acoustics

jj has made me much more comfortable using non-linear DAGs in my trunk-based development workflow. Several changes with the same parent, changes with several different parents, etc.

I used to have a habit of imposing an unnecessary ordering structure on my work product. My stack of changes would look like A -> B -> C -> D, even if the order of B and C was logically interchangeable.

jj makes DAGs easier to work with because of how it handles conflicts and merges. Now I feel empowered to be more expressive and accurate about what a change actually depends on. In turn, this makes review and submission more efficient.

At internet scale, this would roughly be equivalent to not doing any warning or detection at all.

Scalable systems need to use heuristics to catch threats. Needing concrete evidence in every case means that an enormously higher amount of malicious resources will not be flagged.

There is a policy argument as to the right balance of concerns here. But there is a clear trade-off to make.

How is any kind of antivirus or threat detection software supposed to operate on this standard?

Libel suits can be financially catastrophic, so even a tiny false positive rate could present risk that disincentivizes producing such software at all.

And a threat detection mechanism that has a 0.0% false positive rate is conservative to the point of being nearly useless.

It seems that many people lean into the "community" aspect of open source. In real communities there are webs of mutual responsibility. If you use open source to fill the role of community in your life, it makes sense psychologically that you would project moral stakes or obligation onto the maintainers. But this is really not fair to the maintainers who don't view their work that way.

RISC-V doesn't make sense to 99% users at this stage.

Agreed. Boards like this are helpful for getting RISC-V to the next stage, where it could make sense for more users.

I'm not sure if it's true that the leader is less powerful.

In many countries, it seems that the leader has near total control over candidate selection, and dissent is punished ruthlessly.

In the US, it's easier for a member of Congress to openly dissent against the President's agenda. This was a major thorn in the side for e.g. Joe Biden.

Some Republicans today fear dissenting (though of course, most are enthusiastically on board), but I'm not sure that it would be any different in a place like Canada or the UK.

I thought QPR2 and QPR4 were the only releases anyone cared about regardless.

I agree that we should not provide targeted subsidies for Twinkies, Mountain Dew, or cigarettes. The whole premise of food stamps is flawed. We should provide cash instead.

If there is an objection that giving cash is equivalent to subsidizing Twinkies, I would push back. Child tax credits are in many ways economically equivalent to cash transfers, but we don't usually see arguments that this is a subsidy for Mountain Dew.

Mountain Dew and Twinkies are bad for your health regardless of your income level. We should tackle unhealthy eating by going after the supply, not by going after a class-segmented group of consumers.

Like many Americans, I grew up in a town where unhealthy eating was a major part of the social rhythms of life: a bag of buttery popcorn at the movie theater, an ice cream at the zoo, things like that. Not having the means to participate in these simple pleasures is a kind of social deprivation. I view redistributive programs as a tool to lessen the gap between families. Food regulators can handle the junk food problem.

People should be able to get cash transfers to buy goods on the general market. There shouldn't be food stamps.

The success of SNAP comes despite its inherent inefficiency, friction, and the indignity of its limitations. We structure the program the way we do in order to mollify voters who twitch at the idea of the poor ever enjoying anything.

Inequality isn't just about healthcare costs, biological metrics, etc. It is also deeply corrosive socially and psychologically, and this side of things is systemically underappreciated in policy circles.

To be sure, our food and diets are bad. Americans broadly should eat healthier. But are society's interests really better served by insisting that a poor child not be allowed to have a cake and blow out the candles on his birthday, the way all of his friends do?

I am a firm believer that the very notion of IP ownership needs to die a horrible death, something that AI may very well make happen in short order, yay.

The leading AI labs are not killing IP. They are taking IP and reshaping/combining it to produce their own highly lucrative proprietary IP package which they sell to you.

The mirror image of IP defenders are AI boosters who argue against IP when it comes to slurping up media but squirm when you say "ok, then publish all of the inputs that go into making your frontier models, and publish the model weights too."

ChatGPT dominates the consumer market (though Nano Banana is singlehandedly breathing some life into consumer Gemini).

A small anecdote: when ChatGPT went down a few months ago, a lot of young people (especially students) just waited for it to come back up. They didn't even think about using an alternative.

I don't understand the disappointment expressed here in the maintainers deciding to WONTFIX these security bugs.

Isn't this what ffmpeg did recently? They seemed to get a ton of community support in their decision not to fix a vulnerability

I think people are confusing the bubble popping with AI being over. When the dot-com bubble popped, it's not like internet infrastructure immediately became useless and worthless.

Don't self-promote without disclosure.

Microsoft hasn't been very quiet about it, at least in my experience. Every time I boot up Windows I get some kind of blurb about an AI feature.

jj has been fantastic for my productivity, but most of that comes from its alignment with the particular SWE practices on my team: trunk-based development, small atomic commits, quick review turnaround.

Getting rid of the staging area and allowing conflicts are the biggest wins for me day-to-day. No more stashing/popping or littering my workspace with WIP commits. It's so easy to whip up a change, send it for review, then ping-pong between writing new code on top of the change and making reviewer-requested edits further down the stack.

It depends on the nature of the code and codebase.

There have been many occasions when working in a very verbose enterprise-y codebase where I know exactly what needs to happen, and the LLM just types it out. I carefully review all 100 lines of code and verify that it is very nearly exactly what I would have typed myself.

This is tricky to get right.

If the false positive rate is consistently 0.0%, that is a surefire sign that the detector is not effective enough to be useful.

If a false positive is libel, then any useful malware detector would occasionally do libel. Since libel carries enormous financial consequences, nobody would make a useful malware detector.

I am skeptical that changing the wording in the warning resolves the fundamental tension here. Suppose we tone it down: "This executable has traits similar to known malware." "This website might be operated by attackers."

Would companies affected by these labels be satisfied by this verbiage? How do we balance this against users' likelihood of ignoring the warning in the face of real malware?

Notably this post did not examine whether any of the sites it was hosting on this domain was malicious/misleading.

If religion had been the cause of a lasting difference, I would have expected it to go in the opposite direction. Articulate, persuasive, emotive public testimony done in a declamatory style is part of the fabric of historical American Christianity, much more than the mostly liturgical traditions of British Christianity.

If there is a difference in communication skills, I don't think religious history explains it.

iMessage is extraordinarily popular in the US. Its userbase dwarfs Signal by over an order of magnitude

This might not be charitable, but my perspective is that some of the advocates want it both ways.

I would be interested in seeing an MIT/BSD licensed project saying, from the beginning, something like "This project is available under a permissive license, but I have a strong ethical expectation of my users to give me money if they build a product off of this work. I am fully aware that I can't legally enforce this, but I will certainly call you out publicly for your greed and lack of respect for my wishes."

My hunch is that many advocates would hesitate to put this in their project Readme, because they know that some companies might actually comply... by not using the code. (Call me naive but I think this is plausible.) They would rather give the impression that the code is truly no-strings-attached, because that would help drive adoption. Then later they can come back and say they ought to be given a cut.

I haven't been following this conflict: have the terms of the GPL been broken?

We're made to feel like we should open source things and not retain exclusive rights to commercialization.

Who is telling you that you have to write open source software? Millions of programmers around the world make a living writing software with much more restrictive licenses (including simply All Rights Reserved). I write proprietary code, and I don't feel any pressure to stop doing that. Somebody on the internet telling me that I should write open source software instead is not an issue. They can't stop me from making money writing code.

Edited to add: I don't own the rights to my code but I am fairly compensated for it. If I were to write code that I have direct ownership of, the above principles would still apply.

CC-BY-SA-NC isn't OSI approved and you get told you're "not open source" if you try to use it or licenses like it.

CC-BY-SA-NC is indeed not open source, but that doesn't mean you can't use it.

Permissively licensed software is intentionally designed to be used by anybody for any reason with essentially no restrictions beyond attribution. Advocates of permissive licenses explicitly reject the argument that commercial users ought to have any kind of obligation to the authors. "Thief" seems like a category error here.

For people who want to make money down the line, what is so hard about selling commercial licenses? Or better yet using GPL so that your software is still open source but the big commercial users will still want to pay you for a separate license?

Democratic Party voters seem to be more aligned with Euro-style socialist policies, but among elected Democrats this is a small minority view.

European socialists usually advocate for direct state ownership of certain industries, sector-wide union contracts, universal (not means-tested) child allowances, fully public health care, wealth taxes, free college, etc. There are a handful of elected Democrats that sign on to some of these views, but these have never been in the actual party platform, since the mainstream of the party roundly rejects these. Democrats are only somewhat radical in certain social/bioethical issues like abortion and LGBT rights (although the latter is being tested, with some influential Dems defecting); otherwise, the better European analogue would be Macron's Renaissance party (formerly En Marche), the UK's Lib Dems, the Nordic countries' social liberal parties.

You've made me realize that I probably have a subconscious bias against science and engineering.

My view of the ideal math curriculum is very humanistic, focusing on the broad civic and intellectual value of formal reasoning, statistical fluency, etc. I never liked the in-the-weeds numerical stuff you get in science and engineering, but it's what the world is built on.

This is why I'm so glad that I work in a closed monorepo now. There is no package management, only build tooling.

I find myself nodding along to many of the technical and organizational arguments. But I get lost in the licensing discussion.

If it is a cultural problem that people insist on giving things away for free (and receiving them for free), then viral licenses can be very helpful, not fundamentally pernicious.

Outside of the megaprojects, my mental model for GPL is similar to proprietary enterprise software with free individual licenses. The developer gets the benefits of open projects: eyeballs, contributors, adoption, reputational/professional benefits, doing a good deed (if that motivates them) while avoiding permissively giving everything away. The idea that it's problematic that you can't build a business model on their software is akin to the "forced charity" mindset—"why did you make something that I can't use for free?"

If you see a GPL'd bit of code that you really want to use in your business, email the developers with an offer of $X,000 for a perpetual commercial license and a $Y,000/yr support contract. Most are not so ideologically pure to refuse. It's a win-win-win: your business gets the software, the developers don't feel exploited, noncommercial downstream users can enjoy the fruits of open software, and everybody's contributed to a healthier attitude on open source.

What do you propose to remove?

Personally, I'd say that geometry and trigonometry seemed the least useful out of the high school math sequence. Trigonometry seemed like "Algebra 3: this time with identities to memorize" and geometry seemed mostly like an homage to Euclid. In my day-to-day life, algebraic thinking comes up much more often than geometric thinking, although of course I know this is not universally true.

Geometry is the classic introduction to proof and rigor, but if I were the benevolent dictator of the math curriculum, I would try to accomplish that with basic combinatorics, graph theory, or even a tiny bit of abstract algebra (proving basic arithmetic facts from the real number axioms, maybe modular arithmetic).