is less than ideal, war is less than ideal, death is less than ideal, HN is less than ideal.

Are you satisfied with this sort of Twitter-like posting and thinking? I am not.

Pixels are basically free and we should strive to post more than one-sentence snarks. For one-sentence snarks and drive-by dismissals, Reddit is the ideal territory.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#282

Post by scroot »

pjc50 wrote: post #49
karel-3d wrote: post #29

I remember when I had a lesson about OSI layers, where the teacher has carefully described all the layers in detail and then said something like "most of this is not important, these layers don't really exist, TCP/IP got popular first because it's just much simpler than OSI was"

Oh, there's an entirely different feature-length article to be written/found about how packet switching beat circuit switching and the "Internet approach" beat the telco approach. The great innovation of being able to deploy devices at the edges without needing clearance from the center. I don't think very many people even remember X25. The one survivor from all the X standards seems to be X509?

This might be fiery take, but I think the X.400 standards for naming and messaging would have been a lot better than the chaotic email situation, and probably would have made more sense from a commercial/legal perspective than making DNS "the" global naming system

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#283

Post by dmbche »

inglor_cz wrote: post #281
dmbche wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So free association is less than ideal is what you're getting at?

If you abstract away enough, you will always get to "X is less than ideal". Food is less than ideal, war is less than ideal, death is less than ideal, HN is less than ideal. Are you satisfied with this sort of Twitter-like posting and thinking? I am not. Pixels are basically free and we should strive to post more than one-sentence snarks. For one-sentence snarks and drive-by dismissals, Reddit is the ideal territory.

[flagged]

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#284

Post by turtleyacht »

anthk wrote: post #192
turtleyacht wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you get far enough to need external dependencies, do you use your work as a library in another language or rewrite it? http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

QuickLisp solves most of the issues. Quiop and closer-mop if you want a universal CLOS. Scheme is not Common Lisp, it's kinda the opposite. It comes with batteries included and MCClim is the defacto GUI for it. >Stuck with Emacs [from the URL] Well, Lem tries to be Emacs for Common Lisp, but without having to think on two Lisp languages (albeit closely related) at once. Once you have a REPL, autocomplete and some doc…

Good point. I neglected to consider standard libraries (stdlib) at the time. If those are allowed, then a lot more can be done with one's code without reaching much farther. Thank-you.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#285

Post by foldr »

inglor_cz wrote: post #277
foldr wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can apply the same cynicism to any political or protest movement. Not sure that it tells us very much.

I agree with your first sentence, only I would replace the word "cynicism" with "skepticism". And I think it is actually useful. People will try to manipulate other people through emotions, and mobs are easy to manipulate. One should have fairly high barriers before joining a street mob, because its potential destructive power is enormous, and it also tends to elevate unsavory characters to positions of power. I am n…

If innocent people being murdered or the threat of an imminent environmental catastrophe don't meet your 'high barriers', then nothing will. So though you claim in principle to approve of some protests, what you're saying in practice is that no-one should protest against anything because they'll probably just make things worse – because people in general are fairly awful and people who take charge of things are even worse. It's impossible to argue against this kind of cynicism as it's self-reinforcing, but it doesn't strike me as an interesting or insightful position to take. Especially when painting in broad brushstrokes rather than addressing issues with particular political or protest movements (which no doubt are not beyond criticism).

It's also important to weigh the harmful effects of apathy in the balance. These are easily forgotten but almost inestimably enormous. Just think of all the damage done in the decades (centuries) where hardly anyone could be bothered to protest against slavery, women's oppression, racial segregation, pollution, etc. etc.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#286

Post by inglor_cz »

foldr wrote: post #285
inglor_cz wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your first sentence, only I would replace the word "cynicism" with "skepticism". And I think it is actually useful. People will try to manipulate other people through emotions, and mobs are easy to manipulate. One should have fairly high barriers before joining a street mob, because its potential destructive power is enormous, and it also tends to elevate unsavory characters to positions of power. I am n…

If innocent people being murdered or the threat of an imminent environmental catastrophe don't meet your 'high barriers', then nothing will. So though you claim in principle to approve of some protests, what you're saying in practice is that no-one should protest against anything because they'll probably just make things worse – because people in general are fairly awful and people who take charge of things are even…

War is often more complicated than "innocent people being murdered" and we both know it. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn't morally black and white, and the current Israeli-Hezbollah conflict is something else entirely.

I think you may be proving my point. Taking one side of a complicated situation because of a black-and-white moralistic thinking is potentially destructive, and organizations like Hamas benefit from that.

As for your slavery example, did slavery disappear because humanity awakened morally and started demonstrating in the streets, or because we gained a new non-human resource of raw power? Previous civilizations didn't engage in slavery because they were profoundly immoral, but because human and animal muscle was the only practical source of power. The specifics varied across the globe, but unfree labor was ubiquitous in pre-modern societies.

For a contemporary situation, imagine a 22nd century activist judging people of 2024 for eating meat from dead animals, when he can get a good steak by pressing a button on a steak-making machine. It wouldn't be demonstrations which made the difference between 2024 and 2124.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#287

Post by wismi »

Arch-TK wrote: post #272

I have a theory that the worse is better approach begets an environment where the worse is better approach is better. At least hypothetically, I think there's an approach which is not "the right thing" or "worse is better" but rather more like "the right foundations". Most interface complexity in my experience seems to be inherited from underlying interface complexity, and it takes a lot of work to fix that underlyin…

I think there's a lot of truth to this. It reminds me of an idea in economics about the "second-best". From the wikipedia page:

"In welfare economics, the theory of the second best concerns the situation when one or more optimality conditions cannot be satisfied. The economists Richard Lipsey and Kelvin Lancaster showed in 1956 that if one optimality condition in an economic model cannot be satisfied, it is possible that the next-best solution involves changing other variables away from the values that would otherwise be optimal. Politically, the theory implies that if it is infeasible to remove a particular market distortion, introducing one or more additional market distortions in an interdependent market may partially counteract the first, and lead to a more efficient outcome."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_second_best

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#288

Post by jpc0 »

Arch-TK wrote: post #272

I have a theory that the worse is better approach begets an environment where the worse is better approach is better. At least hypothetically, I think there's an approach which is not "the right thing" or "worse is better" but rather more like "the right foundations". Most interface complexity in my experience seems to be inherited from underlying interface complexity, and it takes a lot of work to fix that underlyin…

I have a question for this premise.

How would you design a network interface using your right foundations model? I'm not talking about HTML or whatnot.

I have some sort of medium, copper, fiber whatever and I would like to send 10 bytes to the other side of it. What is the right foundations that would lead to an implementation which isn't overly complex.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#289

Post by tightbookkeeper »

bccdee wrote: post #187

> Both early Unix and C compilers had simple structures, are easy to port, require few machine resources to run, and provide about 50%-80% of what you want from an operating system and programming language. > Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses. The key argument behind worse-is-better is that an OS which is easy to implement will dominate the market in an ecosystem with many competing hardware standards. Ope…

Rust is not very popular in terms of number of users. It’s just over represented in online discussion.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#290

Post by sjamaan »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #182
actionfromafar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Javascript is the only language which straddled the Client Server Gap. If it weren't for Node, Javascript would not have been as popular.

It's still absolutely baffling to me that anyone is willing to run JS server side. There are so many options which are much better suited, why are people willing to jam that square peg into the round hole?

Perhaps the siren song of "isomorphic JS", where you can run the same code on the server and on the client? I can see the use case for having complex model and validation code running on the client for speedy feedback and on the server for security, and perhaps also the idea you could render something entirely on the server when needed (eg for indexing and non-JS clients) and on the client when it's capable.

Personally, I wouldn't want to touch server-side JS with a 10 foot barge pole.

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