simondedalus

you can't be neutral on a moving train.

carlsen (like all super grandmasters) would happily concede that he can't beat 3000+ engines most of the time. i don't know if chess commentators appreciate what this means about chess engines and the fundamental principles of chess (i know i don't / can't), but it's universally agreed that these "3000 ELO" chess engines are demonstrably stronger than every known human chess player.

they like the absence of all of gnome's chrome and the smooth animations and transitions.

me, i like gnome 3 and unity. all told i think this is really good news from canonical, for wayland, for gnome, for desktop linux in general, etc.

very good. dualism and pessimism particularly funny. like the overall design too.

obviously decades of security advisories means it's not easy. what in the world does 'easy' mean in your current usage? surely "tons of failures" is a better indicator of difficulty than "it feels easy to me / that's 'naturally how my brain works'," etc.

and of course, if lots of people fail at something, it will get proportionally harder with a larger team / larger codebase / different stakeholders demanding xyz, etc etc etc.

not chiming in about the basic disagreements in this thread, but the repeated claim that something that has caused trouble for countless professionals is "easy" just can't be right. if all the qualified people are "unqualified" because they all fail at something "everyone can do," the speaker is the one who's confused, and it's a lexical problem.

I know that the response I'm about to give makes a statement that is not falsifiable and very much has the form of "I can cart this out and think I'm right no matter WHAT you respond," but I still feel compelled to say...

...the point I'm making is absolutely not that building an OS is equally hard in all languages, and equally likely to be buggy. My point is that creating a general purpose OS that only gets its rigorous testing from getting put into production before the majority of its target hardware has even yet been developed... that's going to be buggy in all languages.

Designing and running an OS on a known system with a few applications in mind can't really refute what I'm saying. I mean, I could of course be wrong. But I can't imagine a convincing counter-example that doesn't have for its evidence "largescale adoption on disparate systems."

(there could be an in-principle reason that I'm wrong that I just don't understand, but this is the risk we take in having opinions)

To be fair, the value of the features you cite are very dependent on the size of the team and the type of work being done. If you're throwing tons of engineers, tests, and money at something--think aircraft or whatever--you're not relying on the language to be smarter than the programmer.

And as for operating systems being written in C and failing, writing a general purpose, hardware agnostic operating system isn't exactly easy. This is not to say that C should be the systems language of choice, or even that C is easier or more stable to write operating systems; just that stuff will be buggy regardless.

And I think your main complaint is stuff like OpenSSL and its vulnerabilities... I don't think I would blame the language there. I would blame age / inherited bugs / lack of testing (amazingly that's the case, but we don't live in a world that's too concerned with the common good).

I agree with you for many, many use cases for a programmer these days... but only if you just contextualize all these assertions.

Totally agree, DNS and Bind and Essential System Administration alone are completely worth it if you're at all interested in (using) Unix-like systems.

As for being dated, I think simply reading (and understanding) Essential System Administration and then spending an afternoon looking at grub and systemd could get you pretty far in the RHEL certification cycle.

No I totally use it for tiling as well; I just meant that the "too much chrome" complaint about gnome3 can be overcome.

And while not as good as real tiling, keyboard shortcuts to the various snapped positions go a long way for the couple minutes of effort they require to configure in the settings UI.

Edit: e.g. super+arrow keys for various areas, or add in shift. Not a lot of planning required.

indeed, the early wittgenstein thinks that the world is must be one of those things we must pass over in silence, while how the world is is exactly the kind of thing about which we can talk and reason.

the later wittgenstein (still?) thinks that explanation comes to an end somewhere, and just wants to make sure one doesn't append "and isn't that mysterious?" to the end of a good explanation (ie one that sets out to answer a precise question, then does so).

but who knows. wittgenstein and mysticism is an interesting topic... for the early wittgenstein, it's crystal clear that he's saying there are 2 domains: stuff that admits of being talked about in a propositional way, and stuff that doesn't. all the latter stuff is mystical; it's not necessarily supernatural, it's just that we can't get anywhere talking about it with true/false (or satisfaction-condition or whatever) talk.

but what about the later wittgenstein? he thinks that the domain of things we can talk about has opened up considerably, because he no longer things that language functions as a mirror of "the world", nor should it even try to. now he thinks that utterances are tools to get this or that done. this does not neatly carve out anything to be called mystical.

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relating this back to the article, the idea is that we sort of put an air of magic about the mystical, and when we treat something for which we can create an adequate explanation as mystical or magic (or "strange"), we lead ourselves and others into getting perplexed.

and if there is something to be said for religion or purpose, it's not to be found in something we can explicate adequately by adverting to neutral drift, etc. that being the case, we want to be careful about what we call strange. what are we endorsing when we see strangeness in something we can understand?

yeah, i got used to gnome3 during a redhat class, and subsequently on a default kali install for its own particular purpose, and i don't mind it at all. the alignment is good, and when you want to get rid of all the border stuff you can just full screen.

for example, my firefox looks like something out of windows 95, but if i want to pretend i'm using i3, f11 -> fullscreen, ctrl+tab and i'm set. and if i want to see a bookmark toolbar, url bar, tabs, a title bar, and a menu, i can. why not?

and yeah, the real goodness (which is not unique to gnome3) is the snap alignment stuff and ease of using virtual desktops and setting keyboard shortcuts. gnome3 could be a lot worse than it is. (edit: for me, everything gnome3 does, kde does better, but gnome3 "just works" a lot better than kde and, to some degree, unity. i'd rather be using i3 generally, but that can be more effort to maintain than its worth in certain situations)

screenshot link errors out (owner of website doesn't allow hotlinking to that resource)

not to mention that i've yet to have as bug-free an experience on elementary as i have on vanilla ubuntu, or opensuse with kde, or a really basic arch + i3 install, or kali with gnome 3, or (the list goes on).

the unearned appreciation of elementary has always baffled me. i mean, the developers are not hacks or anything. i quite liked geary, and i'm fine with distros multiplying (why not? just use what you want, it doesn't matter). but elementary is barely any more mac-ish than ubuntu with unity, and it's always felt like the beta version of someone's side project.

to sum up, i'm happy that they have interest in their project, and i respect the effort they put into it. however, most of the praise for elementary seems to come from and for the wrong places; it's not particularly polished or user friendly (they have a history of "i'll choose for you," but not in as an intuitive way as Apple), its thematically unified design does not last unless you either use a vanilla install forever or put in just as much linux-y work in maintaining your install as you would w/ arch or debian or ubuntu (and you cared about how everything looks).

to me, elementary is a nice little niche distro like bodhi linux. it's bizarre to me that people can use it as a main system unless they're very advanced (read: they play with config files like a sysadmin and code decently in at least bash), and it's outright unthinkable that people use it for anything beyond checking email if they're keeping a vanilla install. this stuff keeps the ecosystem healthy, but the articles and comments i read about it look like they're coming from people who simply don't use linux that much (and aren't aware that all the good things they see in elementary are done better in other distros).

As usual, this article makes me think of Wittgenstein, who would probably say, "I agree with everything you're saying, except the word 'strange'."

The content is interesting, definitely, but you could save some time and potentially misleading "appreciation of strangeness" by stating that neutral drift allows for dramatically more random possibilities than those offered by one-time random mutations.

Not that Wittgenstein (or I) want to poopoo the "wonder" element of science or life in general... but I think it's telling that the author, as other comments point out, mentions creationism, as if that's a natural motivator for "wonder" (or a natural view to take in light of "wonder"). But creationism is simplistic, incoherent, and wrong. If "strange" is adding nothing to the truth or falsity of any of the statements involved, and "strange" is somehow an excuse for creationism, perhaps we should take issue with this being "strange" at all.

The problem is that Gödel builds self-reference. It's not like Peano arithmetic has recursion or self-reference operators.

To put it another way, in order to disqualify self-reference, you would need to employ a higher order proof system--which gives the game away anyway.

But doesn't the constant Gödel reference push people, exactly, to work toward effective cheats? Imagine if the people putting in effort to make real systems instead spent their time trying to create the self-verifying prover.

I understand the frustration, but the Gödel objection will always be raised as long as someone asks for a prover that can prove itself correct (read "proves false statements or fails to prove true statements," which just is consistency). To put a finer point on it, once you get how "an axiomatic system [can't prove] its own consistency," it actually is rather obvious that "a theorem prover [can't prove] itself correct." How would it? Without axioms or classical logic? What's it doing for the things that aren't it itself?

Notice though, Gödel's incompleteness didn't end formal logic (all the better for Gödel). I know we're in a public forum, but I would note that your "But what about the practical applications!?" is misplaced (though not poor analogous reasoning--I think you're hitting the nail on the head, honestly). Formal verification is not futile because of Gödel's proof. However, a self-verifying formal system is--which is a useful insight, especially for those interested in formal verification.

As an aside, I don't think you need to convince anyone that's actually recreated Gödel's proofs to approve of continued work on formally verified code. We would get excited about that stuff even if it weren't practical.

I don't mean to be rude, but this objection only seems handwave-y if you don't understand Gödel's proofs (common), or you have some refutation of them (obviously uncommon, but definitely interesting).

This is a good not-too-technical but not-condescending explanation https://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6dels-Proof-Ernest-Nagel/dp/081... (it does get into the technical details; it just doesn't go line by line as you would if you wanted to recreate the proofs).

As long as you have the expressive power of Peano arithmetic (which all programming languages ought to, and definitely all proof systems ought to), you can find a Gödel sentence in the system and thus prove that it can't prove, of itself, "x is consistent".

It's worth looking into, if only for the enjoyment.

Gödel proved that we will never get such a prover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...

Particularly, he proved that it is impossible for a formal system to prove its own consistency.

why is that clear? the post to which you responded notes that piracy didn't hurt PS2. why should it hurt dreamcast?

but more importantly, suppose it did hurt dreamcast. wmil already said that. if you're convinced that this is the correct position, why not point to interviews or news articles of the time to prove your point, instead of just endorsing someone (as if that proves anything)?

You would only not be able to map higher order functions to Gödel codes if it is not the case that for some n, f(n) outputs but does not determine m. I'm far from the most knowledgeable programmer in the world... but I do know that such a function could not be implemented by a computer.

As long as f(n) outputs a unique m, you can number f, n, and m. And as long as a programming language is Turing complete, you can do that. Interpreting any sort of abstraction is beside the point (even the "Gödel sentence" that you could ultimately find needn't be interpreted... which I suppose in this case would be a "Gödel operation").

Insofar as a program can be compiled and implemented in machine code, all the functions of that program's programming language can be mapped 1 to 1 to nat -> nat operations. This is just what's at issue here.

To cut through it a bit, you write

> The Church-Turing thesis says absolutely nothing about abstraction barriers your language might enforce, e.g., what you get if your language has parametric polymorphism

If a language has parametric polymorphism, is it therefore not Turing complete? Because if the language with parametric polymorphism is Turing complete, then the Church-Turing thesis absolutely has something to say about that language.

Whether or not you can map everything in the higher order language to the nat -> nat one is what's at issue, not the reverse.

For an analogy, you can map all the natural numbers to real numbers. This proves just about nothing. That you cannot map all the reals to the naturals proves something very important.

It would be truly bizarre if a useful programming language could express something that computation on bits could not.

that depends on your opinions regarding free software. people who support the GPL would probably call BSD/MIT less free, because the software is "free, for now," or "free, for me." that might not be good enough for actual freedom to be maintained, along the lines they're thinking about freedom.

i'm not going to argue about that though. surely you're familiar with the territory.

the point, though, is that the GNU ethos is the reason for the GNU tools, and the onus would be on you to show that that ethos was interchangeable with some other in order to get where we are today.

when you're explaining an event in history, you need to take the facts and look for "why did things happen this way after that particular event?" you can't just substitute a comparable event and say "everything would be the same." if we're talking about the legal basis of this or that for the GPL and BSD licenses, sure, you can interchange things and show that "here, in this case, you'd be regretting GPL, and in this case [etc etc etc]." but for the course of history, you actually have to be much more careful with your scope... it's unlikely that one change (one that the primary person involved, RMS, himself took to be the central point of all it) could have no effects, or no salient ones.

notice how these points are distinct. RMS wouldn't but have written the GPL. history worked out how it did. these are different than your or my opinions on the merits of varying degrees of permissiveness in licenses.

it would have been absurd to write that toolchain with a "kind of free" license. why would RMS bother? it's not like he didn't have access to existing software.

i'm guessing you think that's just "incidental"... but that's a very strange argument to ever make if you think anything has any explanatory power at all.

if you read the thread, he's plainly referring to the fact that he missed a very natural reading of his sentence (he thought it was clear he meant "we'll probably change things during this contest," but the sentence really lent itself to meaning "we'll probably change things dramatically next time we do this"--since experiments are rarely changed mid-performance). readers pointed this out, and he got it.

that's not even close to blaming the community, that's taking full responsibility for unintentionally misleading writing.

this article commits the same error that much of analytic philosophy does: it asks how something observable could be possible, and when it doesn't find a good answer, it suggests that the thing to be explained actually is impossible.

it's statistically unlikely that plato and aristotle were that good, ay? and they simply picked off low hanging fruit? okay, show me 13 modern day publish-or-perish professors whose thought and work are as sweeping, insightful, or profound as plato or aristotle. show me the last person since wittgenstein or frege or kant about whom we could write something like woodbridge's "aristotle's vision of nature." they certainly write down as much as plato or aristotle. show me the thinker with that much quality work.

the point here is that this is always how philosophy has been, and how it always should be: yes, we need to question our assumptions; yes, we need to listen to any voices that have been historically locked out of our discourse for biased reasons... but if you want to do either of those, you show me the damn proof of it, and you explain it really, really well.

edit: in other words, an explanation of why we just can't appreciate the current 13 platos in athens is worth exactly nothing. show them to me, and prove to me that they're as good as plato. that's how philosophy works. giving an abstract argument trying to explain why you can't give me a good argument just is giving me a shitty argument.

spending $1m to get into a 5c isn't exactly a PR disaster for apple.

that's debatable, once you appreciate the point about having a reason to do something.

calculation itself really only exists with purpose. it's a thing to do if you have a reason to do it. of course, these kinds of things too seem more "discovered" than "invented", but it's a very different kind of discovery than "the earth revolves around the sun". the earth revolves around the son, as far as we can figure these days, whether any agent/subjectivity/etc intends anything or not.

however, no full-blooded calculation will ever occur anywhere in the universe unless someone needs to figure something out. in other words, intention is implicit with calculation (and truth-functional representation, by the by). as such, you could make a case for an argument for "inventing" strategies in mathematics. and of course, a lot depends on your ontology of mathematics in the first place. if you're a wittgensteinian about numbers, and you think any of what i said above is at all compelling, you may be inclined to believe that mathematics itself is an invention. you may admit of some more nuanced way that entities like "number" still exist without mathematics as a tool, you may not, but you'd probably see all mathematics existing as active work, not pre-existing objective Truth.

of course, most people think of math as an always-there abstract object (roughly). maybe they're right. even so, there must be some force in the "i use it as a tool" and "it just revolves around the sun no matter what anyone--god or man or beast--wants" distinction.

i'm not saying that microsoft is fundamentally evil, but don't you think it's problematic that the premise "business X is evil" is necessarily "dogmatic" or "not conducive to discussion"? i mean, specifically, what about the case where "business X is evil" happens to be true?

"what's evil? this is so subjective and [insert complaint]"

suppose an organization is committed to tricking the public, ripping off the government, committing crimes, gaining power at the expense of any idea of the public good... don't you think at least some people would be confident in thus concluding "business X is evil"?

again, regardless of microsoft's motives for litigation (which i'm going to go out on a limb and suggest are probably more nuanced and confidential than can be explained in a single article), shouldn't "business X is fundamentally evil; ie they are united in the pursuit of a criminal or publicly hazardous goal," be available for discussion? all the more if the speaker has evidence?

neutrality is great if you want to be level headed and find facts... but it can't be true by stipulation. that's just crazy, and truly "dogmatic and not very conducive to discussion". yeah, "x is evil" statements require more evidence, and more explanation of what you mean (because rando on the internet stating "x is evil" conveys pretty much no information at all), but they have to be admissable.

...unless you think it's somehow impossible for organizations to come together to pursue evil (by most standards) goals?

(and, again, not asserting that microsoft is evil myself, but didn't the karma-bombed author cite reasons that s/he found microsoft taking legal action to protect its customers dubious? if someone provides argument for a conclusion, and you--without even handwaving at a reason to dismiss their argument/evidence--dismiss her conclusion out of hand, aren't you doing some serious violence to intelligent discussion? you're expressly taking a discussion that had progressed to the point of thesis-with-argument back to bald-statements/opinions/theses... that's nothing to endorse)

it also imports concepts like "authenticity" that are extrinsic to the simulation. which is absurd.