evdev

I was going to rant, but this:

> The energy-driven reduction of entropy is easy to demonstrate in simple laboratory experiments, but more to the point, stars, biological populations, organisms, and societies are all systems in which energy is routinely harnessed to generate orderly structures that have lower entropy than the constituents from which they were built. There is nothing physically inevitable about increasing entropy in any of these systems.

is so straightforwardly incorrect that it frankly just should not have been published.

In my experience what we have in a lot of places are cultures of anti-competence.

In a competence culture, you try to understand your sphere very, very well, including not only the current facts of the matter but how those facts might change under different circumstances. Then you try to understand enough of spheres of people around you that you can bracket what will affect you, and how you will affect them. It's implicitly understood that the functioning of the entire enterprise comes from people doing this.

In anti-competence culture, the functioning of the entire enterprise is mysterious and located somewhere else where it's not your problem. You only know as much about what you're doing as you need to barely keep going. You try to know as little about what's going on with others as possible, and if there is any interaction between you, you try to minimize and even resist it, in the hopes that you will have to change as little as possible or changes will be discovered to be unnecessary or deemed to be too expensive.

You want to stay in the cultures of competence. What the article is describing is just how much of the other kind is out there.

> But subscribers to a scientific worldview often make a more ambitious claim: that the best theories are isomorphic with the fundamental nature of the universe.

This is not an "extra" claim on top of conservation laws/fundamental symmetries.

> Reductionism can be understood as a combination of (1) the claim that the intelligibility of the universe depends on the unity of scientific theories

It's strange and frankly likely just projection to say that it's the reductionists that claim the universe must be a certain way in order for it to be intelligible.

> Despite its limited usefulness as a guide to scientific practice, reductionism is a powerful cultural idea. We might call it the Lego-block conception of reality: only the Lego blocks are real, so ‘fundamental’ science involves identifying what the blocks are and how they interact, while ‘applied’ science involves discovering the right combination or permutation of blocks that accounts for the phenomenon in question.

The question of realism is separate than reductionism of fundamental law, and it's not a good sign to (deliberately?) confuse them. EDIT: Just to be clear to people skimming this stuff, I can hold two theories: a) your dog is real, b) your dog is not real, only quarks are real. We can debate this for as long as we'd like, but what I am not necessarily saying is that your dog's dogness corresponds to some suspension or modification of fundamental physics.

> that parts and wholes have ‘equal’ ontological priority, with the wholes constraining the parts just as much as the parts constrain the wholes.

Again, if ontology means "realism" this is a confusion, if it means the way things work, it's simply wrong or completely unsupported.

Rabbit MQ is a traditional message broker; you use it when you have lots of messages you don't particularly want/need to be stored persistently, and where you want/need to take advantage of the routing feature--that you put keyed messages into some topic/exchange and then subscribe to only part of the messages any given application is interested in.

Kafka creates the abstraction of a persistently stored, offset-indexed log of events. You read all events in a topic. Kafka can be used to distribute messages in the way AMQP is used, but is more likely to be the centerpiece of an architecture for your entire system where system state is pushed forward/transformed by deterministically processing the event logs.

It begs the question to just assume there is a "feudal society" that needs to be "run". For instance, why not have a "first citizen" who is selected to manage internal coordination and external strategy, but must live in the worst house in the village and wear a hair shirt.

You can say, well that wouldn't work! But now the idea is that the structure of this model feudal society is justified by reasons like "people won't follow someone if they don't have a gold hat and a scary sword" and not by any process that led to selecting the particular feudal lord.

There is a sleight-of-hand in "meritocracy" evinced by the Scott Alexander quote--we ask "who should do surgery, the best surgeon or the worst?" and agree that surgeons should be chosen by "merit", or better yet, by their instrumental value to the task at hand.

The trick comes in when we switch without acknowledgement to describing the system for the distribution of wealth and status.

This kind of "meritocracy" is more like if we held an arm-wrestling tournament, declared the victor to be our new feudal lord, the next 6 runners up to be knights, and everyone else to be peasants. Our position in this new society was based on "merit", but that can't necessarily justify the difference between nobles and serfs.

We could even re-run the tournament every year. We could make sure no child gets extra time in the weight-room because of her noble parents. We could decide that arm-wrestling is stupid and brutish and so, in a glorious revolution, switch to speed chess. None of it would address the question of justice.

Meta comment, but I would love for there to be more insight into the sociology of Hacker News. I feel like in the last couple of years we've seen a stark decrease in the frequency of "What to expect when you're expecting (to be a millionaire founder)" articles and a stark increase in "Enterprise Patterns" discourse. The latter is oddly at pretty serious tension with PG's ideas about development and Scheme.

I find the "Liskov Substitution Principle" is an awkward way of pointing at the idea that your usage of subtyping should not render the type variance in your system nonsensical.

It seems like there's something deficient in the way we tell the story of the history of software architecture (to the extent we tell a story at all) in terms of the name-brand techniques and technologies involved, rather than in the actual layout and organization of actual codebases.

For a while I've assumed that OOP as in C++/Java essentially formalized modular programming in C. In other words, that people were already writing programs whose state was divided into functional areas, with some functions serving as the interfaces between the modules. With a class-based system you can rigidly formalize this; and then OOP as we use the term essentially just reinterprets this formalization as actually creating the architectural paradigm that had already evolved as programs grew.

(This is NOT meant as the one way to sum up the whole world of things identified as or related to "object-oriented programming".)

But I wasn't around at the time...

... "natural selection" IS the mechanics. The reason it's convincing is you can imagine what would arise, systematically, from imperfect reproduction under forces of selection, NOT because it's an attractive theory you saw in the tea leaves of the complexity of the world.

It's cargo-culting physics to assert that there are a set of "high level" laws in some area without having in hand the reductionist mechanics.

This cart-before-the-horse is so pervasive in social sciences, and developing sciences like neuroscience, that it's understandable one would ask why history can't get in on the action.

The glib invocation of phlogiston theory is telling. The essence of phlogiston theory is not wrong!