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csb6

1,136 karma · joined March 28, 2019

Currently developing synergy between multiple innovative strategic initiatives with a goal of increasing metrics. Strong believer in 10xers, but more so in 1000xers.
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csb6··on Sergey Brin Confronted Gavin Newsom
I am skeptical billionaires will actually leave their mansions in Malibu or Santa Barbara in any significant numbers just because of higher taxes they can easily afford to pay.
csb6··on Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages
Ada 83 did have generics - maybe you meant OOP support? That wasn't added until Ada 95.
csb6··on Sports bets on prediction markets ruled to be "swaps," exempt from state laws
If profit is the measure of utility, then gambling is just as useful: a winning bet makes you a profit or reduces your overall losses (depending on how you view it). But fundamentally you are making a bet that some future dice roll will go your way. It is still gambling.
csb6··on Sports bets on prediction markets ruled to be "swaps," exempt from state laws
The key contradiction is that financial speculation and gambling are a distinction without a difference. Financial speculation is just now more accessible and widespread than ever due to the accessibility and aggressive promotion of gambling/stock trading/crypto trading apps/websites.

Rather than reigning in financial speculation and gambling our institutions seem to have resolved the contradiction by reclassifying gambling as a legitimate "market".

csb6··on The house is a work of art: Frank Lloyd Wright
A house can be aesthetically appealing and matched to its surroundings without being leaky or damp. A house that is ugly and out of place can also be leaky and damp (they often are because those architects often are also prioritizing form over function, but an ugly form instead of an appealing form).
csb6··on The house is a work of art: Frank Lloyd Wright
> They should be trying to mesh with and improve the neighborhood they are in. They should be rooted in time and place.

I take it you are not familiar with FLW's philosophy? He believed buildings should mirror their environment using local materials and forms that fit into the landscape. He definitely wasn't in favor of the houses you seem to be describing, which don't fit their environment or local nature. That doesn't mean his buildings can't be considered beautiful or art. Art can fit into and mirror its environment.

csb6··on Miscellanea: The War in Iran
There is no evidence Iran has an active nuclear weapons program or has had one since the early 2000s, which even the article's author seems not to know. They have enriched uranium that could be further processed and used to make weapons, but there is no evidence they are doing so or have the capability to do so (and no, Israeli government/military sources are not reliable. They have every interest to lie about Iran having/nearly having nuclear weapons)
csb6··on Forget Flags and Scripts: Just Rename the File
It just doesn't seem that hard to send someone a message stating: "Run foo.exe --bar from command prompt/the terminal"
csb6··on Forget Flags and Scripts: Just Rename the File
Seems a lot easier to have a --help flag that lists all of the options and their function. That is self-documenting (assuming the descriptions are useful) and helps with discovery. Changing the name of the file to foo--bar.exe doesn't seem any easier than writing foo.exe --bar
csb6··on Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager
Interpreters for Python, Lua, etc. can be embedded so using them does not require a separate process.
csb6··on Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager
I was responding to this comment in the article and wondering about the historical context:

> Although, I do not know for sure why the original Wayland authors chose to combine the window manager and Wayland compositor, I assume it was simply the path of least resistance.

csb6··on Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager
Yeah, that makes sense. It seems like instead of introducing another IPC protocol like this project does, there could be a compositor that loads different window managers as plugins. Then everything is in the same process and there is no need for async communication. Of course a crash in the window manager would take down the compositor, but this is already true for Wayland compositors that combine both.
csb6··on Jeff Bezos wants Washington Post’s newsroom budget halved, productivity doubled
> Was it moral or good for the American republic? Again, he is not an elected official so it doesn’t matter.

Not sure where you have gotten this idea that morality or "doing the right thing" only applies to elected officials. The choices people make can be criticized even if those choices were legal or beneficial for their investors.

Destroying the credibility of a leading newspaper for some lucrative government contracts seems to be a net loss for society, but hey, at least Amazon's investors are happy and Bezos' tremendously unprofitable space company has some more cash.

csb6··on Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager
Wasn't one of Wayland's key design features combining the window manager and compositor? I am not too familiar with its history but surely there have been presentations or papers about the Wayland designers' reasoning for doing so.
csb6··on Jeff Bezos wants Washington Post’s newsroom budget halved, productivity doubled
> Who cares anyway today about newspapers and tv

Maybe the subscribers of the Post? They (reportedly) left in droves after Bezos interfered to stop the opinion board from endorsing a candidate and more recently fired nearly all international reporters. (including those in warzones)

He owns the paper and can do what he wants within the bounds of the law, but anyone is also free to criticize the decisions he makes, and subscribers are free to unsubscribe.

Criticism is about what someone ought to do, not what they can do. (these are very different)

csb6··on Dijkstra's Crisis: The End of Algol and Beginning of Software Engineering (2010) [pdf]
Not sure if I agree with his conclusion that Dijkstra believed all programming should be done by an "elite corps" of programmers. He believed (rightly or wrongly) that undergraduate students could be taught his mathematical methods of programming, and that formal methods could make programming simpler and more manageable. Claiming he was against "working-class" programmers seems silly; anyone employed as a programmer will work for a living and so would be working-class.
csb6··on First 6 days of Iran war cost $11.3B
Destroy civilian areas neighborhood by neighborhood until they comply? That's not only a war crime - that would create an international humanitarian crisis and millions of refugees. Tehran alone is a city of more than 9 million people. The IRGC doesn't care how many civilians the U.S. kills. It only strengthens their case that the war is existential and America/Israel want to obliterate Iran. They have a huge stockpile of missiles and drones that are not easily destroyed. Mines are not needed to close the strait, just the credible threat of drone and missile strikes, and no ship will sail through.

"Regime-aligned civilians" is a slippery slope that is essentially collective punishment. Most anyone in Iran can be tied to the government through jobs or family, and they are not segregated by level of "regime alignment", so you would be obliterating the homes of many civilians who might otherwise oppose the government.

Genuinely flabbergasted that you came up with that strategy unprompted when not even Hegseth ("drink blood from the skulls of our enemies") has suggested it AFAIK. Your post genuinely reads like the monologue of a cartoonish villain.

csb6··on First 6 days of Iran war cost $11.3B
Attacking Iran has made the entire region less safe and so far there is no evidence Iran has been deterred. They continue to successfully hit targets with missiles and drones, and they have expanded operations to successfully close the Strait of Hormuz. Seems like it would have been a lot cheaper to not attack Iran and instead to rein in Israel, an existing nuclear power that is the primary destabilizing force in the Middle East.
csb6··on North Korea Was Right About Nuclear Weapons
The message to all other states to get nuclear weapons as soon as possible is reinforced by Trump's scrapping of the Iran nuclear deal. Even if you negotiate a treaty with the U.S. agreeing to deescalation, a new leader will likely tear it up (given the flip-flopping of the U.S. presidency, which has near total power over foreign policy).

Even returning to the negotiating table isn't enough - the U.S. and its allies may strike you anyways. (as they did last year when they killed the lead Iranian negotiator and again preemptively attacked during recent negotiations)

csb6··on Practical Guide to Bare Metal C++
The generic algorithms that come with the C++ standard library are useful. Once you get used to using them you start to see that ad-hoc implementations of many of them get written repeatedly in most code. Since most of the algorithms work on plain arrays as well as more complex containers they are still useful in embedded environments.
csb6··on Tony Hoare has died
Sad that his (and many others') dream of widespread formal verification of software never came true. He made really fundamental contributions to computer science but will probably be mostly known for quicksort and the quote about his "billion dollar mistake", not his decades-long program to make formal methods more tractable.

Makes me think of an anecdote where Dijkstra said that he feared he would only be remembered for his shortest path algorithm.

csb6··on Sir Tony Hoare has died
The blog author says that Jonathan Bowen informed them, so it is possible it hasn't been officially announced.
csb6··on Ethiopia gets $350M World Bank financing for its digital ID project (2024)
Having a single digital ID that is used for everything makes sense from a technical perspective (less duplication, ambiguity, and need to maintain multiple IDs) but from a privacy perspective it is bad. Effectively everything you do online would be tied to a single comprehensive representation of your identity even if the task that uses the ID doesn't require more than knowing "this is a unique person using this service". If user data is leaked then it is easier to tie every digital service being used by a person together since there is a single ID number used everywhere.

IMO fewer things should require ID (e.g. domestic flights) because it opens up the risk of personal data being leaked or misused for often not much benefit.

csb6··on Why Objective-C
That is one advantage of C++ - you can use higher level features like generic data types/algorithms, member functions, constructors, destructors, and iterators and still have performant code. You can use object-orientation without having to heap allocate each object and pay the cost of "virtual" calls. (which many other object-oriented languages couple together)
csb6··on PL/0
I think the name was likely a tongue-in-cheek reference to PL/I being notoriously complex to implement a compiler for. Wirth designed a language for teaching that had an extremely small set of features (making its complexity much closer to "0" than "1"). It is basically a small subset of Pascal.
csb6··on Trunk Based Development
Yeah, I work on avionics software where we sometimes need to support old releases with fixes for many years, and this is basically how we do it. Essentially maintaining multiple trunks and only backporting changes needed by customers using the old releases (there is a high bar so it has to be something like a security fix or an important bug fix)
csb6··on Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking
It seems people have figured out that sociopathy and self-promotion are rewarded in the current culture and that being a con artist has essentially no consequences anymore. And all of it is done by ambitious people who are p-zombies, lacking an inner life or curiosity about anything but how to make more money.
csb6··on US businesses and consumers pay 90% of tariff costs, New York Fed says
One way to view the history of the Republican Party is a power struggle between Wall Street and regional/small business owners. Wall Street understands that the U.S. consumer economy depends on international trade to provide cheap, abundant goods and so supports free trade, immigration of skilled workers, and foreign aid/interventions to further U.S. business interests. For them, the culture war and nationalist rhetoric is a way to get Republican voters riled up but they don't really believe any of it.

The regional/small business owners are always threatened by competition from larger international firms and benefit less from international trade. They believe in the nationalist rhetoric and are opposed to free trade because it undercuts their businesses with cheaper products. They think the U.S. can remain the world's superpower without running a trade deficit and doesn't need to build alliances to maintain its power. This is Trump's base, and their misunderstanding of U.S. power is why they love the idea of tariffs. (good for local producers!) They want to get all the benefits of being a superpower without any of the costs.

csb6··on Apple XNU: Clutch Scheduler
I believe it means Apple's other hardware platforms (phones, tablets, smart TVs, VR headsets, smartwatches)
csb6··on I write games in C (yes, C) (2016)
Yes, having built-in generic containers and algorithms is the part that keeps me favoring C++. Bespoke versions of these can always be written in C (and work fine) but C++ makes it much easier and saves time. Lambdas and function objects are also useful.
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