Not the author, but it is large enough to generalize to any other big bitvectors and small enough to handle. The use of SAT solver of course means that 32-bit is not a hard limit, but humans can't easily look at them.
> If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage.
Or they'll just buy you out. Competitive advantage doesn't work too well when your competitors have large moats of cash that you don't have access to.
Honestly, people just need to organize unions. That's the only effective counter to policy like this.
You say "buy out" like it's a bad thing. Presumably that's a huge win for you if you started (or have equity in) the company - and if not, you can just... not accept the buyout offer?
Yes but the idea is that competition should help the economy in surfacing "good ideas". If competition leads to acquisition all the time, then really there isn't much benefit to the overall economy.
> Presumably that's a huge win for you if you started (or have equity in) the company - and if not, you can just... not accept the buyout offer?
The issue is that this will not raise the working standards of the workers already working for the abusive employer, not that this can't be leveraged by a privileged few.
> Honestly, people just need to organize unions. That's the only effective counter to policy like this.
This seems like a non-sequitur to me. You seem to be suggesting that unions magically understand the best way to organize each and every workplace and that every employer should be required to organize its efforts according to the wisdom of "the union".
How about each company runs its business as it sees fit and each person decides on their own who they want to work for or perhaps just work for themselves? Systems that work thrive, systems that don't work wither away. Build in some social support for people to be able to move to new jobs or create new jobs/companies with as little friction as possible. For example:
ensure that substantial changes to a work arrangement must have a notice/grace period (no unforeseeable changes)
* make health insurance independent from your employer
* reduce occupational licensing regulations and require states to accept licenses from other states
* simplify and streamline the creation and overhead of small/all companies (incorporation, taxes, reporting, etc.)
* allow employers and employees/contractors to define the relationship that works for them without the ambiguous and irregularly enforced employee/contractor distinction in the tax code
That would require you to sell. And if one is confident they can win in the marketplace then why sell to them when you can eventually flip the scenario and have them asking to be acquired?
Fully granted that in my experience, in the USA for the past long time, it's felt like Corporatism has made this scenario far less likely. But, perhaps that's more of a sign to start your company elsewhere. Perhaps America is no longer a good place to start a company.
Or for people that want better for themselves and their coworkers.
Listen, I know as SWEs, we're supposed to reject unions because we're paid so well, and listening to a lifetime of anti-union propaganda that leads to hilarious conclusions like the above. But reading some of the other threads complaining about work conditions that it sounds like a majority would like to avoid, not to mention some of the horror stories out of, eg, video game development studios, getting people to understand that, no, a union could be useful is, for some reason, an unhill battle. Wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to try and do deep work in an open office floor plan? if there were more conference rooms? If RTO wasn't a thing? If there was no deathmarch to make the upcoming release?
Because people, including those that can compete on skill, could still band together and say "we're not putting up with open office floor plans".
> Unions are for people who can't compete on skill (or no longer wish to).
I mean, the “on skill” part is superfluous, but, yes, it is definitionally true that a union is for workers that no longer wish primarily to compete with each other, and who realize that such competition is a race to the bottom that works against them and for the benefit of their employers.
All organized groups are rejections on some level of competition among the members in favor of cooperation for joint advantage.
There are many situations where employers are not interested in skills, they’re just looking to fill a position with the cheapest (licensed) person. There’s very little ROI in upgrading your skills in this situation.
I suppose that's a union by name. But for the millions of people in a real union, it isn't recognizable as one.
Most unions function to keep an established order where seniority matters more than capability and performance.
Besides sports unions, actors guilds, and other small examples, unions exist to provide a framework for collectivising unskilled labor into a unit of power, where individually they have none.
Yeah, you handwave some of the most visible and effective unions in the United States (SAG-AFTRA, WGA), you're also ignoring education unions, healthcare unions, and many other careers where pay is not just about seniority, but also education, certification, specialization, and other factors.
Even unions in industries with legitimately undifferentiated labor will have shift differentials built into their contracts.
What you’re doing is trying to craft a special definition of a union that excludes the most analogous unions to the one that software engineers could form and ignores the real examples of solidarity between professional class and other types of workers. See also the solidarity strikes against Tesla in Sweden. I won’t speak to your motivations in attempting to do so, but it doesn’t correspond to how labor organizing is actually practiced.
I would put a hypothetical software engineer's union in the same category as a sports union/actor's guild. Just as an actor has brand recognition and can leverage this or start their own productions, so can a skilled software engineer start their own company/be recognised in their craft. And beyond that, can you imagine what would happen if software engineers decided to strike? It has the potential to have a far greater impact than pretty much any other industrial action. If factory workers down tools for a week, production is delayed. If Google SREs down tools for a week, it might break the internet.
Python is of course a major boon to humanity, but the things that need funding are typically things that corporations aren't using. It's our reliance on private spokes of technology (think: app stores & sales platforms, operating systems, hardware designs, etc) that are major risks to the long-term stability of our society and economy.
> Sure, they could all be faking it, but at that point you have to question how much evidence it takes to believe in anything at all.
This is worth questioning (and hopefully coming back around to believing in)! Most of the reason I reject the idea of young earth theory is that the incentive to fake the earth's evident age is so vanishingly low my understanding of the rest of society would also have to be rejected. And that's a deeply stressful act to engage in without my own incentive to. But it's worth knowing about yourself that your view of the world is inherently based in your place and comfort within it, even the stuff that people broadly agree about, not some sense of discovering absolute truth. The latter aspect is just a symptom of having a coherent worldview, which people manage with very heterodox beliefs all the time.
It's worth looking into examination of flat-earthers and why they turn to it—it's often linked to myriad other conspiracy theories, each of which support each other.
Not arguing the specifics here, but a deliberate effort to deceive is not a prerequisite for a widely held theory to be false. It is likely that all of the proponents of luminiferous aether believed they were dutifully following the evidence but they still arrived at the wrong conclusion.
All evidence is theory-laden. Scientific study is still a sociological system despite our best efforts (yes, I've read Kuhn like everybody else)
> Only a very small percentage of the world has a complete grasp on the evidence for natural selection, climate change, the big bang, etc...
I'm guessing only a small number (1-2 digits of people) has a "complete grasp" on the evidence for any one of those topics at all, and there isn't a single human on earth with a "complete grasp" on all of them. To support the article, integrating knowledge of fields that you don't have "complete grasp" on still requires faith in institutional processes that produce what we call "science".
And this is even more complicated when it comes to the replication crisis—I'm guessing having a "complete grasp" on the understanding the literature represents of difficult to reproduce fields is 0. I don't know much about climate change work myself, but it seems like such a dynamic and chaotic field that many results on specific claims of cause and impact are going to be difficult to reproduce.
> There isn't anything actually wrong with JavaScript in 2023, either.
The semantics of the language can be quite complex and it took decades for browsers to agree on them for most use cases. WASM arose out of a failure of browsers to figure out ways to deprecate this—mostly unnecessary—complexity.
> The idea that it needs to be replaced stems from countless failed attempts to shove a bunch of crap into the client with a bunch of frameworks and without a shred of actual engineering discipline.
The same can be said about the implementation of javascript in browsers as well.
We're stuck with it regardless, but our reliance on javascript and its myriad interactions with html and css functions much the same way for large browser vendors as regulatory capture does for large corporations at the state level.
> WASM arose out of a failure of browsers to figure out ways to deprecate this—mostly unnecessary—complexity.
No, WASM arose out of the work done by Alon Zakai on asm.js at Mozilla which was in good part motivated to show that the web didn't need Google's PNaCl.
> The semantics of the language can be quite complex and it took decades for browsers to agree on them for most use cases.
That's ancient history. JavaScript has its quirks, but it's not a difficult language to learn or use. Frankly, I don't know where you get this idea that the semantics of the language are hard. In contrast to what? Maybe if you shared some examples I could understand what you're talking about. JavaScript was challenging in decades past not because it was complex but because it was way too simple. Using it on a webpage to do more than very rudimentary things with the browser API meant doing a lot of whacky stuff and using libraries for operations we take for granted today.
> WASM arose out of a failure of browsers to figure out ways to deprecate this—mostly unnecessary—complexity.
As someone else mentioned, no it didn't. WASM came from the same desire as Java applets and browser plugins for Shockwave and Flash, which was to develop applications that run in the browser using entirely different languages and authoring tools.
> The same can be said about the implementation of javascript in browsers as well.
No idea what you are basing this on. Nobody (as in the vast majority) thinks that modern web development is a failure because JavaScript the language is too complex. Everyone is complaining about web development because of all the tools that have been added between the keyboard and the code running in the client, and said tools failing to live up to their promise while encouraging patterns that commonly backfire.
> our reliance on javascript and its myriad interactions with html and css functions
What does that even mean? JavaScript only has as much interaction with the DOM as is demanded of it. If there's a myriad of ways that JavaScript can interact with the DOM, well, that's by design... how else would you have it? CSS functions have nothing to do with JavaScript, if that's what you're actually referring to. At most, JavaScript can listen for some events that are emitted by things like CSS animations.
> You are a member of the intellectual dark web, and care more about finding the truth than about social conformance
Isn't this a declaration of what social conformance you prefer? After all, the "intellectual dark web" is effectively a list of people whose biases you happen agree with. Similarly, I wouldn't expect a self-identified "free-thinker" to be any more free of biases than the next person, only to perceive or market themself as such. Bias is only perceived as such from a particular point in a social graph.
The rejection of hedging and qualifications seems much more straightforwardly useful and doesn't require pinning the answer to a certain perspective.
We've needed a search engine that excludes the work of corporate giants that dominate our modern internet for a while. It's just never been so clear and dire as today.
Interestingly google used to have a per-user, user-controlled domain blacklist that go excised around ~2008 or so—presumably because this would have enabled automated blocking of high-value clients.
That seems to remove the advantage of using the browser in the first place—leveraging native controls and integrations, giving the user control over how things are renderered, and accessibility concerns.
Of course, I can see how this is mostly irrelevant for some applications like games, but that's still rather niche compared to, you know, useful and wide-spread apps that people actually want to use.
You forgot about the most important advantages. True write once run anywhere cross platform support, and one click zero install distribution with no gatekeepers. The latter in particular is key and impossible to replicate any other way because device gatekeepers like Apple or Nintendo will never allow any other app platform to bypass their distribution monopoly.
> True write once run anywhere cross platform support, and one click zero install distribution with no gatekeepers.
We had (have) that, and the apps were miserable to use for the same reasons enumerated above. The place where it has come closest to succeeding? Video games.
Unfortunately, platforms are too diverse to target as a generic platform without making major sacrifices as to either consistency or usability.
Why should a community limit their potential and ambition because another can’t seem to figure it out? This is like the crabs in a bucket thing. There’s no need to solve every social issue before progressing to high tech things.
We would do well to ignore the cynical and misanthropic who contribute nothing but complaints about how the capable people should serve their personal interests first.
Well there is one argument that, in my opinion, is a reasonable one.
We should try to improve and solve some of our cultural, philosophy, and systemic problems -before- we replicate them in isolated pockets of humanity. Otherwise we might suffer a replication crisis, where cultural and societal advancements are not shared by all.
For example, many dystopian media in the past few decades has focused on images of what a hyper capitalistic society could look like in space. Where you may have to pay for every breath, pay for literally existing in a space. A society where every day of your life must be profitable and servicing the corporations you have sworn fealty, a world where the only purpose for the foreseeable future is growth and commerce.
Perhaps having a society that is a bit more communally focused, and less self centered. One where the purpose of society is to nurture and spread life to where complex life does not exist. A society where the primary driver isn't growth for growth's sake.
The argument is that if we ignore our cultural and philosophical short comings, we could replicate them. Why is replicating them bad? Because the stakes are so much higher when you have a space fairing race. Do you know what a small crew of technically literate people could do with the tech a society building a mar colony would require? Capture and redirect an asteroid, and if they were half intelligent they would know that the best way for it to go undetected would be to play the long game and give it a long trajectory out of the solar plane where most of the solar systems mass is. Or they could just as easily purposefully seed a planet's orbit with debris to create an intentional Kessler's syndrome. And you might say that these are outlandish, but any society that lives in space or on an non-terraformed would be a society where the base competency would be vastly higher due to survival pressures.
So, yes we should keep advancing tech but I think it's an obvious deficiency with our silicon valley minded leaders. We don't put any time/money/energy into the fundamental problems of our society because these newage business men have been indoctrinated into the ideology that technology is the one and only savior. It's important, but you can't build a society or a building with only one pillar.
> We don't put any time/money/energy into the fundamental problems of our society
We spend untold billions and trillions on these things. You will never solve every problem for every person. Utopia does not exist. You see, a lot of different people have a lot of different ideas on what the fundamental problems of our society are. Some people think it's because people have abandoned traditional values and religion. Other people think it's because of that. You can't solve all the problem for all the people. You can't care for everyone because you just end up caring for no one.
> Perhaps having a society that is a bit more communally focused, and less self centered.
Your vision, to my judgement, sounds self centered though. It's saying "take care of me first instead of fulfilling your ambitions". There can't be a single "community". It's just not possible or realistic. It will always be plural because to be quite frank, many groups of people do not like each other, will not change for each other, and don't want to waste their lives trying to be accepted by other groups. And that's OK.
> We should try to improve and solve some of our cultural, philosophy, and systemic problems -before- we replicate them in isolated pockets of humanity.
This is saying we should paralyze ourselves until an arbitrary group of people say everything is good now. Again, why would we do that?
Exactly. While I strongly support efforts to improve life for the masses and solve problems on Earth, I also think that there will always be problems. As such, if we wait for Earth’s problems to be solved before venturing into space, we’ll simply never venture into space, and eventually something will happen to cause humanity to forget how to build and launch rockets, potentially for the remainder of the species’ existence.
It’s better to use the capability while we know we have it and have the chance to etch that knowledge into our very existence by way of living all throughout the solar system.
> Why should a community limit their potential and ambition because another can’t seem to figure it out?
I reject that interpretation of the the song completely—theoretically, a nation represents a single community. The issue is that the nation in question (the United States) doesn't seem to give a shit about its own needs outside those of its dominant (i.e. rich and ruling) class. Keep in mind that—although the song in question does present it as a racial matter, because race and class are so deeply intertwined in this country—that the focus on economic dominance over all other concerns leaves the poor in this country behind regardless of race.
And the implication that the poor (especially poor black folks) in this country are poor because they "can't seem to figure it out" is so asinine I'm not going to bother addressing it.
