This post shows exactly why "just use code to get things done" can be taken too far and why a solid theoretical background can be essential to growing as a programmer. The author bravely admits, "The async-style of programming is almost entirely inaccessible to my brain." There comes a point on the road to being a great coder where you can no longer really approach it as a craft; the theory and philosophy start to matter. A common plateau is the point where it becomes necessary to see the commonality between essentially the same computation being driven by different control approaches. I've seen many a competent procedural programmer be unable to write their first GUI app because they can't adjust to an event driven model or unable to make the most of SQL because of its semi-declarative nature. Coders need to see such mind expansion as an essential and fun part of the job.
While I don't think it's to the same degree, I do think that "fix it" is at least in the same category of "things that turn people off OS" as RTFM.
There are different level/kinds/what-have-you of users/coders. There are wizards who write operating systems, grey-beards who write API's, application developers, scripters, and application users. It's perfectly valid for one kind of person to complain to another with no hope of fixing the issue themselves.
I work on open-source middleware both for a living and for fun and I welcome complaints about particular use-cases just as much (if not more than) patches. Cultural silos do exist between the different kinds/levels of coders and these kinds of heated conversations are needed. I can't even count how many times I've received a complaint from an app developer that ended up being a valid use-case that I had not foreseen. In fact, most of the time fixes for these issues are easy on my end. These complaints are helping me expand the user-base and utility of my code. In cases where the fix is not simple, it means there is a deeper architectural issue that I need to put on the road map. Even if they hurt my pride occasionally, these users are helping me and are contributing.
I'm going to possibly expose myself to some ribbing by assuming this this a genuine question instead of a statement that just presses the joke.
By "see-through" I assume the author refers to (mostly motel style) apartment buildings that are completely unoccupied or even unfinished and hence they lack blinds, drapes, furniture, (and sometimes walls). Thus, you can completely "see-through" them from street level.
You can---by the way---see the same phenomena in the American South where gulf-relief zones made building (or to start building) new apartments/condos in some areas practically a tax-dodge but where the natives in those areas don't have the means to buy them at even a quarter (sometimes eighth) the cost.
I'm not sure about in China, but in the South another way such buildings are "see-through" is that the buildings were built elevated over completely empty parking lots.
There are streets where you can see two or three streets over "through" these empty parking lots.
i thought it might refer to buildings laying fallow and having no substance in the context of their use; ghost buildings. nowhere in the article does he refer to why they are see-through but he does mention unused buildings.
You are correct regarding the impotence of votes, but I'd say the situation is even worse than you describe. Pragmatically, the FBI and your local police do get the choice of which laws to enforce by choosing their allocation of resources and by the "on the street" decisions of their staff. Further, their allocation of enforcement is also dictated by their competencies. Corporations and lobbyist get to influence these decisions (and hence enforcement) as well.
This is a major flaw in how we are governed and is one of the reasons a common political trope is "we don't need a new law, we just need to enforce the existing law".
Morally and legally fraud and theft are pretty much equivalent, but theft is de facto "more illegal" in terms of your expected legal retribution due to a number of factors (the poor are more likely to commit theft than fraud, theft is easier to catch, etc.).
Enforcement oversight is a good example of a governance issue that only engineers seem to latch onto. This is likely because we live in a world where the "intention" of statements is so meaningless. The average person (or even lawmaker) seems to regard law as some kind of magic, rather than as code that runs on an enforcement arm. As evidence of this I present the many Internet bills asking for technically impossible things or related Internet bills that require massive spying but don't dictate whose responsibility it is to do or pay for the spying. Think of the healthcare law. There have been vague movements that the IRS would be responsible for tracking compliance and fines, but no one seems to know how it's (if not overturned) actually going to shake out.
Innocents will only be hurt during the transitional period before they learn that they should avoid relationships with patent trolls for the same collateral risk reasons they avoid befriending gang members, child-molesters, and other anti-socials.
One of the arguments made against repealing Jim Crow laws was the harm that would come to business owners in terms of infrastructure and other spending. There were many such businesses whose owners were not racist but who had invested in locations and buildings out of innocent compliance with the law and the demographic business climate it created. The judicial system makes accomodations for parenthood but it does not refuse to punish parents despite the fact that it is absolutely certain that such punishments will be detrimental to the child. By definition, disruptive social change is disruptive and punishment is punative. Surely that no collatoral innocents be harmed ever is too high a standard that favors both the status quo and protects bad actors?
"Surely that no collatoral innocents be harmed ever is too high a standard ..."
When we're talking about independent outlaw actors, as opposed to the law and justice that you invoke in your response, then no, I don't think it's too high a standard.
Just to have you elaborate then: you are against all forms of civil disobedience that cause harm? Is it that you believe movements can succeed without such tactics (e.g. that the civil rights movement would have succeeded without the race riots and that the earlier mill rights movements would have succeeded without violence) or that you are against all such social change?
"you are against all forms of civil disobedience that cause harm?"
Mostly, but not absolutely. Unnecessarily exposing the existence and whereabouts of someone's kids for what amounts to little more than vandalism and tagging, yes.
This. We have a bubble in dubious relationships not being properly exposed: from patent trolls, to wealth financial scammers, etc. If you play with fire - be prepared to get burned. Let's hoping Anonymous and others can help burst this bubble.
It's a tough question, but so is: what is just? Like justice value is a possibly unknowable, possibly immeasurable communal platonic. We forged, refined, and sanity check our justice system using a few simple tricks from measurement theory. We ensure that the commonly agreed on axioms are covered (i.e. murder is wrong). We try to reduce several "intuitively agreeable" outcomes into simple rulesets (i.e. possession is 9/10ths of the law). And so on... Yes it's hard and our current system is only an approximation of the communal ideal, but few would want to dismiss law altogether because such measurement systems can do a pretty good job.
Defining value by the workings of the market is simply a circular and technical argument. It's no more useful than defining justice by actual outcomes of court cases. For one thing, markets define value rather simply: a simple majority vote where present and future votes are discounted. It's a pretty good rule with the nice feature that it's distributed requiring no central planning, but it is not magic and does have some less than desirable corner cases such as, say, the state of everyone at the lower end of the bell curve in western countries for the last four or five years.
> For one thing, markets define value rather simply: a simple majority vote where present and future votes are discounted.
Well it's a bit more fiddly than that. A better analogy is that markets integrate individual tradeoffs. That is, value is constantly established by exchange: I give up 2X for 4Y. I value X at 2Y at the moment.
Economists call this "subjective value". The point being that no objective measure can be thought of which isn't circular or ultimately subjective, relying on some exogenous assignment of value.
If I say 'value' is something like 'hours of labour', then I've just pushed back the definition. Why are labour hours valuable? If it's 'ability to support life', I've merely promoted life-support to a higher value and ignored all other considerations; but are all economic decisions so made with a singular objective? Again I've just made a subjective judgement about what is and isn't valuable.
