csnover

No, it is the following the principle of YAGNI.

In my opinion, clap is a textbook example of over-engineering for a single metric (UX) at the expense of all other considerations (compilation speed, runtime cost, binary size, auditability, and maintainability). It is an 18kloc command-line parser with an additional 125kloc of dependencies that takes nearly 6 seconds to compile (‘only’ 400ms for an incremental build) and which adds nearly 690KiB to an optimised release binary (‘only’ 430KiB if you strip out most of the sugar that only clap provides).

There are many other command-line parsers to choose from that do all the key things that clap does, with half or less the build cost, and most of them with 30x less binary overhead[0]. argh is under 4kloc. gumdrop is under 2kloc. pico-args is under 700loc. What is the value of that extra 10kloc? A 10% better parser?

I am not saying there is no room for a library like clap—it is, at least, a triumphant clown car of features that can handle practically any edge-case anyone ever thought of—but if I got a nickel every time I spent 15 minutes replacing a trivial use of clap with pico-args and thus reduced the binary size and compile time of some project by at least 80%, I would have at least three nickels.

Just to try to pre-empt arguments like “disk space is cheap”, “compiler time is cheaper than human time”, etc.: there are no golden bullets in engineering, only trade-offs. Why would you default to the biggest, slowest option? This is the “every web site must be able to scale like Facebook” type logic. You don’t even have to do more work to use argh or gumdrop. If clap ends up having some magic feature that no other parser has that you absolutely need, you can switch, but I’ve yet to ever encounter such a thing. Its inertia and popularity carry it forward, but it is perhaps the last choice you should pick for a new project—not the first.

[0] https://github.com/rosetta-rs/argparse-rosetta-rs

Three-strikes-style rules like this make for easy decision-making, but they don’t make for good decision-making. They eliminate curiosity about the root problem, reject the reality of how humans learn (it is almost never linear), and usually end up backfiring catastrophically at some point. Compliance by fear does not make for open and healthy communities.

The fundamental attribution error makes us believe the problem must be that this kind of person is “not interested in listening to reason”, but I can tell you that the ones who aren’t interested in listening make that abundantly clear when you ask them to stop. They are not the ones I struggle with. The problem cases are those who act in good faith but have trouble regulating their emotions, infrequently enough to not be an obvious menace, but consistently enough that I recognise their names.

The goal of an online community is to be a space where people interact, so banning someone from interacting is a failure to succeed at the goal, but so is allowing someone to remain to the point where others choose to leave voluntarily.

The angst comes from the grey area between “do nothing” and “ban forever”. How does one strike a balance between the health of the overall community against the need of the individual to be able to take risks and make mistakes? A simple binary doesn’t cut it.

Sorry for the confusion. I was referring to other online spaces like Twitter and Reddit where the discourse today is so toxic that it has desensitised people into accepting or even encouraging abusive behaviour. Name-calling is a typical example. It’s something that should register as abusive but doesn’t for most people any more, because in these very high-profile online spaces it’s not just normative, it’s actively rewarded with likes and upvotes. It’s probably impossible to not have that seep into most people’s baseline expectations for online conduct.

An army of dictatorial tone-policing moderators won’t create a safe space free from abuse, just a different kind of toxic space. So it is a very hard problem, not solvable by just kicking out a couple of bad apples. We are all swimming in a sea that causes the apples to rot.

This is exactly what happens on VOGONS, but it relies on the community reporting violations, and I suspect this isn’t happening consistently. I’ve reviewed too many reports where multiple people had been breaking the rules for days before anyone bothered to flag a single post.

I don’t know what to do about how toxicity has become so normalised in online spaces that people don’t even bother to flag it. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to tell new members that VOGONS is not Reddit or Twitter and to not import antisocial behaviour from those places into this place. It is like fighting a losing battle with an invasive species.

Frankly, I also don’t know how to strike the right balance when it comes to long-time members who break the rules infrequently but consistently. Knowing that a forum regular is probably going to break the rules again in the future, but not for several months, doesn’t make for an obvious solution to me. So I try to do the best I can to remind people to do better, and hope the time-until-relapse goes up. But I am sure this negatively impacts other community members since they will see the same person doing the same thing again and wonder why nothing is being done about them, not noticing that the last incident was three or six or twelve months ago.

Forum admin here. No posts were reported or removed and the author hasn’t posted since last April. I don’t know what’s going on here and have reached out to them to try to understand and assist. The community standards explicitly prohibit off-site harassment but unless someone tells us, there’s nothing I can do about it.

By the time someone has entered the workforce it should not be necessary to be ‘checked on’ by some surrogate parental figure.

In a functioning workplace, everyone agrees to do their work because it is part of the social contract of working on a team. They don’t need to be told what to do. If someone is falling behind, they’ll talk to other team members and work together to get back on track. You are there to help your coworkers, and they are there to help you. Someone doesn’t have to be your manager to make sure projects run smoothly; everyone can take turns in this role if they feel like it’s something they’re interested in doing and are competent in that role.

It’s only through the distorted lens of corporate ladder climbing and backstabbing departmental politics that the idea arises that you’ll just hire untrustworthy people and then beat them into submission by making a workplace into a prison.

There is a podcast miniseries called The Divided Dial[0] that answers the question of why conservative radio dominates in America, but very briefly, based on my understanding of their reporting:

1. The elimination of the Fairness Doctrine meant that radio stations no longer had a legal obligation to provide a fair reflection of differing viewpoints on matters of public importance;

2. The elimination of national ownership caps in the 1996 Telecommunications Act enabled a rapid and extreme consolidation of radio stations;

3. These new national radio conglomerates slashed costs by vertically integrating production, creating fewer shows, and rebroadcasting them to all their owned stations;

4. The concept of “format purity” spilled over from music radio into talk radio, causing commercial talk stations to switch from showcasing a variety of opinions to airing one political perspective all day;

5. The conservative talk radio format was perceived as less risky by radio executives, and so that was the format that commercial talk radio switched to.

Air America may have eventually succeeded despite its many other flaws—except they owned no radio stations of their own, so there was no place for them to go in this hyper-consolidated, format-pure commercial market.

[0] https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/divided-dial

It’s not making up history. There is a documentary[0] on the history of React where the people involved in its creation and use at Facebook described it this way:

> Bolt [a predecessor of React] was basically more or less Facebook's implementation of a client-side MVC. [It was] not a tool belt, it was truly an application development framework. Something designed and meant to build complicated interactive rich apps and was being used to build pretty complicated very real products at Facebook at the time. […] As the product itself got more complex and as we added more engineers to the team, we didn't hit a wall but it started to get really, really hard to make changes. And that was around the time that Jordan [Walke, creator of React] was on the ads team and he's like ‘I wonder, there's got to be a better way’. […] Jordan was a product engineer at the time, working on ads, and ads has one of the most complicated pieces of UI across all of Facebook at the moment. On the ads team they were hitting the limits of what you can do without React complexity wise. […] Jordan had a lot of very interesting ideas around how you could take what we had done in Bolt and make it easier for it to scale with people's ability to understand large applications.

As the GP said, React was explicitly designed to solve the problem of having many engineers writing large, complex, client-side applications. It was not designed for building simple web sites.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pDqJVdNa44

This doesn’t make sense to me. You can perform the exact same fingerprinting by looking at which image in a srcset is being requested.

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.[0] The burden of proof is on the author to demonstrate that software quality is actually worse now. If they want to refute the argument that they are engaged in rosy retrospection, then they should offer more than a handful of personal anecdotes that demonstrate nothing.

Google Drive lost some data that one time in 2023? Cool. In the 1990s, Windows uptime was measured in BSODs per day, and data loss was predicated on how frequently you remembered to hit Ctrl+S before your computer crashed.

Your bank has a frustrating mobile UI? Cool. Ten years ago, they probably didn’t even have a mobile UI, or if it did, people were also complaining that it sucked[1].

Security is worse now because people don’t update their dependencies so leak user data? Cool. The largest known data breach to date happened in 2013[2]. Ten years before that, the entire internet nearly collapsed because of a computer worm[3].

Is any of this a more valid rebuttal to the original author? No. They’re just more anecdotes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor

[1] https://reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/30psm7/any_ban...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/technology/yahoo-hack-3-b...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Slammer

The answer is “because the author is engaged in rosy retrospection”.

The Atlantic, in 2013: Why is software so slow?[0]

Mac Observer, in 2015: OS X quality is declining.[1]

Some random programmer blog, in 2015: “Worse Is Better” 25 Years Later – Have We Gotten Lazy?[2]

Information Week, in 2009: Paging AIM: Why Does Software Always Get Worse?[3]

MIT Technology Review, in 2002: Why software is so bad.[4]

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/why-is-...

[1] https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/mac-experts-weigh-in...

[2] https://spin.atomicobject.com/worse-is-better-vs-right-thing...

[3] https://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/paging-aim-why...

[4] https://www.technologyreview.com/2002/07/01/40875/why-softwa...

> If you supply your own encryption key, it's true that Backblaze can't read your data at rest.

It’s worse than this. The private key for data decryption is sent to their server by the installer before you can even set a PEK. Then, setting the PEK sends the password to them too, since that’s where your private key is stored. So you have to take their word not just that they never store the key and promptly delete unencrypted files during restoration, but also that they destroy the unprotected private key and password when you set up PEK. It’s a terrible scheme that seems almost deliberately designed to lull people into a false sense of security.

> Of course, if you've started with the conclusion that smartphones and social media can't possibly be the problem, you'll be able to deflect anything away from that particular cause.

Similarly, starting with the conclusion that smartphones and social media must be the problem, you’ll deflect away from a lot of contradictory evidence that suggest a more complex interplay between other societal issues, and that smartphones/social media are—if anything—likely just illuminating and amplifying known and pre-existing root causes of poor mental health in young people: poverty, trauma, discrimination, and pressure to excel[0].

Literature reviews of social media and smartphone use show “conflicting small positive, negative and null associations” and “do not offer a way of distinguishing cause from effect”[1]. Some hypothesised alternative causes of increases in depressive and anxiety symptoms with some stronger effect sizes include: increases in online bullying, decreases in sleep, long-term effects of the Great Recession (and, by extension, the European debt crisis), biological changes[2], restrictions on independent activity[3], and climate change[4]. Even before the invention of the smartphone, psychopathologies in young Americans had increased by a full standard deviation[5] over the previous 70 years. The number of teens that report extremely high levels of stress doubles during the school year[6], yet there is little blame currently being cast in that direction, despite it being the overwhelmingly largest self-reported source of stress at 83%.

Claiming causation from such weak evidence is not merely foolish, it’s potentially quite dangerous. Despite the parent commenter’s incorrect claim that this is purely an American issue, they are almost certainly correct that smartphones and social media are currently being used as scapegoats so society can avoid confronting and addressing the deeply entrenched and deeply uncomfortable root causes of harm. I think this can be seen, at least in part, in the casual discarding of evidence that—especially for marginalised groups[7]—access to online spaces can be protective to young peoples’ mental health.

Trying to avoid discussing the root problems is bad enough on its own, since it means they will not be fixed, but the proposed solution of using restrictive mediation—that is, shielding young people from harm rather than educating them—is almost certainly worse than doing nothing at all[8].

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31697105/

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8221420/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7015269/

[3] https://gwern.net/doc/psychiatry/depression/2023-gray.pdf

[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00059-3

[5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19945203/

[6] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2013/stress-r...

[7] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305121988931

[8] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...

> I think few people have any doubts about social media being a net negative for young people.

They should have doubts. This position is not supported by the currently available evidence[0][1][2]. The APA’s position paper makes this explicit: “Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.”

So long as focus remains on scapegoating ‘social media’ as the main cause of suffering, we will never solve the problem. The negative aspects of social media apply to young and old equally, and as far as I can tell are largely manifestations of deeper societal issues that have festered for generations.

[0] https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advi...

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8221420/

[2] https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-screen-time...

No, it is just a numeronym[0], just like K8s for Kubernetes, g11n for globalisation, i18n for internationalisation, or L10n for localisation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym

The article states that adverse events were “twice as likely”, but the abstract of the study says that the hazard ratio was 4.53 (95% CI 2.00–10.27). Can someone who is hopefully more statistically literate than me explain what seems like an obvious discrepancy here? Did they just take the lower bound of the confidence interval and report that?

In searching for a non-paywalled copy of the actual study, I found that other news outlets like CNN seem to be doing the same thing.

> I'm not sure if there's a decent UPS brand any more. I get the impression APC has been going downhill since the acquisition.

I’ve noticed a similar thing.

I had a 2005 Smart-UPS tower that never failed, but developed some transformer buzz that was annoying in an office environment—and hey, improved standby efficiency and an LCD panel would be nice—so I replaced it in 2013 with its latest equivalent. This one ran for about nine years and then started rebooting itself randomly, dropping the load each time. (It had no issues transferring and holding a load on battery, and self-test passed.) Its 2022 replacement now uses a non-standard USB-A male-to-male cable, is missing information that used to exist in the LCD menu, seems to have a problem charging from 98% to 100%, and has a broken event log (event 1 is always “Site wiring” and every other event is always “None”, even though there have been multiple power events, and there is no site wiring issue). It works, but QA issues are evident.

I’d previously tried a prosumer-grade CyberPower UPS (CP1500PFCLCD) on some other less critical equipment. When its battery failed after two years, it cut power to the load. When the charger failed a few years later, it cut power to the load. It died completely in about six years.

Tripp-Lite’s consumer grade stuff seems to work well enough for what it is, but their higher-end equipment seemed to all be designed for environments where noise doesn’t matter, which makes it a non-starter for an office. Eaton (their parent) seems the same.

So it would be great to know what is an actually good choice these days. At the moment I’m not in the market for anything and hopefully what I’ve got will run for another decade, but if it doesn’t, I have no good idea about what else to buy today.

It’s baffling. When APC first added native USB support to their Smart-UPS series, they chose a standard USB-B port. When they introduced “SmartConnect” a few years ago, this port was replaced by a USB-A port which requires a non-compliant USB-A male-to-male cable for monitoring. The only ‘good’ reason I can think of for this change is that someone realised that these new cloud-connected UPSes would be easily bricked by some bad firmware update (since apparently that’s a feature now), and wanted to use USB thumb drives as a recovery mechanism, but I have no idea. I think even though they have a built-in Ethernet port now, one still needs to buy their network management card for non-cloud remote management, so it could just as easily be another attempt at some weird vendor lock-in.

I never said generative AI was itself capable of creativity. Generative AI is a tool, not an entity. I said it enables more people to be creative, in the same way that other tools like Photoshop enable more people to be creative. Using a sampler to create a song rather than arranging and playing all the instruments doesn’t make it less creative, or devoid of creativity. It’s just a different, more accessible form of expression, enabled by technology.

I agree that generative AI, due to its nature, trends toward the average and thus is incapable of engaging with the extremes of human experience—but not every creative expression has to be at the extreme. Every Marvel film, every shovelware game, every summer pop jam, panders to the average. There’s enormous value in having a tool that allows professional artists to work more quickly at the average—and, perhaps more critically, for everyday people to approach the average in the first place. I don’t believe it is fair to suggest that such things are valueless “not ART”, but I’m not definitely not here to engage in philosophical discussion of the definition of “art”.

As far as history goes, I did provide a citation, which I encourage you to actually look at (and it cites several dozen more books and other articles if you need more primary sources). You are objectively incorrect in your assertion that the phonograph facilitated the growth of live music(ians), but I suspect you may not even understand what is meant by “live musicians”—not because of you, but because the phonograph was so revolutionary that it fundamentally changed what it meant to be a musician—and even redefined what a “song” is[0].

It is only with the benefit of hindsight that you can state so confidently that audio recording is a net benefit to music. Many felt that the phonograph was an abomination at its conception. They claimed that the essence of music was in its ephemeral nature, that the uniqueness of each performance contained the creative expression and the sheet music itself was just a skeleton for creativity. They said mechanical recordings deprived listeners of the true experience, and that individual artists lost their autonomy. They spoke in terms exactly like you are now, and those ideas were wrong then, and they are almost certainly wrong now.

[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/phonograph-chang...

> Society is built by and for humans.

These machines are also built by and for humans.

> If we want to empower humans over machines, that seems perfectly acceptable.

But that’s not what’s happening here. This is a faction of humans fighting to maintain their power and control over how the rest of humanity is allowed to produce artistic works.

Creatives who fight against generative AI are trying to empower themselves over everyone else. Corporations who develop closed-source AI like OpenAI are also trying to empower themselves over everyone else. The main problem in both cases is the way a select few are trying to amass power for themselves.

Generative AI has fundamentally shifted the scope of what it means to be creative, and prohibiting it from being trained on the collective works of humanity doesn’t empower humans over machines. It empowers some humans at the expense of other humans. Big AI companies acting exploitatively and trying to figure out how to build their own moats so only they are allowed to control the technology does the same thing, so this shouldn’t be allowed to happen either.

This is not the first time, nor is it likely to be the last, that a major disruption happened in creative arts due to technology. The invention of the phonograph decimated live musicians. Hundreds of thousands of jobs in cinemas, radio stations, and restaurants were permanently lost[0], but I don’t think anyone today would argue that we’d be better off if record labels hadn’t been allowed to reproduce the works of other artists.

Instead of retreading the same tired arguments about generative AI itself, let’s instead focus on how to ensure creatives can adapt and not end up homeless and penniless, and on how to ensure a few giant tech companies don’t monopolise an otherwise democratising technology. That, more than anything, will ensure that we are empowering humans over machines.

[0] https://slate.com/transcripts/RS94QUlwS0ZsSnZnakE4UVUzR2loUV...

As far as I can tell, consumer interchange fees in the US are significantly higher than they are in Europe. The interchange fees for Visa and MC consumer products within the EEU are 0.2–0.3%[0][1], whereas in the US they are from 1–3%[2][3].

[0] https://www.visa.co.uk/dam/VCOM/regional/ve/unitedkingdom/PD...

[1] https://www.mastercard.co.uk/content/dam/public/mastercardco...

[2] https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/vis...

[3] https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/n...

There is some additional detail in the reporting from Ars Technica[0]:

> The study looked at all emergency department visits, not only visits related to abortion. This could capture medical care beyond abortion-related conditions, because people on Medicaid often lack primary care and resort to going to emergency departments for routine care. When the researchers tried to narrow down the visits to just those related to abortion, they included medical codes that were not related to abortion, such as codes for ectopic pregnancy, and they didn't capture the seriousness of the condition that prompted the visit. Medication abortions can cause bleeding, and women can go to the emergency department if they don't know what amount of bleeding is normal. The study also counted multiple visits from the same individual patient as multiple visits, likely inflating the numbers. Last, the study did not put the data in context of emergency department use by Medicaid beneficiaries in general over the time period.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/anti-abortion-groups...

Places like Avivo Village[0][1] which put single-room homes into unused commercial/industrial spaces and offer them up to unhoused people without most of the strings attached to traditional shelters: families are allowed, pets are allowed, people without ID are allowed, addicts are allowed.

[0] https://avivomn.org/avivovillage/

[1] https://www.mprnews.org/story/2023/10/04/resident-of-tiny-ho...

Link to the actual report:

https://groundworkcollaborative.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/...

The medical underwriting on Medigap plans also affects people who have the foresight to choose Original Medicare with Medigap.

Once you have a disqualifying health condition (and since Medicare is for the old and disabled, this is most people), you are stuck. If your Medigap provider raises their premiums above the rest of the market, you can’t switch to another one. If you miss a premium payment and get dropped by the plan, too bad, so sad, Medicare Advantage is your only practical option now.

Man, thank you for saying this. Stuffing results with geolocated local junk despite explicitly opting out by choosing “All regions” is so frustrating. This wasn’t happening a year or two ago. I submit negative feedback about it constantly, but I guess not enough people are doing that for anyone to notice or care.

I’ve also noticed a significant increase in attempts to stuff news into regular search results. I really do not appreciate being force-fed mental health poison. I don’t need it ever, but I especially don’t need it when I’m searching for some specific technical thing and then get emotionally sabotaged by some clickbait headline because … why? Some bullshit KPI? Why are tech companies so obsessed with pushing news into every orifice?

Whatever the problem is, all I know is that last year Linode said they tried and failed to get Microsoft to actually fix the problem[0], apparently despite assurances and multiple requests for a root cause analysis. Everyone else seems to have figured out how to not be overrun by spam and also not block entire netranges, so I’d say it is well past time for Microsoft to figure out how to do that too.

Thanks and good luck!

[0] https://www.linode.com/community/questions/22287/550-57511-a...

Linode respond swiftly to abuse reports[0], block outgoing SMTP by default, and prevent so many people from even registering for services that it is the #1 question people ask on their IRC channel. What more should they do? What is “enough”?

90% of the spam that I receive from a DMARC-validated sender comes from Google; should every Gmail user be punished because Google aren’t “doing enough”?

[0] Linode twice threatened to shut off services within 24 hours due to some vigilante scanning the internet with a broken virus scanner and automatically sending reports: https://virtuallyfun.com/2014/04/23/dumbass-of-the-year-awar... (n.b. this is not my site)