I don't believe you actually think it's odd to not want to run unreviewed code in prod. I accept that you might disagree, but I don't believe this is a take you haven't heard a million times before.
1,547 karma · joined July 7, 2023
I don't concede that the act of sharing this code is stealing, of course. The act of helping one's fellow man is a good thing. You've made your stance clear, and the very cogent and fairly conclusive arguments people have made against your stance don't seem to land, and I have no interest in repeating that exercise (and neither do you, I'm sure).
But this phrase stood out to me, and in particular that you would choose food as an example. You could've used any other example, like a new hat, or a baseball bat, a tricycle, a mirror, and so on. But you chose food, something people need to survive. Is the case of stealing food not at all morally ambiguous to you? What about the case of a young mother stealing diapers she can't afford?
And some attached pdf that I could have an LLM generate in a minute I wouldn't call a source. I'm talking about a source in the sense of journalism -- something I cannot find for this story.
Oh, it's an analogy. This is a frequently used rhetorical device where you take a similar analogous setup (maybe hypothetical) to elucidate certain aspects of a situation you're considering.
These responses talking about Apple's bottom line kind of feel like this convo:
> Cigarettes are bad, they cause cancer. Philip Morris shouldn't be selling them
> Yeah but they sell so many cigarettes! Isn't that great?
- Not realizing it's a very concrete theorem applicable in a very narrow theoretical situation, and that its value lies not in the statement itself but in the way of thinking that goes into the proof.
- Stating it as "pick any two". You cannot pick CA. Under the conditions of the CAP theorem it is immediately obvious that CA implies you have exactly one node. And guess what, then you have P too, because there's no way to partition a single node.
A much more usable statement (which is not a theorem but a rule of thumb) is: there is often a tradeoff between consistency and availability.
Afghanistan
Yugoslavia
Before 98:
Libya
Panama
Iraq
Kuwait
Somalia
Bosnia
Iran
Sudan
Afghanistan
Before 88:
Korea
China
Guatemala
Indonesia
Cuba
Guatemala
Belgian Congo
Guatemala
Dominican Republic
Peru
Laos
Vietnam
Cambodia
Guatemala
Lebanon
Grenada
Libya
El Salvador
Nicaragua
Iran
Japan
Before Pearl Harbor:
Dominican Republic
Nicaragua
China
Mexico
Russia
Wow, that's a lot of bombs! Hope this helps.
Sometimes the answer to "why?" is that the dev had a hammer and the codebase was starting to look an awful lot like a nail. In-memory cache isn't considered as a serious option nearly enough imho.
I don't know about the guy you're replying to, but I've made many mistakes in my coding life, and some of them more than once. The Date API is written in a way to obfuscate the real complexities of date and time management, so I find it quite easy to imagine someone stepping in the same footgun more than once.
EDIT: oh ew, grandparent comment is a bot. How did you recognize it?
Even if you build in a self destruction mechanism to landmines(1), this indiscriminate nature remains.
On top of that, you mention something about peppering cities with land mines not being ok (and it wouldn't be), but I'm not convinced that anyone's doing that. And still civilians make up 90% of the victims.
Of course, there's another thing playing into that 90% figure, which is that, by and large, mines are not very effective against military tartgets because they have ample means to dispose of them. Given the fact that our target here is Russia, and not some poorly funded guerilla outfit, I think this should be taken into consideration.
Pairing their war crimey nature and their low efficacy (2), I personally cannot get behind withdrawing from the Ottawa treaty.
There is much more to say about this, and much more has been said about this. I would recommend giving
https://www.humanity-inclusion.org.uk/en/landmines-can-no-lo...
a skim. They give alternative, more effective, less inhumane, solutions to the problems that mines try (and largely fail) to solve.
(1) Which is ultimately a bit of a hypothetical exercise, because the nations that left the treaty, well, left the treaty. They didn't propose an amendment allowing for temporary mines, they left the treaty. And on top of that the failure rate for such smart mines is like 20%. You get 1/5th of a war crime I guess.
(2) Earlier I said something to the effect of "I'm sure they're effective". At the time I hadn't read up on the actual effectiveness of mines, because to me, the effectiveness of a method plays no role in whether it should be allowed in combat. I've since read up on that part too, and I'm reasonably convinced they're not very effective in our current context.
There is not a single doubt in my mind that mines are useful. As are executions of people suspected of collaborating with the enemy. As is instituting precautionary concentration camps to round up folks who might have some bond with the enemy. The utility of dropping atom bombs on civilian centers is probably extremely high in negotiating with the enemy. But, like mines, these things are unconscionable, and when you start using these highly effective means, you should really ask yourself: "am I the good guy in this conflict?"
For me, the answer is no. I don't think we should commit war crimes, which somehow has become a controversial opinion.
Here's the first paragraph of Harry Potter and the philosopher's stone. I rewrote it from scratch, apparently:
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense. Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache.