Decentralization. Although this term does not yet apply to the avenues through which this outreach occurs, but give it ten to twenty years and that too will change.
Hands down, the number one problem in hiring and retaining senior engineers is being able to match the compensation level. FAANG-type companies have a huge difference to practically everyone else. Startups, especially, can’t match the salary, and few make up for it in equity comparable to the risk level engineers take on by accepting the job. Senior engineers typically know better, and so you end up with mid or even junior applicants for senior roles, and out of desperation, they end up being the pick.
On the other hand, containerization typically occurs on an independent (from other owners) instance of a virtual machine, which typically is running on separate processor cores, helping increase the overall isolation despite residing on shared hardware. Exposed processor caches due to exploits like Meltdown are a significantly higher risk on a platform of this kind than on a containerized environment. V8 exists at a much higher level than hardware-level exploits. How does your platform mitigate these kinds of concerns? Presumably you have some kind of virtualization above this to manage roll out of your execution environment, but adding a shared execution context like V8 feels to me like the risk factor is doubled, not reduced.
Tone is relative. Although the words individually are not incindiary, the post being replied to was equally incindiary in nature. Subtlety in verbal attacks does not have true distinction, other than one having (weak) deniability of malevolence. Arguably, it’s because of this it is more dishonest.
To me, the most interesting thing in this entire post is the following:
> Funny enough, in the middle of that question, my internet died and interrupted the call for the first time in the six months I lived in that house. Odd. It came back ten minutes later, and I dialed back into the conference line, but the mood of the call pretty much 180’d.
I find that when strange things happen like this, they’re hardly coincidence. Did you run a traceroute after the disconnect anywhere? Did you see an IP address change? If so, was it a significant change in the CIDR block it was within?
I actually gave a talk about automating influence on social media with what effectively amounted to chatbots, as a part of the 2016 election. Many of these factors were used, but also a few other interesting elements this article didn’t mention:
1. Geographic locales have linguistic norms that silently help in-group association. Adjusting rhetoric to these terms make people more pliable.
2. Context-aware sentiment is more impactful than general sentiment analysis. Someone may not have been a Trump supporter, but they didn’t like Hillary. This became another fulcrum.
3. Social leaders had the biggest impact, but social leaders can be made. This was leveraging a thought experiment conducted by DARPA, published in a paper titled, “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity“ (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf)
These and a few other factors lead to my prediction of polling trajectories delivering a win for Trump in 2016 (the lecture was in August).
Why is this surprising? Their entire business model for having a news wing is to funnel traders into their terminal. Being the first to break market-relevant stories sounds like a plus, not a negative, even if the incentivization model is potentially encouraging to write stories with a bias towards moving markets.
1 : a corrupt practice or custom — the buying of votes and other election abuses
2 : improper or excessive use or treatment : misuse — drug abuse
3 : language that condemns or vilifies usually unjustly, intemperately, and angrily — verbal abuse a term of abuse
4 : physical maltreatment —child abuse sexual abuse
5 obsolete : a deceitful act : deception
They explicitly said they were upfront with their peers about how criticism is delivered. Whether that is true is beyond the scope of discussion; what has been said is nowhere near gaslighting or other forms of abuse. I don’t understand what has happened as of late, but the western world has taken a very strange turn in redefining terms to make the smallest of infraction or abrasiveness a great harm. Criticism does not need to be laced with praise to be useful, and justified critique does not equal abuse. That’s complete nonsense. Delivering it in private rather than publicly, if anything, seems more in consideration of the recipient’s feelings anyway.
With respect to the topic of this discussion, I will refrain from passing a judgment on Torvalds’ change of heart until we see quantitative data on how this has impacted the kernel.
If that were true, every startup would be successful.