in my experience it is how both real and imaginary Canadians talk
Readit Newsq845712 commented on Is shareholder capitalism a suicide pact? medium.com/imagining-equi... · Posted by u/gardenfelder
In many ways, the growth obsession is a product of the Reagan-era deregulation craze, and the "Greed is the One True God" ethic that kinda took over Wall Street then. (Try reading some stories about GE before Jack Welch became CEO, and after.) Other big contributors:
- The huge sums of wealth which tens of millions of ordinary people feel they need to accumulate, to pay for their (grand)?children's college education, unexpected medical bills, many decades of retirement and elder care, etc. Compare that to (say) the 1950's.
- The huge structural and social barriers to creating small businesses in most economic sectors, compared to (say) 60 years ago. Back then, how many of the businesses in an average town were (at most) small-ish, family-owned companies?
- How d*mn much "money" is sloshing around the financial system these days, with the "at any sign of crisis, pour in more $trillions" monetary policies of the Fed.
> the growth obsession is a product of the Reagan-era
I hear you, but uncle Karl names and shames the growth-obsession in Das Kapital which predated Reagan by over 100 years. It's a part of the system that many people have incentive to deny, hide, or minimize, but endless growth seems to be a requirement of "the system of organizing our resources that prioritizes turning capital into more capital" aka capital-ism.
q845712 commented on Is shareholder capitalism a suicide pact? medium.com/imagining-equi... · Posted by u/gardenfelder
There is this thing called "reasonable dosage". A huge hunk of the current problem is the large-corporation- and Wall Street-based financialization of far too much of normal human life.
It feels a little inevitable though, given the other rules of the system: Companies don't become more valuable by having a steady earnings forecast, they become more valuable by having an _increase_ in earnings that is forecast to continue increasing. How can everything always increase? Well when you reach market saturation on one product, start a new product in a different market. What if all the markets seem saturated? Find a new thing to commoditize, a new market to create... Any system where unlimited growth is rewarded is going to try to take over everything it possibly can.
q845712 commented on 2048 Bit RSA and the Year 2030 articles.59.ca/doku.php?i... · Posted by u/upofadown
By "perverse incentives", do you mean something like: "it appears the cryptographic research department has hit a brick wall in terms of useful advancements, so we're reducing the budget and the department head will be taking a 75% pay cut"?
I mean like the incentives aren't aligned. So maybe you're giving an example but i'm honestly not sure. :)
in the space of cve or malware detection, the user wants a safe/secure computing experience with minimal overhead, but the antivirus / cve-scan vendor wants to claim that they're _keeping_ the you safe. so they're motivated to tell you all about the things they scanned and possible attacks / vectors they found. You probably would've been safe responding to only a subset of those alerts, but they have no incentive to minimize the things they show you, because if they ever missed one you would change vendors.
in the space of cryptography, the user wants secure communications that are unbreakable but with minimum hassle and overhead, but the advisory boards etc. are incentivized to act like they have important advice to give. So from the user perspective maybe it makes sense to use 2048 bit encryption for a few more decades, but from the "talking head" authority figure perspective, they can't afford to ever be wrong and it's good if they have something new to recommend every so often, so the easiest for them to do is to keep upping the number of bits used to encrypt, even if there's 99.99% odds that a smaller/shorter/simpler encryption would've been equally as secure.
Yeah, they make sense, just surprising that C++ is finally tacitly admitting that iostreams were a mistake.
I kind of wonder why anyone thought iostreams would be a good idea to begin with. I don't think anyone but C++ ever created a comparable interface.
I could be wrong as I was young and not yet in the field, but my impression has always been that sometime in the 80s/90s as the whole "networking, world wide web, wowie!" moment happened, there was this idea that "maybe on a local computer everything is files, but on the network everything is streams. Hey, maybe everything is streams!?" and C++ just happened to be creating itself in that zeitgeist, trying to look modern and future-thinking, so somebody decided to see what would happen if all the i/o was "stream-native".
IDK, it'll probably make more sense in another 15 years as we clear away the cruft of all the things that tried to bring "cloud native" paradigms into a space where they didn't really fit...
q845712 commented on 2048 Bit RSA and the Year 2030 articles.59.ca/doku.php?i... · Posted by u/upofadown
Recommendations from various organizations can be found at:
Anything recent (≥2016) seems to say 3072 for RSA.
I have no specialist knowledge in this subfield, but after reading the article's arguments that basically if you could sic the entire bitcoin network on 2048 RSA it would take 700+ years, I have to wonder about perverse incentives.
Another thing that's missing is the lifetime expectancy, e.g. "for how many years does something encrypted in 2030 need to be unbreakable?"
The author doesn't seem to be a big authority, so has little to lose by staking their reputation on "you don't need it to be that good," whereas by the very nature of their authority, anyone in the resource you link is going to be motivated to never be wrong under any circumstances. So if someone with some reputation/authority/power to lose think there's a 0.001% chance that some new incremental improvements will allow for fast-enough breaking of 2048 bit encryption created in 2030 within a window where that would be unacceptable, then they're motivated to guess high. The authority in this case doesn't directly bear the costs of too high of a guess, whereas it could be very bad for, i dunno, some country's government, and by extension the org or people that made that country's standards recommendations, if some classified information became public 15 or 50 years earlier than intended just because it could be decrypted.
q845712 commented on Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013) github.com/steveklabnik/C... · Posted by u/rchaves
I never got it. Everyone says it’s fantastic, I feel like an idiot for absolutely not getting it at all when it came out and still not today.
I said this elsewhere too -- while in general I like things _like_ the poignant guide, and appreciate its existence, I never actually finished reading it.
To me it's an interesting touchstone work showing/reminding that the "invisibly neutral" tone we've collectively adopted is still an editorial choice and cultural moment.
I'm sure writing and communication styles will drift back and forth over the next few decades. Sometime soon (if not already) another generation of younger developers will coalesce around some document that feels authentically counter-cultural, like their own late-night jokes and dreams have been given just enough coherence to hook them in, and then I probably still won't get it because I'll be out of touch.... :)
q845712 commented on Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013) github.com/steveklabnik/C... · Posted by u/rchaves
_why's work was much of what got me into Ruby in the first place. Not so much quirky as proudly both hyperliterate and unhinged, like the computing world's extension of depressed indie bands meeting David Foster Wallace in the early aughts.
Most of us that would've been into _why's stuff now have more traditional-looking jobs and responsibilities. But I'm so grateful for what he showed us then, and miss the more genuinely human, broken and vulnerable community he represented.
Honestly at the time I remember getting weird twee/precious vibes from the Ruby community and I wasn't particularly interested in it or Rails. I only discovered _why's poignant guide later after I had to learn Rails on the job, and to be honest I never finished it.
I still strongly prefer the worldview, circumstances, mindset, etc. where that kind of content is written, read, and celebrated over today's focus on Influence and Professionalism.
Reduce, reuse and recycle was the original term. Everyone over indexed on recycling and completely abandoned the first two. (Instead we went the other way and started individually wrapping bananas in plastic)