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You aren’t forced to use the new c++ features. You can continue to write as you have always written. I think the core complaint is that OTHER people are now writing c++ that looks like - HORROR! - Python. If this was the 1980s and the only way to learn C++ was to pore over a book from end-to-end, ok. But it’s the 21st century! We have the internet! There are online references which have example code snippets to go with each C++ concept or standard library class. A quick web search will get you any concept that you like.
Taking the example used in the article, I LOVE the range based for loops. It makes it less text to read. Don’t like
auto, fine, use explicit typing. A modern IDE will still do code intelligence for you onautovariables, don’t forget and the compiler, of course, will keep you on the straight. You may worry about unfortunate implicit conversions, and then, yes, you should be explicit.I’m not convinced all this griping about the size of C++ and all these “modern” features is not a bit of conservatism run amuck. Especially with the new
memoryfeatures which allow us to avoid bare pointers.Sorry for my wall of text. Just a long time C++ fan here who’s a big fan of the new standard.
A side note on the lego pictures
- It’s probably a result of what I’m used to, or some pleasant memories of childhood, but I too miss the “ugly” blocks of my childhood. It wasn’t ugly, because in my imagination all those knobs weren’t making my spaceship ugly - they were potentials for expanding my spaceship even more.
- That new spaceship looks like a rebuild of the “Voyager” set (6929) and I find it awesome to see that old computer block unchanged in the new set
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The new C++ features are execllent. The problem is the legacy of bad defaults and backward compatibility at all costs. This is probably the right decision overall, but it makes for an uglier language. I would also point out that you do pay for features that you do not use. Why? Well it might be used by code that you call, triggering weird behavour (e.g. const casts) and it makes tooling considerably hard to build (see Clang’s code complexity).
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I have three comments:
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I think it’s natural for any language to eventually buckle under the weight of Amdahl’s law, which in this case is making common idioms faster to write and recognize.
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The author seems to simultaneously criticize modern C++ for having too many ways to do something (as in the vector insert example), but also criticizes modern C++ for attempting to make idioms that guide you towards a few ways to do something. In that sense, I’m not sure which he’s arguing for/against.
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I agree having too many syntactical features/sugars can create cognitive overhead (one of my pain points with learning Haskell), and I assume that’s why the community has rallied behind guidelines like: https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines
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spoiler: no.
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I usually link to Betteridge’s Law when I write a post like this, but didn’t this time.
Apparently a significant portion of people found the title to be clickbait-y, but I thought it was a pretty straightforward question. Oh well!
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This knee-jerk reaction against “clickbait” kind of annoys me. Imo there is nothing wrong with an article having a title that attempts to engage a reader and pique their interest. I would also much rather a title pose a question and answer it in the article, rather than containing the answer in the title itself. (The latter can lead to people just reading the title and missing any nuance the article conveys).
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“WebAssembly is not the return of Java Applets and Flash.”
Edit: I did enjoy the article, however.
Edit2: As site comment:
I had no idea what the “kudos” widget was, moved my mouse to it, saw some animation happening, and realized I just “upvoted” a random article, with no way to undo it. Wondeful design. >.<
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Am I the only one who sees irony in the author putting all this thought into a problem that could be summarized as people simply being bad at their job?
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No. My insight is this: all of his anecdotal examples are examples of people poorly managing time due to poorly prioritizing their work. This fault has many causes such as poor design goals, miscommunication, avoidant behavior, boredom, et al. This is a fault everyone is aware of. The author has recognized this problem and decides to spend time formalizing it, making anecdotal stories, accompanying graphics, and a blog post, when that time could be spent on some aspect of enriching his life or self improvement (unless he finds writing the post enriching which is entirely fine.)
To the extend of the author’s examples, these workers sound bad enough to warrant labeling them as either incompetent or just lazy. In which case, we should just call a spade a spade and force this worker to make a course correction or replace them with someone better. That would be the simple and most straightforward response to the problem, and I am simply pointing out the irony of the author’s response.
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I read the article as an extended meditation on the Upton Sinclair quote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
A story. Years ago, when I was in college, I did some consulting work at a company. My coworker was also a college student (same college, same department). One project was editing a printed manual to put up on an internal Website. The conversion from Microsoft Word to HTML was trivial (Microsoft word provided that much). But not linking each vocabulary word to its definition in the glossary section. There were perhaps a hundred words (it was a specialized industry) and there were some 100 pages to edit.
My coworker wanted to dive right in and do the editing by hand. That was a lot of work. Days worth of mind-numbing work. I wanted to take some time to think about the task and how best to approach it. An argument ensued. We ended up using
lex(since we had access to some Unix workstations with everything preloaded) to add the appropriate HTML links to the glossary page for each web page and were done in maybe two hours or so.Was I smart in finding a quick way to reliably edit the 100 pages? Or was my coworker smart by trying to get X extra days of work even if it was drudgery? [1]
(Yes, I see the relationship of my story to the article, but I’m having a hard time articulating the connection I see. It’s similar to doing badly at ops—the ops who “save the day” with heroics in getting the system back up get the kudos, while the ops who set things up to run smoothly with almost no down-time get laid off because they appear to be doing nothing. Incentives matter.)
[1] And it wasn’t like
lexwas an unknown tool—my coworker was a grad student in the CS department and had written a compiler using bothlexandyacc.-
It depends on the point of view. If you were doing it because you honestly thought it was the best solution to the problem at hand, well then you were right, and hopefully your coworker learned a lesson and this isn’t an imaginary problem. If you were doing it for yourself, for your own knowledge, believing that the the skills learned would pay off at a later date, well then that’s up to you to decide but not an imaginary problem.
The second scenario seems falsely conflated with the first. That is a problem, but a different one of management incorrectly valuing their employees.
I would say the act of spending the effort to connect these dots is an imaginary problem. A lot of these characteristics are human nature, which no amount of writing or philosophizing will fix (if the goal is to “fix” the problem).
I understand the meditation on the topic, perhaps in an attempt to clarify to himself a series of problems that his intuition tells him has some tangible connection, which is beneficial for one’s own peace of mind. And to be clear, I am not criticizing the post. I just thought the meta-connection between the post itself and its content was amusing. Contemplating the “metaness” of things is my personal imaginary problem pit.
Edit: A larger point I want to make is that these ARE very complex problems. Knowing which solution is going to be optimal is something that takes either lots of research or experience and intuition. Of course people will choose wrong occasionally and make the problem even worse. Hopefully they learn and make better choices next time. Trying to paper over this experiential process by making it a “problem” (in the first examples in the article) is foolish and can send a message that any mistakes made are self inflicted instead of being part of the process of self-development.
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In your scenario, you saved time and money. Real problem.
If the task had instead been to change one web page’s header from h1 to h2 and you had to go out and buy a new sparcstation and compile Perl from scratch, etc., that’s imaginary problem territory.
Imaginary problems seem to be justified by “but what if?” What do the kids say? YAGNI. Perhaps the question can’t be fully resolved until afterwards, in hindsight, but we can at least keep track of which developers seem to correctly identify what ifs. I’d bet some people are prone to under building and some to over building. (And also never learning from those experiences, always erring in the same direction.)
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I like that the author is only attempting to formalize a style, rather than offer an obnoxious opinion. There’s a use for these designs, but not every website needs to have such a design, nor would I want the web to be chock full of such websites.
Spending a couple weeks in Albany, NY, where much of the architecture was inspired by brutalism, is enough to appreciate the variety of architectures across different cities.
Every now and again it’s nice to stumble across a http://lingscars.com
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Having spent the last 6 months working Rust, I’d disagree with his conclusion around Rust being prideful about pushing the borrow checker.
The language is explicit in how you should use it - the rules are different than someone coming from C++ or C# might expect. It is to be expected that you fight the compiler - it’s a different way of thinking. That doesn’t mean Rust is right but it also doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It’s an opinion.
This is similar to new users of Haskell fighting purity. Just because Haskell is pure doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong - it’s a design choice that you have to learn to work with.
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There is quite a large class of bugs that Rust purports to fix in which you only get a runtime error if you’re lucky. At least, when compared to C or C++.
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You’re right. It’s closer to a (
wait for the world to explode->printf debugging->wait again) loop. This goes along with the metaphor of building software as construction. There’s a whole group of people who just want to duct tape that leak under the sink. They aren’t building a house or even a shed, as much as they are temporary tenants. You know you won’t be living in the house forever, so it’s not worth it to actually fix the problem.-
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I do think most source codes live too short to care
Even then, Wirth’s languages showed you could get fast compiles, be safe by default, have clean module system, and support concurrency built-in. C the language is still worse if one aims to quickly throw together code that doesn’t crash or get hacked as often.
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I’d disagree. That feels considerably less productive for systems programming. In fact, it’s infuriating. I mostly work in client-side software developed on a large-to-huge scale. Runtime failures are the last thing I want to deal with - it means I have to update upwards of 500k clients.
While it might be acceptable to deal with
compile->runtime error->printf debugon the server side. It’s hardly a good solution on client side – even if it was how we dealt with it for many years.-
Yes, I agree that certain tasks require different tools. I was trying to specifically point out that generalization is for most people. E.g. quick data analysis jobs, internal web UI, etc. Obviously dynamic or interpreted languages are better for such tasks, than something like C. Personally I see the future of C being for microcontroller projects or toy ISAs, where you care about ease of implementation, and support for better defined languages take over primary systems. That may take another half-century at this rate, though.
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Well, there are those who feel that compile/type errors hold back their unbounded creativity, but that doesn’t mean those analyses are bad.
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I hope there’s been enough publicity about C gotchas, at this point, that most professional programmers know to do a quadruple-take whenever handling pointer arithmetic or type-punning. And that’s hopefully only when they need to use C.
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Fun part for me is how people describe it as a “close to the metal” language that lets you “work directly with memory operations.” Then, I see an article talking about how pointers, a critical part of it, are abstract things that might not work the way you think they do. They also find the language specs’ meaning debatable in a language whose programmers often oppose using formal specs for things like languages or compilers. That part was totally predicted by prior results in formal specification.
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Fun part for me is how people describe it as a “close to the metal” language that lets you “work directly with memory operations.” Then, I see an article talking about how pointers, a critical part of it, are abstract things that might not work the way you think they do.
This is because the language is more abstract than people generally think it is. They often talk about the speed of C (because “it’s a compiled language”), or the stack, or the heap (or memory layout in general), or how “the size of char is 8 bits and size of int is 32 or 64 bits, depending on how old your Intel CPU is”, or about any of many other implementation details attributing them to a programming language that never defines strictly such things or sometimes even doesn’t even talk about them, leaving them for the language implementors.
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The benefits of the idioms discussed can be summarized as 1) less boilerplate code and less noise, which leads to 2) a ad-hoc DWIM approach to designing components. These factors lead to less friction while writing down “COMPUTER, I command you to do X!” I don’t think this sentiment is controversial, and identifying particular pain points in other languages is good for when you have to decide amongst them.
That said, I personally prefer static languages simply because they fit my use cases more: 1) applications that chew through huge amounts of data, where feedback latency is important, and 2) toolsets that prefer to be integrated/interfaced through other low-level statically types languages.
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Programmers mental model changes while he learns and is very flexible. Statically typed languages cannot match to this.
Many statically typed languages still allow you to do really bad errors and botch it in numerous multiple ways despite their type system. Very classic example of this would be the whole C language. But it is not the only statically typed language ridden full of foxholes. For example, you may use variables before you’ve set their contents in some corner-case that the language designer did not manage to solve. Then you got a surprise null, despite that careful use of Maybe or nullable-property.
Another example of this kind of failure would be the introduction of corruption bugs. Too many popular statically typed languages do not protect you from data corruption bugs when handling mutable data, and do not provide tools to protect your mutable data from corruption bugs.
I think that dynamically typed languages are easier to use because they genuinely let you decide afterwards on some design problems that you face. They are polymorphic without work, and programmers who use them naturally produce more abstract code. I also think that you can prove dynamically typed programs correct, and you don’t need full type annotations for that which means it can still be dynamically typed after that.
They are simply, just better programming languages.
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In such situations, I like to bring up Strongtalk and Shen w/ Sequent Calculus & Prolog. Both add typing to high-productivity, dynamic languages/environments.
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1900: people going around on horses, public lightning using gas.
1960: cars, jet and nuclear powered airplanes, satellites, semiconductors, computers with LISP and COBOL compilers, antibiotics, fiber optics, nuclear fusion experiments (tokamak)
2020 - another 60 years and do we really have to show?
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Compared to “commonplace” things like cars and antibiotics? Internet, GPS, maglevs, a vast array of surgical techniques, the absence of smallpox…
Compared to “works but government and academia only” things like satellites and compilers? Hololens, quantum computers, drones, railguns, graphene, carbon nanotubes, metamaterials…
Compared to “wildly experimental and probably won’t ever happen” things like tokamak and nuclear airplanes? Probably a lot of classified shit. Antimatter experiments at LHC. Arguably a lot of work with AI
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Maglevs were invented in 1950s and first operated in 1970s. I also don’t have anything made from graphene, or know anyone who knows anyone owning a graphene artefact.
More importantly, none of that is imagination shattering from 1960s point of view. We do not have things mid-century people couldn’t come up with.
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More importantly, none of that is imagination shattering from 1960s point of view. We do not have things mid-century people couldn’t come up with.
Antibiotics, heavier-than-air flight, cars, and computers (if you count Jacquard Looms) were all demonstrated before the 1900’ss. They weren’t imagination shattering from a 1890’s point of view.
Even the internet isn’t imagination shattering from an 1890’s point of view.
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- We first observed that bacteria didn’t grow in the presence of mold in the 1870’s.
- The first manned, powered heavier-than-air flight was 1890.
- The Jacquard Loom had programmable loom patterns and was 1804, and the first programmable reading of data was the US 1890 Census.
Do any of these look close to what our modern conceptions of these things are? Not really. But it shows that the evolution of the first demonstrations of ideas to widespread use of polished version takes time.
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There’s a huge difference between observation of mold and a concept of antibiotics, no matter how trivial that sounds with hindsight.
The “uncontrolled hop” does not qualify as a flight, except in the most trivial sense.
The loom is not a computer, but I’d love to see a fizzbuzz with Jacquard patterns to prove me wrong.
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It still means that all of the “imagination shattering” stuff in the 1960’s had precedents more than half a century old. We do not have things mid-century people could not have come up with. They did not have things 1800’s people could not have come up with, so we shouldn’t be thinking that our era is particularly barren.
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I think it is reasonable to say that the reworking of daily life has slowed.
The stove, the refrigerator and the car changed the routine of life tremendously.
The computer might be more impressive by any number of measures but it didn’t rework daily life so much as add another layer on top of ordinary life. We still must cook meals and drive around.
The linear extension of the car and the stove would be the auto-chef and the flying/auto-driving car.
Both things are still further than is sometimes claimed by the press but the seem a bit closer than 2012. However, the automation offered by externally available power, which began in the 1800s, definitely has reached a point of diminishing returns.
We may experience further progress through computers, AI and such. But this seems to hampered by a “complexity barrier” - an equivalent amount of daily life automation as various technologies offered earlier through power now requires systems that are much more computationally complex. Folding towels really does turn out to be the hard part of washing, etc and even with vast advances in computational ability, we may still be at diminishing returns.
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There have been significant advances since then (for instance, in medical treatments like cancer therapies and surgery—life expectancy in the US has risen from 70 to 79 since 1960), but nothing revolutionary, that would seem remotely as magical as the developments across the first half of the century.
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Sometimes I’m not sure whether the internet has exacerbated or helped reduce the Dunning-Kruger effect. I want to believe it’s harder to convince oneself to write a book like this in the information age.
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joshsharp
2 months ago
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link
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Why Skylake CPUs Are Sometimes 50% Slower – How Intel Has Broken Existing Code
I guess I don’t know enough about CPU architecture as I can’t understand the reason behind this change. Could someone explain why Intel would want to increase so dramatically the number of cycles a pause takes? Is it meant to be an efficiency tradeoff that means fewer explicit pauses while waiting for locks?
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Indeed a timing change like this is normally due to power efficiency constraints or targets. I’d conjecture that in their internal evaluation benchmarks, Intel decided that this allowed their cores to
more aggressively drop to a lower power state while seeing an acceptable performance loss(which is exactly what Intel’s docs say, shown in the article). It would seem that the .NET spinlock implementation was dependent on knowing the latency of pause instruction. I wouldn’t call this a hardware performance regression. It just looks like software didn’t support the hardware well yet, and soon there will be official support by MS. It’s still a well done exploration into the performance regression of that workload.EDIT: as someone pointed out in the HN thread, the change in cache configuration in Skylake is another possible (and probably bigger) motivation for changing the pause latency. He points out that specifically a dirty read from another core’s L2 has increased latency compared to previous gen’s dirty hit to the inclusive L3. I’d assume a shared hit wouldn’t be that much better.
EDIT2: DVFS latencies are on the order of ms for Intel speed shift, orders of magnitude too large to be useful in this context. The “small power benefit” mentioned would just be the reduction in dynamic power from the reduction in spinning.
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As a European, I don’t quite get it: Americans seem to be concerned with net neutrality, meanwhile not protesting huge monopolistic corporations(the gatekeepers) removing some controversial users on their own judgement and with no way to appeal. Are individuals excluded from the net neutrality?
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.
Well, they’re also private, for-profit companies that legally own and sell the lines. So, there’s another political angle where people might vote against the regulations under theory that government shouldn’t dictate how you run your business or use your property, esp if it cost you money. Under theory of benefiting owners and shareholders, these companies are legal entities specifically created to generate as much profit from those lines as possible. If you don’t like it, build and sell your own lines. That’s what they’d say.
They don’t realize how hard it is to deploy an ISP on a shoe-string budget to areas where existing players already paid off the expensive part of the investment, can undercut you into bankruptcy, and (per people claiming to be ISP founders on Hacker News) will even cut competitors’ lines “accidentally” so their own customers leave them. In the last case, it’s hard to file and win a lawsuit if you just lost all your revenue and opponent has over a billion in the bank. They all just quit.
Do you have the source for these claims regarding ISPs?
Which ones?
One of them described a situation with a contracted, construction crew with guy doing the digging not speaking English well. They were supposedly digging for incumbent but dug through his line. He aaid he pointed that it was clearly marked with paint or something. The operator claimed he thought that meant there wasnt a line there.
That’s a crew that does stuff in that area for a living not knowing what a line mark means. So, he figured they did it on purpose. He folded since he couldnt afford to sue them. Another mentioned them unplugging their lines in exchanges or something that made their service appear unreliable. Like the rest, they’d have to spend money they didnt have on lawyers who’d have to prove (a) it happened snd/or (b) it was intentional.
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.
I think this is too optimistic. I live in Chicago, the third biggest city in the country and arguably the tech hub of the midwest. In my building I get to choose between AT&T and Comcast. I’m considered lucky: most of my friends in the city get one option, period. If their ISP starts doing anything shady they don’t have an option to switch, because there’s nobody they can switch to.
It’s interesting to contrast this to New Zealand, where I live in a town of 50,000 people and have at least 5 ISPs I can choose from. I currently pay $100 NZ a month for an unlimited gigabit fibre connection, and can hit ~600 mbit from my laptop on a speed test. The NZ government has intervened heavily in the market, effectively forcing the former monopolist (Telecom) to split into separate infrastructure (Chorus) and services (Telecom) companies, and spending a lot of taxpayer money to roll out a nationwide fibre network. The ISPs compete on the infrastructure owned by Chorus. There isn’t drastic competition on prices: most plans are within $10-15 of each other, on a per month basis, but since fibre rolled out plans seem to have come down from around $135 per month to now around $100.
I was lucky to have decent internet through a local ISP when I lived in one of Oakland’s handful of apartment buildings, but most people wouldn’t have had that option. I think the ISP picture is a lot better in NZ. Also, net neutrality is a non-issue, as far as I know. We have it, no-one seems to be trying to take it away.
I’m always irritated that there are policies decried in the United States as “impossible” when there are demonstrable implementations of it elsewhere.
I can see it being argued that the United States’s way is better or something, but there are these hyperbolic attacks on universal health care, net neutrality, workers’ rights, secure elections, etc that imply that they are simply impossible to implement when there are literally dozens of counterexamples…
At the risk of getting far too far off topic.
One of the members of the board at AT&T was the CEO of an insurance company, someone sits on the boards of both Comcast/NBC and American Beverages. The head of the FCC was high up at Verizon.
These are some obvious, verifiable, connections based in personal interest. Not implying that it’s wrong or any of those individuals are doing anything which is wrong, you’ve just gotta take these ‘hyperbolic attacks’ with a grain of salt.
Interlocking Directorates
Non-mobile link
Oh yeah it’s infuriating. It helps to hit them with examples. Tell them the media doesn’t talk about them since they’re all pushing something. We all know that broad statement is true. Then, briefly tell them the problems that we’re trying to solve with some goals we’re balancing. Make sure it’s their problems and goals. Then, mention the solution that worked else where which might work here. If it might not fit everyone, point out that we can deploy it in such a way where its specifics are tailored more to each group. Even if it can’t work totally, maybe point out that it has more cost-benefit than the current situation. Emphasize that it gets us closer to the goal until someone can figure out how to close the remaining gap. Add that it might even take totally different solutions to address other issues like solving big city vs rural Internet. If it worked and has better-cost benefit, then we should totally vote for it to do better than we’re doing. Depending on audience, you can add that we can’t have (country here) doing better than us since “This is America!” to foster some competitive, patriotic spirit.
That’s what I’ve been doing as part of my research talking to people and bouncing messages off them. I’m not any good at mass marketing, outreach or anything. I’ve just found that method works really well. You can even be honest since the other side is more full of shit than us on a lot of these issues. I mean, them saying it can’t exist vs working implementations should be an advantage for us. Should. ;)
Beautifully said.
My family’s been in this country since the Mayflower. I love it dearly.
Loving something means making it better and fixing its flaws, not ignoring them.
Thanks and yes. I did think about leaving for a place maybe more like my views. That last thing you said is why I’m still here. If we fix it, America won’t be “great again:” it would be fucking awesome. If not for us, then for the young people we’re wanting to be able to experience that. That’s why I’m still here.
Only if you can’t find Austin on a map… ;)
Native Texan/Austinite here. Texas is the South, Southwest, or just Texas. All the rest of y’all are just Yankees. ;)
But if their ISP starts doing anything shady, they’ll surely get some backlash, even if they can’t switch they can complain.
They’ve been complaining for decades. Nothing happens most of the time. The ISP’s have many lobbyists and lawyers to insulate them from that. The big ones are all doing the same abusive practices, too. So, you can’t switch to get away from it.
Busting up AT&T’s monopoly got results in lower costs, better service, better speeds, etc. Net neutrality got more results. I support more regulation of these companies and/or socialized investment to replace them like the gigabit for $350/mo in Chattanooga, TN. It’s 10Gbps now I think but I don’t know what price.
Actually, I go further due to their constant abuses and bribing politicians: Im for having a court seizetheir assets, converting them to nonprofits, and putting new management in charge. If at all possible. It would send a message to other companies that think they can do damage to consumers and mislead regulators with immunity to consequences.
The problem is that corporate fines are generally a small percentage of profits.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-radcliffe/should-companies-obey-the-law_b_1650037.html
What incentive does the ISP have to change? Unless you can complain to some higher authority (FCC, perhaps) then there is no reason for the ISP to make any changes even with backlash. I’d be more incentivized to complain if there was at least some competition.
Nobody says this. It’s being pushed because it prevents large corporations from locking out smaller players. The Internet is a great economic equalizer: I can start a business and put a website up and I’m just as visible and accessible as Microsoft.
We don’t want Microsoft to be able to pay AT&T to slow traffic to my website but not theirs. It breaks the free market by allowing collusion that can’t be easily overcome. It’s like the telephone network; I can’t go run wires to everyone’s house, but I want my customers to be able to call me. I don’t want my competitors to pay AT&T to make it harder to call me than to call them.
That assumes people have a choice. They very often don’t. Internet service has a massively high barrier to entry, similar to a public utility. Most markets in the United States have at most two providers (both major corporations opposed to net neutrality). Very, very rarely is there a third.
More importantly, there are only five tier-1 networks in the United States. Five. It doesn’t matter how many local ISPs there are; without Net Neutrality, five corporations effectively control what can and can’t be transmitted. If those five decide something should be slowed down or forbidden, there is nothing I can do. Changing to a different provider won’t do a thing.
(And of those five, all of them donate significantly more to one major political party than the other, and the former Associate General Counsel of one of them is currently chairman of the FCC…)
Net neutrality says nothing about how much it costs. It just says you can’t charge different amounts based on content. It would be like television stations charging more money to Republican candidates to run ads than to Democratic candidates. They’re free to charge whatever they want; they’re not free to charge different people different amounts based on the content of the message.
Democracy requires communication. It does no good to say “freedom!” if the major corporations can effectively silence whoever they want. “At least it’s not the government” is not a good defense of stifling public debate.
And there’s a difference between a newspaper and a television/radio station/internet service. I can buy a printing press and make a newspaper and refuse to carry whatever I want. There are no practical limits to the number of printing presses in the country.
There is a limited electromagnetic spectrum. Not just anyone can broadcast a TV signal. There is a limit to how many cables can be run on utility polls or buried underground. Therefore, discourse carried over those media are required to operate more in the public trust than others. As they become more essential to a healthy democracy, that only becomes more important. It’s silly to say “you still have freedom of speech” if you’re blocked from television, radio, the Internet, and so on. Those are the public forums of our day. That a corporation is doing the blocking doesn’t make it any better than if the government were to do it.
There’s a big difference between Twitter not wanting to carry Alex Jones and net neutrality. Jones is still free to go start up a website that carries his message; with Net Neutrality not only could he be blocked from Twitter, but the network itself could make his website inaccessible.
There is no alternative with Net Neutrality. You can’t build your own Internet. Without mandating equal treatment of traffic, we hand the Internet over solely to the big players. Preventing monopolistic and oligarchic control of public discourse is a valid use of government power. It’s not censorship, it’s the exact opposite.
This was also brought up by @hwayne, @caleb and @friendlysock, and is not something that occurred to me. I appreciate all who are mentioning this.
Wow, I did not know that. I can see that as a legitimate reason to want net neutrality. But, I also think that they’ll piss off a lot of people if they can stream CNN but not InfoWars.
I understood it to also mean that you also couldn’t charge customers differently because of who they are. Also, don’t things like Tor mitigate things like that?
I completely agree. But in the US we have a free market (at least, we used to) and that means that the government is supposed to stay out of it as much as possible.
I also agree. But these corporations (the tier-1 ISPs) haven’t done anything noticeable to me to limit my enjoyment of conservative content, and I’m pretty sure that they would’ve by now if they wanted to.
The reason I oppose net neutrality is more because I don’t think that the government should control it than any more than I think AT&T and others should.
But they haven’t.
edit: how -> who
Even though I’m favoring net neutrality, I appreciate you braving the conservative position on this here on Lobsters. I did listen to a lot of them. What I found is most had reasonable arguments but had no idea about what ISP’s did, are doing, are themselves paying Tier 1’s, etc. Their media sources’ bias (all have bias) favoring ISP’s for some reason didn’t tell them any of it. So, even if they’d have agreed with us (maybe, maybe not), they’d have never reached those conclusions since they were missing crucial information to reflect on when choosing to regulate or not regulate.
An example is one telling me companies like Netflix should pay more to Comcast per GB or whatever since they used more. The guy didn’t know Comcast refuses to do that when paying Tier 1’s negotiating transit agreements instead that worked entirely different. He didn’t know AT&T refused to give telephones or data lines to rural areas even if they were willing to pay what others did. He didn’t know they could roll out gigabit today for same prices but intentionally kept his service slow to increase profit knowing he couldn’t switch for speed. He wasn’t aware of most of the abuses they were doing. He still stayed with his position since that guy in particular went heavily with his favorite, media folks. However, he didn’t like any of that stuff which his outlets never even told him about. Even if he disagrees, I think he should disagree based on an informed decision if possible since there’s plenty smart conservatives out there who might even favor net neutrality if no better alternative. I gave him a chance to do that.
So, I’m going to give you this comment by @lorddimwit quickly showing how they ignored the demand to maximize profit, this comment by @dotmacro showing some abuses they do with their market control, and this article that gives nice history of what free market did with each communications medium with the damage that resulted. Also note that the Internet itself was an open, free-if-you-have-a-wire system that competed with the proprietary, charge-per-use, lock-them-in-forever-if-possible systems the private sector was offering. It smashed them so hard you might have even never heard of them or forgotten a lot about them depending on your age. It also democratized more goods than about anything other than maybe transportation. Probably should stick with the principles that made that happen to keep innovation rolling. Net neutrality was one of them that was practiced informally at first then put into law as the private sector got too much power and was abusing it. We should keep doing what worked instead of the practices ISP’s want that didn’t work but will increase their profits at our expense for nothing in return. That is what they want: give us less or as little improvement in every way over time while charging us more. It’s what they’re already doing.
I read the comments, and I read most of the freecodecamp article.
I like the ideal of the internet being a public utility, but I don’t really want the government to have that much control.
I think the real problem I have with government control of the internet, is that I don’t want the US to end up like china with large swaths of the internet completely blocked.
I don’t really know how to solve our current problems. But, like @jfb said elsewhere in this thread, I don’t think that net neutrality is the best possible solution.
I might recognize a name, but I probably wasn’t even around yet.
Thanks for the info, I’ll read it and possibly form a new opinion.
What obvious reasons? Because customers will switch providers if they don’t treat all traffic equally? That would require (a) users are able to tell if a provider prioritizes certain traffic, and (b) that there is a viable alternative to switch to. I have no confidence in either.
I don’t personally care if the prioritize certain websites, but I sure as hell care if the block something.
As far as I’m concerned, they can slow down Youtube by 10% for conservative channels and I wouldn’t give a damn even though I watch and enjoy some. What really bothers me is when they “erase” somebody or block people from getting to them.
well you did say they have an incentive to provide “equal service” so i guess you meant something else. net neutrality supporters like me aren’t satisfied with “nobody gets blocked,” because throttling certain addresses gives big corporations more tools to control media consumption, and throttling have similar effects to blocking in the long term. i’m quite surprised that you’d be fine with your ISP slowing down content you like by 10%… that would adversely affect their popularity compared to the competitors that your ISP deems acceptable, and certain channels would go from struggling to broke and be forced to close down.
Well, I have pretty fast internet, so 10% wouldn’t be terrible for me. However, I can see how some people would take issue with such a slowdown.
I was using a bit an extreme example to illustrate my point. What I was trying to say was that they can’t really stop people from watching the content that they want to watch.
I recall, but didn’t review, a study saying half of web site users wanted the page loaded in 2 seconds. Specific numbers aside, I’ve been reading that kind of claim from many people for a long time that a new site taking too long to load, being sluggish, etc makes them miss lots of revenue. Many will even close down. So, the provider of your favorite content being throttled for even two seconds might kill half their sales since Internet users expect everything to work instantly. Can they operate with a 50% cut in revenue? Or maybe they’re bootstrapping up a business with a few hundred or a few grand but can’t afford to pay for no artificial delays. Can they even become the content provider your liked if having to pay hundreds or thousands extra on just extra profit? I say extra profit since ISP’s already paid for networks capable of carrying it out of your monthly fee.
yeah, the shaping of public media consumption would happen in cases where people don’t know what they want to watch or don’t find out about something that they would want to watch
anti-democratic institutions already shape media consumption and discourse to a large extent, but giving them more tools will hurt the situation. maybe it won’t affect you or me directly, but sadly we live in a society so it will come around to us in the form of changes in the world
Most customers have exceedingly limited options in their area, and they’re not going to switch houses because of their ISP. Especially in apartment complexes, you see cases where, say, Comcast has the lockdown on an entire population and there really isn’t a reasonable alternative.
In a truly free market, maybe I’d agree with you, but the regulatory environment and natural monopolistic characteristics of telecomm just don’t support the case.
That’s a witty way of putting it.
But yeah, @lorddimwit mentioned the small number of tier-1 ISPs. I didn’t realize there were so few, but I still think that net neutrality is overreaching, even if its less than I originally thought.
Personally, I feel that net neutrality, such as it is, would prevent certain problems that could be better addressed in other, more fundamental ways. For instance, why does the US allow the companies that own the copper to also own the ISPs?
Awkward political jabs aside, most of your statements imply that you believe customers are free to choose who they get their internet from, which is just plain incorrect. Whatever arguments you want to make against net neutrality, there is one indisputable fact that you cannot just ignore or paper over:
ISPs do not operate in a free market.
In the vast majority of the US, cable and telephone companies are granted local monopolies in the areas they operate. That is why they must be regulated. As the Mozilla blog said, they have both the incentive and means to abuse their customers and they’ve already been caught doing it on multiple occasions.
I think you’re a bit late to the party, I’ve conceded that fact already.
All of that is gibberish. Net Neutrality is being pushed because it creates a more competitive marketplace. None of it has anything to do with professional liar Alex Jones.
That’ s not how markets work. And it’s not how the technology or permit process for ISPs work. There is very little competition among ISPs in the US market.
Hey, here’s a great example from HN of the crap they pull without net neutrality. They advertised “unlimited,” throttled it secretly, admitted it, and forced them to pay extra to get actual unlimited.
@lorddimwit add this to your collection. Throttling and fake unlimited been going on long time but they couldve got people killed doing it to first responders. Id have not seen that coming just for PR reasons or avoiding local, govt regulation if nothing else.
It’s not about how much internet costs, it’s about protecting freedom of access to information, and blocking things like zero-rated traffic that encourage monopolies and discourage competition. If I pay for a certain amount of traffic, ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to turn to Google and say “want me to prioritize YouTube traffic over Netflix traffic? Pay me!”
Where on earth did you hear that? I sure hope you’re not making it up—you’ll find this site doesn’t take too kindly to that.
I might’ve been conflating two different political issues, but I have heard “fascist” and “nazi” used to describe the entire right wing.
A quick google search for “net neutrality fascism” turned this up https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kbye4z/heres-why-net-neutrality-is-essential-in-trumps-america
You assume that net neutrality is a left-wing issue, which it’s not. It actually has bipartisan support. The politicians who oppose it have very little in common, aside from receiving a large sum of donations from telecom corporations.
As far as terms like “fascist” or “Nazi” are concerned—I think they have been introduced into this debate solely to ratchet up the passions. It’s not surprising that adding these terms to a search yields results that conflate the issues.
Ill add on your first point that conservatives who are pro-market are almost always pro-competition. They expect the market will involve competition driving whats offered up, its cost down, and so on. Both the broadband mandate and net neutrality achieved that with an explosion of businesses and FOSS offering about anything one can think of.
The situation still involves 1-3 companies available for most consumers that, like a cartel, work together to not compete on lowering prices, increasing service, and so on. Net neutrality reduced some predatory behavior the cartel market was doing. They still made about $25 billion in profit between just a few companies due to anti-competitive behavior. Repealing net neutrality for anti-competitive market will have no positives for consumer but will benefit roughly 3 or so companies by letting them charge more for same or less service.
Bad for conservative’s goals of market competition and benefiting conservative voters.
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.