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We should not judge the potential of a technology only by the worst-case scenario for which it may be used. If a promising technology has a high likelihood for

by m_fayer 11y ago

We should not judge the potential of a technology only by the worst-case scenario for which it may be used. If a promising technology has a high likelihood for serious abuse but also a highly desirable upside, instead of tossing the baby with the bathwater, we should preempt the abuse through culture, policy, and possibly engineering.

pdkl95 11y ago
> We should not judge the potential of a technology only by the worst-case scenario for which it may be used. That's exactly how we need to judge any important technology. This is a basic part of making things that "fail safely".
- eggy 11y ago
  The word 'only' means not to exclusively judge it in that manner; it does not exclude risk analysis and mitigation. By your statement's logic, banish or redesign the kitchen knife, and put the genie back in the bottle, since it is a technology that can be used in very bad ways in a 'worst-case scenario', and it is hard to make it 'fail safely'.
wlesieutre 11y ago
Oh definitely. People did some great stuff with Flash, and I'm excited to see what people come up with using WebAssembly. I'd just temper our excitement because it's going to make some things better and it's going to make other things shitty. Somebody's going to write a DOM-replacement page layout and rendering system, other people are going to adopt it, and we'll have to go through another whole phase of "Guys, we made this shim layer that will make your website compatible with screenreaders and HTML5 semantic tags again!" "I dunno, that sounds like work. And people could copy/paste from our articles? I'll pass." <5 years later> "The new version of PageRenderingFramework natively supports screen readers. Can we maybe make your content accessible to non-visual browsers now?" "Yeah, I guess. We'll install it next time we rebuild our website." On the plus side, I think most websites have outgrown the autoplaying music, so maybe we'll skip that part in this cycle.
- m_fayer 11y ago
  The more things change the more they stay the same, I agree.

by m_fayer 11y ago

pdkl95 11y ago

> We should not judge the potential of a technology only by the worst-case scenario for which it may be used. That's exactly how we need to judge any important technology. This is a basic part of making things that "fail safely".

eggy 11y ago
The word 'only' means not to exclusively judge it in that manner; it does not exclude risk analysis and mitigation. By your statement's logic, banish or redesign the kitchen knife, and put the genie back in the bottle, since it is a technology that can be used in very bad ways in a 'worst-case scenario', and it is hard to make it 'fail safely'.

wlesieutre 11y ago

Oh definitely. People did some great stuff with Flash, and I'm excited to see what people come up with using WebAssembly. I'd just temper our excitement because it's going to make some things better and it's going to make other things shitty. Somebody's going to write a DOM-replacement page layout and rendering system, other people are going to adopt it, and we'll have to go through another whole phase of "Guys, we made this shim layer that will make your website compatible with screenreaders and HTML5 semantic tags again!" "I dunno, that sounds like work. And people could copy/paste from our articles? I'll pass." <5 years later> "The new version of PageRenderingFramework natively supports screen readers. Can we maybe make your content accessible to non-visual browsers now?" "Yeah, I guess. We'll install it next time we rebuild our website." On the plus side, I think most websites have outgrown the autoplaying music, so maybe we'll skip that part in this cycle.

m_fayer 11y ago
The more things change the more they stay the same, I agree.