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I myself use a standard 104(?)-key Type Heaven w/ Topre switches.
Only customization I do is Dvorak layout and CapsLock=Control.I have never heard of QMK. Seems powerful. Some of these features (Space Cadet, Steno/Plover, Macros) seem really cool to me. I might look into this later..
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Complicated software breaks. Simple software is more easily understood and far less prone to breaking: there are less moving pieces, less lines of code to keep in your head, and fewer edge cases.
Sometimes code is complicated because the problem is complicated.
And sometimes the simple solution is wrong, even for something as basic as averaging two numbers.
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But there’s a difference here: a code is simple when it doesn’t introduce (too much of) its own accidental complexity. The innate complexity of the field is out of the equation, can’t do anything about it. But the code must strive to express its intent as simple as possible. It’s not a contradictory goal.
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Funny as he is, there were systems- and performance-oriented variants of LISP that either stayed low-level or produced C output that was low-level. They were really fast with many advantages of LISP-like languages. PreScheme was an early one. My current favorite, since they beat me to my idea of C-like Scheme, was ZL where authors did C/C++ in Scheme. With Scheme macros, one might pick the numeric representation that worked best from safest to fastest. Even change it over time if you had to start with speed on weak hardware but hardware got better.
These days, we even have type-safe and verified schemes for metaprogramming that might be mixed with such designs. So, you get clean-looking code that generates the messy, high-performance stuff maybe in verified or at least type-checked way. People are already doing similar things for SIMD. And you’re still using x86! And if you want, you can also use a VIA x86 CPU so you can say hardware itself was specified and verified in LISP-based ACL2. ;)
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Is complicated code that solves complicated problems immune from breaking?
It’s more that some problem cannot be solved with simple code, because you can’t capture the whole complexity of the problem without writing a lot of code to capture it.
Consider tax code. Accurately following tax law is going to be messy because tax law itself is messy.
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Definitely not. If you have simple but wrong, it’s no good by definition. You can “not have” fast, but essentially, you still need “fast enough”. If you can accomplish the task, and you can do so simply and correctly, but can’t work it quick enough for real-life workloads, then in those cases you might as well call it broken.
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I am put in mind of the quote:
You can make simple software with obviously no defects, or complicated software with no obvious defects.
I don’t even think “correct” software is required–for many lucrative things, you have a human being interpreting the results, and oftentimes incorrect or wrong output can still be of commercial value.
That’s why we have customer support folks. :)
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This is a misquote of C.A.R. Hoare:
I conclude there are two ways of constructing software design: one way is to make it so simple there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
Nothing wrong with a misquote btw, as it means you internalized the statement rather than regurgitating the words :).
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If I understand correctly (hah), his point is that if you aim for simplicity, it’s easier to ensure correctness.
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WinSCP & Xming are quite good, if you can install them. Putty is worth getting used to.
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unwind
2 months ago
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If Facebook starts in 2018, what language, framework, and database will they use?
Well, wouldn’t we have to ask Mark why he chose Perl, then PHP, back in the day? I suspect it’s because they were high on the GTD spectrum.
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Wow. Seems like if your content is too popular and doesn’t make them ad revenue, they want you to gtfo. “This ain’t no charity, this is YouTube! The ads must flow.” Am I wrong?
On the other hand, this PeerTube thing seems pretty cool.
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They support charities though: https://www.google.com/nonprofits/products/youtube-nonprofit-program.html
I’d be interested if the Blender Foundation is part of that program.
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Well, the email thread said nothing about a bug. The only problem seemed to be lack of ads. If this were a wave, this is what the beginning might look like. It doesn’t appear to be, since the videos are back.
If you read the contract Blender posted (there have been updates), I wasn’t too far off. It’s not “the ads must flow”, it’s “Google has the sole right to show ads, monetized or not.” You can’t include an ad in a YouTube video that they don’t get a cut of, but they can show ads whether you check that box or not.
Why should I act charitable towards a non charity, though? They’re clearly tilting the table in their direction. How do I choose between assuming the best and fearing the worst?
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The emails look like a confused bureaucracy triggering an automatic response and a clueless support response. Being charitable isn’t about them, it’s about understanding that mistakes are more common than maliciousness. Today there’s an update (titled “Wednesday June 20 2018”) confirming that this was a series of errors on YouTube’s part that they’ve resolved.
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“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” (Robert Hanlon)
Or understandable human error. Or ridiculous bureaucracies. Or…
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That’s also true and 100% compatible with the other heuristic.
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unwind
2 months ago
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Truth First, or Why You Should Mostly Implement Database First Designs
There’s that Carmack quote about anything the compiler will accept will make it into the codebase.
I think there’s a parallel where anything the SQL tables will insert will make it into the domain logic. It smells like Database Fixer routines to clear out “bad”, “dead” or “orphaned” rows, de-duplicate jobs that run nightly, &c. It’s a huge back door for inconsistencies to sneak in. The code should prevent such things, but bugs happen and rows end up getting inserted.
I think it’s more scary to not know SQL than it is to let a framework “handle it” for you.
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That godbolt website he keeps linking to & talking about is really, really cool. I am just in awe right now. Carry on..
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You might be interested in watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSkpMdDe4g4
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I feel this pretty much miss the point of just silencing your phone and using it when you actually need it. Push notifications are made to save you from checking all your apps where new content is there but you don’t want to open them everyday 1 by 1.
If you want to save yourself from the trend, don’t deactivate push notification, just let your phone at home while going to work, or let it in another room, in you bag, whatever. The issue is not the push notification itself, but your addiction to new content.
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Of course, that’s easier said than done. What happens when my girlfriend sends me an urgent message but I don’t see it because my phone is in my backpack/at home/whatever else? That’s what I mean by the “culture” of push notifications - there’s an expectation that you’re available/able to be reached.
All that said, I do like the idea. All of these comments have really got me thinking about potential solutions. I think a follow-up post is in order.
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Trash that culture. In my “culture”, I can’t bring my phone into my work building. The phone is off from about 6a until I remember to turn it back on, maybe 6p. You could probably do something similar without being fully off.
In my culture, I don’t even want to figure out how to set up voicemail, and I don’t care. If don knuth is allowed to not have email, I’m allowed to not have voicemail. I hate voicemail. Texting is the way
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I have only voicemail (delivered to my chat client as both listenable audio and machine-transcribed text) so that I can have my phone never ring but still know if anyone tries to call me about something (and text them back)
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quoting my other comment https://lobste.rs/s/gmdgnf/push_notifications_considered_harmful#c_bljj0c
On iphone (I don’t know for other platforms) you have a DND mode with “favorites” that can still notify you. I’ve been on-call several time and just setting SMS/Phone Call on first method of contact on pager duty + using this DND mode was enough for me to let my phone upside down the whole day and still be notified when I needed to be.
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This seems a lot like Object.freeze(obj) / deepFreeze. Seems like
letis the newvar,constis the newvar .. = Object.freeze(..)or deepFreeze variant. Except const doesn’t even do that. Hmm
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An interesting & thought-provoking post. The thesis seems to be does the Web & its social networks influence languages’ popularities? I think it’s a good question. It’s probably yes. But how is StackOverflow & Github much different from comp.lang.perl and the CPAN? What’s different? I think it’s a big step that Excel will start incorporating JavaScript, but I could easily see things go a different direction. I mean, what if Chrome reaches full monopoly dominance and they decide to ship their own language runtime? Or what about Rust on Firefox? The “network” effects that have surprised us so far may continue to, well, suprise us.
I find this part a little bizarre:
Even purely social factors like the number of participants in a Gitter or Slack chat room about a project, or the number of people who follow a project on social media, are all weighed when we look at new technology.
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Bear with me, this might sound dumb, but I find it super confusing when you have some object reference, which might be null itself, and it’s also got object values/references inside, which could also be null. So a value can be more-or-less null/unusable in multiple ways, but sometimes it will(!) be usable with almost nothing not-null, depending on context. Each time I step into the code I’ve got to re-establish which things are going to be present and why, depending on context. And add null-checks everywhere. I wish I knew the name for this pattern. (the errorless data structure, the bag of holding, &c) I’m totally down with make illegal state unrepresentable but it’s hard to refactor once the code is already written, inherited-from, corner-case’d, and passed around everywhere.
It’s the same with functions. I swear I saw a line of code today that was like below (paraphrasing). I mean sure, I can get used to anything, but it just looks to me like a failure mode.
return service.Generate(data, null, null, null, null, null, null);-
I wonder what would happen if say, 64K of data was mapped to virtual address 0 and made read-only [1]. That way, NULL pointers wouldn’t crap out so much, A NULL pointer points to an address of NUL bytes, so it’s a valid C string. In IEEE-754 all zeros represents 0. All pointers lead right back to this area. If you use “size/pointer” type strings, then you get 0-byte (or 0-character) strings. It just seems to work out fine.
It’s probably a horrible idea, but it would be fun to try.
[1] I would be nice if this “read-only” memory acted like ROM—it could be written to, but nothing actually changes.
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I’ve had some fun thoughts about this before :D
I was sketching out ideas of a microcontroller design that could potentially “not have registers” and also try to avoid lots of arbitrary hardcoded memory addresses. In practice it always ended up having registers in the form of a couple of internal busses and some flags, but it would look like it mostly didn’t have registers as far as programmers were concerned.
I wanted to make the “program counter” a value stored at memory address zero. This would also mean the ‘default’ value of memory address zero set in the ROM would be the entry point in the code, which I thought was pretty.
This also simplified a few things from the circuitry point of view:
- No JMP instruction, just MOV 0,value
- No halt instruction, just MOV 0,0
Some thought later made me realise that using low memory addresses for critical things was a bad idea. When a program wigs out it can start writing to arbitrary random addresses, and address zero is a very common target in many bugs. Overwriting address zero would make the CPU jump to new code and potentially make things harder to debug.
In the end I thought it best to setup the first 64 bytes or so of memory to be an intentional trap instead. ie any read or write to those bytes would immediately halt the processor. A lot less elegant, but a lot more practical.
Back to your idea.
Letting the first 64K of memory be usable would allow a lot of programs to keep running, a lot like the old “Abort/retry/ignore” allowed us to do in the DOS days. For some bugs this would be brilliant and let you try and gracefully recover (eg finish saving a document).
Alas there would also be a chance of data being damaged (eg files getting overwritten) if you continue into unknown territory; so I think it would still be worth bringing up an A/R/I style dialog. Even if only so we can blame the users if something goes wrong :P
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I like this plan, one & a half thumbs up. Shush: it’s good. Wind down: also good. Dashboard data: who’s really going to open that? Armchair design session time: a phone should have a real bedtime with the same annoying “Are you sure you’re not sleeping?” questions you get in Driving mode. Second, the Dashboard data should pop up when you open any app, so you can see you opened $app 15 times already today, once not even 3 minutes ago.
I think the real battle against phone addiction is to acknowledge its downsides and focus on them, and it’s hard for a phone to know what you’re not doing when it’s face-on-screen. But all in all, good stuff.
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I mostly use Firefox Sync. That and Safari/iCloud. The Single Source of Truth is a paper booklet I bound myself. I used to use an encrypted org-file w/ Emacs, which was really nice, but it was not super convenient (and I did sync w/ Dropbox, just not my keys!).
As for generation, I start rolling 5 d6 and open diceware.txt . The OS X Password Assistant is pretty good, but my preference has shifted to diceware.
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It’s fine to use Firefox Sync as long as you’re aware of the security issues & take appropriate countermeasures; see my other post. I’m worried that some people don’t realise how broken the Firefox Account model is, and rely on it more than it deserves.
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Cool, thanks. How many bits of entropy are we talking about? The example you posted looked to be maybe 120? bits. Correct horse.. should be around 50 bits. Is 80 enough?
My main concern so far is the authenticity of the password prompt, it’s just totally unstyled and I can’t tell/remember if it’s really Firefox asking, especially when I haven’t really tried logging into anything (even though it syncs bookmarks too) so I often hit cancel.
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Yogthos
edited
3 months ago
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Smartphones Are Killing The Planet Faster Than Anyone Expected
Capitalism is killing us in a very literal sense by destroying our habitat at an ever accelerating rate. The fundamental idea of needing growth and having to constantly invent new things to peddle leads to ever more disposable products, that are replaced for the sake of being replaced. There’s been very little actual innovation happening in the phone space. The vendors are intentionally building devices using the planned obsolescence model to force the upgrade cycle.
The cancer of consumerism affects pretty much every aspect of society, we’ve clear cut unique rain forests and destroyed millions of species we haven’t even documented so that we can make palm oil. A product that causes cancer, but that’s fractionally cheaper than other kinds of oil. We’ve created a garbage patch the size of a continent in the ocean. We’re poisoning the land with fracking. The list is endless, and it all comes down to the American ethos that making money is a sacred right that trumps all other concerns.
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Capitalism is killing us in a very literal sense by destroying our habitat at an ever accelerating rate.
The cancer of consumerism affects pretty much every aspect of society, we’ve clear cut unique rain forests and destroyed millions of species we haven’t even documented so that we can make palm oil.
One can get into a big debate about this, but the concept of externalities has existed for a long time and specifically addresses these concerns. Products do not cost what they should when taken their less tangible environment impact into account. It’s somewhat up to the reader to decide if the inability of society to take those into account is capitalism’s fault, or just human nature, or something else. I live in a country that leans much more socialist than the US but is unequivocally a capitalist country and they do a better job of managing these externalities. And China is not really capitalistic in the same way the US is but is a pretty significant polluter.
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Indeed, it’s not the fault of the economic system (if you think Capitalistic societies are wasteful, take a look at the waste and inefficiency of industry under the USSR). If externalities are correctly accounted for, or to be safe, even over-accounted for by means of taxation or otherwise, the market will work itself out. If the environmental cost means the new iPhone costs $2000 in real costs, Apple will work to reduce environmental cost in order to make an affordable phone again and everyone wins. And if they don’t, another company will figure it out instead and Apple will lose.
Currently, there is basically no accounting for these externalities, and in some cases (although afaik not related to smart phones), there are subsidies and price-ceiling regulations and subsidies that actually decreases the cost of some externalities artificially and are worse for the environment than no government intervention at all.
The easy example of this is California State water subsidies for farmers. Artificially cheap water for farmers means they grow water-guzzling crops that are not otherwise efficient to grow in arid parts of the state, and cause environmental damage and water shortage to normal consumers. Can you imagine your local government asking you to take shorter showers and not wash your car, when farmers are paying 94% less than you to grow crops that could much more efficiently be grown in other parts of the country? That’s what happens in California.
Step 1 and 2 are to get rid of the current subsidies and regulations that aggravate externalities and impose new regulation/taxes that help account for externalities.
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It’s just impressive that a capitalist would say. If China was even remotely communist, don’t you find it interesting that most capitalists who made deals with China seem ok helping ‘the enemy’ become the second largest economy in the world? I prefer to believe the simpler possibility that China is pretty darn capitalist itself.
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I think the consumer could be blamed more than capitalism, the companies make what sells, the consumers are individuals who buy products that hurt the environment, I think that it is changing though as people become more aware of these issues, they buy more environmentally friendly products.
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You’re blaming the consumer? I’d really recommend watching Century of the Self. Advertising has a massive impact and the mass of humans are being fed this desire for all the things we consume.
I mean, this really delves into the deeper question of self-awareness, agency and free will, but I really don’t think most human beings are even remotely aware.
Engineers, people on Lobster, et. al do really want standard devices. Fuck ARM. Give me a god damn mobile platform. Microsoft for the love of god, just publish your unlock key for your dead phone line so we can have at least one line of devices with UEFI+ARM. Device tree can go die in a fire.
The Linux-style revolution of the 2000s (among developers) isn’t happening on mobile because every device is just too damn different. The average consumer could care less. Most people like to buy new things, and we’re been indoctrinated to that point. Retailers and manufactures have focus groups geared right at delivering the dopamine rush.
I personally hate buying things. When my mobile stopped charging yesterday and the back broke again, I thought about changing it out. I’ve replaced the back twice already and the camera has spots on the sensor under the lenses.
I was able to get it charging when I got home on a high amp USB port, so instead I just ordered yet another back and a new camera (I thought it’d be a bitch to get out, but a few YouTube videos show I was looking at the ribbon wrong and it’s actually pretty easy to replace).
I feel bad when I buy things, but it took a lot of work to get to that point. I’ve sold or given away most of my things multiple times to go backpacking, I run ad block .. I mean if everyone did what I’d did, my life wouldn’t be sustainable. :-P
We are in a really solidly locked paradigm and I don’t think it can simply shift. If you believe the authors of The Dictators Handbook, we literally have to run our of resources before the general public and really push for dramatically different changes.
We really need more commitment to open standards mobile devices. The Ubuntu Edge could have been a game changer, or even the Fairphone. The Edge never got funded and the Fairphone can’t even keep parts sourced for their older models.
We need a combination of people’s attitudes + engineers working on OSS alternatives, and I don’t see either happening any time soon.
Edit: I forgot to mention, Postmarket OS is making huge strides into making older cellphones useful and I hope we see more of that too.
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Century of the Self was a real eye opener. Curtis’s latest documentary, HyperNormalisation, also offers very interesting perspectives.
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Capitalism, by it’s very nature, drives companies to not be satisfied with what already sells. Companies are constantly looking to create new markets and products, and that includes creating demand.
IOW, consumers aren’t fixed actors who buy what they need; they are acted upon to create an ever increasing number of needs.
There are too many examples of this dynamic to bother listing.
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It’s ridiculous to expect everyone to be an expert on every supply chain in the world, starting right from the mines and energy production all the way to the store shelf. That’s effectively what you are requiring.
I’m saying this as a very conscious consumer. I care about my carbon footprint, I don’t buy palm oil, I limit plastic consumption, I limit my consumption overall, but it’s all a drop in the ocean and changes nothing. There are still hundreds of compounds in the everyday items I buy whose provenance I know nothing about and which could be even more destructive. Not to mention that manufacturers really don’t want you to know, it’s simply not in their interest.
You’re creating an impossible task and setting people up to fail. It is not the answer.
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“It’s ridiculous to expect everyone to be an expert on every supply chain in the world, starting right from the mines and energy production all the way to the store shelf. That’s effectively what you are requiring.”
I don’t think it is what they’re requiring and it’s much easier than you describe. Here’s a few options:
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People who are really concerned about this at a level demanding much sacrifice to avoid damaging the environment should automatically avoid buying anything they can’t provably trust by default. The Amish are a decent example that avoids a lot of modern stuff due to commitment to beliefs.
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There’s groups that try to keep track of corporate abuse, environmental actions, and so on of various companies. They maintain good and bad lists. More people that supposedly care can both use them and join them in maintaining that data. It would be split among many people to lessen each’s burden. Again, avoid things by default until they get on the good lists. Ditch them if they get on the bad ones.
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Collectively push their politicians for laws giving proper labels, auditing, etc that help with No 2. Also, push for externalities to be charged back to the companies somehow to incentivize less-damaging behavior.
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Start their own businesses that practice what they preach. Build the principles into their charters, contracts, and so on. Niche businesses doing a better job create more options on the good lists in No 2. There’s entrepreneurs doing this.
So, not all-knowing consumers as you indicated. Quite a few strategies that are less impossible.
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@ac specifically suggested consumer choice as the solution to environmental issues, and that’s what I disagreed with.
Your point number 3 is quite different from the other three, and it’s what I would suggest as a far more effective strategy than consumer choice (along with putting pressure on various corporations). As an aside, I still wouldn’t call it easy - it’s always a hard slog.
Your points 1, 2 and 4 still rely on consumer choice, and effectively boil down to: either remove yourself from modern civilisation, or understand every supply chain in the world. I think it’s obvious that the first choice is neither desirable nor “much easier” for the vast majority of people (and I don’t think it’s the best possible solution). The second is impossible, as I said before.
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“consumer choice as the solution to environmental issues”
edit to add: consumer choice eliminated entire industries worth of companies because they wanted something else. It’s only worsened environmental issues. That’s probably not an argument against consumer choice so much as in favor of them willing to sacrifice the environment overall to get the immediate things they want.
“either remove yourself from modern civilisation, or understand every supply chain in the world”
This is another false dichotomy. I know lots of people who are highly-connected with other people but don’t own lots of tech or follow lots of fads. In many cases, they seem to know about them enough to have good conversations with people. They follow what’s going on or are just good listeners. Buying tons of gadgets or harmful things isn’t necessary for participation. You can get buy with a lot less than average middle or upper class person.
What you said is better understood as a spectrum to be in like most things. Lots of positions in it.
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I think we might actually be mostly in agreement, but we’re talking past each other a bit.
That’s probably not an argument against consumer choice so much as in favor of them willing to sacrifice the environment overall to get the immediate things they want.
I agree with this. But even when consumer choice is applied with environmental goals in mind, I believe its effect is very limited, simply because most people won’t participate.
This is another false dichotomy.
Yeah, but it was derived from your points :) I was just trying to hammer the point that consumer choice isn’t an effective solution.
You can get buy with a lot less than average middle or upper class person.
Totally. I’ve been doing that for a long time: avoiding gadgets and keeping the stuff I need (eg a laptop) as long as I can.
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“But even when consumer choice is applied with environmental goals in mind, I believe its effect is very limited, simply because most people won’t participate.”
Oh OK. Yeah, I share that depressing view. Evidence is overwhelmingly in our favor on it. It’s even made me wonder if I should even be doing the things I’m doing if so few are doing their part.
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The blame rests on the producers, not on the consumers.
Consumers are only able to select off of the menu of available products, so to speak. Most of the choices everyday consumers face are dictated by their employers and whatever is currently available to make it through their day.
No person can reasonably trace the entire supply chain for every item they purchase, and could likely be impossible even with generous time windows. Nor would I want every single consumer to spend their non-working time to tracing these chains.
Additionally, shifting this blame to the consumer creates conditions where producers can charge a premium on ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ products. Only consumers with the means to consume ‘ethically’ are able to do so, and thus shame people with less money for being the problem.
The blame falls squarely on the entities producing these products and the states tasked with regulating production. There will be no market-based solution to get us out of the climate catastrophe, and we certainly can’t vote for a green future with our dollars.
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Consumers are only able to select off of the menu of available products, so to speak. Most of the choices everyday consumers face are dictated by their employers and whatever is currently available to make it through their day.
That’s not true even though it seems it is. The consumers’ past behavior and present statements play a major role in what suppliers will produce. Most of what you see today didn’t happen overnight. There were battles fought where quite a few companies were out there doing more ethical things on supply side. They ended up bankrupt or with less marketshare while the unethical companies got way ahead through better marketing of their products. With enough wealth accumulated, they continued buying the brands of the better companies remaking them into scumbag companies, too, in many cases.
For instance, I strongly advise against companies developing privacy- or security-oriented versions of software products that actually mitigate risks. They’ll go bankrupt like such companies often always did. The companies that actually make lots of money apply the buzzwords customers are looking for, integrate into their existing tooling (often insecure), have features they demand that are too complex to secure, and in some cases are so cheap the QA couldn’t have possibly been done right. That has to be private or secure for real against smart black hats. Not going to happen most of the time.
So, I instead tell people to bake cost-effective security enhancements and good service into an otherwise good product advertised for mostly non-security benefits. Why? Because that’s what demand-side responds to almost every time. So, the supply must provide it if hoping to make waves. Turns out, there’s also an upper limit to what one can achieve in that way, too. The crowds’ demands will keep creating obstacles to reliability, security, workers’ quality of life, supplier choice, environment… you name it. They mostly don’t care either where suppliers being honest about costs will be abandoned for those delivering to demand side. In face of that, most suppliers will focus on what they think is in demand across as many proven dimensions as possible.
Demand and supply side are both guilty here in a way that’s closely intertwined. It’s mostly demand side, though, as quite a few suppliers in each segment will give them whatever they’re willing to pay for at a profit.
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I agree with a lot of your above point, but want to unpack some of this.
Software security is a strange case to turn to since it has less direct implications on the climate crisis (sure anything that relies on a datacenter is probably using too much energy) compared to the production of disposable, resource-intensive goods.
Demand and supply side are both guilty here in a way that’s closely intertwined. It’s mostly demand side, though, as quite a few suppliers in each segment will give them whatever they’re willing to pay for at a profit.
I parse this paragraph to read: we should blame consumers for buying what’s available and affordable, because suppliers are incapable of acting ethically (due to competition).
So should we blame the end consumer for buying a phone every two years and not the phone manufacturers/retailers for creating rackets of planned obsolescence?
And additionally, most suppliers are consumers of something else upstream. Virtually everything that reaches an end consumer has been consumed and processed several times over by suppliers above. The suppliers are guilty on both counts by our separate reasoning.
Blaming individuals for structural problems simply lets suppliers shirk any responsibility they should have to society. After all, suppliers have no responsibility other than to create profits. Suppliers’ bad behavior must be curtailed either through regulation, public education campaigns to affect consumption habits, or organizing within workplaces.
(As an aside, I appreciate your response and it’s both useful and stimulating to hear your points)
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“I parse this paragraph to read: we should blame consumers for buying what’s available and affordable, because suppliers are incapable of acting ethically (due to competition).”
You added two words, available and affordable, to what I said. I left affordable off because many products that are more ethical are still affordable. Most don’t buy them anyway. I left availability off since there’s products appearing all the time in this space that mostly get ignored. The demand side not buying enough of what was and currently is available in a segment sends a message to suppliers about what they should produce. Especially if it’s consistent. Under vote with your wallet, we should give consumers their share of credit or blame for anything their purchasing decisions as a whole are supporting or destroying. That most won’t deliberately try to obtain an ethical supplier of… anything… supports my notion demand side has a lot to do with unethical activities of financially-successful suppliers.
For a quick example, there are often coops and farmers markets in lots of rural areas or suburban towns in them. There’s usually a segment of people who buy from them to support their style of operation and/or jobs. There’s usually enough to keep them in business. You might count Costco in that, too, where a membership fee that’s fixed cost gets the customers a pile of stuff at a promised low-markup and great service. There’s people that use credit unions, esp in their industry, instead of banks. There’s people that try to buy from nonprofits, public beneit companies, companies with good track record, and so on. There’s both a demand side (tiny) and suppliers responding to it that show this could become a widespread thing.
Most consumers on demand side don’t do that stuff, though. They buy a mix of necessities and arbitrary stuff from whatever supplier is lowest cost, cheapest, most variety, promoting certain image, or other arbitrary reasons. They do this so much that most suppliers, esp market leaders, optimize their marketing for that stuff. They also make more money off these people that let them put lots of ethical, niche players out of business over time. So, yeah, I’d say consumer demand being apathetic to ethics or long-term thinking is a huge part of the problem given it puts tens of billions into hands of unethical parties. Then, some of that money goes into politicians’ campaign funds so they make things even more difficult for those companies’ opponents.
“Blaming individuals for structural problems simply lets suppliers shirk any responsibility they should have to society.”
Or the individuals can buy from different suppliers highlighting why they’re doing it. Other individuals can start companies responding to that massive stated demand. The existing vendors will pivot their operations. Things start shifting. It won’t happen without people willing to buy it. Alternatively, using regulation as you mentioned. I don’t know how well public education can help vs all the money put into advertising. The latter seems more powerful.
“(As an aside, I appreciate your response and it’s both useful and stimulating to hear your points)”
Thanks. Appreciate you challenging it so I think harder on and improve it. :)
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Only consumers with the means to consume ‘ethically’ are able to do so, and thus shame people with less money for being the problem.
This is ignoring reality, removing cheaper options does not make the other options cheaper to manufacture. It is not shaming people.
You are also ignoring the fact that in a free country the consumers and producers are the same people. A dissatisfied consumer can become a producer of a new alternative if they see it as possible.
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Exactly. The consumers could be doing more on issues like this. They’re complicit or actively contribute to the problems.
For example, I use old devices for as long as I can on purpose to reduce waste. I try to also buy things that last as long as possible. That’s a bit harder in some markets than others. For appliances, I just buy things that are 20 years old. They do the job and usually last 10 more years since planned obsolescence had fewer tricks at the time. ;) My smartphone is finally getting unreliable on essential functions, though. Bout to replace it. I’ll donate, reuse, or recycle it when I get new one.
On PC side, I’m using a backup whose age I can’t recall with a Celeron after my Ubuntu Dell w/ Core Duo 2 died. It was eight years old. Attempting to revive it soon in case it’s just HD or something simple. It’s acting weird, though, so might just become a box for VM experiments, fuzzing, opening highly-untrustworthy URLs or files, etc. :)
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Capitalism is killing us in a very literal sense by destroying our habitat at an ever accelerating rate
Which alternatives would make people happier to consume less – drive older cars, wear rattier clothing, and demand fewer exotic vacations? Because, really, that’s the solution to excessive use of the environment: Be happier with less.
Unfortunately, greed has been a constant of human nature far too long for capitalism to take the blame there.
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Which alternatives would make people happier to consume less – drive older cars, wear rattier clothing, and demand fewer exotic vacations?
Why do people want new cars, the latest fashions, and exotic vacations in the first place? If it’s all about status and bragging rights, then it’s going to take a massive cultural shift that goes against at least two generation’s worth of cultural programming by advertisers on the behalf of the auto, fashion and travel industries.
I don’t think consumerism kicked into high gear until after the end of World War II when modern advertising and television became ubiquitous, so perhaps the answer is to paraphrase Shakespeare:
The first thing we do, let’s kill all the advertisers.
OK, maybe killing them (or encouraging them to off themselves in the tradition of Bill Hicks) is overkill. Regardless, we should consider the possibility that advertising is nothing but private sector psyops on behalf of corporations, and should not be protected as “free speech”.
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If there was an advertising exception for free speech, people would use it as an unprincipled excuse to ban whatever speech they didn’t like, by convincing the authorities to classify it as a type of advertising. After all, most unpopular speech is trying to convince someone of something, right? That’s what advertising fundamentally is, right?
Remember that the thing that Oliver Wendell Holmes called “falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater” wasn’t actually shouting “fire” in an actual crowded theater - it was a metaphor he used to describe protesting the military draft.
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I agree: there shouldn’t be an advertising exception on free speech. However, the First Amendment should only apply to homo sapiens or to organisms we might eventually recognize as sufficiently human to possess human rights. Corporations are not people, and should not have rights.
They might have certain powers defined by law, but “freedom of speech” shouldn’t be one of them.
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It would be a start if we designed cities with walking and public transportation in mind, not cars.
My neighborhood is old and walkable. I do shopping on foot (I have a bicycle but don’t bother with it). For school/work, take a single bus and a few minutes walking. Getting a car would be a hassle, I don’t have a place to park it, and I’d have to pay large annual fees for rare use.
Newer neighborhoods appear to be planned with the idea that you’ll need a car for every single task. “Residential part” with no shops at all, but lots of room for parking. A large grocery store with a parking lot. Even train stations with a large parking lot, but no safe path for pedestrians/cyclists from the nearby neighborhoods.
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There’s also several Lobsters that have said Android smartphones get slower over time at a much greater rate than iPhones. I know my Galaxy S4 did. This might be hardware, software bloat, or whatever. There’s phones it’s happening on and those it isn’t in a market where users definitely don’t want their phones slowing down. So, my theory on Android side is it’s a problem they’re ignoring on purpose or even contributing to due to incentives. They could be investing money into making the platform much more efficient across devices, removing bloat, etc. They ain’t gonna do that.
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Hmm. I’ll try it since I just backed everything up.
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I’m still using a Nexus 6 I got ~2.5 years ago. I keep my phone pretty light. No Facebook or games. Yet, my phone was getting very laggy. I wiped the cache (Settings -> Storage -> Cached data) and that seemed to help a bit, but overall, my phone was still laggy. It seemed to get really bad in my text messaging app (I use whatever the stock version is). I realized that I had amassed a lot of text messages over the years, which includes quite a lot of gifs. I decided to wipe my messages. I did that by installing “SMS Backup & Restore” and telling it to delete all of my text messages, since apparently the stock app doesn’t have a way to do this in bulk. It took at least an hour for the deletion to complete. Once it was done, my phone feels almost as good as new, which makes me really happy, because I really was not looking forward to shelling out $1K for a Pixel.
My working theory is that there is some sub-optimal strategy in how text messages are cached. Since I switch in and out of the text messaging app very frequently, it wouldn’t surprise me if I was somehow frequently evicting things from memory and causing disk reads, which would explain why the lag impacted my entire phone and not just text messages. But, this is just speculation. And a factory reset would have accomplished the same thing (I think?), so it’s consistent with the “factory reset fixes things” theory too.
My wife is still on a Nexus 5 (great phone) and she has a similar usage pattern as me. Our plan is to delete her text messages too and see if that helps things.
Anyway… I realize this basically boils down to folk remedies at this point, but I’m just going through this process now, so it’s top of mind and figured I’d share.
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I’ll be damned. I baked up and wiped the SMS, nothing else. The phone seems like it’s moving a lot snappier. Literally a second or two of delay off some things. Some things are still slow but maybe app just is. YouTube always has long loading time. The individual videos load faster now, though.
Folk remedy is working. Appreciate the tip! :)
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w00t! Also, it’s worth mentioning that I was experiencing much worse delay than a second or two. Google Nav would sometimes lock up for many seconds.
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Maps seems OK. I probably should’ve been straight-up timing this stuff for better quality of evidence. Regardless, it’s moving a lot faster. Yours did, too. Two, strong anecdotes so far on top of factory reset. Far as we know, even their speed gains might have come from SMS clearing mostly that the reset did. Or other stuff.
So, I think I’m going to use it as is for a week or two to assess this change plus get a feel for a new baseline. Then, I’ll factory reset it, reinstall some apps from scratch, and see if that makes a difference.
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Awesome. Please report back. :-)
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I’ll try to remember to. I’m just still stunned it wasn’t 20 Chrome tabs or all the PDF’s I download during the day. Instead, text messages I wasn’t even using. Of all things that could drag a whole platform down…
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Sms is stored on the SIM card, right? That’s probably not got ideal I/O characteristics…
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I thought the contacts were but messages were on phone. I’m not sure. The contacts being on there could have an effect. I’d have hoped they cached a copy of SIM contents onto in-phone memory. Yeah, SIM access could be involved.
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Now, that’s fascinating. I don’t go in and out of text a lot but do have a lot of text messages. Many have GIF’s. There’s also at least two other apps that accumulate a lot of stuff. I might try wiping them. Btw, folk remedies feel kind of justified when we’re facing a complex, black-box system with nothing else to go on. ;)
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Official from apple: https://www.apple.com/au/iphone-battery-and-performance/
They slow phones with older batteries but don’t show the user any indication that it can be fixed very cheaply by replacing the battery (Until after the recent outrage) and many of them will just buy a new phone and see it’s much faster.
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Wow, so much to unpack here.
You said they slow old phones down. That is patently false. New versions of iOS are not made to run slowly on older model hardware.
Apple did not slow phones down with old batteries. They throttled the CPU of phones with failing batteries (even brand new ones!) to prevent the phone from crashing due to voltage drops. This ensured the phone was still functional even if you needed your phone in an emergency. Yes it was stupid there was no notification to the user. This is no longer relevant because they now provide notifications to the user. This behavior existed for a short period of time in the lifespan of the iPhone: less than 90 days between introduction of release with throttling and release with controls to disable and notifications to users.
Please take your fake outrage somewhere else.
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Apple did not slow phones down with old batteries. They throttled the CPU of phones with failing batteries (even brand new ones!) to prevent the phone from crashing due to voltage drops.
In theory this affects new phones as well, but we know that as batteries grow older, they break down, hold less charge, and have a harder time achieving their design voltage. So in practice, this safety mechanism for the most part slows down older phones.
You claim @user545 is unfairly representing the facts by making Apple look like this is some evil ploy to increase turnover for their mobile phones.
However, given the fact that in reality this does mostly make older phones seem slower, and the fact that they put this in without ever telling anyone outside Apple and not allowing the user to check their battery health and how it affected the performance of their device, I feel like it requires a lot more effort not to make it look like an intentional decision on their part.
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Sure, but if you have an old phone with OK batteries, then their code did not slow it down. So I think it is still more correct to say they slowed down those with bad batteries than those that were old even if most of those with bad batteries were also bad which really depended on phone’s use.
The difference is not just academic. For example I have “inherited” iPhone6 from my wife that still has a good battery after more than 2 years and performs fine.
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Again, untrue. The 11.2 release notes make no mention of batteries, throttling, or power management. (This was the release where Apple extended the throttling to the 7 series of phones.) The 10.2.1 release notes, in their entirety, read thus:
iOS 10.2.1 includes bug fixes and improves the security of your iPhone or iPad. It also improves power management during peak workloads to avoid unexpected shutdowns on iPhone.
That does not tell a reader that long-term CPU throttling is taking place, that it’s restricted to older-model iPhones only, that it’s based on battery health and fixable with a new battery (not a new phone), etc. It provides no useful or actionable information whatsoever. It’s opaque and frankly deceptive.
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You’re right, because I was mistaken and the change was added in iOS 10.2.1, 1/23/2017
https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1893?locale=en_US
It also improves power management during peak workloads to avoid unexpected shutdowns on iPhone.
A user on the day of release:
Hopefully it fixes the random battery shutoff bug.
additionally in a press release:
In February 2017, we updated our iOS 10.2.1 Read Me notes to let customers know the update ‘improves power management during peak workloads to avoid unexpected shutdowns.’ We also provided a statement to several press outlets and said that we were seeing positive results from the software update.
Please stop trolling. It was absent from the release notes for a short period of time. It was fixing a known issue affecting users. Go away.
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I don’t hate Apple. I’m not going to sell my phone because I like it. The battery is even still in good shape! I wish they’d been a little more honest about their CPU throttling. I don’t know why this provokes such rage from you. Did you go through all my old comments to try to figure out what kind of phone I have? Little creepy.
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I’m not angry about anything here. It’s just silly that such false claims continue to be thrown around about old phones intentionally being throttled to sell new phones. Apple hasn’t done that. Maybe someone else has.
edit: it took about 30 seconds to follow your profile link to your website -> to Flickr -> to snag image metadata and see what phone you own.
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They throttled the CPU of phones with failing batteries (even brand new ones!)
This is untrue. They specifically singled out only older-model phones for this treatment. From the Apple link:
About a year ago in iOS 10.2.1, we delivered a software update that improves power management during peak workloads to avoid unexpected shutdowns on iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus and iPhone SE. [snip] We recently extended the same support to iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus in iOS 11.2.
In other words, if you buy an iPhone 8 or X, no matter what condition the battery is in, Apple will not throttle the CPU. (In harsh environments–for example, with lots of exposure to cold temperatures–it’s very plausible that an 8 or X purchased new might by now have a degraded battery.)
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You are making a claim without any data to back it up.
Can you prove that the batteries in the new iPhones suffer voltage drops when they are degraded? If they use a different design with more/smaller cells then AIUI they would be significantly less likely to have voltage drops when overall capacity is degraded.
But no, instead you continue to troll because you have a grudge against Apple. Take your crap elsewhere. It’s not welcome here.
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You’re moving the goalposts. You claimed Apple is throttling the CPU of brand new phones. You were shown this to be incorrect, and have not brought any new info to the table. Your claim that the newer phones might be designed so as to not require throttling is irrelevant.
Please don’t accuse (multiple) people of trolling. It reflects poorly on yourself. All are welcome here.
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It’s both. The user wants something new every year and OEMs don’t have anything worthwhile each year so they change things for the sake of change like adding rounded corners on the LCD or cutting a chunk out of the top. It makes it seem like something is new and worth buying when not much worthwhile has actually changed.
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Yep. I guess humanity’s biggest achievement will be to terraform itself out of existence.
This planet does neither bargain nor care about this civilizations’ decision making processes. It will keep flying around the sun for a while, with or without humans on it.
I’m amazed by the optimism people display in response to pointing out that the current trajectory of climate change makes it highly unlikely that our grand-grand-children will ever be born.
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The list is endless, and it all comes down to the American ethos that making money is a sacred right that trumps all other concerns.
s/American/humanYou can’t fix a problem if you misunderstand what causes it.
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Ideology matters, and America has been aggressively promoting toxic capitalist ideology for many decades around the world. Humans aren’t perfect, but we can recognize our problems and create systems around us to help mitigate them. Capitalism is equivalent of giving a flamethrower to a pyromaniac.
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If you want to hash out how “toxic capitalism” is ruining everything, that’s fine–I’m just observing that many other countries (China, Germany, India, Mozambique, Russia, etc.) have done things that, to me at least, dispel the notion of toxic capitalism as purely being American in origin.
And to avoid accusations of whataboutism, the reason I point those other countries out is that if a solution is put forth assuming that America is the problem–and hence itself probably grounded in approaches unique to an American context–it probably will not be workable in other places.
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Don’t backpedal. You wrote:
The list is endless, and it all comes down to the American ethos that making money is a sacred right that trumps all other concerns.
As to whether or not capitalism is clearly responsible for a lot of harm, it’s worth considering what the alternatives have accomplished.
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Benjamin C. Pierce, Types and Programming Languages, MIT Press.
That’s the one you want. I’m biased towards ML (vs Haskell), and I think the book is, too (it’s not a Haskell book). You can get all six, sure, but if you had to get one that’s the one.
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+1 for this. I’m using TaPL in my PL class this quarter and it’s awesome. Super well written and ML is great for this class - the work involves writing successively more complex interpreters for successively more complex toy languages. We’re not sticking strictly to the book, but the sections our prof has pointed us to have been great.
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I also highly recommend TAPL.
I’ve been recommended TAPL before, but seeing as this isnt a class thats strictly about type systems, I’d like to get a more general one and read TAPL later.
TAPL isn’t just about types neither - it’s types AND programming languages.
Practical Foundations for Programming Languages is also very good.
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I feel like the site is heavily biased towards the mods and high-karma users, with active disdain for what the n00bs want. Just a small, harmless example: posts shouldn’t say hello, which they justify as extraneous, and they don’t want to waste their time reading “hello”. But you know what else is extraneous? Usernames. Karma. Yet they prominently display that everywhere, because I guess it makes the high-karma users feel better?
They’re clearly smart enough to write the regex to strip it out, but not smart enough to realize they could leave it in the question text but extract the inner message for the preview window? No, that’s a huge blind spot. Salutations must go. Everything must cater to Mr. Atwood & Mr. Skeet, always.
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I’d rather write Pug, honestly (it’s a Haml-like HTML dialect). Am I the only one? I don’t want to remember all these rules for lists and line breaks and whatnot. Markdown strikes me as both simple and confusing.
If there’s a compelling non-HTML target for writing Markdown, I totally understand; power to them. I never found one myself.
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using this as an occasion to trot out one of my favorite essays on naming: https://blog.janestreet.com/whats-in-a-name/
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I like this essay, and it makes me think about a couple things.
…the length and detail of a name should be proportional to its scope: A variable that is referenced across multiple files ..
It’s funny, because I like to write CoffeeScript, and you can’t really do that: variables are file-scoped by default. It’s a preference thing. (Some people like to shadow lexical bindings? not I)
Another issue with picking long names vs short names is that often (depending on language), naming is itself a leaky abstraction, because you just know it’s gonna allocate an entire word if you want “int cc_exp = credit_card_expiration; ..cc_exp..”. I don’t think all languages give you aliases for free. We also contort to make things fit 80 characters. Variables can’t have spaces (except Common LISP?), most can’t have dashes, I really want subscripts!—it feels like those password prompts: “5-8 characters, alphanumeric only”. At least we don’t have 8.3 FILENA~1. We learned to name files! (except the pain with spaces, again..) The tools often give naming a hard/constrained time, since it’s somehow never a priority.
I wish a lot of code were just a little more wasteful/redundant to be a lot more readable.
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Your point about spaces is a bit confusing because on the one hand you complain you can’t have spaces in variables, but then complain about problems with spaces in filenames. I am not sure what you want at this point? Maybe some kind of `
variable notation`?Another language that allows spaces in variables is SQL. You can have spaces in e.g. table names just fine.
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I want spaces in variable names & filenames. I do tend to use spaces in filenames, but I also forget to quote my “$@” bash variables so it tends to hurt. I think it’s crazy some people (usually programmers..) always_use_underscores.txt to sidestep it altogether. I actually really like SQL in this regard, since you’re right: spaces are ok, and aliases are free (you can even start a column name with a number). I also much prefer spaces in regexes like Perl 6 does right.
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unwind
4 months ago
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link
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Ask crustaceans: Did your Android device just mysteriously auto-update apps?
Android 4.1.2, auto-update off, on wifi but not on wireless, last updates were in February according to the Play Store app. Just updated Firefox, and now it’s the only Recently Updated.
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Nope! It’s not. It’s to make the client happy, both long- & short-term. Here we go again, reaching for the Technical Hammer when we have a People Problem.
Not happy usually, just content enough that he pays you and maybe even does business with you again.
For us, finding solutions to problems is part of making the client happy. That is why we wrote:
How do you make the client happy?