mediocregopher

It's very clearly a toy example to demonstrate the idea, and it does so well.

> What we have here is a Rube Goldberg machine, not a cleanly solved engineering problem.

And what _we_ have here is unfounded indignation over a perfectly fine way to solve a problem. People have been using linked libraries to re-use code across languages since forever, it's fine. This solution isn't very different, it just makes shipping easier.

As a parting comment, "sound software architecture" is not a decided upon principle which can be empirically determined, and if it was we'd all be out of a job.

War is a symptom of various causes, like over-population, changing geographical conditions, and just plain old greed. It is not a root cause. If humans had no bloodthirst we would still wage war, so long as we had a will to survive (something which would be difficult to take out of a lifeform).

The actual article only asserts that military innovation is a predictor for social complexity, which is pretty different from saying that "war makes society complex".

> “Nobody likes this ugly idea because obviously warfare is a horrible thing, and we don’t like to think it can have any positive effects.”

The implicit assumption being that a more complex society _is_ a good thing, which is not clear to me.

They did this in a few places in caphill during covid, 16th and 11th being big examples. The cars have since been allowed back on those roads, though. Someone went tearing down 11th in their jeep at easily 50mph the other day, made me really really miss those days.

- A lot of practice, which stemmed from a lot of fooling around and abandoned side-projects. I would deliberately start projects which were way over my head, with no intention of even getting something working, just to see how far I could get before getting bored.

- Learning new languages which had vastly different paradigms than the ones I was used to. Java to Perl to Javascript to PHP to Erlang to Clojure to Go to... Over time you learn patterns from one place you can bring to another, and learn patterns which exist in most places which you'd rather didn't.

- Lots of experience in the actual workforce, building things people (supposedly) wanted. There are aspects of programming which people spin their wheels on which really don't matter in the long run, and conversely there are aspects which go ignored but are very important. Working on real, rubber-to-the-road projects gives you perspective on what actually matters.

- Being a daily archlinux user (I don't use any non-archlinux OS on any machine I own). Yes, it's hard. Yes, it's an incredibly good use of your time to figure out. Once you're comfortable in arch, every other Unix-like OS (ie, most of them that you'll ever probably work with) will feel familiar.

I don't think that's what web3 is, that's just one direction some are taking it. Web3 is a move away from centralized platforms to ones which are either decentralized or more directly controlled by users (self-hosted, federated).

> Like anything blockchain there is no real solution for how to handle records becoming stale over time without a central authority that manages disputes.

I don't understand this part. In pretty much every decentralized name system I've seen a user pays to own a name for a period of time, there's no stale records.

Link doesn't load, so with only the title to go on...

It feels like it's implying that sincere is the opposite of cynical? But someone (me) could be sincerely cynical. Or falsely optimistic.

In any case, signaling sincerity sounds a bit like fighting for peace, and doesn't give me high hopes for this article whenever we do get to find out what it says.

(It _is_ sort of fun to have this playground though, where we can all just freely admit we didn't read the article, and riff off the title alone)