I'm surprised at how many people are responding negatively to software that improves user experience.
Suppose we had started out with the command UI that gitless has and someone came along and tried to sell us the current git cli UI. It would be completely ridiculed.
The only thing possibly questionable about the gitless interface is that it does away with staging. However, you can always fall back to git for staging functionality if you like, and use gitless for most other commands. I think it is a win.
I think the author address that point in the introduction:
> Experts, who are deeply familiar with the product, have learned its many intricacies, developed complex, customized workflows, and regularly exploit its most elaborate features, are often defensive and resistant to the suggestion that the design has flaws.
Having spent dozens, even hundreds, of hours learning the intricacies of the Git command-line, it must be extremely shocking and insulting when you are told that those efforts were in vain, because the original UI was not very good and an alternative can be grokked by people of varying levels of technical competence with only a fraction of the effort you put into the original thing. I think this is what we're seeing here: people will try and defend their time investment by arguing that a professional would learn the hard thing and not lower himself to easy-to-use tools, that the new UI hides some powerful features that are rarely used, etc.
I think it's a little different from that actually. That's normally about the merits of ongoing financial investment, but I get your analogy and there should be a name for it because you see it all the time from compsci types.
How about "sunk knowledge fallacy" or something like that?
Using artificially complex, unfriendly tools is a form of honest signaling. [0]
Making tools complex and painful, denying their complexity, and scoffing at the very notion of allowing a non-expert to accomplish what before required esoteric knowledge is the way the tribe of self-styled Real Programmers protects its integrity.
> "dumbed down" only improves the user experience of new users. It hurts power users and is rarely useful to anyone other than newbs.
That's only true if the power users perform a completely different group of tasks from the new users, or if the "new user" interface is made wholly incompatible with the "power user" interface.
If the power users still needs to perform the same basic tasks, the simplified and easier interface will likely make those tasks more efficient for the power user as well.
They are not paying $250k per employee. You have to factor in payroll taxes, paying accountants to keep books and CPAs to do taxes, benefits, and a multitude of other regulation-imposed payroll costs.
All of this is to support salaries of around $125k - $150k.
The same goes for pretty much any employer. If a fast food restaurant hires someone at $8/hr, it actually costs them around $16/hr to hire the employee.
In a free market Let's Encrypt could probably cut its expenses to close to half what it's at now.
In a "free market", I'd demand higher wages to cover medical expenses, my membership in the local road association so I could use the roads, etc. And I'd get it because I'd be in a union (as a programmer in this current non-free market, I don't feel super compelled to unionize, yet). But otherwise, yes, agreed.
I'm only out of a job if you can successfully get to work without using the roads owned by the local road association. And if you can do that, so can I, so I wouldn't be paying that cost. But this is SF we're talking about, so that seems unlikely - transportation is extremely monetizable.
Alternatively, maybe you're taking a worse route to work and willing to suffer a worse commute, in which case fine, you're just willing to work for lower pay than I am. I'm only out of a job if you're an equal-quality employee despite being willing to work for lower pay, in which case one of us is being stupid (either you are undercharging, or I am overcharging) and could just choose to stop being stupid.
The Swedish head of state does not live in Silicon Valley (and I would be surprised if the Swedish state is spending less than $250k/yr. in total on its monarchy).
It's amazing how many people didn't actually read all 4 parts of the article.
His argument has nothing to do with caching or prefetching, etc.
First, it's about random access. You can't prefetch a random fetch!
Second, he's measuring time, a perfectly valid thing to do. And the reality is when you lay your memory cells out in 2 dimensions it takes order of sqrt(n) time to fetch a random memory cell value, where n is the number of memory cells you're using.
Third, it turns out order of sqrt(n) time is the best you can do even if you had the best technology in the universe.
This is why there needs to be less taxes and mandatory benefits. Counter-intuitively, these things work together to reduce the number of jobs and reduce worker flexibility and happiness.
In Australia "taxes and mandatory benefits" on a $100k USD salary cost the employee ~30% in taxes and medicare levy and the employer ~5% payroll tax + ~10% superannuation (401k). In total, 1.15x the salary is being spent and of that, 0.69x goes to the employee.
If the employer pays an extra 50% salary in the US, then 1.5x the salary is being spent but the employee only gets salary after tax, which (based on my payslip) is only ~0.65x salary. So the employee only gets 0.43x the total amount being spent. If the employer has a fairly generous 401k match that results in an extra ~10% going to the employee from that extra 50%, that's still only 0.50x the expense going to the employee.
As someone who's lived in both countries, I don't really get anything extra in the US thanks to that cut. The health insurance seems to be the main thing people care about but I found healthcare in Australia to be cheaper and superior to the care I've had in the US (on PPO).
I think the US needs to adopt single payer healthcare like the civilised world and work out its government spending and taxes a little better.
Or completely the reverse - all mandatory benefits as a percentage of wages. We kind of, sort of do that in Germany (up to about 50k for health insurance, 90k for retirement, I think)
How would increased taxes and mandatory benefits reduce the cost of employees?
Increased employee costs make an employer less likely to take risks and produce pressure to hire less workers. Then a few workers gain at the expense of others not having a job at all. Why do you hate workers?
It would make benefits a more constant cost per 1k paid to employee, making the cost per hour of a 30 Hr/wk employee closer to that of a 40 Hr/wk employee.
Come to think of it, that's probably why I have so many colleagues on 20-32 Hr/wk contracts... Mostly, mothers of young children. But they're doing the same sort of technical work others on full time contracts are.
So what is the solution? If we spend all our time arguing what the solution isn't, we leave a big vacuum which is then filled with even more garbage ideas.
The solution is to go on with your life. You cannot stop terrorism, but you can take out it's sting. We seem to have forgotten the lessons about the IRA, et al.
In addition, when people say "solutions" what they mean is "something that doesn't inconvenience me or require me to do anything".
However if you want "real" solutions, here are some:
1) Start denouncing ALL religion as the force for stupidity that it actually is. "I believe in an imaginary sky being with no evidence and you can't convince me otherwise" should be LAUGHED AT as the absurdity it is.
2) Get everybody off of petroleum so that there isn't any money for people to fight about over in the middle east.
3) Quit supporting dictators and bombing countries for geopolitical reasons.
4) Start fixing double digit unemployment rates instead of making them worse with "free trade" agreements that only allow companies to use open borders while preventing workers from doing the same.
5) Make mental health care a much bigger priority than it currently is.
Unfortunately, these solutions don't feed into people's preconceived biases and xenophobia and don't put more money into rich people's pockets. So they are all non-starters.
Hmm, I think your first two points are a bit harsh and don't cover the whole picture.
1) Religion is not really the problem. There are a over a billion muslims in the world, and a little more than that who are Christians. The percentage of each that are involved in violence, even major wars, is so small to be statistically insignificant (definitely less than 1% or even 0.1% (or even 0.00001% if you just consider terrorists)). When religion does come into play its typically in a more ethnocentric way - e.g. religion-as-race.
2) most of the current problems, including those coming out of iraq, were not due to 'petroleum', but rather internal rebellions and foreign interference that is probably more political/ideological than financial in nature. A certain mindset might attribute a lot of the problems in the middle east to politicians a decade earlier seeking to win elections by looking tough on dictators, but not having the willpower to deal with the aftermath of their intervention.
The other points are good, though blaming 'freetrade' as the cause for unemployment and/or other financial troubles is probably a bit simplistic.
Most religions promote "us vs them" attitudes that make people think that anything can be done to the "them". The religions in the US also give birth to our "domestic terrorists" but they don't get called that because 1) they are white and 2) "Well, they just kill baby killers, fags, etc. so they kinda deserve it."
I don't see calls to deport Baptists, thank you very much.
Religion needs to finally get terminated. Period.
> but rather internal rebellions and foreign interference that is probably more political/ideological than financial in nature.
Nobody would care about most of those dictators if there wasn't enough money involved to make them important. See: Africa. Nobody really cares one iota about genocide or terrorism in Africa as it has no importance.
> though blaming 'freetrade' as the cause for unemployment and/or other financial troubles is probably a bit simplistic.
The issue isn't "freetrade" per se. It's the fact that the corporations get to be transnational while the workers don't get to cross national borders anywhere near as easily. So, the corporations get the benefits while the workers get shafted.
I think you will find most states promote an 'us vs. them' attitude, especially in times of hardship. And conversely that both states and religions promote harmony and communion during times of plenty.
I'd argue for example that Christianity is only peaceful these days because the states that are predominantly Christian are also the most prosperous. And, if you want an example of what atheists do during times of hardship, look to soviet Russia or even Nazi Germany.
As for why middle eastern dictators matter more than African dictators to the west (basically the US), it's possibly because, on the international stage, your partially right: the middle east was initially interfered with because of its oil, but also because of its proximity to Russia. And today's conflicts are not about those reasons but the legacy of those reasons, I would say.
I wasn't arguing that it was their atheism that they committed atrocities in the name of - rather that you don't need religion to commit atrocities. That article and, I think, your position are pursuing the same fallacy but in the opposite direction.
Hitler had his ideology, Stalin his manifestos etc - they all had their own, unique 'holy book' or similar that justified their crimes and it would be a mistake as you've said to somehow link them all as being from a common position.
And yet Hitchens and possibly you do the same thing in the opposite direction: despite the average ISIS member having as much in common as your, say, average US muslim as a nazi might have to a 1917-era russian communist (next to nothing) - you are arguing that their religion, not their idealogy is at fault.
You might argue that the various holy books of faiths cause a problem: for as much as the bible and the (far better written) quran espouse love and joy etc etc they both also include a fair amount of violence. But these books have been rewritten, multiple times, and are constantly being reinterpreted. Blaming the text for the actions of the reader seems harsh.
I guess ultimately the problem I have is that people who say religion is the problem and it should be banned seem to me to be worryingly similar to those that said computer games should be banned in the 90s. A very small amount of people committed atrocities, and all of a sudden it was the games 'promoting violence and hatred' that needed to be stopped, rather than people confronting the more nebulous and difficult issue of culture surrounding the criminals that made them more susceptible to hate and sociopathy.
> There's nothing about being an atheist that promotes hatred. There isn't a holy text for Atheism that tells people to believe or do things.
On the other hand, there is nothing in atheism that can possibly say that anything is wrong. If the material universe is all that exists, humans are fundamentally no different from mosquitos or rocks. Killing a handicapped person because they inconvenience you cannot be seen as essentially worse than burning a leaf. In short, atheism provides no reason to do or not do anything other than "because I want to".
By contrast, if someone claiming to be a Christian wants to commit murder, they can only do so in opposition to the explicit commands and teachings of Jesus and of the moral laws they claim to believe.
By no means does this imply that "Christians" will always behave better than atheists. But at least there is ground for defining what it means to behave "better" and to argue for such behavior.
Nazi Germany was Christian, very much so (There were also fringe pagan elements, yes). Atheists were persecuted under Hitler. Soviet Russia didn't kill anyone in the name of atheism. Atheism isn't an ideology, only the lack of a certain kind of ideology. There isn't much that unites atheists. It doesn't mean atheists don't subscribe to any ideologies, of course. In the case of Soviet Russia, the ideology responsible for the atrocities commited would be communism. Of course, these ideologies are not the sole reason people turn into savages. But Nazi Germany and Christianity for example were compatible because they shared a lot of hatred against jews. Christianity made a lot more people susceptible to Nazi propaganda (together with economic problems) than would have been possible.
That is right, but I suspect, that if it weren't for religion, people would find another narrative, to create a "us vs them" attitude. Nationalism is an example that comes without religion, racism is another, and I suspect a plentitude of isms, that can be used for that.
I think, religion is mereley a vector for marginalization, not the problem in itself.
May be there should be a constitutional requirement to put those politicians that call for war right in the front lines along with those who actually fights it. Then may be they would have an appreciation for veterans and their care, cut back on unnecessary wars as they would think hard before putting themselves in harms way rather than war mongering sitting in the luxurious comfort.
Taking responsibility can put an end to a lot of bad things happening in todays society. Doing whatever without having to face its consequences is the root cause of such behavior that causes harm to people.
There's a lot of room for innovation here, and there hasn't been much precedent for this historically.
You could have constitutional measures controlling the way that wars were funded. A simple example: simple outlaw any kind of deficit spending by the national government. Another: a mechanism by which the release of funds could be tied up under legislation supervised by a third party such as the judiciary. [You could have a war chest, but encode it in a law such that the money could only be released if a senior court ruled that the release satisfied self-defense criteria.]
One of the reasons that the original United States constitution (Articles of Confederation) was replaced by the current one was related to military funding. In the old system, it was difficult to raise an army for shared purpose (e.g. fighting the revolutionary war) and there was potential for states to go to war with one another. The issues raised by that period will be familiar to anyone following European integration projects. Some hard-line libertarians in the US remember the Articles of Confederation fondly, because of the limits it imposed on government power.
Not at all ridiculous. You need to work harder if you're actually trying to troll people--I'll assume you are not, however.
1) Most modern societies are becoming increasingly secular.
2) Global warming demands that we get off of petroleum as much as possible anyway.
3) Not poking our nose into geopolitical nightmares is quite doable, thanks. Bush Sr. sure showed how it was done.
4) You can fix massive unemployment or you can get violence out of young men. This is pretty simple cause/effect. If young men have no prospects, they never settle down and you wind up with a large disgruntled population segment with nothing to lose.
5) Mental health care needs to be better. Period. This includes the young and the old.
One of you is answering the question "What should the country collectively [i.e. the government and people, negotiating and communicating with each other through elections and media] do about the destruction caused by terrorism?".
One of you is answering the question "What should the government do about popular fears of terrorism, which might cause the government to lose elections?".
You're in violent agreement that the easy answer to question 1 doesn't solve question 2, and the easy answer to question 2 doesn't solve question 1. Why not moot some other answers to those questions, instead of sitting on your high respective horses?
The solution is accepting that the potential for crime, even mass murder, is a necessity for a free society, and that it's better for some terrorists to succeed than for everyone to live under a government that sees all, knows all, hears all and cannot possibly be risen up against. The greater threat to life and liberty always comes from a government's response to terrorism, not from any act of terrorism itself.
Treat terrorism as just another crime, nothing special, nothing existentially critical. Nothing to fight a war against the entire world over. Governments already have the tools they need to fight terrorists without limiting encryption, they simply choose not to use the tools they have, because they would rather use terrorism as a pretext for grabbing power.
On your first paragraph, that sounds like the absurdist end of the libertarian spectrum and I'd expect more moderately minded people would take some issue with that line of thinking ...
With regards to "Treat terrorism as just another crime, nothing special," I feel that the problem with terrorism, as it is called is the fact that it is coordinated and targeted. It is more like "organised crime" but it has the specific goal literally of creating terror, whereas the interests of organised crime are purely commercial and if you don't get in their way they won't get in yours.
The issue is with people going around creating terror in a coordinated way, which undermines the authority of the state, and many people's feeling of safety.
Of course that still leaves the question of how do you respond to it, but simply "accepting that the potential for crime, even mass murder, is a necessity for a free society" is similar to me to accepting that a waterfall software development model is a natural emergent phenomenon, inevitable and should thus be embraced. It's a mode of thought that never has a happy ending.
Just to yank myself back on topic again, terrorism is thought to be similar to a child who wants his way and keeps escalating negative attention seeking tactics to the point where you either acquiesce (thus reinforcing the negative behaviour), or you smack the child (at best only a temporary solution, that could lead to further escalations if not sooner, then later in life - could even put you in front of a judge).
"Smacking the child" is what the west has been trying so far.
My personal opinion is that there is no universal generalised "third option", though intricate behavioural theories abound. I would take the opinion that every child is an individual and must be dealt with, and respected as such. It may be as simple as giving them something else to occupy themselves.
>that sounds like the absurdist end of the libertarian spectrum and I'd expect more moderately minded people would take some issue with that line of thinking ...
Should people have the right to communicate with one another without government interference? Does encryption undermine the state in a similar way as terrorism, or is it merely an extension of the existing right of people to be (to quote the US Constitution) "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects from unreasonable search and seizure" ?
I concede that reasonable people can disagree with where the line should be drawn (given different states and different philosophies about the proper nature of government) but I don't think it's that absurd to insist there should be limits on what any government can know about its citizens.
Unfortunately, there have been too many demonstrated cases of governments abusing the legal limits given to them, so I have no reason to expect that greater surveillance powers would be used responsibly. When it comes to weakening encryption, they're not "smacking the child," they're smacking every child and hoping they'll hit the right one sooner or later.
This may be a controversial opinion, but I do believe that a certain amount of surveillance is effective. It worked in London. It worked in New York.
But that is "using" technology. Not "crippling" it. I am sympathetic to the needs of the state, and I believe there should be some attempt to meet these needs, but with oversight, and with proper procedures and protections.
It's one thing to say James Bond doesn't have time to call back to 'M' to get permission to plant a bug but James isn't a massively industrialised automated spying operation. I'd give him sole dispensation on national security grounds but that doesn't scale up to the level that GCHQ and NSA were doing. The more actors involved the greater the possibilities for systematic abuse and that has to be acknowledged, and those questions answered.
I don't think it's controversial - one of the reasons people oppose domestic surveillance is because it's effective, if it weren't effective, its abuse wouldn't really be a problem.
But law enforcement already has ways of doing its job without getting new surveillance powers. They can find people on Tor, they can pay for exploits to get into cellphones, and there always seems to be obvious (in hindsight) dots that could or should have been connected, leading to a terrorist plot, which rarely seem to involve encrypted communications.
I want terrorists stopped, but i'm not convinced that governments can't stop terrorists even with the existence of encryption.
Just on my final point, for anybody who wants to look at how terrorism has been "resolved" in the past, I highly recommend researching "The Good Friday Agreement" which was hugely successful in Northern Ireland. It involved a large amount of compromise on both sides, and the consumption of a whole heap of humble pie.
Why do you think that there is a solution? IMHO it's a mistake to think that there are solutions to everything. Sometimes, not doing anything is the best we can do.
I know it sounds cliché to say that, but I'd rather see my gvt taking actions on things that could easily be improved. For instance, many teenagers smoke in front of every high school in my country. I see that as a much bigger threat than terrorism, and one that is much easier to address.
Hell, even trying to explain how a relatively simple shopping cart web app works, unambiguously, in plain English, to an executive, is extremely tedious and verbose, requires defining a lot of specific terms, and at the end of the day it still confuses the hell out of him.
In Utupia (aka Nowhere) we will have programs that a human being can know is correct. This might involve mathematical proofs, tests and whatever. But how do we know that those things are correct?
In some cases, it would help if we had an English text explaining what the program should doo + computer verification that the program really does that. The English text is only one part of the picture -- but an important part.
This is what acceptance testing tools like Cucumber and Robot try to do; but they avoid actually parsing English. Computers are getting better at parsing human languages, so I expect improvement in this field.
Isn't doing programming projects much less cumbersome when you hire a professional programmer and express a high-level project spec to him/her? Why cannot a sufficiently advanced machine-learning model behave just like such a professional?
Modern models learn to achieve goals in increasingly sophisticated 3d environments and even learn execute commands in some very limited form of natural language. You could say that the question of achieving more humanlike performance may be "just" a question of engineering and scale.
It's humorous that they trot out the definition of innovation:
"make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas or products"
A patent explicitly forbids you to make changes on something already established. Want to make an innovation on a processor that already exists? Sorry, patent! You'll have to wait nearly 2 decades to make your innovation.
Plus it just doesn't pass the smell test. They're basically claiming that if companies spent billions of more dollars on innovation instead of patent litigation we would have less innovation!?
The j-core open processor and RISC-V instruction set are only possible because of patents that expired. Imagine what web development would be like if someone had patented using xmlhttprequest to update the DOM and info in the DOM. Would innovation have increased or lagged?
Patents quite literally create monopolies. If monopolies are so good, why does anti-trust exist? I think it's quite obvious that patents stifle innovation. Oh yes, they may provide a legal method for people to rent-seek, and make lots of money through extraction, but they definitely slow the rate of innovation.
