bulleyashah

Tangential question but hoping someone knows how to do this :

Is there a setting in Firefox that allows me to invert colors without a plugin or javascript? The default Black on white is too painful for eyes.

I get what you're saying but I wouldn't discount all other forms of knowledge besides science.

For example, mathematics is not mystical. Philosophy is also well argued.

And secondly, not everything might be definable with data. For example, how should one treat others is not a purely scientific question.

Having said that, what would you like to know?

Can I ask a really basic question?

I understand that transistors amplify current but how do they amplify voltage (like in CMOS)? Isn't voltage going to amplify current also?

I never understood this.

Yeah dude, I think so too. Some of the ideas I liked though we're about prescription, and then him saying it's all about destination. And trying to look beyond words and towards an understanding.

And I agree, most of it can be summarised as "life is a complex system. You can't marry any kind of ideology if you want to achieve any goal, but instead keep listening to feedback and tune accordingly"

Is there a cloud provider that doesn't require a credit card for free tier?

I see. My only contention would be that abuse is stopped but use is also equally degraded (due to randomness).

But I see what you're saying. Some combination of voting and randomness might br worth it. Also, another thing is maybe some sort of sentiment analysis can help (abuse mainly comes from trolling, virtue signalling etc).

I don't know, if ther was a way to figure out what value a comment adds (or inverse), then that, combined with voting and some sort of randomness might make the system fairer and better?

That plugin is for desktop browser. My biggest distraction is the phone actually. And firefox for phone doesn't support it yet. Somebody should really port it. Grease monkey also doesn't work on mobile browsers.

What a great idea. I have myself disabled colors on the screen to avoid those addictive contrasts.

I also try to do a phone fast every Sunday, where I give my phone to my wife and just live without it for a day. It's amazingly rewarding. You should give it a try :)

I didn't mean celebrity but more like knowledgeable people. A random system, just like random election, does not guarantee best or betterness in any form. It's not important however, because I agree it's unlikely and I do see where you're coming from (I also share your sense of cynicism about democracy).

I don't use Twitter that much but I hear that twitter is really toxic. Assuming some part of twitter tweet section is random, does that inspire confidence that such a system might work.

Could you share the plugin?

Let me chime in on the voting issue (or I think what you mean is mob voting issue?)

Imagine a discussion on Linux and Torvalds comments on it. But due to randomisation, it doesn't get enough traction. Note that this problem will become bigger the more top level comments you get.

This is the same problem with democracies also. Everyone gets to vote but the outcome might not be the best.But the alternative of randomly selecting people to govern also has its problems.

Do you know any platforms which have successfully done the randomisation thing?

Well, no matter how fast a single server is, it can't keep getting faster.

You might shoot yourself in the foot by optimizing only for single servers because eventually you'll need horizontal scaling and it's better to think about it in the beginning of your architecture.

+1

I realized this one day when I was drawing some nice sequence diagrams and presenting it to a senior and he said "But who's ensuring the sequence?". You'll never ask this question in a single threaded system.

Having said that, these things are unavoidable. The expectations from a system are too great to not have distributed systems in picture.

Monoliths are so hard to deploy. It's even more problematic when you have code optimized for both sync cpu intensive stuff and async io in the same service. Figuring out the optimal fleet size is also harder.

I'd love to hear some ways to address this issue and also not to have microservice bloat.

Sounds like you're saying "Don't do distributed work" if possible (considering tradeoffs of course, but I guess people just don't even consider this option is your contention).

And secondly, if you do end up with q distributed systems, remember how many independently failing components there are because thag directly translates to complexity.

On both these counts I agree. Microservices is no silver bullet. Network partitions and failure happen almost every day where I work. But most people are not dealing with that level of problems, partly because of cloud providers.

Same kind of problems will be found on a single machine also. Like you'd need some sort of write ahead log, checkpointing, maybe optimize your kernel for faster boot up, heap size and gc rate.

All of these problems do happen, but most people don't need to think about it.

Correct. That doesn't make monolithic systems "not distributed".

Secondly, I don't know why you say "distributed systems are an active area of research" and use this as some sort of retort.

If I say "Is a monolithic app running on two separate hosts a distributed system or not", if your answer is "We don't know, it's an active area of research" or "It's not. Only microservices are distributed"

Monoliths are also distributed systems and will run on multiple hosts, most probably co-ordinating on some sort of state (and that state management will need to take care of concurrency, consistency). Some hosts will go down. Service traffic will increase.

I understand your point. You are using distributed in the sense of "how is one big work distributed", you probably also hate overly "Object Oriented code" for similar reasons.

But distributed systems is a well understood thing in the industry. If I call you and you tell me this, then you're directly responsible for hurting how successful I would be by giving me a misleading sense of what a distributed systems is.

I mean, you can always deploy your microsevices on the same host, it would just be a service mesh.

Adding network is not a limitation. And frankly, I don't understand why you say things like understanding network. Like reliability is taken care of, routing is taken care of. The remaining problems of unboundedness and causal ordering are taken care of (by various frameworks and protocols).

For dlq management, you can simply use a persistent dead letter queue. I mean it's a good thing to have dlq because failures will always happen. About which order to procese queue etc. These are trivial questions.

You say things as if you have been doing software development for ages, but you're missing out on some very simple things.

I know we should not judge person and only ideas but it seems like all of Pinker's ideas are tok shallow for an academic. For example,

Also, Pinker wrote a book on how the mind works, which is very very wrong (my wife, who's a psychologist absolutely hates it). She asked me to read a small article called "That's not how the mind works" by some guy at MIT to explain.

Then I've also read his book on "How to write" and as an avid reader, I'd say we'd not have had Shakespeare if we followed his advice.

And now you're telling me that his other books are also very shallow? Does he not realize it?

Exactly. So let's not exaggerate the role of learned helplessness in Google's monopoly.

Hmm. Don't like your planet? Terraform a new planet.

Don't like End of Universe? Create your own big bang.

What do you mean it's impossible? Stop this learned helplessness.