flipgimble

"ideas in question are racist" is presented without evidence or a convincing explanation.

I agree that racism has no place in government, so this quote, among many, from the president is very troubling:

"You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn't it, don't you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we're so different? You have good genes in Minnesota."

Here is the video: https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1307124621389463553?s=20

Have you read the executive order or the article?

From the article: "agencies are directed to initiate adverse action proceedings against managers who continue to hold CRT trainings"

This does not sound like a dispassionate funding policy change, more like an ideological purge of a set of ideas on which there is an ongoing debate across the country.

What do you imagine a treasury employee does all day, sits in a locked room and counts coins without any connection to the outside world? These are the people that are directing monetary policies that affect people's lives, well being and equity. Without an opinion on CRT itself, which I don't know much about, I think learning from any side about how those lives are affected, and the history of the country, is exactly what well informed government official should be doing.

It like telling a programmer they should only ever have a terminal and a code editor open, and ban using a browser during office hours.

At first I thought this was a news article, but looking into the author's writing this looks more like political ideology and propaganda wrapped in a pretense of pointing out the opposing ideology.

Banning ideas and research as "poison" and "dangerous" and even prohibiting public debate is about the most un-American position I can imagine. Was I the only one taught in public school that McCarthyism was bad and stain on the country? McCarthyism is still defined as the practice of making accusations of subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence.

The fact that Zenimax corporate, and likely some unknown exec in that machine, had a long standing grudge against John Carmack made me loose so much respect for them. I may not always agree with Carmack from what I've read on twitter (he works for Facebook now) but I have the utmost respect for him, his transparency in his key note lectures, and his supremely engineering focused priorities. His leadership at id Software led to open sourcing of game engines and building modding support in all their titles. This openness and community building became a trend in the PC gaming industry though the 90s and 2000s and ushered a creative golden age that jumpstarted many game development studios and careers. It seems like Zenimax took whatever excitement those early days of PC gaming generated and started extracting consumer dollars with over-produced sequels that treated PCs like another console. They were able to make much more money, but we all came out intellectually impoverished in my opinion.

Luckily there are a multitude of computing platforms where people with such uncompromising and dismissive views can take their business and let the market sort out the rest.

Can't help but think of parallel to programming languages as an analogy: Would you say that incompetence of programmers is a valid reason to advocate for languages with strict type systems that prevent them for making mistakes? If not, then assembly language should be the only way to program with maximum flexibility and opportunity for innovation.

I agree that Apple does not have a reputation beyond reproach and your criticism is valid on all points. However they do have a consistent track record of putting more power and control in the user's hands in terms of privacy, security and controlling access to their personal device. So I do recommend Apple products to overwhelmed parents and older relatives that I would otherwise have to spend hours supporting.

Quick google search (that apparently I've been to several times before) points me to a list of options on how to cancel subscriptions: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202039

But you are right that it takes more work to stop paying them money, that for example to swipe on the home screen and disable all push notifications from Facebook. The latter being something that doesn't impact Apple's revenue.

I could give you a quick example but do you expect the answer to this repeated question changing the fact that this is a real issue for responsible and engaged parents?

I was going to write more details, but I don't feel comfortable recounting other people's personal details. I could anonymize it but that would make it sound contrived. As someone who's daily job is consulting and helping solve tough technical problems for non-technical clients, I feel for these parents being overwhelmed. I can see how the technology is not always on their side when considering the marketing towards their kids and the type of e-commerce dark patterns.

Sure, but it also an increasingly common pain point, especially when combine with e-commerce dark patterns. I see a clear market demand for solving it. Busy parents may not have a comprehensive understanding of what the technology enables and what they need to restrict, when its one of 3-4 different platforms in their house, all subtly broken.

This is often missed by technology enthusiasts that evaluate a merits of a platform from their own individual point of view that prizes flexibility and lack of constraints over everything else.

A quick story to illustrate why Apple will likely keep doing its thing despite Epic and any other criticism:

My neighbor has two young teenage sons who are into PC gaming, also Android tablets. They sometimes come to me with questions knowing that I'm in the industry. Several months ago there was an incident where the parent discovered over $2500 in credit card charges mostly due to in game purchases. A good chunk was on Fortnite V-Bucks but also some SuperCell games. They were able to request a refund for more than half, and it was a stressfull event for the family with a lot of disciplinary actions following. I was asked for advice on about any technical solutions to the problem. I was able to suggest monitoring credit card charges in realtime, some parental controls that were rather painful to setup. Another touchy subject was how to talk to and educate their kids about online spending.

This incident highlighted how unregulated and seemingly dangerous the Windows and Android platforms are to an average non-technical family. You need to install AntiVirus software, you have to worry about malware, you have to worry about kids installing random crapware that bogs down performance (remember the IE toolbars?). I have to say Amazon and Xbox Live parental controls are some of the most kafkaesque nightmares I've had to battle with.

I also see predatory techniques aimed at kids that have long been used by companies that are primary funded by in-app purchases. There is widely discussed concept of fun-pain in this genre of game development, where you induce some level of "pain" that would induce someone to pay money to alleviate it. Simple example is to eliminate wait time for artificial delays in game progression. Yes, in some ways Apple and this entire genre of mobile games, profited from it and is now trying to provide alternatives with the Apple Arcade model.

In comparison Apple and iOS provides a walled utopia for these families and justifies its tight controls as a method of providing that safe and worry free computing experience.

How many people bought an iPad for their older relatives because they were just tired of family tech support? Seems like it was enough for that to become a tired stereotype with a grain of truth.

I have sympathies for the idea of an open computing platform as a developer. I see the web and open source an excellent outlet for those that are willing to take on that level of responsibility with their devices.

However most takes on Apple in response to the Epic spat have been crude caricatures of a capricious monopolist robber baron type. I'm not in complete opposition to that idea, but that its not a particularly sophisticated or informative analysis, when their success clearly shows a market need for just this type of curated platform.

Also Epic knowingly violated terms of a contract that they agreed to when it suited them and are painting it as a moral imperative as opposed to an argument over money and how to extract it from customers.

Could you explain the connection between this feature and a possible side channel attack?

I agree that having a political opinion is not a basis for firing anyone, and likely illegal. However as a manager, and a CEO of a company, your biases and prejudices regarding the rights of some of your employees are more likely to affect your performance and hurt the company.

But we are talking about Mozilla specifically, which states in their manifesto: "We are committed to an internet that includes all the peoples of the earth — where a person’s demographic characteristics do not determine their online access, opportunities, or quality of experience." If we put aside any value judgement on that statement, I can see how a CEO publicly supporting exclusion can raise concerns about their performance with respect to the company's mission.

Even so, Eich wasn't fired, he resigned and moved on.

Far more interesting to me is that 6 years later, you and others on this forums go to such effort to justify why any problem with the company is a consequence of that resignation. Eich doesn't need your support. I'm curious as to what drives the justifications and the splitting hairs as to what is the approved meaning of human rights as defined by international organizations. The language about denying human rights should have been the least controversial part of what I wrote.

I had to look up on wikipedia the details of the Brendan Eich resignation. It sounds like he donated money to California Proposition 8, and politician supporting it, which wanted to pass a state amendment banning same-sex marriage. So he supported denying a human right to a group of people. As a prominent CEO he was called out for it and he made a choice to resign. Is that about right?

It is notable that in your summary you refer to this as political fashion swings, and "unpopular" political views, and an overreaction. Would you characterize the civil right movement in the same fashion?

You also seem to correlate competent technical leadership with someone who sympathizes with Eich's views. That in my experience doesn't follow at all. If anything competent leadership means you have worked with many people of all different backgrounds and have excelled at leading and empowering them. Mozilla likely has many LGBTQ employees, and if your personal prejudices stifle their contributions, then you are not competent by definition of leadership.

It may not be significant to you, but to an epidemiologist this means a certain fraction of the overall population is going to die.

Facebook is a dying platform, and due to its enormous size and momentum it may be a decade before its downward trajectory is fully appreciated. Facebook will also fight like all hell to remain relevant, and the cheapest way is making empty pronouncement like they can help "heal the divisions in our society". Helps that they can never be made accountable for it.

Why do I think its dying? Generative youth culture has long left it for other social media platforms. In the US even the middle aged suburban demographic is getting tired of the Karens and Boomers spewing their hatred or turning what could be valuable online community spaces into their culture war battle ground. Facebook is very good at driving engagement in people that are susceptible to conspiracy theories, extremist views on any spectrum and generally excels at turning people into assholes that would not be tolerated in civil society. Just because its statistically easier to get high engagement metrics from people that are susceptible to fear tactics and have low critical thinking ability, their algorithm hyper focused on feeding them exploitative content. To be honest Fox News perfected this on an older medium. Facebook claims ignorance and plausible deniability: all they are doing is maximizing the daily-average-user analytics.

Its no wonder that it was the birth platform for Zenga and genre of games that exploits dopamine reward system. The games industry was too obvious about it and now cultural opinion turned them. They'll never go away, much like slots and casinos. Facebook is going with the same playbook but substituting shiny coin rewards with confirmation bias newsfeeds and viral factoids.

Only sadder is that most of the executive team has no idea what their critics are talking about because they have largely no social acumen, empathy or wisdom. Really good at convention keynotes:"But look, we're also doing VR and AI! We can't wait to see what you do with it, our free developers!"... They can point to numbers going up in fancy real time dashboard, they get praise for shareholders and bosses. They don't understand the what kind of people they snare up to make their number work. People quitting their platform is a lagging indicator, at least by years, that they built nothing of lasting human value, but exploited flaws in human psychology. I could be wrong of course, cigarette companies are still going strong.

Let me throw in an anecdote that may amuse some: I was working for a now defunct large game company when Epic and Tim Sweeny came in to demo Unreal Engine 3 very early before the PS3 and XBox360 were launched. This was about 2004. Their demo blew away executives in particular. They showed multicolored lights casting multicolored shadows on a single high detail character. One of the lights was behind a stained glass window, projecting beautiful patterns. Soon after a deal was signed to use the engine throughout the entire studio. In retrospect that was a good decision and I have a lot of respect for Unreal Engine and Epic in general.

Edit: found the video of the demo levels that shipped with very early UE3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m7T5ay_8DI

However UE3-generation games that finally shipped had none of the visual effects from the early demos. The multicolored shadows could only be rendered with multiple passes, at least one per light, which proved to be too expensive for larger dynamic game scenes. It took years of work from the demo to shipped games, and an army of unnamed engineers to wrestle the technology into a product.

UE4 had a great early demo of dynamic global illumination using something like voxel cone tracing if I remember correctly. To my knowledge that tech demo was never incorporated into the engine and never shipped.

Epic is famous for their demos, and I love them for it... at least now that I no longer work professionally in that field. If anything it charts a long term technical direction for interactive entertainment.

Its interesting that they call this a "Contact Tracing app" even after changing the naming to ExposureNotification.framework

I think these restrictions are meant to win confidence with a somewhat skeptical public. This will also confine the apps to be single purpose for contact tracing only.

You're right that nobody is blameless. But we can't abandon everyone to destructive whims of the minority. In the US only about 23% of the possible voting public won the last presidential election.

It's not just voting. I'm to blame for inaction and not running for office. As an engineer I could have something credible to say about many pressing issues. By why would I ever enter a race that is decided not on any values I uphold, but by manipulating the under-educated. Somehow the message did not win many races: "Vote for a scientist or an engineer or you may die from the next catastrophe that nobody believed us when we said we should prepare for it."

This article has an unexpected resonance for me after several weeks of pandemic lockdown. Just three months ago I would have laughed it off. Now I am increasingly pissed off.

In the US, but I see reflection of this in Europe as well, has allowed irresponsible puerile imbeciles to be elected. These people play games with wealth and power, with no regard to the lives and well-being of the society that pays for it. I did not mention any party, that perennial misdirection to their collective heist. Also don't fall for the other smoke screen of small vs. big government. I demand at least a competent government.

For politicians truth is whatever you make people believe it to be.

Meanwhile engineers and scientists struggle daily to find the hard facts of the world to painstakingly build or discover something that improves lives. We should be disgusted and revolted at who is leading us right now. We should drive these fools out office and strip them of any respect.

If we don't, there will be no one competent left in position to rebuild from this, or the next, catastrophe that "nobody" could have expected. Or maybe there will be some states or localities that can get their act together, and the rest will be a wasteland of warring cultural and racial tribes.

I’m not telling you to switch. I don’t think the S4TF team is telling you to switch anytime soon. At best you might want to be aware and curious about why Google is investing in a statically typed language with built in differentiation, as opposed to python.

Those that are interested in machine learning tooling or library development may see an opportunity to join early, especially when people have such irrational unfounded bias against a language, as evidenced by the hot takes in this thread. My personal opinion, that I don’t want to force on anyone, is that Swift as a technology is under-estimated outside of Apple and Google.

you may have replied to the wrong thread.

But I'd like to point out that while Google has some of the top C++ experts working for them, is heavily involved in C++ standardization and compiler writing process, in 2016 they claimed to have 2 billion lines of C++ running their infrastructure...

.. and yet they don't suffer from familiarity bias or the sunken cost fallacy I hear in your comment.

Instead Google C++ developers are sounding an alarm over the future direction the language and its crippling complexity:

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2020/p213...

I think my point stands that the criticism on this thread is mostly a surface level reaction and hung up on meaningless slogans like "software 2.0" or "breakthrough".

You use of the word "seems" is very apt here.

Have you considered that Google might have hired Lattner precisely because he is the founder of LLVM and Swift, and they hoped to leverage his organizational skills to jump start next generation tooling? We know google is heavily invested in llvm and C++, but dissatisfied with the direction C++ is heading [0]. They also are designing custom hardware like TPUs that isn't supported well by any current language. To me it seems like they are thinking a generation or two ahead with their tooling while the outside observers can't imagine anything beyond 80s era language design.

[0] https://www.infoworld.com/article/3535795/c-plus-plus-propos...

Reading through the top level comments, they are all a form of surface level aversion to the unfamiliar. It really highlights that many industry trends are based on hot takes and not any sort of deep analysis. This makes sense why Javascript and C++ will remain as entrenched favorites despite their technical flaws.

For those who actually spent time with Swift, and realize its value and potential, consider yourself lucky that large portions of the industry have an ill informed aversion to it. That creates opportunity that can be taken advantage of in the next 5 years. Developers who invest in Swift early can become market leaders, or run circles around teams struggling with slowness of python, over-complexity of c++.

Top three comments paraphrased:

> 1) "huh? Foundation?"

but you have no qualms with `if __name__ == "__main__"` ?

> 2) "The name is pretentious"

is that an example of the well-substantiated and deep technical analysis HN is famous for?

> 3) Swift is "a bit verbose and heavy handed" so Google FAILED by not making yet another language.

My day job is leading teams that build native and web versions of applications for clients, so it’s strange how much I agree with the sentiment, except for the world “replace”.

Steve Jobs’ original iPhone announcement gets brought up a lot. You don’t release an entire development platform in a couple months as a course correction. They were working on a native SDK before the first iPhone launch. The talk about developing web apps as being the primary way to develop on mobile was a bit of face saving and Jobs style misdirection since the SDK was delayed.

Native apps will never go away, because mobile platform owners can’t wait years until their hardware features are accessible through standardized web interfaces.

That said I agree that too many mobile apps out there should have been made as a website. Also many digital experiences take just seconds or minutes of interaction to be meaningful, so the overhead of App Store reviews and publishing is total overkill. About 80% of apps I have on my phone are not used daily and just taking up space.

However web apps historically have been painfully negligent in persisting user data, and lost some trust among non technical users in my experience.

Google is now starting to feel the economic impact of being a known "mercurial company" that cannot be trusted with any long term strategic partnerships. see https://gcemetery.co

As a customer, why would I "buy" a game that I will never own, on a service that is likely to close on a whim. As a game developer why would I invest time and effort supporting a new platform from a company without a proven track record in the game industry.

This will severely limit their impact on the industry, and the executives have nobody to blame but themselves for the lack of trust.

While I agree there is an even chance that Google will allow S4TF to fade away after Lattner's departure, that is more of a reflection on the company having no commitment or consistency to good ideas: ex: https://gcemetery.co

However S4TF should be taken seriously if you understand what they are trying to accomplish and how deeply they designed machine learning support into the language. Take a look at http://fast.ai new course offerings using S4TF. Swift has always been a long bet. If it doesn't work as you want it, is still short sighted to discount it in the future.

also: https://twitter.com/JokerEph/status/1221831507351748608

These executives have no one to blame for erosion of trust in Google but themselves. Here is a company that appears to be driven by transient market share in their decisions while appointing itself the caretaker of the open internet and the dictator of open standards.

I found it informative to research the author and his background: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Krein

For some reason my mental image of the messenger behind the article was that of a well studied and neutral academic throwing out firehouse citations.

his points are thought provoking, but it reduces everything to purely economic competition by a delusional population with only the author to cut through the illusions.

What you describe is called the Expression Problem [1] in programming language design and there is no simple formulaic answer on which method is better. I think you have to consider many aspects of your code's current design and possible future evolution when deciding which approach to use. For example: do you expect to have more types of transforms, or more operations/method per type of transform? It also means you can't nitpick a limited tutorial for focusing on one approach vs. the other.

Fortunately swift (as well as Rust or Kotlin) has excellent modern toolbox that includes protocol conformance and algebraic data types so you can use either one.

Keep in mind that swift protocols avoid many of the pitfalls of Java\C++ school of OOP design you might have seen before that can only express "is-a" relationships.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expression_problem

Compensation may be lagging but still being pushed up by national competition and a mobile workforce. However the 2x cost of living premium over the national average in the Bay Area doesn’t seem to have any downward pressure.

Then the cutting edge work seems to be rather myopically focused on advertising, surveillance, yuppie culture products or developer tools.

Plenty of arguments for talent to look away from the Bay Area.