Hacker News: toomanyducks

New comment by toomanyducks in "Ask HN: What news sources do you use to maintain a broad perspective?"

toomanyducks — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 14:09:13 +0000

As an addition to your request, I'd recommend reading some philosophy. If you want left-leaning, you can jump straight in with Marx, Foucault, and Judith Butler (some of my favorites), but you don't really need to.

I'd just recommend this because the news is useless without a meta-understanding of its purpose in public opinion, ideology, and power. If you want to skip dense philosophy readings, just make sure to ask yourself, "Who benefits from the story being told?" Try to seek out a large variety of sources in respect to this answer. The reason that this is hard though, I'll personally leave to Marx and Goldman.

New comment by toomanyducks in "The Magic Behind the Scenes of Docker Desktop"

toomanyducks — Sun, 12 Sep 2021 17:54:39 +0000

So... it's a GUI package manager with extra steps?

New comment by toomanyducks in "Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech"

toomanyducks — Sat, 11 Sep 2021 00:10:27 +0000

The above x100. Technology isn't a cheat code for a hard problem, it's just another tool. When we assume that tech fixes everything with no further research, everyone gets a lot worse off.

New comment by toomanyducks in "The web browser as a tool of thought"

toomanyducks — Sat, 21 Aug 2021 16:41:49 +0000

I can see how somebody would go down this line of reasoning, but I wouldn't. It requires too many steps when compared with my personal alternative: literally just some paper, an email inbox, and a semi-structured directory of notes available for grepping. I have no brain cells, so anything more than this distracts and overwhelms me to the point of counter productivity.

New comment by toomanyducks in "Vieb – Vim Inspired Electron Browser"

toomanyducks — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 13:21:28 +0000

Are there any more differences with qute? I've found the best solution to the web being broken is to use as little of the web as possible, but qute was the closest I think I came to tolerating it. Would I prefer Vieb?

New comment by toomanyducks in "Volkswagen detects when tests run in a CI server, and makes them pass (2018)"

toomanyducks — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 04:05:36 +0000

I'd go one step further in that analysis. Why does it feel that large companies are the most representative to the people (like me) claiming that consumption under capitalism is unethical?

Well, I'm a bit of an anarchist, so I'm going to go down the 'distribution of power' line here. It doesn't matter that purism or system76 is ethical when Google controls my every waking moment. When the mega evil Corps have all the power and the influence. When they control not just my life but also the ecological and political environment around me. Denying the power of Google is akin to climate change denial. So yes, I'm not going to point to a small company built off of open source and pretend that my life is okay.

Or I could go a bit further down the Marxist line, and say it's because capitalism requires large scale exploitation at a large scale. Ignoring that exploitation is supporting that exploitation, and is immoral. I'll not get into the theory to support this in this comment, but when Amazon warehouse workers literally work themselves to death for my shitty orders, we've got a problem. And it is immoral to point to the existence of Purism and say that everything is fine.

This is coming off more intense than I intended. I'm sorry. I swear this isn't personal criticism, just an attempt at productive engagement with ideology, but the world is breaking. It's really fucking hard to be kind.

New comment by toomanyducks in "Volkswagen detects when tests run in a CI server, and makes them pass (2018)"

toomanyducks — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 03:50:51 +0000

Are the produced mechanisms really the same when the incentives change? That's not really something I can quite get myself to believe.

The incentives in free software, in my limited experience, are to grow a productively maintained system, not necessarily a profitable one (assuming, of course, the existence of some outside source of stable income). And with that motivation, I feel that competition disappears. When I look at an alternative solution to a problem I'm trying to solve, it's more in the lense of 'oh, that's a good idea!' than anger that their solution is better than mine. Then, if I'm lucky, it might be the type of thing that can be refactored out into a library and shared across implementations. I still feel that competition precludes that, regardless of incentives.

New comment by toomanyducks in "Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'"

toomanyducks — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 12:09:55 +0000

Came here to say this. I also want to add that there are no solutions with the West's current consumption habits. If we all switch to electric cars today, oil might be doing okay, but we'll still be exploiting workers and raiding resources in environmentally costly lithium mines. This is not a technical issue. This is a political issue. The question we should be asking is how we reduce our consumption and how to increase our reciprocity with the environment, not at an individual level, but at a systemic and societal level. And here's the hard part: this isn't done through innovation. This is done through reducing the capitalist pressures to consume and produce. This is driven locally, slowly, and radically by pushing back against what capitalism has done.

New comment by toomanyducks in "Satan should chair your meetings: A literature lover’s guide to office politics"

toomanyducks — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 21:12:30 +0000

Ah, I see how I communicated that poorly - it's not that the meetings aren't there, it's that they're oriented towards production.

New comment by toomanyducks in "Satan should chair your meetings: A literature lover’s guide to office politics"

toomanyducks — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 20:53:19 +0000

I do not expect this to be a popular opinion, but I am slightly entertained reading this from more of a Marxist perspective.

> We used to make things. Now we have meetings.

Well, of course. This is what happens when the purpose of a corporation isn't production but profit, and if the workers, the people who by definition exist in the company to make things, were to own their means of production, this would look very differently. But anyway, I digress.

New comment by toomanyducks in "Bombs vs. Bugs"

toomanyducks — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 20:41:55 +0000

It might not be fair to assume that OSHA, etc, and the NSA, etc, operate under the same agenda. Some industries do have standards for tech. HIPAA, for instance, sets some minimum expectations for cyber security with regard to private health information (PHI). And there are HIPAA inspections, right along with OSHA ones. Of course, it's a fairly clunky solution given that government is slow and tech is fast, but it's certainly there, and it's certainly helpful.

New comment by toomanyducks in "Leap seconds: Causing bugs even when they don’t happen"

toomanyducks — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 12:00:51 +0000

I personally tried this for a few weeks: I set my clocks to GMT, and converted everyone else's silly little timezones into one unambiguous number. All I accomplished was memorizing the offset between GMT and local time and getting marginally quicker at the required arithematic to convert between them. It didn't even solve any problems, because a) nobody else was doing it, so, shrug, and b) I immediately lost all context for the earth's rotation, and that turned out to be a massive pain in the ass. I think the very least we can do, though, is get rid of DST.

New comment by toomanyducks in "Ian Manuel, survivor of excessive child punishment, tells his story"

toomanyducks — Sun, 01 Aug 2021 14:11:08 +0000

We can't keep pretending that our justice system is utilitarian. It's so very clearly not about helping those that commit crimes improve themselves. If it was, we wouldn't be punishing people with literal torture methods such as solitary, and we wouldn't care so much about being 'tough on crime'. We need to refocus our justice system on the criminalization process so that we reduce the importance of 'correctional' facilities. There is nothing utilitarian about the above story, let's not deceive ourselves.

New comment by toomanyducks in "A Unix-style personal search engine and web crawler for your digital footprint"

toomanyducks — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 17:52:58 +0000

If nothing else, that README is fantastic!

Ask HN: How) should data be incrementally reclaimed from the cloud?

toomanyducks — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 05:45:52 +0000

Company A exclusively utilizes a small set of domain-specific SaaS products to store literally everything. There is nothing of importance on local machines. They are essentially thin clients for a small set of cloud services.

This strikes me as precarious, given that everything breaks the moment that something happens to the local internet connection or service providers' connection (the latter, but not the former, being highly unlikely). It's turtles all the way down, and if a single turtle slips and falls so does the business at the top. I'm the type to use plain text formats stored on a local server, use WAN as little as possible, and keep a gun next to the printer if it makes any weird noises[0], so I'm (opionatedly) suspicious of 'too much' cloud.

The thing is, Company A's setup works. Functionally, the amount of abstraction they're playing with is quite powerful, and it makes everything pretty easy for them.

The following questions are asked from a technical perspective, not an inter-personal/workplace perspective:

- Should I work to keep this company's data a bit more independent? If everything is working just fine right now, is it really best to start messing with things?

- If so, how do I do this incrementally?

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20981980

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27890459

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

Bernard Friot

toomanyducks — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 05:21:14 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Friot

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27890339

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by toomanyducks in "Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?"

toomanyducks — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 05:06:24 +0000

Some of the examples given wouldn't even run, as far as I know. Copilot writing Haskell/Rust/ would probably just fail to compile.

I know very, very little about AI, but, like the OP said, it'll reproduce the traits of its training distribution. If the traits don't map on to the domain-specifics of the type ssytem, the traits don't map on, and the code fails.

Generating garbage the compiles is harder, but generating garbage in general is just as easy.

New comment by toomanyducks in "Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?"

toomanyducks — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 05:02:24 +0000

But if a human isn't messing with the code, the code doesn't matter - what the bot does to the code matters. And if the bot can handle bad code in a way humans can't, that means something. Code quality will become less important if automated tools, the ones reading and writing the code, don't care about it.

New comment by toomanyducks in "Don’t Let Police Arm Autonomous or Remote-Controlled Robots and Drones"

toomanyducks — Mon, 19 Jul 2021 00:27:58 +0000

This seems like a false equivalency between a given individual and the state: I can ask what weapons I'm allowed to have without asking what weapons the state is allowed to have.

New comment by toomanyducks in "Don’t Let Police Arm Autonomous or Remote-Controlled Robots and Drones"

toomanyducks — Mon, 19 Jul 2021 00:26:14 +0000

What's your argument here? That working towards something perfect is inherently a waste of effort? It should not need to be pointed out that trying to change things for the better does not have to create a utopia to be beneficial. Reducing crime in non-militant ways (and therefore a reliance on police) does not need to remove crime to be a good thing to do.