Hey you know I did my last (happens to also be my first) OSS in 2002. The abuse I got for my efforts was insane. This is just another example that fits right into my (personal, for sure) view of the community as a whole. I also understand that bad news travels, and good news is just the status quo so you don't hear about it. Such is life.
Currently, that situation isn't possible, as self-driving cars still require an attentive driver who can take over at any time.
In the future? That's a hard question, and I'm sure however the legal system deals with it first will be wholly unfair and illogical. It'll be a battle between car owners, manufacturers, state and federal bodies, cities and counties, certification and safety agencies, etc.
Are we talking push bikes? At least in the UK you don't need a license for that anyway. I guess it's possible you wouldn't need a license for a self-driving car, but while regulations demand a fit driver who can control the vehicle that won't be the case.
My point is, I think regulations will change as technology improves. As transatlantic flights started, engines were unreliable, so regulators forced airlines to take awkward routes when crossing oceans (so that they would be 60 single-engine flying minutes away from a diversion airfield). Now that engines are more reliable, the regulations are significantly more relaxed, sometimes allowing 330 minutes to a diversion airport.
The point is, regulations are not set in stone. Companies can advance the state of the art, and ask the government to regulate less strictly.
As it stands now, self-driving cars are a research project, so we'd expect them to be regulated very strictly. As testing shows them to be safe, then we can relax the regulations. If self-driving cars without a supervising driver end up being safer than a normal car with a normal driver, it would make sense to not require a license. If an accident happens, it happens. Car accidents are nothing new.
High school math is often taught as simple facts, without proper explanation of the significance or how it's derived. It's entirely possible to learn how radians correspond to degrees and what you can do with them without understanding where they come from or what they mean.
I learned all the rules of logarithms in 10th grade, but didn't actually know what a logarithm was until chemistry in college. They just.. didn't really tell us. And how often are integrals explained as "the area under a curve", which is a definition that makes absolutely no sense?
It's hard to take your claim seriously that people readily respect technical expertise, when I see "Twitter is just caching" repeated on this very site all the time.
I've not been able to find a great many massively uninformed comments about it. Admittedly I only went two pages back, but it was starting to get to the X years ago stuff, so... I lost interest at that point ^^
He's not generating bigotry. He is saying that people who are uneducated in politics on a fundamental level are trying to make the rules that govern us all. Not that they are valueless, or are in any way worse; just that they have no idea what they're talking about.
You wouldn't ask a 6 year old how the government ought to be run. Why should you value the opinion of a 30 year old who hasn't actually learned any more about the topic in the intervening 24 years?
> Why should you value the opinion of a 30 year old who hasn't actually learned any more about the topic in the intervening 24 years?
Because in many cases it's not about opinions, but about decisions that affect that 30-year old. For example, every citizen should get a say in whether taxes get raised, I really wouldn't leave that up to the experts.
comparing a 30 yr old that will be subject to the laws to a kid that can't even wipe properly is idiotic. Just because you can't afford to be dedicated to the law does that mean your opinion should be excluded?
When you refuse to acknowledge the value of expertise in a field, you are effectively discrediting the entire field. You really think you know just as much as someone who has studied it for their entire adult life? The only way that can possibly be is if there's nothing to be learned about it.
You may think you understand a topic, but you really have a narrow view of it. You understand your own point of view, but not necessarily others. Or the breadth and depth of consequences to a decision. How can you expect equally valid results through a narrower lens?
Well it's possible for people to obtain negative learning, e.g. learning things that are false.
I would consider anyone who studies Marxism to be in this category.
For most people, it is a blend of positive knowledge, and the political prejudice of their discipline, so one should neither reject or blindly accept the views of an "expert" in the social sciences.
My PhD is in economics, and I would love to be able to pull rank on people who talk about "buying locally" or putting people before profits. But there is no way to consistently enable such rank pulling, since there is a Professor of Marxist Economics somewhere would could accuse me of being ignorant of 100 years of Marxist thought, and give me 1000 books to read before I'm qualified to speak on the topic.
So the only way forward is to reach out to the public and convince them that one's discipline knows the truth.
I've seen a Harvard PhD in economics espouse on TV the false cost-push theory of inflation. It made me wonder what is taught in Harvard econ classes.
Further undermining the credibility of econ degrees is an econ professor from my college stating that he believed in the free enterprise system, and the equal distribution of all income. The contradiction didn't seem to bother him in the slightest.
I hadn't heard of cost-push inflation before, and I didn't specialize in macro-economics. Who discredited this theory? The Wikipedia article says that according to Keynsians (and most modern economists are neo-Keynsians who beleive in sticky prices), prices are sticky downwards and so a supply shock to a single good would cause inflation. This seems to be an issue that could be resolved empirically. Are you familiar with the empirical evidence?
On your second point, perhaps your professor meant that he believed in free enterprise, but wanted to use the taxation system to make post-tax income much more equal? If so, there is no contradiction.
> I hadn't heard of cost-push inflation before, and I didn't specialize in macro-economics. Who discredited this theory?
Cost-push is described in Reisman's tome "Capitalism" and is shown why it is a false theory starting on pg. 907.
> perhaps your professor meant that he believed in free enterprise, but wanted to use the taxation system to make post-tax income much more equal? If so, there is no contradiction.
I quoted his exact words, and he did not qualify them. In particular he did not say "more equal", he said "equal". I remember it to this day because I was astonished.
>Cost-push is described in Reisman's tome "Capitalism" and is shown why it is a false theory starting on pg. 907.
I couldn't understand that. One difficulty is that not only do Austrian economists use a different language to describe things, but it seems to be arguing against a traditional Keynesian viewpoint. Right now PhD programs don't teach any traditional Keynsian econ, (undergrad programs teach a bit), they skip straight to neo-Keynsianism, which only keeps a few ideas from the original Keynes (e.g. sticky prices). So I don't really understand what the article is arguing against.
I already gave a description of what I thought the sticky-prices based argument for cost-push inflation was. Can you explain in your own words how this particular argument is refuted?
Re the professor, I guess I'll just chalk that up to a bad professor.
It's not really. The point is that the market is segmented and you need to target the segment for which your product is the right fit. People who already have a fully-featured tool which solves their problem and they are comfortable with are never a good market.
It's not that they don't "know better", it's that their needs are different. Just like it's hard to sell an amateur tool to a professional, it's hard to sell a professional tool to an amateur.
Of course, that's not the only division. Small business vs. enterprise is another. For instance, Amazon S3 enabled an entire new class of content-based web startup. Not because it was "like having fileservers but worse", but because it served the needs of users who needed to host files, but didn't need and couldn't afford to have their own hardware. A group which was otherwise underserved in the market at the time.
I expect you've only noticed one case of sexism. That only one case was overt enough that, despite being a man, it affected you. Many women in the field have countless stories of discrimination. The article I think you're referring to was a parent complaining about a teacher not reacting to harassment and bullying her daughter was receiving simply for being female in a computer science class. To the extent that her daughter no longer wanted to study computer science. That's a far cry from arguing in favor of "positive discrimination".
But here's the thing: it doesn't really matter what you have or haven't experienced. What matters are the experiences of the people being discriminated against. As I said, these stories are everywhere; if someone says they were made to feel a certain way (such as: unwelcome) it's not your prerogative to question whether that was a valid way to feel.
If you're only doing one or two things, the value is a bit more vague. But consider even the simplest interaction: the config file for a service should look like X, and if it has to be changed, the service needs to be restarted afterward. Oh and there are 10 config files, but you only want to restart the service once if any of them changes, after they've all been changed. That's not hard, but it's already starting to look non-trivial.
And what if you want to have the same logic for several services? I guess you abstract it out to a function. But then it turns out one of those services doesn't have a restart command, and you have to do stop+start. And another service won't start if you use restart while it's not running, so you have to check if it's stopped and use start, otherwise use restart.
It's much more than just whether the code is declarative or imperative, or whether it's idempotent or not. An imperative tool can change your system from known initial state A to desired state B. A declarative system can change it from whatever initial state it's in to desired state B, even if you never considered it might be in that state.
When you want to make a configuration change to your servers, and they aren't already in a "known state", why would you think any tool could put them into a known state? When a computer has a virus, say, you don't think it's been put into a "known state" after the anti-virus program gets done with it; the virus may have done any number of things you might be unaware of, altered any number of data or configuration files in subtle ways that the tool doesn't look for, but implicitly relies upon.
Example: what if, say, one of the provisioning requirements is "make sure this gem is installed", but on one of the servers /etc/gemrc has "install: --no-rdoc --no-ri" in it? Now on one server, the docs are missing, while everywhere else they're available. That sort of thing.
If you're already running on an IaaS like EC2, I think there's a simpler, better way: rather than trying to get "unknown state" to "known state", why not use the simplest known state of all--unprovisioned? Write an imperative script that reinitializes a freshly-provisioned IaaS node to your known state, and then do a rolling reprovision, terminating old nodes and provisioning new ones.
An equivalent comparison[1]: would you feel safe running an automated script that would SSH into a production machine and "git pull" a checked-out repo sitting on it, from whatever state it happens to be sitting at, up to refs/heads/master, so as to deploy code from it? Could you guarantee that that repo hadn't been moved to some state where refs/heads/master isn't a fast-forward commit? Or would you rather do a fresh "git clone"?
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[1] A contrived comparison, though; although the former option is unreliable, the latter is terribly inefficient, and they're both horrible for keeping a .git directory inside of a directory that might very well be web-accessible.
