ATsch

I can't personally speak to the effectiveness of all of the systems humans have lived under or seriously proposed, but I'm fairly certain that among them capitalism is pretty unique in being a system where a paperclip maximizer can be considered a good product. (incidentally also fairly unique in being the only system so far under which hunans have created a global extinction level event)

Capitalism is a system where, so it is claimed, atomized individuals pursuing their "rational self-interest" produce an inherent moral and societal good. This is to be aided by a lack of regulation and interference by non-market forces. The freer the markets the freer the people.

This case is a pretty clear example of how this is not in fact the case. By the metrics of a captialist system this should be a huge success. You have investment, voluntary contracts, free markets and fierce competition that results in huge amounts of innovation. Yet the result is horribly useless waste that hurts society. I think it's pretty fair to call it out.

In the original context I read the statement "either google is screwed or society is screwed" as referring to the lawsuit, not Google's behavior.

That is, to project some of my own opinions: If something like this is not enough to cause major consequences for a big company like google, there is little hope that anything will.

If there's one thing I've learned from the world of think tanks it's that you have to be extremely critical when someone starts arguing about the woes of SMEs.

I agree in the general case but I think there are uses for it that only go slightly beyond the fully automatic version. For example selectively encrypting less frequently needed sensitive fields can give you more granular access control and logging, especially if you have to check in with another service to perform the decryption instead of having the key available locally.

As defines so much of society and what people claim is "human nature", there is no need for shadow governments or deep states when you have power structures and incentives. Those scale, conspiracies don't.

Very glad to hear this, the X11 mechanism has been causing issues for me for a long time, as detailed in the article.

I am aware, as you might be able to gather by reading past the first sentence of my comment. Of course if you'd just said what you needed the binary tree for, I could have given you a better answer.

If you don't have a use case in mind, I'd suggest just trying to actually use Rust for something instead of spending time trying to construct problems where Rust would be bad at the solution.

No, I probably would use the BTreeMap in std instead, assuming I want a search tree. Which is even better, because the primary reason you use binary trees in C is that they are easy to make intrusive. But if I want a priority queue instead there's also BinaryHeap. If I wanted to store data on the branch nodes I might use intrusive_collections. Or maybe if I was dealing with a more complex graph I'd pull in a library like petgraph. If all that fails I could still arena-allocate the nodes to get around the lifetime issues. If I really absolutely wanted to, which I don't see happening any time soon, personally. I'd need a more concrete example there.

> The above statements are then wrong or patronizing or completely misses the point.

I think more what's more going on is that longtime Rust programmers can get frustrated by the sheer volume of people who have never used Rust but dismiss it because they hypothesize that they will need to regularly write things like linked lists in Rust just because they are the easiest data structure to write in C.

When in reality let alone the amount of high performance data structures in the standard library and crate ecosystem mean it's extremely unlikely they'll even feel to write any data structures in the first place. Programming Rust and C or C++ is a very different experience in numerous ways and it is unproductive to expect that not to be the case.

The changes since 2018 have been very minor

Cryptocurrency is much better understood as a social phenomenon than a technical one. The reason for the hype is very simple, people who have already bought into it greatly benefit financially from creating more hype. They also have a lot to lose from the bubble bursting (savings, jobs, companies, friendships). So from just a few free market extremists who think this is a good idea for ideological reasons, it can sustain itself indefinitely as long as it keeps roping in more people. Hence nfts for artists, web3 for web devs etc.

Disclosure: I own ~$1 in cryptocurrency I forgot the password to years ago

I think it's kind of sad that, with all of the services offering an object store, nobody has created a better API standard than cloning the weird and clunky S3 API.

Since I know someone will ask for a source, here's one: https://www.investigate-europe.eu/en/2020/the-gas-trap-repor...

> Silvia Pastorelli explained that companies “have been consistently over-estimating the need for gas and basically, ENTSOG members have received something like, just short of 90% of the EU’s gas infrastructure subsidies which is a lot of money, and the fact that they basically can decide gives them lots of power.”

> But according to Global Energy Monitor’s (GEM) report, ‘Gas at a Crossroads‘, the EU already has a large excess of gas infrastructure. The EU gas import capacity is nearly twice as high as EU gas consumption – according to the report, “The utilization rate in 2018 was ~60%, with ~40% spare capacity.” And GEM’s survey found €117 bn in new EU gas projects are in development, including €52 bn for gas pipelines, €12 billion for LNG import terminals, and €53 bn for gas-fired power stations.

The gas infrastructure currently deployed is already far sufficient to serve that purpose. It is a good argument for not tearing it down, but not for building more. Conflating these two has been a great success by the fossil fuel industry.

These policies were introduced precisely so that people like you could defend them as "not racist" while still having the same net effect. We have more than ample documentation of it to the point that the only reason to disagree is deliberate ignorance or historical denialism.

I'd strongly dispute that this is "part of the solution" because the forces increasing prison population (Bolsenaro ran under "tough on crime" policies) and the ones instituting this program are one and the same. That is the context this has to be seen in, massive expansion of incarceration while making sure a select few get out more easily.

The program is called "Redemption through Reading” and the officials statements are in similar vain. The implications are pretty clear.

It's only made worse by how only select people can participate. That is on top of Brazil's history of using literacy tests for racial discriminatation. As well as their current, ineffective mass-incarceration policy (now 3rd largest in the world), which as in the US hits indigenous and black south americans harder. I don't expect they'll have a rich corpus of indigenous literature either.

This is why I am very critical, despite reading a book generally hurting nobody. If they truly wanted to keep people out of prison they should end their mass incarceration and improve inequality, not allow select people (who will be almost definitely be disproportionately white) to get out easier.

But then again the head of state is an outspoken fan of the military dictatorship so that does not seem likely.

This is such a condescending understanding of why most crime happens. Especially in a country with as much wealth disparity as Brazil.

The toilet paper shortage is kind of a bad example, because it was caused by a very real and sudden shift in demand from the very seperate commercial and personal toilet paper manufacturing markets.

They can take their content, but not their audience, making the whole thing rather useless. The only thing that enables that in film is the relative neutrality of cinemas and streaming platforms.

Not really. I can't easily find any statistics, but I just based it on the fact that a few years ago roughly half of my techy friends used XMPP. Many ran their own servers and all of the clubs had one. The work one had hundreds of users online at all times. Today all of these numbers are zero. Roughly split 40/40/20 between telegram, matrix and discord.

In my experience (which was echoed by coworkers requests to resend messages, until we switched) there are a select few happy paths where it works reasonably well and a lot more where it doesn't. You seemed to agree with that in your original comment.

In general the problems with XMPP are rarely with missing checkboxes or things that miraculously don't exist somewhere in the hundreds of accepted and in-progress XEPs, but the long tail of user experience in the real world.

> It would be nice if I could, say, post a picture or an emoji in one xmpp client and have it displayed in all other clients that are capable of sending emojis and pictures.

I don't personally think multi-device will ever be solved in a satisfactory way in XMPP. Like IRC, the whole architecture is fundamentally based on relaying messages. This works great for desktop computers, but as you add more devices with more intermittent connectivity, it breaks down quickly as you need to resort to hacks like sending deltas to other devices as carbon copies, which may or may not be delivered or interpreted correctly by clients. To solve it you need to fundamentally rethink your protocol not as one that relays messages, but synchronizes history. This is extremely hard to do without breaking backwards compatibility as you basically need to rearchitect every part of the stack. Matrix is a notable open messaging standard that does this and although it has it's flaws, multi-device experience is not one of them.

I'd definitely welcome XMPP making improvements in this area, but I'm not personally optimistic it can be done in time considering the generally dwindling userbase.

I don't think recognizing it as labor needs to change how you feel about doing it at all. I'm doing labor that makes HN more monetarily valuable right now by writing replies and I'm obviously fine with that. And as to almost everything being labor in some way... well, that's the world we live in for better or worse.

Yes it is. That is what they make their money off of, the difference between what they earn off of the labor of the video creators and the money they pay out. If nobody uploaded videos, youtube could not sell attention just like if no steelworkers arrived, the steel mill can not sell steel. That applies to all social media/user generated content platforms.

Now, you might argue that this does not feel like labor because it's more voluntary than labor usually is. Which is totally correct and exactly why this industry is so lucrative.

This is very naive but more importantly, there are more than enough engineers out there that there's no need to risk creating a hostile workplace by employing bullies anywhere in your organisation.

Why are you so intent in employing them?

Sorry, but a good architect bully is not a bit better than a bad manager bully.

My unfortunate conclusion is that a large portion of people in this industry are either like this or wish they could get away with being like this. The amount of people who always reply about how they don't see any issues is enough proof of that.

The way I see it, this is the only possible purpose this system could have. With the press after this announcement, almost every single person in posession of those materials knows it's not safe to store them on an iPhone. By it's construction, this system can only be effective against things that the owner is not aware their phones are being searched for.