E14n (u/E14n) - Readit News

E14n commented on Giving Up on Privacy (2011) jefftk.com/p/giving-up-on... · Posted by u/mhb

jefftk · 3 years ago

You're right that that's what the piece says. It's not what I would write now: there definitely are things that I think are right and most people don't. Instead of doing those things secretly, however, I do them and make a public case for them.

Examples, explaining why I:

* Often let my kids do things alone at ages when other people wouldn't: https://www.jefftk.com/p/whats-the-alternative-to-independen...

* Disregard the warning on baby formula that says not to use the microwave: https://www.jefftk.com/p/stop-discouraging-microwave-formula...

* Work(ed) on ads: https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-i-work-on-ads

E14n · 3 years ago

It is hard to read this any other way then - you are in a privileged position of having never been personally challenged by a lack of privacy so are fine with privacy not existing. By that reasoning you are also OK with those who are effected being silenced, because they are, for example, not cisgender, white skinned and male and could face attack for random individuals for expressing their views in public.

The challenging thing about reading books like Bonhoffer is that it compels you to questioning what your response would have been if placed in the same situation.

E14n commented on Giving Up on Privacy (2011) jefftk.com/p/giving-up-on... · Posted by u/mhb

seti0Cha · 3 years ago

I think I more or less understand as well, but I have a pet peeve about people using the word "cowardice" for things they think are morally wrong. The classic example was how everyone was calling the 9/11 bombers cowardly, when clearly their actions required a certain amount of bravery. If memory serves, Bill Maher lost his show for pointing out that fact. I think people do this because they don't feel comfortable with a purely moral condemnation, so they reach for something that is also suggests weakness, a more universally despised trait.

E14n · 3 years ago

The cowardice is in surrendering your moral agency

"So if there was anything I was considering doing where if it became public I would be hurt, I wouldn't do it."

There is a great book Bonhoeffer[1] by Eric Mataxas which deals with this and a lot of other issues

1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35493109-bonhoeffer

E14n commented on Don't Feed the Thought Leaders earthly.dev/blog/thought-... · Posted by u/crummy

agbell · 5 years ago

Thanks for reading it. It was one of the those ideas bouncing around in the back of my head for a while but hard to put into words then I read something about Tetlock and the dots sort of connected for me.

Software advice isn't totally a prediction, but it sort of is.

E14n · 5 years ago

I think this is generally good advice for software engineering, accept when its not. The problem is that some bad ideas become better ideas by virtue of being popular ideas. Write a shitty framework/language/technology and you have nothing, convince a million people to use it and it becomes compelling because it has a lot of users working with it and solving problems.

Its the classic stone soup story[1]. You see this especially with software and tools that focus on front load new users making it really easy to do trivial things but failing catastrophically when you need more.

You also see the reverse of this, great ideas that don't get bye-in failing by virtue of being too niche.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup

E14n commented on Linus Torvalds on Rust support in kernel lkml.org/lkml/2021/4/14/1... · Posted by u/EvgeniyZh

tene · 5 years ago

I've got some vague opinions about "easier to learn" that I'd like to hear some disagreement on, to help me work out my thoughts more. Please forgive me if I'm not very clear here.

I don't know if this is what you mean or not, but I've seen a lot of claims that a language is "easier to learn" that seem to be considering "learning a language" as a valuable topic on its own, separate from "learning to write and maintain correct nontrivial programs in the language", and that seems wrong to me.

There's a part of this idea that does seem valuable to me, in that at the beginning of your learning process, there are a lot of benefits from being able to quickly get to a point where you can successfully write small programs that do something. It helps your motivation. It helps you reach some amount of productivity faster. When a language is better at early onboarding, it's more-useful to people who have smaller needs and more-constrained use-cases. Python being so easy to learn to glue together some libraries makes it a fantastic, valuable tool for many people.

The part of this idea that I really disagree with is how it applies to non-trivial, non-beginner use-cases. There are topics and skills that languages vary in their coverage of, but that you still need to learn about and deal with anyway for many types of programs. Memory management, resource handling, ownership and sharing, concurrency, nullability, error handling, composition, organization, abstraction, refactoring, testing, debugging, etc. A language including more or less that directly addresses these topics doesn't necessarily mean you won't still need to learn them.

To me, the relevant question isn't "Which language is easier to learn in isolation?", but instead "Which language is easier to learn to implement safe, performant, efficient, reliable, concurrent code with?".

If you take a new engineer who has "learned C", how easy is it to train them to get their rate of memory safety errors, thread safety errors, missed error checking, etc. down to the same rate as you'd get from a new engineer who has "learned Rust"?

Without tooling support like you get from Rust, you instead need to learn safe idioms, learn strategies to minimize your exposure to errors, train yourself to always always check everything at all times, learn how to write tests to discover mistakes you've made, learn how to use a collection of third-party tools you can use to approximate some of the benefits of Rust's compile-time checking, and train yourself to always use it. That's not "learning C", but it's still required in order to implement something like Linux.

Rust's bet is that there are ways to reduce the overall complexity of everything involved in implementing high-reliability high-performance systems by moving some of that complexity into the language. If you don't think it's accomplishing that goal, that's fine, but make that case directly.

I agree that the C programming language is smaller and easier to learn in isolation. It's not so obvious to me that something like "C + Valgrind + ASan + TSan + UBSan + ..." is easier to learn than Rust.

On the other hand, for many classes of errors that C offers no help with, Rust's compiler will directly point out where you've made a mistake, why it's wrong, and often offers advice on how to fix it. When learning a new language, having that kind of tooling support universally available is extremely helpful.

To be clear, Rust doesn't handle everything, and there's still a lot of benefit you can get from dynamic analysis tools, fuzzing, etc. There are also levels of reliability and assurance that aren't currently feasible with Rust. Rust has a long way to go.

The point I think I'm trying to make is that Rust really raises the bar in a meaningful way. There's some nonsense and awkward bits in Rust, but a lot of what you need to learn to be effective with Rust are things that you'd need to learn anyway to be effective at this level with C, and I think it's easier to learn those with Rust's help, and it's significantly easier to build systems with a much lower rate of these problems by using Rust.

Sorry for the length, and lack of organization. This has been rattling around in my head for a while, and I wanted to get some thoughts out in writing.

E14n · 5 years ago

100% this. People forget when using dynamic languages they are trading up front cost - its easier to write the code but harder to test. In trivial or exploratory coding the tradeoff can be good, but it is a tradeoff.

That being said, using rust can be really nice for exploratory coding. If don't worry about edge case (use unwarp()/panic!) and don't worry about memory efficiency (use clone()) it still produces fast, memory efficient code.

E14n commented on Linus Torvalds on Rust support in kernel lkml.org/lkml/2021/4/14/1... · Posted by u/EvgeniyZh

caslon · 5 years ago

>- I think it would increase the general productivity in kernel development. A better kernel helps everyone out.

Don't you think the massive increase in compilation time would negate any productivity gains and probably decrease productivity overall?

E14n · 5 years ago

If you are talking speed to production ready code then rust is really productive. The rust tooling picks up a lot of errors and leads you to spending more time fixing coding issues rather then compile to test your code.

E14n commented on Show HN: Mob Translate – Translation for Australian Aboriginal Languages mobtranslate.com... · Posted by u/thomasfromcdnjs

thomasfromcdnjs · 5 years ago

Thanks, that is a good start.

E14n · 5 years ago

If you are trying to promote usage of the data you might want to put the dictionary under a more permissive license as GPL-3+ conflicts with a lot of other licenses. Something like Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence (V3.0)[1] might work better.

1. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

E14n commented on Internet Archive responds to publishers’ lawsuit blog.archive.org/2020/07/... · Posted by u/edward

themodelplumber · 5 years ago

By media-constrained I'm referring to the fact that, as far as I could tell, once you checked out one of these books, there was no way to grab a PDF and run. There was no way to grab an EPUB and bob's your uncle, you're in Kindle or iBooks and reading your text. This constitutes an easily validated, qualitative, experiential difference from what parties to the case are implying. If this isn't the case, let me know.

E14n · 5 years ago

Ironic to me that it is completely possible to make pdf copies of a physically borrowed book, and at least in academia making physical copies of chapters of books was extremely common and one of the primary uses of photo copy machines.

E14n commented on Internet Archive responds to publishers’ lawsuit blog.archive.org/2020/07/... · Posted by u/edward

jjcon · 5 years ago

>Their example didn't say they got their friend's permission prior to lending whatever was being lent to them.

You think it is okay to lend out other peoples property? You need a serious reality check if so.

E14n · 5 years ago

If the people you borrowed from say its OK after the fact then yes it is OK.

If I borrow a neighbours defibrillator, without asking, to save their child it would be insane for the manufacturer of the defibrillator to sue me for not buying my own defibrillator. While in theory the neighbour could object to me borrowing the defibrillator without permission, that does not appear to be what happened. Based on IA's statements it appears that libraries are saying after the fact that they were happy for their copies of books to be loaned by IA.

I would assume from their actions these publishers hoped to make a windfall on book sales when people were no longer able to access libraries and they saw IA's actions as attacking this potential profit. I can't think of any other reason why they would peruse their current course of action.

E14n commented on An average family in Tokyo can own a new house for $850/month curbed.com/2017/2/3/14496... · Posted by u/jseliger

creamyhorror · 6 years ago

Because many of them were built cheaply to begin with and develop problems over the decades. They weren't built for long-term living, and in a sense it was the right move since Japan was developing rapidly up till the end of the '80s. (Well-built exceptions probably exist, of course.) And then there's increased earthquake/disaster risk with poorer construction.

It's something I wondered about too until I looked at descriptions and photos of >30-year-old houses on real estate sites.

E14n · 6 years ago

I think that's more perception then reality. I live in a 30 year old house and it could easily last 100 years if properly maintained, but there is little incentive to improve the building because it will not improve the resale value.

E14n commented on An average family in Tokyo can own a new house for $850/month curbed.com/2017/2/3/14496... · Posted by u/jseliger

SpicyLemonZest · 6 years ago

> The first thing to note is that in Japan, housing isn’t an investment. It’s a place to live. The country’s slow population growth means that increases in property values aren’t guaranteed

I feel like this is a misleading way to put it. Japanese houses decrease in value, generally quite severely - the conventional wisdom is that after a few decades you might as well just tear it down and build a new one. So there's very real option value you're losing in the Japanese model; if you have to move in a decade or two, you won't be able to get back the equity you put in.

E14n · 6 years ago

You are loosing the investment potential of the building on your property. There is nothing to stop you buying an old house (that is essentially valued at nothing) on a property and living in it. That will essentially maintain the equity you put in.