jka

Related: https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/05/12/sap_foun...

Have you {used/read about} jj[1] as an alternative?

[1] - https://github.com/tidwall/jj/

Without mentioning any of the incidents involved, could you link to one of the rules mentioned that discouraged documentation of technical mistakes?

(my guess is that those may have been written at a point in time during which it did make sense to prevent publication/knowledge of mistakes like that - I'm wondering whether that remains a good policy nowadays, when risk-reduction can often benefit from information-sharing, even around failures and errors)

Summary: the document is written by a former regular committer to the gedit codebase.

It mentions a few concerns about recent changes to the software and the process surrounding it ('undo' and other frequently-used items of functionality are no longer immediately visible and accessible, scrollbar behaviour has changed, and the author believes that design changes have been made largely for the sake of changing the look-and-feel of the software).

There's a mirror of the gedit codebase on GitHub here: https://github.com/GNOME/gedit/

The addition (and subsequent removal) of the "tepl" text editing library and "amtk" internationalization may also be a point of contention: https://github.com/GNOME/gedit/commit/fa587e033c97fac65dacdb...

To draw a comparison with software development: how much test coverage does this argument have? And do those tests genuinely handle most expected inputs/outputs and demonstrate correctness?

Similarly, recursively: do the claims that the argument relies upon also have good test coverage?

And, extrapolating beyond the article: how can we identify the flaws with minimal effort and help the authors to correct those (or fork improved arguments and build support for those when they refuse to)?

Cool, thanks - yep, DynamoDB seems fairly reliable, and that's also good to hear another vote in support of Cloud Spanner.

Glad to have learned about rqlite from this thread as well.

It's a process and culture thing: maintain descriptive context and history about all changes, and ensure that references and hyperlinks within those are temporally stable (that is, they'll still refer to the same content when they're examined by a future observer).

"Chesterton's Permalinked Fence" is generally straightforward to reason about.

Yep, your assessment seems broadly accurate to me. I was going to suggest Cassandra until I saw it in the list. I'm {interested in/optimistic about} FoundationDB too, although haven't had a chance to use it in practice yet.

Out of curiosity: what would your preferred choice(s) be to fit these requirements using existing proprietary products?

Even in a worst case where they don't survive -- and I hope that they will survive -- it seems near-guaranteed that GitLab will turbo-boost the next generation of technology companies.

The stack that they provide within the free edition alone is phenomenally consistent and capable compared to the collaboration tools that teams had available when they started - a mere seven years ago.

Are you sure it's profit, as opposed to certainty, that drives the investment mindset here?

I agree that renewables and distributed energy generation are the path forward, but I can understand a lot of investors having reasonable scepticism (even after more than a decade of proven wind + solar ramp-up) about those technologies remaining market-leading.

Under that mindset, it's not so much about "will investment in this individual company make {me/my portfolio audience} the largest return", but moreso "is this the investment that I can leave as-is for twenty years and be most-confident about".

I'm not on Twitter currently, but I did recently learn about the Free Ebook Foundation[1] and their free-programming-books resource[2].

One nice aspect of their project is that they provide links to translated versions of many free programming books.

[1] - https://ebookfoundation.org/

[2] - https://ebookfoundation.github.io/free-programming-books/

It's OK, thanks.

Impressions: this looks like extensively-researched scholarly work. It raises questions about the veracity of hierarchical model of evidence-based medicine (EBM).

However, I was lazy and skipped to the conclusion[1] to determine most of that. People with experience of both statistics and healthcare policy would have more useful thoughts.

[1] - http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3284/1/Blunt_heirachies_of_evidence...

A selected quote:

"It should be realised that the fighting-instinct, if well directed, gives energy for much that is good and beautiful. But the same instinct may create chaos if it breaks loose from all restraint, making use of the greatest discoveries of the human intellect."

Kinda evading the question, but: I get the sense that you'd enjoy it.

Could you try challenging each of your own paragraphs, to determine whether you can find alternative perspectives?

Sure, I see what you're saying, and I'm fairly resilient, but I don't think it should be anyone's duty to accept widespread, severe adversity based on the mistakes of world leaders.

It'd be a difficult, long grind back to normality with no guarantee of reaching a better or more equal world than today's (perhaps worse, given the way that resources were redistributed after the fall of the USSR, as I understand it).

If unrest really becomes that widespread, I'm off on the road with some books, the most-reliable, widely-compatible electronics available, whatever's left of my sense of humour, and a few stories.

I think I spend time trying to reduce the amount of (time and/or money) that other people will have to spend on those same items in future. Thus I'm reluctant to spend money on them (I'd prefer to reduce their costs).

It's possible I'm self-deluding, but your comment is wise and I felt like chiming in.

(late-30s here)

"In 2011, Money magazine placed Danville as the fourth-best place to retire in the United States."[1]

What can I say - it's hard to argue with that!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danville%2C_Kentucky

It's a common and rational response, but my philosophy tends to be slightly different:

If the world becomes the kind of place where those preparations are necessary, it's no longer the kind of world that I'd like to exist in. Buying from fear-mongers is only going to hasten the onset of a world like that, so I'm going to try to relax, have a bit of fun, and enjoy myself while taking care of others as best possible (which in my case, isn't always particularly well).

(I'm hyperfocused on the conflict too, although I guess our responses to the situation are different)

Danville, KY?

Stephen's obituary from the article is available here: https://www.megiefuneralhome.com/obituaries/?obId=24311617

A credit from there, not mentioned in the article, is that at one time he was chief architect of America Online (AOL).

If this were implemented today (or, to be realistic - using technology from within the past five-to-ten years), what would it look like?

That's curious - I expected the answer to be "they're provided with discreet advice about expected future events based on friendly intelligence with sufficiently-high degrees of confidence that it's shared with them in order to further promulgate their success in a kind-of realpolitik to advance their peers' and nation-states' interests".

But that's not the case, apparently. Worth a watch, perhaps.

Grand. Take with a grain of salt, but it's possible you could find https://osf.io/m43tg/ worth a look.

Safety-wise even if something like this sounds surprising, it could be best to assume that all the statements are correct, and then work backwards to try to determine what the cause is/was, and possible solutions.

Hehe, this sounds like fun :) I should probably improve a bit at standard chess first, but I'll give it a try some time. Thanks for sharing!

An unrelated tangent: Have you watched Primer[1]?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film)

Yep, it's difficult to think how to handle impermissible moves gracefully in the general case.

I suppose that one option would be for the game state to diverge for each player, and only after both of them have reached a conclusion could they both be told the move at which that happened.

(and in that case, ensuring that both players reach their respective game's conclusion near the same point-in-time -- hiding the magic trick -- becomes a separate challenge)

Particularly towards the endgame, could sneaky players attempt moves that they believe will be invalid given their opponent's likely behaviour, in order to infer what those moves could have been? (and if so, I wonder what the risk tradeoff would be if they guess incorrectly and make a valid-but-suboptimal move while attempting discovery)

In response to the vision statement's third entry:

> "Encrypt everything"

I'd quite like to see HTTP signatures[1] become a thing before deciding to join a world where everything is encrypted.

Servers can and do provide different HTTP responses to different users; that dynamic rendering ability is part of what enabled so much of the functionality and promise of the modern web.

But for many sites (for example, news publications) we expect to see the same content as our neighbours would see.

Despite all its' problems, HTTP (without TLS) could allow benevolent eavesdroppers to detect tampering of web traffic by a server (or equally, by a proxy).

Providing content-integrity signatures at the protocol level would allow individuals to gain cryptographically-secured confidence that they received the same document as another person making the same request.

[1] - https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-httpbis-message-s...