a4isms

Old-timers who date back to when Joel Spolsky's early musings on the business of software development were fixtures on the HN front page will remember him using the phrase "fire and motion" for Microsoft's old strategy of constantly making changes so that everyone trying to keep up was—like the Red Queen—running as fast as they could but not getting anywhere.

> Watch out when your competition fires at you. Do they just want to force you to keep busy reacting to their volleys, so you can’t move forward?

> Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP.

—Joel Spolsky, "Fire and Motion," 2002

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

Old poker adage: "The more wild cards and crazy rules, the greater the expert's advantage."

Poker has nothing on Commercial Lawfare.

Are you seriously suggesting that Chinese automobile companies exporting to Europe and possibly North America are oblivious to the existence of winter? Their own country has cities like Harbin where temperatures can reach -35.

> Exporting your manufacturing base to a nation that opposes the fundamental values of a nation is completely suicidal

How do you feel about integrating your manufacturing base with a nation that opposes the fundamental values of our nation, and constantly fantasizes about annexing our nation?

Unless you're arguing for Canada to make its own EV manufacturing industry independently from both China and America?

Rules in sports are always being adjusted, and participants are always looking for (barely legal) ways to get around them.

Example: In cycling, they banned narrow handlebars. There's an aero advantage, but it was seen as a safety problem. So cyclists canted their brake hoods way inside, rested their hands on the brake hoods, and got an aero advantage.

And now there's a rule about brake hoods. Laws are meant only be living things that change as society changes, and also change to patch what we might call "exploits." You are perfectly correct: It's never one and done, it's an ongoing process.

He has often said things that are true, provided you ignore the ten to twenty times he said something else about the same subject with equal confidence. He is a master of goalpost relocation. Ask any Cybertruck owner. He shipped it, but was it the Cybertruck he promised?

There is a process by which functionality is pushed outward from the core to the edge. And there is another process by which functionality is pushed back from he edge to the core.

For example, people did things in JS over and over and over again and some off those things became browser functionality, and some of them became CSS functionality, and some prompted server and browser changes.

Yes, you are right, the process is slow. But when software has a way for people to customize it, that customization is a very egalitarian kind of feature discovery.

Take off and nacho them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

I follow your reasoning. If we just look at businesses, and we include every business that pays money for AI and one or more employees use AI to do their their jobs, then we're in the Early Majority phase, not the Innovator or Early Adopter phases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle

Once upon a time, society was all of us, but Society were the filks that held coming out parties and gossiped about whose J-class yacht was likely to defend the America's cup.

Society with a capital S are the beneficiaries of the bubble.

> The 50x developer is a pervasive myth in our industry

Doesn't it depend upon how you measure the 50x? If hiring five name-brand AI researchers gets you a billion dollars in funding, they're probably each worth 1,000x what I'm worth to the business.

Back in the days when desktop applications were the thing, I recall a (probably apocryphal) claim that nobody used more than 5% of Microsoft Office, but no two users used the same 5%.

So it always appeared to be bloated with features nobody ever used, but actually somebody, somewhere, was using every one of the features. I doubt the number was actually 5% or that usage of features was close to even, but the principal idea seems reasonable. Different users use different subsets of a product.

No different than the Russians hunting for American dissidents to prop up. Well, a little different in that the Russians hunted for them in the Senate chamber and golf clubs.

I think everything you're saying about the difference between school shootings and NPM supply chain attacks is correct, but at the same time "You made a joke about why A is like B, but here's why A and B are actually different, therefore the joke is not funny" is not persuasive. Comedy does not need to be rigorous, the person you're replying to is not arguing that supply chain attacks are like school shootings, therefore open source programmers should do active shooter drills. That would be fallacious reasoning.

It's literally just a joke. If it tickles your fancy, it works for you. If you get lost in the weeds of comparing the socio-political mechanisms of open source to guns, or note that supply chain attacks happen to other package managers, the joke won't work for you.

I assure you, it works just fine for me even though yes I think it would be ridiculous to claim there's anything more to the comparison than, "This thing keeps happening, nobody thinks doing anything about it is worth the bother, so look at that, it keeps happening."

Anyone familiar with The Onion knows this, The Onion themselves repost the exact same thing every time there's a school shooting. Which emphasizes how regularly it happens, and therefore in turn I have no objection to a joke like this becoming copy pasta every time an NPM supply chain attack takes place.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Atheonion.com+%22no+way+to+p...

Deeply underrated comment. You can peel back the layers of sarcasm like... An onion.

For future reference: https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/usage-bad-rap-vs-bad...

I share "Intuitive Equals Familiar" on a regular basis. And here I go again:

https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html

"/s" to the point of "/S!!!"

"Do you know how naive you sound, Michael? Political parties and mega corps don’t strive to undermine the fabric of democracy itself."

"Oh? who's being naïve, Kay?"

How about if it's just to land the aircraft?

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/autonomi/autoland/

A classic of its era, thanks! And there's something enduring about the basic issue of integrating systems that are fundamentally misaligned.

Is AI the Vietnam of Product Management in the same way that Object-Relational Mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science?

https://web.archive.org/web/20220823105749/http://blogs.tedn...

Long before modern porn, there were laws that a man could not be charged with raping his wife. Society largely looked the other way when a man beat his wife. There was a time when underage women could be trafficked by their parents into marriage against their will. There was a time when a woman who accused a man of rape would basically end up on trial herself while his lawyer dragged out every single romantic or sexual relationship she had in graphic detail so that the jury would believe "she was asking for it."

I am under the impression that "unhealthy ideas about sex and the opposite sex" have been with us for a very, very long time. If we observe that porn addicts have such unhealthy ideas, are we confusing correlation with causation?

> I didn't even mention that it's free or that there are no ads, because that's pretty much the least important attribute to me.

In 2001, Joel Spolsky wrote:

Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like “Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music” and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it’s interesting because it’s peer to peer, completely missing the point that it’s interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

And in 2003, Apple started "selling" songs for 99 cents. They were incredibly successful, demonstrating that people weren't "pirating" songs to save a buck, but pirating songs to escape the deeply enshittified DRM shenanigans the industry employed, like installing rooting your PC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

There is a very large market of people who want no fuss, no muss access to movies, shows, and music. I personally think that many people who "pirate" shows do not want adware of any type, especially if it surveils them, and also do not want to stream certain shows and deal with issues like region locking, the shows vanishing when the streaming service retires them, and so forth. But that is a small quibble.

History agrees with you that "piracy" is not about the price, it's actually about the shitty experience that the music, TV, and film industries impose.

The fictitious Voight-Kampff test is based on a real machine based on terrible pseudo-science that was used in the 1960s to allegedly detect homosexuals working in Canadian public service so they could be purged. The line from the movie where Rachel asks if Deckard is trying to determine whether she is a replicant or a lesbian may be an allusion to the fruit machine. One of its features was measuring eye dilation, just as depicted in the movie:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_machine_(homosexuality_t...

The stakes for men subjected to the test were the loss of their livelihoods, public shaming, and ostracism. So... Blade Runner was not just predicting the future, it was describing the world Philip K. Dick lived in when he wrote "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" in the late 1960s.

It's not a dichotomy between "unfair" and "absolutely fair." Things can be more or less fair, and it makes sense to discuss making things "more fair" or "less unfair" even if in doing so, we cannot reach "perfectly fair for everyone, all the time."

A joke from the same family involves a pilot who gets lost in IMC conditions, and his radio is dead. Suddenly, looming out of the gloom is an office building with an open window. An employee spots the plane going by and waves. The pilot circles around and shouts "Where am I?"

The employee shouts back "In an airplane!" The pilot nods, sets a course, and navigates precisely 11 nautical miles NNE, and descends. Sure enough, a runway appears and he lands perfectly. Of course, he's debriefed about the incident. "How, " the investigator asks, "Did you find the airport?"

The pilot recounts the shouted conversation. "My question was answered in a way that was absolutely correct but useless for any practical purpose. I reasoned that I was talking to Microsoft Tech Support at their HQ, and I could dead reckon to Redmond Municipal Airport from there."

Has this consequence happened with self-driving automobiles on open roads in the US of A when people died in crashes? If not, why not?

> I think the American dream is over.

“The reason they call it The American Dream is that you have to be asleep to believe it.”

—George Carlin (1937 - 2008)