hxa7241

Code is a tree, code is about nesting. If you do not like nesting, you do not like code.

Code is not 'text'. You do not read code top to bottom like text. Code has a structure, and you read that structure.

And if an example of 'improvement' doubles the line count, you have a pretty good indication you are doing something wrong.

What seems to have happened is a small piece of advice has been taken too far. The early-return shortcut is reasonable. It is indeed advocated by Fowler and Beck (who deserve some trust) -- they call it 'replace nested conditional with guard clauses'. But that is something very particular. It does not suggest removal of all nesting in general.

And a/the virtue of any law is that element of general agreement, not just that it happens to be the law. So to do something agreed on but not law seems righter than to do something that is law but not so much agreed on.

Perhaps it could be put simply as: ultimately the law should follow us, not the other way around.

Yes, sort-of, although . . .

A simple example 'in the small' to consider: function/procedure size. Should we (syntactically) limit functions to, say, <30 lines?

What we are really trying to do here is limit complexity. And that is not simply a result of length, but more of interrelation.

If we recall Dijkstra's intent with 'Structured Programming', it was to make complexity proportional to program length. It is not the total amount, but the way it is arranged or broken up. Strict size limits in effect sort-of do that -- they make complexity nearer constant (since it is bounded) within each part.

> should create a DSL at their particular level

And that leads to why the DSL idea (or something else to do a similar job) is more important than the simple limit idea. What we want primarily is different structuring.

In terms of the function-size example, we can (rather ideally) compare imperative with functional programming. FP languages seem to tend away from the length problem: because they are more trees of expressions instead of sequences. They have different structuring basics that control interrelation complexity more.

To put it briefly: we want it so you cannot add length without also adding 'depth' (of abstraction, of levels, of separation).

Expressed more fully here: 'Should there be hard limits on program part sizes?' http://www.hxa.name/notes/note-hxa7241-20101124T1927Z.html

The pilots were not making an 'absurd error'. They did not forget to fly the plane.

It is that what they thought they were doing was not what they were actually doing. Their mental model broke away from the reality. (They thought the plane was in 'normal mode' when it was actually in 'abnormal mode' -- an expression of which: one them declaring "this cannot be happening!")

Telling them just fly the airplane is not (quite) the solution -- they thought they were flying it.

But the remedy is sort-of basically correct. It just seems better expressed as: when nothing makes sense (your mental model has suddenly utterly failed), fall back to a more basic backup mental model and system -- like primitive manual override.

(How clear can such separation of a basic mode be? How practical would it be? How reliable? It leads to a set of engineering/UI questions . . . were they well designed in this particular case?)

The basic structure of copyright-based business is this: the creator expends effort up front, then hopes buyers will pay later. The information flow, or rather lack of it, introduces a large risk of producing what is not wanted. Also the copy restrictions necessarily raise prices far above the real marginal costs of near zero. That means there is a large potential value the public is prevented from getting.

Such a structure consumes a scarce resource -- creative effort -- wastefully, and restricts an abundant resource -- copyability of information -- needlessly.

That seems very much the opposite of economically efficient.

Certainly not as an article of faith. It needs to be configured according to evidence, and that is about as far from the case as possible today.

> It is vital for our whole economy

That as a whole statement is definitely false, since plenty of things have nothing to do with it. And it is quite possible it is not vital to any part of the economy.

Economic research has not been able to determine the value of IP (see, for example: 'The economic structure of intellectual property law'; Landes, Posner; 2003. Conclusion, p422, s3.). That means, as far as anyone knows, we might actually be better off without it. That might be surprising, but there you are.

If there were no, or much limited, IP structure/law, business activity would re-arrange; it would do different things. Putting forward an argument that business could not do what it currently does rather misses that. And if, as you describe, music recording is a business where "almost every one of your products loses a lot of money", it seems there is indeed a very great deal of room for improvement economically.

Yes, this is a key economic truth that seems almost completely missed.

Every pirated copy that is used actually adds value into the economy. It is sort of hilarious how upside-down the usual presentation is: all the figures of so many m/billions of losses are actually more like the opposite, they are gains to the public. The only possible loss anywhere is in reduced production -- but that is never demonstrated.

That actually seems even less defensible than the normal pragmatic, consequentialist position. See Koepsell and Wilson, as summarised in this article: http://www.hxa.name/articles/content/copyright-ethics-agains...

Also, one can see a simple question that no moral argument for copyright/IP seems able to answer: why impose a restriction on a beneficial abundance? (where there is no need and no gain). Copyright creates an entirely artificial restriction. How can there be duty in that, or derivable from that? Why would we want to make a rule to restrict a beneficial abundance? It does not seem possible for that to make much rational sense.

Ethics is grounded in physical reality, that is sort-of where the buck stops -- at least it seems a better place than anywhere else. Surely an ethical evalution of an act depends on what the act is.

What makes an act bad? If, for example, you say stealing is bad, and are asked why, you can reply that someone loses something -- they could do things with it before, but no longer can. There is a sense of harm, in basic physical terms that we can all pretty much agree upon, simply because we all share the same basic physical condition.

But what if it were possible to steal something without taking anything away from someone -- i.e. the basic physical effect is different. Is that still bad? In what way could it be? You could just institute a rule proscribing such an act anyway, and so breaking the rule might seem bad superficially. But that would be like ruling that no-one can go out in the sun on wednesdays -- surely at some point someone will ask why. And there would not seem to be a good answer.

That is the way copying is different from taking. Because, at bottom, it does not do anything harmful, and is in fact positive. And that is why people are probably likely to have some underlying sense that copying is morally OK.

That is actually quite Kantian. But maybe best left there: recommending a normal person look up the 'Critique of Judgement' would be like recommending a normal person read a book on computational type theory . . .

The idea that you should not be allowed to make copies, but must pay for them, is very unnatural. Humans are evolved to copy and share information -- that is the most effective behaviour. The problem is not people's inclinations, the problem is copyright/IP. You possibly can make some case that IP is a net positive system (although no-one seems to have found any evidence), but nevertheless, its essential structure/mechanism is intrinsically problematic.

An abstraction unites something fixed with something varying. It specifies something fixed that ecompasses a set of variants.

For example, an 8 bit number fits this straightforwardly. The number of bits and their interpretation as successive powers of 2 is what is fixed; the actual values of the bits is what varies.

It seems quite a good definition: it is simple, and discrete -- it is measurable, and it very neatly fits software/computation. It is pretty much built-in to the basics of what we commonly take as computation, the bit -- a single element (fixed) with two values (varying between 0 or 1). And everything follows on top of that.

And furthermore, this definition can even be seen as somehow quasi-fundamental, as inevitably arising in how natural systems behave (well, with a little imagination maybe -- it is worth a ponder) . . .

http://www.hxa.name/notes/note-hxa7241-20110410T0910Z.html

One would expect that this publicity will do a lot more for profits than the 'lost sales' would have.

That half concedes the original opposing point.

> think of the return to education as stochastic

To say that the effect of education is stochastic means it includes some either purely random factor, or something else not understood or not considered -- i.e. the thing having a big effect is not the basic factor of education but something else. Well, that really does seem to concede the original opposing point.

> It has allowed value to accrue to things that were actually valuable while also being intangible.

It allowed price to be given to them, but since that detracts from the value we can immediately see it is not such a clearly good proposition -- it is very questionable.

Copyright gets by to a large degree on a conservative mind-set. It is almost impossible to see alternative ideas, but very easy to appreciate what actually exists. Caution is not all wrong, but when the greatest information tech in history has recently been invented, one would think the situation is more about turning the clock forward not back.

That is a good simple way to put it.

> But it's a voice that cries, "I will cut off my nose to spite my face." ... By pirating the material, we end up hurting the creators

But hold on. Hurt? There is a hidden assumption here: that current 'protections' of copyright stuff are at the right level. But what sets that level? (It could be made law that everyone must pay not just for a copy, but for every use: would you then say creators are hurt by someone who did not pay that?) The level is set according to an overall aim: whether sufficient new stuff is created -- it is not about whether creators are 'hurt', it is about whether consumers are satisfied.

Is there any evidence that creative product is diminishing? (doubtful) Just casually, anyone can look around and see plenty of new books, music, film, TV is being made. That means producers are getting enough, and it is the consumers being 'hurt' (more like ripped-off and annoyed).

The extra money IP supposedly allows creators to make does not come from nowhere: it is paid for by everyone else, the consumers. And consumers have just as much interest in having money as creators.

So IP is a tradeoff, and for that to work properly, both parts must be properly represented. Which is the point at issue.

(And this 'artists rights' stuff is nothing but PR spin. They have no intrinsic right to have a special market-restriction set up for them. Do tea-makers have special rights to a monopoly on tea-selling: so tea can only be sold in tea-shops, and no-one is allowed to make tea at home? With a justification that otherwise tea-makers cannot make so much money? How would the public greet a law to do that -- here is the proposition: everyone must pay more for tea, but in return tea-makers earn more money! No-one is going to be interested in that; do you want to pay more just so someone else gets more money? No, of course not. So, mutatis mutandis, the 'public' is only interested in granting monopoly privileges to creators of 'IP' because they get something in return (supposedly, more product) -- and they expect to get a good deal, not one rigged in favour of industry representatives.)

Not really. A different balance of taxation would be a form of redistribution of income (and indeed would be interpreted as 'forced' by some). Would that be an unmitigated disaster? Well, it needs checking in the detail, but one suspects that such different tax profiles and hence 'redistribution' existed at various times in the USA's past: the 1960s probably, for example. That is unlikely to be called a period of disaster: it was one of growth and creativity, was it not? If all that happened was going to the moon and inventing the internet, you would have to call it pretty good.

And this is more true of software than anything else, and there is a good reason. The most important ingredient of software production is not 'incentivization', not money. It is other software, other information. That is because it is leveraged unlimitedly by being copyable: a single sum of money can support a single piece of development effort, but a single piece of information can support any number of development projects.

The more completely you have and enforce copyright, the more you destroy that leverage.

No. A plumber wants to be paid for work, your musician wants to be paid a rent. A plumber wants to be paid once, your musician wants to be paid for every copy.

If your musician comes to me and offers to make a song, and I agree to pay to fund it, then fine: we make an exchange just like a plumber and customer. But a plumber does not then impose restrictions that I cannot copy their pipes and stuff, or cannot allow anyone else to use them.

A plumber is not given special monopoly privileges -- that is the difference. Now, such privileges might be pragmatically justifiable as a market mechanism (as is the contention of copyright), but there is clearly a difference between having them and not.

If you can see this then why can you not see that absolute adherence to copyright is baseless?

Production -- effort, resources -- is scarce. Copies are not scarce. That means we should be paying for production, not copies. The ideal structure is: we pay producers the funds they need, and then let all copies of the product be freely available to all. Everyone producing is paid appropriately, and everyone can maximise the benefit. Is that entirely acheivable? Maybe not, but the point is it sets the upper bound on what we should be looking for.

Copyright only makes sense if there is no suitable alternative, and if it is not too onerous, wasteful, or counterproductive itself. The problem is that it is onerous, wasteful, and counterproductive now. The solution is not to keep hammering away at a dead old way of doing things, but to come up with good alternatives.

And you cannot invent something like the internet and not expect the economics of information-goods production to be eventually utterly transformed. It changes not only the kind of info produced, but how it is, and the ways consumers and producers can interact. So why keep looking backwards? We should be prompting, encouraging, or forcing companies to develop new ways to do things now.

Are we doing things the same way as before the industrial revolution? Is anyone really going to propose that by ditching old practices and adapting to the full capabilities of the greatest info tech in history we will see a drop in production? Does that really not sound ridiculous?

What do Landes and Posner say? (in 'The economic structure of intellectual property law'; Landes, Posner; 2003. Conclusion, p422, s3.)

"Economic analysis has come up short of providing either theoretical or empirical grounds for assessing the overall effect of intellectual property law on economic welfare."

and:

"It is a reasonable surmise [as well] that some core patent and copyright protection is welfare-improving."

('surmise' meaning of course: 'a supposition that something is true without having evidence to confirm it')

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Copyright restricts access to goods -- that is bad. It only makes sense to do that in so far as it is counterbalanced by doing some good -- supporting production. That is something to weigh up by evidence, and the lifespan of the creator seems not particularly germane.

And what exactly is being 'suffered'? If you look carefully, you will find nothing there. The loss of control of the work? But you only expect that control because of the current law. You cannot justify that expectation based on itself. The connection between creator and creation is abstract. Using a creation hurts the creator no more than poking a voodoo doll of them.

You might say you still 'feel' hurt by uncontrolled use. But by restricting other people's use you are very directly, materially, controlling them. Ought there not to be a good reason for telling someone else what they can or cannot do? Is some vague 'sense' or 'feeling' enough? It really does not seem to weigh up in favour of the creator.

And one cannot simply say that other people are irrelevant, that it is only about what is right for the creator. Laws or rules are not made to serve one (kind of) individual but to serve everyone -- otherwise why should everyone have any interest in obeying them?