For me personally, seeing the phrase "both sides" used pejoratively is a red flag telling me I don't need to read any further.
When people disagree about something, hearing from both sides is important. Can this ideal of openmindedness be cynically abused by strawmanning one side while steelmanning the other? Yes, but in that case the appropriate response is to criticise the specific ways that one or both sides were misrepresented -- which is also the appropriate response to a piece that only presents one side, and does it badly. Muttering about "both sides" never adds anything to an argument. All it does is signal a deep commitment to remaining entrenched in your current position.
This doesn't add any malware risks beyond what a JavaScript-enabled browser already allows.
Re excessive browser memory use: Yes, it adds non-negligible weight, but again, you could already achieve excessive browser memory usage before this. For comparison, a true color 1080p image, uncompressed (which is needed for actual display on screen) is only slightly smaller at 6.22Mb.
> Elm was better without custom kernel modules and sync JS-interop.
That may be true, but what would have been even better is never having the feature, as opposed to adding it, allowing many people to become dependent on it, and then taking it away. (Like everyone else, I'm not claiming Evan should not be able to make such changes -- just that making such changes will breed predictable resentment.)
> It kept the Elm kernel small and portable.
This is a good thing.
> It forced the 3rd party package eco system to innovate and create things rather than just wrap existing Javscript libraries.
This is a bad thing, presented as a good thing. Boring as it may be, if wrapping an existing piece of working code does the job with no downsides then it's always better to do that than reimplement it for reimplementation's sake.
It's in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Windows 10, macOS because it efficiently solves a huge number of use cases while giving plenty of headroom for flexible querying.
If you have data more complicated than a single CSV or tab-separated text file that you will only ever process in sequential order, and you don't need inter-process interaction, you should be asking why not use SQLite.
Suppose you use PostgreSQL + Something Else instead of Just PostgreSQL, and PostgreSQL goes down: Is anything still working?
I suspect the answer is "Very little still works when the DB is down", so the opportunity cost of Just PostgreSQL is low.
Also, while it's possible that PostgreSQL still has concurrency bugs, I think for most teams the odds of hitting a concurrency bug in PostgreSQL are much lower than the odds of hitting a concurrency bug in your own complicated bespoke in-house distributed system.
If you use hashes of the content itself for your UUIDs, you'll (a) get deduplication and data consistency checking for free and (b) have basically implemented (a subset of) git that uses S3 backing instead of a local filesystem directory :)
I used a Porteus boot USB a couple of years ago to rescue the secondary hard drive on my Dad's ancient Windows 7 PC. The drive had partially died, making it inaccessible under Windows -- but 99% of the disk was still readable with Linux's NTFS support. There was some glitch that caused the GUI to lock up shortly after booting about 80% of the time, but if I could make it to the console tty it worked like a charm!
People die on roads anyway, even with government control. And if there were no official government control, most roads would still not be a free-for-all -- in most places, informal community standards for road use would have developed in their stead. It is only the difference between these two states of affairs that government control of roads buys us. (FWIW I certainly think the difference is likely very large and government control of roads is therefore warranted.)
One of the consequences of the government knowing who wrote or said everything on the Internet would be that it would be much harder for organised crime like drug and human trafficking to operate. Of course, another well known consequence is that the opportunity for government corruption is greatly magnified. My point is that the safety improvement is significant enough that the debate is worth having.
Attitudes to government involvement vary from place to place. In Germany, you need to register your home address with the local government; while most Americans would chafe at this level of government "surveillance", a majority of Germans are comforted by it.
I agree. But it's not clear to me that the downsides of this outweigh the upsides.
The government has control over many areas of life, and in most cases I feel that to be on balance a good thing, even though governments can be corrupt or inefficient.
Consider some other domain, like roads. In every country, the government issues licenses that include photographic ID to residents to drive on roads; driving without a license is illegal and can result in fines or even imprisonment. But this level of government control feels normal to people, and most would say the safety benefits outweigh the government interference.
> The repeated failures of authoritarianism to get to a good place are so consistent it is wild that people keep trying it.
Lee Kuan Yew would like a word.
The world is complicated. There may be more than one way to get to a good place, if we can even agree on what good looks like. Most people, even libertarians, think that some kind and degree of authoritarianism is beneficial in a government, we just disagree on the details.
It doesn't -- it's marketing, much like adding "Labs" to the end of your company's name. Its association with infinity makes the company sound cooler to potential customers, many of whom are software engineers who consciously or unconsciously view pure mathematics as a prestige "final form" of their own logic-focused mental ability.
> Anyone who doesn't understand this is an idiot imo
I disagree. A priori it's not obvious to a layperson whether or not a statement that uses unconditional phrasing is intended to be authoritative or conditional on something unspecified, like the resolution of the measuring device. This goes for any sufficiently technical field.
If you got the brakes checked on your car, and the mechanic did <something> and told you there are no issues with them, and you then took your car to a different mechanic who did <something else> and told you there is a problem, you would not be an idiot for thinking that these conclusions contradict one another.
I guess the connection between reading/listening, comprehension and retention ability on the one hand, and language generation ability on the other, isn't as strong as I'd been assuming till now.