I searched docker for windows and it took me to this page. Which asks for a login to download. I think the big deal is how dishonest the reply from the docker team is.

“we’ve made this change to make sure we can improve the Docker for Mac and Windows experience for users moving forward.”

This is such obvious marketing BS and it’s insulting that they think the average developer doesn’t know this is so they can send more marketing emails and not to “Improve experiences”.

It’s required from >= 18.03

The Ubuntu Blog advertising proprietary software? I hope they got paid for it at least.

Wouldn’t want all those crazy Stallmanites hanging around calling them on advertising non-free software, which you can get from their new package manager that caters to for-profit companies.

The word “emacs” doesn’t even appear in the listicle so I suppose it’s just clickbait.

I’m not very familiar with the legal details, but I assume the distinction is general access to the internet being considered a utility, while access to platforms being considered something like a privilege. E.g. roads shouldn’t discriminate based on destination, but that doesn’t mean the destination has to let you in.

edit: As to why Americans don’t seem as concerned with it (which is realize I didn’t address): I think most people see it as a place, like a restaurant. You can be kicked out if you are violating policies or otherwise disrupting their business, which can include making other patrons uncomfortable. Of course there are limits which is why we have anti-discrimination laws.

The landmark case in the United States is throttling of Netflix by Comcast. Essentially, Comcast held Netflix customers hostage until Netflix paid (which they did).

It’s important to understand that many providers (Comcast, AT&T), also own the channels (NBC, CNN, respectively). They have an interest in charging less for their and their partners content, and more for their competitors content, while colluding to raise prices across the board (which they have done in the past with television and telephone service).

Collectively, they all have an interest in preventing new entrants to the market. The fear is that big players (Google, Amazon) will be able to negotiate deals (though they’d probably prefer not to), and new or free technologies (like PeerTube) will get choked out.

Net neutrality is somewhere where the American attitude towards corporations being able to do whatever to their customers conflicts with the American attitude that new companies and services must be able to compete in the marketplace.

You’re right to observe that individuals don’t really enter into it, except that lots of companies are pushing media campaigns to sway public opinion towards their own interests. You’re seeing those media campaigns leaking out.

Switching to the individual perspective.

I just don’t want to pay more for the same service. In living memory Americans have seen their gigantic monopolistic telecommunications company get broken up, and seen prices for services drop 100 fold; more or less as a direct consequence of that action.

As other posts have noted, the ISP situation in the US is already pretty dire unless you’re a business. Internet providers charge whatever they can get away with and have done an efficient job of ensuring customers don’t have alternatives. Telephone service got regulated, but internet service did not.

Re-reading your post after diving on this one… We’re not really concerned about the same gatekeepers. I don’t think any American would be overly upset to see players like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Netflix go away and I wouldn’t be surprised to see one or more of those guys implode as long as they don’t get access to too much of the infrastructure.

Right-leaning US Citizen here. I’ll attempt to answer this as best as I can.

Net neutrality is being pushed by the media because it “fights discrimination”, and they blame the “fascist, nazi right” for it’s repeal (and they’re correct, except for the “fascist, nazi” bit). But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

I can’t speak to why open-source advocates are also pushing for net neutrality, because (in my opinion) the government shouldn’t be involved in how much internet costs. I do remember this article was moderately interesting, saying that the majority of root DNS servers are run by US companies. But, that doesn’t really faze me. As soon as people start censoring, that get backlash whether the media covers it or not

Side note, the reason you don’t see the protests against the “gatekeepers” is that most of the mainstream media isn’t accurately covering the reaction of the people to the censorship. I bet you didn’t know that InfoWars was the #1 news app with 5 stars on the Apple app store within a couple of weeks of them getting banned from Facebook, etc. I don’t really have any opinion about Alex Jones (lots of people on the right don’t agree with him), but you can bet I downloaded his app when I found out he got banned.

P.S. I assumed that InfoWars was what you were referring to when you said “removing some controversial users” P.P.S. I just checked the app store again, and it’s down to #20 in news, but still has 5 stars.

One part of it is that we already have net neutrality, and it’s easier to try to hang on to a regulation than to create a new one.

When the pitch is “good computing is possible”, “bad computing has dominated” isn’t actually a great counterargument – particularly when the history of so much of it comes down to dumb luck, path dependence, tradeoffs between technical ability & marketing skills, and increasingly fast turnover and the dominance of increasingly inexperienced devs in the industry.

If you’re trying to suggest that the way things shook out is actually ideal for users – I don’t know how to even start arguing against that. If you’re suggesting that it’s inevitable, then I can’t share that kind of cynicism because it would kill me.

A better world is possible but nobody ever said it would be easy.

I think the best way to describe what we have is “Design by Pop Culture”. Our socio-economic system is a low pass filter, distilling ideas until you can package them and sell them. Is it the best we got given those economic constraints? maybe…

But that’s like saying “Look, this is the best way to produce cotton, it’s the best we got” during the slave era…(slavery being a different socio-economic system)

It’s more like, deflect and avoid an automatic “yes” to superiors.

Obviously you need to weigh input from organizational heads differently, they have a different context then you do (otherwise what’s the point of em’). They tend to have a broader context, you tend to have a more narrow and detailed context.

The superiors’ version of this advice is, don’t automatically override the decision making power of your subordinates, they probably have details that you don’t have. This article is full of good advice.

That is very much not what I’m suggesting.

A potentially interesting challenge: What does a design language for maker-first applications look like?

P.S. compared with “hipster” modernist things of ~2010

What do you mean by this

Haskell has no syntax in the core language to sequence one expression after another.

It has quite a few alternatives actually. Depending what you mean by “syntax in the core language”, there are some things with specific grammar rules in the Haskell98 and Haskell2010 standards; there are some “userspace” functions/operators (i.e. their syntax is a special case of functions/operators) which are nevertheless mandated by those standards; there are some things which the de facto implementation GHC supports (e.g. via commandline flags); etc. Here are a few:

• a : b is the expression a followed by the sequence of expressions b (all of the same type)
• a ++ b is the sequence a followed by the sequence b (again, of the same type)
• [a, b] is a sequence of the expression a followed by the expression b (of the same type)
• (a, b) is a sequence of the expression a followed by the expression b (can be different types)
• f . g is the expression g followed by the expression f (input and output types must coincide)
• g >>> f is the expression g followed by the expression f (same as above but their order flipped)
• a -< b is the expression b followed by the expression a (must have compatible input/output types)
• do { a; b } is the expression a followed by the expression b
• f <$> x is the expression followed by the expression f (must have compatible input/output types)

These all define a specific order on their sub-expressions. They’re not all identical, but they follow roughly similar usage:

• a : b tells a Prolog-style interpreter to perform the computation/branch a before trying those in b
• a ++ b generalises the above to multiple computations (the above is equivalent to [a] ++ b)
• [a, b] is a specialisation of the above, equivalent to [a] ++ [b]
• (a, b) generalises [a, b] to allow different types. We can use this to implement a linear sequence (it’s essentially how GHC implements IO). Somewhat surprisingly, and completely separately to anything IO related, it also represents parallel composition
• f . g is a rather general form of composition
• g >>> f is the same as above
• a -< b is is part of arrow notation and desugars to a mixture of sequential and parallel composition (using lambdas, >>>, (a, b), etc.)
• do { a; b } is a generalisation of b . a, corresponding to join (const b <$> a), which is the most similar form to the ; operator of other languages you refer to: both because it has the same syntax (an infix ; operator) and a similar meaning (generalised composition). This can also be written as a >> b, and is related to a >>= b and a >=> b which are also built-in sequencing syntax, but didn’t seem worth their own entries.
• f <$> x is generalised application of f to x. That generality also makes it a composition/pipeline operator

The reason I’ve listed all these isn’t so much to say “look, there are some!”; but more to point out how many different meanings the word “sequence” can have (a list of values, an composition of functions, a temporal ordering on side-effects, etc.); how many different implementations of sequencing we can build; and, most crucially, that they all seem to overlap and interminge (e.g. the blurring of “container of values” with “context for computation”; how we can generalise a single thing like “composition” in multiple ways; how generalising seemingly-separate ideas ends up at the same result; etc.). This tells us that there’s something important lurking here. I don’t think investigating and harnessing this makes someone a wanker.

Monads only matter for representing sequential execution in extremely constrained languages, like haskell. (Some people believe monads are useful for other things, but I’m not interested in that debate, I’m just talking about where monads are certainly important.)

This is not true. Monads are critical for code reuse. I’ve used the concept of a monad in many areas, but explicitly and critically in Scala.

Haskell has no syntax in the core language to sequence one expression after another.

Yes it does: do-notation. You can even use semicolons if you don’t like newlines. It’s the syntax to sequence expressions which can be sequenced. You can’t use semicolons to sequence things that can’t be sequenced in other languages, either.

And why talk about Maybe but not MonadPlus, free monads, transformers…? All you know is Maybe and IO? Of course it’s boring to you. In stead of writing blog sized posts about how blog tutorials don’t teach you everything you could read up, but oh well you do you.

By changing each stage to take and return a fat outer type holding the entire context, you can just as easily achieve the cool pipeline effect by defining >>= as function composition rather than bind.

With bind you don’t have to change each stage.

Understanding how to write programs which allow change without triggering catastrophic rewrites is pretty useful.

Understanding why some programs are easy to modify is pretty useful.

Having language to discuss why some programs are easy to modify and others are not; also pretty useful.

The original post is about how thinking in terms of Monads can make a program which is hard to modify into a program which is easy to modify, it’s a useful post.

Some people believe monads are useful for other things, but I’m not interested in that debate, I’m just talking about where monads are certainly important.

First of all, by far the most popular monadic interface in modern software development is not Haskell’s IO type, it’s JavaScript’s Promise type, together with similar systems for writing asynchronous logic in other languages. If we’re talking about use cases where monads are “certainly important,” I think it’s worth mentioning the large number of programmers writing monadic code on a daily basis in languages which certainly do not lack native support for semicolons.

I love monads and find they’re actually among the most useful and important tools I’ve ever acquired as a programmer, but I agree that the PLT and functional programming communities could do a better job communicating exactly why monads are actually important. The use of monads as “extendable semicolons” does have some narrow but critically important use cases, such as asynchronous code, exception handling, and recursive backtracking, but I actually believe that the exotic forms of control flow you can express with monads is of only secondary importance.

In my experience, the most important consequence of modeling side effects with monads is that it allows you to reliably distinguish between pure and impure functions. The features which you claim make Haskell “extremely constrained” in fact give it an entirely new dimension of expressive power, because whereas most languages only have one form of function, which is implicitly allowed to perform side effects, Haskell has two forms of functions: functions which may perform side effects, and functions which may not. Given that a function’s interaction with an environment is an extremely important aspect of its semantics, this is information that you would be informally documenting and keeping track of anyway; Haskell just allows you document it in a precise, machine-checked format with great integration with the compiler.

This immediately allows you to separate functions which perform IO from those which do not, but that’s not actually the coolest part. The coolest part is that once you start defining your own monad types, you can express much much more precise and interesting classes of side effects, like “a function that interacts only with a random number generator” or “a function that interacts only with my database state” or “a function which interacts only with a sequential-identifier generator.” This is the real power of monads: the ability to make fine-grained guarantees about the data dependencies and side effects of a function given only its type signature.

The last time, I tried nix, everything in the store had to be world-readable, which made it rather questionable to manage things like private keys for TLS certificates and so on through nix expressions. Is this an issue with guix too?

Not gambling. Securities fraud! If you want to gamble you have to go find a slotmachine game with loot boxes.

I’m overall loving what’s in there. I’d definitely support it. It seems like a more realistic thing of hackers supporting other hackers instead of hoping society will change to. Great stuff.

“The Foundation will help to create environments where hackers are welcomed, supported, nurtured and celebrated. Creating a safer, more supportive and accepting world for hacker will help to reduce depression and suicide among hackers, and enable hackers to live fuller and happier lives.”

I still think someone should bring up one point when stuff like above is mentioned. The corporate media and Hollywood, the most powerful influencers, have totally redefined the label “hacker” to be criminality to a point where it’s probably beyond salvage. If anyone uses it, the laypeople hearing it will immediately have a negative mindset that creates a harder conversation for that person. Its constant association with evil by media makes me think of it as the geek N-word or something in terms of average person’s negative usage or reactions, hackers arguing about why they identify with positive version of it, and media fueling fires for ratings and profit. Although I got good at explaining real meaning, I’ve found that there was no real effect among the hundreds of laypeople I tried that on. There’s not enough of us doing it to counter media’s reach. Being uncommon and marginalized group means that will remain true a long while.

This is a marketing problem more than anything. A brand was trashed but people keep using and defending it. Marketing practice (and results!) say we need new brands so we start fresh in the minds of the audience to get broader support. I’ve been using the words thinker, inventer, technologist, and recently maker. Three already have positive connotations which correspond with what people will be doing on software and hardware side. Lay people might be happy to invest in locations, equipment, and support for (those words) among the nation’s youth. Ive found that maker generates confusion (“What’s that?”) that lets me explain the concept with positive examples from makerspaces. So, it’s weaker initially and requires a little work but that can be as simple as linking to a story. So, there’s some options.

I say we keep the hacker term among ourselves while garnering mainstream support with the kind of words they understand and would back. I’ve already been doing it with positive results. I see others doing it, too, even though many wouldn’t call themselves hackers. They’re just folks recruiting youth to let them do group projects, dream big, and so on. Happens in many fields. It’s a proven model. If we use it, though, we might not call them hackerspaces given that name leaking out to external supporters could cause conflicts or damagen. We’d have to use makerspaces, invention/technology centers, and so on… which again is already happening in many places. Hacker stays internal. Alternatively, we take those little conflicts using them to educate people on the term with positive examples risking losing support or funding on principle. If so, I argue we don’t explain the term: use examples of people who built amazing things that countered the status quo using their inquisitive attitude and deep understanding. A number of them showing up in the media overtime coming out of these (words here)-spaces might positively define the hacker spirit in the new terms and/or slowly undue damage to original term.

It would also help if we kept collectively pushing the media for distinction between positive and criminal hackers. Showing more of the inventive ones plus their disdain for the damaging ones. Least there’s hackers on the cop shows saving peoples’ asses. That’s… something… I don’t think they understand good hacking, though. I see hints of it with characters that use tech or deep knowledge to bypass limitations of an obstacle or tool. Maybe hackers can keep coming up with ideas like that for major shows forwarding them to the producers. Trickle examples into stories with wide audiences. Similarly, keep forwarding inventive folks to local and national media outlets so they highlight them slipping in words like maker or hacker. Need a positive pushback against what media is already doing preferably in a way that they co-opt it into their own, standard practice due to positive ratings. In the end, they’ll be taking credit for their show elements with us rolling our eyes at least being grateful that we’re a bit safer and more appreciated for our efforts.

Just some thoughts I have after years of fighting this battle with the general public looking at what worked and didn’t. We need to do more of what works. It’s more about perception and influences than facts or tech. Our methods must be likewise. Just the way it is.

If you only ned to run Linux VMs then it may still be 100%, since that’s how this is being done…

If Google was good, then Google would push their drivers for Chromebooks upstream. Google does not push their drivers for Chromebooks upstream.