The other problem is that all the details matter all the time.
Like if you want to mathematically model what happens in a pool table hall when somebody strikes a ball with a great deal of force... by the time you get to the six or seventh bounce you are going to have to start to take into account the position and movement of people standing around the table watching it. The airflow, the vibration of them moving, the relative gravitational forces, etc. It all matters all the time.
And the problem only gets worse the larger the scale and longer the timelines.
Like if you want to manage a economy.
It is tempting to want to look at "things from a high level" and imagine that all the details just kinda average themselves out. So it isn't necessary to figure out the behavior of each individual in a national economy. It should be possible to simply plot out the results of their decision making over time and extrapolate that into the future to come up with meaningful policy decisions and 5 year plans.
The problem is that that doesn't work. Because all the details matter all the time.
Also the very act of making policies causes changes in the behavior economy in wildly unpredictable manners. Every individual actor involved is going to change their behavior and decision making based on your decision making, which then changes the behavior and decision making of every other individual, etc etc. In a endless fractal involving billions of actors, since your national economy is not isolated from the forces of every other economy and visa versa.
Also trying to make targets out of measurements and indicators tends to destroy the value of the measurements and indicators. Meaning that by setting policies you are destroying the information you are basing your decisions off of.
So you can't collect enough information to make good decisions. The information you receive is already obsolete by the time you get it. And the act of trying to create rules and policies based on the information you do have tends to destroy what little value it has left.
You sound like you would really enjoy the book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have failed.
I wonder if a lot of this comes back to the enlightenment/science-y way of looking at the world that imagines that the way to understand stuff is to break it into subproblems, solve those, and build back up from there. It relies on a fundamental assumption that there are separate things instead of a big continuous process of happening. I recently read about a study where participants were asked to pick the best car for a set of needs, and were given 4 variables per car in one case, and 16 variables per car in another. Then, each group was either distracted while pondering, or allowed to think through it directly/consciously. The conscious thought group did better than distracted group did when there were 4 variables, but worse when there were more. Intuition is great at the missable details.
…and that’s all before you get into all the other logical fallacies that tend to compromise one’s perspective. Anything that requires anticipating and/or interpreting the behaviors of other people, or that involves accounting for risks or probabilities—these are especially fraught as our own instincts and nature actively works to warp objective reality.
In the context of policy making (or presidential fiat, as the case may be), there is always the risk of mistaking what people should do with what they will do. A pragmatic strategy for success will include systems that can help to thwart the worst impulses of our flawed reasoning, including things like dispassionate peer reviewed analyses (oops) that is untethered by the ambitions or ideologies of individual people or groups (oops), a diverse array of advisory opinions (oops), functional checks on monolithic authority (oops), and mechanisms for correcting prior mistakes (fingers crossed).
I think this all contributes to the phenomenon that folks have (a bit erroneously) associated with the Dunning-Kruger effect—essentially the idea that people who haven’t learned enough to know how much they don’t know are dangerously overconfident and naive. That said, I think there is a tendency to assume this about others that’s probably fallacious in and of itself. In the case of current events, I don’t believe the individuals involved actually care enough to have even mounted the left peak of the Dunning-Kruger chart, but rather are fully uninformed and unconcerned with much of any implications outside of their own very narrow ideological ends (it’s probably more accurate to apply Dunning-Kruger to the ideology itself, or maybe the broader coalition of partisan cohorts who share it, than it is the people wielding it).
Generally speaking workers in the USA are anti-union. Or at least see them with suspicion. They are widely perceived as a waste of money on dues and just plain kinda unpleasant to deal with.
This isn't true for all types. Like welders and pipe fitters tend to like unions, but by and large if unions don't exist it is because nobody (including the workers) wants them.
They also don't really like what they perceive as "leftists" either. They much more strongly prefer to identify with somebody like Trump then somebody writing for a Marxist online website.
There are exceptions to this, of course. Like if you live in a large city, especially predominately "Blue" area you are going to see a lot of people running around trying to advocate for unions and such things.
But that isn't normal for the rest of the country.
There is a lot of literature spent discussing this sort of thing... Why American workers are largely very conservative.
Back in the 1960/70s when student groups went around in working class areas of the country and tried to organize labor... a lot of them ended up hospitals as a result of their efforts. This is why Marxists don't go around making murals about the greatness of the working men anymore.
The rule of law says innocent until proven guilty.
The reason they didn't go after him for murder for hire allegations isn't because they felt bad for him or that they didn't want to waste tax payer's money.
The reason they didn't go after him for 'murder for hire' was that they knew there was no merit in it.
They did go after him for "murder for hire"; the murders were part of his conspiracy predicates, and evidence for them was introduced. This stuff about him not being taken all the way through a case charged on murder-for-hire, after receiving a life sentence in a case where those murders were part of the case, is just message board jazz hands.
>case where those murders were part of the case, is just message board jazz hands.
you're trying to look like you don't understand or aren't aware that jury didn't convict him of murder-for-hire.
He chose a trial by jury, not by a judge. Nevertheless the judge herself decided that he is guilty of the murder-for-hire, and additionally the judge used significantly lower standard than required for conviction.
Feel free to use the search bar to see what's been written (including by me) in the zillion discussions we've had on this case in the past. Again: primary source documentation of what happened in that trial is right there for you to read; you're just a Google search away from it.
> A) What does DRM realistically accomplish for the media companies?
Control publishing rights, platforms, software and hardware that is used for the consumption of said media.
The publishers control the DRM, which then needs to be licensed by television makers, software writers, and such things. Then that gives them control over how is it presented, how it is sold, how it is consumed and it forces everybody to agree to their terms.
It is a power thing. They want to have power over other businesses. DRM laws help them do that.
> How are these DRM schemes actually being defeated?
Well I don't follow DRM piracy stuff, but at a high level the people that want to consume the media must be able to decrypt it to enjoy it. So if you buy one of these DRM devices and figure out how they work then you can decrypt anything that is compatible with them.
And you only need to decrypt it once since digital media can be copied a infinite amount of times.
> It is a power thing. They want to have power over other businesses. DRM laws help them do that.
This is the argument for repealing them, which is why you rarely see them making it out loud.
Instead they come up with some rubbish about making it marginally more difficult (spoiler: it's still easier to pirate stuff than use legal services and the only thing actually preventing everyone from doing it is that some people want to follow the law). So it's good to knock those fake arguments down when you see them and leave no excuse to keep the bad laws that ought to be repealed.
Accepting their actual motivation like it's a legitimate reason to keep those laws is like saying the reason we should keep doing the stuff Snowden revealed is so the intelligence agencies can spy on the elected officials regulating the intelligence agencies.
It is sorta like Vagrant, but instead of using virtualbox virtual machines you use podman containers. This way you get to use OCI images for your "dev environment" that integrates directly into your desktop.
There is some challenges related to usermode networking for non-root-managed controllers and desktop integration has some additional complications. But besides that it has almost no overhead and you can have unfettered access to things like GPUs.
Also it is usually pretty easy to convert your normal docker or kubernetes containers over to something you can run on your desktop.
Also it is possible to use things like Kubernetes pods definitions to deploy sets of containers with podman and manage it with systemd and such things. So you can have "clouds of containers" that your dev container needs access to locally.
If there is a corporate need for window-specific applications then running Windows VMs or doing remote applications over RDP is a possible work around.
If everything you are targeting as a deployment is going to be Linux-everything then it doesn't make a lot of sense to jump through a bunch of hoops and cause a bunch of headaches just to avoid having it as workstation OS.
If you're doing this, there are many cases where you might as well just spin up a decent Linux server and give your developers accounts on that? With some pretty basic setup everyone can just run their own stuff within their own user account.
You'll run into occasional issues (e.g. if everyone is trying to run default node.js on default port) but with some basic guardrails it feels like it should be OK?
I'm remembering back to when my old company ran a lot of PHP projects. Each user just had their own development environment and their own Apache vhost. They wrote their code and tested it in their own vhost. Then we'd merge to a single separate vhost for further testing.
I am trying to remember anything about what was painful about it but it all basically Just Worked. Everyone had remote access via VPN; the worst case scenario for them was they'd have to work from home with a bit of extra latency.
The painful part of that setup is that all the tools you want to use on the source code must either run on the server itself, thus installed somehow, or some slow remote mounted filesystem, this severely limits the tools you may want to use.
What tools don't run on Linux? Modern tooling almost assumes Linux in most cases now. As a Windows user I feel like I hit this wall way more often than any other.
Running an IDE over ssh or samba is just an awful experience, but generally if I want a command line tool to be installed I need to be either root or I need to ask the administrator of the server to install it, on my own machine I can install whatever I want and I can run whatever operating system or distro I want.
And if I'm traveling I can bring my laptop with me, can't do that with a server.
Oh right sorry I did forget about that aspect. I haven't done that for a while with a big codebase with, say, VS Code, and not on anything that wasn't very low latency (sub 10ms, so local LAN). I am mostly editing directly on the server when I do it these days but that wouldn't fly for anything other than the light hacking I do.
Deamonizing means double forking processes to break away from the terminal executing it.
This sort of behavior makes writing proper systemd unit files and containers a pain. It is a lot nicer to keep them 'attached' so that you can do things like capture stdout for logging and all that fun stuff.
That is what they are talking about when "daemonizing is considered undesirable".
Kubernetes is one of those things that are only as complicated as you want it to be.
The problem with Kubernetes and complexity is that because it simplifies a lot of things that are a huge PITA to accomplish on a "homemade" server/container setup is that there are a huge number of products and things you can run on kubernetes to "do stuff".
And it is hard for a lot of people and organizations to resist the "oh shiny" aspect. Stuff like "Oh, look I can do network policies and service meshes!" or "Lets create this really complicated and big thing so we can configure all our AWS infrastructure with kubernetes objects! Who cares that a bad commit can destroy the infrastructure the cluster depends on along with our ability to manage any of it!" or "Look we can have lots of namespaces for all our internal orgs and departments, lets make a gigantic centrally managed Kubernetes cluster that will be managed by IT and that everybody will be forced to use at the same time! Putting all our eggs in one basket is a awesome idea!".
K8s sorta removes the barrier of entry that world normally stop people from implementing those sorts of bad ideas.
Otherwise the core vanilla Kubernetes isn't really that complicated compared to most DIY solutions that try to manage large numbers of apps on clusters of systems. Most of the time it ends up a lot more robust and simpler in the right hands.
You're not wrong about the ideal case, but I've never seen the ideal case in any real (read: paid) context. I've seen hobbyists with very solid setups that were well managed, I've made the thing that kubernetes wants to solve by hand and I understand it's not a trivial (that is to say, not a single afternoon of design and implementation) to do.
I guess I'm just really frustrated with seeing the people that get paid to use and promote it be so bad at what they do and I don't like cleaning up after them :)
Emacs is unique because it is self-editable. That is you can edit and modify the program on the program realtime. There is a C-based core that can't be updated on the fly, but by and large Emacs a self-mutable Lisp virtual machine that comes with a built-in editor and repl.
Depending on how you want to look at it it is possible to say that Emacs editor you use when you first install it is just the default application for the ELisp machine. This is why people talk about things like Org-Mode as if it is this separate thing. It kinda really is. Sure it is included with Emacs nowadays, but it really is just another Elisp application. And, yes, it is a editor first and the machine is based around concepts like buffers, but it is still a full fledged programming environment.
Which also means that if you don't like Emacs as a editor you can write your own. Which people have done. It makes a great Vi/Vim editor with Evil that is far more compatible with Vim then most people imagine. I use "Meow-mode" which is another model editor that adopts some more modern approaches from things like Helix and puts a lot of focus on improving the efficiency of Emacs keyboard macros.
So saying that Emacs users just have a "Emacs-shaped hammer" makes as much sense as saying that all Java authors have is a big Java hammer or that Linux users can only see problems as Linux nails, or whatever.
There is a downside to all of this, of course.
Emacs where-everything-is-changeable-and-accessible-all-the-time doesn't lend itself to multi-threading, so if you have a lot of stuff going on in the "background" it can cause performance problems. The newer "native compilation" that became standard in the past few years does helps a lot, but there is a still a single thread deep down.
Also if you want to get very productive in Emacs there is a learning curve. If you are a sysadmin type that has been using Vi for decades then going to Emacs is going to be very painful. The best bet for becoming a advanced user very quickly is to learn just enough Emacs to do basic editing and navigating info files... and then just put the effort into learning Elisp. You don't have to do this, lots of people use it for years without learning any real elisp, but it does limit you. Of course thanks to things like Doom Emacs you don't lose much compared to other editors/IDEs.
Also things like Eshell and GNU Calc are criminally underrated and misunderstood. (hint: Eshell is not a terminal emulator and doesn't use a external shell program, so don't confuse it with things like ETerm)
And, hey, I can now have conversations with my editor with the help of ollama. So there is that.
Like if you want to mathematically model what happens in a pool table hall when somebody strikes a ball with a great deal of force... by the time you get to the six or seventh bounce you are going to have to start to take into account the position and movement of people standing around the table watching it. The airflow, the vibration of them moving, the relative gravitational forces, etc. It all matters all the time.
And the problem only gets worse the larger the scale and longer the timelines.
Like if you want to manage a economy.
It is tempting to want to look at "things from a high level" and imagine that all the details just kinda average themselves out. So it isn't necessary to figure out the behavior of each individual in a national economy. It should be possible to simply plot out the results of their decision making over time and extrapolate that into the future to come up with meaningful policy decisions and 5 year plans.
The problem is that that doesn't work. Because all the details matter all the time.
Also the very act of making policies causes changes in the behavior economy in wildly unpredictable manners. Every individual actor involved is going to change their behavior and decision making based on your decision making, which then changes the behavior and decision making of every other individual, etc etc. In a endless fractal involving billions of actors, since your national economy is not isolated from the forces of every other economy and visa versa.
Also trying to make targets out of measurements and indicators tends to destroy the value of the measurements and indicators. Meaning that by setting policies you are destroying the information you are basing your decisions off of.
So you can't collect enough information to make good decisions. The information you receive is already obsolete by the time you get it. And the act of trying to create rules and policies based on the information you do have tends to destroy what little value it has left.
reply