This is very close I think. In a way it is a business crisis, in that business directs software engineering not science or academia nor some physical constraint.
A real estate developer would probably promise you a ten story building made of straw if you seemed willing to pay but a civil engineer will never go make it because they listen to the physics and ethical rules of the trade mostly.
For some reason software engineers bend over and say yes sir when faced with a similar situation.
Perhaps looking at Boeing the same is becoming true of other engineering specialties as well.
I don't really use Pulsar as its heavy weight. But I'm glad for every legit open source project that pushes editing forward be it NeoVim, Emacs etc. The mono culture of do everything in vsCode under MS's thumb is not a great idea. Microsoft has proven itself untrustworthy time and time again.
I interviewed for a role at FedEx about two years ago. It was absolutely the most confusing and just junk process although blessedly I did not have to take this personality test. I ended up bailing out of the process mostly in confusion.
Russia hitting civilians isn’t really accidental. They’re quite happy to terrorize the population, and are quite comfortable deliberately committing atrocities (see Bucha, et al). Flattening whole cities is longstanding practice of theirs, too; it’s largely how they won Chechnya 2.
At best, their weapons aren’t terribly precise and they don’t particularly care about that.
Using cruise missiles to terrorise civilian population will be incredibly stupid move. Hits into houses are usually accidental.
If you want to terrorise civilian population, it's so much cost effective to use cheaper unguided rockets from MLRS systems or artillery shells. You have this news in your echo chamber, haven't you?
Artillery and MLRS is being used for that purpose in places where Ukrainian cities are within range. But that does not apply to most of the country.
Given that Russia has openly talked about targeting civilian infrastructure to "freeze them out" (and then tried to pull that off last winter), I think you should be rather careful with your assertions about others' echo chambers...
Yes, Russia army attacked electric infrastructure, that's common knowledge. No, there is no use of precision weapons to willingly attack apartment houses, that's definitely a lie.
There is a lot of cases of Ukrainian army to use indiscriminate and "dumb" weapons to attack civilian districts of Donetsk (and now, Belgorod) just to terrorize population.
The use is terrorism, of course. Breaking the will of the population is very much a war strategy, and it has been tried before (notably in WW2). If you believe that it is effective, there's no reason why precision weapons can't be used for that purpose if that's the only thing you have that can reach and hit.
And, sure, the Ukrainian attack on Belgorod is similarly problematic. But if you're willing to go there, how many attacks have Russia carried in the same time period?
It's not that more precise weapons are being used to target civilians, it's just that if they miss the target, the Russians aren't really heartbroken about it. There's plenty of examples of "precision" weapons hitting apartment buildings, train stations, hospitals, schools, etc. I don't think those are targeted specifically, just that any carelessness isn't considered a bug.
But the "echo chamber" framing you use for what's at best a nitpick/misinterpretation of what I said, that says so much more about you and your own biases than anything about me.
Setting aside the numbers you've opted to pull out of your ass, there's absolutely no comparison between how the US wages war vs the Russians. Your attempt at drawing an equivalence is ignorant, at best. Just stop.
It isn't whataboutism to point out the propaganda-like language being used when the higher level comment this descends from is about propaganda-sounding language. There is so much endless Russian boogyman shit flying around and while yes, the Russian invasion is horrific and awful, and it's massively frustrating for people to be so overwhelmingly critical of it being Russian specific while completely ignorant of the US having done things that look almost identical for 30+ years.
Claiming these bad things as Russian specific is flat out wrong, harmful to the discourse, and massively lacking awareness.
You also make a claim with zero support. Here's mine:
Google for yourself, there's tons of information to corroborate this. Other US wars have much worse figures.
Your tone is frustrating especially given the appearance of hypocrisy when calling someone ignorant when there's easily verifiable evidence if you put in any effort to look. I don't see the need to be nasty to me like that especially when your bold black and white claim is so very clearly wrong.
"the Russians aren't really heartbroken about it" - I don't understand this. How you can make such assumptions about hearts? Definitely there is a grief from common Russian people and denial of willingness from Russian propaganda. I don't know if Putin personally "heartbroken" and neither do you.
This kind of thing just reeks of shortsightedness.
Having one lucky prick who sure maybe worked a little hard maybe not decide what to do for humanity with his money that he won through predatory means is dumb. Garbage in garbage out, anyone who is focused on mind fucking the worlds population in order to get a little richer is not going to give away anything in an effective manner.
When we stop having zuckerbergs, gates buffets and so on we probably will see improvement.
I hope we can have a more reasoned debate than this. This topic is really important and frankly there's so much to it I hope that hearing others I can learn more.
When I read some of the thread above what I am hearing is: "I don't want people to be able to run programs on my computer without asking explicitly". Which is exactly what the modern web and modern web browsers enable.
If you learned computing in the 90's you were very much told not to install things you do not trust. Everyone remembers downloading some game from the internet and suddenly their OS was trashed via malware or non subtle virus. The modern web is essentially a giant way to circumvent that. Sure only your browser can get shitted up but its the same browser you do your finance in and has access to your GPU.
Certainly it enables easy sharing of programs but so does something like java. Most OS's still recognize a .jar file as an executable and ask you about it before you can run. They never do that before javascript starts processing in your browser.
There are several other issues here such as:
- Many essential processes such as banking, medical records and education all rely upon the modern web paradigm at this point. One cannot simply access them on an e-reader or using a browser with javascript disabled. Are you saying you think that someone should be left uneducated or lack medicine if they don't like running an unsecured browser? Should those with privacy concerns just incur the cost of having one "safe" device and one they do their "interacting with the web" one?
- The modern web sandbox includes very high access to sensitive things. Many people's file systems are from a cloud platform all of which malware in the browser can access for example.
- The modern web can be highly performant but generally its not and requires ever increasing hardware cost simply to do things like read a book.
Ironically, that decision to run Javascript without a prompt was probably a huge step forward for the security of most users. The 'do you trust this' model of security doesn't work well in practice once you can download programs from the internet - there's too much stuff you need to or want to trust to get on with things, and even if it's not actively malicious, it may be vulnerable.
Because Javascript can run in the browser without the assumption that you completely trust it, browser developers have put a load of work into restricting what it can do, even within the browser. Of course, sometimes there are holes in the sandbox - nothing is perfect - but I think it's vastly better than giving any program you decide to run complete access to your computer.
(Better for the majority, that is. If you're truly paranoid and have enough time, explicitly deciding what to trust can be better. But I think that's <1% of people - certainly not including me.)
This argument makes sense for the security angle. At least as it pertains to getting malware on your local machine.
But what about all of the "not security" but bad things that happen because we allow people to run code we have no choice over on our computer. The attention tracking features marked as tools to understand user intents are exfiltrating information from you perhaps when you don't expect.
Are you happy for example for someone to be logging where on a screen you are sitting and reading within a book or video. Do you not find it problematic for example that you could purchase a subscription to medium, but medium finds out you pause your computer to read descriptions of guns? Would you mind if they then sold this knowledge to Glock who then showed these ads on your work computer?
I get what you are saying for security. But "knowing" if and when something is happening is important. I may be worse or better at evaluating applications to run on my machine than the chrome team. But at least I know when I am entering into a risky situation.
That makes sense. But I think that's a money problem, not a technology problem - if the money was sloshing around desktop applications, I think we'd get a lot of locked down desktop applications tracking us. We kind of have that on mobile, indeed. Sometimes there are nice community built alternatives, but not that often.
In real life you have even less freedom. There doesn't exist an equivalent of "reader mode" out in the streets. You can't mod reality or add a few scripts.
Don't like the topology of a parking lot? Tough luck, either navigate it or don't park there.
Hate the hospital's maze-like corridors? Sure they suck, but you are still getting operated there.
Your department's bulletin board is an unorganized mess? I'm sure you'll not drop out because of that.
"Don't visit the website" is as simple as it needs to be.
This is HN. 90% of the time, the nitpicking here isn't about computer security, bandwidth efficiency, free speech, or whatever the high-minded principle of the day might be. People nitpick because they don't like something about the website, full stop.
It it wasn't the design, it would be the ideological bent of the writer. If not that, it would be annoyance as to why they put up an email signup form or use an analytics script, as if those aren't present on any of the other websites that are
featured on the front page every day.
I'd wager that a good chunk wouldn't be happy unless they can extract your article into their homemmade RSS reader.
I get what you are saying but does every operating system have the goal of allowing unpredictable multiple user applications running? A cooperative system can easily be correct for something well managed like an IOT device with only certain tasks or something somewhat general purpose but still more restricted like a video game console.
> I get what you are saying but does every operating system have the goal of allowing unpredictable multiple user applications running?
Certainly not, cooperative multitasking is used all the time in userspace programs to great effect, and OSs can do the same thing if the limitations are understood.
For the OS that's the focus of this post though, I think it does have the aim of being general purpose and running whatever you want on it. At that point the limitations aren't really acceptable (which the author acknowledges), and that's why the whole question of "what happens when a program misbehaves?" has come up. If the answer is "preempt the process to run it later" then it's not actually a cooperative system and application developers need to keep that in mind.
I think left to our own engineers would have resolved to something like this already. The issue as I see it is corporations and business people have taken over the leadership of this trade to rake in money regardless of what it does to the real world.
And why wouldn't they you can create a problem out of thin air, solve the problem poorly selling the solution, and then when your rushed, half assed and bad solution has issues, you can simply sell the fix to that as well.
I doubt we will see much progress in the quality and rigor of software engineering in the near term, it will need to take a shift from making money in the short term at any cost to making a quality product. Instead we see the same thing happening to other industries so I hold little hope in the near term.
