I was waiting for the new spaghetti cowboys to arrive. Good luck guys, but keep in mind that a 1000 cores can do a lot more damage than 3 people can fix.
288 karma · joined January 11, 2019
I would say moderation is by definition editorial, but I have learned to not confuse logic with the law.
Can someone explain what d(3)=(|x|^3+|y|^3)^(1/3) would actually mean as the blog seems to suggest something more profound than the below?
If d=|x|+abs|y} is moving in 2 dimensions, one dimension at a time and d(2)=(x^2+y^2)^(1/2) is moving in 2 dimensions at the same time, d(3)=(|x|^3+|y|^3)^(1/3) would have to mean moving 3 dimensions at once in two dimensional space (as it is missing the 3th position z) and for all n moving n dimensions at once in two dimensional space.
Now pi comes down to the constant calculating circumference. The blog shows we can approximate it best ignoring all other dimensions but those two in two dimensional space. Seems obvious, but that has everything to do with the nature of pi, not with the math.
d=(|x|^3+|y|^3+|z|^3)^(1/3) would approximate pi better in 3 dimensional space than in any other, etc.
Well we expect people and corporations to fix a problem when confronted with it. That is what we expect.
> „Normal“ people will not read this, nor be able to understand, nor gauge or grasp the impact. It’s become way to complex. We can’t simply stop using mentioned services anymore as a society.
Have to give you a pass on "normal" people. I don't know any. I see no reason why we cannot go without the (by the way) unmentioned services or why we cannot change them to be more privacy conscious.
>Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to teach:
No it would be more reasonable to teach that privacy is vitally important to have a functioning society and economy. Anyone claiming different think they can exploit the information disparity between you and them to make money in the short term.
>1. You have no privacy, it is impossible to ensure or guarantee privacy, and there’s no incentive at all for anyone to ensure privacy. (Scott McNeally of Sun said that already in the late 1990s).
Well I respect Scott, but this is not his great moment. Let's change this to be still completely true: You have no property, it is impossible to ensure or guarantee property and there's no incentive at all for anyone to ensure property. Well we did find a way to actually do ensure property. It is called the law (and a government to enforce it). Just an idea to use this tried and tested concept on privacy as well.
>2. There is no security and every kind of security has been, was designed to, or will be compromised.
First this has always been true. Every lock can be picked. Fortunately not everyone can pick a lock. That is the reason why most of us still lock the door.
>3. All your digital information is already public or will become public at some point. (btw: Every top-tier consultancy operates under that assumption)
You mean those top-tier consutancy firms mentiond in this book: "The Big Con" by Muzzucato and Collington, Penguin, 2023? I can see that they sell the assumption, but they are not operating by it. If that were true McKinsey for example would have known their advice to Purdue Pharma would become public and they would lose big on it.
In short people who claim privacy is not important mean: _your privacy_ is not important and they are overly confident they can keep ahead of the information disparity to keep themselves private. See how hard, ironically, Google is working to keep all their information private in a public anti-trust trail.
"Which idiot wrote this crap?
You did!
Which idiot hired me?"
I think this also points to the statistical significance. Code that has been worked over a couple of times and/or has been worked on by different people for all those hard and fringe problems will be better, but also accumulate more comments venting the trouble people had fixing them. It does not seem very interesting.
1. There is nothing (medically) wrong with you. Although I should own a t-shirt saying *) may contain nuts.
2. No you don't procastinate or are lazy for that matter. You probably already moved on to the next 10 things before people can come up with that diagnosis.
3. Yes you are the librarian of the infinite library of unfinished projects. In that you do have the tendency to keep track of all the projects you have not finished and feel inadequate (that moment between projects)
But the honest problem is that projects fizzle when you solve your erebra problem. And that is usually way before anything got made. Let alone finished. Quick win is to ask yourself: What have I learned from this project? And make that the result of the project. But after doing that a couple of thousand times you start to realise: Why am I learning all this stuff if I never use it to create something.
And that is the biggest problem. All your insights never lead to anything being created and that sucks.
Possible solutions ( and I personally do all of them ):
1. Find a job/role/gig where you think of the solutions and let other people implement them. Just always remember that it is no longer your project. You might have thought of something, but without the efforts of others it will never amount to anything, ever. So as long as you can respect the work of others and your own limitations in doing what they do you will do fine. But is harder than you might expect: My rule of thumb is that the moment I think they should be able to solve something on their own I failed.
2. Find more challenging problems. I usually do this by trying to expand something that spiked my interest to make it more generically applicable or asking myself if the problem is actually worth a solution ('faster horses') and if the underlying problem is not more interesting (mobility). This has two advantages: It will keep itching longer and takes you longer to scratch. Less projects to add to your library. You might create, solving your original itch, products that are basically byproducts of the solution you are looking for. Such a product is basically what pays my bills at the moment.
3. For those smaller itchy patches it helps to promise other people something: Present your findings, write a paper, make a POC by an agreed upon deadline. Now you have to be empatic enough to want to meet their deadline and thus create what you promised with all the works that comes with it. That is your result. You also have to be selfish enough to tell people that is where you end your involvement, because it no longer interests you, regardless of the plans they have pursuing this further. That is a tricky balance to strike and I struggle at times and do it wrong.
What ever you do and maybe you have better ideas than the above make sure you get to the point were your projects lead to something being created, because that really makes the difference.
If you read the article and think there is something to it, please read it again and compare all the 'evidence' to the behavior of what you suspect a normal forum user would do: Ask questions? Gather information? Establish rapport? Propose something stupid or dangerous? Comment on the wrong thing? Post something that leads people away from the post you are interested in and have so much people comment on it that your important information disappears. You can get that just by the number of people telling the original poster it is 'off-topic'. Yes you would expect normal users to do all of them some of the time.
If you value your (online) community judge all actions by Hanlon's razor: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". If malice was that easily distinguishable from normal behavior there would be a lot less of it. Don't let anyone tell you you should approach your community with suspicion, because then they are already halfway there in destroying it.
First realise that there won't be a lot to do when you get back. They are not that quick as you say.
Second discuss with the team the problem: If you need to correct all their work when you get back the project will get delayed and hell will be paid/management will be displeased (depending on management culture). So you expect them to do minimale code changes and spend extra time testing. In your absence review each others code changes so you won't have to spend too much time approving when you get back. Empower them.
Third, but long term: If you are the most competent person in the room look for another.
Don't tell your prospects that all companies big and small can fail and don't use data to prove your point. It might all be true, but telling your prospects they are doomed whatever they decide is not getting you to a 'Yes'.
In my case I have niche products that are still largely unique and don't have to compete with bigger organizations. A competition I would lose in a heartbeat if customers had the choice regardless of price or chances of success. I still make sure that I have a decent solution for the 'bus' argument and I am generous with supplying access to the code they need to keep their application running when I do get hit by bus, financials ruin or old age. At best I can say: It worked up till now.
Getting the perjury clause of the DMCA upheld would of course have a chilling effect on sending take-down notices in such a frivolous manor.
Disclaimer: a) I am not a US citizen b) TGIANAL
There is also no opposite to self-censorship: I want to be able to say everything I want without consequence. You say something because you want it to have and audience and thus consequences. Saying you want the consequences, just not the negative ones is saying you want everyone to confirm you are right. Well join the other 7 billion.
The idea of self-censorship is also not innocent because you are robbing people of agency. You actually deny them to choose their own words. The idea of self-censorship requires an external party to declare someone wanted to say something, but he or she is self-censoring, That implies that you know what they think and the absence or presence of words gets filled in with whatever that third party thinks that person wanted to say.
As what is reasonably expected (an this is old): https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
It is not a slippery slope argument, because they have that data and can use it as they see fit. I just suggested 2 ways in which Google can make more money with information people shared with them. Why is it reasonable to expect them not to do it?
Alas you get a lot of extras to go with it: An algorithm decides that you then must be hungry so ads for Arby's (they really can't rely on word of mouth) keep popping up in your navigation.
After three such messages an algorithm decides your wife might be in the market for a divorce lawyer, because in 50%+ percent of the cases this might be a sign of marital disagreement. Your wife's newsfeeds change just a little because she is now deemed pro-divorce with messages about huge settlements and divorce horror stories, because those keep people engaged.
Safe driving...
Asking people to invest their time to actually read extensive information about what your try to say, with no perceived additional benefits to them is just hubris.
Pick your audience or tailor your message to your audience. Don't blame the receiver.
The conditions it is under might make it into more of a front stage, but given that the selfie itself is front stage the fact that you are not hiding making it is very hard to see as "authentic" back stage behavior.
People might use selfies to practice (back stage behavior), but you will normally never see those and what they do present is obviously fit for front stage.
Yes you might walk into someone practicing with selfies, or accidentally see some practice selfies, but that in itself does not provide better or more reliable information than any other incidental back stage information like seeing someone in the shower.
Now if your point was that selfies invite us to perform too much and practice too little than we are in agreement.
I would say taking a selfie is a form of front stage behavior, albeit a more egalitarian one.
On the other hand I am someone who thought a selfie-stick was a tool for punishment for people taking selfies at inappropriate moments.
The fact is that those companies are not telling people what they did wrong and even more persuasive these days not explaining why their apparent transgression is leading to a particular punishment. Or how that transgression fits the punishment. I for one will not subject myself to such a form of tyranny.
In this case even if having your app in TestFlight too long, why is now (3 years in) the time to revoke the app? Having 200 test users is too much. Why not tell people beforehand they exceeded a limit if that is your rule?
Lets say you are invited into a country as a citizen, but the conditions are: You can be punished arbitrarily, even banished, without recourse, harassed, given arbitrary commands by minions. You pay a 30% tax on all your proceeds, but your proceeds are your sole responsibility. There is no right to have your grievances addressed by the tyrant, not even by one of the lower minions. Would you go? I will not. Now say you already find yourself in such a country. I'm sorry for you. I think I would organize and try to collectively have those rights improved.
The claim is this:
> "Using a popular family hatchback running on brand new, correctly inflated tyres, we found that the car emitted 5.8 grams per kilometer of particles."
It does not seem to be a mistake:
> "Compared with regulated exhaust emission limits of 4.5 milligrams per kilometer, the completely unregulated tyre wear emission is higher by a factor of over 1,000."
A tire might way up to 15 kilograms for a 20 inch type. Lets assume 10 kilograms for a normal tire which is on the high side. 4 tires is 40 kilograms. Even if we assume half of the particals are not coming from the tire (but from where?). That still leaves 40,000 / 2.9 = 13793 kilometers for the tires to be completly consumed (weighing nothing anymore). That is definitely not happening.
So without an explanation on where the matter is coming from this does not read right.
I do see some problems with it that were not addressed. The way the demos are setup are by definition an NP!=P problem. It is easy to verify you found the right command, but may be fiendishly difficult to navigate the tree to get there. Menus with sub-menus having sub-menus at least makes it visually clear which paths you have not taken and allow retracing your steps. Something akin to Ctrl-R in shells may be needed to allow you to type certain keywords to find all possible actions.
Options and parameters are not part of a decision tree as they don't specify a logical action that will follow, they just change the action. Those parameters need evaluating the entire progress in the tree to be able to suggest a next available parameter, option and action. Try it with something like ffmpeg. Modelling this to work in a CLUI will evolve into a hard problem very quickly.
The more actions, options, parameters I add as a user the more important it becomes that I can backtrack and correct mistakes. Corrections may or may not have consequences for the position in the tree I already choose. Starting over even from there might not be the right solution in terms of usability if the correction does not necessitate it.
Now Quora would still be fine terminating the partner program with the OP for whatever reason they see fit. What is not okay is that he did not get paid for the questions he asked, because that was the nature of their partnership.
It looks like Quora is trying to avoid paying for a service (questions) they received within a contract (the partner program) they themselves proposed. The term scam does not seem too far fetched.
First of all. Tesla counts the number of miles for every Tesla being involved in an accident. The other figure you quote is for all miles driven by motor vehicles before getting involved in an accident. Given that accidents tend to involve two or more vehicles the number of miles traveled before an accident involving a Tesla without autopilot or safety measures would be closer to 820.000 miles.
In that figure of 479.000 miles commercial traffic is also included. Commercial traffic makes up around 60% of all accidents. We cannot translate this to miles per accident comparable to Tesla, because commercial traffic tends to drive more miles than passenger vehicles do, but there are far less of them, etc. Another big category that needs to be excluded from the general figure is motor cycles, that generous source of donor organs, to make it comparable. Passenger vehicles in general are more safe than the overal figure and thus closer to Tesla's figure.
Second point is that Teslas are hardly part of the second hand or n-hand market yet. It is even a question if Tesla will tracks that data in those markets. In those markets you will see more young people as drivers (something to do with income). They are responsible for a majority of the traffic accidents involving passenger vehicles (something to do with tendencies to discount the future and to overestimate their own capabilities).
Third point is that the really good figure comes from auto pilot, but that only works in places and under conditions that are already far less accident prone like highways under normal weather conditions.
The good news from the figures is that enabling the safety measures make Tesla drivers better drivers: From 1.6 miles to 2.1 miles roughly a 25% increase in miles traveled before an accident. That would lead us in the direction of mandating level-2 automation in all new cars for more safety rather than trying to push for level-5 for some brands.
In answer to your first question. There might not be an insurance against the system failing. The honest answer to what to do then, because someone always needs to ask is: Panic! It might not even be unrecoverable, just really expensive and time-consuming to do so.
The follow-up question would be: Yes it is a risk, yes it is a possible disaster. What do you want to do about it? If your answer is anything more than: We should not have taken on that risk in the first place or lets bet the companies future on the fact that we can fix this. Then it might actually be interesting to listen to. It seems from your comment you resolved it.
As for messaging. I do not agree you should explain the situation on the server. Just let people know they should not touch this ever. As soon as you explain why people will assume their reason to do so will trump whatever reason you gave. If they need to think of all possible disasters that might happen it has more impact than the one you can describe.
Messages like "Before doing anything on this server contact Bob" will eventually lead to Bob receiving a message: "We have done this or that. Just letting you know, but it was after office hours" which he will probably see rushing into the office in the middle of the night because the server is not working anymore. The other type of message: "Don't reboot this server ever! For more information contact Bob" Bob changed because he spend a considerable time saying no and explaining the situation to the sysops team, their manager, their manager's manager, etc. who all thought their priority must trump Bob's. Bob might still be working for the company. He might have tried the better part of his career to get this stain resolved. Nothing bad about Bob.
Just another perspective on that server message. This server might be actually running a real-time legacy interface to one of your biggest customers who pay a 6 figure premium to keep this old thing running, just so they have time to migrate. Which they have been trying to do since the 80's, hence the fact that few people remember why it is there.
I'm not saying this happened here, but it happens a lot more than any of us want. Just keep in mind there might actually be a good reason for the warning, although I would object to the wording. First head the warning. Then figure out why it is there.
First of all you are there to build a replacement service. As long as you do that in the allotted time what happens to the old should not bother you. Focus on your part of the solution.
The fact that you do seem to worry suggests you need something from the old service. Do you have a good design for the new service? Are there details of the old service that you do not know about? It won't be the first time a company has an application that runs complex calculations, but nobody knows how it is done. We actually built black-box applications in the past to replace calculation modules on obsolete hardware.
If you need information from the old system you may have to resort to cloning the input and output preferably on the network level so you don't have to mess with the existing service.
If the replacement service is years out you might suggest to the company to put in a red team. Another person or persons who work on finding out how the service works by running a duplicate on another system, rent it if necessary, and poking at it seeing if they can get comparable results quicker than the replacement service. But that is not you.
There are a couple of things you need to have in place before going live. Make sure you can clone input and output so you can run the old service next to the new one for a while. You don't want to stop the old service the moment you go live, because if anything goes wrong you need to be able to switch back. Even than starving the old service of input might have adverse effects, so cloning is better. If the old service uses external resources, like a database, files, etc. make sure you do not interfere with file locks, sequence numbers,etc. when running in parallel.
Fact in this matter is that the license for the Amazon API does allow the API to be copied. But Oracle did and does not follow the license, because the required attribution is missing. They are therefor not protected by the license. It is like using an illegal copy of Windows and claiming you had the right to use it under the license for the small omission of not having paid for it.
Even if the change the code to include attribution they are still liable for significant damages to Amazon for the period preceding the correction. Amazon can claim to them the attribution is a very significant part of the license agreement: It would deter competitors having to advertise Amazon and tell their customers that their product was actually invented by someone having a competing product.
Google can claim their fair use was actually already common practice, as most of us thought. Even Oracle itself assumed and acted on that assumption that copying APIs was fair use / not copyrightable and did not require following a license agreement, as they did not. Worst case for Google is that they should not have to pay significant damages for something they and others would see as a common mistake and Oracle's reversal complying with the Amazon license is proof that there was no established judicial practice to follow.
So Oracle is in a pickle: Either they claim copying the Amazon API was fair-use, or APIs are not copyrightable and they lose the case against Google. Or they claim that the license of Amazon allowed for copying of the API and they violated that license. The harder they push Google in the later case the bigger the risk Amazon will claim their share of Oracle's pie in return. Better get the spreadsheets out.
1. Theoretical: chaotic and complex are not the same thing. Organized and tidy are neither the opposite from or excluding complex systems. Some very tidy systems can still be mind-boggling complex. Furthermore Chaotic systems have a single underlying order (it might just be impossible to discern), but they are not complex. Complex systems might have multiple orders, none at all or everything in between.
See for an in-depth discussion: The Collapse of Chaos; Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World, Jack Cohen & Ian Stewart, Penguin, 2000.
2. Practical: The amount of tidiness in a complex system does not say anything about its efficiency, but neither does its untidiness. Complex systems might be untidy through sunken costs, like most cities are, revolution, evolution, historical accident, or even attempts to make an ordered system (like a system of law) always leaving some gap. The fact that a complex system exists does not say anything about it being efficient or its fitness for purpose. Like the three year old who thinks the mess is beautiful, but cannot find her favorite plush toy.
Changing complex systems is indeed hard, because different subsystems will interact, have feedback loops, create externalities, exclude external information or are near impossible through sunken costs. But that still leaves the calculation of how much the new system or altered system might be more efficient or better than the current system and what the risks involved are.
Tiding up complex systems has risks, but also benefits even if you don't believe the second law of thermodynamics applies to human created systems. Tidied up systems are more easy to reason about and thus can be more easily fixed, adapted or expanded upon. The act of tiding up has the additional benefit of adding to our knowledge about how a system actually works.
3. This guy works for Uber. The cab company with a computer that wants to uproot the current (complex) systems and replace it with something simpler. Yet fails to turn a profit. Do we need to read something into this article, or did he just not realize he contradicts his employers mission?