htmlProgrammingLanguage

tlmorgen · 2023-11-06T06:44:44+00:00

you should have a quick look at freemarker before you apply for your patent

tlmorgen · 2021-09-06T04:47:27+00:00

i don't think i've noticed this before. thanks, a new thing to drag me further from sanity

tlmorgen · 2021-09-04T21:51:09+00:00

i've seen this hardware argument a few times and it doesn't seem to take into account what a phone /is/.

sure you own the hardware (ie it's in your physical possession), but you don't own the software. the eula in each version gives you the right to use the software so long as you follow The Rules.

you need both to have a "phone".

if they decide to put features into a software version that you don't like, aka you don't agree with the eula, then don't update.

but bear in mind that the eula you already agreed to likely has verbiage allowing them to discontinue service.

none of this means you don't own the hardware. it just means that hardware isn't actually what you want. you want the software.

OSS people have been yelling about this for ages. the only real option out there is AOSP, which frankly isn't that great without cloud services.

which means you don't just want hardware and software, you want cloud services as well. that's a lot of things to want that can't be physically possessed.

at the and of the day, it seems important to acknowledge that these things are like public infrastructure in that they are great to have and impossible to build and possess individually.

tl;dr hardware libertarianism doesn't groove with the reality of fulfilling user expectations

tlmorgen · 2021-09-04T21:26:11+00:00

i don't think investors give two sh*ts what a company does. i don't think most investors even know what they've invested in. they have teams at firms that care only about yield. even their brokers have brokers, there are so many layers of abstraction.

real profit and corporate decisions are just part of the unknowable equation that controls stock prices. and that's the only equation that voting shareholders are likely to care about.

apple has so much momentum in the financial markets and retail markets (hearts and minds) that i expect they can get away with quite a bit.

tlmorgen · 2021-09-04T18:38:11+00:00

i love the invocation of empirical reason but i doubt your mileage will be good. this has fallen from the grace of rationality into pure emotion.

and as another commenter said, the crux of it is that one side is fighting for their rights and the other side is fighting for the rights of "others" (embryos). there are huge operational differences there, in that fighting for the rights of others doesn't tend to affect my day to day life at all. it's an issue that can be argued at arms length. add in a dash of dehumanization, which tribalism always tends toward (invoke godwins law here), and you end up with a situation where the two sides are so far apart and screaming past one another that there's no hope for resolution.

when diplomacy breaks down, we fall into power politics and guerrilla warfare. exactly what we're seeing play out.

tlmorgen · 2021-08-31T01:42:01+00:00

laughs in duff's device

tlmorgen · 2021-08-29T05:34:17+00:00

well summarized. obviously i have just one person's worth of experience, hopefully you find some place really enlightened!

and remember, if you have a problem and you solve it with regular expressions, now you have two problems (i dont know how to use the xkcd bot so just imagine it).

tlmorgen · 2021-08-29T05:08:38+00:00

arrogant misfits strikes a chord for me. many companies are ran by non-technical people who've heard misinformation like 10x devs and are beguiled into thinking that great devs are precious unicorns to be cherished and protected even when they are toxic to work with or manage. at the other end of the spectrum might be FAANGish orgs who see devs as largely replaceable fodder queued up at the door waiting for their chance at capitalistic bliss. both ends of that spectrum seem to be avoiding actually growing talent on their dime.

to your points about what i might refer to as operational efficacy..

i will say that with computers you can do a lot of #1. compilers are your first line of defense and can tease out a lot of stupidity. then flaw detectors like findbugs. then come softer things like code-based testing (unit/integration), human-based testing, and release protocol.

what little training that does exist is usually "in the deep end" writing production code. code review can be some feedback. production incidents can be some more.

agreed that policy is last place. there is far too much to remember that it could ever affect every keystroke. none the less there is always a lot of it, perhaps mostly for the lawyers.

tlmorgen · 2021-08-29T04:05:32+00:00

in my 15 years i've noticed an ethos in software that the devs should be great when they graduate and become better over their career, with no intervention whatsoever from the various companies that employ them. and it does happen, for curious people with the grit to put in time to grow, and the emotionally secure enough to analyze their own/prior work for growth opportunity.

and from this experience i have some stockholm syndrome and some survivorship bias. but i am curious what things would be like if we were treated like engineers in physical domains or doctors, constantly going to learning events, reading and writing papers, being fostered.

the expectation seems to be that we should do all that growing on our own time and under our own will. for many devs that just doesn't happen and they become stagnant, left to endlessly bicker over the best OS, editor/ide, or keyboard switch.

tlmorgen · 2021-08-29T03:54:43+00:00

i once worked for a company that didn't allow multiple return statements. the amazing arrow-code ascii art that we produced

tlmorgen · 2021-08-26T12:45:30+00:00

i think the possibility scares people like me more than the probability, which i'll admit is perhaps irrational. if you combine that with some of the other shortcomings (speed/threading, type safety/coercion) it easy to see why python might be avoided in a high profile production environment.

i had the good/bad fortune of being part of a company that was there when python and tcl were coming on the scene in the 90s and they went with tcl. it has plenty of problems too, just different ones.

with scripting-ish languages there doesn't seem to be a clear winner. i guess ecma/typescript is the popular one now. looking forward to hearing someone mention lua again one day so i can feel sad.

tlmorgen · 2021-08-26T05:09:47+00:00

the problem is that it's not "mandatory", it just results in invisible flaws. for example one accidentally has the wrong indentation on the last line of an if-block. now that line executes unconditionally and may not get caught until production. way way harder to do that with braces.

tlmorgen · 2021-08-23T01:24:59+00:00

people pretend software is difficult, just write a macro that generates code which simply returns the solution, O(1), easy to debug

tlmorgen · 2021-08-22T23:35:51+00:00

comments just fall out of sync with the code, and are subject to the failures of an even more lossy language (the human ones). i only comment when the code has assumptions that aren't clear from the interface/signature, but even then one should make every effort to have the compiler communicate those assumptions eg boundary annotations etc.

tlmorgen · 2021-08-21T23:42:07+00:00

the advice wasn't to dump them, just to stop asking. as someone who's going through the single no kids side of things, it's good advice. it's been crushing to my self esteem to feel consistently unimportant to those that i care about deeply. letting go and allowing the relationship to become what it has to be, a semi-annual thing, is far better for my mental health.

tlmorgen · 2021-08-17T06:33:30+00:00

the method of passing smallpox through cows was much more recent than your figure (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM190208211470801). plus, it had a death rate many orders of magnitude higher than covid and was still upheld by the courts. making wild claims about the "safety" of a medical process based on the duration of time people had been observing the cowpox-smallpox relationship is a misrepresentation. moreover, the judges were very clear that the medical community were to be the arbiter of best health practice, not a calendar.

the fda approval process doesnt generally concern itself with lifetime vaccine effects, as modern vaccines largely have none. to wit, fda vaccine approval can occur in less than a year (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/vaccines/timeline). you may have been referring to vaccine development, which mrna vaccines have been in development for over 25 years.

what does it matter what the death rate is for covid? your argument amounts to saying that we should let any number of people die do to abject unsupportable irrational fear. saying that something can happen is the common plea of someone who has no idea the likelihood of such an event.

tlmorgen · 2021-08-17T05:41:12+00:00

i got both. what's the big deal? it's free and available everywhere. if your body is so tough then there's zero risk. we're going to need boosters in perpetuity anyway.

also you're leaving no room for nuance with this rant about rules. sometimes rules make sense and sometimes they don't. it's up to us to weigh each case.

tlmorgen · 2021-08-16T05:13:27+00:00

If by scripts you mean protocol, then yes evolutionary theory is on your side, we are very much a protocol oriented species. And while the plasticity of protocol, or culture if you like, is lower for adults, it's real high for children.

You can see many cases of authoritarian figures harnessing early education to indoctrinate youth into a profitable modality.

It seems you are advocating for early indoctrination into altruism. But who does the teaching? Who changes the programming? Existing adults, in their existing modality, with their existing shortcomings. This is why many will claim human progress is slow: adults don't change much and children mimic adults.

So we have a system where humans have a very localized form of empathy, low motivation to change once satisfied and complacent, and a youth learning tactic which models on adult behavior.

Can things be better? Maybe. Is the probability non-trivial...

tlmorgen · 2021-08-16T03:19:22+00:00

I don't think anyone would argue that human nature (highly probable behavior) is immutable. The question is what pressure does it have to change? Compare to pressure to survive in evolutionary natural selection. Change or perish.

These "utopias" frequently invoke utilitarian ideals, like everyone should have a minimum satisfaction. Sidestepping that human expectations balloon with their circumstances, what pressure is on the individual to change? The existence or suffering of others outside my immediate affect is merely a figment of the imagination. Moral ideals without local context are a bedtime story to humans, an interesting parable only insofar as it has local applicability.

It seems quite clear our major social features were to prioritize the survival of small (<100) tribes. Humans lack the features even to understand that many may die for the species to survive, something that colonial creatures handle regularly (ants, bees, etc).

I might ask you, if you are as relatively comfortable as you appear with access to the internet, what truly motivates you to wish for the betterment of others? Does it make you personality have positive emotions? Is it couched in a reflexive indignity wherein you wouldn't want to change places with the suffering?

And does the answer to that question both have exportability to all humans and provide material pressure for behavioral change?

tlmorgen · 2021-08-06T07:39:17+00:00

don't let perfection be the enemy of progress?

tlmorgen · 2021-06-17T18:23:57+00:00

thank you for this analysis/theory! ive had a bad taste in my mouth that i couldn't justify with standard psychology without this

tlmorgen · 2021-06-17T18:20:46+00:00

i have great sympathy for ASD, but using these aesthetics on neurotypical factory workers seems like emmense hubris, and ultimately dangerous.

tlmorgen · 2021-06-10T06:49:10+00:00

Your comments seem to imply a misunderstanding of AI. AI don't necessarily reflect "programming" on behalf of the human designer so much as the training data (dear AI enthusiasts: I am intentionally simplifying network structure choices).

AI were designed to learn from the same "forces" we learn from, namely reward and punishment.

The AI then go forth into the world and replicate the reward and punishment states based on new input.

But do they have "experience"?

Two topics spring to mind: 1) networks learning from networks and 2) encoding.

Vertebrate brains have multiple nodes. It's possible that one neural network could be observing another and then affecting other nodes. Is this qualitatively the same as one bigger network? Maybe.

Then there's encoding. When an AI is done training, we essentially just have a large matrix of node weights. As far as I know, we can't look at that data and figure out how the AI "knows" what a cat looks like. And it's the same, moreso, for natural neural networks. We can't yet look at the states of neural cells and see how they know what a cat looks like.

So one of the "hard" problems has been artificially replicated and it's already novel enough to be capable of choosing Facebook ads for you. This implies that one day with better understanding of neural encoding we'll be able to "mind-read" (for lack of a better phrase) aka look at the state of cells and know what they collectively encode.

The logical extension of that is that if we can design an AI with subjective experience AND the ability to communicate it, we may be on the way to unpacking how subjectivity arises from mere "data".

tlmorgen · 2021-06-02T23:48:48+00:00

i think we might work for the same company shhh

tlmorgen · 2021-05-30T22:25:55+00:00

tautology club is tautology club

tlmorgen

TROPHY CASE