Yes, I understand, fair point.
1,298 karma · joined May 12, 2018
The nice thing about GraalVM and modern gradual typing techniques is you can actually start by writing an interpreter, fully dynamic, no type system at all. Graal turns the interpreter into JIT compiled code on the fly, you can even create a standalone (no JVM) AOT compiled binary containing your language runtime, all with one command. Then as your language evolves you can add interpreter hints to gain extra performance, but, it's totally pay-as-you-go. There are no walls of effort facing you: you do a little work to get a little benefit, and a lot more to get to V8 type speeds. You can also introduce a type system gradually these days, as CoffeeScript/TypeScript or Groovy style languages do, again incrementally as your language evolves and gains usage.
Also with Graal you get the world's best GCs for free, plus access (if you want it) to the JDK class libraries for things like files/sockets/time&date handling. Oh, and language interop with other languages for free, no complex FFIs. It's pretty neat.
That said, are there lots of programmers itching to write dynamically typed scripting languages these days? Probably not. Languages like Kotlin deliver most of the benefits with very few of the downsides.
Firstly, yes, empires can be good for peace in some ways. The Roman Empire had Pax Romana. But the Soviet Union was also internally fairly peaceful, at least as much if not much more than the Roman Empire. Oddly enough, lots of people didn't want to be a part of either empire. There are downsides to empires that outweigh enforced "peace".
Secondly:
EU is not an empire and it is not trying to be
I think you missed a possibility: the EU is not an empire yet but is trying to be, and this is already causing various kinds of conflict. The fact that it's not creating World War 3 is no excuse: the Soviets didn't cause World War 3 either but not many people think the USSR was a good thing.
For an empire to dominate people it must have at least two things. One, a large number of people physically within that population who are loyal to the regime. Two, military strength to swiftly put down any rebellions and ensure the loyalists remain in power.
The EU has the first in abundance, as the horrible situation in the UK is showing. People were given a vote. The British establishment are refusing to implement it, as they're more loyal to the EU than to their own voters. This is no surprise because the same pattern is observed throughout Europe, where the EU creates a constant series of constitutional crises. Democracy is being crushed throughout the continent without a shot being fired due to the massive weight of regime loyalists already in positions of power.
The EU doesn't yet have the second. But it wants it very, very badly and has identified an EU army which reports directly to the Commission as its new top priority. Why does the EU need an army when NATO exists and works? Nobody can quite explain that. But let's face it: people keep voting in anti-EU politicians throughout Europe and if current trends continue, eventually one of these power struggles will be lost by the loyalists. The only way the EU could then keep control is by suppressing anti-EU citizens through force. If the local police won't do it, an EU army will be ready to step in and enforce Commission policy. It's hardly going to be useful for major conflict anytime soon given its size and newness, but as a form of ultra-loyal police it won't be half bad.
I'm personally planning based on the belief that the EU will be a new USSR-style empire before I reach retirement, complete with ability to put down insurrections, a large propaganda apparatus and ideological loyalty of at least 100 million people. I expect to die of old age with it firmly in control of most of Europe.
Finally:
Second: The collaboration between countries is not mandatory to be an empire as form.
I completely agree, so why are we building one? The useful work the EU does could be better done by a constellation of standards bodies and independent political alliances. The politics of unity and Europeanism that comes with it is unnecessary and dangerous.
This is visible in your own post! My view of the EU is neither bleak nor non-bleak. It's a simple factual statement of what the EU is and what it's becoming, as stated very clearly and repeatedly by the people who run it. The goal of the EU is to merge countries together.
Do you believe the EU is not a federalist project? That its goal is not to become a new country? How do you explain the ever growing power of the Commission, the new Army, the flag, the laws that make disrespecting the flag illegal, the continual push for ever more integration, the explicit talking points you repeat here that the EU must "unite" to "face US, Russia and China"?
The end state is not to lose a "degree" of independence, as you put it. It's to lose all independence completely. That is the end result of ever closer union, as the treaties word it, and that goal can be seen in the actions of the EU every day. It's not standing still. It's unifying armies, tax rules, trying to create new immigration law and so on, often without adjusting the treaties because they know that would trigger automatic referendums in some countries that they are guaranteed to lose.
Finally, the EU is not an alliance. Alliances are agreements between separate entities to support each other within some precisely defined scope, like military defence in case of invasion. The EU is something more: a movement to merge the separate entities together completely in all conceivable areas, until there's nothing left to be allied anymore because they're the same thing. Rejection of the EU is not a rejection of alliances, it's the opposite - it's a preference for alliances.
I have unfortunate news for you.
People hating larger governmental forces that control them isn't something weirdly unique to Spain or European nations. It is a part of the universal human condition.
If all existing European nations were abolished and merged into a new EU "country", guess what? The "nationalists" would hate the EU instead. This already happens in fact. Why do you think Brexit won? It won because so many people really don't like the EU and the way it works. The entire British population was threatened by its own government with ruination and told anyone who voted Leave was thick and racist, and Leave still won. Imagine how much bigger the result would have been if the government hadn't relied on such aggressive tactics.
Worse still, people who think they aren't "nationalist" would also be filled with hate, but towards imaginary external enemies instead. Go listen to the people who run the EU. Listen to people like Juncker, Verhofstadt and Merkel. They can't stop talking about the EU empire and the threats posed by "China, Russia and the United States". The USA is rather different to China but to the new Europeans, it's just another foreign enemy.
The way to stop people hating on each other is to help them resolve their differences amicably. Lots of votes, lots of tiny nation-states or even city states, and yes lots of borders, ideally of the smartest possible type to ensure they're hardly noticeable. In the end, forcing everyone to comply with one small group's set of preferences will always create big tensions. The solution is thus not fewer countries, but more.
I don't mean that in a cynical or nasty way. As the years go by I get more convinced that the rise of atheism is causing some of our biggest problems in western society, and I'm not religious myself. But it seems that for all its flaws, Christianity at least was an infrastructure of people and principles that hung together in some vaguely coherent manner such that people could pose the question "Is this right? Is this good?" and either answer it themselves by reference to a book, or ask it of a full time moraliser (priest).
The reason the OP is expressing unease at this kind of tech worker "morality" is because it's wafer thin in a way that makes medieval theology look like a towering pinnacle of intellectualism.
They aren't making moral judgements of their customers consistently. ICE is targeted only because a bunch of journalists started covering it extensively as part of their anti-Trump agenda. ICE did similar things before Trump but they weren't in the news, so GitHub workers ignored it.
Moreover their morality isn't universal. ICE is bad because it hurts people who only want a better life. OK, so, should there be no borders at all? What happens then to all the American workers in marginal jobs who suddenly lose their income because an immigrant willing to live in practically sub-Saharan conditions took their job? That worker only wanted a better life too, do they not matter? If not why not? Is it because they're white and GitHub workers are racist against whites? What about other border control agencies? What about governments in general?
Christian religious morals are very far from ideal but at least make a show of being universal. You forgive those who trespass against you - it doesn't matter who they are or what they did. You forgive them. You are the good Samaritan who helps those in need. Doesn't matter who they work for. You love your neighbour. Doesn't matter if they voted for the other guy.
You're arguing that tech workers should engage with morality as if it's any other hard question that can be whiteboarded out in a few hours. But tech workers have got nothing to say on this topic that hasn't already been said hundreds of years ago. They have no special insights to provide. The rigour of their moral logic is trivial compared even to a bunch of men in funny clothes reading stories about camels out of a book written anonymously 2000 years ago. Why shouldn't they be reminded of this?
It's no accident that Python and Ruby were both the work of one guy in their early years: very, very simple to implement incrementally.
Arguably this wasn't fair. Splitting a country in two affects everyone, so why couldn't everyone vote? But if the rest of the country could vote then there'd not have been even a tiny hope the SNP would have accepted the results. In fact, they did not accept that they lost anyway, even when voting was restricted to Scotland. But it's easy to understand why the referendum was designed the way it was.
Ironically it might be that these days the rest of the UK would kick Scotland out, if they were given a vote. It's not necessarily true that everyone cares about the Union.
Spain will cease to exist anyway given the trajectory of the EU. I don't know why anyone in Spain seems to care about Catalonian independence. They seem to want to immediately turn around and (re)join the EU, which is rapidly taking over more and more areas of governmental policy. EU forbids different regions from being more "competitive" than others (see their demands to the UK) and implements large wealth transfers from richer to poorer areas, so, the rest of Spain would end up being subsidised by Catalonia still.
If you care about Spain existing you should be campaigning for Spain to leave the EU, rather than being distracted by whether Catalonia does or does not possess whatever trivialities the EU leaves behind to member states as it grows.
Also, don't for one second think the EU is against nationalism or patriotism. They desperately chase both. Why do you think the EU has a national anthem? Why do it's supporters say things like, "we Europeans". The entire EU project is a project to craft a new form of loyalty to the state and a self-sense of tribal belonging. Those who don't think this new nation, with its so called "European values", is better than their current nations ... well, they're treated with contempt.
Finally, there are no problems to which the solution is empires. The world has more countries than ever, yet is also richer and healthier than ever. This correlation and trend can easily continue for long time.
The Commission is all about "European values" and how they're going to impose penalties when a country is doing something unaligned with their own agenda. But their agenda is to destroy all European nations and merge them all into one super-nation controlled by itself. As part of that they desperately want people to feel patriotism and nationalism towards their new nation called Europe, not existing countries. See how disrespecting the EU flag is now illegal in some countries.
From their perspective Catalonian independence = more countries = harder to unite Europe. Therefore it's fine to crush the resistance. "European values" have mysteriously gone missing.
There's a basic assumption you're making here and which underlies a lot of the writing on this topic - that it's desirable, even morally virtuous, for research funding to be disconnected from application.
Bell Labs funded the transistor and not radio astronomy because apart from making cool TV documentaries, radio astronomy isn't actually useful for much. If we knew how to travel faster than light and explore the universe it'd be extremely useful, but we don't, so learning things about what a remote corner of the galaxy looked like a few billion years ago is easily argued to be a rather absurd waste of limited research dollars.
It's exactly what this op-ed in the Scientific American is talking about: a research field optimised to produce papers independent of any concrete economic utility function. In a world where such things get funded, what exactly should scientists be measured by? They can't be measured by market success because nobody cares or has any use for their output: their work is pure academic navel/star-gazing. So they pretty much have to be measured by volume of output or respect of their peers, both of which are closed and circular systems of measurement.
In my view the right fix for the science crisis is not to pay scientists to research whatever the hell they like with no success measurement at all: that really is directly equivalent to just firing them all and putting them on social security (or "UBI" as HNers like to call it). The right thing to do would probably be to just slash academic funding dramatically and reduce corporation taxes so corporate research can be given more funding. The net result would still be a drop in the amount of science done, but as Bayer's study makes clear, "not enough science" is not the world's problem right now.
I don't think it's as simple as "web secure, everything else bad". For the very longest time only Chrome and Safari had working sandboxes, and there wasn't a huge difference in the exploit stream between WebKit, Flash, Java and Adobe Reader. They all had somewhat similar feature sets.
For instance look at AnchorPane in JavaFX. You can lock things to the edges or offsets from the edges. You can nest layout managers if you want something different like a table or HTML style wrapping text flow.
In the end HTML is just being abused. It was never designed to be a Flash replacement. If the web was a more pluggable platform Flash would still be alive and kicking for sure, the creation tool itself was lightyears ahead of anything HTML ever had, but the browser makers have killed it pretty ruthlessly. Looks like groupthink to me, tbh.
Weapons are created so they can be pointed at living things, regardless of who they work for. I'm not defending NSO but let's not pretend selling exploits is any different to e.g. a Tazer or rifle manufacturer.
Look at it this way. Huge numbers of Americans and especially Democrats believed for the longest time, and many still do, that Trump was a Russian spy. The entire "Russiagate" phenomenon was investigated to ludicrous depth and found no evidence such claims were true; so does that mean every journalist and Democrat politician that fueled those flames now goes to prison, or can't speak in public anymore? Think about what you're arguing for here! That was an absolutely massive factual inaccuracy so how would it be held to account?
And let's not even get into cases where someone genuinely believes they're repeating something true, which turns out not to be. If that were the case, given the replication crisis in science virtually all politicians would end up being unable to speak publicly as they'd have repeated the claims of studies that later didn't replicate.
Instead what happened is they decided the temperature records that showed a pause were wrong, went back and adjusted them so there's no longer any real pause if you look at the latest temperature datasets. The entire thing was written off as a giant measurement error.
Would you be so sanguine about promoting businesses because they are not women owned? Why can't you see that it's just discrimination against men?
Because you believe it's fine to discriminate against men, which is offensive and wrong.
"Google" in that context doesn't mean exclusively its management, but rather, the whole group of people. When Googlers stage walkouts and so on they don't care much about the specific situations at hand. If it wasn't one thing it'd be another thing. This is clear from scratching the surface of their complaints in any detail: it's all built on very brittle foundations.
What they want is the feeling of collective moral action, of clarity of purpose, of being a part of something bigger than building the next chat app, and they're able to get that at Google where it wouldn't be tolerated at most companies. It's exactly because this sort of activity does not affect their career prospects or might even enhance them that is why they do it: remember that their promotions aren't decided by management at Google but rather, by committees of the same sorts of people who are protesting.
People with 0 confidence aren't conducting walk-outs, they aren't whistleblowing on Google's questionable military deals.
This is exactly what people with no self confidence in their own goodness would do.
If they were secure in their own morality, in their own sense of living a right life, they wouldn't be attempting to find it by engaging in constant cultural crusades inside their own place of work. It seems quite clear to me that many of their supposed moral positions aren't well thought through and exist primarily so they can protest. In other words, the protests aren't a means to an end (change of policy by Google's management), the protests are the end, in and of themselves, because it's via noisy displays of moral virtue that they find what they're truly looking for.
If you like I can go through some of the inconsistencies in the various positions their employees have taken.
Also note it's impossible for models in the 80's to have been accurate because the temperature data for the past itself has been continuously adjusted by climatologists since then, so any models calculated back then would be using temperatures now considered wrong (and not by a small amount!). Either the old models are wrong or the old temperature records are wrong, but they can't both be true simultaneously.
In effect they want Google to be a church and executives to be priests, preaching a moral code and equally importantly railing against heretics, sinners and apostates.
This need for a new religion can be seen in many walks of life but it seems strongest amongst those immersed in the university system for longest. They've never been judged by any system that wasn't artificial and based purely on the opinions of superiors - from school to college to promo committees and peer bonuses, very few of them have ever really hunted hard for a job, made a product themselves or taken any risky decisions. They've got nothing to give them self confidence and thus fall back on membership of a group identity defined by a mishmash of whatever ideas they picked up from others just like them. Google struggles with them the most because it has hired so many and because Google internally is such a poor approximation of the real world: absolutely stuffed with "rewrite X in Y" style projects and people that don't have any strong reason to be there.
The best way for Google to solve this is a major reduction in headcount, least experienced first. But I think headcount is rather sacred there as it's used as a proxy for ambition, so instead they will continue struggling to be as holy as their student staff demand.
Email is already the decentralised identity protocol.