BaseballPhysics
BaseballPhysics on Hacker News
Yes, it is.
The core of their comment is "oh noes western values will be lost!" (Or as they put it: "the global West has values worth preserving for the future").
My point is, no, they won't, because fertility is dropping everywhere. We're not that special. And that this purported fear is simply rooted in age-old racist tropes of a loss of cultural identity to scary foreigners, nothing more.
I cannot think of worse advice.
Congratulations to you that you found a life that works for you.
But the idea that people should just stop thinking and start procreating is absurd. Kids are a gigantic decision, the biggest one a person will ever make in their life. To not carefully consider that decision is utterly irresponsible, and to tell people to thoughtlessly have children without considering those consequences is equally so.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India
Bluntly, whether you meant to or not, this comment is full of coded bigotry. It invokes images of a foreign hoard, bang at the walls of the west, threatening to dilute or destroy "our" way of life.
And software reverse engineering is just grunt work. I'd start with a very well known existing hardware platform with a very simple CPU design--the GBA is actually a really nice platform as the ARM has a very sane ISA and it's all memory mapped I/O--and get a devkit and start experimenting by writing software to run in an emulator so you can get a feel for how the hardware works.
And the other thing I love about it is the communities are typically super open and collaborative. I remember back when I first got into GBA development, there was a ton of docs, tools, libraries, and other things that folks had put together and then shared with one another. It's a lot of very passionate people sharing some very niche interests, which can be incredibly fun (of course it can also be a drama filled nightmare but such is life with passionate people).
Such as? What provider would you be comfortable with?
Meanwhile, the vast majority of users around here will have a GitHub or Google account, and probably Facebook as well. This is hardly much of an inconvenience.
And if the complaint is that now Jitsi can tie back activity to a durable identity: yeah, that's the entire point. They're fighting abuse. At some level, to prevent that abuse, they need some form of trustworthy authentication. That, by definition, means to some extent piercing the veil of anonymity.
It's also why running their own auth doesn't fundamentally solve the problem, as anonymous users creating their own accounts on their platform is a minor speed bump to folks who would use the service for nefarious activity. For that auth to be worth anything, they'd have to engage in their own forms of user verification, and that'd be no more privacy protective, and frankly probably less so since you'd have to trust their security posture.
Look, I get it, I'm not a fan of the big tech providers, either. But the claim that this somehow crosses the privacy rubicon is a massive overreaction. And the software itself remains as Free and Open Source as it ever was.
They literally cannot run the service in a way that's both perfectly anonymous to Jitsi themselves and simultaneously resistant to abuse.
Just stand up your own instance and make it available to the anonymous public?
Jitsi itself isn't going away, just their anonymously-accessible instance.
By all accounts it's very easy to operate and requires very little in terms of resources.
So what's the problem?
Don't blame Jitsi. Blame the people abusing their previously wide open service. They're why we can't have nice things.
As for expecting them to run their own auth service instead of relying on a third party, that is a hell of a lot more complex than it looks. I can't blame them for not wanting to take that on.
If you really disagree that much, go ahead and fire up your own Jitsi service and open it up for anonymous use by the public. Let's see how long you can run it before you encounter the exact same problems.
Wikipedia literally uses the word "decentralized" to describe the Fediverse, which would seem to violate your personal definition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
> While a traditional social networking site will host all its content on servers owned by the parent company, the decentralized social media sites that make up the fediverse allow any individual or organization to host their own servers (referred to as an "instance").
Meanwhile Python always felt like an ill-fitting suit to me. I just personally didn't connect with the language design.
But, to each their own!
The things I may want to learn or do in service of a hobby or personal interest are very different from those topics relevant to my professional life, and the motivations and the value I get from it are entirely different as well.
And this article is clearly written with a professional context in mind.
Unless you think that when he mentioned how his "software developer colleagues often ask me where I do get all the time for reading all the tech books or articles, watching conference talks and listening to podcasts," they were marveling at his woodworking hobby?
https://focus.science.ubc.ca/worms-ae3a1579c58c
Humanity evolved with parasites. Like gut bacteria, excessive focus on hygeine may be more harmful than helpful.
You're treating tech as a hobby and engaging with it accordingly.
This piece literally started with:
> My software developer colleagues often ask me where I do get all the time for reading all the tech books or articles, watching conference talks and listening to podcasts.
Immediately we, the reader, know this isn't about having fun in your spare time or learning and building purely for pleasure.
It's all about achieving, about being that person that other people look to and think "wow, where do they find the time to be so productive??"
If it were as you say, I'd have no issues with the piece at all.
Oh good.
More productivity hacking.
Maybe I should come up with some KPIs? Put together quarterly reports? Find more ways to quantify my self-worth so I can maximize it?
> My software developer colleagues often ask me where I do get all the time for reading all the tech books or articles, watching conference talks and listening to podcasts.
They're not talking about learning about woodworking on the side, or learning about tech for fun. They specifically situated the piece in the world of work right at the start, going so far as to present themselves as some kind of mysterious marvel that their co-workers have tried to unravel.
This is just another tech productivity hacking piece. Good ol' workaholic porn, in the same vein as "Wanna get hired? Start a dozen side projects!" or "Hack leetcode in your remaining waking hours for fun and profit, except without the fun!"
It's a trope at this point, and an unhealthy one.
But that requires a fundamental change in organizational productivity culture and means this kind of policy probably needs to be implemented -- and critically, measured -- at the corporate level so people collectively recognize that learning time is sacrosanct.
No big deal!
In fact, their dynamically typed nature is a perfect example of that since it's much easier to quickly manipulate strings in a language that isn't so strict, as they'll do more heavy lifting for you via automatic coercion while limiting extra syntax/boilerplate (which, granted, is less of a problem with modern type inference). That makes it a lot easier to toss together quick one-liners and glue code, which is where these tools shine in the first place.
Hell, even something like python or ruby is just a little too structured for my taste when doing something quick and dirty, which is why I love perl as it can be unstructured if that's all I need, or I can create a more structured program if that's what the problem requires.