q845712

In all fairness it's really hard to make money off of "reduce" and "reuse," and we've decided to use money as the system for allocating all of our resources.

in my experience it is how both real and imaginary Canadians talk

> the growth obsession is a product of the Reagan-era

I hear you, but uncle Karl names and shames the growth-obsession in Das Kapital which predated Reagan by over 100 years. It's a part of the system that many people have incentive to deny, hide, or minimize, but endless growth seems to be a requirement of "the system of organizing our resources that prioritizes turning capital into more capital" aka capital-ism.

It feels a little inevitable though, given the other rules of the system: Companies don't become more valuable by having a steady earnings forecast, they become more valuable by having an _increase_ in earnings that is forecast to continue increasing. How can everything always increase? Well when you reach market saturation on one product, start a new product in a different market. What if all the markets seem saturated? Find a new thing to commoditize, a new market to create... Any system where unlimited growth is rewarded is going to try to take over everything it possibly can.

if it helps, that's just the stars and galaxies we're capable of observing. There's probably more :)

I mean like the incentives aren't aligned. So maybe you're giving an example but i'm honestly not sure. :)

in the space of cve or malware detection, the user wants a safe/secure computing experience with minimal overhead, but the antivirus / cve-scan vendor wants to claim that they're _keeping_ the you safe. so they're motivated to tell you all about the things they scanned and possible attacks / vectors they found. You probably would've been safe responding to only a subset of those alerts, but they have no incentive to minimize the things they show you, because if they ever missed one you would change vendors.

in the space of cryptography, the user wants secure communications that are unbreakable but with minimum hassle and overhead, but the advisory boards etc. are incentivized to act like they have important advice to give. So from the user perspective maybe it makes sense to use 2048 bit encryption for a few more decades, but from the "talking head" authority figure perspective, they can't afford to ever be wrong and it's good if they have something new to recommend every so often, so the easiest for them to do is to keep upping the number of bits used to encrypt, even if there's 99.99% odds that a smaller/shorter/simpler encryption would've been equally as secure.

I could be wrong as I was young and not yet in the field, but my impression has always been that sometime in the 80s/90s as the whole "networking, world wide web, wowie!" moment happened, there was this idea that "maybe on a local computer everything is files, but on the network everything is streams. Hey, maybe everything is streams!?" and C++ just happened to be creating itself in that zeitgeist, trying to look modern and future-thinking, so somebody decided to see what would happen if all the i/o was "stream-native".

IDK, it'll probably make more sense in another 15 years as we clear away the cruft of all the things that tried to bring "cloud native" paradigms into a space where they didn't really fit...

I have no specialist knowledge in this subfield, but after reading the article's arguments that basically if you could sic the entire bitcoin network on 2048 RSA it would take 700+ years, I have to wonder about perverse incentives.

Another thing that's missing is the lifetime expectancy, e.g. "for how many years does something encrypted in 2030 need to be unbreakable?"

The author doesn't seem to be a big authority, so has little to lose by staking their reputation on "you don't need it to be that good," whereas by the very nature of their authority, anyone in the resource you link is going to be motivated to never be wrong under any circumstances. So if someone with some reputation/authority/power to lose think there's a 0.001% chance that some new incremental improvements will allow for fast-enough breaking of 2048 bit encryption created in 2030 within a window where that would be unacceptable, then they're motivated to guess high. The authority in this case doesn't directly bear the costs of too high of a guess, whereas it could be very bad for, i dunno, some country's government, and by extension the org or people that made that country's standards recommendations, if some classified information became public 15 or 50 years earlier than intended just because it could be decrypted.

I said this elsewhere too -- while in general I like things _like_ the poignant guide, and appreciate its existence, I never actually finished reading it.

To me it's an interesting touchstone work showing/reminding that the "invisibly neutral" tone we've collectively adopted is still an editorial choice and cultural moment.

I'm sure writing and communication styles will drift back and forth over the next few decades. Sometime soon (if not already) another generation of younger developers will coalesce around some document that feels authentically counter-cultural, like their own late-night jokes and dreams have been given just enough coherence to hook them in, and then I probably still won't get it because I'll be out of touch.... :)

Honestly at the time I remember getting weird twee/precious vibes from the Ruby community and I wasn't particularly interested in it or Rails. I only discovered _why's poignant guide later after I had to learn Rails on the job, and to be honest I never finished it.

I still strongly prefer the worldview, circumstances, mindset, etc. where that kind of content is written, read, and celebrated over today's focus on Influence and Professionalism.

it's probably a good starting position to assume that since we all the share the same closed-ish system called planet earth, there's interconnections between different systems. Certainly the border areas between desert and not-desert aren't very crisply defined. Certainly (reference in other threads) nutrients can be blown by the winds from desert into non-desert areas far away. Certainly there exist some animals who go in and out of desert regions (birds, butterflies, ...). It's a really good idea to assume that things on this planet are connected to each other.

but there's a premium on our youth -- The people who complain that it's harder to find a job in their 50s and 60s can't _all_ be wrong or mistaken. I feel like we like to imagine that these treatments would extend our 20s and 30s, but what if they extend our 60s instead?

if they have money they can buy a gopro; I've known many cyclists who list having the record of a potential accident as one of their reasons for buying and using a gopro.

I'm not sure it's exactly "what customers want" so much as it is the sweet-spot or intersection of the two curves: "what customers want" with "how much cost and risk owners and managers are willing to put in up front"