paulajohnson

A formal specification language is a programming language that we don't know how to compile.

If we can use AI to automatically implement a formal spec, then that formal specification language has just become a programming language.

This reads like a case study from "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen.

TL;DR: big incumbents (e.g. IBM) get out-innovated and replaced by scrappy startups even when the incumbent sees it coming and tries to react. The incumbent's business processes, sales metrics (NPII in this story), internal culture and established customer base make it impossible for an innovative product to succeed within the company.

The incumbent produces an innovative gadget. It may even be good, but its Sales Dept earn their quarterly bonus from the existing product line sold to the existing customers. They haven't got time to go chasing small orders of the new gadget from new customers who they don't have a relationship with, and the existing customers don't see the point of the new gadget. So orders for the gadget stagnate.

Across town is the small scrappy start-up making a similar gadget. It lives on those small orders and has a highly motivated sales person who chases those orders full time. So their orders grow, their product improves from the market feedback, and one day the new gadget is actually better than the incumbent's main product. At that point the incumbent goes out of business.

This has much the same design philosophy as the original Land Rover: tough, reliable, simple and maintainable. It was originally developed as the UK answer to the Jeep, but rapidly became the standard utility vehicle for anyone with an outdoor off road job. Especially farmers. Something like two thirds of all Land Rovers ever made are still in use.

This might well go the same way.

Gentrification doesn't reduce segregation, it just moves the boundaries of the segregated areas.

Poor people mostly rent because they can't afford or can't get a mortgage. When an area gentrifies those people are forced out because the rents rise, and wealthy people move in. If you just look at the income distribution in the area it looks like "the population" became wealthier, but if you look at the individuals you find that the old residents have been forced out, and generally wind up poorer because of this (social networks disrupted, work further away etc).

This is the Paradox of Tolerance. If you tolerate intolerance then intolerance wins, and you don't have tolerance any more.

Intolerance isn't just "causing offence", it is the creation of an environment which is threatening. If ou get enough veiled anonymous threats against your life, health and family then you might well withdraw from public life. And then, what value does "free speech" have for you?

But, you say, you aren't talking about threats, just about "offence". But offensive speech begets threats. If Mr Rabblerouse publicly calls Jenny Good out as a dangerous degenerate, some of his followers will, quite predictably, follow his lead and start to make actual threats. Some might go further and carry out those threats. Even if they do not, Ms Good is going to have a perfectly reasonable fear that they might.

You say that Mr Rabblerouse is merely stating a legitmate opinion, that he has a right to be offensive, and that the Ms Good is equally free to say unpleasant things about him. But that is just deliberately ignoring the power inequality. Ms Good has no mob who will take the hint to hate on Mr Rabblerouse, no power to put him in fear. But he does have the power to do it to her, on a whim, answerable to nobody. And when people see that, and see how easily he can put Ms Good in fear and misery, they will think twice about their own speech.

And this is the point. Hate speech is not merely unpleasant and worthless, it actively suppresses the speech of other people. US jurisprudence makes much of "chilling effects" of government action on speech, and with good reason. But it is not just the government that can chill speech. Mr Rabblerouse can chill the speech of others against himself very effectively. So the only way to ensure freedom of speech, paradoxically, is to ban speech that incites hatred.

I think the parent comment is about the likelihood of recovering enough money to make the exercise worthwhile, rather than the propriety of getting ripped off.

Yet another reason why not to be a sharecropper.

The 10 LOC/day includes the entire project, including analysis, requirements, design, documentation (user and tech), test, management etc, in a large project. Saying (as many do) that an individual programmer has produced hundreds of LOC per day is to miss the point.

You have to start by defining your terms of reference and make sure you are comparing like with like.

If you are ever in Stockholm do go and see the Vasa. The picture does not do it justice. Seriously amazing.

Taking care of the elderly is a labour intensive business. Automation doesn't clean an old person's glasses (real life example), make their bed or cook their meals.

And what happens when your consultant bills you for a big but vaguely described fee?

In Roe vs Wade the Supreme Court found a right to privacy. The fact that this is not in the Bill of Rights is irrelevant, as per the Ninth Amendment.

Makes Kim Yong Un look like a minor nuisance.

The point is that option types let you explicitly state which values are nullable, but null references mean that every value is potentially null even if it doesn't make sense.

But today we have people paying for high quality content streamed over the net. Its the business model of Netflix and Amazon.

Aleynikov was charged with stealing trade secrets, which does not apply to GPL software.

Cease and desist selling your core product until you replace the GPL bits, or else make your core produt open source.

I think you are erecting a straw man here. The article

1: identifies a set of social norms which it names "thar".

2: Asserts that these norms tend to occur together (i.e. a society in which individuals primary allegience is to a family or clan is likely to find it acceptable to kill in vengance and be paranoid about female sexuality)

3: Argues that these social norms are generated by poverty, and simultaneously likely to perpetuate poverty, thereby creating a vicious circle.

4: Considers the possibility that our society could develop a similar culture in the future.

You claim that the author believes that this is something that cannot be extricated from the societies that practice it, but I cannot see such a claim in the text. In fact the writers concern about the possible descent of western societies into thar would seem to put the lie to your claim: if a society can descend into thar then it can also climb out of it.

If you say that all "cultural" critique is actually racism in disguise then you make it impossible to consider any aspect of how a culture might affect the prosperity and well-being of its members. This can only be justified if you believe that culture has no impact on prosperity and well-being. If it does have an impact then it becomes necessary to consider which cultural norms promote prosperity and well-being and to criticise those that prevent it.

The way it was explained to Joel Spolsky in the article linked earlier is that Gates just pokes away at increasingly fine details until he finds some question you can't answer, and uses that to make you look dumb. Its actually just a form of intellectual bullying, like a jock who challenges you to an arm wrestling contest before he'll let you out of the changing room.

Thats not to say that Gates isn't extremely intelligent and hardworking, just that his approach isn't necessarily the best. Also, Spolsky's anecdote is from a few decades ago. Gates will have matured a bit since then.

3a) If research doesn't exist, find some impecunious person with a PhD and pay them to create some.

Other governments take note: this is what good electronic security looks like.

For those who don't know, the Robert T. Morris quoted in the text turned out to be the author of the worm, and the R. H. Morris also quoted was his father (who also did a lot of work with the NSA).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morris_(cryptographer...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris

That doesn't make sense. As soon as the developer wrote the code (I.e. fixed it in tangible form) he had copyright in it. Copyright cannot be transferred except by a specific written transfer, which doesn't exist in this case.

Neal Stephenson, not even you could have invented this!

I love the statement “Humans violate the rules in a safe and principled way”. Really sums up the problem.

So when you break the rules, what principles (i.e. rules) are you following?

As they say oop north, where there's muck there's money. Although I don't think its meant quite so literally.

"If I have a friend who squanders their money while I save and build up wealth, are they stupid?"

No, they are probably "helpless". If they actually have a more fulfilling life then they may be "intelligent".

The distinguishing feature of "stupid" people in this typology is that they are the ones who cause grief to others with no gain to themselves. This is not the same as being unintelligent; the intro to the article points out that nobel laureates are just as likely to be stupid as anyone else.

I wouldn't take Capers Jones' estimates of SLOC/function point as evidence of anything. In most cases (including these two) this seems to be Jones taking a look at the language Wikipedia page and guessing a number.

#3 bugs me. It gets asked every time there is a breach, but its irrelevant.

Encryption at rest is only useful if the only way to access the data is to type in the key. But for Equifax there are going to be hundreds or thousands of accesses per second. If you encrypt the data then you have added no protection at all because you still have a huge pipeline out through an always-on decryption mechanism. Any attacker is going to access the data through that mechanism and ignore the encryption completely.

Same here. So what is chrony doing differently? Is it just that the developer(s) are really clever, or are they using static analysis, or a better coding standard, or what?

This is important. We don't often get the chance to compare side-by-side implementations of the same requirement, so when big differences turn up we need to understand why.