BaronSamedi

If any of the alternative search engines would offer this and a feature to block pages with affiliate links--like those "review" sites--I would be happy to pay for them. They need to offer ways to customize the search experience.

It is possible to agree that content creators should be paid and that ads are bad. Substack, for example, allows you to pay and doesn't have ads. Ads are one business model, not the only one.

Thanks to the magic of modus tollens, absence of evidence can indeed be evidence of absence. "A 100kt nuclear bomb just went off in your front yard!" Me, looking out the window, nope. It depends, of course, on the argument being made. It could be true in some cases.

As cliches go this one is better than "you can't prove a negative"--not true. At least the "evidence of absence" one makes you think about causality and the nature of evidence.

"The point of experts is they have thought about a field more and are better at making sound arguments in that field."

This is an excellent point. It is so good that I think it may serve as the definition of an expert: An expert is someone who is better at making sound arguments in that field. Sound arguments being what matters and not the person making the argument, just as the calculations matter more than the mathematician.

Ironically, if we apply your first statement generally you are likely excluding yourself from the debate.

"If you are not a logician your opinion on fallacies doesn't matter at all."

I thought his statement that all requirements should have a name assigned to them was very good as well.

I agree with you. The idea that using e-prime makes one's writing more clear isn't a "fallacy". People might disagree but it's hardly fallacious. There are many items in this list that aren't fallacies (e.g., "Dog-Whistle Politics"). This list seems to be a mix of actual fallacies and "Things I don't like".

If it is a fallacy we should be able to construct a simple argument from it. With the "Be-verb Fallacy" what would that be? Perhaps, "You used e-prime in your argument but all people who use e-prime are part of a cult, therefore you are part of a cult (and are wrong)." That's a fallacy all right just not the "Be-verb" one.

I also found the definition of a fallacy at the start lacking. It conflates good argumentation with rhetorical technique. I prefer T. Edward Damer's definition from my old logic textbook:

"A good argument must have premises that are true or acceptable, premises that are relevant to the truth of the conclusion, and premises that together constitute good or adequate grounds for the truth of the conclusion." Fallacious arguments violate one or more of these three principles.

For your home network DNS: a server with dnsmasq -> stubby -> DNS over TLS -> NextDNS works quite well. Fast with dnsmasq caching and reasonably secure, plus NextDNS can block unwanted domains (ads, malware, etc.)

The governor of Nevada is proposing exactly this. https://apnews.com/article/legislature-legislation-local-gov...

Autonomous zones appear to be leaving the realm of science fiction and into reality.

After many years working with these tools I agree. Declarative and template DSLs are OK for basic things but you quickly bump into their limitations when you want to do advanced configurations. At this point administrators should know how to code so being able to use a normal programming language with IaC modules should be the standard.

Amazon's CDK for AWS is a step in the right direction. Microsoft's new Bicep for Azure misses the mark in my view because it is yet another DSL and not a real programming language.

Scalability is just one reason for using serverless. There are many others. Most of which have to do with being able to focus on the part of your code that actually does something instead of on infrastructure and integration. For example, not having to configure and maintain VMs, containers, or Kubernetes, off-loading a part of security onto the cloud provider, and built-in integration with supporting services like logging and metrics.

Serverless, like every design decision, comes with its own set of trade-offs. Whether those trade-offs make sense for your environment is something you have to determine. At my company we have seen a productivity increase and shorter development times using serverless. Of course, that was after the learning curve which is certainly not trivial.

One rarely discussed effect of drug legalization is that pharmaceutical companies would start developing recreational drugs. I expect they would create milder versions of current drugs specifically for the recreational market. That market would almost certainly be huge. Because of this, Big Pharma ought to be one of the biggest proponents of drug legalization. Whether the net effect on society would be positive or negative I do not know.

Your are conflating what is practical with what is true in logic and argumentation. It is practical to accept our doctor's diagnosis because we trust that the medical system produces competent doctors and because of constraints on our time. If you claimed that a diagnosis must be true because it came from a doctor then you would appealing to authority.

My first thought when reading the article was, how about CORBA? The author makes no attempt to explain why CORBA and SOAP/WSDL failed so their recommendation has very little merit. Software technology historically follows a pattern: "worse is better". We might also call this pattern "commodification". HTTP/JSON has likely reached the lowest common denominator sweet spot to ensure its success and dominance.

Lumpers vs Splitters is a fun categorization. When I see a group of things categorized I view it as a set partition and I wonder what equivalence relation is being used to distinguish the partitions (categories). The relation is usually unstated so it becomes a mental exercise to steelman the categorization by trying to think of one.

It cost a bit more but not, for us, excessively more. A big upside was that we no longer had to tinker with docker and especially kubernetes. This allowed us to focus almost entirely on delivering functionality (and reliability and security) rather than infrastructure. It's always a matter of tradeoffs.

I would play that. Your comment makes me wonder why policy simulators don't already exist, or maybe they do and I am unaware of them. Such a simulator would have to be able to handle the "cobra effect" which could be quite a challenge.

The Cobra effect, by the way, is a great illustration of the problem with static thinking. Problem: too many cobras, Solution: pay a bounty for them, Unintended side-effect: people raise cobras for the bounty so now there are even more cobras.

This is an excellent comment. Thinking about laws or policies as dynamic processes with various feedback loops and side-effects offers a better model than the usual static approach. Side-effects are critical, so critical that they often often work against the intended goal. Yet side-effects are almost never mentioned when people advocate for a certain policy.

How does it end? Probably with brittle systems that are unable to survive exogenous shocks.

We migrated from containers to serverless (Azure Functions in our case). This removed a large amount of complexity from our architecture and we are pleased with the result. It is always a question of tradeoffs, serverless has its own issues but overall it has worked out well.

Academia is not unique in this regard. Superficial metrics have been introduced into many fields with similar results. Warnings about the danger of metrics have been ignored.

Campbell's law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." (1979)

There is a scene in The Simpsons where TV stops working and the children suddenly have to go outside and play. Great happiness ensues. That is exactly the scene I imagine if Twitter were turned off.

Since this is a widely held view, it is worth debating. I would argue for a contrary position: 1) every organization has an ethical responsibility, and 2) corporations not only do have an ethical responsibility but have a higher one. A few, abbreviated reasons are as follows.

Every member of a physical grouping (e.g. neighborhood, community, city, state, etc.) has an ethical responsibility to other members of that group. Organizations, like individuals, are members of a physical group. Therefore organizations have an ethical responsibility to other members of that group.

Those who are granted special privileges by the group have a higher obligation to the group as a result. Ethical responsibility represents one of those obligations. Corporations are granted special privileges such as limited liability, hence they have a higher obligation.

Similarly, those organizations that are granted disproportionate political and economic power, assume disproportionate obligations. With, again, ethical responsibility being one of those obligations. This is the "to whom much is given, much is required" principle. Also, since an organization with disproportionate political and economic power necessarily has a disproportionate impact on a given society, it is entirely reasonable for those granting that power to expect it to be used benevolently.

Good points but I think it would be accurate to say that Docker solved a developer problem. But developers are only part of the story. Does Kubernetes solve the business' problem? The user's problem? The problems of sys admins, testers, and security people? In my experience it doesn't (though I wouldn't count my experience as definitive).

At my company we have had better success with micro-services on AWS Lambda. It has vastly less overhead than Kubernetes and it has made the tasks of the developers and non-developers easier. "Lock-in" is unavoidable in software. In our risk calculation, being locked into AWS is preferable than being locked into Kubernetes. YMMV.

This reminds me of my wish to see a unified theory (and notation) that encompasses formal logic and probability. On their own, each is lacking. A unified system, for example, in which we have all the tools of first order logic and Bayesian probability would be very powerful.

I think of the current neural net based approaches as more "artificial instinct" than "artificial intelligence". The goal of the older, expert system AI paradigm was to create software that could reason about a problem, and it therefore produced systems that could answer the question "why?". ANN systems cannot answer that question. Both approaches seem useful to me, but for different problem domains.

I agree. While this is well done, it seems to be copying human programming techniques rather than allowing the AI to create code that it thinks is optimal. I think there is the potential to evolve efficient and secure code that is free from the constraints we impose on it due to the way our minds work. Such code may not be intelligible to us but could very well be much better than what we could write.

Instead of Test Driven Development, Test Only Development? I like that idea. This reminds me of an article I read a while ago on co-evolutionary training in genetic programming: one algorithm evolving to do something, with another evolving to break it.

Good point. I've seen this mistaken notion of science a lot recently. Scientists can describe the world and make predications about how it might behave, they don't have anything to say (as scientists) about what one ought to do.

Also, it appears that by "science" commenters here really mean epidemiologists or medical scientists, not economists, psychologists, political scientists, etc. Scientists from each of these fields have a limited perspective, a good leader tries to balance these perspectives when choosing a course of action. Of course, the medical view matter a lot now but its not the only view that matters.

The funny thing is that this search is pretty easy to put into first order logic (shirt(x) & ~striped(x)). I guess we now have computers that are bad at logic.

Is the Gompertz function the function behind the standard "epi curve"? It appears from the CDC web site and other places that the epi curve is the standard way epidemics are modeled. The CDC even has a simple tutorial for creating them: https://www.cdc.gov/training/quicklearns/createepi/index.htm...