HN user
You seem to be attacking a different statement that no one says: "if the product isn't free, you aren't the product". There's no "if and only if" in the maxim.
Pretty sure you agree that if the product is free, the company is definitely getting value by monetizing something else of yours. It very much is true as written.
Great example of what we used to call: "default definition changed". RSI 20 years ago = Repetitive Strain Injury RSI today: Recursive Self Improvement
You don't think a human using an LLM to generate content that convinces another human to press the launch button is a concern? Sure seems like there's more than one thing we need to do.
Tend to like a lot of formal rules about everything.
I would amend to: what Americans don't like to accept are what they see as preventable mistakes. The least American sentiment of all is "shit happens". Americans sometimes say that, but they don't mean it. What they really mean: "this shit shouldn't be allowed to happen". Hence the rules, and (in the extreme) the litigiousness.
there's not really a destination. There is only the process of improvement
Surely you can appreciate that if the next stop on the journey of technology can take over the process of improvement itself that would make it an awfully notable stop? Maybe not "destination", but maybe worth the "endless conversation"?
"Until then" means others will pay for your decision to ignore policy when it happens. It's never on the person who -- with every good intention, full of an instinct to "build a better world" -- willfully ignores the stuffy rules in handbooks and HR guidelines. Instead, when it backfires and someone does threaten to sue, it's precisely execs, HRs, legal who have to deal with it. The rules are there for good reason.
This is an extremely important question, and you’ve phrased it nicely.
We’re either handicapping our brightest, or boosting our dumbest. One part is concerning, the other encouraging .
Try to keep in mind that your attention to detail is almost certainly perceived by them to be fastidious, and that quietly your seniormost colleagues and leaders may well muse: "Man, if only sublinear would loosen their standards, just imagine how much faster we'd proceed". Put another way: the fact that you can't relate to OPs problem is because you're hardwired to solve it (putting things in their place) continuously, likely without exception, which means you're paying a different cost. Try to think of _that_ cost when you bristle at their solutions.
"Short-lived" depends on your perspective. Cloudflare owns the rights to that trademark now; because they believe their mission furthers that vision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Network_is_the_Computer (and John Cage, the Sun employee who coined the phrase, said he was fine with Cloudflare picking it up: https://spectrum.ieee.org/does-repurposing-of-sun-microsyste...)
Wahlberg lampooned himself in a follow-up appearance with Samberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYcHxF_cO8o. So: "and" is also correct.
the vast majority of Kubernetes clusters are just hanging out on the public
How does the author know that? Doesn't "not public" mean not visible, and therefore not countable?
“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they fly by.” - Douglas Adams
This 2021 New Yorker article: How Your Family Tree Could Catch a Killer (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/22/how-your-famil...) was incredibly illuminating and changed my perspective on our sense of privacy. With a surprisingly small fraction of the world's population sequenced, we can still match a sample to a person whose sequence we don't have. To quote the article: "Genetic genealogy, it turned out, could function as an all-purpose de-anonymizer".
So perhaps be less upset that Mom signed up; our DNA really isn't ours in the same way the documents on our hard drive. You were never going to be able to opt-out.
See also good podcast dedicated to this topic: Why can't we turn all the empty offices into apartment buildings?
https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/why-cant-we-turn-all-the-empty...
OK but then what is the thing in the middle, between documents and applications?
There are fantastic, beautiful interactive experiences (for lack of a better word) that are obviously not documents (they can't be represented on paper, there is code running) but they're not really applications, either (they are fully offline, self-contained, state that's only evident on the page).
But they are, universally: dynamic.
Examples: - https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ - http://worrydream.com/TenBrighterIdeas/ - even : https://neal.fun/space-elevator/
This is what I think the future of textbooks and presentations should be. But I think part of the problem is that not only do we not have tools geared toward creating them, we don't even have a name for these things. If we say "document", they flunk the pdf test. If we say "web application", they are lumped into the same lumbering category as office docs and enterprise software.
Maybe Nota is a step in the right direction. But it'd be an even better step if it didn't call itself "21st century documents", if for no other reason than to defend against the valid criticism you levied against it.
I think what you're picking up on is that people in leadership positions have to communicate to very different audiences.
As a first approximation, just think of the size of the destination audience:
- if it's a few people, the language will sound direct and casual
- if it's many thousands, millions (likely to include government, investors, customers) then it will sound formal, corporate, "PR"
Because we're more often likely to be in the 2nd category, we're used to hearing senior leaders sound like their words have been carefully edited.
But we shouldn't be surprised that when we get a glimpse of their comms in smaller settings, it sounds "just like us".
It sounds like you already have exactly the right perspective. It _is_ a nightmare. That $200M isn't their money, it's not in their pockets, and it's far short of what it was hoped to be. You framed it perfectly, and so did they: they're in deep shit, and it's a horror story.
Yup, all those. Also, at least for me:
- it was slow
- it wasn't consistent; not unusual that thread replies would be out of order
- it was text only (essentially)
- posting and downloading binary files was even slower and cumbersome)
Made a list of all the revision control tools I've used over the decades, the year they were created, and the year I last used them:
sccs 1973 2000
rcs 1982 2000
cvs 1990 2004
clearcase 1992 2004
perforce 1995 2011
subversion 2000 2015
mercurial 2005 2015
git 2005 present
But often time when I tell juinors that when they're my age, git will be distant a strange memory to them, they look at me funny. It's a wonderful tool and earned its success, but I'll be sad if it's our final take on the problem.
Great to see. More generally: I feel like playgrounds are grossly underused in our industry. It's possible the issue is in the name -- it immediately connotes that whatever you're doing isn't real work, it's just a place to, well, "play".
But really these kind of playgrounds are at least a cousin, if not a direct descendant, of the immediate feedback principle that underlies everything from a REPL to the kind of systems (Symbolics, etc) that allow you to edit running code. Their potential is beautifully illustrated in Brett Victor's famous 'Inventing on Principle' talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII
Three areas that I'd love to see playgrounds mature beyond teaching beginners CSS:
1) Integrated directly into developer documentation. You can see some of that in systems that are documenting services -- for example, the Google Sheets API documentation has a 'Try this Method' box that lets you post a request to the service on the same page that describes it, but what I really want is something like that when I'm reading the man page of a destructive disk command, or a complex database query, or a low-level C graphics library. That'll require a playground wired to something as big as a VM, maybe.
2) Integrated into textbooks: for the last couple years the astonishing posts from Bartosz Ciechanowski ([Sound](https://ciechanow.ski/sound/), [Bicyle](https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/)) have demonstrated just how much better a textbook could be if you could interactively play with the concepts you're reading about. Unlike dev docs, the thing you're interacting with doesn't even have to be "real".
3) Most ambitiously: integrated into the input form of bug/issue tracking tools. This is the opposite of play: it means a running system would need to be in cahoots with a playground, so that mature apps could let you record and playback what you saw as a user, allow you to edit irrelevant parts of input and output out and submit a complete here-look-see-it-is-busted asset for analysis. A Stackoverflow of the future would be orders of magnitude more interesting if each question was posed as a broken playground.
I think we've already seen the first shoots from that nascent new system: https://webassembly.org/. And this hilarious talk will continued to be viewed by future generations for marking the 2013 inflection point: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
Great observation. I found myself thinking it reflected the famous quote: "“Watch your thoughts, they become words; watch your words, they become actions; watch your actions, they become habits; watch your habits, they become character; watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.” The post author is traversing the actions-habit-character territory.
Monitor and measure the boundary jumping. Treat it as any other business metric you want to improve.
Surely you can appreciate that the language you're using isn't always your choice.
An excellent tutorial that takes exactly this approach (building up to a novel Emacs mode for NYT Crosswords, of all things) is the O'Reilly book "Writing GNU Emacs Extensions, by Bob Glickstein.
Think of it as: reasoning=computation, knowledge=data. Data alone doesn’t say it must be computed. But computation, by definition, is attempting to create data (the result) that doesn’t exist. Thus: knowledge isn’t aware it must be reasoned about, but reasoning knows it’s trying to find (deduce, compute) knowledge it lacks.
Static linking also relative in a discussion about coupling and OS dependencies : http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/38914/17683
A lot of well-reasoned arguments are laid out in the Tcl advocacy page here: http://wiki.tcl.tk/590