notdonspaulding

Well said.

> I said median, not drunk driver.

Right, and I originally said:

> I think one of the reasons there's such an inherent distrust of Tesla's FSD is that when it fails, it fails in scenarios in which people can easily see themselves succeeding.

The above-the-median driver is rationally able to see themselves beating Tesla's FSD. But importantly, even below-the-median drivers are likely to think they can beat Tesla's FSD for as long as the mistakes it makes seem naive and trivially-avoided by them. Human trust will require a higher bar than "beats the median human on 5 KPIs, but still on rare occasions decapitates someone because it doesn't know what a semi truck looks like from the side".

FSD advocates seem to want to focus on the "beats the median human" bit. I'm saying it's unlikely they'll gain much public trust until the "can't recognize a sideways semi" stories die down.

> And you (if you're being rational about it) want them in a Tesla

Right. Rationally, we all want folks who are worse than the state-of-the-art FSD AI to be using FSD. But thinking that the "very low bar" that has to be cleared is drunk drivers misses the point that most drivers are not drunk. So it's much less impressive to a "safe" human driver to clear the low bar.

I think you're right that the bar of "average human on the road's driving skills" is very low. However, I think one of the reasons there's such an inherent distrust of Tesla's FSD is that when it fails, it fails in scenarios in which people can easily see themselves succeeding.

Say, on average, human drivers crash into barricades once out of every 500,000 miles driven. And say Tesla's FSD can beat that number by crashing into barricades once out of every 1,000,000 miles driven, it's still possible (probable?) that many people would trust their own control of the vehicle more than Tesla's FSD AI. And they might be justified in doing so!

Why? Because human-caused accidents are not uniformly distributed among the driving population. Insurance companies have employed actuarial analysts for decades to split the driving population up into buckets of greater and lesser risk. Thus, if you're a 17-year-old male, or an 85-year-old woman, or have several DUIs, you're likely to pay higher premiums than most other drivers.

If you're not in one of those high-risk categories though, it's possible your driving performance exceeds the average, and maybe you might only crash into barricades once out of every 2,000,000 miles driven. In that case, you'd be right to trust your skills ahead of the AI.

My example is contrived. It's possible that the FSD AI leapfrogs even the most skilled human drivers. But until it does, there may be rational reasons for many folks to continue distrusting it.

What people say they will do when there's no cost associated with an action and what people will actually do once a cost IS associated with the same action are frequently 2 different things.

Bob Lutz, in his self-aggrandizing book "Gutz", describes the initial phase of an automobile design project where a survey is conducted asking respondents whether they would prefer a vehicle with heated cupholders. It turned out the percentage of people who responded positively was significantly higher than the percentage of people who ultimately chose to pay for the option in actual sales.

I wonder if a similar effect will be seen regarding people returning to work.

> Why wouldn't an accurately simulated brain be considered a person?

Ah, and here we come to the crux of the matter! What makes a person a person? Is it merely electrochemical activity in a certain type of tissue?

It's important to recognize that this question comes to the border that marks the end of the territory of biology and the beginning of the territory of philosophy. It's possible to charge right through this border (as Stephen Hawking did in his book The Grand Design) but there is a peril in doing so.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/27/physic...

> The attempt to fit consciousness into the material world, > usually by identifying it with activity in the brain, has failed dismally, > if only because there is no way of accounting for the fact that certain nerve impulses > are supposed to be conscious (of themselves or of the world) > while the overwhelming majority (physically essentially the same) are not.

Mea culpa!

I read right over the words you wrote because I'm so used to the phrase interstate commerce and not at all used to seeing intrastate commerce. I wasn't trying to use Article I to argue that the federal government had any right to regulate INTRAstate commerce. Sorry about the mixup.

So, now your original point makes much more sense, and I completely agree with you. Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution reads (emphasis mine):

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes; ...

>> Git should work the way we think it does!

> Hold on, who is "we"?

I'm not the GP, but I agree that git should work the way "we" think it does, and I think a reasonable definition of "we" in the context of Git Users is probably SaaS/Startup/SMB software engineers.

Git is popular enough to have many thousands of different use cases, but I would speculate that the distribution of use cases probably follows the distribution of public Github/Gitlab repos pretty closely.

> Personally speaking, git works the way I think it does. Granted, I've written my own (simple) libgit2 frontend, ...snip...

> Am I blinded by the knowledge I gained from writing my little tool and learning about git internals?

Yes.

> I get that a tool you need to learn the internals of to use is probably a bad tool, but is asking git users to understand the contents of the OP blog post really too much?

Yes. Or rather, knowing git's internals is incredibly helpful if you've already decided to use git and now you're deciding what workflow to use to develop software, because you can match your mental model of how to use git to the way git naturally wants to represent your stored work.

However, if you come to git with an existing mental model of software development, and that existing mental model includes the idea of "branches" or "diffs" or "immutable history", then you're going to quickly and repeatedly run into stumbling blocks as your mental model doesn't match git's internal model. Git can do branches and diffs and immutable history, of course, but they're a leaky abstraction on top of the concepts git really cares about.

> Maybe I'm just a git fanboy...

Sure, nothing wrong with that!

> The reporter should have probably cared a little more, during the trip, as he had entered a contract to provide a certain kind of experience to these kids, and he clearly failed at that.

I'm not sure he "clearly failed at" providing "a certain kind of experience to these kids". The program sounds like a way for rich families to give their teenage children an international learning adventure trip with close exposure to world-wise adults. The focus of this trip was on rural health and included shaman rituals and hiking around Macchu Pichu. These teenagers intellectually engaged a decades-long journalist and it sounds like he was giving them a masterclass in critical thinking. That they were unprepared to have their thoughts contradicted is a sign of something else, but not his failure to help guide them through an adventure trip on rural health.

Fair enough. But can we at least agree that the line between the 2 examples is so fine that the monologue comedian on a satirical TV program had to run his joke by his lawyer's lawyer in order to make sure he was standing on the right side of it?

True, but if that's the metric we're basing our language choice off of then we should all go back to PHP.

On the one hand, Google deplatformed Parler by blocking their app from the Play Store, and on the other hand it continues to be "cool with" 3rd-party content on Youtube which is "openly calling for violence against and murder of elected officials".

https://youtu.be/jRLH8E_CpP0?t=205

For the record, I'm absolutely fine with Google deciding what content stays and what content goes when it comes to their hosting infrastructure. But in so doing, they need to retain legal culpability for the content that remains.

Judges deciding cases based on what the law says, free from fear of political reprisal is the intended feature. Lifetime appointments get you that (or very nearly to it). If you know of a strictly better way to get the same feature, what is it?

I think you find this amazing, in large part, because in 2021 the American culture (and to an extent, the global culture) has equated wealth with corruption. If somebody has wealth, then they must have done something distasteful to get it. The wealthier they are, the more people they must have exploited to gain their wealth. So the logic goes.

This is wrong-headed but pervasive thinking. In reality, rich people are just people. Politicians are just people. Celebrities are just people. All people are corrupt to some degree, and some people are corrupt to a large degree.

It's easy for you to imagine a very wealthy person slipping into amoral hedonism, but I contend that their wealth has little to do with it. I once visited a rural Siberian village where a significant contingent of the older men wandered around town drunk. It was so commonplace that 10-year-olds in the community could tell you which of the men were angry drunks, and which ones could be led by the hand back to their homes. Those men lived on food rations from the government, and the first thing they would do when they got their ration of bread was to take it to the local convenience store and trade the bread for vodka. There are probably lots of reasons why someone would wallow in drunkenness for months at a time, but one reason is that they're just following whatever desires they have at any moment in time. Amoral hedonism isn't strictly a rich man's game.

IDK anything about the pentagon, but as for why Pence's call would have more gravity than Senators is fairly obvious: he's the second-in-command of the executive branch of the government. Emergency military mobilization is much more the prerogative of the executive than the legislative branch.

This.

I can't figure out how to explain to Junior Devs (who have only ever known git), that they have a concept of a branch in their head that doesn't match the concept their tool of choice is giving them.

We talk about "branches" as logical sets of changes. We give them meaningful names, we construct the concept of Pull Requests and code reviews around the concept of a branch. We later refer to Feature X as having landed in master from branch Y. But git doesn't have any of those semantics. It has lots of ways of dealing with commits, and a facade of a branching model is just one more way of dealing with commits. Branches are not a first-class concept in git. And certainly not like they are in our minds.

However, git is amazing at what it does! And if I was running the world's most popular OS kernel development team and was expecting to receive hundreds of patches a day via email from developers in whom I have limited trust, I would definitely start with git's model and change the way my brain works to match its semantics.

Instead, I find myself on a small team of high-trust coworkers who all talk about branches as if they really exist in our git history, and somehow I'm the crazy one for pointing out that every time we hit a problem with this mismatch the fact that we're using git is the reason that we can't have nice things.

> Upping the ante indiscriminately only continues to make the > world even more unequal and inaccessible for the people who > need your products the most.

Ah, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need?"

My general advice for anyone who has a little spare time at work and is looking for how to improve their company but doesn't know where to start is:

Take out the garbage.

By which I mean, everybody has a part of their job that they just don't like to do. It's a necessary chore, but not fun or interesting or exciting in any way. Look around you for that kind of work that's already being done by your management or your peers. Take that task off of their plate (most folks will gladly give it to you) and do it for a while, and then see if there's a way to eliminate it, automate it, or otherwise improve the experience of doing the job.

Especially as a software person, the amount of power you have to take little parts of the business that are rough and make them smooth is tremendous. Taking out the garbage is just an easy way to get started helping out.

I'll say this also applies to your first few weeks/months in a new codebase. Find the little problems that everyone else is ignoring because they have bigger things to worry about and tackle those for them. Beyond being helpful to the team, it helps you learn the territory of the codebase more quickly than you otherwise would.

Investigative journalism at its finest.

The parent comment is confused. NYC mesh doesn't use actual laser beams, they use a cheap 5Ghz TDMA solution made by Ubiquiti called Litebeam. Interference can be a big issue for this equipment, especially in an urban environment with a high noise floor.

(No affiliation with NYC folks, just a WISP guy handing out the basics)

Ubiquiti makes gigabit speed wireless backhaul devices in the unlicensed 24Ghz band. It's the AF24HD. They can go several miles, but are susceptible to the signal dropping in the rain depending on your climate.

MikroTik makes some 60Ghz point to point gigabit radios that can supposedly go for 2km.

Finally, many commercial providers of E-band devices (licensed 70-80Ghz spectrum) sell gigabit capable radios that can go a couple of miles.

Any of those seem like good options for an urban building in need of better internet service.

Doesn't it?

You arbitrarily picked 16 possible photorealistic faces out of a total solution space of what? Millions?

Wouldn't the balance of probability be on someone in the general population of humans more closely resembling one of your 16 candidate images than any of your candidates resembling the Ground Truth image?

Doesn't the problem get both better and worse as you scale your N up from 16? That is, it would be better because one of your candidates is more likely to match the Ground Truth, but it would be worse because you've also widened your net for catching false positives?

This is a great essay, and worth the read. The first part is descriptive in nature, and I highly recommend reading that at least through the "Parenthood" section.

The article is short on prescriptive advice, however, and it really loses some of its steam because of it. This is partly due to the authors frank, humble admission of ignorance about how to build a culture that honestly evaluates itself, an admission which is admirable.

But the prescriptive section also seems weakened because it is devoid of any consideration of religion and spirituality on culture. Both in history as well as the present, one of the "experiments" the author could refer to is the removal of religion from all aspects of public life.

Still, this essay does much to point out the impropriety of our Current Culture emperor running around in the nude, and for that, it's worth the read.

As a man who's been married for 15+ years, I would absolutely advise young couples to consider the disciplines and policies they expect their relationship to abide by in much the same way managers and employees discuss their policies and procedures. "Talk freely", yes, but also, as this article so correctly points out, understand the effect your language has on your relationships (direct reports, friends, spouses, family members) and make sure to not treat heavyweight issues with an air of flippancy or triviality.

My wife and I decided, before we got married, that divorce was off the table for us. Understanding that it is not even an option for me (and trusting/believing my spouse that it's not an option for her) gives us so much stability to launch into uncomfortable topics and conversations with each other. If we got into a habit of treating that topic lightly, I could easily see many instances over the past decade where life has gotten hard, we would be in the middle of a stressful situation, and we would have doubted each other's commitment.

There's a broad range of experience out there in marriages, so it's likely possible to have that same stability while regularly joking about divorce, it just seems like a foolish thing to risk so huge a downside (actual divorce) for so little an upside (getting to joke about divorce).

Bringing this back to the article, that's the same idea at play. For the manager to restrain themselves from a few key topics which are inappropriate for them to joke about, they avoid a huge minefield of stressful issues for them and their direct reports.

Just lightly skimmed the docs, so I am probably missing something. Do all the consumers of gila config use the singleton class instance and just call gila.get() everywhere?

If I'm just focusing on how to make my code easier to read by my fellow developers, I would want to see something like this be based off of a dictionary-style API, that could be imported and used like so:

    import gila as config
    bucket_name = config["bucket_name"]

Since .get() is already so close to this API, I wonder if you considered this and rejected it for a specific reason?

> What you're saying is that your personal "principle" is more important that facts.

What uk_programmer's original argument was that even if it worked, even if we could afford it, it would be wrong to make uk_programmer work for $5000/mo. and then take $1000/mo. of their money and give it to someone else.

Having a factual discussion about the implementation may be interesting, and may be worth discussing, but the argument has already been laid out on moral grounds. If you're going to continue answering the "How?" question and ignoring the "Why?" question, you're going to keep finding that you're talking across purposes from the GP.

(BTW, I think your "factual" case is severely flawed as well, but that's a story for another time.)

Mirus Research | ONSITE | Normal, IL | Frontend, Backend, UI/UX/Designer | Full-Time

Mirus is a small software company in the Midwest that builds Enterprise products in a SaaS startup style. We have total control of our tech stack like a SaaS startup, but we have the stability and scale that comes along with having large Enterprise customers.

We are looking for frontend engineers (new stuff in VueJS, some legacy React), backend engineers (NodeJS and Python, with some Rust sprinkled in), and designers (ideally who can work in HTML/CSS, but we can outsource the Illustrator->CSS workflow). If you've can demonstrate some talent with designing and/or developing modern web applications, we're interested in talking to you.

We have a pleasant office environment including: standing desks, big monitors, couches, portable whiteboards, kitchen, free soda, team lunch on Wednesday.

I direct the app-dev team, you can reach out to me directly at don@mirusresearch.com or to our jobs inbox jobs@mirus.io

To the best of my knowledge, Comcast is running dual-stack v4 and v6. The GP was talking about running a purely v6 network, and pointing out that it wasn't yet feasible. Your example of Comcast doesn't really fit the bill because Comcast already has a v4 network to all of their customers, and they are not migrating customers to a solely-v6 network.

This is the chicken-and-egg problem that all new networks are facing with regard to IPv6 adoption. In order to have a usable network, you have to support IPv4 to all endpoints. But once you have v4 at all endpoints, the incentive to run v6 is greatly diminished.

As always, v6 needs a "killer app" that Grandma wants to use that is unavailable over the v4 internet, and then network administrators could use the actual demand from their customers as a justification for moving to v6. Unfortunately, at the moment, the list of v4-only must-have apps is still greater than the list of v6-only must-have apps.

You quoted GP as saying:

> > "There is no moral issue with inequality"

Then you replied with:

> Well, there is. <snip some unrelated discussion about Regulatory Capture [0]>

At no point did you make an argument that there is a principled, moral problem with Wealth Inequality. My "diatribe" was simply pointing out that there was a moral argument to be made, but that you weren't making it, and instead you were actually agreeing that there's nothing wrong with a little inequality now and again.

Personally, I don't care what stance you take, I was just trying to help you decide on a better one than you were taking. ;-)

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