Many years ago, as an undergrad, I had a conversation with a grad student friend about the Selection algorithm (which will find the kth largest item in an unsorted list in O(n) time). I loved it, but when I tested it in practice it was slower than just sorting and selecting well into the billions of elements.
My friend said "that may be true, but consider the philosophical implication: because that algorithm exists, we know it's possible to answer the question in O(n) time. We once didn't know that, and there was no guarantee that it was possible. We might still be able to find a better O(n) algorithm."
I feel the same way about this. Sure, this might not be faster than Dijkstra's in practice, but now we know it's possible to do that at all.
Not all time spent interacting with a screen is "screen time".
The problematic thing is kids spending endless hours just absorbing rather than playing or interacting or doing stuff. It culminates in kids (and adults) who cannot mentally handle being bored- they must have the screen to relieve the horrors of the idle mind.
If achieving these same goals is easier without an app for you and your kids, then by all means, do that. But an app on a screen is a very powerful tool to structure and organize things. My daughter is still a bit young for this one, but I can see how useful it will be when she's a couple years older.
I don't disagree that the balance is shifting towards "why is this taking so long". There's ebbs and flows in that ecosystem.
But overall, I think you overestimate how much time you spend loading the website and how much time it's just sitting there, mostly idle.
And in the end, as long as it's fast enough that users don't stop using the site/webapp/program/whatever, then it's fine, imho. When it becomes too slow, the developers will be asked to improve performance. Because in the end, economics is the driver, not performance.
I think the author is taking general advice and applying it to a niche situation.
> So by violating the first rule of clean code — which is one of its central tenants — we are able to drop from 35 cycles per shape to 24 cycles per shape
Look, most modern software is spending 99.9% of the time waiting for user input, and 0.1% of the time actually calculating something. If you're writing a AAA video game, or high performance calculation software then sure, go crazy, get those improvements.
But most of us aren't doing that. Most developers are doing work where the biggest problem is adding the next umpteenth features that Product has planned (but hasn't told us about yet). Clean code optimizes for improving time-to-market for those features, and not for the CPU doing less work.
> Social media is global, so any effects it has should be visible globally.
That isn't true at all.
There may be a hundred factors at play, which are all different in different cultures, regions, countries, etc. The cultural context of an individual can dramatically change how they react to situations, pressures, and mental illness.
The infancy period of this technology is fascinating.
Think about computer graphics 15 years ago. Beowulf came out in 2007, and was developed in the preceding years- let's call it 15+ years old. And it was right there in the uncanny valley where it didn't look real, but it looks realistic. It was interesting visually, but my brain told me "this isn't correct".
And now some modern game engines are doing more realistic rendering than that in real-time.
Now look at these generative models. Some state of the art ones with humans helping are pretty convincing, but it's slow work. The more general ones like these are making these wonderfully interesting images that our brains immediately say "That's not correct".
But where will this technology be in another 15 years? I think the possibilities for entertainment are really interesting. Imagine a D&D game where the GM is vocally telling the AI what to generate, then making small tweaks, and the players are seeing the results.
Farmers need to work on daylight. They can't change their schedule when the clocks change. So during half the year, the busy half, all the business start closing down an hour early.
But truthfully, if our society wants more time in daylight after work... let's just leave work earlier. I mean, we are doing that, we're just changing the clocks and pretending we aren't. It's dumb.
Golf courses. Well, okay, this is my wonderful father's half serious answer that I love to retell.
The basic idea is that it's easier to convince everyone that is actually 5:00pm and time to leave work than it is to convince just your boss that you want to start work an hour earlier and leave and hour earlier.
This problem is then applied to politicians and other powerful people, who want to go golfing after work. If there's no DST, the sun will set "earlier" according to the clock, and you can't get in a full 18 holes.
So therefore, we change all the clocks so that powerful rich people can go golfing.
No other group of people sees any benefits to DST.
Doing unethical things because "We had to so the shareholders would make money" is such a cop-out. I see it just the opposite way. You have a duty to do things ethically so that in the long run customers continue to want to use your product. So that governments don't start going after you for the unethical things you do. So that other businesses will trust you and continue to work with you.
Here's an example: Huawei. They've reached out to me saying they'll pay me more than my employer and my commute will be shorter. No effing way. I'm sure I could make them a lot of money, but they're history of unethical behaviour is an instant deal-breaker for me. Others will, sure, but in the market of labor they're going to have a reduced supply because I'm surely not alone in this attitude.
These aren't mutually exclusive things. The people working on Chrome were and are highly motivated, intelligent and passionate people, some of whom I call friends, who want to see the web become a better place. In that regard they have succeeded massively.
But by this point, Google has dropped billions of dollars on salaries for those developers to build Chrome (call it >500 devs, >$200k salaries, >10 years). Google is not a charity. They didn't build Chrome with the intent to lose money on it. Everything else Google made that wasn't profitable is gone now, and yet here Chrome stands. Because it is an indirect profit center.
And you've pointed out the real issue: Chrome was about freeing the world of a truly terrible web browser. 'Was'. But it did that! So what is it about now? Why would Google continue to pour money into it if they didn't expect to extract more money out of it in the future?
You can make the world better and make money while doing it. Ideally, that's what we all are doing.
> Google claims that it's not being used for tracking
> Occam says that, no, it's probably just a misdesigned feature.
Allow me to introduce to you "mabbo's razor": If someone can make money by doing X and it's impossible for anyone to tell whether or not they are doing X, then they are probably doing X or else will as soon as you believe they won't.
I think the concern is that this disarms Google's competitors while keeping them fully-armed.
Ads are a business, and they are Google's business. They are how they make money. And like all businesses, they are competitive. Tracking is a way to make more money off online advertising. By removing tracking from their competitors while keeping it for themselves, Google stand to make a lot of money off this change.
Their motivations are not honest, but they're pushing them as if this is the high road. It isn't. It's the dirty low road of dominating the online ad business, made possible by their dominance in the browser market. And it's always been the end-goal of Chrome browser.
But then, since the logic points to the US it only stands to reason that is a false false flag! Why those wiley spies in Beijing really are clever. Discredit The USA and plant spy chips in important computers!
> Two of Elemental’s biggest early clients were the Mormon church, which used the technology to beam sermons to congregations around the world, and the adult film industry, which did not.
An example, an admin could have a personal password that is used to update a secure hash of "last known time the market was not compromised". The users can use the public key to verify the markers. Every day or two, the admin updates that marker using the private key (password). A few days after they're arrested, they won't have updated it, the users will know something is up.
My friend said "that may be true, but consider the philosophical implication: because that algorithm exists, we know it's possible to answer the question in O(n) time. We once didn't know that, and there was no guarantee that it was possible. We might still be able to find a better O(n) algorithm."
I feel the same way about this. Sure, this might not be faster than Dijkstra's in practice, but now we know it's possible to do that at all.