Readit NewsI'm not exposed to this space very often, so maybe you or someone else could give me some context. "Sabotage" is a deliberate effort to ruin/hinder something. Are compiler engineers deliberately hindering the efforts of cryptographers? If yes... is there a reason why? Some long-running feud or something?
Or, through the course of their efforts to make compilers faster/etc, are cryptographers just getting the "short end of the stick" so to speak? Perhaps forgotten about because the number of cryptographers is dwarfed by the number of non-cryptographers? (Or any other explanation that I'm unaware of?)
A lot of software engineer are seeing this as compiler engineer only caring about performance as opposed to other aspect such as debuggability, safety, compile time and productivity etc... I think that's where the "sabotage" comes from. Basically the focus on performance at the detriment of other things.
My 2 cents : The core problem is programmers expecting invariant and properties not defined in the languange standard. The compiler only garanty things as defined in the standard, expecting anything else is problematic.
Honestly any idea that defends NIH like this belongs with dinosaurs. NIH is a stupid meme, not the opposite of it.
Every team and sub culture will have an "energy" and different attitude etc... sure
But this is much more than racy poster on the walls... This behavior was never acceptable. I find it fascinating that we have to rediscover and relearn every generation why professional etiquette is so important. And what happens when. We blur the line between professional life and "familial" attitudes
Just painting the situation as well google have influence because they work the hardest is just bizare. Having been in some standard / comity meetings. Everyone in those room work very hard... but someone hard work is not enough
Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, etc took the horribly dastardly approach of "participating" and then "doing the work".
The horror.
Microsoft gave up because it wasn't worth it when someone else was willing to do the work. It was not something that was adding value to them by them doing it themselves anymore.
It's hilarious to try to pain this as some evil dastardly thing where they badly tried to keep up and just failed because it's just so hard and costly vs something where it just wasn't worth them paying for because they didn't derive enough value from it.
Remind me which earnings call it was where they were saying "you know, we are going to issue rough q4 guidance because we think it's going to be really hard to implement these next 3 CSS features"
The cost of keeping up for them, even now, if they started again, would be a rounding error in any MS VP's overall equity refresh budget (IE the money they are giving out in stock per year to employees in their org). So please, let's not pretend it's too "hard" or "expensive" for them.
In the end, the world is 99% built by those who show up and do it. That's how this "weaponization of complexity" happened - people showed up and tried to solve problems. The world evolved. They tried to keep moving forward as that happened.
If you think you can do it better, or that it doesn't need to be this complex, or whatever, awesome. show up and do it, like everyone else did.
The world has never been built by those throwing rocks from the sidelines, no matter how much they want it to be, and no matter how much they try to paint the hard problem-solving work of others as "weaponization of complexity".
Calling it that is just plain lazy. Almost all improvements and backwards compatibility shims make it harder for someone else to implement from scratch. That's because the primary goal is usually to help users.
I mean, why stop with the web with this argument?
How come the Go folks weaponized the Go language by adding generics? By making it harder for me to implement my own, they've weaponized it against me!
I can't believe nobody has stopped their dastardly deeds.
No reasonable amount of engineering resources would have made a dent in the problem. What OP is calling "weaponization of complexity" is just the asymmetry of effort required between new comers and entrenched players.
You would have to be naive to think that google would just open their arms and kumbaya with microsoft to do the "hard work"
We have seen this played out in any industry in history. Sometime hard work is not enough and it's easy to abuse dominant position to grid lock a market.
The rest of your post frankly sounds like someone who is drunk on the usual company cooliad.
> The end goal is to help user
No. The end goal is to make money. Sometime it requires helping user, other time a bunch of anti competitive ( forcing android oem to prevent meaningful forks)and anti consumer (like playing hard ball with ad blockers) BS.
>The world has never been built by those throwing rocks from the sidelines, no matter how much they want it to be, and no matter how much they try to paint the hard problem-solving work of others as "weaponization of complexity
So much wrong with this. And is just a strawman. OP is not saying that it's not hard problem solving. The point is the solution achieved is self serving and sucks for the rest of us.
> In the end, the world is 99% built by those who show up and do it. That's how this "weaponization of complexity" happened - people showed up and tried to solve problems. The world evolved. They tried to keep moving forward as that happened.
Yeah no. History disagree with you
Wouldn’t be every coworker a competitor? How do you plan your life or start a family if you are every year 10% likely of being fired or backstabbed?