egyptiankarim

"Important" in the sense that many IT organizations have predicated their data forensics and incident response capabilities on being able to intercept and analyze traffic at arbitrary points within their corporate networks.

That's not to say that those choices reflect good architectural design, to be sure quite the opposite. But like many things in enterprise IT risk management, it comes down to where you spent your money, and things like DoH/DoT force will force certain organizations to admit "a lot in the wrong place".

I think the arguments are that there's a degree of security through obfuscation by forcing everything over a single common port (443), the transmission integrity benefits of TCP versus UDP protocols, and maybe just the overall simplicity of HTTPS as a protocol.

Correct. TLS-wrapped protocols don't seek to offer anonymity of the source and destination. They're designed to protect the confidentiality and integrity of data in transit. The best tools we have for anonymity are things like onion routing.

Turns out the most important part of the entire text is the acknowledgements section.

A PhD is intended to demonstrate that a person is capable of pursuing a course of research within a field of study, and has a mastery of the existing knowledge and pertinent skills/methodologies.

Unfortunately, in some fields, the PhD has sadly become a form of lazy gatekeeping, and reimagining the PhD in those cases may just be a matter of waiting for the old guard to step down.

In some other fields, the PhD is probably ripe for reimagining, but "independence" might not be the right lens through which to think about it. For example, it would be exceedingly difficult for a would-be physicist to independently build a large hadron collider to do their research with. The institutions that make those sorts of resources even possible are inherently large/complex, and in those cases the PhD is a less sad and lazy form of gatekeeping (i.e., you need to do a set of progressively more complex stuff under the tutelage of someone more experienced before we let you touch all of our big expensive things).

In yet some other fields, which may be younger, have less of an established orthodoxy, and lower overhead to participate in (e.g., the economic/anthropological open source software type work the author does), it seems totally reasonable that a person could develop and demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and abilities on their own and without a formal course of study. In such fields, the concept of the PhD doesn't seem as ready for reimagining as it does retirement.

But for data we can use the seed files and associated patterns, right? Since it's just text in those files, they're trivially checked into source control, diffed, distributed etc.

Is this approach materially different/more scalable than using the active record, ORM, and seed file patterns supported by popular MVC frameworks (e.g., like how Rails does it https://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_migrations....)? Isn't the crux of all that to be able to source control and easily distribute schemas and data in a database agnostic way?

> Use these charts where the communication goal is to show intent or generality, and not absolute precision. Or just because they're fun and look weird.

I love the intent and execution behind this. The implication of imprecision in the underlying data through rough looking "hand drawn" charts and graphs is a really smart design hack.

Neat to see that they started by interviewing a diverse subset of their engineers; that type of user-centric research is invaluable. Moreover, I wonder what of their methodology could be mapped to a live analysis of the code review conversation threads they're having via GitHub.

More than anything else, though, I'm curious where teams like this still go to buy those amazing Apple Cinema displays?!

I wonder if Amazon hopes to eventually get into manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. How long before we start to see AmazonBasics versions of Aspirin?

Agreed! I have a template built that allows me to spin up a basic web app with all my baseline common dependencies ready to go and a handful of little nice-to-haves in place and deploy to Heroku in well under an hour. I love Rails!

> Who will take his place? Who will be the Stephen Hawking of my children's generation?

I nominate Brian Greene from Columbia University! Rhodes Scholar, mind-bending types of work in theoretical physics, cofounder of the World Science Festival, frequent appearances on fancy-schmancy podcasts and television shows. Definitely all the makings of a science hero.

Fair enough. Maybe I'm being an idealist hoping for some idealism in the world.

And yeah, there've been several theories about who it might be. It's like the Banksy of the cryptocurrency world. Just as cool, but way less street cred :)

Fair enough. I know lots of researchers are very personally invested in their work and I can imagine the sting. I promise I wasn't calling you a blowhard or anything :)

You're absolutely right. There are. Blowhard professors, in my opinion, are the ones that prioritize recognition over research. There's a thread in certain research circles that would eschew any such recognition in the hopes of putting their work on a pedestal in place of themselves (e.g., the Bitcoin people, again in my opinion).

I don't know. I think there's a benefit to having anonymized research. It forces the work to stand on its own. Sort of an extension to blinded peer-review processes. Plus, I highly doubt Apple researchers, or researchers at any other tech giants, are toiling away for peanuts.

Livable wage? Researchers at Silicon Valley powerhouse companies aren't exactly toiling away for peanuts, are they? Also, the implication of my statement is that blowhards tend to prioritize their desire for recognition, not that the desire for recognition makes you a blowhard. Hardly an "obscene" assertion.

Definitely.

Exactly!

My implication was that Apple had been doing that research work behind the scenes the entire time.

Right?! I can't wait for the computer-human interaction research teams to jump on this trend and start publishing! The CHI/HCI/HCC community would flip out. My favorite example of how this sort of transparency would benefit the community: In 2009, Microsoft published an academic paper called "Mouse 2.0" (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/mouse-2...), where they walked through the research prototypes for touch-sensitive peripherals. The paper was met with awe and acclaim... A mere few months before Apple took the Magic Mouse to market.

The occasional blowhard professor aside, there is a thread of idealism in many research circles that advancing the field is more important than advancing one's stature. My favorite example of this is all of the research that went into the creation of Bitcoin and the still unknown identity of its creator.

But in the sense that Apple is notoriously tight-lipped about research, it's a notable PR stunt. Unlike with Microsoft and Google, you don't see a lot of Apple in academic research circles despite them having a significant brain-share. Love them or hate them, Apple is a powerhouse and the (undoubtedly amazing) research happening behind the scenes could do a huge amount of good with just a bit more visibility.

"Top 9 strategies for disrupting web markets... You won't believe number 7!"

I'm a sucker for irony :)

You just gave me flashbacks to giant chunks of GL boilerplate C code. (shudders... smiles)

True and fair. I overstated my point. More appropriate to say "provably secure (under practical constraints)", and that's a rather significant caveat.