white-flame

His distinction with hidden memory allocations vs perfect software fails even in his C boolean example.

Calling a C function takes up stack space. That's a hidden memory allocation which can exhaust just like heap does. But it's even worse because stack allocation failures don't have a place that return a nice clean NULL like malloc does. It's pretty strong to still call this case "perfect software" under his definitions.

There's no reason to believe this won't be sky-higher than current DDR4 RAM prices.

I'm of the mind that UBI might work with the absolute minimum of amounts. Give enough for food, a bus pass, renting a room (not an entire apartment), and some for incidentals. It would basically be "stay out of trouble" money, from which people can physically live, which allows them to then go forth and pursue something societally beneficial, because you don't just want to stay at that level. In theory, this might make their income less available to predatory targeting.

However, with a looming jobs crisis, the assumption of being able to go out to earn more remains to be seen.

Surely this exact situation is how university prices skyrocketed in line with increased loans to students.

Detriment is wholly subjective here. When it comes to politics or social issues, people have different views on how society "should be", and those differences are offensive and considered toxic to the other side. In that sense, everybody is toxic and the label is meaningless and unactionable.

Obviously, most people hold beliefs of some form, and those beliefs will clash with others. Bandying around "toxic" as an absolute in those situations is narrow-minded and prejudiced. Reasonable people with contributions in one neutral area and one controversial area are lumped with this same label as trolls, doxers, and inciters of violence.

Specificity of labels is very important, especially when they are tied to consequences.

Where "toxic" can certainly be used is in relation to a certain goal, like reasonable level-headed discussion, or subscription to a certain worldview; instead of as absolute. Even actions like deliberate trolling aren't considered toxic on sites like 4chan, because that's part of their accepted and promoted culture.

I can guarantee you that most people who went through CS in college never had a course like that.

What's going to be more interesting:

- Police departments won't get revenue from traffic violations anymore.

- Police won't have the source of suspicious, law-ignoring driving to find people who need to be found.

- Towing & crash repair shops will drastically drop in business (maintenance will probably increase, but not commensurate).

- Auto insurance won't be able to justify high premiums anymore.

As your ending suggests, older developers tend to rock the boat more. As their bosses tell them to do something, the old timers see failures of history repeating themselves and try to steer the direction elsewhere. Younger devs fall in line much easier.

It can sometimes be a double-edged sword. Some older devs get hung up on bikeshedding and tunnel visioning about old specifics instead of just getting work done with whatever the new environment is. However, this problem is far more represented in the big slow-moving corporate world, and go-getter active old timers looking at startups wouldn't generally fit that stereotype.

But if 2 devs are agreeably working on a complex project, the old timer will probably be faster to finish than the younger one. For non-complex projects, it's a crap shoot.

In my opinion, the advertiser should not know that the current visitor is an 80 year old grandmother in the first place.

Just like TV, radio, and magazines before them, advertisers can select which advertisements to put on which sections of websites (or broadly make their decisions on what types of sections they should display on), and individual display requests can and should be de-personalized for privacy measures. Advertisers can still access or determine indicators of demographics for places on the web without individual tracking measures, and measure click-through for various A/B testing for different ads in different contexts.

The contents & general audience of a page should determine the ad, not the individual visitor.

My specific, stated metric was pigeonholing.

You receive less information online when these systems are employed, ie more repetition in the same space. Youtube optimizes for maximizing the viewing time across the most common types of viewing associations, namely people watching for entertainment, not looking for information. If you ever look for information in a new topic, you tend to be signposted back towards your old time-sink staples from your history instead.

Certainly, one can also point to algorithmic enforcement of echo chambers, which would be a subjective value judgment as well. It feels good in immediate practice (and can increase viewing time), but many don't view it as a net positive at scale for social issues. Yet for things like small-scale hobbies, it can be beneficial.

For one, it pigeonholes your internet experience. Systems like this basically take the simplest, stereotyped, one-note view of you from a snapshot of your online activity, and constantly projects that judgment back at you.

Buy a microwave oven on Amazon, for example, and now you're seeing microwaves everywhere. If you browse Youtube with cookies enabled, it's a terribly limited experience compared to with cookies blocked. The recommendations are circular within the topics you've browsed and never expose you to the broad content out there. It's a much better experience when recommendations are simply associated with the video you're currently watching, instead of from your viewing history. The data selling effect causes this sort of thing to percolate among your entire web experience.

Another is simply monetization of the self without being part of that direct monetization stream. To some people, if actual money is made off them, it seems unfair they don't get a cut. Receiving services doesn't suffice in those people's minds.

Many people are fine with sites selling ad space & what's being viewed, but are not fine with their personal information being attached to it, for basic privacy concerns.

So, of course, there's the Big Brother aspect which is socially unhealthy, and has chilling effects on freedom of expression. Obviously, there is strong, negatively associated generational memory still in play from places like North Korea and Nazi Germany, where people are/were constantly spied on for "incorrect" beliefs and statements. Certainly the personal data collection & warehousing portion of this industry can evoke similar fears here. People have already experienced negative effects like ending up on no-fly lists for zero understandable reason, presumably because of government snooping with false positives or incorrect association with similarly-named people.

Imagine if every time you went to a store, a federal agent followed you around with a clipboard with 2 columns labeled "Terrorist?" and "Child predator?". For every item you looked at, the agent would make marks evaluating how much that reflects one of the two columns. You're an upstanding citizen with zero affiliation to those categories, yet marks are being made. That's what online surveillance (for whatever reason, including PII-linked advertising) feels like to many. Even if the columns are "only" political affiliation or touchy social issues, the same response can be had.

I agree, but the providers are financially incentivized to make the UX worse via all this stuff, which reduces the number of providers offering a non-terribled UX.

In becoming ad revenue maximizers, taking for-granted assumptions on audience, this situation doesn't optimize for serving the audience well. And since their models are to provide content in bulk, it keeps users served "well enough" to keep coming back, as opposed to less-funded alternatives which might provide a better UX, but don't provide the bulk content that monied sites can.

Fundamentally, people visit sites and endure bad UX if the content is there to draw them. The utility cost of bad UX often isn't the dominating factor.

It's a heck of a lot cheaper than it was in decades past, and things like torrents and ipfs can help eliminate high-cost choke points.

A properly working market requires informed decisions. Internet privacy invasions are not something that people are well-informed about at a practical level. So GDPR is actually helping to restore the market.

It comes down to one thing: Money.

The older internet was not a network of for-profit users trying to rent-seek on every digital interface & every page view. Standards were created by academics, internet committees, and concerned & involved users, trying to figure out what would work best as a resilient distributed system.

Now what goes on online is defined by the rent-seekers, the data pimps, and the predators. Their actions have real-world, legal consequences which ruin it for everybody, and their size & clout overwhelms the decisions of average people.

> It would seem that Silicon Valley perceives the GDPR as more of a hindrance than an opportunity to offer users better privacy.

Why would you think that SV would be interested in offering anything for its own sake? The vast majority of the model is to create new rent-seeking profit opportunities for investors, with internet users as a mere means to that end.

It does sound like the programmers were still productive in that time, though. The beneficial features of the custom compiler came iteratively throughout.

> Z. Writing an entire language and ecosystem just for a game is insane.

Surely you must have heard of the term "Domain Specific Language" by now? Many are one-offs per project, heavily including games as well.

If I recall correctly, they used manual memory management for many things. But regardless of specific tooling, you can still do memory pooling in GC languages just as well as in manual ones.

The Lispiness that they took advantage of was metaprogramming via s-expressions, an interactive REPL, and dynamic updating of functions during runtime (which would require some form of GC in function memory footprint, but wouldn't be a drag on normal gameplay timing).

Causality is a concept found in this universe/reality. All meta-reality concepts like causality, time, place, identity, information, and such originating from within are underjustified for considerations outside it.

Old school AI had stunning successes of offloading and combining human situational knowledge into automated systems (under certain conditions). New school AI has stunning successes of association and prediction on data sets (under certain conditions).

Neither seem to point to a grand unified theory of human-level intelligence.

> Now that bluetooth has returned to its roots with Bluetooth Low Energy, maybe we have another chance at flash-mob mobile gaming - everyone on the same bus can join in to a chatroom or a roleplaying game for the duration of the ride.

Note that the Nintendo 3DS effectively has this capability. I believe it's all WiFi-based.

Yes, this was my initial reaction as well:

Is "memory" a parameter to a variable mechanism? Does a hardcoded/fixed mechanism express "memory" of its design changes, or does it have no "memory" because of its non-parameterized operational characteristics?

As humans, we sort of consider memories to be data parameters to our flexible thinking processes.

"Free" doesn't mean unregulated free-for-all, it specifically means that people are free to enter the market as buyers or sellers, and free to choose what and when to exchange, at what price. The government does not regulate who is allowed in the market, nor the prices; but rather would get involved by protecting those freedoms to engage & price.

Monopolies work against a free market, as do barriers to entry. Businesses make more money if the market is not free, i.e. if others in the market are not free to choose competitors' products or to become a competitor themselves. The "invisible hand" is about reflecting pricing movement of free exchange, not enforcing the freedoms. If a society wants a free market, they need to set up rules that promote market freedom as a societal goal, which would (ideally) end up working against individual profit maximization (compared to a usurpable market) but for greater overall robustness and correction.

Yes I agree things are fundamentally broken with these situations, and they're at the common OS design level.

Just like the Martian invasion tropes of decades past, the zombie tropes of today play on & exaggerate social fears. They're not a projection of what would actually happen.

No, I'm simply saying that if they're killing themselves by maintaining such a high-stress & rigorous involvement, they should at least be getting something out of it and should ensure that that extreme level is short term, because it's not healthy.

If they're doing it only because they kind of fell into it as baseline socialization shifted, they need to step back and reconsider things because it's not healthy.

Of course, things like "easier to digest" are neither a nutritive nor health benefit, so technically both that statement and some of the pro-A2 claims could simultaneously be true.

I don't purchase vehicles that get less than 30mpg, so his crack really isn't out of line. Especially considering his Volt is a plug-in that can be in all-electric mode most of its time.

A basic gasoline sedan can still often get 30mpg, so you don't have to go to subcompacts or hybrids to get decent gas mileage.

Diesel vs electric is a false dichotomy. Many cities in north america have natural-gas powered buses, and a lot of taxi fleets are CNG as well. Then there's also old-style cable cars and overhead electric lines scattered around, too.