1,077 karma · joined April 1, 2018
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18256660
For me the breakthrough was when I realized that the colors I think I see in the world are all lies. Try this: look at something near you that's a uniform color. Looks like one color, right? Wrong! Light hits the object, and bounces off in a million different ways depending on physics. Your brain interprets these light rays as a single composite color for each object, but it's not the physical truth - it's just a simplification to deal with overwhelming detail. If you want proof of this, just look at what a digital camera sees. Pixels that the brain would consider the same color... aren't.
A big part of the artist's journey, perhaps the main part, is in developing the ability to break through the brain's natural conceptual abstraction layer and see the world much closer to the sensory raw data that normally goes unnoticed. Ironically, the better an artist manages to reproduce these low-level details, the more their work will seem obvious and like something anyone could do!
It would be even better if something like this could be integrated directly into the package management tool itself, so that you could run `npm update` and get back "New dangerous API usage in package X version a.b.c: filesystem access. Type package name to acknowledge and upgrade."
For example, money in itself won't make you a famous actor, an award-winning musician, a bestselling author, a renowned artist, or an Olympian. But it will open the path to such goals by giving you leisure time to pursue them without worrying about pure survival.
More directly, it's extremely easy to transmute money into status via vacations, ownership of desirable real estate, expensive cars, etc. I would submit that it's generally not the money being coveted here, but the lifestyle it allows.
Physically speaking, we generally have either:
1. a "push" button, which activates when you press it down fully, or
2. a "hold" button, which activates continuously when you hold it down.
In either case, the "action" occurs at the instant you press the button down, and perhaps continues until you let go.
But the standard HTML button works differently, and from a physical perspective, quite weirdly: when you press it, it only gets "cocked", and when you release it, it activates. That's why its state representation feels complex and unintuitive!
Rather than the behavior of a "push" or "hold" button, the standard HTML button behavior is more like extracting an SD card: you press the card in and then release it to get it out.
(I'm sure there are physical buttons out there somewhere that activate on release. And you can also make a great model of a "push" or "hold" button with custom JS. But I think it's fair to say that the default HTML button doesn't work like real-world experience would lead anyone to expect.)
Some viewers might see this industrial aesthetic as just eye candy (and in the Rebuilds, it mostly is), but I actually think it's at the core of what makes the original series great. The most memorable part of the series, the fragility, anxiety, and despair of its characters, doesn't land nearly as hard without a foil to contrast against. This is provided by the aforementioned machines-as-characters, not just because they reliably perform their basic duties, but also because they're physical evidence of what other humans could accomplish, people who weren't consumed by doubt, fear, and mistrust. We're constantly seeing juxtapositions between frail man and stable machine, whether it's the elevator patiently clicking through floors while someone inside seethes, the telephoned voice that falls upon would-be-closed ears, or the commuter train being used not to go places, but rather to avoid all places entirely. (And that's just at the surface level --- the broader plot, of course, goes much further and deeper into these themes.) It's only because the industrial aesthetic is so heightened in Eva that the opposing human-fragility aesthetic can reach as low as it does.
The typewriter is the most unforgiving writing device known to man. There is no erasing, like on the computer. You can't just try out sentences willy-nilly and Backspace your way to something decent. When you inevitably make a mistake, a typo, or a bad turn of phrase, it's there, and even if you type something else over it, it'll always be there.
Paper has dimensions, which means paper has edges. Edges which your typewriter is happy to ignore until the moment when, looking up from your small black sailboat, you find them looming over you like the god-damn Cliffs of Dover. On the computer, whenever you find yourself playing margin chicken, your words get automatically teleported to safety. The machine does it every single time, magically, perfectly, trivially. Not so, with the typewriter. If you fail to ensure that the last word on a line really and truly fits there, or if you discover, too late, that a line break would've been real nice about two words in the past, well, there ain't no magic coming to kiss it all better. The responsibility, and the blame, is all on you.
What about the pen or pencil? You've got edges there too, and even worse, you have to draw all the letters using your knobbly, callused old fingers. You might think that writing with pen or pencil is primitive, repetitive, and exhausting, which is all true---but it also represents a form of writing that's nearly entirely free from constraints. It's so easy to write in whatever size letters you want. Whatever font. Whatever spacing. Even whatever color. Switch it up, or around, or back, according to your whims, your audience, or just the time of day. Draw diagrams. Make notes. Sign names. Use cursive, drop caps, small caps, big caps, triple underlines, and weird foreign accents. Anything you can imagine, dude. You're free.
In this day and age, anyone who writes on a typewriter is taking a stand. They're saying: Shackle me. I want to hear the chains clatter and feel the metal bite. I want to think, think, think about my words, and then I want to stamp them onto dead trees for the rest of living memory. I want to remember the old rituals, and commune with the ghosts of the past, and the present. I want to call back the remnants of the Golden Age and I want to hold them in my hands for just a moment. I want to do the hard thing, because it is hard, because I am hard.
There are hundreds of specialized pieces of equipment on a film set and a gun is just one of them. It's not anyone's job but the person responsible for that category of equipment to ensure safety. Here, that would be the armorer, who appears to be have gotten her job through family connections and is clearly a mortal danger to herself and others.
But the buck doesn't stop there. This wasn't even the first misfire on this particular set. A few days prior, when two rounds were negligently discharged, anyone responsible for weapons should have been immediately fired. This didn't happen, showing that the gun safety issues were not only the armorer's fault, but also a symptom of irresponsible and dangerous management at the higher levels of the production.
As a matter of fact, according to the article, the movie's managing team routinely cut corners on the filming environment, forcing crews to commute 100 miles round trip for 12 hour work days, delaying paychecks, and bringing in scabs to keep shooting (both cameras and guns, apparently) when a half dozen crewmembers walked off set to protest working conditions.
Underlying all of this, and at least partly to blame, is the hard truth that every dollar spent to make the set safer for the crew is a dollar that won't be going into the pockets of the people backing the film. Notably, one of the financiers for this movie is BondIt Media Capital, which specializes in lending to troubled or otherwise high-risk productions, and surely expects to be repaid commensurate with that risk.
So in the end, would gun safety have prevented this tragedy? Yes. But the gun was just the weakest link in a chain that was "Rust"ed through from the start.
This bears repeating. When you automate a task, you often push it over a "breakpoint" where it suddenly makes certain things profitable in terms of effort. For example, say you fill up a water bottle and place it within arm's reach, instead of running to the tap every time you're thirsty. You save maybe 10 seconds per sip, but the real win is that you can now consider behaviors like "drink water every 5 minutes" that previously you would have considered too much effort.
1. Shinkansen trains are run on an extremely tight timetable (often 5 minutes or less between trains). It takes twice as long to load or unload a double-decker car, so this presents a significant risk for schedulers.
2. One of the key benefits of double-decker cars is that they save space by cramming two cars worth of passengers into a one-car footprint. This allows significant passenger service in and out of small stations with short platforms. But Shinkansen platforms are not hurting for space (nearly all of their usage is single-decker trains, sometimes quite long ones), so this benefit isn't worth much in practice.
Everyone takes for granted how smooth their own workflow is to them, both because they're already used to it, and because they sunk effort into it to make it smooth (via learning or planning), which has probably been forgotten. So, people just take for granted that new features will maintain that acquired smoothness --- unfortunately, they usually don't.
As the author found out, most of the work in building features is often not in the "raw functionality" of the feature, but rather in making something that performs its functions while also not costing the user significant extra mental or physical effort to use.
This is hard, and rare, because it requires predicting how all sorts of different people are going to interact with the community. Traditionally, this hasn't been something that the people who start software companies are particularly interested in, or good at. And a laser focus on user growth only compounds the problem.
Hard deadlines are a really underappreciated factor in JIT supply chain issues. When deadlines are softer, time itself can act as a buffer to smooth out the supply chain --- e.g. if the latest iPhone needs an extra month to finish production, that's not the end of the world. But with stricter deadlines like planting, you don't have the same release valve for supplier pressures. When your Just-In-Time becomes Just-Outta-Time, you've got to scrounge up the necessary inputs ASAP, and that sends price spikes reverberating throughout the system, or worse, cascading downstream failures in the event that you're unable to find enough inputs for what you're already in the process of producing.
As users, we all pay for upload bandwidth, and 99% of the time it's sitting there idly and providing literally no value to us or anyone else. That's because gosh darn it, we paid for it, so there's no way we're gonna let anyone else us it!
But, if we stop thinking in binary terms of "my property" or "your property", and open our minds for a minute, what's so bad, really, about each of us donating a few resources to make the shared Internet run faster for everyone? If everyone does the same, we're all better off, and no one is worse off since the bandwidth was just going to waste anyway. Furthermore, the storage needed is already in use, storing the exact same content, just for your own exclusive use instead of everyone's, and the additional CPU cycles needed are surely much fewer than it takes to run the worthless ads your browser downloads everyday.
I think of it as sort of the same logic as vaccination, where we ask people to pay a small private cost in a way that produces outsized benefits for society as a whole. In particular, each person gets an individual benefit much larger than the cost of the private resources they paid.
Now, if the private resources aren't practically free like bandwidth or ROM, but actually expensive like capped data or mobile phone battery life, the ethical logic starts to get a bit murkier. However, I think it's definitely possible to build an effective peer-to-peer CDN without needing to touch those kind of scarce resources.
The other reservation I have about this sort of project is that you really need to be able to trust the people running it to not abuse their control of the network (which really just means: other peoples' computers). That's, in my view, a much thornier issue than anything relating to the consumer end of the network.
Let's hope the team will be able to successfully tackle both the technical and the human problems of a P2P CDN, and help push the Internet towards a more communal, sharing paradigm. Best of luck to them.
And sure, everyone has different priorities, and may not understand the urgency of tasks in the same way. And it's only human to want to promise to do things for other people, and therefore make them happy. But promises by themselves aren't enough to get work done: when I'm in the workplace, I don't want wishes and happy thoughts, I want people to deliver. If someone tells me to hold off on doing a one-day project, because they're going to do it for me, and rest assured, it's on the roadmap, even though we won't tell you when we're going to do it, because quite probably, the answer will be something like "never, as long as we have more fun things to do" --- well then, at the very least I expect to be told as much, so I can avoid throwing my project into that particular black hole. If they can't, or won't, communicate realistic priorities and deadlines, then they might be great to eat lunch with, but I definitely don't want to work with them on a project.
Office jobs, in my opinion, tend to play host to microcultures which value politeness, sympathy, and relationship building so highly that these virtues start to displace and eclipse the honesty that is the cornerstone of serious, professional work. I come across this theme over and over in these kind of "story-rants", a theme that in the telling can come off as rudeness or abrasiveness on the author's behalf. Those who are keen to interpret it as such, should keep in mind that this says as much about them, and their own opinionated view of how the workplace should operate, as it does the authors of those stories.
Those who do have pricing influence are riding the wave for short-term gains (e.g. M&A), or washing their hands of the whole mess and leaving it for someone else to clean up (e.g. becoming NZ citizens).
But when the "wrong" people benefit from that connection, they find themselves swiftly cut off.
Now, I'm not saying it's wrong to cut people out of the network. (As we've seen quite recently in the US, deplatforming is quite effective at reducing the spread of extremism.)
But I think this particular incident demonstrates that there's an inherent paradox in trying to "grow the network" while also attempting to keep out "bad actors", one that can't be resolved entirely through automated tools, or simple sets of binary rules.
Situations like this one are always going to be a judgement call, where a real person has to decide who's right, and who's left (out). And I think the prospect of having that duty, of taking on the responsibility of judgement, scares Big Tech's executives more than anything else.
- from Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2676263
And 2 years later: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6817095
If I sell lots of identical goods, it's totally clear what the law is entitling prospective customers to buy. But if I make and sell creative works, I'm naturally making something different for each client. How could anyone decide whether the work I do on one project is "equivalent" to the work done on another, or if a completed workpiece is up to my "usual standard", or even whether I put in "the same amount of effort" for this client as I did for a different client, when by definition each project is one-of-a-kind?
It's not a perfect analogy, but you can imagine the US government as a factory that slowly churns out "Benefit Programs", and in the process emits a large amount of pollution onto nearby homes.
This factory could invest in polluting less, but that would cost money, and would require it to increase the price of the product. And it so happens that the factory's customers are very price conscious! The customers are willing to accept a lot of pollution, because their goal is primarily to go back to their bosses and say "Look how cheaply I got all these Benefit Programs!"
None of the participants in the production or buying processes have much incentive for the factory to clean up its act, so accordingly it keeps spewing out pollution onto people who, even if they hate it, can't really do anything to stop it (besides moving away from their homes).
One possible tactic for resolving these negative externalities is to give the factory owners and customers skin in the game by making them live right next to the factory. In real world terms, this would be something like requiring lawmakers to live entirely off of government benefits, instead of any other income or wealth they possess.
Another possible tactic is establishment of a universal basic income, which (in theory) could replace every other welfare program and thereby remove a lot of potential for time pollution.
TL;DR: The incentives for US government administered benefits are all in favor of shifting work away from the government and onto individual citizens, as a way of saving money.
But the "official" (as you say) transliterations of world languages enjoy wide usage not because they're necessarily the best anyone could come up with --- rather, they just represented the right local maxima at the right time in history.
Displacing those romanization systems with better ones (assuming those exist) would be an uphill battle lasting decades, and I wager there aren't many people who would find that struggle worth the effort.