dunkelheit

I acknowledge the difference, but it is quantitative, not qualitative.

> We dont apply similar standards to blogs nor videos nor art - them being crappy is not "taking away our attention resource".

That's because the attention cost was driven way down by awesome information retrieval systems that we have (google, etc.). But the cost is still there and it is a good idea to compare it against benefits. Again, this doesn't mean that you should not publish anything.

> Publishing them is not using someone elses attention.

If you publish anything, you expect it to be found by someone (otherwise, why publish at all?). Voila, you've used their attention.

> And I dont go around hating on eHow. I do expect google to put them down in ranking over time and I do structure my queries so that I dont hit them.

This just corroborates my point that the cost is real. In this case the cost is paid by google (they have to expend resources to fight SEO spam) and you (you have to reformulate your queries).

> Also, small one time open source project is not tweaking SEO like content farms. That comparison does not work either.

I'm afraid without concrete examples we are talking past each other. Of course a small-time project that is clearly marked as such is totally OK, but the original post by saurik mentioned squatting common names and overpromising on features, which is definitely into the SEO territory.

> American Voters barely understand the difference between the popular vote and the electoral college -- to ask them to view the results of QV votes as fair and legitimate would be a bridge too far.

It is not like simpler voting methods are without subtleties (and I certainly wouldn't call electoral college simple!), but these subtleties are well-known and everybody is kind of accustomed to them. Again, immediately abandoning ordinary voting and switching to QV on the level of countries would be stupid, but I don't think they are advocating that.

> Hell, I know a fair bit of math and CS, and I would feel uncomfortable quickly deciding how to divide my votes across issues, let alone advising other people on what to do.

This can probably be less of a problem with sufficiently good UI. Imagine that you can play with some sliders and immediately see the consequences of your actions. After some fiddling you will probably get pretty close to what you want. Some friction can even be beneficial, encouraging people to be more thoughtful about issues. There was a study (link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2755844) where they used QV in opinion polls and were able to get more information about relative preferences of participants because they were forced to think about correctly allocating their credits instead of blindly answering "strongly agree"/"strongly disagree" even if they didn't really care about a particular issue.

Most of the time yes, but it is not so simple. There is a common resource that can be described as "attention of people who are looking for a library for X" and every time you publish a library for X you use up a bit of this resource. Most of the time this effect is small and more than offset by the value of your code, but it is not zero and overusing this common resource is a dick move.

As an extreme example consider content farms like eHow. After all, they simply publish some low-quality how-to guides, no one is obliged to read them. Why then are they so universally reviled?

> If someone then goes ahead and uses my library, without understanding what needs it satisfies and what it does not, how is that on me?

Being upfront and clear about the needs it satisfies is good documentation practice and plain common courtesy. If you did it and they still misunderstood, then yes, it is on them.

Agreed. People who demand free labor from open-source maintainers get a lot of deserved flak lately, but it is not that project authors are always blameless. Everyone who publishes some code for others to use faces a dilemma: they want their project to be popular (because being associated with a popular project is prestigious), but popularity means that the project demands additional effort to polish it, deal with bug reports and pull requests etc. So there is a temptation to convey the appearance of maturity without putting in the required effort.

So yeah, it is totally OK for your open source library to be shitty, but please state this clearly in README to save everyone's time.

On what grounds should they remove it?

The app is bad and quite invasive, but it should be noted that it is supposed to be installed only in a specific context (covid patients who have chosen to quarantine at home) so it is not much different from e.g. exam proctoring software (which is also very invasive).

Great question! I know of the standard simplistic answer, but still curious about how it works in detail. In theory a share represents your claim on the future profits of the firm and grants you some control over its decisions. So when the prospects of the firm look bleaker, more shareholders will sell, pushing the price down until there is a consensus that the current price fairly represents the value of a share.

What bothers me is that most traders don't care about control or profits - they just want the number to go up (or down). How does the price get grounded in reality in this case? The answer is presumably: in trades between speculators and those who do care about profits and control. But where is the guarantee that those trades happen? What if speculators mostly trade among themselves?

> It's not clear what technical content this post has.

Indeed. The post is a big exercise in strawmanning (and of course ad hominem but I am willing to forgive it because it adds entertainment value). Andrew Gelman (a well-known statistics expert) dunks on some guy because he dared to defend a shitty graphic and "made a statistical error". Which is kind of unfair, because he didn't do any statistics. Of course when our brains see some curves they can't resist the temptation to do some statistics on their own, but bad dataviz is a different sin than bad statistics and should be treated as such.

To begin, if the curve doesn't extend into the future, it can't forecast anything.

When I visited Dublin last year (as a tourist, exacerbating the problem, hehe; although I stayed in a hotel), the housing problems were obvious - lots of homeless in the streets, they also were in the process of banning short-term rentals. But to my outside view the root of the problem was simple - the Irish are too attached to their lovely small homes and don't believe in building anything even moderately high. Of course a few high-rises would look ugly and create other problems but maybe this is the way to give everyone a place to live, not tightening regulations some more.

Git almost qualifies, but it has no automatic conflict resolution mechanism. Imagine how you would program a bank using git as a database. You would put each account balance in its own file and install a hook that checks that no money is created out of thin air. Commits are transactions. Everything kind of works, but how would you prevent double spends in such a system? Double spends are like divergent branches so presumably someone will need to step in and perform a merge. But this someone then becomes a point of centralization, thereby disqualifying git as a blockchain ;)

Well, the pathogen is not the reason but one of the reasons. The message is clear - if not one thing then another will get you. Again, I feel that this is a metaphor for expansionism in general, not necessary galactic expansionism in particular.

> But in Aurora KSR also decides to make the generation starship’s quantum computer evolve to become sentient. Now the obvious question to resolve is that machines wouldn't be susceptible to all the biological challenges that KSR listed, so why can't civilizations expand to other solar systems in machine forms? But KSR doesn't grapple with that at all, it is completely passed over.

Yeah, it was a kind of a gimmick. KSR is clearly more interested in societies and ecologies than AIs. And this is not a bad thing in my view.

Yeah, ethics of generation ships is interesting. But I'd say the problem is present in attenuated form even today. Is it ethical to give birth to beings (our children) who haven't asked to be born? Indeed the negative answer to this question is the basis of several anti-natalist philosophies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism

> some of the settlers did stay behind to work with the materials of the system's asteroid belt to make space habitats.

The author was clearly unsympathetic to them. They died rather quickly and all they got in the book was a short "signals stopped coming" mention (which was another infuriating thing).

I have weird feelings towards KSR. His Mars trilogy is awesome in imagining a realistic kind of future that wouldn't be so awful to live in. He is interested in alternative forms of social organization and does a good job of depicting them (he is obviously sympathetic to local egalitarian governments but in his novels they are often quite realistically hampered by indecision and lack of consensus).

Yet I couldn't but feel disgust towards his later novel Aurora. Spoilers follow.

In the novel a group of colonists on a big generation ship (a transparent metaphor for the spaceship Earth) fly towards a nearby star. Near the end of their voyage they encounter lots of ecological problems that they don't quite know how to deal with. When they arrive they are dealt the final blow - the most hospitable planet contains a deadly pathogen that shatters all hopes of establishing a colony. The author is clearly unsympathetic - their problems are the retribution for the hubris of their ancestors. The solution to the problem is emphatically not science and tech, which is helpless (it even can't quite pin down what the pathogen really is). What is the solution that he approves of? Fly back to Earth, quit thinking about anything so arrogant as star expansion and lie on the beach enjoying the surf.

Yet we don't have anywhere to go back to. Sure we must temper our hubris but the only way to solve our problems is forward.

I disable javascript, it works against this kind of shit for now.

Sure, not going to quibble about word choice. The point is that many comments are like "so what, everybody knew this", but there is a material difference between "everybody knows" and "everybody knows that everybody knows".

Wow, lots of comments stating that it was common knowledge, but some fact doesn't become common knowledge simply because everyone knows it. Everyone should also know that everyone knows it and know that everyone knows that etc. which only becomes true after the article is published. The situation is materially different - this is illustrated e.g. by the famous 'island with a blue eyed population' puzzle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic)

In this case one of consequences could be that previously during negotiations with Amazon suppliers couldn't effectively use the fact that Amazon would scoop them (even if both parties knew that it was true), and now they can.

I don't get why everybody is raving about "Why Nations Fail". Their definitions of inclusive/extractive institutions seem hopelessly muddled. It is almost as if they've collected all the stuff they liked in prosperous countries and called it "inclusive" and then did the same with all the stuff they disliked in impoverished dictatorships and called it "extractive". If you try to distill a succinct definition of these concepts and then apply it, you run into contradictions such as (borrowing an example from Fukuyama): "The Indian political system is so inclusive that it can’t begin major infrastructure projects because of all the lawsuits and democratic protest, especially when compared to the extractive Chinese one."

If the thesis is "institutions are important for prosperity", it is kind of obvious. But the book does little to explain exactly what kind of institutions.

I guess this explanation is flattering to US citizens but actually the reverse is happening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma. Due to reserve currency status of the US dollar, there is additional external demand for dollars. This means that the US will necessarily experience a trade deficit, importing more goods from other countries than exporting US goods to them.

> Why are these American dollars valuable to you?

You need them to service your dollar-denominated debt or to put them in your reserves.

> I might be wrong but for C++ for example every C++ fan seems to happy about every new release (at least happy with new features, not lack of desired new features).

I believe you are mistaken. C++ community has a lot of diverse opinions about its features. As an old saying goes, it is possible to use only the good subset of C++ features, the problem is every shop has its own subset. Even about something as basic as exceptions there is no consensus. Similarly, not everybody is happy about the "modern C++" movement. I guess these people are just confident that thanks to serious commitment to backwards compatibility they will be able to continue writing code in their old grumpy ways so there is no need to loudly express their dissatisfaction.

Rust community is much less fractured (in part because it is smaller and younger) and there is a sense that decisions made today will determine how everybody will write Rust code tomorrow. Combine that with efforts to encourage an inclusive discussion and you get a lot of disagreement visible in discussions, especially concerning aspects that are prone to bikeshedding.

I’ve always assumed it was a reference to Anton LaVey (seemed appropriate for Gilfoyle to name his server after the founder of the church of satan). It would be interesting to know which theory is correct.

I'd say that for widely used library code it makes sense to implement an efficient algorithm. By its very nature the context in which a library routine will be called is unknown and so it must be prepared for everything. Also for widely used code the amount of total saved machine time can be quite substantial.

In the story the senior dev makes a judgment call (that this routine will be used in LOB applications where the worst case is unlikely to appear so the implementation is OK) which is probably correct, especially considering other priorities. And of course senior devs are much better equipped to make this kind of calls than juniors, but they still can and will guess wrong.

> Moreover, Tim explained to me, any solution that involves allocating a table, preprocessing strings, and so on, is going to take longer to do all that stuff than the blazingly-fast-99.9999%-of-the-time brute force algorithm takes to just give you the answer.

That's why a good implementation will dispatch to the best algorithm at runtime!

Reminds me of this essay: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/

Thanks. Although the author is not an expert and he kind of lost me when he used normal distribution to model the curve, it still looks like the right ballpark. That's a lot.

> I believe that nobody really expects to meet the gap between actual capacity and "required" capacity

Well, that's exactly my problem - I don't really know what kind of gap to expect. It is all very qualitative at this point but scenarios (and thus the best course of action) are wildly different depending on how exactly do the relevant quantities compare to each other. Of course "we don't know yet" is a perfectly valid answer but then it must be clearly stated in the article that this is just a speculation describing a plausible scenario.

I've upvoted because the article encourages proactive thinking so that we don't just sit in our homes congratulating ourselves how well we socially distanced from each other. What is sadly missing is some back-of-the-napkin math estimating the required capacity increase. Like, is it closer to x2 or x100? is it feasible at all? What is the damage to economy from doing this compared to lock-down for N months?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noon_Universe (not coincidentally, this name is also reminiscent of the sun)

One thing to bear in mind is that the series begins with stories that are very optimistic (some would say naively so), but the themes increasingly became darker as the authors aged.

Sure, wireheading is just part of the story, but I'd argue that the 'evil corporation' trope perfectly fits the same narrative. What is particularly evil about these corporations? It is precisely the fact that they don't care about individual humans and treat them as expendable resources to be exploited in pursuit of their goals. Aided by novel technologies, this exploitation can take some weird and scary forms. And those who try to fight back have no choice but to treat themselves as rats.

For me cyberpunk is defined not simply by its aesthetic, but by its exploration of the thesis "anything that can be done to a rat can also be done to a human being". A cyberpunk novel is a (usually cautionary, of course) tale of what happens when you strip away outmoded humanistic notions of dignity and agency and replace them with something weird.

In relation to this I'd like to mention Strugatsky brothers' book Predatory Things of Our Times (translated into English as The Final Circle of Paradise, wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Circle_of_Paradise). It is their lesser known work, but IMO it is first-grade cyberpunk. The rat-human stuff is there all right, but also a very believable near-future setting with a post-capitalist society that is outwardly prosperous but rotting inside. The remarkable thing is that this book feels very modern but it was published in 1965 in the Soviet Union.

I enjoy reading about Dyson and reading his writings. Among the greats he seems the most human. Von Neumann was always this martian with an IQ of 500, Einstein the quintessential absent-minded professor, Feynman the trickster genius, Landau the force if nature in life and research. But stories about Dyson always radiate human warmth. Very inspiring.

Probably you are right about vertica and snowflake (where can I browse the source code to be sure?) but with these clickhouse competes on price.