mwfunk · HackerTrans

7 năm trướcdiscuss

Totally tangential, but who could have predicted, 20 years ago, that in 2019, more than zero people would be talking about having to use Macs at work, then going home to their comfy PC. How the turns table. I increasingly don't have strong opinions either way (pros and cons to everything, etc.), it's just such an unexpected timeline we've ended up in.

mwfunk

7 năm trướcdiscuss

I'd say one aspect of having good social skills is getting along with people you have nothing in common with, but the bulk of what it means to have good social skills is still just having good social skills. Being able to communicate, being able to listen, being able to put your thoughts into words that convey your meaning to other people with minimal misunderstanding while remaining concise. Being socially self-aware and having some minimal ability to read the people that you're interacting with, regardless of whether or not those people like the same TV shows or video games or whatever.

Personally, I think it's easier to get along with people I have a lot in common with, but that's the extent of it. It's a teensy bit easier because at least we have things to make small talk about. Us having stuff in common doesn't have anything to do with how we approach problems or how rational we are or how we work together in a group though. It doesn't have anything to do with our respective social and emotional hangups, which are bound to be different despite us having the same tastes in some form of entertainment. It doesn't have anything to do with how well I can articulate the problem I'm having to that other person, or how well that person can draw meaning from what I told them, come up with a solution, communicate it back to me, and then iterate with me on that solution during a conversation.

I think that for a lot of people in the tech world, especially those still in their teens and 20s, the biggest social impediment that they perceive in themselves is that they have no idea how to interact with someone who's not like them. They think that if they can somehow overcome that, that they'll be golden, because they assume that they do great with the people who are like them. But that's rarely the case IME. It's just less obvious to them that they do just as poorly dealing with their own peer group, because things get papered over with fun small talk that they misinterpret as succeeding at socializing and communicating.

mwfunk

7 năm trướcdiscuss

It's hard to say. It's never going to be a win/win for them, and unfairly cutting someone off would be terrible publicity for them. I'd imagine they're totally inconsistent about these things and don't spend hardly any time policing their customers (nor should they). I have a feeling these things tend to be on a case-by-case basis, mostly fueled by investor concerns, but I guess that just doesn't bother me like it does some people. I don't see them as having any responsibility at all to be guardians of free speech or anything, maybe that's the distinction.

mwfunk

7 năm trướcdiscuss

I agree with you. Those sites were closer to home and less alien to Americans, and thus might get more scrutiny and judgement. That's got to be a factor. But I've got to think avoiding bad publicity and negative headlines is the #1 factor behind any inconsistencies in their reaction. The news cycle can be a powerful force for companies concerned about how they're perceived by their investors.

mwfunk

7 năm trướcdiscuss

Probably it's closer to home- those sites fuel domestic terrorism, whereas the Taliban do not. Also public pressure and public attention. They're probably incredibly hesitant to take anything down, but if something becomes front page news then they have to deal with it. Also I don't know what's proactive about any of this, if anything it's way too little too late. The sites you mention provide absolutely zero value to anything resembling civilization- they're gathering places for sociopaths and psychotic morons. I'm not even close to being remotely upset that they may have been treated more harshly than actual ISIS or Taliban sites or whatever. There is a level of pathetic beneath which it all just kind of blends together and it doesn't make sense to attempt to rank them. Yeah, ISIS is shittier than the people who like Daily Stormer, but they're both so shitty that it's not really possible to rank their shittiness relative to each other. It's like the difference between jumping off a 50 story building vs. a 100 story building- there is a distinction, but it doesn't really matter.

mwfunk

8 năm trướcdiscuss

Toxicity is detrimental by definition, so not sure what you're getting at.

mwfunk

8 năm trướcdiscuss

Sandboxing isn't to prevent people from damaging their own computer (i.e., the "sudo rm -rf /" case), it's to impose a ceiling on how much damage can be done by an exploited process that the user doesn't realize has been exploited. It's not to save you from yourself, it's to save you from stuff that you wouldn't otherwise have any way of knowing was even happening. Sandboxing restrictions are more like using asserts in your code than anything else- they only stop programs from doing things that the programs themselves are stating that they would never attempt to do.

Having said that, plenty of useful apps can't ship in sandboxed form because of limitations in the current sandboxing model. And of course the fact that sandboxing is required for store distribution makes the store less useful. The implementation has much room for improvement, as do the store distribution policies.

mwfunk

10 năm trướcdiscuss

I thought Google Drive did as well, is that not the case?

mwfunk

10 năm trướcdiscuss

It is an additional thing to be concerned about, but the alternative (static linking everywhere) is so much worse! At least, for most (but not all) situations.

It's sort of like democracy (or capitalism?): the worst system in the world, except for every other alternative. :)

Having said that, many of your pain points are specific to C++ rather than system-level ABIs. C++ compilers have to abuse most OS-level system ABIs (example: symbol name mangling) because of linkage-related concepts in C++ that don't exist at the lower-level (and simpler, yet very different) system ABI provided by the OS.

In a way, you're really complaining (rightfully so, IMO) about one of C++'s core design principles: that the programmer should never pay a performance cost (compared to C) for language features that aren't used. For example, methods are non-virtual by default. Support for virtual methods are required for polymorphism, one of the defining features of OOP. However, calling a virtual method is always going to have at least a teensy bit of overhead vs. calling a non-virtual method. As a result, in C++ all methods are non-virtual unless defined otherwise.

Higher-level (and admittedly <= C++ in performance) OO languages tend to make everything virtual by default, and may not even have a mechanism for making a non-virtual method. These languages give away a small amount of performance in exchange for a reduction in cognitive load on the programmer. Reducing cognitive load is also a reduction in potential bugs, so there may be pragmatic reasons for using a higher-level language other than making the developer's life easier.

Most (but not all) other OO languages take away the option of direct memory management, and instead have some variant of garbage collection to keep memory usage somewhat constrained. C++ can't do this by default because then it would take a performance hit compared to C. So again, you get stuck with one (or two or many) options for higher-level memory management, but by default you're doing manual memory management a la C.

I can see (heh) C++ being very appropriate for certain types of projects and certain types of developers, but IMO its popularity is mysteriously much greater then its usual level of appropriateness. I don't dislike the language (OK, maybe a little), but it's unfortunate that it is considered the default alternative to C as often as it is.

mwfunk

10 năm trướcdiscuss

If you incorporate tribalism into a national constitution, all it does is amplify tribalism in society. Whatever social problems exist between unassimilated immigrants and locals will get worse, not better. A constitution is probably the single least constructive place possible in which to wage culture wars. It should be steering the country towards helping different cultures coexist, not feeding into both the xenophobia of one group while formalizing the outsider status of another one.

mwfunk

10 năm trướcdiscuss

I was thinking the same thing. WebObjects has been on life support for many, many years now. What's shocking is that it had any level of external support 10 years ago, not that that support is ending now. It reads like CNN was framing it as another Apple doom-and-gloom, whatever-will-they-do-without-Steve story, especially with the claim that it was one of his "favorite projects" [?], and OMG now they're cancelling it, this is proof that it's not the same company anymore, etc.

Its importance to NeXT in the '90s was more as a life raft than as something they thought would sweep the tech world and make billions of dollars for them. It was something Steve was hoping NeXT could pivot to instead of going out of business (NeXT was circling the drain in the mid-'90s, just not as dramatically as Apple was). It came out after NeXT had left the hardware business, after it became clear that going software-only wasn't going to save them, and in the early days of the dotcom bubble, so it would've made a lot of sense to try to hitch their wagon to up-and-coming web technologies.

This was before Apple paid a lot of money to get taken over by NeXT, and the rest is history! The life raft never caught on in a huge way (although it obviously found some valuable niches to fill), and after a couple more years it became clear that a life raft was no longer needed, and may have even become a distraction.

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