3,223 karma · joined January 31, 2010
Quote I like:
"Make game of that which makes as much of thee" -- Omar Khayaam
Contrast that with how Valve handled Steam. Valve set no restriction on game publishers. Publishers were never forced into taking advantage of digital distribution at all. They were able to preserve all of their retail distribution contracts by screwing the customer. Digital distribution is profoundly cheaper, enables release of games a week sooner, could rely on Steams DRM without needing third party extra DRM, etc. These are all things Valve could have required publishers to take advantage of to benefit customers. But they didn't. They gave publishers carte blanche and let them do absolutely anything they wanted. If another company had been the one to become the dominant platform, it could have been more like the iTunes situation.
This is also the thing which guarantees Steams eventual downfall. Music publishers considered, and a couple even tried, building their own digital distribution service. But, the publishers were incapable (because of institutional restrictions) of building a competent competitor that would be appealing to consumers. The publishers board wouldn't permit things like individual track sales, 99 cent price caps even for popular singles, etc. Steam is a different story. Since there are literally no restrictions on publishers at all, there is also no reason for publishers to refrain from building their own separate platforms and cutting out Valve's cut of the sale. Gamers have established that they are more than willing to install and use however many launchers as necessary, so there is almost no reason for big publishers to use Steam rather than just building their own.
Restore as much autonomy to especially adolescent students as possible while still accomplishing education. Stop driving kids into a corner and making them feel so desperate and trapped that they're willing to throw their own life away just to do a little damage and escape.
I think it is good for people to be interested in and discussing the nature of oppression and its consequences. As I see it, oppression is incremental, with people as a group generally responding fairly predictably as it increases. I think this is biologically rooted, stemming from fundamental drives toward autonomy. Any time autonomy is violated, regardless of intent, it is a small bit of harm. Sometimes, that harm is justified. If you pull someone out of the way of a speeding car, you have saved their life by violating their autonomy, but the tiny harm still exists and has consequences. These harms accumulate (though I am sure it is a complicated process where the harms are alleviated by other acts of autonomy, so not purely inevitably accumulative).
Just looking at history and at various situations in which oppression occurs (workplaces, prisons, schools, etc, not just nations) it seems to me there are broad patterns. When peoples autonomy is heavily infringed, they concentrate more on the forms of autonomy which are more difficult or impossible for whatever authority is in play to prevent. They express themselves through their dress, through body modification (piercings, tattoos, branding, scarification, etc), through their language with development of new slang or codes, and can even engage in self-harm (cutting, anorexic starvation, bulimia, binge drinking or eating, harmful drug abuse, etc) to exemplify that they still control something.
If the untouchable authority continues to increase the control it exerts, the people begin seeking to establish an alternative sense of a power hierarchy they can influence. They engage in interpersonal conflict, seeking to establish that they are stronger, better, more well-liked, more pious, more loyal, etc, than those around them.
As the oppression increases, those power hierarchies become more formalized and gangs (or cliques, brotherhoods, clubs, etc) form, with members adopting the gangs norms and moral codes as the authority they respect and are loyal to. They cling to their tribal identity, and see the actions of the group as expressions of their own desires, increasing their sense of autonomy.
As it gets more oppressive, the gangs begin to vie for turf or control or influence. Gang wars emerge. These aren't always literal guns-in-the-street or shivs-in-the-exercise-yard wars and can be done through proxy competitions of all sorts. Anything which the participants mutually agree to can be an analog, but in situations with such a high degree of oppression, violence is often the only thing left. A couple warring prison gangs can't really organize peaceful means of establishing dominance as no one has enough autonomy to do so and the overarching authority has a vested interest in not acknowledging the gangs as legitimate organizations.
In the final stage, the gangs dissolve/join and emerge as an army. They rise and destroy the oppressive authority through the only means the authority has made possible - brute violence. Democracy was revolutionary in its provision of a peaceful means of destroying the controlling authority through electing those who can change things. Every oppressive state that I am aware of has gone through these different phases. There has never been a happy, prosperous police state and I don't think that is a matter of just not getting it right. I think the basic human drive to autonomy would make such a state unlivable even if run by infinitely beneficent people and with every restriction being made in the honest best interests of those being controlled.
The 'inefficiencies' in law enforcement where not everyone is surveilled at all times, which enables some laws to be broken, is not a flaw. It's a feature of the system. And a valuable one. Every ratchet click towards catching every single infraction squeezes people tighter. We've seen in schools what happens when you load the place with cameras, have cops roaming the halls arresting kids for insubordination, requiring ID badges be carried at all times, restricting dress, speech, affectionate contact, etc. Some people will snap and be made to feel so desperate that they are willing to die just to do some damage. What happens when that sort of infrastructure comes to every workplace and every public place including the sidewalk?
If you were building a bridge and you hired unqualified engineers, deprived them of tools they needed, ignored them when it came time to determine scheduling, didn't follow established regulations and standards, etc, the companies executives would be prosecuted for criminal negligence and be sent to prison. If software is involved, however, the situation couldn't be more different. It's an issue that has been debated for well over a decade in the ACM at least. Companies don't want to have to pay more for talent, and most software engineers don't want to raise the barrier to entry. The real danger is that if the software industry waits too long to establish some way of handling these issues, some public tragedy will inspire a kneejerk government response that results in a suffocating set of standards that makes everyone unhappy.
None of the things you 'buy' will be fungible because they will all be discrete licenses locked to you personally and have no actual 'value.'
Does it sound to anyone else like the author would benefit tremendously from learning the Lambda Calculus? It seems to me to be a disproof of the authors contention that a 'definite value' is needed at some point.
This sounds like a terrible idea. Especially given the nature of Javascript, this basically would mean that you would have to write every single bit of code to be re-entrant. What if you 'perform' and then the 'resume' doesn't happen until every single assumption made about the entire program state for the entirety of the function in which the perform occurs has been invalidated? After doing a 'perform', you would have to operate under the presumption that nothing done in the first portion of the function has any relevance any longer, no? The enumerateFiles example later in the article is an even better example. It performs in multiple places, but carries on like it's a normal function, not considering that at each of those performs, the entire state of the program could be changed, and none of the conditions established prior to those lines can be relied upon to still hold.
Lack of availability of data and code should be an immediate disqualifier from publication for research. In any field. There is no substantial difference between withholding source code or data and withholding experimental procedures or list of materials tested. I can only think that the people who withhold such things are either actively malicious or are completely ignorant of the stupendous danger of cutting corners in science. Given the history we have to work with, it's pretty clear that the distance from cutting a corner in a way that seems harmless to the deaths of millions of people is very short. This is not something people should trifle with.
Have you considered Patreon?
When you paint a medium or platform with a broad brush, and chastise them for not censoring it to your liking, you should at least check the alternative you're recommending is at least as censorial.
YouTube is a key factor in Alphabet exercising the cultural 'guidance' that Eric Schmidt argues is not only Googles responsibility but moral obligation. For people who agree with Schmidt and disagree with the position that the public should be permitted to decide their own future, good or bad, it will be impossible to gain their support. Make no mistake, that viewpoint is the one that has supported every monarchy, dictatorship, theocracy, and non-democratic social structure throughout history. Political scientists call is Conservatism with a capital C, whereas the view that the public should play a role in their own governance and decide their own fate, for good or ill, is the alternative that drove the American Revolution, French Revolution, and countless blood-soaked revolutions across the globe. It won every single one of those wars. But it, too, lost to Google.
Just consider, if 70+% of the public today believed that interracial marriage was offensive and disgusting, which was true when interracial marriage was legalized by the Supreme Court in the 1960s, Google would deplatform anyone who agreed with the legalization of interracial marriage in order to defend that status quo. They do not seek to provide an open, global platform that can host or play a part in public debate about serious issues. They seek to exercise cultural guidance as Eric Schmidt sees fit. It has been the public which has reliably improved over time and progressed while still containing contingents of nuts and extremists. And it has progressed not despite that, but because of it. No closed and centrally managed society in history has become more progressive except through dreadfully bloody revolutions that destroyed its management.
That is extremely unlikely and borders on impossible. AVs have some profound things working against them. They share the problem airplanes have. Human beings are abysmal at risk estimation, and a very large factor of the estimation they do is whether they have personal control. It doesn't matter that planes are much safer than driving, the fact that people don't have direct control of the aircraft makes them feel unsafe to the point that some people are paralyzed by their fear of flying. The same will be true of AVs, and for the same (un)reasons.
But I have my own doubts that it will even get far enough for that to pose a serious problem. We have a more general problem with technology in our society. It is nearly unanswerable to the law. Take the Toyota "unintended acceleration" scandal from a few years ago for example. Investigation of that issue determined firmware flaws were the cause, and led to the deaths of over a dozen people. The criminal court case against Toyota unearthed that while the automotive industry had coding practices that established 'required' and 'suggested' techniques, lists of around 100 practices. Toyota followed 4 of them. Firmware developers working for Toyota did not even have access to a bug tracker at all. They did not have access to static analysis tools. They had no role in determining scheduling.
They were found 'not guilty' for criminal negligence. The reason given by the court was that because the problem involved software, criminal negligence was impossible. No standards exist governing software, and therefor no company can be held criminally responsible regardless of their practices. During the civil case, they were found guilty and responsible for the deaths, but before the jury could award damages, Toyota settled with the victims families.
That legal precedent is terrifying. The first AV to market will inevitably be the one that cuts the most corners and is rushed the most in its development. When it kills someone, as is basically guaranteed to happen by simple statistics, the public will be paying more attention than they did to the Toyota case. And when the public at large hears that tech company executives are literally above the law, the outrage and consequences will likely be swift and severe. Sensing political opportunity, the legislators will descend and could very well end up dictating what language must be used, what coding standards must be followed, what tools must be used (you know the tool vendors will be lobbying hard), etc. The ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) has been discussing this issue for years, debating the potential merits and pitfalls of establishing a licensing system for software engineers. Thus far, the discussion always ends with 'companies would have to pay more for licensed developers and the cost of labor must be contained.' The looming pitfall of avoiding certification and licensing, however, is that government will step in and do it themselves which is virtually guaranteed to enact the greatest pain on the software industry.