This reminds me of an earlier blog post by the same author: https://web.archive.org/web/20121111234839/http://www.altdev...
215 karma · joined May 23, 2010
I have prior experience working as a theoretical physicist in government and academia, and also as a software engineer. Before that, I worked as public relations coordinator at the Software Freedom Law Center.
On the web: https://jimgarrison.org/
Even a revived effort on getting core Julia tests to pass under Valgrind would not do much to help catch correctness bugs due to composing different packages in the ecosystem. For that, running in testing with `--check-bounds=yes` is probably a better solution, and much quicker to execute as well. (see e.g. https://github.com/JuliaArrays/OffsetArrays.jl/issues/282)
It's not clear that they deserve the benefit of the doubt, if we are to believe Casey Newton's article, "What really happened at BaseCamp":
> Employees say the founders’ memos unfairly depicted their workplace as being riven by partisan politics, when in fact the main source of the discussion had always been Basecamp itself.
> “At least in my experience, it has always been centered on what is happening at Basecamp,” said one employee — who, like most of those I spoke with today, requested anonymity so as to freely discuss internal deliberations. “What is being done at Basecamp? What is being said at Basecamp? And how it is affecting individuals? It has never been big political discussions, like ‘the postal service should be disbanded,’ or ‘I don’t like Amy Klobuchar.’
> Interviews with a half-dozen Basecamp employees over the past day paint a portrait of a company where workers sought to advance Basecamp’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion by having sensitive discussions about the company’s own failures. After months of fraught conversations, Fried and his co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson moved to shut those conversations down.
https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec...
EDIT: formatting
Brad Smith in 2020: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers.
My goal was to explain quantum computing in a way that is mathematically precise but doesn't require one to learn linear algebra first. To do this, I implemented a quantum computer simulator in Javascript that runs in the web browser. Conceptually (in mathematical language), in each simulation I present, I've started by enumerating the computational basis of the Hilbert space (all possible states the qubits could be in) and represented the computational state by putting an arrow beside each of them, which really is a complex number. (This similar to how Feynman explains things in his book QED.) The magnitude of the complex number is the length of the arrow, and its phase is the direction it points (encoded redundantly by its color). I've filled out the amplitude symbol with a square so that at any given point, its probability of a measurement resulting in that outcome is proportional to the area of that square. Essentially, in this language, making a measurement makes the experimenter color blind -- only the relative areas of the amplitudes matter and there is no way to learn directly phase information without doing a different experiment.
I could make a further document explaining along these lines if people are interested. The source is on github too: https://github.com/garrison/jsqis
Does this mean the new Raspberry Pi is now susceptible to Spectre-type vulnerabilities?
Other than issues I mentioned in that thread, my main ongoing concern is that it is unclear where the boundary between Julia the community project (which includes their non-profit fiscal sponsorship via Numfocus) and Julia Computing, the company. Who owns the Julia trademark? Who owns the julialang.org domain? Who, ultimately, controls the direction of the project?
Ultimately, I want Julia to last for a long time, and for it to remain free software. I get the impression that all the founders want the same thing, which is encouraging. But even more encouraging would be to see the community's governance structured in a way that enforces this.
This is true when linking to blogs, but frequently in the media it is the editor of a publication, not the article's author, that chooses the title.
I have strong doubts that mass-produced anything is the key to solving poverty. Having people rely on outsourced production rather than encouraging the local construction industry is no way to empower them.
EDIT: That said, having such housing available for rebuilding after a natural disaster doesn't sound like such a bad idea.
More likely, it's because all said software is proprietary. If people got the source code to their cars' computers, you'd see a lot more people repairing their cars (and a lot more interest in automobiles in the current generation, leading to real, open innovation in the space).
It's interesting to consider how cars went from being something anybody could hack on, to something that only a few "qualified" people are now able to service. I don't expect the same thing will happen with software (in other words, I don't think "trusted computing" will ever become the norm), but we must be sure that it never does if we want innovation to continue in the software space.