BaronSamedi

12 ms·

61.
by BaronSamedi 8y ago
Good point. I would suggest that a better model for discussing politics is even more important than a better role model. Current political discourse is so full of emotionally laden words, shibboleths, and moralizing that discussions inevita
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by BaronSamedi 8y ago
I have also seen the content quality decline. Online community management and moderation policies seem like an important research area but I have found little that explores the dynamics of these communities and analysis of which policies wo
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by BaronSamedi 8y ago
If it required you to make arguments in the form of First Order Logic statements and then did automated validation of them, then I would use it. I'll grant this is probably a niche use case. With the power of modern automated reasoning
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by BaronSamedi 8y ago
In his classic, must-read article, "Worse is Better", Richard Gabriel explains why. The victory of the C ecosystems has had a profound impact on computing. One small example is that it produced the need for scripting languages lik
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by BaronSamedi 8y ago
"The whole thing is people need to surround themselves with a good number of people they disagree with on things." I agree with this sentiment. I think, however, a more fundamental problem lies with peoples' attitude toward
66.
by BaronSamedi 8y ago
I agree with you though I still think what the OpenAI team has achieved is impressive. Dota has two levels: the strategic and the tactical. The AI is very good at the tactical level (teamfighting) but poor at the strategic level. Perhaps t
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by BaronSamedi 8y ago
I agree that liability is probably the best approach and is long overdue for software. The problem is the standard for proving security nonfeasance? My thought is that if your product was found to have a security problem and you did not hav
68.
by BaronSamedi 8y ago
"Most aspects of systems development are fundamentally creative processes ..." I'm not sure this is accurate. The Space Shuttle systems software, likely among the highest quality software systems ever developed, does not appe
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by BaronSamedi 8y ago
Exactly. We support Windows runners for several tools and they work fine. Our developers delight in adopting obscure build tools and we have been able to support them all. On a humorous note, when I told my management that we had updated ou
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by BaronSamedi 8y ago
GitLab has moved past being a "a code repo manager" and is creating a tool to manage the entire SDLC. My reaction to this is the opposite of yours. Adopting it has already allowed us to get rid of Jenkins (shudder), and will soon
71.
by BaronSamedi 8y ago
In my view, what we see in public debate on these issues, and indeed most political issues, is a sole focus on the symptoms of the problem and never an analysis of the factors causing these symptoms. Adding to the dysfunction, no analysis o
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by BaronSamedi 8y ago
I agree with you. Root cause analysis should be informed by an understanding of complex, dynamic systems. The article's assumption, however, that RCA and systems thinking are somehow at odds is incorrect. Root cause doesn't necess
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by BaronSamedi 8y ago
Good point. The Left/Right model of politics poorly reflects the complexity and nuance of people's actual views. It is good for encouraging us-versus-them conflict but terrible for real understanding.
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by BaronSamedi 8y ago
Or, perhaps, not identities but fuzzy sets.
75.
by BaronSamedi 9y ago
Almost everyone would agree that being informed is important. The question is whether the news leads to being informed. Many would argue that daily news consumption has the opposite effect.
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by BaronSamedi 9y ago
You ascribe this to maturity, and while I agree, I think the more fundamental issue is one of developer talent and ability. Bright ideas from developers lacking these is not just unhelpful it is an active hindrance. Dealing with bad ideas t
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by BaronSamedi 9y ago
I would define "capable" in terms of developer productivity--the time it takes to deliver quality software. For example, if you decided to write a DNS server from scratch would choosing Haskell or Scala (both fine languages) reall
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by BaronSamedi 9y ago
You need only watch the YouTube video about the Xerox Star from 1982 to see that the desktop is conceptually the same now. Sure, we have better graphics but all the key elements were there 35 years ago. I'm sure there will be innovatio
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by BaronSamedi 9y ago
I think Parc was a unique "a serendipity moment". These Cambrian Explosion type moments happen frequently in history: high creativity in which a new form is developed, followed by an increasing focus on small incremental improveme
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by BaronSamedi 9y ago
I agree. It would be inaccurate to say that the invention of the electric guitar was the sufficient cause of rock'n'roll. On the other hand, the electric guitar is clearly a necessary cause. I think the best model for this interac
81.
by BaronSamedi 9y ago
I'm sympathetic to agile but it does have a quasi-religious feel to it. I've noticed that its proponents make claims about the right way to do things with an unwarranted level of certainty. When I ask "why" (politely) I
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by BaronSamedi 9y ago
Don't forget our bizarre and inexplicable neoteny. We are the Peter Pans of the primate world.
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by BaronSamedi 9y ago
Maybe it's time to discuss how big is healthy for democracy. I think there is a case to be made that companies that get this big should be broken up into smaller ones. It's a tuning mechanism to keep competition alive and prevent
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by BaronSamedi 9y ago
I apologize if my statement was misleading. I do not think the visual problem itself is trivial. I think the choice of input mechanism is tangential to the hard problems actually faced by the AI designers: strategy and tactics.
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by BaronSamedi 9y ago
I completely disagree. An API is software's natural input mechanism just like the senses are a human's natural input mechanism. Having the AI use human senses unfairly handicaps it. More importantly, however, is that this is not t
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by BaronSamedi 9y ago
Very good. I would add that I like my git commit messages to be narrative of the development process. Hmmm...I wonder if someone could write a science fiction short story using only git commit messages?
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by BaronSamedi 9y ago
Sure but that doesn't mean we can't understand why some works of art resonate with us. The computational folkloristics field has found some very interesting patterns (see for instance http://www.mftd.org/index.php?
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by BaronSamedi 9y ago
In my view what happened was usability and security suffered. See for example, https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=JavaScript I have no problem with JavaScript itself, it allows developers to build some am
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by BaronSamedi 9y ago
Ethereum reminds me of what happened to the web: the desire to add code. The blockchain by itself wasn't good enough so Ethereum added code to it, just like HTML wasn't good enough so people added applets, Flash, and JavaScript. I
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by BaronSamedi 9y ago
Good point. Everything annoying and insecure about Flash and Java applets has been carried over into JavaScript. The root cause issue is the desire for client side execution of arbitrary code.

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