dasyatidprime

I don't know about the people who “know and care” being the “elite”. In my experience, attempting to act on that mostly results in being ostracized in the “person who breaks the flow by not doing things normal” bucket, à la the “crypto nut” in xkcd's “Privacy Opinions” strip: https://www.xkcd.com/1269/ (contains suggestive content).

Nick Bostrom's “Vulnerable World Hypothesis” working paper touches on some of this. https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf

One of the things that digital intermediation devours from social interactions is partial visibility (especially transitive visibility) outside the digital space (and often within it, but that's dependent on the social software and the impact is much more varied).

Glancing passively toward someone reading a book, versus watching a movie, versus chatting with someone else, all give quite different impressions. Glancing passively toward someone reading with the Kindle app, versus watching Netflix, versus chatting on WhatsApp, all on the same handset—you don't get nearly the same level of cues. And those cues help shape the social interactions around them.

Most of the other answers to this comment are at least a little bit ignoring the “… which only works if the other kids in the neighborhood haven't already tuned their habits to the popular chat app and won't bother dealing with the weird kid who uses anything else” part. Which is in turn its own mirror of the adult world…

Keep in mind that the accounts are user-submitted and thus reflect the perspectives of the individual authors; the way you've put this sounds to me like it implies a site-wide perspective.

Maybe this isn't quite the perspective the article's taking—but damn near no one visibly wept for LXC when Docker stomped all over it in terms of “what people think containers just Are”. And now the news asks why I don't weep for them? Live by the stomp, die by the stomp.

It's already blurry; humans are already used to using chunks of the environment as parts of their state of mind. I have personal experience with this: as I've been dragged from my previous highly-customized Linux desktop into a more software-conformity-centric world, it's had pretty distinctly constraining effects on the way I'm able to use my mind, making various forms of easy external fluidity close to impossible. I've tried to fight against it, but the environment evolves so that people expect you to have the executive function of all their devices combined, and the only way that you're allowed to is by having either the same or similar devices or orders of magnitude more resources.

Toddlers are, today, growing up with iPads, YouTube, and Alexa/Siri as just a natural part of the world. As far as I've observed—admittedly not much—educators and parents are far behind, I would speculate both because grasping the indirection-of-agency that this sort of technology creates is a heavy abstract task of the kind that doesn't seem to filter through those parts of civilization well and because the technology has the ability to change too quickly to counter any attempts to pin it down. And pinning it down in too static a fashion could have its own horrible effects.

“FOSS” in the original sense is largely a distraction here (even though it is still an important idea), given that we've wound up in the “programming is specialized” world. The dynamic characteristics involve how agency flows through systems, and in the presence of highly distributed and often SaaSS (Service as a Software Substitute, as the FSF describes it) systems, being able to alter the source code isn't a solid defense even at “skilled programmer” speeds: going against a rushing current just means you get torn apart as soon as you touch the world. I think we need a new word for what you probably meant but which I don't know how to articulate well.

At the risk of overexposure, there were also some strange claims made in 2009 whose source seems to have vanished but which I recall being based on a different machine ambigram generator, resulting in Cerulean responding with this 7×7 half-turn rotational ambigram grid (where transposing the matrix flips the images, so that there's 28 distinct images presented in 49 cells): https://ceruleanst.livejournal.com/177992.html?nojs=1

The extra digit names flow well, but I think shoehorning it into the same constructions English decimal numbers use doesn't, mostly because the “-ty”/“-teen” suffixes are too tied both etymologically and phonetically to being “ten”. If I say the word “eighteen”, making it 0x18 in one context and XVIII in another is close in plausible applicability and far in exact meaning, which is about the worst case for avoiding misunderstandings. In fact I have a vague recollection of my computer architecture instructor back in undergrad warning us about exactly that regarding hexadecimal numbers: do not ever be tempted to pronounce them as though they were decimal, even if all the digits fit into the pattern.

There might be ways to fix that with variants of those suffixes, though my first thought of “-xy”/“-xeen” might be too hard to distinguish in a noisy auditory environment.

Thus “know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em”.

Which still isn't good to use as an excuse for fatalism, of course. “Knowing when” may be superficially similar to giving up out of raw emotional weakness, but it's not the same underneath at all.

It's usually meaning 2, but “success” as applied to life can refer by contextual metonymy to success in any number of areas of life, so securing a good position in a corporation can be considered a particular form of success. Career-oriented advice shows up a lot on HN, in which career-focused successes are likely to come up as central examples of the idea of life success, even though they aren't necessarily a representative class of all successes.

If that worked enough of the time, articles like the OP wouldn't get written much. Emotionally speaking, giving up is actually a pretty sticky idea! The potential for putting a pile of effort in, finding it wasn't really enough, and being confronted afterward with all the things you did wrong with no chance to correct them now is paralyzing; it's “safer” in a way to not try, never know, and only experience the one, easily-dampened gnawing failure of having wandered off the path, rather than having a hundred different failures confirmed through hard work and inadequacy. I think a lot of people experience this in at least some areas of life, and it's a big source of deciding to lowball, or of blaming the environment (which isn't always factually false, but I'm referring to the emotional interpretation) or making various rationalizations surrounding “talent” or whatnot.

So cognitively I know that's a common problem with an obvious answer, but it doesn't mean I can just skip to the end without convincing the rest of me.

Okay, sure, but: many physical attributes, social perceptions, and pervasive mental habits probably do become increasingly solidified, even if fatalism about it is counterproductive. Sure, there's plenty of late bloomers, but how many of them do you get from a broken late starting point, and how many do you get from people who worked slowly and methodically and did the right slow things earlier on, taking care of their minds, bodies, social connections, growing their resources, gaining experiences, broadening and/or fine-tuning their abilities, and so on? Do fit/rich/popular/etc. 35-year-olds regularly get there from a truly broken (including internally!) state at 31, or is it more that they actually took all the advice about regular exercise/investing/graciousness/etc. back when they were 25, kept taking it, and maybe despaired in the moment about it not seeming to work while actually stacking up tons of invisible long-term bonuses?

I'm trying to come off about a decade of poor habits myself, due to a number of factors which are undoubtedly my responsibility but which it's not clear whether I could have realistically avoided. I've had some minor successes but have never really stabilized so far, including in all the little things like the above. I don't usually see this case handled clearly in the “it's okay to be a late bloomer!” inspiration crowd. (More personally, it doesn't help that the things I most want to do in life probably require being exceptional in specific ways that I'm not sure I can predict in advance and not just “successful” in a generic sort of way, and beyond a certain limited extent, I don't consider the wanting-what-I-have approach to be a viable one (except insofar as having that attitude on the face of things may make it more likely to reach my original desires anyway).)

I'm trying to convince myself to try anyway and it's hellishly difficult.

See also module music. MIDI + SoundFonts would be a reasonable idea for music and sound effects, but it wouldn't be suitable for voice.

Something like Vocaloid parameters would be interesting, but the synthesis engine is probably pretty intensive.

(To be clear, I think this is an idea that's fun to think about as a novelty but probably a dead end otherwise.)

Now, what happens when, say, memories of conversations turn into pointers to chat logs that are stored on the central server, where they can be modified, deleted, or your access taken away by the service or nowadays often by the other party?

From what I keep hearing from other people transitioning between language contexts, that second sentence is what seems to make this the most asymmetrical—put another way, the environment refuses to immerse you as an adult in the same way a child would learn. You won't get the same inputs, you won't get the same idioms; you might get more of a sanitized or limited version.

This is something that I think happens not just with language, but with other traits—personality, skills, etc. A lot of these things can be more mutable than “expected” purely based on what a “self” can withstand, but the expectation itself causes friction and inertia from both directions: the person has to adjust their self-expectations, but also the social environment has to add energy and information to make those changes happen in a way that's integrated with the world. For anything that isn't adequately compartmentalized, sometimes there is no effective framework available; if the people around you already think they know you, either by broad categorization or by previous experience, you have an uphill battle. Children are more socially recognized as mutable, so both adults and child peers are more likely to put in the energy, and they're also placed in roles where experimentation is safe.

Well, / is path traversal; I think + would be too easily conflated with the “similar but importantly different” string concatenation, especially since « + "/" + » is an idiom in string-based path manipulation. For instance:

  p1 = "/a/b/c"
  x = "d"
  p1 + "/" + x == "/a/b/c/d"
  p2 = Path("/a/b/c")
  # If + replaced / for Path:
  p2 + "/" + x == Path("/d")

Now if you've just reflexively written the concatenation the way you did before, the type signatures match up but the result is completely wrong. The current situation where / doesn't exist for strings and + doesn't exist for Paths is much safer versus that.

I still run a pretty basic ejabberd on Fedora. I've heard better things about Prosody, nowadays. (A while back I didn't transition to it due to some incompleteness in IPv6 support, but I'm told that that has since been fixed.)

As for refinements, the use case I imagine is when you need to be defining a method that dispatches on the type of objects that are not “yours”, especially where that dispatch plausibly needs to be extended with more types by other code. (If it doesn't need to dispatch on type, you can just define a function in a module and be done; if the dispatch never needs to be extended, you can kinda do the same thing, but it's much uglier.) Serialization is the most common case where I've run into this, where objects of different types need to be serialized differently; indeed the https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/projects/ruby-trunk/wiki/Refineme... gives “ToJSON” as an example refinement.

A different way of handling this exists in CLOS: methods are defined on generic functions, which are are namespaced in packages just like class names are, but importantly, the class package and the generic package have no pervasive special relationship: a class doesn't “own” methods. So I can defgeneric extravagant-imperial-licentiousness:freeze and then define methods for it on all sorts of types, and it won't clash with someone else's jawbreakingly-simplistic-obdurate-numbness:freeze method. A consumer of either or both methods can choose to import one of the symbols and/or refer to either or both of them by their full names.

In Ruby, I've observed two “traditional” ways to do this: (1) add an ugly decoration to the method name which can never be elided (which is what I did in some internal projects, and then I added a prettier module function for external consumption that just trampolined to that method); or, seemingly more commonly and much worse, (2) ignore collisions, define whatever name you like on whichever classes you like, assume that you have dominion over your favorite short name and/or that the semantics are “obvious” and universal and that no one will ever load a library that does it some other way on top of yours and thereby break all the code depending on your version, and thereby, when that sometimes happens, land the hapless integrator in the dreaded “monkey patch hell”.

Refinements supposedly provide a better way to evade (2). I didn't get to play with them enough to be sure that they do, and in particular ISTR this might not actually let you have a fresh method name which can also be extended elsewhere without requiring all consumers of the method name to be aware of all the extension refinements, which if so seems like a disaster for serious use. I feel like there's a better mechanism for this hiding somewhere in Ruby design-space, but I don't know what it is.

Regarding the @ positional-argument syntax: I mean, my use of Ruby dropped considerably years ago, but from a Ruby-philosophy standpoint it looks fantastic to me. Having to constantly make up (usually single-character anyway) names for those parameters in map/filter chains was one of the ugliest parts of the language, especially when there was no actually-good name for things like temporary tuples, and the Smalltalk-derived (I think) syntax for block parameters is so visually heavyweight: { |…| … } { |…| … } { |…| … } where all the stuff in the || is close to useless, as opposed to just { … } { … } { … }. Method references passed with &, while separately useful, are not a good substitute; they're often less readable (to me) because the form of the expression is obscured, and they break down much faster, for instance as soon as you need any single other argument, rather than just when the block gets complex enough that the parameter names become important for readability.

I can appreciate that it moves farther away from “requiring things to be explicit means you get fewer accidental barriers to moving code around or increasing/decreasing complexity”, though, as some of my recent work has been in Java and I've had an eye for that aspect of it. But the next time I do anything in Ruby I'll be remembering that this is there.

> It's almost as if unpopularity is the root cause.

It kind of is. What determines which things people are excited to learn? What determines which things people will feel safe doing? What determines which things get you in, and which get you sidelined?

Creating knowledge that can be used in practice in a non-enclave environment, and creating common knowledge, overlap a lot. “Make this maintainable” = “Make this something people can adequately be assumed to know how to maintain” = “Don't do anything weird”—thus the focus on keeping code idiomatic. So it's not really about absolute power; it's about relative power. If you can establish a cultural boundary, and then set up a pipeline of enough people dealing with a higher-power language, it seems possible to make that work, but that's a social undertaking that easily falls apart to things like “people will call you elitist for separating yourself and doing anything that might imply the others are inferior” (this visibly happens to Lispers) and “your code gains more from talking to other code easily than it does from being powerful in itself, so you need a lot of knowledge surface area, where people who use your environment are widely distributed in what else they know”. Notably, though, enclaves of Lisp and OCaml do exist in industry where there's some amount of big projects that have a limited surface area and they can make use of the higher power. I've heard similarly for Haskell. And academia seems to practically be a supercluster for higher-power language use.

I get the impression that one of the big ways Java and C#¹ are gradually steering the big ships into higher-power water is by having backing organizations who can introduce a new “fancy” feature, document it extensively, watch how the great masses of programmers in that language actually use it, push for them to learn it, and then wait before adding the next feature, so that the delta between highest and lowest power feels more socially safe; no one is ever far enough from the crowd to become a problem, but the rallying banner can still move it gradually. The slowness is widely detested among programmers who want to jump to the higher power level now and know that there isn't necessarily a technical reason not to, but it's a feature for social cohesion. It also provides a convenient binding for transmitting this information for teamwork purposes: “we're using Java 8” implies a whole set of things about expectations in a way that “we're using Common Lisp” by itself doesn't.

¹ Apparently I can't write the sharp sign here.

Please don't do this.

You've gone from “implying that an attitude is out of the acceptable/plausible range” to “implying that the visible counterexample doesn't understand why anyone else might hold a different one” in the span of three posts.

I can imagine several reasons why this might be a hot-button topic for you, especially given what you've just said, but I am not putting my nature up for attack here. If you expect me to have a generalized disregard for or incomprehension of people who don't share my tendencies, I don't think it's true, though I don't expect you to believe me. If you feel like my attitude or existence is a shock or an affront, I'm sorry. If you resent feeling stuck with the institutions that surround you because they're not serving you well, I'm sorry. I would ask that you not extrapolate my personal attitudes about alcohol and speed limits to assuming that I follow social institutions “unquestioningly”, if that's what you were doing, and especially that you not extrapolate it to much wider and deeper issues.

This will be my last comment on this topic.

Currently, I don't drive, so I have no empirical answer.

Some people who know me have joked that I would hate learning to drive (here in the US) because of the issue where most drivers break the speed limit most of the time and expect others to do the same. I think I could get used to it or find a way to deal with it, but it's possible it would stress me out for a while at the beginning.

As I sorta-mentioned, I'm not sure my original level of tendency to follow the rules is actually adaptive here. The point was more the existence proof. And between cultures it may vary even more widely than this.

It was primarily the former. Had I been in a jurisdiction where it was legal, it seems very possible I would have tried some of the alcoholic drinks—of course I don't know this for sure, because that's not what happened. I didn't have a strong desire for it at the time, so it's not an ideal test case, but neither is it an isolated case; other situations with age-restricted materials or activities went very similarly.

(I'm eliding and slightly distorting a lot of surrounding details both because my memory of the time is often fuzzy and because I don't feel inclined to detail too much of my ancient personal life here. The central points, however, I'm clear on.)

It might be worth adding, to circle back toward the original topic, that while I notice that this isn't “normal” in much of the US (where I live), people around me have wondered whether I got this tendency from somewhere else. (In fact, I had one (non-Japanese) Asian immigrant parent, and while that one was quite chaotic about following the local laws, it's possible that more indirect connections had strong subtle influences.) Some societies are much more regimented and/or conformist, and Japan is frequently described as both (not that I would know what bearing it has on these specific questions). The “natural pattern of rule breaks” is not universal, neither in cultures where it's nearly-expected, nor between cultures.

Yes.

Me.

Plus various other, similar situations.

(I am in complete honesty unsure whether to regret it.)

I know you mean well, and I'm glad this exists and that you reminded me of it (I now remember having seen it before), but this isn't enough to invalidate my point. The installation instructions are… barely okay. AUR… okay, I guess. What would people on Debian-based platforms, like the very popular Ubuntu, do? Compile from source?

Let's see what the README says: “I know this is a bit clunky, but using the command interface for interactions makes the plugin usable in clients that do not have a GUI.”

So now I get to explain this to the other people I was using Pidgin+OTR with too, right? (Also I get to have to remember what the commands are, because I won't be using them frequently.)

I mean, this can also be phrased as one of the disadvantages of being part of the earlier installed base, but on a wider scale, buildup of legacy resistance is one of the things that you wind up having to overcome if you want to introduce new features that aren't strictly optional—which is kind of why we still don't really have secure email that doesn't take massive cognitive overhead in “remembering which things people are using” and massive social overhead in negotiating about it and being prepared for all sorts of responses.

(Added:) And to make sure I'm not accidentally taking this into the weeds, the incompatibility was introduced AFAIK when Conversations dropped OTR. That means any Pidgin clusters suddenly take on a big UI and polish downgrade for their E2E if they want to stay interoperable. I'm not meaning to criticize this specific plugin so much as to point out that there wasn't enough overall coordination between seemingly-major clients to stop this from happening.

E2E hasn't come gracefully to me yet, because my Pidgin still only has OTR support, and so does the one one of my primary Jabber contacts uses, except Conversations has now dropped it in favor of going all-OMEMO. My current answer is to ignore the mobile case like I did most of the time before, but that's not a good answer.

I guess maybe I need to switch to Gajim, but this sure isn't frictionless, mostly due to the lag-induced fragmentation.

But what is “high quality software”, if we look at it from a perspective of user expectation? There are a lot of things users expect now that are not just a function of the software itself. And how do you organize the people to produce the software? I think the volunteer model that powered a lot of the IRC and Jabber era you mentioned is both decaying and under attack in terms of viability for mainstream end-users.

One psychological element is that I suspect the “service = client = identity = interaction model” meta-model of mental compartmentalization has been embedded firmly into mainstream end-user consciousness, because it's easy to understand and provides strong environmental cues. This is both encouraged and to some degree enforced by the “Does It Work On Mobile” situation, which implies dealing with Google or Apple app stores. Notification handling seems particularly awful, because it usually means going through an app-specific developer account which is required to be responsible for a forwarding server, which then becomes both a recurring financial expense and a centralized point of attack, and so on.

OS-level, user-level, and security-apocalypse-related requirements for fast-paced updates destroy anyone following the “make something acceptable and then leave it be for a while” development model, which drives the effective cost and need for commitment way up. In the dominant IRC/Jabber era, clients could have code that didn't get touched for a long time, which is much more amenable to a volunteer model.

Non-volunteer libre software models run into all the usual market and funding problems, but both they and volunteer models also run into the problem of being exploitable via the newest iterations of embrace-extend-extinguish, which I guess I'd call copy-customize-clobber. Marketing departments are both ethically Interesting and a massive money sink. Taking money at all at least used to involve huge logistical concerns (which themselves have centralizing effects), though some of this has become easier.

The pricing gradient is abysmal. Much like how the iOS App Store has had its pricing driven to rock-bottom by price anchoring on “things that got added onto your phone bill” even though the new crop of apps was full-fledged polished packages that cost much more to make, the anchoring expectation for keeping a new service running (and its client maintained, and so forth) has been driven to “free” by VC-backed data-driven operations providing a very strong distorted market signal to that effect (I say “distorted” under the assumption that users don't realize the full scope of the mass surveillance and control that is possible with digital socialization and aren't taking it into account, but in either case it hurts the open options).

A lot of the polishing of end-user-facing software involves slogs, and some of them involve money-draining and executive-function-draining slogs. “This doesn't work on Android device Foo” is something that is very hard to fix without having a Foo on your desk. Users, frankly, can also be quite ungrateful in an open-source development context (keeping in mind that whether this reflects badly on them is a separate question, given the amount of hidden psychological distance involved and the social context of other unfortunate power exchanges that they're pushed into by digital technology). In a corporate context this is mitigated by social barriers and financial compensation, but avoiding maintainer burnout in more idealistic contexts seems to be an unsolved problem, and my observations suggest that it's true even when there's a crowdfunding model, because now if you make any mob-justice-able missteps, a bunch of your money immediately goes away. (Arguably this should be true for the big closed networks too, but it isn't, so you're still at a disadvantage.)

Non-text telecommunications sometimes involves esoteric skills. There's been motion to improve things (for instance, the rise of Xiphophorus audio codecs (Vorbis, Opus, etc.)), but there's still things like echo cancellation and noise reduction which can get arcane and maybe run into patent minefields (I haven't checked recently). My Discord calls don't have anywhere near the level of background noise that my Signal ones do.

I've weakly observed a strain of resistance to acknowledging or prying into uncomfortable models of human psychology among open-source developers, who tend to lean systematizing and abstracting… I don't have a good perspective on that one right now, but I guess I'd say the “we need to be friendlier to Normal People” departments seem to default toward “normal people like flashy websites” and away from (I'd approximate) “normal people like not having to keep cognitive context or be put in situations where they might be embarrassed or have to be responsible for something awkward”. The latter is a much, much harder set of problems, even if you ignore the ones that are inherent to network effects and seemingly have to be bypassed by luck. Then again, proprietary services sometimes mistreat their users in these ways and don't necessarily get exoduses, so maybe network effects just completely dominate here; I don't know.

(I guess a secondary problem is that an emotional understanding of the mechanics of fashion is rare in conjunction with the technical skills to close gaps like this, because they involve such vastly different approaches to the world. And that leads into a whole potential digression on whether human fashion cycles are even amenable to creating a world in which people can generally live without relying on abusive services for their social lives, without strong common-knowledge agreement to avoid them.)

I'd love to hear better ideas for tackling any of this. (And sorry for the core dump!)

When aunt Martha and uncle Martin weren't using the free and open system, but also weren't using computers to talk to people regularly, the social pressure, if you wanted to stay in touch with them, was toward more physical means: in-person visits, mail, and telephones, which, while definitely technological in nature, have more physicality than the currently-dominant digital world.

People have more of an instinctive understanding of what “open” means in terms of the physical world. You don't meet them at Facebook Square, where every word you say to them goes through corporate-controlled smart air; you might meet them at their house, or at some public or commercial place, and when you're in public, you're both being continously reminded of this through physical environmental cues. The mail is often a monopoly, but its function is circumscribed, and opening your envelopes without a really good reason is at least a clear violation of social norms; the physical object provides a boundary. Telephones don't usually manipulate the context of what you say during calls, and while the mass surveillance issue is hazier there, the basic model of social expectation is still simple. (The simplicity of model applies to a lesser extent to IM, but telephones currently have universal interop in a way that got shattered for e.g. XMPP by a whole storm of issues, and the subscription funding model for the infrastructure has social acceptance that it doesn't in the IM world. I don't have a short history of why this is right now.)

Nowadays, it's likely that the social pressure is for you to actively use the closed system, because that's what your aunt and uncle have reoriented their habits toward after finding that it felt so much more convenient and took so much pressure off them. Which is arguably one of the good effects—though other people have written uneasily about how this is in a way the outsourcing of emotional labor to machines. But because digital social networking is intermediated so much more deeply than earlier and simpler forms of telecommunication, whoever controls the software now has hard influence over the form those habits take, and your aunt and uncle's need to not have a big chunk of their social life disrupted, combined with the relative non-manipulability of the digital world to people who don't fall into the “programmers with a lot of free time who are willing and able to flout TOSes and/or evade detection” class, means they can't easily resist it. The resultant inertia is very asymmetrical in a way that I don't think it was for previous means of socialization. It's also fast in a way that it wasn't before: governments can crack down on things in oppressive ways or manipulate and infiltrate people's social networks, but it's harder to do en masse, and the actions in question have to be more visible to have an effect, so grassroots opposition has more margin to get started. Nowadays, I see people saying that they feel like planning their activism on Facebook is the only way to get any reach.

Then you get how a lot of people's working understanding of computer technology is based on a fuzzy notion of “computers” and “the Internet” which mushes everything together, so whatever decides which models of interaction are fashionable can force you to follow them or be in the dreaded “inaccessible to users because of lack of familiarity” weak position, which just gets reduced to “not easy to use”, and then you die. Compare how Mastodon is basically a Twitter clone on many levels, and that's seemingly what wound up taking off among less distinctly-in-the-know users in the ActivityPub sphere, and even then merely introducing the idea of “instances” seems to have taken a lot of social doing.

So I think we are in a worse position than we used to be, both because getting traction on “move from physical world to open, benevolent digital” is harder than “move from closed, manipulative digital to open, benevolent digital” and because the closed, manipulative digital now has a lot more ways to close off the terrain before you can get anywhere.

… I seriously need to compose my thoughts on this into something more coherent and well-researched at some point.

Is it easier to spell “bureau” itself correctly? If so, you might be able to use that as a mnemonic. You can also take the “-cracy” part from other words like “democracy”.