Monopolization and patent evergreening. Monopolization is a natural tendency of markets, you should expect it often.
265 karma · joined February 16, 2017
It's like an English major who can read and analyze the classics and nothing else - and cannot write at all outside of abstract poetry.
While I understand the value of distinguishing between CS and software engineering, not being comfortable with basic shell commands, installing programming language tools, compiling something using those tools, or source control means that there has been a huge gap between theory and practice in their education, which hurts understanding of both.
Particularly when interacting with senior CS students, they'll spend 6 months just getting comfortable doing very basic things like installing and running Python, using ssh with a VM, and using the command line. They try to do productive work, but their unfamiliarity with the basic tools of making software means they actually spend their time learning that.
Actually, this also applies to the basics of just writing a functioning library or piece of software, or being familiar with async vs. sync programming, etc etc. It would be better if they could dip their toes into these things while learning about, say, algorithms, because identifying the slow step in its execution context and designing a better algorithm requires knowing this stuff. Or even better, before doing any of that. I've met people with 6+ years of CS or CS-related educational background who don't know how to do basic problem solving / troubleshooting of their work because they've only done toy coding for coursework.
What amount of violence would you need to experience before you would acknowledge victimization? There's plenty that goes around that you apparently don't know about.
Let's say you are poor, went to a protest, and got arrested. You can't make bail (you're poor) and are fired from your job because you are in in jail. You easily win your case and see no prison time, but your life has been massively impacted in the negative by others unjustly.
This person was a victim of policing and likely the system in general that creates these trade-offs and punishes a lack of material wealth. You cannot begin to even understand the situation without acknowledging the fault and the injustice.
If someone steals from your car, nobody plays philosophical games about whether you were victimized and understanding that you were is the very first step to even understanding the situation and then adopting habits of not leaving expensive stuff in your car, investing in locks, taking a focus to the causes of crime, etc...
For example, according to this metric, the vast majority of poverty reduction happened in China. What factors can we attribute to that development? Well even asking that question means we have to go back and look at other metrics and means by which to understand economic systems and the distribution of material goods. The moment we ask a pretty basic, but arguably more relevant and useful question, we have to throw this metric away and do something else.
And when I've encountered this information in this past, the utility seems to be more about propaganda and lazy inferences than anything else, and often among famous academics. While we all have our bubbles, it does make you question the point of trying to make poverty just one quantity.
Natural experiments: looking at Germany and noticing that there are still lots of Nazis doesn't mean those interventions were not effective, as you don't know what would've happened using other regimes (or just doing nothing). You haven't tested the most basic alternative hypothesis that would confound using this data in this way.
Causes: this is a big can of worms, particularly on a forum where "politics" is frowned upon, which really means that anything non-normative that could cause significant disagreement is frowned upon. But unless you can identify driving forces of, e.g., Nazis and their recruitment, talking about effective interventions is premature and reductive.
- To treat it as a "third world" issue, as such diseases often are, rather than taking it seriously. Like Sweden health officials believing their cultural superiority alone would protect them.
- Focus on scapegoating China rather than adopt appropriate measures at home, those recommended by the WHO over a year ago and only implemented in places that have now had some successes - China, Vietnam, South Korea, New Zealand...
- Delayed lockdowns that reopen early without any appropriate tracking capabilities. They reopen early to satisfy short-term profit motives and little else: businesses reopening (like Europe for tourist season) and desperate people having few options outside of taking unnecessary jobs that interface with the public - itself a product of not paying people to stay home during a global pandemic.
- The building of a denialist movement that aligns well with corporate-friendly political movements. Different flavors of denialism for different political movements. e.g. anti-maskers doing protests vs. Fauci casting doubt about masks early on, likely to protect PPE supplies for healthcare workers, as strategic stockpiles had been devastated by decades of neoliberalism.
- Zero international consequences for countries that ignore these rules and become large reservoirs of virus.
- Vaccine availability falling along typical colonial lines, benefiting rich white people within and between countries.
- The decision to privatize vaccine production, prioritizing intellectual property over availability. Consequently, long delays in production, national resources going to purchase vaccine rather than directly ramping up production, and an intellectual property regime that treats other countries using information about these vaccines to protect their populations like it's some kind of horrible crime or strategic disadvantage.
The issue here is that the solutions to our collective problem, here, are all at odds with the established economic hegemony. There is a very direct conflict between people staying home and an economic system that depends on forcing people into low-paying jobs rather than waiting out economic downturns (or a pandemic) with a robust safety net. There is a very direct conflict between an international financial system that has been pushing for the prioritization of IP over national interest for decades (it's actually a very recent development that there would be any expectation that, say, India respect the US's IP let alone prioritize it over public health) and collaborative worldwide efforts to eradicate the virus. There is a very direct conflict between (nearly) everyone staying home and an economy largely driven by demand for unnecessary in-person services, something you see every time there's an article on the plight of restaurants and restaurant workers.
The only way out of this is to luck out with vaccine efficacy (though vaccines are on track to be available to all nations on the order of years, not months), additionally luck out with unexpectedly wide and equitable production and distribution (making it months not years), or a dramatic shift away from a profit-dominated regime (people get to protect themselves but the economy must be, at least temporarily, reconfigured to handle lower demand and growth).
This isn't a criticism of your code, it just reflects a larger issue in scientific programming: most code is never read, edited, or re-run by anyone other than one sole author. If that is the status quo, most considerations about languages don't even matter anymore, since the biggest issue is normally just finding a good balance between functionality and ability to collaborate, and scientific culture has lopped off the collaboration side of the equation.
This choice may also feed into that culture, a positive feedback loop of cloistering: if I were in your field and noticed you had a code base, I would have to go out of my way to run your code or improve it, so I probably just wouldn't.
If someone were only interested in the smallest possible minified size, the appropriate solution would be to use all of these minifiers every time and choose the smallest result.
If you're doing the meme stock with RH, it is probably safer to leave it there for a bit.
They froze only the 'buy' option on their app. Selling would still go through and they'd still have to process those trades. There would still be movement, it would just be solely in the direction of selling.
For long-term viability of a popular project, I think you'll eventually need more maintainers, which brings back most of the problems of having multiple contributors.
I won't suggest solutions to this at the moment other than to say there are more options that providing democratic power over existing private commons. There could be public online commons that are guaranteed to meet certain standards, for example, and for private spaces to not compete and subsume them. Though this is speaking vaguely - there are many potential discussions to have about what a public digital commons could look like.
We say, "5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0", not "4, 3, 2, 1, 0, done".
Both switches were for the same basic reason: packages broke just often enough that it wasn't worth the benefits of having a simple/clean system or bleeding edge libraries.
My switch to ubuntu was maybe 7-8 years ago, though, so I can't speak to whether this has changed. I just know that I used to need to spend 1-5 hours fixing an esoteric X.org problem (or similar) every few months on arch and that I don't need to do this on ubuntu.
I stay on ubuntu because of its critical mass of users. If there's a prebuilt package for something, it's probably a .deb that's compatible with ubuntu and debian. And PPAs are nice. I don't like where they're going with snap at all (I disabled snap and added flatpak support instead) and would probably switch if I thought another distro offered the same benefits.
I think we need to embed accessibility and accessibility audits as a basic and essential aspect of all tooling and standards. It shouldn't be up to diligent people like yourself to notice these issues as a matter of expertise or personal interest, but something we notice by default because it hasn't complied with standards.
SVGs are a minefield for accessibility and tend to be either wrapped in a container with accessibility info or have nothing at all added. It's a mess.