> if everything was so great in this imagined past, why are we here and why if we did go back and revive this past would we not end up right back here “repeating the grade” so to speak?
"Progress" doesn't occur because things are "better" it occurs because things are incentivized. A system can incentivize bad things, and at many points in life we may choose bad things for one group and good things for another. Progress is merely another point further down on the timeline, as is the past. Qualitatively judging these points in isolation is difficult, but when viewed in collective over time I think people will often reflect that some things have gotten better, some have gotten worse, and we also have new problems. I view the past less as a former grade and more as just a different state of things, neither better nor worse in totality, but I'm also not cynical enough to say that restoring a previous state is the right choice either. Somewhat anecdotally I hardly ever believe in software rollbacks, I almost always bias towards rolling forward but I understand why some people think rollbacks are something they'd want.
> The second is that (as I hinted above) I am extremely skeptical of narratives that excessively glorify the past. I think it’s all a bunch of survivorship bias. Things often seem better in the past because we are experiencing only those cultural artifacts of the past that survived, which tend to be the most memorable or interesting.
Again, the present doesn't necessarily mean that things are better for people. We make choices every day to marginalize a group or way of life over another. A lot of times, this is just necessary but I can understand why people don't like it.
> Lastly, I have doubts about the very possibility of revisiting the past. The arrow of time is unidirectional.
You and I agree here, in that I understand the state of the past, even yesterday, can never be fully recreated. Again, I understand why that's difficult for people to wrestle with.
It sounds like for you and I, life is mostly good, so it makes dealing with the present and optimism for the future quite palatable. For others, I think that's challenging, so the past looks favorable even if unviable.
> The reactionary is a particularly lazy kind of critic. They don’t even bother to propose an unworkable solution.
Unfortunately this is most of our politicians. Pretty much anyone that media would call a "firebrand" from Matt Gaetz to AOC is a reactionary, and they're so absorbed in their own thoughts, world, and problems that they can't help but take it out on the rest of the world. It's a symptom of a broken, tired, and frustrated system that we put trust in people who are simply meant to agitate rather than build comprehensive, intersectional systems.
The term came about in the 50s and is mainly used to highlight problems with the exploitative nature of the NCAA. Basically, athletes aren't being told to, or put in environment where they can, balance education and sports. Sports and selling the colleges brand take priority and colleges were known to make it easier for athletes to get through or with passing grades. Sometimes making up entire coursework for their athletes to take. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/10/16/breaking-ncaa... That obviously undermines and frustrates anyone who had a hard time in college.
My dad, who was a college athlete, used that term a lot to express frustration at systems which no longer served their purpose and were acting performatively.
libadwaita and Kirigami are huge improvements for the desktop app ecosystem from what I've seen as a user. When I started to delve into desktop applications I quickly realized there's a couple hurdles I face:
1. QT was an ecosystem shock to me. I barely knew what to do to get started and got lost easily.
2. Do these applications work outside of Linux; more directly, do they have dynamic dependencies? From my experience, the former is difficult and the answer to the latter is yes.
3. The lack of library support for Go and Rust is notable. Sometimes I want to throw a UI on top of what used to be a terminal app written in Go (or Rust).
I'm not going to dabble in your cultural representations because I think they're a bit dangerous. I will say that maintaining the idea that we have blind spots is good, overaddressing this is usually called "hand wringing" and is equally prohibitive. To me, it's about having a mix of the two. Think about things critically, but accept that you are not in total control of the world and that any good solution takes iteration and learning.
> Something bizarre I have noticed though in junior-almost-senior engineers is that they pride themselves in obfuscating and writing "highly complex" logic, with no documentation
I've noticed this too. One thing I've had mild success with is the concept that a particular programming document (especially in functional programming) is really a series of mini-documents. Each mini-document has function-level comments, a signature, body, and returns that tell part of the story of what that function does. The minute that the collective of those fail me and I find myself reverse engineering code, then we have failed the team and cost the company money.
Some complicated things must be done, especially at the size and scale of our products, but complex things are painted with a fine veneer of interfaces and documentation.
I think another exercise that can help is putting junior engineers front and center to architecture. Whether it's exposing them to review, the review process of a Senior engineers design, or putting them front and center to design implications. I've seen having to figure out the difference between a controller and a service cause some really positive abstract thinking that puts people on the order of thinking for the group rather than their own merits.
I will take back that you're here in bad faith, I apologize. You just lack equivalent empathy for people who have had these APIs used on them, had their data sold, etc... as the empathy you have for developers cleaning up data from people trying to avoid having these APIs weaponized against them. Empathy is selective, and my empathy for the devs is much lower because that's what they get paid to do. I think that's a fair stance to have.
If data being 100% available is a natural consequence you're okay with, and I have to accept that then you will have to accept that people who don't agree with this growing practice but don't want to be excluded from society will introduce entropy to make those systems less efficient as a natural consequence. The efficiency and ease of access of which is what makes them weapons.
I take issue with "repercussions" because it comes off as a dog whistle for "people who believe in privacy have something to hide". I understand that's not 100% of what you meant, but it's awful close. Generally, I don't think it's okay for data to live on forever other than in highly significant events, even then it should likely be anonymized.
I do agree that we'll have to agree to disagree that not participating in the new public discourse is a viable approach.
Yeah, that's not "personal convenience". I would say this borders on safety. I don't think it's that difficult to imagine how this same dataset in the hands of a bad actor is to be abused.
In your case, my assumptions of you are based on how you continually downplay concerns to "not happening" or "that's no big deal". You also readily accused me of avoiding repercussions, then walking back and walking forward those claims in some kafka-esque dance.
"Arguing in bad faith" also doesn't mean you've offended me. It's just a realization that you have some other motivation at stake here. People don't just recategorize a safety and privacy issue as "personal convenience" while dancing around calling it a problem.
> I think you are assuming a specific connotation on "repercussions"
Use more careful wording then. In my eyes, you're here to deny that a problem exists (for average people, not experts) and you're advocating for me to not participate in communities which I was historically able to participate in without having my data exfiltrated or stored in perpetuity. I've argued in the past that limits to public data could perceivably exist, I think this is reasonable, but to a denialist nothing is reasonable.
The framing you propose is quite rosey, but then you immediately walk it back with how bad it is, but that it's a "natural" repercussion. So, while I want to do something about it before it becomes a bigger problem that can't be contained you're happy to sit back and say there's nothing to see here.
But hey, feel free to keep commenting on my ethics without questioning your own.
Every rebellion looks hyperbolic from the outside, I would say.
Reddit is indexed by an outside party, not Reddit itself. Twitter is the same way. The most infamous of Facebook's data exfiltration was Cambridge Analytica, which again is an outside indexer. The accurate comparison, imo, is "we all came to this land to communicate together, but you use the platforms features to stalk people."
Advertising is more of a concession of privacy, which I can tolerate if it's iterated on.
The option you lay in front of people is "leave". So, someone of my convictions must leave once a platform becomes so popular that it attracts professional stalkers? Why is that the only acceptable option to you?
Unethical, maybe. Though, how ethical should one be in war when the enemy is a tyrant?
The signals to rebellion start slow: you pester and annoy the enemy to let them know they have tread on the wrong turf. You try to inform them, then you try to concede points for shared ground. Once the enemy has decided that your advancements and ground meeting are to their advantage, and continue to gain ground is what we identify as skirmishes and battle starts. You ambush, you destroy logistical routes, you make it difficult for the enemy perceive that this ground is worthwhile.
At what point do you fire the cannons? At what point does the normally docile rest of society join you to arm your rebellious battlements?
I think you are witnessing the populous arming their cannons. You can object, but you can't object that the enemy is closer than ever.
I definitely understand that it's difficult to listen to people like this. If you feel that way, my recommendation is don't engage with his content. I certainly don't recommend Drew Devault's writing or projects to anyone precisely because of this. That said, I do still listen to him because that vitriol and frustration does seem to come from a good place and genuine frustration.
"Progress" doesn't occur because things are "better" it occurs because things are incentivized. A system can incentivize bad things, and at many points in life we may choose bad things for one group and good things for another. Progress is merely another point further down on the timeline, as is the past. Qualitatively judging these points in isolation is difficult, but when viewed in collective over time I think people will often reflect that some things have gotten better, some have gotten worse, and we also have new problems. I view the past less as a former grade and more as just a different state of things, neither better nor worse in totality, but I'm also not cynical enough to say that restoring a previous state is the right choice either. Somewhat anecdotally I hardly ever believe in software rollbacks, I almost always bias towards rolling forward but I understand why some people think rollbacks are something they'd want.
> The second is that (as I hinted above) I am extremely skeptical of narratives that excessively glorify the past. I think it’s all a bunch of survivorship bias. Things often seem better in the past because we are experiencing only those cultural artifacts of the past that survived, which tend to be the most memorable or interesting.
Again, the present doesn't necessarily mean that things are better for people. We make choices every day to marginalize a group or way of life over another. A lot of times, this is just necessary but I can understand why people don't like it.
> Lastly, I have doubts about the very possibility of revisiting the past. The arrow of time is unidirectional.
You and I agree here, in that I understand the state of the past, even yesterday, can never be fully recreated. Again, I understand why that's difficult for people to wrestle with.
It sounds like for you and I, life is mostly good, so it makes dealing with the present and optimism for the future quite palatable. For others, I think that's challenging, so the past looks favorable even if unviable.
> The reactionary is a particularly lazy kind of critic. They don’t even bother to propose an unworkable solution.
Unfortunately this is most of our politicians. Pretty much anyone that media would call a "firebrand" from Matt Gaetz to AOC is a reactionary, and they're so absorbed in their own thoughts, world, and problems that they can't help but take it out on the rest of the world. It's a symptom of a broken, tired, and frustrated system that we put trust in people who are simply meant to agitate rather than build comprehensive, intersectional systems.