Hacker News: mojzu

New comment by mojzu in "“Laws” of software estimation for complex work (2021)"

mojzu — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 09:27:42 +0000

I wouldn't disagree that decomposing a system in this way before implementation is a net positive, however I think different stake holders view plans like these very differently. If you discover partway through development that the library you planned to use for a feature will not work and as a result have to revisit your plan, then some stake holders see that as a failure or delivering late because to them the original plan was an iron-clad guarantee whereas to developers that's just an expected part of the process where not everything can be known ahead of time

New comment by mojzu in "A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto (1993)"

mojzu — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 10:32:14 +0000

I quite like the idea of a ratcheting mechanism, something like copyright for a few years is free, then the creator must pay an increasing amount of money to extend it every X years up to a maximum of the creators lifetime

New comment by mojzu in "A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto (1993)"

mojzu — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 10:28:20 +0000

It's unlikely to ever happen as it would require a lot of political wrangling, but I think a system where you only gain copyright protection or the ability to sue for damages by submitting your work to a repository/archive would be beneficial (either for free or very low cost). Then when copyright has expired the archive can make the work available to the public

New comment by mojzu in "Twitter to ban unlabelled parody accounts"

mojzu — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 16:49:36 +0000

It probably is against the ToS, but it's also perfectly legal first amendment speech, which undercuts Elon's claims that he's turning Twitter into a free speech platform. Seems more like a Elon-sanctioned speech platform

New comment by mojzu in "Twitter to ban unlabelled parody accounts"

mojzu — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 10:53:31 +0000

I wouldn't be happy with it but that doesn't make it illegal. In some countries it might be considered libel/defamation depending on what was said, but those standards vary wildly between/within countries and are to my understanding generally not considered criminal

And permitting lying or misleading speech is a pretty core part of free speech, it might be socially frowned upon or disincentivised by terms of service/moderation/other methods, but it's certainly not illegal

New comment by mojzu in "Twitter to ban unlabelled parody accounts"

mojzu — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 10:10:13 +0000

For the purposes of opening a bank account or for getting a loan then it would be considered identity theft. Pretending to be someone else online though? That's perfectly legal free speech in the US as far as I'm aware

New comment by mojzu in "Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon"

mojzu — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 10:14:36 +0000

I'm not a big Twitter user but am often bombarded with right wing content on other sites like Reddit and Youtube no matter how often I try to tell the site/train the algorithm that it's not content I'm interested in seeing whatsoever, the idea that conservatives are being silenced when I (a left wing Brit) am constantly seeing their content is frankly ridiculous

New comment by mojzu in "How to leave dying social media platforms"

mojzu — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 19:57:56 +0000

Wouldn't these points also apply to the internet itself? Large monopolies in infrastructure, having to teach people what domains are, diplomatic conflicts between nations over access to information/infrastructure, prolific spam and scams, etc.

The internet did grow out of telephony so perhaps it's not surprising that it shares many of the same qualities, however I think these government vs private debates often ignore that the failures and shortcomings of these systems are usually a result of both bad government intervention and bad private actors, not solely one or the other

New comment by mojzu in "Ask HN: How to deal with burn out whilst in probationary period?"

mojzu — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 14:19:42 +0000

Very much agreed. I also take issue with the 'received wisdom' that eking out productivity from people at any cost to their physical or mental health is actually producing more benefit over the long term, it seems more likely to me that it's just externalising the increased societal/healthcare/other costs for short term benefit

New comment by mojzu in "My next Mac might be the last"

mojzu — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 08:49:28 +0000

Personally I quite like the settings change, perhaps I didn't spend enough time with the old one but it felt rather clunky/disorganised to me. Whereas now they're roughly approximate between devices there's less for me to remember. I'd agree no one expects a computer to work the same as a phone/tablet, however when it comes to such basic things as settings having the same interface and syncing things where it makes sense is a positive for me

New comment by mojzu in "I help seniors with technology issues"

mojzu — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 12:34:34 +0000

I recently ran into this setting up a laptop for work and how user hostile this step had become made my blood boil. There is no option to setup an initial local account unless you intentionally provide bad input to the Microsoft login page, I ended up just wiping the machine and installing Windows 10 from scratch

I'd really like to able to send invoices to Microsoft and other companies like Dell who pull this bullshit for wasting time in my life to work around this stuff (and I wonder how much potential productivity is used up by these practices)

New comment by mojzu in "We're Drowning"

mojzu — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 11:19:18 +0000

That's true, and there may be valid reasons to remove a library and reimplement that 10% yourself such as for performance, stability or educational reasons. However if the library is performing as expected, does not using 90% of it make it any less valuable? If the problem has been solved in a satisfactory way and remaking it doesn't bring benefit or solve a problem then it seems wasteful to spend the human time to do so

New comment by mojzu in "We're Drowning"

mojzu — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 08:19:08 +0000

I think they mean that it's code they're not having to write/test/maintain themselves because presumably if you pick a good enough library the quality of code/features are better then what one individual or team could do

While there are issues with this approach like the article outlines, personally I believe it to be better then the alternative of countless developers reimplementing the same feature sets over and over because honestly that just seems like a waste of human time and talent

New comment by mojzu in "iPad Pro M2"

mojzu — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 15:58:17 +0000

Yeah this would be an improvement I think, considering how little I've seen iPads used in portrait mode it's a little surprising they haven't done it already. I'm guessing it's to support the pencil charging, since the new iPad does have cameras in the expected landscape location but only supports pencil 1

New comment by mojzu in "Meta, aided by Apple and Google takes down an ad-free Instagram clone"

mojzu — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 22:04:21 +0000

It seems like they were just a client for Instagram which was stripping out the ads, which would probably be a pretty clear cut violation of Instagram ToS or whatever API they were using, so I'm not surprised Google/Apple would remove it from their stores

New comment by mojzu in "87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone"

mojzu — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 21:59:19 +0000

The screen size/battery size would probably be larger on a price competitive Android phone then the SE, however I doubt you'd get as fast a processor/as many years of software updates either so it really depends what you prefer. I may be biased though having the SE, think I'll only bother to upgrade it when Apple finally switches to USB-C

New comment by mojzu in "Apple is quietly pushing a TV ad product with media agencies"

mojzu — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 18:31:27 +0000

The number of other 10 minute jobs I passively ignore a month could probably take up a significant portion of my free time, and many of those would probably provide more reward then trying to send a signal to a billion dollar corporation this way (shopping around for slightly better contracts, accounts, finding the cheapest variant of a product, etc.).

There's enough to do in life that everyone makes trade offs on what they're willing to spend their limited time on, personally I'm not willing to spend my time solving a problem that can absolutely be solved technologically but is prevented from being so by intransigence

New comment by mojzu in "Quiet Quitting"

mojzu — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 15:14:24 +0000

It's a way for some people to try and reinforce the hustle culture status quo that doing unpaid labour for your employer, even to the detriment of your own physical or mental health is a moral or worthy goal that will definitely (maybe) be rewarded. Label/name it in a way that seems derogatory and many people will make the implicit assumption that it's derogatory for a good reason

New comment by mojzu in "Intel Laptop Users Should Avoid Linux 5.19.12 to Avoid Damaging the Display"

mojzu — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 12:30:24 +0000

> Hardware bugs can cause hardware damage.

That's true, although I think the original point was that if software can damage the hardware it's running on then that should be seen as a fault/bug, but with cost reduction/market pressures/etc. it is often ignored

And fail-safe doesn't necessarily mean everything turns off because that can be just as dangerous, I take it more as a systems mindset where thought, care and attention are paid to failure conditions and making sure those outcomes pose the least risk. Again something which can often be ignored for cost or expediency reasons

Perfection is probably an unattainable goal but I've been around software long enough that I wouldn't want someones safety to depend solely on one piece of software

New comment by mojzu in "Intel Laptop Users Should Avoid Linux 5.19.12 to Avoid Damaging the Display"

mojzu — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 11:36:04 +0000

I think the argument is less related to hacking, as that would be like making something tamper proof which is a much higher bar. But more like if software can cause hardware damage, that means software bugs can cause hardware damage and potentially pose a safety risk, which should be seen as a critical hardware bug

For example the safety critical systems you mention should absolutely fail-safe at the bare minimum, all kinds of things can adversely affect running software like equipment generating EM noise nearby or someone tripping over the wrong cable