433 karma · joined March 22, 2012
And yet, with «stable diffusion» it is just so. Disruption is declared wholesale, without even passing mention of the preceding state of the art of computer generated art.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but do you not see the own goal here?
Slide along the scale towards more and better documentation and our perceptions might diverge. I don't think all the valuable know-how that goes in to fulfilling a specific role in a larger organization (and in particular the marginal knowledge, relations and skill that increases performance) can be captured in words. Even if it were, there is so much of it and it is full of subtle nuance and context sensitivity. On top of that each individual person takes to different parts of it in different ways. The things you can only learn by jumping in at the deep end. We all know, deep inside, that this is the stuff that matters and I see no reason to play charades and pretend we can know or see how even half of what we do really works. If we did, the world would be a very different place. Until then: tacit, implicit, context bound and relation contingent knowledge and skill will be the light that shines on our practice; and what we can put in to words, a mere shadow.
This depends on both the defect and the business. Just because critical regressions and recurring denial of service has become normalized as somehow par for the course in our line of business does not mean it comes without cost. It's all situational and subject to calculated tradeoffs but every shop i've worked with/in has classes of defects on the "Never Again" list, and sometimes on the "NEVER EVER EVER AT ANY COST" list.
I don't think i can fully appreciate how mind-bogglingly huge a company like Google is, so it might well be the case that tacit knowledge, skills and relations acquired in one team don't transfer meaningfully to another. I would have to see it to be convinced however, even more so to make me believe this kind of transfer was the norm.
On the scale of lifetimes, I don't think we can refer to it as "churn" as understood in the context of a modern company.
I'm being facile, of course. Developing a good library of knowledge as you propose is hard, takes a long time and many iterations and there is the unfortunate matter of time taking it's toll on the relevance of such recorded knowledge (esp. in our line of work). Not to mention costs. Even academic institutions, who are in the business of doing exactly this, guard their staff with tenure (some of the staff anyway, the big boys)
So too is believing it is anything more than a community of individuals, cooperating on the basis of shared- and tacit knowledge as well as skill to perform the different tasks that comprise business operations. Tacit knowledge and skill resides in the specific individuals, and shared knowledge in the specific relations between individuals. Losing an individual is losing part of aggregate tacit knowledge and skill, as well as all the specific relations shared by the individual. The organization as a thing-in-the-world loses part of itself not captured by it's charter and governing contracts (or share value, or business strategy, i could go on). These things are hard to quantify on the best of days, so to assume (or even mandate) that this cost is incurred with net benefit (by, as you say, hiring some industry heavy-hitter who is expected to bring the goods) is fraught with unknowns, and on balance likely hubris.
Anyhow, this military comparison just keeps sprouting thoughts in my head. Isn't an owner-management almost perfectly comparable to aristocratic officership? Is GGP's theory of defensible churn basically a modern incarnation of feudalism and aristocratic privelege?
Pay developers like it's monopoly money.
You could call this "The benefit of retention", though that may be a bit reductive.
To make workers replaceable is to rely mostly on the knowledge you can reasonably expect to regain on rehire. Remember: Management (up to owner-management) are also workers, so running some kind of special culture-and-knowledge preserving über-organization is predicated on somehow retaining the structures that support and maintain this secret sauce. Military services around the world have researched this extensively (for obvious reasons), then again, we refer to a well-seasoned and experienced practitioner as a veteran. Veterans are invaluable in military service, as they are in any other endeavor. Trade them off against ease-of-management at your own peril.
However, I think it's incumbent on us compare bitcoin as a religion to the prevailing mode of social organization (or religion, as it were) where money is concerned:
The Rule of Law International Trade RelationsI just don't see how bitcoin can fulfill any of it's purported roles (asset, currency, value-store) outside the rule of law, and yet flouting the established legal ways of settling transactions, asserting ownership and saving for the future were all part of the elevator pitch.
This begs the question: What effect will bitcoin have on the rule of law? I fear that, on net, it may serve to undermine our legal, liberal traditions by antagonizing proponents to the regular economy and pursuant democratic processes for improving its shortcomings.
More directly, the unregulated nature of the bitcoin economy leaves affected societies knee-capped in managing externalities and second order effects right where the incentives are the most perverse (on the ledger), forcing heavy-handed and perhaps illiberal responses from regulators. Success on it's own terms will spell bitcoins demise so long as belief in the rule of law remains stronger than in crypto-utopia (I will take that bet).
This assertion immediately falls apart on consideration IMO. Even in simple, controlled circumstances like football, the meaning of "possession" is subject to mutual agreement (i.e. "rules").
You could take some particular definition of "possession" as "natural" or otherwise axiomatic. This is not unheard of, but I think it's a trick of misdirection to place it in the domain of the "physical/real" when it is plainly a political matter.
I sense that your arguments are in concordance with TFA, broadly speaking. Also, I suspect you read it rather uncharitably for reasons having to do with tone or stated thesis. Either that, or my reading comprehension is failing me. Maybe I want it to be more convincing that it really is, as i already laid bare my sentiments towards accelerationist woo.
This will invalidate fantastical accelerationist woo until such evidence is presented, and -in the current state of the art research within relevant fields- it's not even certain we can know what would constitute such evidence _in principle_.
Three common (IME) manifestations:
1. the domainObjectClass is disallowed to do something across the ORM due to constraints enforced on the domainEntityTable (varchar truncation, anyone? No? Just me?)
2. some domainObjects fetched through the ORM are deserialized into an implicitly (e.g. null/empty collection members) or explicitly (violates some invariant enforced by domainObjectClass) invalid state
3. domainObjectClass has to grow hairy with bookkeeping metadata (read: implementation details) to facilitate work with partial object graphs while still enforcing domain invariants on the data in scope (null vs DbNull, "object with PK already exists" oh God please just kill me now)
The common cause for the preceding examples is that the ORM (and it's tutorials) encourage you to do the same domain modelling twice, for the price of one. To wit: You do your domain modelling in your classes and the ORM translates this into a database schema with the same entities at the same level of abstraction. This causes a coupling of the semantics of database constraints to your domain objects and vice-versa: your database records may not violate domainObjectClass invariants otherwise inexpressible in the database engine.
Whether or not this is a problem depends on context, but it happens either way. If and when it becomes a problem your options are usually: quit, rant on you blog or both.
Insurance only works if the insuree bears the risk (and it has to be an actual risk with nonzero probability times cost, i'll leave why as an exercise to the reader) and in the case of car accidents, that risk is liability, which people have and computers don't. Can TSLA or Uber be charged and convicted of vehicular manslaughter?
Lower rate of accidents will just lower the market rate of insurance contracts.
Another sense in which i think APL is... un-competitive is that its strengths (terse, mathematical, matrix-centered) are the easy parts of programming, i.e. the parts that are the most objectively quantifiable and verifiable (you just use math).
Accounting for numbers is trivial, accounting for human factors is a proverb.
People want to Get Stuff Done, and preferably without getting all math-y about it. Compile now plz.
Add the null-reference to your spec and Presto! the problem is now confined to userspace.
it can be done, but it's Not Fun, and definetly mathy, e.g. Predicate Transformers or ß-reductions
All my skater friends are very particular about who's real an who's posing, and also rather hostile towards wrongboarders, inline-skaters, parkour-runners and any other street-based activity except BMX (they're cool somehow). It's all very tribal and I really can't relate.
>Are gray turkeys slimmer on average? Worse? Different distribution? No. They are just harder to find.
Who knows? Anyone who tries to find out are hung out to dry. Now I value my precious bodily fluids so I'll refrain from commenting, but I've heard there's been some science done somewhere, once or twice.
I think I'm going to have to politely WTF? that, if you don't mind.
I don't know [wo]man, the cure might be worse then the ailment.
The only way these contrivances would be harmful was if they were unknown to society at large.
I would like to add that I was trying to make a point about morality and nihilism in our culture with developing technology as the backdrop, not the cause as such.