5 ms·

I am not saying that you are wrong. Not at all. However, something I’ve come to learn is that some ideas I thought were bad were actually not bad. They were po

by jchw 5y ago

I am not saying that you are wrong. Not at all. However, something I’ve come to learn is that some ideas I thought were bad were actually not bad. They were poorly executed and the exact reasoning why they did not work well in a given application was not well-understood. So I can see an argument for “this was horrible back when it was done in the early 2000s” simultaneously with “this could actually still be a good idea for some use cases.”

janderland 5y ago
Currently reading about agriculture throughout human history. It made me wonder how many people failed to domesticate a single kind of crop and assumed crop domestication as a whole isn’t a good idea. I realize that people need to make decisions based on their personal experience, and I don’t have a good rule-of-thumb for when to try a variation of a “bad” idea.
- marksbrown 5y ago
  ‘Many of life’s failures are people who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up' -- Thomas Edison.
  - burnished 5y ago
    said the man who tested something like 6000 different kinds of plant materials as filaments for a light bulb
    - smitty1e 5y ago
      Three cheers for brute force methods. Sometimes you need the BFH to get to the elegant solution.
  - craftinator 5y ago
    Said the man who lied, cheated, and stole his way to fortune and historical fame.
    - fruityrudy 5y ago
      You’re just jealous
- samus 5y ago
  Agriculture is difficult because it is literally a fight against nature/entropy. And it still has to be proven that it is a viable way to drive human civilization in the long term. In nature, species populations compete with each other and are kept in a dynamic equilibrium. If population size of a species increases, then its predators will have more opportunities to predate, and their population size increases as well. This leads to more predation pressure, which should negate the population increase and decreases opportunities for predators as well. "Predators" is to be understood in a very general way. It can also apply to fungi and other microbial forms of life. Changes to this equilibrium arise when prey species evolve to resist the predation pressure by predators. And vice versa if the predators improve. Then, ecosystems change, and these changes can be very disruptive. Agriculture is a rebellion against this dynamic equilibrium because it creates irresistible opportunities for predators. They have to be held in check either by brute force (hunting, pesticides, containment) or by hacking the ecosystem (for lack of a better term) to ensure that helpful predators are around. The former is probably unsustainable in the long term as it is not at all clear that we will forever be able to outsmart the evolutionary potential of predator species. The latter is difficult as well. Apart from predation, the other challenge to agriculture is that it depletes the soil in the long term. Fertile soil arises as a result of a ecosystem where the decomposers cannot keep up. Most forms of agriculture interrupt such ecosystems and thus deplete the soil in various ways. To keep this in check, different methods were evolved, such as slash-and-burn, crop rotation and artificial fertilization. But it is not at all sure that we will always be able to stop depletion of our soils just in time to prevent civilizational collapse. Currently, availability of phosphorus is a looming danger because most of it is mined. Once we hit peak phosphorus, we better have solutions in place to get it from somewhere else.
valenterry 5y ago
Sharing code between frontend and backend isn't a bad idea, yes. However, using Json for it is. And the problems and limitations with json can't be "fixed" in any way.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Sharing code between frontend and backend isn't a bad idea, yes. However, using Json for it is. I don't see why serializing close to JSON is any worse than doin so to, say, S-expressions, or Algol-style syntax, or WASM. If you aren't manually coding it, but generating it, the capabilities matter, the syntax matters a lot less.
  - valenterry 5y ago
    I think there are very good reasons why languages have their own custom formats and none of them ever decided to serialize into json, even when just "generating it".
    - gnulinux 5y ago
      No I don't think there is a good reason. You're completely missing that programming language syntax is designed for humans. You can still serialize all languages to json syntax trees, just like you can do so with lisp notation, Polish notation etc.
      - valenterry 5y ago
        I'm not saying that you _cannot_ do it. But tell me: why has no programming-language done that? They all could have chosen to serialize their code or AST into json but they didn't. (except JsonLogic I guess)
        andyana 5y ago
        Because someone didn't have the time to do it? Or they didn't think of it? Just because nobody has had success at an idea, doesnt mean that the idea can't work. Or do you think we are at our peak?
healsjnr1 5y ago
I think the key point on this is `some use cases`. For people who've spent a lot of time with ANT, you might be familiar with this article from its creator: https://web.archive.org/web/20041217023752///x180.net/Journal/2004/03/31.html https://web.archive.org/web/20041217023752///x180.net/Journa... It was possible and even made sense to use XML as the format for a build tool, however, it got stretched way to far. The idea was applied in use cases that were less and less appropraite, as a result years later you end up with something that is unwieldy and doesn't make sense and, generally, thought of as "terrible". There are use cases were JsonLogic might make a lot of sense, and for those that is great. Generally, I'm sceptical as there is high risk of increasing couplings in a way that will make change much harder. This will be particularly true if it is applied to use cases that don't truly warrent this kind of solution.

by jchw 5y ago

janderland 5y ago

Currently reading about agriculture throughout human history. It made me wonder how many people failed to domesticate a single kind of crop and assumed crop domestication as a whole isn’t a good idea. I realize that people need to make decisions based on their personal experience, and I don’t have a good rule-of-thumb for when to try a variation of a “bad” idea.

marksbrown 5y ago
‘Many of life’s failures are people who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up' -- Thomas Edison.
- burnished 5y ago
  said the man who tested something like 6000 different kinds of plant materials as filaments for a light bulb
  - smitty1e 5y ago
    Three cheers for brute force methods. Sometimes you need the BFH to get to the elegant solution.
- craftinator 5y ago
  Said the man who lied, cheated, and stole his way to fortune and historical fame.
  - fruityrudy 5y ago
    You’re just jealous
samus 5y ago
Agriculture is difficult because it is literally a fight against nature/entropy. And it still has to be proven that it is a viable way to drive human civilization in the long term. In nature, species populations compete with each other and are kept in a dynamic equilibrium. If population size of a species increases, then its predators will have more opportunities to predate, and their population size increases as well. This leads to more predation pressure, which should negate the population increase and decreases opportunities for predators as well. "Predators" is to be understood in a very general way. It can also apply to fungi and other microbial forms of life. Changes to this equilibrium arise when prey species evolve to resist the predation pressure by predators. And vice versa if the predators improve. Then, ecosystems change, and these changes can be very disruptive. Agriculture is a rebellion against this dynamic equilibrium because it creates irresistible opportunities for predators. They have to be held in check either by brute force (hunting, pesticides, containment) or by hacking the ecosystem (for lack of a better term) to ensure that helpful predators are around. The former is probably unsustainable in the long term as it is not at all clear that we will forever be able to outsmart the evolutionary potential of predator species. The latter is difficult as well. Apart from predation, the other challenge to agriculture is that it depletes the soil in the long term. Fertile soil arises as a result of a ecosystem where the decomposers cannot keep up. Most forms of agriculture interrupt such ecosystems and thus deplete the soil in various ways. To keep this in check, different methods were evolved, such as slash-and-burn, crop rotation and artificial fertilization. But it is not at all sure that we will always be able to stop depletion of our soils just in time to prevent civilizational collapse. Currently, availability of phosphorus is a looming danger because most of it is mined. Once we hit peak phosphorus, we better have solutions in place to get it from somewhere else.

valenterry 5y ago

Sharing code between frontend and backend isn't a bad idea, yes. However, using Json for it is. And the problems and limitations with json can't be "fixed" in any way.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> Sharing code between frontend and backend isn't a bad idea, yes. However, using Json for it is. I don't see why serializing close to JSON is any worse than doin so to, say, S-expressions, or Algol-style syntax, or WASM. If you aren't manually coding it, but generating it, the capabilities matter, the syntax matters a lot less.
- valenterry 5y ago
  I think there are very good reasons why languages have their own custom formats and none of them ever decided to serialize into json, even when just "generating it".
  - gnulinux 5y ago
    No I don't think there is a good reason. You're completely missing that programming language syntax is designed for humans. You can still serialize all languages to json syntax trees, just like you can do so with lisp notation, Polish notation etc.
    - valenterry 5y ago
      I'm not saying that you _cannot_ do it. But tell me: why has no programming-language done that? They all could have chosen to serialize their code or AST into json but they didn't. (except JsonLogic I guess)
      - andyana 5y ago
        Because someone didn't have the time to do it? Or they didn't think of it? Just because nobody has had success at an idea, doesnt mean that the idea can't work. Or do you think we are at our peak?

healsjnr1 5y ago

I think the key point on this is `some use cases`. For people who've spent a lot of time with ANT, you might be familiar with this article from its creator: https://web.archive.org/web/20041217023752///x180.net/Journal/2004/03/31.html https://web.archive.org/web/20041217023752///x180.net/Journa... It was possible and even made sense to use XML as the format for a build tool, however, it got stretched way to far. The idea was applied in use cases that were less and less appropraite, as a result years later you end up with something that is unwieldy and doesn't make sense and, generally, thought of as "terrible". There are use cases were JsonLogic might make a lot of sense, and for those that is great. Generally, I'm sceptical as there is high risk of increasing couplings in a way that will make change much harder. This will be particularly true if it is applied to use cases that don't truly warrent this kind of solution.