I think commenter is drawing a parallel, with leadership demanding both high security and high speed, and then putting pressure on engineers to not be "losers" if they can't do both, leading to exactly this scenario.
I feel like the balance has shifted over the last 30 years, and is speeding up. Semi-automatic and fully automatic re-factoring has made dealing with duplicated code much faster, cheaper and safer. Changing abstraction is still high risk.
Automated re-factoring means you can refactor duplicated code only as long as it is exactly duplicate.
Whereas the whole problem is that when somebody changes 3 out of 10 of the duplicate cases in a simple way that they are no longer exactly duplicate, and then somebody fixes a bug in one of the other 7/10 cases, they can update the bug across the 7 "duplicate" cases but they'll miss the 3 that aren't.
The problem with duplicate code is always when some of the instances get changed/fixed but not all of them. And that when somebody edits one instance, they often aren't even aware of all the other instances.
Abstractions are low-risk, because you know where the code is. If it's the wrong abstraction, you can fix that and know what you're fixing. Whereas with duplicated-yet-modified code, you've now lost the connections between them.
I have regularly watched agents forget to update one duplicated pattern after changing it somewhere else. If it's within a single file or related class, it'll catch it, but if it's off in some other package in the monorepo, it's a crapshoot.
Duplication is often less harmful than abstraction.
Duplications can often be cleaned up over time, bad abstractions can quickly become a bottleneck, that severely slow down everyone working on the project.
The most difficult codebases are those with every little thing some bespoke abstraction that went through 3 rounds of committee reviews that results in having to click through 12 files to figure out what anything is doing. Factory factory factories each with their own little frankenframework to understand before using anything.
I think there are a few things that make it "worthy" of literary consideration:
1. Read a straight horror story, it's quite a surprising twist at the end
2. A critique on the senselessness of following tradition just for the sake of it -- the way a society can just go along with something without really understanding why
3. The banality of evil, and how it can often look like something totally ordinary, rather than some nefarious demon
I loved it when I first read it -- it truly shocked it in middle school and I still have a visceral feeling when thinking about it many years later
> with a pre-built you're at the very least paying for someone to assemble it for you, so it's always going to be more expensive as a baseline
Except isn't it possible that pre-built companies actually get better deals on hardware bought in bulk, and therefore could offset the labor costs with cheaper materials?
I believe this is exactly what's going on -- they're buying parts in bulk, often months in advance, and locking in deals that a single consumer can't easily go get on the open market right now.
Hardware pricing and availabilty pre-COVID was pretty predictable and stable, which meant the consumer could extract a meaningful cost advantage if they were willing to do the relatively modest amount of work of sourcing components individually and personally assembling the build. Right now, though, some places like Microcenter appear to have a cost advantage that fundamentally relies on market and pricing instability and can only be achieved through deeper integration with the supply chain and bulk purchasing in advance -- something a retailer like Microcenter can do, but I personally cannot.
Surely nothing has ever done wrong with this limitless source of clean energy to give people pause? There's no uninhabitable areas of the Earth due to this?
i'm not sure there are, from a science point of view... From political point of view there are probably only 2 locations in one country... vs a gigantic energy output on planetary scale...
Most of them are, even for experienced programmers, we just don't admit it ;-) They are the results from the hard work over time of one or more programmers.
However, do not let it stop you from starting something you might be interested in knowing/doing i.e. do not let self-doubt lead to paralysis. Start at your own pace and focus only on learning and not competing with others.
A good way to get started is to begin with studying prior work in the domain of your choice. For example i link to the works of Adam Dunkels in my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46441772 which you can study for your own implementation. They are all small being made for embedded systems and hence relatively easier to comprehend. Use AI tools as necessary to both understand and generate code.
Or maybe their actual problems are caused by automation, tax cuts on the rich, and a lack of social safety net that lets people live in dignity, but the media they consume mostly blames immigration and crime.
In the US, we spend about $3T on social safety net programs at the federal level, that's half the federal budget or about 12% of the GDP.
I used to live in Oakland, CA...about a mile from MLK. I can tell you plenty about the amount of crime there over the last decade. I've known lots of people from the suburbs that will try to tell me that crime is down, meanwhile I saw my neighbors getting robbed during the day (not just at night anymore).
If your only experience with these things is watching the news, you really shouldn't be talking about them. And taking police services away from the poorest parts of town is despicable.
PS It was the votes from those high crime districts that got Trump elected last year. The people down there don't watch the news. Your take is just copium because you don't want to do the real work of looking at your side's policies and fixing what is costing you voters and elections.
As somebody avowedly on the left-hand side of the political spectrum - yep. I know the crime stats. I also have seen friends of mine get robbed 3 times in 4 years, once with them in the house. (LA, not Oakland. And in the nice suburbs.) And it's not an isolated incident.
I know that the crime stats say crime is down. But that's not the lived experience for a lot of people. And unless politicians are willing to acknowledge there are issues, and do the work to tackle them, you get demagogues. Right-wing ones will use it to extol the virtues of cracking down, left-wing ones will use it to talk about the plight of the downtrodden.
Meanwhile, you still have people for whom crime is the best option, and you have people who suffer from crime. We could choose to solve those problems (independent of political leaning), and we could choose to solve both sides of the coin. But that'd probably be too rational to sell at the voting booth.
> It was the votes from those high crime districts that got Trump elected last year. The people down there don't watch the news.
[citation needed] They do get enough info through various channels to decide "Trump might fix it". And a good chunk of that is news. We can debate the veracity of info they derive, and how they make their decisions, but let's not go "poor people don't watch news". Mass media exists and has effects, across all demographic strata. Mass media is a tool of demagogues, willing or unwilling.
But that's really also the point of the article - "if people just had better info" isn't actually a workable answer to demagogues. And so debates about media consumption are mostly useless waffling. See above re "what if we instead thought about fixing real issues"
First I want to say the last election wasn't people electing Trump, it was people rejecting the Dems. Second, this entire argument from the left on crime is based upon a false reading of the stats. When people quote the single recidivism rate, they are misunderstanding how that rate is measured. The majority of people that go to prison for the first time, never go back again. A fraction of cons go back over and over again and that skews the recidivism rate. A large chunk of those repeat offenders have serious mental illness. Most of the rest view crime as either a job or a lifestyle.
I'm not sure the 'people for whom crime is the best option' is really the right way to look at it. The vast majority of people in West Oakland never commit any crimes. And ignoring these realities is what is driving populism. Articles like this one say a lot more about the author than they do about political science or populism.
When I say the people in that neighborhood don't watch the news, I'm not making a value judgement. I'm just stating a fact. They don't really care about politics. They do care if the police come when they call and they do care if they can walk the streets at least some part of the day safely.
If Dems really wanted to win an election, they would change policy. Until they do that, they will continue to lose elections. That's Democracy working, not some new or different politics at work.
"this entire argument from the left on crime is based upon a false reading of the stats" -> Not sure whom you're debating here. I'm aware of the stats, and don't think I've made points that disagree with your view of them.
"A large chunk of those repeat offenders have serious mental illness" -> 25%. A bigger problem is substance abuse, at 52%.
Your "Most of the rest view crime as either a job or a lifestyle" and my "people for whom crime is the best option" are saying the same thing. So I'm not clear why you say you're not sure it's the right way to look at it. We both agree that there are subgroups that choose crime deliberately, and based on the stats, it's still a fairly significant group.
"And ignoring these realities is what is driving populism". -> Yes. That is exactly what the article is saying. Quote: "This gives rise to a set of views among those elites, [...] which are basically out of sync with the views of the majority". You're 100% aligned with the author here.
The author explicitly says that punishment doesn't work. He implies heavily that only the academics and elites know this because its counter-intuitive.
My point is that what is driving populism is poor performance by the elites. The other side of this coin is regular folks noticing the bad performance while understanding (in this case correctly) the problem. The populism only happens when both of these things are happening at the same time (bad performance, and normies noticing the bad performance).
Fix the policy and the populism fades. But in this situation that is unlikely to happen because the author believes something that is just false. That's why he keeps going in circles about the wrong fixes, because he doesn't understand that he is just wrong in his understanding. Ironic no?
PS The stats you quote, are they all offenders or repeat offenders? Because that's basically the same mistake the author is making by confusing those two categories. I'm not sure that matters for you because you seem to understand policing is effective. For him, it breaks his entire analysis. I hope this explains my point.
Edit: the reason why your way of looking at it isn't all that helpful is that its based in economics instead of policy. There are always rich and poor, there isn't always a big increase in crime.
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