There's an insane amount of tooling with varying degrees of overlap. You've got SELinux, BPF, seccomp, AppArmor as different approaches to security. Each of these takes quite a bit of dedicated time to master and most of them have lots of nuance & there can be overlap depending on what you're trying to secure. In a work environment, I'd typically outsource this to security engineers/experts OR spend my time learning those things for what I need them for - knowing the tools are out there are sufficient starting points for research when I need that knowledge.
None of this applies to maintaining my development machine. You might want to revisit your gate keeping.
Nah. I agree with the other guy. AppArmour takes some time to learn and isn't super mainstream yet. At least it's a step forward from SELinux, but it still feels uncooked and adhoc to me.
This is a simple blog post. Almost only text. You can't read it with a screen reader because all is loaded via JavaScript. Please stop this crap. Sincerely the open web.
Yes something is very wrong with that page, all I see is a link to "all blogs" and a textbox asking for my email address. And I do have JS enabled. FF88.
Screen readers can read what's generated by JavaScript just fine but yes, this is a BS way to deliver a blog article. The article content is even in the page, as Markdown in an inline script block, not where a user could read it if something happened to the JS.
PHP is actually pretty great these days, you should have a look at what modern PHP has become if you’ve been out of the loop for a while. Have a look at https://phptherightway.com/ if you’re interested.
I stopped my subscription to the New Yorker because I got fed up with exactly this. Although, as others here have commented, it may more emotionally resonant to hear one person's story, it also reinforces a very American view of history that all changes good and bad are forged by individuals, not by motivated groups of people or larger stochastic events / underlying structural changes.
Repeated enough, it can create a narrative that the wider groups don't matter as long as you support the few exceptionals. This seems to play out across all sides of US society both in justice (think "headline" prosecution of corrupt individuals in finance etc) and in social welfare. This is not to say that exceptional individuals do not have a disproportionate role in society. They unquestionably do. However I can't think of any of those individuals who has not been enabled by dozens if not thousands of talented others.
This means the numbers are meaningless and don't provide a good representation. Needs better data.
Call me inhumane, but a single story doesn't mean anything. It's just some random point in the set. Drawing any conclusions from such a single point is dangerous (the larger the set, the more), as we humans just love to extrapolate single points and even tend have quite strong emotional defenses about their importance.
To remove the emotional part, just think of something from IT, like response times or test coverages. See, a story of an obscenely long API response (out of thousands) doesn't make much sense anymore. Debugging individual cases may even lead you on a completely wrong track. Unless you want to merely resolve that particular single request.
I'm sorry about the tone. Stories about others make humans relate (which is good), but they also have such undesirable effects (hype over facts, extrapolating, etc).
I'll call you inhumane then. Despite record employment levels and rising average net worth in the USA, millions of people are still starving and struggling with drug addictions and so on.
Averages and generalizations only tell a portion of the story. Anecdotes can shed light on "noise".
That's also a single aggregated number. Until the data doesn't cover those millions dire situation, it's a bad data. Emotionless analogy: like a green status page when some percentile of requests is failing.
See, you've mentioned "millions" rather than some "that person.". That's exactly what I mean.
There was a time (or at least so I'm told) when having a job meant you could build a living, own a house, support a family. So we the started looking at employment percentages as a measure for the quality of the economy.
This incentivizes increasing employment percentage. An easy way to do that is by decreasing the value of a job. Suddenly it doesn't ensure you can build a living, own a home, support a family anymore. But it is still used as a primary measure of the wellbeing of the economy.
This is why you need individual stories to interrogate the quality of your data. Afterwards, you obviously need to come up with new measures that more accurately reflect how well the economy is working for the people in it. But the interrogation will have to work on the basis of anecdotes.
You'd think so, but a little googling shows me that an optimistic estimate is that 1-2% of US Americans that go hungry once in a while because they cannot afford food. Some sources, such as those cited by wikipedia [0], put the number as high as 5-6%.
(Now we could have a debate on the meaning of 'starving', but let's just say there is a broad area between skipping a few meals and dying from lack of food that is all covered by how people use the word.)
I'm not talking about "drawing conclusions from a single point of data". I'm talking about using single points of data to interrogate the completeness and correctness of your data.
You’re correct that the approach can be misused. However, it’s also worth thinking of it like a “persona” in product design. When used correctly the journalist has the data, the data tell a story, the journalist chooses a subject that personifies the story so people care to read about it.
The problem I see is that a lot (I believe) of people still do this, even if you and I don't.
I guess I'll contradict myself with the anecdote (I recognize this is totally not representative). I've heard a lot of stories about how "they do this and that, somewhere" based on a news about some single case. Some make sense, but also lots of variants of vaccines and autism stories (mostly, regarding modern politics, so I don't want to describe anything in particular).
They aren't blind spots, they're outliers. If a change to medicare makes 99% of users significantly better off and 1% significantly worse, then it's a net good change. The useful reporting tells both sides, but simply telling the sobstory of one person really negatively impacted is worthless.
Completely agree. Additionally, data segmentation is important. For example, if you segment employment data by college degree, you would see that overall employment has not risen at all for those without a college degree.
It's like saying the average net worth of Jeff Bezos and 99 homeless people is 1 billion USD, etc etc
Because it is a feature article, not a news or news analysis story. The latter types have a very different 'pyramidal structure' where the most salient facts are in the opening sentences and each subsequent paragraph adds less vital supporting information and colour. That story structure was specifically designed so that as different editions of the paper came out, if a story needed to be cut it could be essentially cut from the bottom in ever increasing amounts without it needing to be be re-written; in extremis being cut all the way back to the opening sentence, in which case it would simply be a 'news in brief' or Nib item.
Feature stories have typically attempted to hook the reader not through a news lead, but though a colour intro - and one technique is to introduce an abstract issue by relating it through a case-study. You may not like them, but when done well they can work.
Being done well, however means that the case study should be fairly short and there shouldn't be a mismatch between headline promising one thing and annoying the reader when the opening paragraphs don't deliver.
In traditional print, the combination of headline, subhead and design combined gives you an idea of the type of article you are about to read. However when the headline is simply posted as a link, it can feel like bait-and-switch. You go in expecting a pithy summary of the issues, you get a feature article.
This is a side effect of the way the story is posted, rather than a particular problem with the journalism, in my opinion, though I do think the initial anecdotage is a bit leisurely and meandering in this case, for my taste.
Most humans remember personal narratives far more efficiently than they parse data tables. Humans who don't operate like this are very much an exception.
So this is a communication technique - part of rhetoric, in fact. And communicating with median readers is what journalists are paid to do.
I'm not arguing for removing all personal stories from journalistic articles. But if every single Article I read has a headline that I am interested in, but then asks me to read a long personal story before it will actually explain to me what the headline means, it will discourage me from reading articles. In fact, it already has.
Journalist aren't just paid to communicate with median readers, but with all readers. If close to all articles have the same format some readers will be put off by that.
I'm not arguing for removing all personal stories. Just for more of a balance.
I feel like there’s some sort of connection here between how magazines are systematically and repeatedly not fulfilling your basic needs to absorb information by using a narrative and the articles description of how society is failing those in poverty with the narrative of “jobs==fixed poverty”.
Agreed. I got a couple of screen-scrolls through the article and gave up. It might be my attention span declining, to it could just be too much fluff in the story.
I attended a panel at Rights Con 2016 about getting tech stories picked up by the news. One tip from journalists on the panel was that articles anchored on a human narrative arc tend to be more successful. The human story helps people understand why it is worth investing time to learn the related facts/science/tech.
Both of these are reports on exactly the same issue, but different techniques.
The NYTimes prefers to use pictures of a doctor, along with quotes from various doctors and medical students. "We need him desperately", says someone about an oncologist. "I love this country", says a Syrian doctor about America.
Fivethirtyeight tells the story with statistics. How many doctors are there in America? How many of those are immigrants? How many from these countries? All told in one image. Which specialties do these doctors practice? In which counties do they practice in? No human interest, just the facts.
Me personally, I prefer FiveThirtyEight's style. I read their article and that one image helped me realise what a grave issue it was. They get straight to the point, no fluff. But I totally understand how others might connect more with the NYTimes article. Seeing the story from the perspective of a real, breathing human. Hearing them talk about love, about sacrifice, about family. It humanises the issue and they understand it better. Different strokes.
It brings it alive - sounds corny, I know, but it's true. The article depressed me, which had it just been a piece about statistics and policy statements would have left me cold.
Interested to know why you're not interested in the human angle.
Yep... imo it's used to manipulate people. In this case it's good, but was also used as bad a bunch of times. So people that find motivation from this kind of story telling, can be manipulated
I actually ripped out Smyte's Android SDK because of how bad it was and replaced it with my own implementation against their API which has a hard limit on retries. But I imagine that other customers were using their SDK and still have live apps out there using it... not good :/
