>> But what if the truth is that we need all of these approaches simultaneously? What if paying off a specific child’s lunch debt today doesn’t preclude advocating for a complete structural overhaul tomorrow? What if the emotional resonance of specific, concrete actions is precisely what builds the coalition necessary for systemic change?
That might happen, but I hate to say that another possibility is people come to expect that someone will just pay the debt. Where unpaid bills may look like some kind of problem, a lack of unpaid bills looks like things are fine and no change is needed. Short term solutions are best implemented along with long term ones. But to the authors point, you gotta start somewhere or nothing will happen.
when i considered whether patching up the problem might be counterproductive i realized that the people who benefit from those payments and who might come to expect that the debt will be paid are not the people who would go out to fight for a solution anyways. the caterers are not going to lobby for a change, they'll just continue to refuse to feed children who haven't paid or they'll haunt the parents for payment because in their eyes it's the parents who are at fault. and those parents don't have any power or resources to change something either. they are busy making ends meet.
but patching up the problem involves new people. people who do have more resources and are thus actually capable of lobbying for change. and that's exactly what seems to happen.
also, a simple law change just to enforce that all children get the same food, whether it's paid or not, even without any funding moves the incentive for the caterers to lobby for more funding. so even that would be a win.
"All tests for infection came back negative and it was assumed she had an autoimmune condition."
They never confirmed the autoimmune hypothesis but tried to treat it. What about the hypothesis of "it's some other infection our tests don't catch"? Antibiotics are a fairly simple thing to try. She got cataracts due to that mistake. Now that eye doesn't have dynamic focus.
>> The big anti-feature is that developers can block users from flashing the chips.
There's a liability angle too. If a company (or person) makes a product that has any potential for harm and you reprogram it prior to an accident, YOU must take responsibility but will probably not.
Another angle is that the hardware may be cloneable and there's no reason anyone should be able to read out the code and put it into a clone device. There is a valid use case in making a replacement chip for yourself.
Companies will buy far more chips than hobbyists, so this feature caters to them and for valid reasons.
>> Yes, there's a security angle, but if I have the chip in my hands, I should be able to flip some pin to reprogram the chip and prevent all the e-waste.
What if the chip used masked ROM? Your desire is not always feasible. You can always replace the chip with another one - and go write your own software for it </sarcasm>.
BTW I'm a big fan of Free Software and the GPL, but there are places where non-free makes sense too.
Seriously now, where is that? The only scenarios I can think of are devices that could put others at risk. Large vehicles. But even, many countries allow modified vehicles on the road.
But everything else should be game. If it's my device and only me at risk, why should anyone else get a say.
At least the European countries I am aware of, the owners will have a hard time on a police control if the modifications aren't part of the allowed ones by law, and depending on the modification, it is missing from the car documentation.
I think that's what I was saying. Vehicle control software is the only place I think where certified code makes sense. When others' safety can be put at risk by your crappy coding. That's not a copyright/licencing issue, or even something solved by making chips harder to flash, it's a vehicle law.
TFA makes it sound like there are many others. What else is there?
I was able to find a preliminary datasheet on Google, it looks like it has 2x CAN (called TWAI in the datasheet). I can't find info on whether it has an FPU or not
I'm starting to think current measures of "the economy" are bogus. It can't grow indefinitely - that's probably just inflation. If you measure productivity in hours rather than dollars, inflation gets a more direct measure: how many hours do I need to work to buy food?
Making a better product than last year is also a strange way to claim growth.
Why do you think the economy can't grow indefinitely? Living standards have skyrocketed in the last 200 years. Most people no longer die of appendicitis or dysentary in the USA. We have a/c now. And unlimited access to free information.
Good news! The average worker has gone from spending about 25% of their paycheck on food in 1930[1] to about 11% today[2]. This is during a time period where the average worker has decreased their total hours[3]. This is confounded by more people entering the workforce, but the earliest data I can find suggests that we've gone from 58% of the population in the workforce in 1950 to 63% today[4].
[1] https://flatworldknowledge.lardbucket.org/books/beginning-ec... (Note that "Food" is "food as a percentage of income", and "eating out" is "eating out as a percentage of food" which makes the chart look weird. This means that the 11% number below includes the cost of the private taxi for your burrito.)
I'm more concerned about the graph attributed to flatworldknowledge.lardbucket.org. I've lived on the internet long enough to know a shitposter when I see one and that's a whale of a URL that every fiber of my body says never to click. I know it is a logical fallacy to dismiss an entire argument simply by association with a crank, but that's my gut reaction to that post.
... I didn't even notice the name. That site is an archive of a collection of textbooks that were Creative Commons-licensed before 2012, dedicated to the memory of Aaron Swartz. Evidently https://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/beginning-economic-an... goes to the same place.
wait, are you saying they actually don't or is this some form of sarcasm? because the link clearly shows, to me at least, that they document the methods publicly
GDP was always a horseshit measure (the inventor of GDP essentially says so *in the paper in which he invented it). But it should still be extremely worrying when ~every possible indicator points toward bad.
Oh oh!! Let me guess!! I don't do mobile but have looked into it. And the guy behind me is doing an app too. Everyone wants to minimize development effort so they pick a framework that will spit out both iOS and Android apps. It's the framework that ends up bloating everything. Maybe? That doesn't explain "why", it just pushes it off the app developer onto someone else.
This is the kind of problem that can be prevented by using "better" coding patterns. Not to say it will be prevented, but that some ways people like to structure code are more prone to these kinds of bugs. I quoted the word "better" because I work with a competent but less experienced guy that tends to write more complex code, or what some claim is just a different style than I would prefer. I make claims that "this way is better" and it's often very difficult to articulate why it's better. Sometimes I am convincing, other times not... I'm not immune to these kinds of bugs either, but I shudder to think I might one day inherit this other guys code and a collection of these weird bugs.
Let’s be honest this is the kind of thing that can happen to anyone.
We all like to think we have picked up habits that immunize us from certain kinds of error but large software systems are complex and bugs happen.
The number of people in here taking ‘Raymond Chen tells an anecdote about the time a dumb bug shipped in Windows and was fixed two weeks later’ as an indictment of Microsoft’s engineering culture is frankly embarrassing. Trading war stories is how we all get better.
It would be better for us all if culturally, the reaction to a developer telling a story of how they once shipped a stupid bug were for everyone to reply with examples of worse stuff they’ve done themselves, not to smugly nod and say ‘ah yes, I am too smart to make such a mistake’.
>> Let’s be honest this is the kind of thing that can happen to anyone.
I didn't say I'm immune to doing this myself, nor did I condemn anything about the particular scenario in the blog. My pain is in trying to articulate why some ways are better when any code that works is in some sense just fine.
>> We all like to think we have picked up habits that immunize us from certain kinds of error but large software systems are complex and bugs happen.
We sure do, although "immunize" is too strong. We try to minimize the likelyhood of these kinds of things. Experience is valuable and sometimes it's hard to articulate why.
That’s been my experience of what it means to try to do ‘software engineering’ as a discipline; it’s the ongoing process of developing ways to articulate - beyond just ‘this way feels better to me’ - what attributes we are trying to build into the software we construct, what methods we use to imbue the software with those attributes, and why certain ways of doing so are better than others.
It still feels more like craftsmanship than actual engineering. A lot of the time it’s more like how a carpenter learns to use certain tools in certain ways because it’s safer or less prone to error, than how an engineer knows how constructing a particular truss ensures particular loads are distributed in particular ways.
And one of the best tools we have for developing these skills is to learn from the mistakes others have made.
So I agree - I think your instinct here was to look at this error and try to think whether you have engineering heuristics already that would make you unlikely to fall into this error, or do you need to adjust your approach to avoid making the same mistake.
My criticism here was more directed to others in the thread who seem to see this more as an opportunity to say ‘yeah, Windows was always buggy’ rather than to see it as an example of a way things can fail that they need to beware of.
I don't think this kind of thing can happen to anyone. This strikes me a feature that was not tested.
So, you're going to implement bitmapped backgrounds. Naturally, after writing the code, you test with and without bitmapped backgrounds and make sure both cases work. Right?
I’ve learned that there isn’t a “magic bullet” policy that we can enact, that always ensures that we do things correctly. Human nature is messy and varied. A word of praise can be weaponized.
I often encounter people that use praise as a domination tool. They praise you in a manner that suggests that, if they did not recognize and note something, you would not have it. They use praise to “declare ownership” of your good traits.
I encounter this, because I have highly valuable skills, that can make others a great deal of money, and have an aspect that predatory people think is “weakness.” They believe I have low self-esteem, because I am not always tubthumping.
Also, we have to be careful of saying things like “Don’t complain, if you don’t have a solution.”[0]
That might happen, but I hate to say that another possibility is people come to expect that someone will just pay the debt. Where unpaid bills may look like some kind of problem, a lack of unpaid bills looks like things are fine and no change is needed. Short term solutions are best implemented along with long term ones. But to the authors point, you gotta start somewhere or nothing will happen.
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