ryandrake

> Saying that what happens on the internet doesn't actually matter nowadays is clearly untrue given even just the most cursory look at the state of the world today.

I mean, you can still have this: by 1. Not being Chronically Online and 2. Not worrying so much or watching what is going on online.

I’ve managed to keep the separation between “online” and “the real world.” Mostly by just not participating or caring about social media. Online only invades Real Life to the extent that you allow it to.

There might be someone over on Instagram “canceling” me right now! I have no idea because I don’t even have an account there.

Yea, this letter could have been written about garden variety "suspected cheating" 20 years ago. And the professor's attitude is the same as a couple of professors I remember back then:

Prof: "I know you cheated."

Student: "How do you know it, can you prove it?"

Prof: "I have ways, trust me I know."

Student: "I know the material, I'll re-take the test right in front of you if you want."

Prof: "Either admit that you cheated and get a F, or don't admit and I'll send you to the school's academic integrity department."

When I took my Freshman year undergrad programming course decades ago, I had already been programming in that language for at least three years. It would have been quite painful to have to deliberately not do things I already know how to do because "I didn't learn it yet."

This was definitely a problem in classes before AI. I had a number of infuriating teachers who insisted on failing me for doing X, because "you're going too fast and we haven't gotten to X technique yet."

All-my-tokens-ar-gon

If the knife was deliberately marketed and sold specifically to someone who the company knew would use it to stab someone, then, yes, the knife company shares part of the guilt.

Often people ignore scale. N=1 is OK, therefore, N=1billion is OK. Same flawed argument as: "It's OK for one police officer to watch one street corner for the purpose of observing crime; therefore it's equally OK to have cameras recording every street corner in the city 24/7, for all purposes. Same thing!"

Nothing in my comment proposed that, but in general, I'd like to see more institutions that benefit people uniformly and equally, and fewer institutions that provide benefits inversely proportion to need.

Your comment is now gray (struck a nerve I suppose) but it's right. I hate the tired "The stock market benefits common folks like you and me!" line. It goes unchallenged because it's almost "technically correct" but it ignores proportion. The stock market does not benefit all people uniformly, it benefits people in proportion to how already-rich and already-invested they are. And, at least in the USA, approximately 50% of people don't have any stocks at all, including indirectly through retirement accounts or pensions. So, invested capital benefits about half of us, and disproportionately those at the very top.

Yea, we see somewhere between 50-75% flake. You have to invite a LOT of people to end up with a few showing up. Without a way to post the Sankey diagram:

Out of 30 people invited to a typical house party, I'd say maybe 10 respond that they'll come. Out of those 10, 3-5 will actually come. Out of the 20 people that didn't reply, maybe 2-3 of those will show up unannounced. So you need to invite at about a 3:1 ratio.

I think a lot of people might think influenza is just a more severe cold, and therefore confuse the two, assuming their cold is "The Flu" because it's worse than usual.

That's what my post was about though: You're not really talking about actual crime--you're talking about your own perception/feelings.

By all measurements and all sources of data available, violent crime has been absolutely plummeting since around 1991. Property crime is plummeting in direct parallel. Yet, nearly every year, a large majority of people (~66% or so) who are polled believe that crime is higher this year than it was last year.

We measure actual crime and we also poll people about their feelings. The large difference between these two doesn't mean that the measurement of actual crime is flawed. It just means that people are not informed, or if they are informed, they are letting their perceptions and feelings override the actual information. We shouldn't be making public policy based on how people feel.

A few sources:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1603/crime.aspx

Whenever I go to one of my kid's friends' birthday parties, it's basically split into two groups: 1. Boomers / GenX "the grandparents" sitting together drinking beer and socializing, and 2. GenZ / Millennials "the parents" sitting alone scrolling their phones.

I think we are just fundamentally disagreeing on what "reality" means. My reality comes from measurement by experts, reports and documentation--hopefully broad, impartial, and highly cross-sectional studies. Yours appears to be about people's everyday perception and lived experience. But lived experience is like looking through a keyhole. It's never going to be complete and applicable broadly. But people believe it's reality because they hear it somewhere or they see a tiny slice of it with their eyes. Your keyhole view of Columbus shapes a broader idea of reality that "crime is rampant everywhere".

Even if these keyhole slices of reality were not being fed by right-wing propaganda (let's assume for the sake of argument that there is no right-wing propaganda at all), it's still not a reality that is applicable broadly across the country.

As an example we saw this during COVID. "Nobody around me that I know personally has died of COVID, therefore it doesn't exist, it's a hoax, or it's not a problem."

There are degrees of crime though. Is going after e-bikes really important enough to justify a surveillance panopticon?

I mean, in some places jaywalking is a crime. Do we really need to spend resources going after jaywalkers?

So many people's heads are no longer in reality. Perceptions and this fantasy world people have constructed (and right-wing propaganda feeds) is driving election results, not the real world. If you are politician who is part of the shrinking population who is actually still in reality, how do you win? You can't go on TV and acknowledge the phony "high crime" non-reality, any more than you can go on TV and say the moon landings were fake. But, pretending falsehoods are true wins elections. We're in a dark period.

Fortunately, at least for now, "Governance" doesn't involve the state coming in to do anything to someone who's not breaking the law. Homeless people have enough problems, they don't need the police to harass them and shoo them away constantly (even without violence).

Just because much of the public think of the homeless as an eyesore that they don't want to see, and they make them briefly face uncomfortable realities, doesn't justify blanketing cities with cops and cameras.

At least on Unix-like systems, if it's free for you to read, then it's free for any process you run as you to read. Sure, macOS has grafted its own weird "permissions" layer on top of the existing OS level permissions, but at the end of the day, when you run an app on Unix, you're allowing it to act as you, with all the powers your user has.

This used to work when you could trust the software you ran on your system to have access to everything you have access to on your computer. I'd argue that time has largely passed, for most third-party commercial developers and even for some OS vendors.

Best solution is to simply not run software made by blatantly untrustworthy developers. Second best solution would be to run such software as a severely sandboxed user who basically doesn't have access to anything important on your system.

> they eventually found that the incredibly large and dangerous engines had a very limited customer base as many evaluated the increased speed to be of marginal benefit when paired with the cost and danger.

When did this happen? At least in the USA, large trucks are eating the lunch of smaller trucks and cars. There isn't a truck so big that the public will say no to. Manufacturers are in an arms race to produce bigger, more dangerous trucks with bigger, more powerful engines.

> I don't know how it just happens that sending text messages to people can manage to result in specs that are painful to implement.

This is what boggles my mind. We're talking: Text. Over the Internet. It should not be a complex, difficult problem! We've been sending text over the Internet from the moment the Internet went online. So how is it that 10 companies have managed to find 30 different ways to do it, which are all incompatible with each other? You have to TRY to fail this badly.

The difference is the failure rate and the corrective action taken when defects are found. If Boeing's software failed at 0.1% of the rate that normal web / commercial software failed, we wouldn't have a functional airline industry.

Maybe it's because they are trained on Internet comments, and the most rare thing to find on the Internet is someone admitting they don't know something.

I've seen so many software bugs in my career where when you traced execution, you'd find the code crashing in a block with the comment //this can never happen

We see this fatalistic attitude all the time in software. "Bugs are inevitable." No, they aren't! Bugs are a choice. Almost all companies choose bugs because "no bugs" is too expensive. It's sometimes the right choice but we need to acknowledge that it's a choice and not some natural property of software. Imagine if people who built bridges or airplanes thought "bridge collapses and airplane crashes are inevitable, no way to solve it."

Same with aviation and safety. I honestly believe all programmers should, early in their careers, do a brief "tour of duty" in an industry where the stakes are high and "good enough" isn't good enough. You might not choose to make it your entire career, but at least you're exposed to the discipline, however briefly. Most software developers today have never in their lives worked on a project where defects were taken seriously and where there was process and documentation designed to reduce their occurrence.

I think you are objecting to OP’s “duty of care” wording which could be interpreted as suggesting a legal obligation. Nobody in this thread is really arguing that open source developers have a legal obligation to do this and to not do that. We are just saying they should do this and should not do that.

HN commenters constantly mistake “what I should do” with “what I am obligated to do.” Nobody is saying open source developers are legally mandated to be careful with user data. We are saying they should. There’s no need to haul out the license and put our lawyer hats on here. One can be within one’s legal rights and still be wrong.

Software’s purpose is clearly shifting from “what’s good for the user” to “what’s good for the developer.” Instead of enabling me, software now seeks to lock me in. Instead of making my life easier, software decisions are made based on what makes developers’ jobs easier. Instead of being careful with my data, software now comes with giant legal terms that allow developers to be utterly careless with it. Software is now designed primarily to funnel money to the developer, not to bring joy to the user.

And look at this article’s HN discussion. Many people indignantly defending it. “It’s open source. If you don’t like it deleting your data, don’t use it!”

I mean, with few exceptions, most people know what they are ultimately working on. I've never encountered someone in an actual company who could truly say "I just convert protobufs at one layer to JSON at another layer, and have no idea what this code is being applied to..."

Airbnb did the same thing: Lie that their business was merely about providing a few bucks to people with a spare sofa in their house, rather than what it really was: Enabling setting up illegal hotel businesses.

I don't know--I think these stories of real-world consequences stemming from online rage are few and far between. It happens but it's rare. IMO the Online World is kind of not-real, and it's really hard to get so much visibility there to actually affect the real world.