freshhawk

Ah yes, the opposite of "totalitarian" is "no questioning how society works at any level other than the political parties".

Makes sense, the totalitarians are always lax about having rules about what you can talk about. It was so much better when there was just "how things are done" and talk that was "unamerican", so much less political.

Agreed. When we focus on the part of the spectrum of optimizations that do require talent, we're thinking of the exceptional, interesting, makes-a-viral-post-on-HN stuff.

The bulk of the work, in my experience, is simpler than the programming part. It's just a culture/priority thing. Like how most of the industry used to not use source control. Now we do, we didn't need to add "talent" to get that done either.

If you think impersonating another browser's user-agent string for compatabililty reasons as a full fledged "real" browser is an edge case ...

You should remind yourself what the Chrome user-agent string actually is.

I think a lot of people are forgetting that Google saying "the browser must not try to impersonate another browser" is a fairly funny part in itself.

Everyone remembers the User-Agent for Chrome starts with "Mozilla/5.0" right? It has always impersonated another browser for compatibility reasons. For so long that we take this for granted now.

"for the collective" ... what collective? This is textbook top-down control, a small elite group spying on the masses. And when the masses find out it is considered a scandal.

So many engineers live and breathe P.O.S.I.W.I.D. (purpose of a system is what it does) in all technical areas and then are violently opposed to that kind of thinking when it comes to politics or sociology.

I'm honestly baffled by it. I get that people can be ignorant of how police act in the real world because they have no experience with it and watch cop shows on TV, but once you learn what the actual behaviour is ...

Sure, if you compare it to scenarios that aren't remotely the same. I think we were supposed to take it as an obvious given that this applies to scenarios where the side giving away the power is watching the side that was given the power.

Being a rube isn't a great hobby either, that's why "fool me once ..." is a famous saying. As are the various versions of "who benefits?".

Pretty decent rules of thumb.

And at a higher level ... who cares if they did it maliciously or because they "panicked", you can't ever know that anyway and either one means you can predict what they will do in similar situations.

That's the distro with the giant text on the website saying it's a bleeding edge rolling release distro right?

That's the portion of the Democratic party that lost the fight for control, has nowhere to go in a two party system and can be completely ignored.

See: the makeup of Bidens cabinet, which is a republicans-from-10-years-ago's dream.

It's real politics though, it's not cynical to not be a complete rube.

Exactly, one is 2 individuals purchasing policies in an undemocratic fashion and another is a subset of a particular upper class group purchasing policies in an undemocratic fashion.

It's like comparing the weight of a pound of bricks to a pound of feathers.

Journalists have to leave this kind of thing mostly implied for ethical reasons if nothing else.

The answer is clearly: because his research showed that this particular messaging (this story and the book) was the most advantageous to his political goals. If any part of it was literally meaningful then it would have the explanations you noticed were missing.

But you don't call out a Kock brother on his weak sauce image management in the WSJ, you just promote his book, do what you're told, and avoid making that kind of enemy.

He's got fairly conservative and finance friendly Democrats to influence right now and taking his money can't be too much of a public scandal.

I've heard some good stories of VMs and obs to circumvent all this insane stuff.

It's good. I remember learning about networks to pirate stuff back in the day and that's much less of a thing now. Now kids have their own incredibly stupid invented problem they can easily work around if they learn some tech stuff, and a lot of them are familiar with obs from streaming anyway.

Isn't it more like "literally any LEO or pseudo-LEO in a 'friendly' country" at this point based on what we know at this point?

I think the threat model here is less about a hostile actor subverting the backups than the extreme ease of access to all data on those systems that is given to law enforcement?

It's definitely easier to talk about coding while you do it.

I make heavy use of voice notes myself.

A transcription of those voice notes isn't something I've found useful. I have one, since it's just a little script but there is a very good reason that "stream of consciousness writing" isn't how we do ... anything.

I'm very curious to see how this can be used but I'm not immediately convinced, you generate commit comments while you write code, documentation is a completely separate thing.

A stream of comments on the why of some parts of code, for people who screencasted the development, would be useful. You could reorganize that stuff and get a really nice set of data about the reasons for code evolution.

That's not user facing documentation however, and providing design docs as documention, especially as stream of consciousness design comments seems like it might not be what people expect or want.

But the trick is to put a crap lock around both something that can be copyrighted but is unimportant and things that cannot be copyrighted.

Now all legal uses of everything behind that lock are illegal for circumvention reasons.

It's a way to apply the DMCA to literally anything digital. The quality of the software doesn't matter, because it isn't for security, just a legal hack.

> Also, does the fact that YouTube doesn't supply a download feature constitute a "technical protection measure"?

My understanding is that basically anything at all, if it is in any way "technical" and shows intent, will be accepted as a "technical protection measure" if you go by what has worked so far.

Much more absurd and blatantly bad faith arguments have been accepted, "conspicuously not supplying the feature" is a very strong case in the absurd world of the DMCA cases.

Older children learn things faster than younger children, why would reading be an exception?

Weird, that hasn't happened to the ones I've been on for years.

If someone tried to build an app on one of those systems where you were forced to accept messages by default until you blacklisted them then it probably would. It would be terrible.

Thankfully no users actually want apps like that, we've already got email and web social media sites for having a public directory of strangers to contact. That is a use-case that is only sometimes needed, and when it is you only need to use it once.

Obviously that depends. Here is another way to phrase your question:

You spend 10 years telling John some stuff every day for hours and Jane is someone you just met.

Which one is easier to lie to?

Sounds to me like it completely depends on a lot of different things, but if you know what lie you want to tell ahead of time: obviously John is easier to lie to.

> School's purpose is not to teach obedience or even getting a job. It is there to teach us critical thinking, and consequently, how to be a good citizen.

That's an interesting use of "purpose". That isn't what our system was specifically designed for (Prussian system adopted by the US) by the people who designed it.

They wrote heavily about how well their new education system instilled obedience and created good soldiers and workers. They were very proud of these good outcomes.

It's also not the actual measured outcomes of our current system. Hell, "critical thinking" is explicitly excluded from the curriculum by a chunk of the US.

The use of "purpose" to mean "thing we want it to be" isn't a critical type of thinking.

"If you and a friend started walking straight north, both at the equator but a long distance apart, you would gradually get closer to each other until you collided at the north pole."

I always thought that was a nice way to drop one dimension down to get the intuition. To the metaphorical 2D ant they see two friends attracted to/falling towards each other, but they are going in a straight line on a curved surface and there are no forces at play.

Tabs are better in theory, obviously.

However people insist on using spaces. Like between words in sentences or between tokens in a line of code.

Spaces are better than mixing tabs and spaces, especially with "modern" (newer than 30 years old) tools. Especially if you use these editors enough that you are never indenting manually with backspace or tab/spacebar.

So the options are tabs+spaces mixed together or just spaces unless you are dealing with tab delimited files with no spaces in them, which is rare.

The tradeoff is you lose the ability for different people working on the same thing to see different indentation levels. In exchange you don't regularly get your formatting confusing messed up because of some kind of invisible control character confusion.

I think everyone knows the rabbit hole problem that this kind of article is warning against. Especially for beginners.

But as a counter-example:

I've done most of those "types of vim porn" I guess, then moved to spacemacs, then my own custom emacs/evil setup. Always with some similar window manager and command line tweaking as well.

Probably spent a hundred hours on all this kind of thing easily, in a small number of big bursts.

Over 20 years.

During which time I've had a very comfortable, understandable, debuggable and pleasant dev environment that made development, testing, documenting, debugging and planning a thing I can just work on without really thinking about the tools. Switching between the files, the command line, the failed tests, the docs, the repls and the browser tabs as fast as my eyes move.

I don't need to break out that one efficiency-tradeoff XKCD either because while it was definitely mathematically worth it time-wise, there is no question the wins were happiness-wise and not-swearing-at-my-tools-wise (just the project code).

Learning to type was probably a better ROI, can't think of what else is in the ballpark though.

Heh, I thought the same thing. And leaving a note for a 5 year old while you leave them alone is an absurd thing to do.

I just assumed the author was older than 5, but felt that their tantrum was embarassing for their actual age so aged it down.

Plausible Storytelling is also a powerful tool.

That's probably why they said "it's harder to oppress people with guns, so they do it less" and didn't add "and if it is hard to oppress people that makes you effective".

Basic "necessary but not sufficient" thing here.

The counter-example would be places where armed people are kept under the boot by those in power anyway, where the government is very effective at oppression.

edit: unless you are equating "able to do things that make citizens want to shoot you" with "effective"? I'm assuming you misunderstood, which is the charitable reading.

Yup. Simple perpetual motion machine if it works.

This seems, to me, to be the simplest explanation of why it almost certainly doesn't work, but that isn't mentioned frequently, am I missing something?

But if you really cared about "election interference" then attacking media monopolies would be at the top of your list and you wouldn't make this argument.

You need to pick things that aren't directly connected if you want to deflect, or your argument comes across as being too obviously in bad faith.

Because it does do you harm, obviously.

If they were just printing money for themselves, and using inflation to lower the value of your money, you would see it and be upset.

They're doing the same thing with power.