rmtech

8 ms·

31.
by rmtech 6y ago
Any system will get dragged down by the need to support all sorts of legacy use-cases. I think there's an xkcd cartoon about this? The core task of a VCS is versioning and collaborating on text of some kind. Git doesn't do this in
32.
by rmtech 6y ago
A good data management system (with hashes of datasets etc) is great. Data mess is not fun. Merkle trees are also fun and have applications elsewhere like cryptocurrency/blockchain. I don't have a problem with computer science in
33.
by rmtech 6y ago
I take the view that developers shouldn't be spending their time fixing their VCS. I use PyCharm. I don't know how PyCharm works internally. I don't even know what language it is written in. I know that it provides syntax hig
34.
by rmtech 6y ago
> With that attitude, I would never, ever, ever, hire you. There are two separate issue here though. (A) How much work does a given person want to put in (B) How much work does a given tool require. It can simultaneously be the case that
35.
by rmtech 6y ago
> A tool you use every day definitely falls into the category of Stuff You Ought to Know, in a way that understanding how quantum tunneling is used in an SSD is in the category of Stuff You Don't Need to Know. I use an SSD every day
36.
by rmtech 6y ago
That doesn't matter, the way people actually use git is that almost all repositories have someone or some small group who rule them, so nothing is really lost by having an easy option to purge things from history. And an inconvenient o
37.
by rmtech 6y ago
But for each one of these, the less I have to know about its internals, the better. The ideal option for each of these things is that it "just works". When you have to think about the internals of your package manager or your CI
38.
by rmtech 6y ago
Yes but filter-branch is horrendous and could very easily result in unintended side-effects, as well as potentially being very slow. I think this command is a great example of the problem; what a user really wants is an undo button but what
39.
by rmtech 6y ago
I use an x86 CPU every day for work and I have no idea how it works in detail, and thanks to the magic of separation of concerns I don't have to (perhaps apart from a few specific things like vecorizing instead of loops that I really d
40.
by rmtech 6y ago
Github already has centralised protections to do with who can and cannot do various things, and so do other similar systems like gitlab. So nothing is really gained but not allowing this, but it makes git very user-hostile because mistakes
41.
by rmtech 6y ago
That only works in some circumstances. For example, suppose I init a new repo and accidentally commit my entire virtual environment, then push, then do some real work, push a few times more and then a colleague notices (after they have pull
42.
by rmtech 6y ago
Probably the biggest problem with the git interface is that the interface exposed to the user isn't sufficiently abstracted from the implementation. Insanely complicated commands to undo things are one symptom of this. As a user, you w
43.
by rmtech 6y ago
Yeah this is incorrect. One of the reasons that we able to achieve so much with computers is that there is a separation of concerns between different areas. Requiring everyone to fully understand git is like requiring people who code in hig
44.
by rmtech 6y ago
A lot of people don't truly understand operating systems and yet they manage to use Windows. You are setting a very low bar.
45.
by rmtech 6y ago
Chernobly may in fact have been a small nuclear explosion.
46.
by rmtech 6y ago
> The more we learn about nuclear, the more expensive it seems to get This is a pretty gross falsehood. Nuclear power is could be cheap and safe, but we _make_ it expensive by banning any form of innovation and by lying to the public abo
47.
by rmtech 6y ago
> As any physicist knows, an uncontrolled aggregation of fissile stuff can go boom. And this is what in fact happened in Fukushima No, that wasn't what happened at Fukushima. There was no "boom" from a nuclear chain reacti
48.
by rmtech 6y ago
They could make them even more expensive without the spying features. But nobody would pay for it.
49.
by rmtech 6y ago
Interesting. Certainly pretty scary!
50.
by rmtech 6y ago
OK and did you get around it? New phone etc? Is there any recourse?
51.
by rmtech 6y ago
That's unfair to Tim. He's a great help to the world's authoritarian regimes. He's doing plenty for them.
52.
by rmtech 6y ago
I don't know about this particular case but I am willing to concede the point - I certainly know that criminals exist and that catching them is good.
53.
by rmtech 6y ago
> provides little evidence that it is a net negative. The negatives of a state that becomes powerful and evil have been thoroughly demonstrated in, for example, the USSR, Cambodia, North Korea and many other times/places. Do you kno
54.
by rmtech 6y ago
Has this happened to you? What was it for? What did you do?
55.
by rmtech 6y ago
> That sounds like a slam dunk good thing for society. That particular application is a good thing. But the existence of such capabilities can be a net negative, and by a huge margin. Crime is something like a "cost of doing busines
56.
by rmtech 6y ago
> Even if it costs more it’s just the right thing to do. Why not use plastic once and then put it into a landfill?
57.
by rmtech 6y ago
Oh my god yes.
58.
by rmtech 6y ago
> why can't I just pay more and opt out? Because they probably did market research and found that ~nobody would pay what it was actually worth, and it would generate negative press.
59.
by rmtech 6y ago
Yeah, I understand this argument but I think it's bad philosophy. You need to think 4-dimensionally: everyone was a "theoretical" person if you go back far enough and making rules that harm people in the future but not in the
60.
by rmtech 6y ago
that is interesting. I also switch from left to right. Maybe that makes a difference? The other thing is that the two explanations are not mutually exclusive. Once you loosen it fully it moves around on your arm, which might move the harmfu

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