mindless_solips

"Grove giveth, Gates taketh away"

Kent Beck's Test Driven Development by Example and Xtreme Programming Explained are delightful books that deserve a place on this list.

"I'd say the friend effect is able to elevate people who have 'mediocre' skills on paper to be efficient enough and start learning at a rate that sees them performing well above their qualifications."

Any sources for this? Should we assume the '96 Bulls were "best buddies"? Are Amazon and Apple the "most tightly knit companies on Earth", thus reaching $1T valuation? This sounds like an "I assume this to be true by' common sense', therefore it's persuasive" type of claim.

The problem is, competence is important. Nice people who design airplanes that are "mostly right, but fall out of the sky slightly more than average" have real costs versus a team that's "a little cold to each other, but meshes well to create a high quality product."

Which matters more probably ultimately depends on the "mission criticality" / ramifications of failure of the product. But assuming that two Advanced Beginners will elevate each other to competence also ignores that they can create a "blind leading the blind" style of effect.

What?!? Russell literally developed Type Theory. Even discussion of Platonic Forms ultimately goes from "lesser" abstractions like the Ideal Form of a Bed to "greater" abstractions like Beauty, Justice, Good.

Please, read more philosophy. Clearer, more informed thinking might lead to better software.

You may want to review Russell's A History of Western Philosophy. Bertrand pretty effectively shredded most of the fantastical precepts Platonism relies on in his analysis in the chapter on Theory of Ideas (15 in the Audible audio book).

The basic gist is that the basis of Platonism is metaphysical more than logical. Mysticism is the key bedrock of the form of the Good. Plato's ideal of Ultimate Truth is self-contradictory when reconciled with Geometry. Plato's lack of subtlety with syntax causes a lot of his arguments to fall flat, such as "beauty is beautiful." The analysis of the Parmenides is beautiful, highly recommended.

I hope the asutute reader is recognizing the classical Western European thinker mentality of "in going through this particular contextual situation where a variety of forces have conspired to create a situation. From my limited view and biasing heavily on observations from a limited sample pool, I derive conclusions broadly applicable to all of humanity across all time."

This is not to say Bonhoeffer was a fool nor to completely disregard his words, but to derive essentially that" all humans are stupid in groups " because you're living through the rise of Nazism is one frame, and is not necessarily self-evidently valid. Until culture became the cesspool of the mid-10s, we had a lot of good analytical evidence for Wisdom of the Crowds, I. E. Wikipedia, PageRank, etc.

What an incredible link and story I hadn't heard of at all. Reading that Lenovo literally knowingly installed self-signed certs on their laptops to send encrypted traffic to ad bots is one of the more horrifying device manufacturer findings I've ever seen.

A serialization format is more than just how things are described on the wire. It's also about how both sides are expected to receive and transmit it. Naive processing of JSON in certain situations can run into sharp edges like this:

https://rules.sonarsource.com/java/RSPEC-4544

Serialization formats are a part of Protocols, which essentially form the software equivalent of a spoken language between two people. Like words, the bytes can have a general syntax and expected semantic, but still be open to problematic interpretation. Like the conceptual difference between a language like English and Ithkuil. (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-beg...)

Like Ithkuil, some formats can specify "a little more" in a way that tries to prescribe semantic meaning and syntax such that implementing according to spec limits the opportunities for issues like this to happen.

Thank you for this. The Love of Complexity is Real in this field. While I encourage and support the goals of anonymity and security everywhere, everything has its design envelope.

This is an e-zine of public content. Sure, "SoMeOnE cOuLd InTeRcEpT", but why bother? Even with encrypted sockets, logs would still show your IP going to the site. What information are we trying to protect or malicious activity are we trying to stop by using SSL?

... And is it worth the unfortunate webmasters having to deal with bullshit like LetsEncrypt's root certificate expiration and all the main of keystores and PKI management so random "Very Serious People on the Internet" can say "ah, they follow The Standard on security."

Controversial statement in 2021, I'm sure, but I think a use case for simple HTML over HTTP websites still exists. Your personal page with pictures of cats and your resume probably doesn't need to be some bastion of cybersecurity.

What we're seeing is essentially the Death of the Free Flow of Information on the Internet;coming concomitant with a pervasive social slide towards Elitism when the whole point of the original revolution was to break down the siloes of power aggregated into gatekeeper hands.

In the Assault on Reason, AL Gore talked about the ability to craft systems that could enable people to create and engage with content in meaningful ways. No doubt viewing YouTube as an antidote to taking people out of a passive TV watching role and towards an active, civically engaged citizen.

The problem is, when anybody can say anything, Everyone will say Everything. YouTube's Really Dumb Idea here is to "mitigate the problem by eliminating discussion." We see how well that worked for the Catholic Church and sexual abuse allegations, the Silent Generation and LGBTQIA rights, etc.

Right after the web exploded in the early 2000s and we were all chanting "Information Wants to Be Free", a large number of us enthusiastically believed in Democracy and Reason. We believed in rational argumentation, with point, counter-point, analysis of biases and nuances, leading towards an ultimately acceptable conclusion.

Instead we got Flat Earth, Anti-vax, and Donald Trump. It's not hard to see why the enthusiasm is failing.

The problem is, it's not The Big Dumb Idiot Public's Fault. It's Ours, as technologists building these platforms.

A +/- button and free-text fields in 2021 is exactly the same technology we were using to talk in 2001, now with far more robots and malicious actors adding noise.

An Obvious Question that has been around since the advent of these technologies, that is in fact inherent in information itself, is "how do we identify Signal from Noise?"

Treating all Anti-Vax view, and even Donald Trump's banned accounts, as just "Noise" are bad precedents.

Rather, we should be leveraging Machine Learning and all the obtrusive user data we're gathering from ad farms to Actually Do Useful Things For Humanity like:

* identifying a user's background and their "conceptual distance" from the topic at hand. Aside from pointing someone to an arcane Wikipedia article likely last edited by an expert into incomprehensible oblivion, how can we determine a "learning path" series of links that can take someone from "completely ignorant" to "common knowledge educated?"

People love anonymity on the internet, but there are times when they don't, as well. (see Facebook's success)

On a random Hot Topic thread in a non-anonymous platform (FB, Twitter), the commenter's background could be probabilistically calculated to inform readers about how likely they are to know what the fuck they're talking about. I. E. If a random computer scientist blowjob like me is mouthing off about how inefficient the vaccine process has been and someone with a PhD in Molecular Biology from a reputable institution that's actively working in a lab developing in a proximal space replies to my comments with counters, that level of expertise needs to be highlighted.

"water flows uphill" and things that are just counter-factual can be detected and auto-flagged.

Actively elevating the discourse by both teaching people And giving easy tools to identify sources, evaluate their credibility, learn the argument space by highlighting the authorities and hubs of different views related to a topic, and ultimately lead to better discussions is Hard... But an infinitely better direction than draconian choices/policies that directly undermine trust in public discourse --which is a core tenet of democracy--.

What?!? BREH, read Effective Java on Serialization.

Every serialization format has security implications.

Some try to make this explicit and probably fail in capturing all conceivable holes. Some leave this implicit to give you "fun surprises."

These are the monsters who told us "XML is too bloated" and "who'd ever want a self-describing, self-transformable interchange format anyway?"

The more I see things like JSONSchema and JSON5 get away from Crockford's original overly simplistic syntax, the more I think we can all agree with Richard Gabriel. Worse Is Better!