shockeychap

Maybe it's just me, but it always seemed like prohibiting spaces and other special characters was a reasonable way to avoid unnecessary complexity (and the bugs that accompany it) when parsing and navigating directory trees and files.

I'm old enough to remember working with 8.3 filenames in DOS, and while the length limitation was maddening, the space part never was. Then Windows 95 came out and all restrictions were thrown out.

Why couldn't we just have a file system that robustly supports long filenames, including variable length extensions, while prohibiting certain special characters - namely spaces, slashes or any directory denoting characters in files, and characters that have special meaning in regex context? (brackets, asterisk, etc.)

"One had better be scrupulously honest before asking people to surrender their own judgment and simply believe what they are told."

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Wow. That's all kinds of gross and shady.

I feel for the sysadmins who are fighting ulcers and migraines at the moment, but I can't shake feeling that the world is just a little bit better for this small window of time.

I'm not aware of which incidents you're referencing. Could you please cite examples of "government takedown of Jihadist and anti-american websites"?

I'll readily agree that we often argue about principles when it's our own content or people involved, and I see hypocrisy on both the left and the right.

But I have to give it to libertarians when it comes to consistent application of principles, even and especially when the specifics of a situation make them unpopular among the left or right. Conservatives find offense in the libertarian position on drug policy and media censorship of sex and violence. Leftists find offense in the libertarian position on economic policy, welfare, and immigration. Both sides find things to be offended about in their views on foreign policy. You know you're doing something right when you offend both ends of the political spectrum at the same time.

> I see no reason why a free exchange of ideas can't sometimes lead to a fascist or communist state if certain ideas get enough social contagion.

That's a fair observation, and making freedom a right comes with a host of risk and peril. But isn't that where the criticality of learning from history comes into play? Furthermore, name one dictator or authoritarian regime whose rise to power wasn't predicated on the necessity of government intervention and rule to protect the people. Everyone from Nero to Boneparte to Hitler to Chavez all claimed the mantle of necessity and greater good, and look where they all led.

The back-and-forth balance between freedom and containment of bad ideas can be tricky, but if you think you'll solve the problem of future authoritarianism through present-day authoritarianism, I don't know what to say.

> So?

Seriously?!? If the lab leak discussion had been suppressed just a little bit more, would we even be talking about it today?

Wrong ideas have always existed and always been part of life. From a pile of wrong ideas, a few right ones emerge.

I'm old enough to remember well the plethora of 9/11 conspiracy theories. Some of them were quite offensive to the people who suffered and died on that day. But I never called for suppression of free speech because of it.

> Anti-1A sentiment is growing on the political left

That statement, if you stop to think about what it means for all other freedoms, should genuinely scare you. Freedom only matters if it includes the right to offend others. Anything less isn't freedom at all.

If you genuinely believe in the principles of freedom, you will trust that the free exchange of all ideas - good and bad, right and wrong - is the best and only way to bring out the truth.

All of this hearkens back to dark ideas in which one class of people exercise power over another. Remember what they say about power.

For decades, we gave young children aspirin, before eventually connecting it to Reye syndrome. Indeed, children are not just small adults.

Much of what Joel says here - especially the conclusion at the end - is also mirrored in what Steve Jobs said when confronted over shutting down OpenDoc: "You have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and figure out where you're gonna sell it."

https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?t=110

I'm not sure what you think "co-infection" means, but you just described precisely that. The reactivation of shingles meant that he was simultaneously infected with two different agents. "Co-infection" (for me at least) implies nothing about how or where the secondary infection came from.

Why spend time on it? To borrow from George Mallory: Because it’s there.

I'm sorry, but I find articles like this entirely disingenuous. It opens with a rural Tennessee classroom in which the teacher and a lone student bravely try to help a bunch of Trumpers understand their perspective. It continues with another example of a right-leaning former WV legislator coming around to the leftist position on transgender participation in sports. But what I did not find was a single meaningful example of the opposite. The best the article could muster - for appearances of neutrality - was an example of reduced support for minimum-wage increases by a group of Democrats. Nothing concrete.

Sorry, but the lady doth protest too much.

Your "Software Isn't Bloated" post reminds me of an old post from Joel Spolsky about how complexity (ie. bloat) creeps in from countless unforeseen edge cases.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

"Back to that two page function. Yes, I know, it’s just a simple function to display a window, but it has grown little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. Well, I’ll tell you why: those are bug fixes. One of them fixes that bug that Nancy had when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn’t have Internet Explorer. Another one fixes that bug that occurs in low memory conditions. Another one fixes that bug that occurred when the file is on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the disk in the middle. That LoadLibrary call is ugly but it makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95."

True. But I’m not talking about end-to-end between sender and receiver. I’m just talking about using public key encryption to encrypt received contents with one key and decrypt with another. There are a lot of technical challenges - particularly with maintaining compatibility with email clients - but it can be done.

The inability of MTAs to negotiate and utilize any kind of SSL-style encryption when relaying messages is also a gross travesty in the year 2021.

So why hasn't end-to-end encryption been utilized for years with the storage of email and other files, like they do with iMessage content?

Apple has always bragged about iMessage content being end-to-end encrypted, and thus inaccessible even to Apple. Why aren't they doing the same with email and other files, like other providers? (ProtonMail, to name one example)

Only if the file contents are accessible. Why isn't end-to-end encryption utilized for storage of email on Apple's servers, the same way they do for iMessaging?

If the email is genuine, then we are officially lost. Apple has gone from the company that refused to break into the San Bernadino shooter's phone (Anyone remember the feature by Last Week Tonight and Tim Cook talking about writing "the software equivalent of cancer"?) to the company that dutifully does what the authorities demand when they bring down the hammer over copyright claims.

The picture of the Metroliner reminds me of the Aloha Airlines incident.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243

It's amazing that the hull can survive in the air for any time with that much torn away.

To do anything in most situations risks some degree of offense. I wholly sympathize with parents who are dealing with loss in any of its forms. I wish there was a way they could be shielded from the world for a time. But SE Railways’ email was quite sensible.

If privacy is the concern, there’s plenty to discuss about FB or Google who actually do target people based on personal and private insights. I think that ranting about this email is misplaced at best.

Nice. :-)

> Here are a few tips if you want to avoid getting microtargetted like this

They sent a mistargeted email. Wow.

A fair number of people who meet the known characteristics of your wife have children, thus it seems reasonable to send them a PSA pertaining to kids. It looks like a sensible email and it’s not a judgment or anything. I think the email could have been better qualified. But this whole things just smacks of hypersensitivity to perceived micro aggressions.

“The Basecamp story’s been a difficult one for me to follow ... it’s a story about racism and white supremacy in that workplace”

No, it isn’t. It’s a story about one group of people effectively arguing that a list of names that sound funny in English leads to genocide. Was the list appropriate? No. Was it unprofessional and immature? Sure. Pathway to genocide? Is that a serious question?

I've also been really excited about a solution only to realize that my excitement was with the underlying technology rather than the customer experience.

I remember this feeling with early web apps. I was excited about being able to update one system rather than several desktops. For the customer, however, the overall UX was actually a slight step down because of the limitations of HTML and javascript.

I can understand this. I've been enamored with good engineering many a time, and it has its place. Something that's well engineered often WANTS to be a good solution. But I also agree with the concept of starting with "where can I take the customer" rather "how can I present this awesome new technology".

Another variation on this concept was an article by Joel Spolsky in which he coined the term "Architecture Astronauts". He describes well the manner in which an architecture astronaut looks at something like Napster and generalizes to peer-to-peer messaging while missing the excitement of "search for song. find song.".

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

Steve Jobs' take at the time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o

"You've gotta start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology."

Couldn't agree more. And I'm guilty of doing the opposite.

None of this is surprising. I’m very sad to say this, but the internet of today, for all of its sophistication, sucks compared to what it was, and all the promise that it held, 20 years ago.

I’m concerned both about an asset bubble and runaway inflation - the kind that destroys savings and triggers class mobility in the wrong direction.

Do you really think there can be this much government-doled money, money printing, and wage raising without permanent inflationary consequences? I can’t hire anybody right now because so many people not working are getting more from unemployment than they would in a job. This is going to unwind at some point.