erikb

Why not take this pain and think about other forms of architecture? Maybe a consistent source of all truth is a bullshit requirement?

Why does anybody need to provide consistency? Often you don't have complete consistency anyways. There are bugs, there are time delays, there is parallel processing. Why even have the requirement?

Consistency is a requirement that holds us back deeply. Implementing constency with eventually voted know-all masters are also holding us back. Looking at this makes an engineers heart cringe. In fact the current architecture is only slightly better than what we had in 2005, more than 10 years ago. And if it runs not on google or amazon clouds, and therefore on UNRELIABLE networks, the voting itself can fail and you have a centralized system without center. And while we claim that we need a central point of knowledge that is at sync throughout the whole system, the whole world AROUND the IT works completely without being in sync and completely without knowing it all (sometimes even having no knowledge or assumed but wrong knowledge), at a scale that IT systems only to some degree come close to nowadays.

> Why go out of your way to poison a no-name activist that operates in fringe circles for researching a story that nobody would care about, even if Putin were to confess live on TV channel 1?

I don't want to support or disagree with the following. I just mention that the possibility exists.

In such groups there are also lots of infighting. The more extreme a group becomes the more the extreme leaders also fight each other. So it's totally possible as well, that these guys killed and harmed each other. E.g. the guy killed the three guys and a friend of them poisoned him, or similar.

Totally with you on the disappointed part. People want things to work, but they don't care why something works and something else doesn't. So usually they allow others to bullshit them into using mediocre solutions just because these were cheaper to implement for the "provider".

However decentralized systems have huge advantages. E.g. in an unsure system (i.e. the normal broken unreliable network, especially when on mobile) decentralization helps to keep the few things running that by coincidence currently work. In a centralized system you always have a few things that really, really need to run, otherwise nothing works. That's for instance why the "ugly" email has survived the competition against "userfriendly" chat apps like ICQ and QQ. People still use email today. So even without much interest in them there can be quite some value for people who implement and design them.

Please mark in the headline that this article is from 2016.

> Best manager I ever had.

Very sorry to hear that.

> 1.) 40-60 percent of a [US] company’s supply chain moves out of China

especially highlighting the part that I added: US company.

Does anybody think this is a bad thing for China? I'd argue that this is one of China's core interest. China is now becoming a major sales power itself. It's not recognized for that yet, but especially in the mobile market it's far ahead of he western competitors, maybe also in IoT.

Actually one of the core Problems China is facing is that it can't BUY the stuff it wants to buy for its own production, like chips.

And what it needs to worry about is that through all the complex entanglement at one or two points its public image of the new super power might slip. And this image is very much needed for it's plans in Belt&Road as well as in Africa. So most of its concerns are not related to the US market.

Why's what?

And probably also: Are you aware that the request to work in email somehow is a joke with about 90% certainty?

Also nowadays they manipulate what you see. From one source you like you might only get 1 out of 100 posts into your stream, and another source you don't care so much about you get 10.

Sending oneself some nifty HTML email would certainly create some cringe, if one likes that.

Maybe someone is paying a PR company do push the topic because they plan to release a new product around RSS. Would certainly be interesting.

That's quite interesting. Do you have more stuff to read about it? I never really used podcasts so I always wondered how people listen to it and assumed people use spotify or something like that.

> LESSON: Never trust a big company that relies on advertising.

Let me rephrase that. Never trust people more powerful than you to consider your situation.

That is basically also a core principle of the distributed building blocks of the internet. It's just that to the masses and to the power hungry these options are not attractive.

> And worst case, there's no major downside to open sourcing language tools.

Worst case is you didn't protect your IP and people get fired because the competition makes the money.

The thing is that the enterprises seem to be okay with them being the only user of their open source projects. Don't ask me why they then decide to do open source projects in the first place, but that's what I'm seeing.

Wasn't HHVM created as compiler or interpreter for PHP?

> you can use git by itself and send the diffs to each other over email

Why not send it via ssh? It's much easier. And if the data is not too big you don't send diffs but complete file states. Git usually calculates the diffs on the fly by comparing two file states.

Sounds like what's happening in many interesting areas these years, to be honest.

Huh? Email >>>>> Twitter over like 40 years or more? You don't work as an engineer, right? If you would, you would know how low the quality of most centralized technology is that is created by big corps. Most of the good stuff is decentralized. But the problem is that decentralization also means that the edge has more responsibility. And that responsibility is what people don't want to have. So they rather use a centralized bad system, because it's "easier" and then every few years they can blame all their own laziness on the centralized service provider and even read about it in the news.

If you need another example google a tool called "git". It is used by almost all software developers nowadays and even by quite a few authors. You don't need to setup anything to use it. If you have ssh you can just share your text based data with others by giving them access to your repository's directory. I bet it transfers more MB/day than Twitter. But nobody counts it because it's so distributed that it's hard to put an owner label on it. (Although the originators can be named quite clearly.)

Ah, really? Not just for presentation but for interactivity? Can you name an example?

Well maybe apps like Facebook (=Instagram), Apple Weather, Gmaps will "only" use your data internally, but they also make most of their money from ads. So yes, all our data is always used to target ads, political campaigns and "viral" marketing campaigns at us. Where is the surprise in that? If you asked 2007 software engineering student me, I would've told you back then. That was the point in time where this work started. Nowadays everybody is doing it themselves or selling the data one way or another.

Don't you know that also this very post will be grabbed by multiple people and companies and analysed to death by their algorithms to maybe squeeze out another bit of information that they then try to link to me as a person in some way?

So if you sit there wondering "does the app X that I'm using does that?" then the answer is yes, because everybody is doing it.

How so? It's just a way of representation. The power is still with the ISPs, backbone providers and governments. Power would only flow to the end user if the communication technology itself would enable him direct 1:1 communication to everybody else.

E.g. if everybody uses IPv6 China can still block you when you are located in their network. Not a single grain more power to you.

or Unity or RPG Maker. Think about you want to build your own game and have tools like the Dwarf Fortress World generator as a starting point. This way it becomes much easier to create a lively world.

I think this stuff is interesting but not heavily moving. Every few years someone shares a tool like this. But why not have such a tool connected to something useful like a flight simulator or openstreetmaps, or in a format that game engines can use as foundation for a game? Then people could actually do something with it instead of just looking at it.

I wish they would apply classical concurrency patterns instead of acting every 5-10 years like there would be none and we would need to start to develop them from zero. If you have some experience with distributed systems and take a look at what kubernetes and friends are doing it is really shocking once more. Funny that this presentation is from the go community which is exactly one source of the current starting from zero attempt.

Why does it make you sad and angry? It sounds quite reasonable to me. I'm especially happy that we went for human readable names rather than wierd letter/number combinations. Also nobody seems to know when to use these [] brackets around the addresses, and they are even hard to type for people who don't use the US keyboard layout. Last but not least NAT is not just a IP-range splitter but also a security feature.

I literally don't see a single thing to be sad about. Angry is even a little harder and honestly a little surprising.

The main point of the original comment with that claim was a little hidden but is this: I come from the eastern side of the Iron Curtain and saw socialism in practice in my youth. Then I saw how in the 90s and 00s everything socialist was suddenly bad and needed to be replaced with capitalist solutions, which in many cases meant replacing stuff that works and that people are used to with stuff that doesn't work and sucks for everybody involved.

Now I went to the western side of the Iron Curtain and see that actual, real life capitalism is not how "they" taught us it would be. It doesn't contain much of the bullshit that was created in our countries to be more capitalist. It is the same stuff we grew up with and that we know that it works. Just here it has a "capitalist" label attached, so nobody thought they need to destroy and replace it.

So yes, from my perspective it's socialist, because the capitalists told us that it needs to get replaced when they arrived in our countries. In fact it's just normal human behaviour.

Not from my side. That you associate "socialist" with "negative" might be already the result of propaganda, though.

Maybe I didn't put it explicitely into the previous comment, but in my understanding there is only one system (power pyramid) and different flavors of marketing attached around it. "We are a transparent tech company that shares all info with everybody" (Google? Red Hat?) is just as much B.s. in my eyes as "Socialism" or "Capitalism". Of course the people up the food chain control more of the "common goods". Is there a single communist country in human history to this date, that doesn't have this same setup?

If you want to claim that it doesn't fulfill Marxist ideology, well yes. But not even communists believe that. The world that fulfills this true common shared ownership is called communism, and from a communist perspective we've never seen that. Socialist countries where an experiment at triggering human evolution to achieve communism. It failed. But if we look at Star Trek for instance, there they have achieved commmunism. No need for money, not much need for ownership, everybody works to improve oneself and further the community. That's communism according to communist, and yes that's different from how capitalist propaganda labels communism.

I'm not part of that group of communists though. I have a more fatalistic/pessimistic approach and think we are not really able to develop any further. We apply different labels, but in the end it's always the power pyramid that succeeds, because we can't overcome our limitations.