15,526 karma · joined July 20, 2008
Not sure that they interpret the Streisand Effect in the conventional way. If anything, temporary increase in usage of targeted tools helps them make the case that they're being harmed by said tools' existence.
We can hope this inspires a) greater suspicion toward proprietary players that are sitting atop open-source work like GitHub (they're not the only one by any stretch); and b) greater adoption of systems that distribute the software's entire history together, including documentation and bug reports, e.g. Fossil.
The common association with computers as mechanisms of boredom, exclusion, and wage slavery is so strong now that it's hard to imagine anyone seriously countenancing the old paradigm that the technology was meant to allow. I don't know whether that outcome was ultimately inevitable or not, but either way, it's massively disappointing.
If it becomes apparent that $CURRENT_EMPLOYER is not such a place, it's time to start protecting yourself with things like formal disability accommodations through HR, etc. The problem is that once this becomes apparent, shrewd politicians will have already worked to make it look like your accommodations are just a cover-up. That's not necessarily a deal killer, as every company puts a different weight on the legal risk that HR exists to prevent, but it's not likely to ingratiate your manager, which makes things difficult.
The long and short of it is that it's folly to imagine that HR is in your corner. They are paid by the company and they exist to keep the company free from the mind-boggling expense of lawsuits. You can work this to your advantage sometimes.
The grandparent was asking what we can learn from Postgres in terms of driving adoption, as I understood it. And the reality is that most of Postgres's recent adoption uptick is because there really aren't many other options. It's not a good example of driving adoption in a crowded market, etc.
My apologies for being unclear before, and thanks for pointing it out so I can try to clarify.
Like most software that gains adoption, MySQL made some very broad claims about their software's capabilities and never really delivered on them, at least not in a way that would be considered production-ready by Serious Persons(TM).
That's the crux of MySQL v. PgSQL, Linux v. BSD, etc. Good engineers spend their time building good software and are generally too focused on that to spend much time going around and making outlandish promises. Postgres has benefited from Oracle's intentionally-bad stewardship over MySQL, but it doesn't usually work that way.
The added benefit of this is that you then know what software you're running, instead of Amazon's fly-by-night hackjob. We've hit several real-world bugs that were either incorrect backports of something that had been patched years before upstream, or wholly new issues caused by whatever they're doing to make Aurora auroar.
Since honesty is a theme of this thread, let's be real here. PgSQL is popular now only because Oracle killed MySQL.
This is not to denigrate the work of the Postgres team -- it's easily one of the best-managed open-source projects and my admiration for them is immense -- but ~95% of the time, the tech stack is chosen as a fashion statement.
MySQL was fashionable until Oracle showed up. Postgres has been trucking along for decades and has essentially won by default. I don't know if there are many great marketing insights to take away, other than "stay out of the way of the $50B gorilla".
* There is no driver for the Goodix USB fingerprint reader yet
* Occasionally thin lines of pixels don't update correctly (hard to describe, might get a photo soon)
* dmesg logs periodic errors with amdgpu and the new driver for the realtek wireless card, but I haven't noticed any negative functional impact associated with these.
* The TSC is marked unreliable on each boot.
That said, it's plenty usable as a daily driver, and the performance is very strong for the price point. GeekBench 5 results at https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/3495992
A little sensitive on this due to a recent experience where I was hired and given "ownership" only to have my very modest proposals for changes shot down if not just entirely ignored. Some "ownership"!
I continue to believe that within 10 years, Microsoft will have just switched entirely to Linux+WINE under the covers. :)
I've had friends who've done it just because they enjoy meeting people who are coming into town and hearing their stories, telling them about the area, etc. Many of the rides I've taken, upon talking to the driver, they'll say they do it because it gets them out of the house and they can work whenever they want. Very few of the people were trying to use it to replace a conventional employment situation.
We should all be grateful that the state is rescuing all of these people from the exploitative habits of these unprofitable companies, I guess.
For any arbitrary shopper-item combination, as long as the item can fit the basic merchantability requirements over the duration of the return period, the only significant criterion is going to be price. Knowing this and then ensuring that they have the cheapest merchantable items in every product class is how Walmart became the de-facto shopping nexus everywhere that major social and/or governmental interference hasn't stopped them. It's the place to go to get the stuff you have to buy, not the stuff you want to buy.
If your standards are too high to wear a shirt that consists of 80% recycled plastic, you don't buy shirts at Walmart. But that doesn't mean you automatically have the same high standards for a garden spade, a toilet seat, or a kitchen spatula. If we imagine that we need all four of these items today, we go to Walmart to buy the latter three and then use the money saved to invest in a better 100% cotton shirt from $FAVORITE_SHIRT_VENDOR.
Every decentralized or censorship-resistant network gets dragged down to the worst of its adopters in the public consciousness (not entirely by accident IMO). It's sad, but should be acknowledged as par for the course at this point. If you're not going to fall into line, expect the power brokers to mix you up with the worst of 'em.
This probably isn't an excuse for Elastic anymore, but it's how Elastic was born ("easier than Solr!" -- they didn't invent full-text search, after all) and it's how whatever supplants Elastic will be born. Why is MySQL dominant over Postgres even though "referential integrity" didn't come to the game until v5? Why Docker over jails or OpenVZ? etc. People adopt technology because it's fashionable and it becomes fashionable in part because it's perceived as easy to use. Security and ease-of-use are not quite true opposites, but there's definitely some intrinsic tension.
We have a lot of hapless practitioners in the space and the root problems here won't go away until we get some standards. Better solutions usually lose because crappy stuff focuses more effort on marketing and an "easy" onboarding process, where better stuff focuses on the operational complications of the real world.
However, if someone is willing to go to that level of effort, the target probably needs to aim for something a little more forceful than tricking Facebook's autotagger.
Surveillance software that purports to accurately identify a person across multiple images is not just looking for the same content with some visually insignificant modifications. It's reading your facial structure, attaching your name to it, and searching for it in every image received. Fawkes is working to defeat that specific use case, not all fuzzy matchers in general.
P.S. If you have a human assailant running a reverse image search for photos of you, I think you're well past the point that something like this could be expected to help.
It's not even about the standard lib as much as the culture. Ignoring the fact that it would take years for the changes to become widespread enough to be usable, "pull in 400MB of dependencies for everything, including dependencies of dependencies" is practically a cultural value in the JS scene. It demonstrates why JS is voluntarily practiced primarily by the inexperienced all these years after it established itself as the universal platform.
Check out https://cvdazzle.com (archive link, because honestly I'm surprised the site is still up: http://archive.is/v39xI)
Zulip is promising but I think there's a little bit of a bubble around it here on HN. In the real world, its reception is much more mixed, and outside the context of software development, topic threads are awkward and difficult to manage.