kolektiv

There's a lovely walk in the UK around Lingmoor Fell which has a famous narrow squeeze between a rock and a cliff face called Fat Man's Agony. There's a good photo about half way down this blog post: https://www.walkmyworld.com/posts/lingmoor-fell-side-pike

Very likely. I remember reading a while back about developers who thought of rendering things on the server side as novel, which was absolutely wild to someone who was writing web pages before JS was a thing! It's such a shame because HTTP + HTML is actually a very, very simple system to learn with literally decades of hard-won knowledge baked in (particularly HTTP and surrounding standards). People end up inventing incredibly complex solutions to problems that could have been alleviated by reading a few RFCs.

It is amazing how quickly a simple, traditional, "collection of pages" type website actually works if you don't do annoying things to slow it down. Most websites would be absolutely fine if a) HTTP was used reasonably well to set things like cache headers, and so (as mentioned in the article) and b) if a load of user-irrelevant stuff like tracking and advertising code wasn't thrown in as well. A simple page with standard HTML, passably optimised assets where needed, and only the JS needed for actual functionality, should be almost instant on most modern connections.

Just to note that in most places at the moment (unless you turn up in that red baseball cap...) the attitude to most Americans is likely to be a kind of horrified pity (again, unless you start saying how great it all is). Most people are generally aware that Trump doesn't have universal support, and unlike your own media apparently, we do get coverage of protests and so on. Getting back into your own country though, yeah that might be a problem. Sorry.

From the outside, it doesn't look like much of the rest of your country agrees with you.

Because they're not perfect, and they're going to lobotomise societal ability to invent if we're not actually careful with them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43504459

And without any traditional software engineers, who's going to check that those test cases actually do anything useful and verify the important properties of the system? It doesn't matter how many unit tests your Therac-25 has if none of them test the thing that matters.

As if the person struggling with the mess will have the requisite skill levels to even recognise a mess!

> "It pits two dramatically different political systems—one democratic, the other authoritarian—against each other."

Mmmm, it feels like that distinction is becoming a little less stark/relevant as things progress.

Agreed - I'm also a European (well, geographically, no longer EU unfortunately).

What do you propose as an alternative? That people should have listen to/host a certain percentage of unpopular views regardless of will? There is nothing stopping you creating your own platform, or finding one where you're welcome - if that fails to get much traction, it's probably because your message isn't very popular, and the people opposed to it perhaps weren't a minority.

What is it that you should do with, let's say, Nazis? Should the rest of society not make it clear that they consider them abhorrent?

Which of the things in the list contained in the article do you either a) deny are happening or b) consider to be unimportant/trivial? They've presented a concrete set of troubling actions, you've just thrown a banal personal attack. If you're going to argue that this is wrong, actually make an argument.

Oh absolutely - both are already quite apparent.

Like a lot of countries, the constitutional set of checks and balances was predicated on the fact that the majority of those involved were basically trying to "do the right thing". It's effectively a state-level gentleman's agreement, where it is assumed that any bad actor is in the minority, and can be dealt with while they remain the minority.

This falls apart if they're not the minority - i.e. you failed to deal with them while they were a minority. There were levers designed expressly to deal with things like this - impeachment, etc. - they weren't used because one side thought that it would play out in their favour. As they will probably learn, it plays out in nobodies favour.

The ACSH is not a credible source of unbiased reporting, in any sense.

Quite - so far the tech community (at the top level), with a few exceptions, has shown itself quite willing to bend itself to whatever is required as long as it can carry on making money. The cowardice involved is apparent, do not look to corporations as your potential protectors. They've never turned out to be before, they're not going to be this time either. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_...

Well, you seem to be rhetorically asking a question, so... Your implied answer would seem to have to be yes to support your point, in which case, would you care to give similar examples? What free speech suppression are you thinking of and how was it enacted?

"Give me the man and I will give you the case against him" [0]

It isn't that they're discussing anything which would traditionally be considered risky or out of bounds - that's the whole point. It's that they're discussing anything to do with an organisation which has made it quite clear that if it disagrees with you, it will find some way to make your life miserable. Even if it doesn't disagree with you today, who knows what it will disagree with tomorrow? This is the absolute classic way of instilling fear in a population, the original chilling effect - when you don't know what will be forbidden tomorrow, better to say nothing today.

Your latter point on assassination attempts is also very odd. It conflates some broadly disconnected things (an actual attempt on a presidential candidate) with an apparent murder based on political views, two unrelated but very direct consequences which you could perhaps correlate through the types of people targeted. On the other hand you completely ignore the wider systemic violence inherent in stripping people of jobs, healthcare, social security, etc. Do you think those actions will have no consequences? That no deaths will result? Just because a chain of action might have more than one link, doesn't mean the consequences can be dismissed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_the_man_and_I_will_giv...

See my comment to a sibling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43132279 - there's a few simple little functional objects out there which make this kind of process quite easy.

I did something similar using these: https://eu.aqara.com/products/aqara-cube-t1-pro (or rather, an earlier iteration). Just Zigbee, nothing too complex, and then you hook it into something which knows how to interpret the events it sends (or events + current state if you want it to be a little more contextually smart). I generally tried to centralise the smarts, dumb devices and a smart interpreter always worked out more robust than clever devices. It's amazing how many combinations of actions you can indicate just by shaking/tapping/turning/flipping - more than enough to do the things you commonly do with one actuator (a light or set of lights for example).

> I saw political correctness arise. When I started college in 1982 it was not yet a thing. Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it. It was still not a thing when I started grad school in 1986. It was definitely a thing in 1988 though, and by the early 1990s it seemed to pervade campus life.

> What happened? How did protest become punishment? Why were the late 1980s the point at which protests against male chauvinism (as it used to be called) morphed into formal complaints to university authorities about sexism?

Wait, what? I feel like I'm not hearing this right, but this feels a lot like implying "people should be able to complain about things, as long as there's no consequences of those complaints". It goes on with:

> A new set of moral rules to enforce was exciting news to a certain kind of student. What made it particularly exciting was that they were allowed to attack professors.

Really? You think they just like attacking professors, that this is, in and of itself, exciting, rather than... Oh, let's say: Seeing a professor who has been actively misogynist towards you face some consequences for that? They just like to attack, with no cause at all?

I'd agree with that if I hadn't had commercial products written in Go crash in production. They're the kind of errors that slip through the net, and "it's easy to fix" is shall comfort at 2am staring at a downstream 500 error.

I'd heard of it as a thing some years ago, but never actually saw it "in the wild" until I was skiing in Norway over Christmas a few years ago. The hotel had it on in one of the lounges, which filled with a variety of nationalities to watch it, notably lacking the British. We're quite mystified.

Is there a deadlocked thread that should have rendered the 'n'?

Don't forget the very real and horrifying links with eugenics and the use of IQ testing to justify sterilisation and worse! It's the gift that keeps on giving.

Oh, you're right actually - mea culpa. I was distracted by the Camp Nou renovation, you're spot on. Although I'm sure Barca will have something equally wondrous.

The updated Barcelona stadium has a similar idea but even more dramatic - the whole pitch is lowered underground into a chamber with sun lights, irrigation etc. so that the stadium can be used for concerts, etc. Quite impressive, to say the least.

I agree entirely on Le Corbusier, while I love the eventual outcome of his work in many senses (aesthetically certainly), his approach to actual people was (as you say) far less humane than Alexander. Alexander I think saw himself as a part of "the people" - from what I know of Le Corbusier, I don't imagine he did.

I've not yet read The Oregon Experiment (it's in one of the waiting piles) but I've skimmed it. Funnily enough, the comparison you make around changing budgeting processes to enable smaller projects, having users working as part of planning, etc. reminds me of some of the original intents of agile before it was co-opted. For agile to work it couldn't just be isolated as software delivery - it had to change the organisations it worked with/within. I remember having just such an argument many years ago about governments building software using ostensibly "agile" approaches, and yet still requiring three-year budget approaches from the national treasury - they simply weren't compatible!

That final quote is wonderful, and I do feel the same about software in many ways - all the true wonder of computers and the things they can do for people will never really benefit everyone fully unless it spans the national, the corporate, and the personal.

That's an excellent summary, and I think it explains what many people (myself absolutely included) got a bit wrong when patterns first became popular in software development some years ago. While I managed to avoid the trap of pattern-itis and try to fit everything into some pattern or other, I still worked with the oversimplification that patterns were simply about a language, a way of communicating. DDD emphasised that very strongly, and it has value, but to see it as only that means missing the vast scope of the original work.

I think most people read books on software patterns and heard about the original inspiration, and (without having read it) assumed it was the same "but buildings". In reality, it is as much a work of philosophy and sociology as it is about architecture - it's about lives and how people fit together more than how bricks fit together. It stands in a long tradition, Le Corbusier, for example, deriving systems for living and modular approaches to constructing space such as the Unité d'Habitation.

It would be fantastic if we could get software people to read this kind of thing before they see what it's inspired in the software world - there's so much more to learn from disciplines older than ours (which is effectively all of them). A more comprehensive theory of building software systems (based on the human aspects, the social, etc., rather than the dry economic and project-management aspects comprising most formal books on such things) seems like a significant step in our little world.

I know we're not supposed to joke here but damn it I'm upvoting that anyway.