Maybe the founders are just trying to throttle for performance and ability to let in users only as fast as they can talk to them and get feedback. That’s what I feel like Y Combinator taught me anyway. Feels like something we should encourage on HN.
I get the concern about vapor ware and fatigue but feels like there is a better happy medium here.
But if you can crack the code in solving the transaction cost/friction, it would open up a tremendous amount of creative value. I hope this team succeeds.
I get what you’re saying but is the track record of terrorism any better at causing constructive change? Really we need to engage a lot of people’s minds, and that just turns out to be really hard in our current culture no matter what angle you come at it from.
No, what I'm saying is that understanding peaceful movements separate from violent ones is missing the point. For example martin luther king jr's peaceful civil rights movement was effective in part because there was a credible threat of a violent movement on its wing. There was conflict and cooperation between these movements, they can't be cleanly separated. A lot of the reason white people came to the negotiating table at all was because of fear of what would happen instead if they didn't.
Whose minds do we need to change? Climate change is a major issue with massive popular support. There are relatively few people actually able to take action on it and they will not under the current circumstances. Specifically because there's no credible non-peaceful consequence they have to confront, they can ignore the demands of everyone else.
The actual historical effectiveness of terrorism alone is questionable. It's not a reliable or sustainable way to change the minds of a large mass of people. But that's not actually what we need to do here. Making a powerful few frightened enough to do what they ought may be sufficient.
And the effectiveness of the credible threat of violence, combined with a mass peaceful movement, is well attested.
I have to agree this is always the way I have understood every peaceful movement that has ever existed, the peaceful movements were big and there were smaller violent movements, it did not take an amazing inductive leap to think hey if we don't make some concessions sooner or later these peaceful folks are going to become violent like these others, and then there will be real problems for us.
Since India is also the start of this whole conversation Gandhi especially comes to mind.
Again I will make this point, again and again. Here, today, on HN, in this comment section, we have people endorsing mass population culling of the most dispossessed people on earth, and the least responsible for climate change. How am I the moral transgressor for arguing, abstractly, that redirecting the harm towards those actually perpetrating it is preferable?
The CCP isn't my problem honestly. Most of the major contributors to climate change are operated from within my own country, so I'll focus on that. There's plenty of work to go around, I'm sure someone over there can handle that part of the project.
The fact that people can never really come up with anything except "but well CHINA" speaks volumes to me. You aren't rejecting this stance because you abhor violence. Climate change IS VIOLENCE. Where is your outrage, what are you willing to do about it?
My actual position is that there does need to be an extremist counterpart to the peaceful climate movement that can plausibly escalate to violence against people. But that there are several steps along the way with chances for those in power to de-escalate first.
Things like targeted destruction of fossil fuel facilities and harassment campaigns against certain politicians and executives are likely to be very effective at raising the cost of contributing to the climate crisis. If those with the power to actually respond to those measures do so, it won't need to escalate further. Hopefully violence isn't necessary but at this point unfortunately, the credible threat of it is.
> Hopefully violence isn't necessary but at this point unfortunately, the credible threat of it is.
The credible threat of violence doesn’t even work unless you can credibly threaten a huge portion of the population. Just look at how ineffective terrorism has been for the last 50 years.
Have you considered the civil rights movement was not successful because of the threat of violence but was instead successful because people actually changed their minds?
We have same sex marriage now, which was as unpopular as desegregation a couple of decades ago. When Obama went into office he was against same sex marriage. Society changed rapidly and without violence.
It likely changed so rapidly because it was not a coercive movement at all, but that’s just speculation on my behalf.
Mass murders in the US won’t help if someone isn’t picking up a machine gun in China as well.
You just said “not my problem”, which means you don’t actually care about stopping climate change. You need to stop thinking about how to kill locally when the problem is global.
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Really interesting to think about hardware vs software. Thank goodness for Von Neumann for helping us get more generic.
A lot of historians assume that Babbages work collected dust and was lost for 100 years. This turns out to not be true at all. His work was consulted by the Scheuts and Jevons. Details on what I found researching him at https://buriedreads.com/2019/02/09/when-computers-stopped-be...
Good blog post and thanks for writing it. But though Babbage's work may not have been lost for quite as close as 100 years, there is truth to the usual history and I don't think these two examples establish the "turns out to not be true at all":
• Charles Babbage lived 1791–1871, dying a couple of months before his 80th birthday. He wrote his Passages from the Life of a Philosopher in 1864.
• The Swedish difference engine, produced by Scheutz father and son, is mentioned in these memoirs. At the time, it was regarded as a smaller-scale/toy/prototype version of the Difference Engine he was engaged in building. So, even though this version did find use "in production" (at the Dudley Observatory at Albany, and an English-made copy in use "the department of the Registrar-General, at Somerset House"), it was still short of what he actually wanted to build (or had promised to build).
• As for the example you illustrate of W. Stanley Jevons's praise in 1969 of the Difference and Analytical Engine, this too came during Babbage's lifetime, and was for the idea rather than any concrete details of the design: "in his subsequent design for an Analytical Engine, Mr. Babbage has shown that material machinery is capable, in theory at least…" etc.
So it does seem to be the case that at least after Babbage's death in 1871 (if not before), his ideas for the Analytical Engine were dismissed as impractical, or absurdly expensive, or a failure, etc, and no one quite looked at them at least until (going by the Aiken reference you found) 1936, which is 65 years.
Wow this really brings home how recent it was still in the scheme of things. I had it in my mind before this thread and article that Babbage was in the 1600’s or something.
More over the risk of death is part of the cost calculation for tobacco. Not all prices / values are monetary. This is a crucial aspect any serious economist incorporates and this article completely misses.
Our dog caught Valley Fever on a road trip through the southwest. It was just dumb luck that our vet originally practiced in Arizona and was familiar with this fungal infection. The only symptom was a mild cough, but left unchecked the fungus spreads throughout the body and can do quite a bit of damage.
Why would this actually be true? If it’s easier to find in source, Microsoft probably would have found it. Ever single feature there goes through multiple security reviews and there is tons of code linting. All the penetration testers I have met don’t even bother looking at source. They just start trying things they think will flummox the software.
>They just start trying things they think will flummox the software.
This works...until you go against a target that's heard of fuzzing before and has the time and money to do it to their own code.
The really interesting Windows exploits require a combination of "throwing stuff that will flummox the software" and a deep level understanding of structures hidden to the average developer. Look at Yardin Shafir's really wonderful blog post about developing a kernel bug to a PoC - there's a lot of moving parts and security checks in modern windows, and having the source is a HUGE help.
I also found another hint about their findings in this PDF written by Yarden's co-researcher Alex Ionescu: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/woot20_slides_ionescu.pd.... One of the slides specifically mentions the use of fuzzing tools to find these issues.
If there are other, better links I don't know about, please kindly share. :)
I get the concern about vapor ware and fatigue but feels like there is a better happy medium here.