_vdpp

A few random thoughts:

1. For as much as we spend on education, teachers seem to be grossly underpaid - to be getting robbed of their share of the budget. Where does that money go?

2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others.

3. Teachers frequently complain about how they are unappreciated, yet children spend _12 years_ in their care. Why do people come up to them and say they hated school rather than “thank you”?

4. Many school problems are caused by disruptive children.

Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit. Throwing more money into schools won’t ever fix this problem.

5. Schools are just too darn big. Thousands of kids in a big prison-shaped building and we wonder why everyone is alienated, miserable and dehumanized?

That’s already happening.

Counterpoint: Star Wars Special Editions.

Vegas, yes. What was wrong with it?

Nobody’s stopping you from starting a anarchist syndicate or commune or kibbutz or whatever. They are out there, but I don’t think they are any kind of utopia.

Just drink it straight. Municipal water (with few exceptions) is already filtered, treated, and regularly-tested for contaminants. It’s an insidious message from the bottled water industry that tap water is somehow poisonous without being filtered. It’s fine.

It’s practically a miracle that I can turn on a faucet anywhere in my state and feel safe drinking the water.

With some exceptions (e.g. Flint, MI) tap water is very clean already, cleaner than a lot of bottled water in some cases.

Eh, I’d argue the opposite: developers expect the end-user to rely on Stack Overflow or perusing GitHub issues to figure out how to use their product, instead of making easy-to-use products.

This reminds me of a small organic farm owner who said something to the effect of “why can’t I just trade my extra produce with the farmer down the street who has extra eggs? And then I can use the eggs to make pastries and trade those with my neighbor who makes homemade clothing?” Someone responded, “congrats, you just invented capitalism.”

Since eggs go bad and produce is heavy, maybe we could invent a durable “value storage” or “token” or “fiat” to trade instead. Storage and transmission of this value store could become useful trades in their own right.

This sounds like a very natural thing to do, almost like it would arise on its own without anyone having to _force_ this on anyone, as opposed to literally every other economic system, including your definition. In your “anarchism” how do you enforce the non-ownership of the means of production except by force? Do you force the farmer not to grow anything?

Really interesting article. I wonder if there’s any possibility of creating ultrapure water from ultrapure streams of hydrogen and oxygen - but maybe it’s harder to filter the component gases than just filtering the water itself.

I’ve been wondering if SWE pay rates have been artificially high for a while due to easy lending - it will be interesting to see if your prediction comes true. Probably a lot of SW companies out there right now are dependent on discretionary income which puts them at risk in a tough market.

Maybe there’s just a higher number of elderly there in general, from people retiring to warmer climes?

How is physical strength unimportant? Stronger people are harder to kill (h/t Rippetoe) and improved strength also helps to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome and neck/back pain for those of us at a computer all day.

Arguably a lot of pre-existing, accredited institutions are now pretty overtly not a traditional degree program (not even in say, English, or History) but a religio-political indoctrination program designed to create warriors for a particular political viewpoint of a theocratic faction…

I think most people would be better served with the original nootropics - caffeine and nicotine (smokeless of course).

The folks holding those assets didn’t have the money either though, until it was time to sell and they sold.

Yes, there can still be side-channel and out-of-band attacks in FV systems. For example, pouring water into the server rack. That’s a cheeky example, but things like timing side-channels via speculative execution and cache hits wouldn’t be addressed by FV at the software level. I think there is some ongoing research for verifying software/hardware interactions but I’m not aware of a product in widespread use that checks this.

The use of constant-time algorithms for crypto is a way to mitigate things like timing side-channels, and there are other techniques like disabling hyper-threading that can help.

The depressing fact is that side channels exist any time there’s a shared computing resource. The question is how noisy the channel is, the data rate, etc.

Granted it was 1982, before software played such a big role in everyone’s life. Maybe it would be a bigger deal now.

A lot of people take undecidability to mean “no program can be proven to terminate” when in reality it means “there exist programs which are impossible to prove termination,” and like you said most of the useful programs we write can be shown to terminate just fine.

I think the cost of provably correct software is actually much lower, but you pay more of it up front. The perceived incentives of being first to market are higher than that of quality software.

I suspect eventually there will be a big lawsuit where the blame can be laid on negligence in the software development and the incentives might change somewhat.

One thing that will help drive adoption is the ability to run SMT solvers more quickly so the proof stage of your design/build has a faster feedback loop.

I ran some experiments with the Z3 and alt-ergo solvers (verifying SPARK/Ada code using GNATprove) on a base M1 Mini and it absolutely screamed, I’m not normally a Mac fan-boy but new chips like the M1 Ultra might have the possibility of driving a mini-renaissance in FV.

I’d like to see more attention being given to GPU accelerated SMT solvers too but haven’t seen much movement outside of a handful of research papers.

In the SPARK subset of Ada, the specifications and contracts live alongside your code in the same language, then you can prove that the specs are satisfied.

You can also leave out the contracts and just prove absence of behaviors like divide by zero, out-of-bounds array access and integer overflow. Proving that code meets the specification can be really difficult but proving absence of bad behavior is usually a straightforward endeavor.

Formal verification predates Rust by decades. The addition of lifetimes and the borrow checker are worthwhile contributions to the field of provably-safe software, but there are a lot of other soundness properties that Rust doesn’t check (though people are working on it).

“Mail hacking” was a thing. I forget the name they gave it but read an article in 2600 or Phrack some time ago that talked about some of the tricks like the one you mentioned. The only other one I remember was to put a smear of Vaseline in the corner where stamps normally go. It was enough to trick the sorting machine.

This is sage advice for non-collectors too. My parents had the good sense to hold an estate sale before they downsized and moved in with a relative, they knew that it’s a massive burden to leave children with a house full of unwanted things and I’m grateful for their pragmatism. Of course the real treasures, things that have been in the family for generations, they held on to.

Most people don’t save a bunch of cash and then dump it all in the market at once, though. Continue to invest in diverse assets throughout downturns and you’ll be fine.

So don’t do that. Diversify.

I’d like to see RAD tools, WYSIWYG editors (that don’t generate awful code), one-click build/deploy without any yaml. I feel like the big cloud providers are really under-invested in this area.

It seems like another “standard” that puts an immense burden on everyone else so the big players can save .01% on their bandwidth/power costs.

It almost sounds like a carnival or arcade where you can buy tokens and gamble them to try and win tickets. I wonder if that’s a potential defense.