He must have read Forster's When The Machine Stops.
Lol, reading this in a call booth at work sure is something ...
Readit Newspvdoom commented on Three Laws of Software Complexity maheshba.bitbucket.io/blo... · Posted by u/r4um
This "trimming" is not just about features, but more generally to simplify and minimise the codebase (less code = less bugs).
Such refactoring is an essential part of maintaining software, regardless of how old or bloated it may be.
Yes, absolutely
pvdoom commented on Three Laws of Software Complexity maheshba.bitbucket.io/blo... · Posted by u/r4um
Re: first law ... one thing I have been thinking a lot lately is just how much like gardening software is. But in gardening we are not afraid to trim the plants and put them in shape as we go. In software we end up just adding stuff on top, without regard for the overall design. There is this bias towards always adding rather than removing things, and the key to keep things in order is to remove things, to say no, etc.
pvdoom commented on Three Laws of Software Complexity maheshba.bitbucket.io/blo... · Posted by u/r4um
First law implies that it is impossible to change a badly designed system into a well-designed system through incremental changes.
I disagree with this, it is certainly possible to improve the state of some system without starting from scratch.
I think we can look into the notion from complexity theory of attractor states. If you want to make a change, you need to shift your system enough that it moves into another state.
In more normal words - the codebase will fight your changes. And that means that small incremental changes may not be enough, and you will need at least a few big leaps.
Yes, spreading the language creates a lot of opportunities. But not the script. Tadjiks are taught Russian. Both languages use Cyrillic, but in another country with different language but same script, you'd be almost as helpless as transitioning between Cyrillic and Arabic (Iran, which has Farsi, which is almost identical to Tadjik).
And in this regard, the west should be happy: Russia has poor culture of spreading its education. In Central Asia, Turkey has put a lot more effort in building and financing its schools and universities, where they teach English and Turkish. Putin's Russia is just ridiculous in this sense: it keeps "Houses of Friendship" with balalaikas, bear mascots and free vodka on holidays.
One of my friends hitch-hiked from Russia to Iran in the mid-2010s. Despite the countries being sorta friends, he had to speak with the local in broken English, not Russian. That's just ridiculous. Another friend hitchiked to Tajikistan, and there they do learn Russian at schools and can have a bare minimum of a conversation.
During the USSR, the Soviet government pushed the cyclic script on populations that speak very different languages, sometimes forcing them to abandon other scripts, i.e. arabic. Same during the Russian Empire.
Some Central European countries adopted the Latin script as a part of their alignment with Rome, and thus making a stronger political alignment.
Scripts and languages are very powerful political tools. In many cases what script a language uses is not a coincidence but a result of conscious choices and policies at some point.
I'm not so sure that renting out housing is a bad thing, unless there is somehow too much rental property. Dense rental housing, which is an inherently corporate thing, is key to affordable housing for people without a lot of wealth.
My intuitive sense is that the proportion of rented housing probably has a seesaw effect on the price of owned housing vs the price of rented housing. If you want them both to go down it's necessary to build a lot more housing.
Well, rental as another profit-driven thing, that has multiple consequences - it removes property away from people, it prevents people from getting their own place, it creates concentration of wealth, it drives policies that favour landlords, etc - i.e. big real estate corporations, and landlords generally have a lot more lobbying power than poor renters.
Nonprofits that self-righteously declare themselves providers of homeless services actively lobby to make homelessness worse in order to increase their own funding
This is unfortunately all too true.
A primary root cause of homelessness is lack of affordable housing. We should be working towards policies and solutions that foster more "market rate" affordable housing, not affordable housing via government programs or nonprofit organizations.
> A primary root cause of homelessness is lack of affordable housing.
Nah, I think that is still a consequence. The root cause is the fundamental assumption that homes should be a commodity that is bought, sold and rented out for profit, rather than something that everyone needs for survival. We should be looking at ways to limit the market here, or finding ways to not treat houses as a commodity, or something for rent-seeking
"using alphabet for geopolitical purposes" sounds a bit exaggeration to me. It's like saying that Gothic script serves neo-nazi purposes. Sure they do print some stuff in Gothic. But should we now shame a German-cuisine restaurant that's branded in Gothic script?
An alphabet is connected to a language. And controlling the language and its writing, especially related to religion is a very powerful tool. How you do communication, what culture is relevant for you, etc.
And that happens even today - just think of the role English plays, and then American cultural artefacts. And compared it to French at the turn of the 20-th century
So, author boils everything down to anti-Western politics a 1000 years ago and insists Cyrillic just got lucky that it spread so wide. And then puts Putin next to it, so that this celebration looked definitely shameful. That's just as ridiculous as pumping it with anti-Western sentiment from the other side.
To put it in a perspective, imagine what tone would a piece on the day of Arabic writing have.
> So, author boils everything down to anti-Western politics a 1000 years ago and insists Cyrillic just got lucky that it spread so wide.
It's a mix of accurate and inaccurate. It is based on a 1000 years old anti-western politics, but also anti-Eastern politics. And it didn't just get lucky, but there was a massive, massive effort on part of the First Bulgarian Empire to spread it via missionaries and the like, which is what set the foundations for its later use up North, where later the Russian Empire became a thing and so on ...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/13/what-is-solar-geoengineering...
[2] https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2024-05-29/exc...
[3] https://www.whitehouse.gov/cleanenergy/