The article is mainly about how cis white males don't like astrology and thus it is misogyny. So the connection is pretty much perfect as he is giving an example of how you can be annoyed by astrology without being a cis white male.
Looks like the journalist is trying to convince us that Google is in fact a company created by the CIA.
It's amazing that the CIA had already predicted that Google would beat Yahoo!, Lycos, Altavista, and Ask.com in 1995.
The belief in competent government would seem to be a logical flaw -- or at least inconsistency -- in most conspiracy theorizing. I'm sometimes shocked by how competent people think the government can be -- especially people with so little faith in government.
> The belief in competent government would seem to be a logical flaw
Only to someone ideologically blinkered or completely ignorant of history. There are countless examples of governments achieving all sorts of highly non-straightforward things both for good and for bad. Even the CIA, which will probably not make it onto many shortlists of history's most competent governmental organizations had its successes.
The real qualifer of signficance is depending upon perfect competence. Which is utterly unrealistic like the "car which runs on water being covered up". Although that example has ample other logical flaws including the fact that it would be a great thing for logistics if possible.
I keep seeing this idea of an incompetent government come up repeatedly.
What people don't understand is that it is precisely this incompetence which allows corporations to manipulate the government so well.
Laws and regulations do not originate within governments. They originate from lobbyists who are working in the interest of corporations and other large financial interests.
When discussing the economy, some people will keep insisting that capitalism is the most intelligent collective system possible, yet when it comes to politics, they will make it seem like capitalism is the dumbest system in the world, utterly incompetent at implementing perverse economic agendas...
So I guess the view must be that capitalism maximizes the extraction of value from every kind of activity except when those activities relate to the government?
Clearly this makes no sense. Why would capitalism's efficiency at leveraging the collective intelligence stop at politics?
South Park had an episode where it was revealed that Dick Cheney and other Bush II administration officials were behind a conspiracy to promote 9/11 inside job conspiracy theories in order to convince the world they were actually competent enough to pull such a thing off.
Alternatively, they could simply have invested in every tech company at the time. Today, it's rather well known that some 3 letter agencies have an uncomfortable relationship (sometimes not even a consensual one) with large companies. It's not unthinkable to me that an organization like the CIA could have had a hand in 'supporting' businesses like Google.
On the other hand, I can totally imagine that having some support from the government itself could be a pretty significant advantage. Perhaps even enough of one to become a market leader.
With all that said, I hardly need a grand conspiracy to dislike both Google and organizations like the CIA.
I haven't read the article entirely because it very quickly started to feel like a conspiracy piece by avoiding the topic as long as possible, but I'm sure if any of the other search engines succeeded then we'd be seeing people digging up whatever dirt they could on them.
I'm sure there was some input from american surveillance in the creation of a lot of modern computer tools, but this would be indirect influence at best, and the three letter agencies gambling on already existing technology at worst.
Which probably means an regular engineer assigned to customer service, I don't think it is means that customer service is viewed as an engineering discipline.
I guess it was used as to mean "without value", which is not exactly what it means.
The prefix "in" of "invaluable" does mean negation but it means negation in the way that the value of the object is such that it doesn't exist. It's so valuable that you cannot even quantify it, it transcends the notion of value.
Well, why do banks don't port all their code to recent and efficient languages?
Pretty much the same here. All the code currently in use is written in English and it will take decades to completely transit from English to French computing (let's take the example of France, since I'm French). Add to that that all classes resources are for English programming languages and that to share knowledge between French, German and Russian programmers English is the only way to go.
But don't be fooled, in most companies all the comments and documentation are written in French. Variables are in English because it's the only language that only use the ASCII charset. Only recent languages have the support for Unicode identifiers names.
English reading comprehension (at the very least) is a mandatory skill to have in our modern world.
It isn't. I'm talking about systematic change, not updating existing code. Like how latin was used to teach everything until nations decided to port religion, science, math, literature, etc to their native languages. Look at how much that changed the world. Rather than a select lucky few having access to knowledge tied to a language, it was ported and made available to all the peoples of a nation.
> Add to that that all classes resources are for English programming languages and that to share knowledge between French, German and Russian programmers English is the only way to go.
The only way to share knowledge is through english? So the french can't translate german and russians can't translate german? What about all the french, german and russians who don't know english? Are they supposed to languish in ignorance?
> Variables are in English because it's the only language that only use the ASCII charset.
Variables, keywords, the standard libraries, runtime, kernel, assembly, etc.
> Only recent languages have the support for Unicode identifiers names.
You make it sound like you can't change it. Like older languages are set in stone.
> English reading comprehension (at the very least) is a mandatory skill to have in our modern world.
This is simply not true as most of the modern world does not have basic english reading comprehension skills. And as I said, this type of thinking is holding back much of the world. And needing to have basic english reading comprehension doesn't mean that computation shouldn't be ported to one's native language.
The selfish few used to keep the masses ignorant through language exclusivity ( latin ). Seems like the same thing is happening here. Maybe it's not selfishness, but laziness or learned helplessness.
I know if I had to learn french in order to code, I wouldn't be a programming. And I'm sure it's the truth for the vast majority of american programmers. I think most people are similar throughout the world and having to learn a foreign language to program is an insurmountable obstacle for many.
> So the french can't translate german and russians can't translate german?
You can but then it's a work to do for each language. That's how science got reinvented in multiple places before virtually all papers start to be written in English and shared in international journals.
> You make it sound like you can't change it. Like older languages are set in stone.
Do you suggest adding a layer of dependencies and complexity to the build systems to preprocess the source code to make it compilable by GCC/clang/Visual?
And it would make sharing open-source project limited to their language speakers, until you have someone translating the project. And what happens when that person can't keep up with the pace of the original project? Just look at all the material in Chinese on Github that is just inaccessible to non-chinese speakers.
All engineering schools in France require a minimum score on tests like TOEIC/TOEFL (in my school it was TOEIC 785 / 990, got raised to 800). High school graduation requires a CEFR level of B2 (even if not all students reach it) in English.
> I know if I had to learn french in order to code, I wouldn't be a programming. And I'm sure it's the truth for the vast majority of american programmers.
Except that a lot of the world is already exposed to English in movies, series, books, websites, memes, YouTube, work. American are not exposed to French, German, Japanese, Chinese.
> You can but then it's a work to do for each language.
You make it sound like that's a bad thing. Once again, I'm not sure whether it is laziness or just learned helplessness.
> That's how science got reinvented in multiple places before virtually all papers start to be written in English and shared in international journals.
That's not why. It's because communication wasn't as global as it is today. And you seem to think that just because each nation/language has their own ecosystem that somehow the world will stop communicating with each other. You think english will cease to be the lingua franca of science. Nothing will really change except a lot of french people who wouldn't program in english would program in french. You can still program in english if you want. You can communicate in english. Your country would just have more options.
> Do you suggest adding a layer of dependencies and complexity to the build systems to preprocess the source code to make it compilable by GCC/clang/Visual?
No. Is there an added layer of dependencies and complexity to compiling languages in english?
> Just look at all the material in Chinese on Github that is just inaccessible to non-chinese speakers.
So translate it. What is with the helpless attitude? Do you feel helpless that russian literature is in russian and you can't read russian? No, you'd find a french translation of russian literature right? Would you rather 1.4 billion chinese be able to use the chinese material or would you rather the 1.4 billion learn english first?
> American are not exposed to French, German, Japanese, Chinese.
Sure, not as much, but that doesn't take away from my point. There would be far less american programmers if we had to learn another language to program. It's common sense.
Do you think more americans would watch Parasite or Amelie if we had to learn korean or french first? Or more watch the movies once those movies were subtitled/dubbed in english first?
All I'm saying is that porting the ecosystem into people's native languages would boost the numbers of programmers and advance technology. It won't take away from those like you who want to program in english and it certainly won't take away from dominance of the english language in international communication.
Just like you can watch an american movie without subs/dubs. But most of your countrymen can't. Would you be against subbing/dubbing of english language movies to disadvantage your countrymen? I doubt it.
> It's because communication wasn't as global as it is today. And you seem to think that just because each nation/language has their own ecosystem that somehow the world will stop communicating with each other.
True, it would not but the communication surface would be much smaller, we would depend on a few bilinguals.
> Nothing will really change except a lot of french people who wouldn't program in english would program in french. You can still program in english if you want.
People barely speak English already so if you remove the need for some English keyword to do development, you can be sure you are heading toward a generation that doesn't know how and doesn't care about speaking English.
> No. Is there an added layer of dependencies and complexity to compiling languages in english?
No because they are built from the ground up to use English. So if I understand your idea, by creating languages that are based on each local language we would not be able to share source code without having to translate it into our own language?
> So translate it.
So I need to learn Chinese. And English. And Russian. Or, more realistically, I need to depend on someone to do the translation for me. Automatic translation is not really that good for books and websites from the experience I have. Just taking cppreference which translates automatically, most of the time it's non-sense.
> Do you feel helpless that russian literature is in russian and you can't read russian? No, you'd find a french translation of russian literature right?
Yes but I miss on a lot of Russian literature.
I agree with you that if we had a programming language in French of the quality of Java or C or Python it would allow some individuals, that see English as a barrier, to get into programming. But the cons and the issues it brins largely outweight, in my opinion, this benefit.
> People barely speak English already so if you remove the need for some English keyword to do development, you can be sure you are heading toward a generation that doesn't know how and doesn't care about speaking English.
So be it if it means more programmers in france, china, russia, etc.
> No because they are built from the ground up to use English.
Yeah, and you can do the same in other major languages. It should be easier since we already did most of the work for you.
> So if I understand your idea, by creating languages that are based on each local language we would not be able to share source code without having to translate it into our own language?
Yes. You'd be able to share the libraries and executables, but not the source unless you know the language.
> So I need to learn Chinese. And English. And Russian.
No. The chinese, english, russian, etc has to be translated into french. Have you ever read a book by a non-french author?
> Automatic translation is not really that good for books and websites from the experience I have.
That's my point. You are a worse programmer than you could be because you are coding in a foreign language. If you coded in french, you'd be a better programmer. After all, programming is an art, like literature.
> I agree with you that if we had a programming language in French of the quality of Java or C or Python it would allow some individuals
You completely missed my point. You could convert Java, C, Python, etc into french or any other language. It's simply updating the grammar where you could do a simple 1 to 1 conversion of the keywords. It's so simple that an ambitious and competent person could do it over a weekend. The hard part is translating the libraries and the executables - the actual code in the wild. But it's doable if given enough resources.
Like you said, people translate documents in many languages already. Why not take the extra step and translate the source as well?
So by political, I'm conflating two meanings. A lot of Silicon Valley techies are apolitical in a sense of against government intervention, believing that science and their own rationality would be able to do better than the social institutions and powers-that-be. That sort of ideology is fine to have, but I suspect the same mindset can lead to neglect of the politics informed by the second meaning, which simply refers to the practice of negotiating, group-work, wheeling-and-dealing; in that sense you can also call it "business" decisions.
Creating software, whether in a corporation or in an open source project, is more often than not a process that involves many stakeholders, processes, and yes irrational traditions or even "religious" ideology (spaces vs. tabs, etc.). So any time you have more than one person writing a program, things will get political. The decisions behind software-making is a political process.
Mathematics, in contrast, is probably not political except in the higher levels of academia.
> So any time you have more than one person writing a program, things will get political.
I agree with you that the software industry seems to struggle more with these kinds of political issues.
However, there are many human endeavours that also require input from large numbers of stake holders and they seem to cope (i.e. going to the moon, building a bridge, building a skyscraper etc.).
That suggests the problem is not so much the large number of stake holders, but rather the software industry struggling to cope with situations requiring large numbers of stakeholders.
Quality on the initial revision of Apollo Program hardware and software wasn't great. They did as well as they could given the constraints at the time. But there were numerous failures along the way, and several missions survived mostly through blind luck.
>...apolitical in a sense of against government intervention, believing that science and their own rationality would be able to do better than the social institutions and powers-that-be.
The gp is talking about: requirements; allocating budget between research, salaries, testing, development, support, marketing, exec's pockets, shareholder's pockets, etc.; decisions about which standards to support or not; agreements with other firms; etc. etc. etc.
Software is the automation of processes. Processes are intensely political, because they effect the world.
Well after just having a 5 hour meeting discussing what exactly constitutes the Presentation Layer vs the Application Layer and debating about whether Authentication counts as business logic in the presentation tier, I can tell you for certain it is Political at times.
Math may not be political. Often it’s the input to the math that’s political.
Besides, the software engineering process is full of political decisions. What does an “unbiased” search engine mean? When you build a recommendation service, do you intentionally reinforce bias of the user or expose the user to other points of view? How do you define and handle abuse of your service? I could go on and on.
Isn't it the same as before? If 4gb of data was too big because you had 2gb of RAM, then the methods used at that time are the same you would apply for a 500gb dataset that can't fit in a 250gb RAM machine, right?
New issues appear when you have to analyze 2Tb with a 32gb RAM machine, but when the order of difference is the same, the issues and thus the answers are the same as before?
No. Because the number of use cases where you have 1TB or 2TB of data is smaller in comparison.
Also, the rest of the use cases (which fits into a single machine memory now), can be handled much more efficiently with memory base algorithm, instead of I/O based algorithms.
The goal of Hadoop, as well as most of the theory on disk-based indices (E.g. BTREE), was to overcome the I/O bottlenecks. But as memory is getting bigger and cheaper there is a trend to drop Hadoop in favor of reading data directly from the cloud and into memory.
edit: typo