Lack of a robust and universally available/adopted mechanism for sharing, standardising and utilising said wheels.
In addition, an ecosystem and/or culture that supports such a universal standardisation.
This is assuming that standardisation is even the answer, i can state subjectively that there is no currently acceptable universally applicable method for implementing authentication/authorisation; and that's just one example.
There are auth standards, sure, even good ones, but implementing said standards across the entire galaxy of development environments,architectures and business limitations.
Good luck with that, i really mean it, solve this and you'll never have to work again.
No github doesn't count, it's not universally accesible, nor is it viable for some
Even if it did, it's still only the availability part.
I'm possibly missing something but i can't see an actual rebuttal to the comic ?
Perhaps it's my reading of the comic.
I'm seeing a comment about software engineering as a profession in relation to other similar "engineering" fields, specifically about them being less mature/regulated/proffesional.
Then a reference to how software running voting machines is terrifying, the article then goes on to deatil why that's the case.
The details of why e-voting is hard are interesting and raise some good points, but it's in no way addressing the "claims" in the comic.
Problem with that is that "best possible outcome" is all about perspective.
I'm not sure if there is a subjective way to quantify such a thing without first taking a stance.
Once you take a stance, the only difference between you and the existing WHO is the particular stance you have taken (assuming it's a different position)
I don't see the problem with taking stances. The very act of thinking about such thing is a stance by itself.
You can simply take stances that would reduce harm, avoid collapse and (optionally) maximize benefit for everyone. The current stance of WHO doesn't seem to be in that realm and something could/should be done about it.
I'm not arguing that taking a stance is bad per se, i'm arguing that almost anything you might want to take a stance on is subjective.
As an example:
Reduce harm: depends on perspective (define harm?), timeframe, priorities.
Avoid collapse of what?, current society? which one? all of them ?
Maximise benefit is the same as reduce harm in its subjectiveness and "everyone" is a big ask given that some perspectives on certain points are potentially mutually exclusive.
A somewhat topical example would be:
"Let everyone get covid-19 by not imposing measures designed to stop the spread, that way the stock market takes less of a plunge because [Insert economic reasons here]"
vs
"Impose measures to follow the model that most analysis(from current data) agrees will minimise the loss of life, at the cost of the stock market taking a hit"
How do you maximise benefit for both parties in that case? only impose half off the measures? who decides what is the fair middle ground ?
I think you already pushed the scenario too far. The best measure to the example you gave is clearly the one we arrived at now. Complete lockdown. Worldwide. There's no discussion about its subjectivity. But the original point/motivation was to avoid getting here in the first place: identify and report potential breakouts early enough. The WHO was too late on this because of the way it's set up and that contributed to getting us to the extreme example you mentioned.
As for subjectivity per se, that's a separate philosophical discussion to me and doesn't have to do much with epidemics. The initital proposition was simple but the discussion drifted (as expected); let's find a better and faster way to prevent outbreaks altogether. There can be no subjectivity/relativity about this - it's a universal imperative.
You simply report/label on a very local level (city/town level) because that's what will really matter for further action. If necessary, report coordinates.
The new ghost 3.0 release is pretty fancy wrt to the styling and layout defaults.
For various subjective reasons, i've not used medium extensively so i can't compare like for like, but from what i have used it's not significantly better than ghost on the usability/styling front.
> It's affecting the quality of the web that you, as a user, are browsing.
Any numbers to back this up?
(also while I'm asking for numbers how about "There is no doubt that this has affected the revenue for website owners negatively regardless of the size of the website." ?)
>The proposed solution is to maintain a global whitelist that each ad blocker is forced to respect.
I personally can't think of an effective way this could be achieved.
Getting even a small proportion of the world to agree on a single whitelist would be difficult if not impossible; who would maintain it, who would decide what was whitelisted and what was blocked? not to mention any actual legal issues across any sort of jurisdiction.
But assuming you could, what mechanism could be used to stop people loading extensions and apps into their browser?
Then, for the more technically savvy users, how do you propose to block the use of something like a pihole (https://pi-hole.net/) or equivalents ?
This all assumes that blocking the ads is even a problem (for the quality and stability of the web) in the first place and without a solid range of evidence to back it up, it's anecdotal at best.
Pure conjecture, but i'd guess there is probably evidence to support declining advertising revenue that might possibly be partially attributed to adblockers, but I doubt its the only factor( or even the biggest ).
"This is wrong because i believe it to be so, based on my personal beliefs, therefore you should too" is almost the very definition of a subjective argument.
Though i admit i may have entirely missed the objective statement in there.
This is assuming that standardisation is even the answer, i can state subjectively that there is no currently acceptable universally applicable method for implementing authentication/authorisation; and that's just one example.
There are auth standards, sure, even good ones, but implementing said standards across the entire galaxy of development environments,architectures and business limitations. Good luck with that, i really mean it, solve this and you'll never have to work again.
No github doesn't count, it's not universally accesible, nor is it viable for some Even if it did, it's still only the availability part.
TL;DR; shit is complicated. https://xkcd.com/927/