klagermkii

Thanks, seeing that atomic fetch in action is very useful.

This might be a fine answer to dealing with a commodity product in a market with strong competition, but a terrible one for any system with limited choice and an extremely strong network effect.

Yes, but now it's pulled again. The link you have is from October 6th.

Every right has been resisted at some point. It doesn't drift in and out of privilege status depending on how must resistance is being applied at any one moment.

A right gains its power from people's belief that it should be universally granted, and that they will stick up for others when that right gets breached. Once a thing gets redefined as a privilege there is no expectation for people to stand up for other privilege.

I think the main issue is that the choice of the words "privilege" or "right", when used by enough people, has the power to set societal expectations. Why should a privilege ever be extended to more people, the people who have them should just consider themselves lucky they aren't taken away.

And I think there are plenty of things that are "privileges", but it's based on the idea that it is impossible to extend it to everyone. Being admitted to a top school is impossible to extend to everyone by the definition of a top school. Being believed in a court of law when it's just your word over someone else's, but being more trusted because you belong to a particular group is a privilege. Being let off with a warning at a traffic stop because you have the right face is a privilege. Living in the "good" part of town is a privilege.

Surviving a traffic stop without being shot by the cop should not be called a privilege. Being able to receive a competent education should not be called a privilege. These are things that can be extended to everyone and the words should reflect it, so that it's clear which things we should be fighting for, vs the things that are impossible for everyone to have.

I think one would need to put something like that as a guerrilla war.

There needs to be a distinction between:

* attacking civilians (terrorism)

* attacking The System, but going for softer targets and not taking its military might directly head on (guerilla war)

* attacking The System, in a Military v Military setting (regular warfare)

While there are groups that will never have the direct strength to take a head on fight, I think it's beneficial to have a category showing that they limit their targets to agents of the system rather than any random civilian.

Wouldn't this line of thinking then apply to any rights that have their scope significantly changed by later disruptive technology, including commercial flight?

e.g. Free movement across the US was fine while it was on foot, horseback, or even train, but once commercial flight allowed for coast-to-coast movement in a couple of hours one can't apply the same rights.

Why be so crudely reductionist as to take problems of laziness, boredom and lack of motivation and try to simplify it down to Fear?

Is the idea that we have a whole arsenal of tools already for successfully dealing with Fear, and if we can just bend all our other problems into the shape of Fear we can apply some existing techniques?

In my experience this doesn't work for me, and the mental model just doesn't fit.

If everything comes down to a mental cost-benefit analysis, I think fear situations are ones where the cost can seem massively over-inflated and getting over that initial hurdle with "Just Do It" can help re-tune the estimation so that the cost doesn't seem as bad.

The problem for Lazy, Bored and Unmotivated is on the benefit side of the analysis, where even if the cost isn't that high, I will feel that the long-term payoff is not worth it. That isn't helped by "Just Do It", because there isn't an inaccurate cost to be corrected, and I won't get the rush of motivation of "oh this isn't so bad" that comes from the cost correcting itself in an anxiety-type situation.

This should be a lesson for adolescents who wonder why people tend to get less and less "edgy" as they grow up.

Just takes one moment of too much edge to lose the gamble and end up throwing everything away.

It seems like a pretty broadly defeatist attitude towards current actions having agency over the future:

> We need to start remembering that everybody who said that Y2K wasn’t a real problem was either shouted down, or kept off the air.

> But my point is, for pending legislation as with everything else, nobody knows the future.

> What will be the effect of electing a certain president, or a supreme court justice? Nobody knows.

If his focus was purely towards the charlatans who make predictions and keep getting it wrong with no accountability, I would agree. But he takes it a step further by seemingly emphasizing the futility of the very act of trying to foresee and head off potentially bad situations be it technical, legislative or political.

This veers far too heavily into cranky-old-man territory.

It tries to take a purely boolean result of knowing the future, when the real power comes from increasing ones prediction odds ever so slightly. And all it takes is very small increases in ones own odds over the average to benefit heavily relative to blindly marching into the future.

Does this mean that QUIC and other protocols implemented by Chrome will be available through this Google library? That would be a benefit over existing cURL.

It doesn't make sense for the average individual homeowner to sign something like this. It's also very difficult to do a fair clause for service quality that works at scale for a contended residential service.

Also a one-year contract still doesn't protect you from them setting predatory pricing for expiring contracts the next year. A large telco can play many games of attrition that are very hard for a small (non-VC) startup to win.

> My key takeaway of Cambridge Analytica was that the advertising industry is a lot more harmful than I thought. I always thought, that there is no real problem when some people influence/manipulate other people on what they spend their money on.

If this kind of advertising is able to make people act against their own interest to the level claimed with this political meddling, how is this somehow more acceptable on an economic level which directly impacts individuals?

At least for most people the consequences of the election are more distant, whereas if people are tricked into making poor purchasing decisions they could be looking at directly losing hundreds or thousands of dollars. Certainly a large amount over their lifetime.

I can't see how this is any better, and I personally think it's worse. Is the only justification that poor purchasing decisions directly impacts the easily influenced people (one could unpleasantly spin it as getting what they deserve), whereas political decisions hit everyone?

When I say "balanced news", I don't mind if the media has a clear bias on a topic which shines through. It's fine if there is a right side, and they come down firmly on that side.

The issue comes when it feels like they're leaving out information or a perspective which would be harmful to their case. Basically if I read something in the news and after reading it I felt like the story made it look like one side was obviously correct, but then I go and look up more sources or more information and I will feel like there's a lot more nuance to it or my opinion even reverses, then I feel like there's been a huge failure in the media and I call that "not balanced".

It feels like they strawman the opinions they disagree with while pulling in the best representatives and sources for the positions they agree with.

I don't think you can compare the relationship of a company to customers, to that of a one-to-one relationship of a doctor or a lawyer. The company acts as a third party with very different (and often directly conflicting with the end user) aims that creates a much harder ethical situation for a developer to navigate and creates confusion as to who has the responsibility to sound the alarm.

I think of something like legal or medical confidentiality, which can involve their clients doing pretty horrible things but it being the "ethical" thing to not reveal that. If one takes this same thing to a Facebook scenario, does the developer who works for Facebook then have the obligation to protect the confidentiality of Facebook even if they're doing awful things? Would it be any different where a lawyer is working for a horrible client, trying to use the law to do things that are a net-negative for society, but ethics would put their obligation towards their direct client rather than society at large.

If one then wants to write a piece about ethics, one should start with examples of fields with ethical codes that have a structure closer to the relationship of users/Facebook/developers.

This article dances back and forth between saying "vulnerability" and "backdoor", which while they may have the same end result wildly differ in intent.

I can't tell the seriousness of this except for the telnet one.

I fully support challenging writing that has a deeper meaning and that forces you to think about it to truly understand the author's larger concept. But there's an awful lot of stuff that is closer to a Rorschach test, where by thinking hard enough you can create your own signal from the noise.

It's much easier to create the second type than the first, and superficially it's really hard to tell them apart. Like a complicated looking puzzle that turns out to have no solution, your mind may manage to make some random connections, but ultimately it's not teaching you any kind of better way of thinking. You can waste a lot of time trying to extract the true deeper meaning when there's none there.

> We have learned through bitter experience that, while free speech is a precious right, it is also an extremely dangerous one in the wrong circumstances. Germans in particular are acutely aware of the disastrous consequences of allowing incitement to go unchallenged.

Have they learnt the right lesson though? What's the alternate history theory here? You toss Hitler in jail after he makes an inflammatory speech to a large crowd, but before he's elected and that prevents WW2?

None of this solves the underlying issue of there being deep political problems in any country that ends up with this kind of leader getting into power. The hope of free speech supposedly being that someone will eventually put their finger on the real cause of the problems and get people on board with it, rather than an unfortunate group being scapegoated.

> We don’t account for advances in technology, like telehealth and new drugs and devices that lessen the burden on physician visits to maintain health.

Can you give some examples of how other modern countries use telehealth and similar technologies as the basis of their provision of affordable universal healthcare? It has seemed like those countries were able to provide cost-effective healthcare without hand-waving future tech by rather boosting the supply in supply and demand.

Interesting to see the difference in style of old Linus vs new reformed Linus.

Seems like the new style comes across as just heavily disappointed and with a breach of trust, which I guess compared to the plain anger of old is easier to convey without swearing and vivid imagery.

I think I personally would still prefer to receive one of the old style messages, but that's probably just because I better handle people angry with me than disappointed.

That's interesting, makes me want to see the graph of power vs cost for extra error correcting data but with longer refresh cycles on the memory (for that suspend-to-RAM application).

Nope, it just needs a more complicated way of handling the API where you run a Docker container with the client that does the E2E encryption, and you interact with that.

https://smooch.io/whatsapp/

> Someone elsewhere likened it to Galileo. Quillette is more like the Church. It says "the Earth is flat!" How many times do you walk someone through the math of proving the Earth is roundish before you realize it's futile? Unchecked confirmation bias always wins. The best treatment is to starve it of air.

I don't think this is a healthy view for the long term success of a culture built around social justice (the combination of how-often-do-I-have-to-repeat-this with it's-not-my-job-to-educate-you). It's been less than two decades since swinging popular opinion over onto the side of broader rights and already the people who should be the stanchest advocates seem tired of trying to persuade people.

This is a fundamental part of human culture, you have to keep explaining the so-called basics again and again, rather than being exasperated whenever people want it explained for the umpteenth time. Learn from religions, and see how even when Christianity was the absolute dominant Western culture, that they were happy to explain it again and again to anyone that wanted to listen. That is what you need to do if you want to keep your gains and keep everyone on the same page.

What you have is an epidemic of powerful employees abusing their position to take advantage of junior employees.

What seems to be suggested to fight it are tools that would be extremely effective against other junior employees (even if the allegations are untrue), but only middlingly effective against the real problem of powerful employees.

That will understandably lead to push back from junior employees who fear abuse. Offer solutions which would primarily work against powerful employees and would be ineffective against other junior employees and I think there would be much more support.

I think it could be that rather than worshiping complexity some people find it hard to value or respect simple things, and that that leads them on a path to "accidental" complexity. Like when someone find out that a rainbow is just water refracting light, or the sun is just a big ball of gas... that it takes some of the coolness out of it. There could be a tendency like that to find simple systems disappointing.

Or it could just be that people have a certain mental budget for maximum complexity, and they'll try and make sure they spend it all in the belief that it will cover more uses.

Or it could be that complex systems tend to stick around because they are far more immune to random management changes because everyone goes "oooh, we'd better not touch that". Simple systems might becomes the victim of their own ease and get subsumed by a more complex monster.

Regardless of if it's the correct name or not, I think what is meant by a "left-leaning code of conduct" is one that puts an emphasis on providing extra protection for people who come from "historically disadvantaged or underrepresented" groups, ostensibly as part of an effort to help support their presence in open source. Individually however it can feel unfair where insulting language can draw different punishments depending on the relative privilege of the groups involved.

It doesn't change the message he's sending, but it does change how the reader should perceive it. Being at the company longer and in a higher position implies that he has more at stake, and so would require a significant change to be worth leaving. It also would mean he's had longer "indoctrination" into the common Google Culture and that this could be the harbinger of further similar reactions from other long-time Google employees.

While I'm not going to condone those kinds of comments in the workforce or elsewhere, I'm not quite sure what the general justification is for putting "rape analogies" on such a pedestal compared to other major crimes.

Murder - "That went so badly, we just got slaughtered in that meeting"

Rape - "If we aren't careful the competition's going to rape us"

Theft - "We need to put in a plan to steal their customers ASAP"

What throws me is all of those are Big Bad Things, especially murder, but I don't feel like there would be anywhere nearly the same kind of pushback to anything except making a rape analogy. Maybe a slavery analogy would do it as well? People have gone through terrible experiences where someone they love has been murdered etc, so I'm not sure it's just about the level of trauma it can induce.

There is a distinction though between the broad concept of "freedom of speech" and the legal government protection and US specific first amendment. I think there is an equal amount of disingenuousness coming from the side that tries to say that freedom of speech only exists within the context of a government backed right-to-free-speech, rather than as a broader concept itself.