Threads for coderpath
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Wow! This is gold! These sorts of videos can help inspire an entirely new generation of developers.
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Intel has become unfocused and lazy. We’ve seen this before. I expect with ARMs rise to threaten desktops and servers they will suddenly jump back out into the lead, with some new innovation, to smackdown any doubt that they intend to remain the CPU leader.
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As my brain becomes older (turned 50 this year) I’ve been looking for better ways to take notes. My current experiment is with MarginNote 3 and Liquid Text on an iPad Pro 12.9. I’m going to keep mixing in more advice (I’m liking Shichao’s and Edd’s Notes) until I find something I’m happy with.
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So long Richard, and thanks for all the code.
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No, but Richard recent insane conjecture on Epstein and the resultant departure from the FSF Presidency has made his views dead to me. https://itsfoss.com/richard-stallman-controversy/
The man suffers from serious Engineers Disease: Thinks being an expert in one area makes him an expert in other areas as well.
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Regardless of what you may feel about rms’ behaviour surrounding the Epstein case, it doesn’t affect the points he has about software. This amounts to little more than a personal attack, and I feel it’s unbecoming and off-topic.
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For the sake of completeness (and I hope neutrality), I will share this text that tries to defend Stallman. There are articulations and counter-accusations I don’t like, but I’m also not satisfied with the flow of events, and the final judgement. There’s no real chance that he’ll be reinstated, but I think that those who hold Free Software dear to their hearts should ensure that the FSF do so too.
I wish not to debate or discuss this, again, because I think that would be off-topic, and I hope everyone can respect that.
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Tee ell semicolon fucking dee are.
It doesn’t matter what rms said. All that matters is what people heard. Richard is a communicator. If he can’t communicate effectively despite his intent, he shouldn’t be in the job of communicator at all.
You can’t blame everyone who keeps “misunderstanding” him after all this time. This has been happening for years. If he can’t get his message across, that’s his fault, not everyone else’s! Communication requires both a listener and a speaker, and the speaker can’t be the only one who is blameless.
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A very sad state of affairs if I may say.
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I thought he was effective in communicating. He said exactly what he meant, it was one other person reading into it who could not get local or national journalists to also see it as a story who blew things up on an internet blog. That people picked it up and ran with it, hollering about his beliefs (like they did here on Lobsters with no evidence) is the real problem.
People see what they want to see.
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It doesn’t matter what rms said. All that matters is what people heard. Richard is a communicator. If he can’t communicate effectively (…)
But this is not what’s happening here. RMS is a very good communicator, his texts are crystal clear even to a casual reader (who may or may not agree with them). The problem here is the large amount of dishonest people that are maliciously misquoting him in a systematic way.
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No, we’re not dishonest nor malicious. We’re just tired of him.
Communication is more than just slapping up bunch of texts on gnu.org. It involves time, and place, and presentation, and mood. The nitpicking that Richard did on this last incident got all of those wrong.
When you yell and get agitated, when you pick your feet in front of an audience, people just stop listening to what you have to say. It doesn’t matter what it is. They’ll just remember, “this guy picks his feet in public”. We are dumb, fragile, tribal creatures. If the leader of our tribe is picking his feet, we are less likely to be in his tribe, regardless of how eloquent he might otherwise be.
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Stallman’s personal antics are irrelevant to his communication abilities and the importance of his message. You sound like one of the 500 honorable citizens of Athens who voted for the demise of Socrates because they were “tired of him” and he was a “horrible person” who “corrupted the youth”. One of these corrupted youths was Plato, and today nobody remembers about the reasons that the honorable athenians produced. They were probably right in their short-sighted way, but it doesn’t really matter.
In school I was taught that what one person does and says is more important than their physical aspect. I like to think that other people does that also, so I do not really care about the strange antics of anybody. If anything, they are a fun addition to an otherwise depressingly homogeneous environment.
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No, we’re not dishonest nor malicious. We’re just tired of him.
If you’re not malicious, why are you intentionally misquoting and misrepresenting him, consistently? Tired people don’t get involved.
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Does your own personal Engineer’s Disease manifest as armchair psychology?
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I resisted Steve Jobs’s snow job in 1989 or 1990
Does anyone know what he is referring to here? Or what a “snow job” is?
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“Snow job” is an older term that simply means saying a whole bunch of stuff to try and persuade people to believe a lie. The image is of a constant barrage of arguements that eventually overwhelms the truth and buries it from view. Think big snowfall that will take a lot of work to dig the truth back out.
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Similar to a “gish gallop”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
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Might have to do with Jobs asking Stallman to distribute GCC as two programs, so that NeXT doesn’t have to release the source code to the Objective-C frontend for GCC that they wrote[1].
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Just a guess but perhaps he’s referring the the controversy around the original APSL or Eric Raymond’s participation in that announcement? Perhaps he had also been approached by Jobs?
I can’t find a video clip of the event and my memory is hazy (this is ~19 years ago at this point) but I remember Raymond being onstage at an early OS X event to announce that the (at the time) new APSL licence and state that it met the OSD definition. Raymond makes a reference to it in this comment, which elaborates on this line from the article it comments on:
I met Steve Jobs once in 1999 when I was the president of the Open Source Initiative, and got caught up in one of his manipulations in a way that caused a brief controversy but (thankfully) did the organization no lasting harm.
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I started to develop pain from typing, so I forced myself to learn Dvorak. Virtually no pain at all anymore.
It’s not the same thing as the article describes, but I figured others here might be able to relate.
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I observe the opposite: why are developer salaries so low? When you look at the value a developer brings to a profitable project, it is not uncommon for there to be an order of magnitude difference between the productivity of people/teams.
Either way, we need better ways of measuring productivity and its correlation with profits. If you bring five times the value, the pay ought to be five times as much.
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This feels a bit like the project management paradox. Often a PM doesn’t really contribute to the deliverable directly, but as they are often the bridge between developers and senior stakeholders, stakeholders tend to attribute success stories to the project manager rather than the individual developers. It’s usually about “perceived value” rather than “real value”.
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Security is always a trade off. There are no guarantees. It’s about managing risk and convenience.
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jjmalina
3 years ago
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‘No way to prevent this’, Says Only Development Community Where This Regularly Happens
I definitely share the sentiment. On the other hand it feels bad to make an analogy to the Onion article which is about gun violence.
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Considering the real-world implications of this sort of technical irresponsibility (which include things like “airplanes crashing out of the sky and killing 600+ people”), I think this is entirely the analogy that needs to be made more often.
It terrifies me that more people in the IT industry don’t realise the real-world implications for their decisions :/
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airplanes crashing out of the sky and killing 600+ people
I’m not especially impressed with npm either, but I don’t think it’s causing airplanes to fall out of the sky?
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NPM isn’t directly responsible for causing airplanes to fall out of the sky because it’s not being used in obviously-critical / life-or-death systems. The most it can do is ruin lives and thus kill people indirectly (ex., by presenting an attack surface by which bank accounts can be drained, or by being so bloated that, when deployed at scale, it heats up the atmosphere enough to be responsible for the death of a few hundred people from flooding or migration-related-violence somewhere down the line).
As a general policy, though, treating software problems as potentially fatal (the way we treat law problems as potentially fatal) is pretty reasonable. Anything deployed at scale has the potential to kill indirectly, and everything deployed at google- or facebook-scale probably has. Nothing is preventing individual software engineers from considering these cases, aside from taboos against reminding us of their possibility.
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The most it can do is ruin lives and thus kill people indirectly
I know someone who works in health informatics, where they provide web-based applications for patient management to hospitals. At least once they had a bug that caused allergy warnings to show up on the wrong patient’s record (such that a nurse might not know that you’re allergic to latex or penicillin). That absolutely could kill someone.
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It terrifies me that more people in the IT industry don’t realise the real-world implications for their decisions :/
Often, the response to pieces like this tends to be a sort of reckless naivete: “what’s this guy’s problem? They can just fix it!” I think there’s a subconscious belief that the community will self-correct after each breach. This belief ends up being something of a thought-killer because it cuts off thoughts of, “but why did it ever happen in the first place?” My guess is those thoughts are seen as a bit negative/taboo, because obviously the community would never all be wrong about something!
I’m not sure what the cure for lackadaisical developers is, other than avoiding massively popular ecosystems just to have a better shot at being around people that care.
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The Canadian practice of the Iron Ring ceremony echos your very important point. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring
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While surely virtuous, I doubt this ceremony (And any feel-good manifesto that gets posted here every now and then) have noticeable impact on how engineers deal with the real-world implications of their decisions. Oaths are nothing but fluff when there are no actual controls and consequence.
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I think that, as you suggest, the ceremony definitely does not usually result in software engineers feeling the weight of their decisions. I would hope and expect that it does feel that way for, for example, civil engineers. I also think we need to all take responsibility for moving our profession in the direction of greater accountability. We should live in a world where software engineers take this stuff seriously, and taking it seriously as individuals is one important way we can work towards that.
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wanton, unspeakable violence.
So, webpack?
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A satirical article by the onion (which is the comparison being made) is not an act of violence in any way, shape or form.
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This was exactly my reaction and put me off from reading the article. For those who recognize the allusion, it’s very much a false equivalence to compare CI/CD failures to actual loss of human life. The Onion’s article is a biting satirical commentary on a tragic systemic failure of American culture and legislative bodies. This article is about NPM being insecure. Distasteful.
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The frustration of the author in their Lobste.rs bio is palpable:
If you take a look at my submissions, you’ll see most of my work is ignored and my book recommendations have been most popular, as of the time of writing this; I believe this is because, no different than Hacker News, this website is mostly populated by people with only surface-level interest in computing, if that; meanwhile, a book recommendation lets everyone have their opinion and they give it points because they easily understand it.
While frustrated, I intend to keep this account until it completely ceases to serve me, at which time I’ll do my best to delete everything ever made under this account.
Marketing yourself is difficult, but having distain for your audience because they will not recognize your obvious intelligence is a trap. Congrats on discovering that a clever project name will get you some self-gratifying attention, but for long term success have some humility and respect for your fellow man.
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People may be expecting to see some moderator action here…
I honestly don’t know what to make of the article. I don’t find the jokes in it funny, nor do I find them appropriate for this forum (“homo” is not simply a silly word; it causes real harm). I don’t encourage personal attacks in all but the most exceptional circumstances, but I did find that your comment provided helpful context, and you were pretty restrained. Ultimately, I think I’m glad that you commented as you did. For the sake of civility, I want to encourage you not to get drawn into back-and-forth about this; I think your top-level comment stands well on its own.
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I don’t find the jokes in it funny, nor do I find them appropriate for this forum (“homo” is not simply a silly word; it causes real harm)
Isn’t this referring to homoiconicity? The author states his language has this property. “Homo” has uses beyond the offensive type you’re referring to, it’s a latin prefix - homogeneous, homophone, homoiconicity.
I’m not trying to say it’s inoffensive to everyone - I just don’t draw the conclusion that the author using it in this way.
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Thanks, but I’m going to let my comments stand. The tone and purpose of the article I think is best explained by his bio.
This article is not a serious attempt at coding. If you think I’m off-topic, fine. But software is more than just code. I’ll take clarity and respect over cleverness and contempt every time.
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coderpath
3 years ago
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‘No way to prevent this’, Says Only Development Community Where This Regularly Happens
Beautiful satire. Hopefully the message might get through to some that npm is self-inflicted psychopathy.
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One word: printers.
Back in the 80’s it was common to print out code on tractor-feed paper. Many printers would go right off the edge of the page if you went beyond 80-columns (drivers? we didn’t need no stinkin’ drivers!).
So we still use 80-columns for code for the same reason QWERTY is used for typing.
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Tradespeople figured this out a long time ago. 20% classroom time, 80% working alongside a journeyman as an apprentice building real projects for paying customers. Do this for several years, and voila!
Software Engineering is more trade than profession.
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Huh. You’ve persuaded me with that blog post. It’s tabs for me from now on.
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The movie “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” is an excellent illustration of this principle. Highly recommended https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiro_Dreams_of_Sushi
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It’s a clever idea, but my family already has a word for me: nerd.
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Uh… wat?
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In its two decade life span, HyperCard was enormously successful, and it succeeded all over the world. The Victoria Museum of Melbourne, which keeps track of Australia’s scientific and cultural history, has published a list of ways that educators in Melbourne used the program:
Today’s Internet has failed to engage educators the way HyperCard did. My wife is a teacher, and I used to work for a school district. We are still in the dark ages of computing.
I’m digging in to what happened to Brave’s Basic Attention Token, a solution to micropayments that looked promising, but now appears to have collapsed or poisoned in some way.