samhwr

System programming is quite poorly defined in general. I’d call it “the kind of software usually written by people who write C instead of Python”, and leave it at that.

“There are far more people doing [thing that I personally do] than [thing that I do not personally do, and thus know fewer people who do it].” — everyone ever

It _affected_ the whole network, and _effected_ the whole outage ;)

It’s massively viral news about the exact stuff they specialise in. I’m not too surprised that they’d be putting out content. After all, Facebook is hardly in a position to do so ;)

>> eclipsing Intel

> AMD had 2020 revenues of $9.76bln to Intel's $77.87bln.

Ever heard of a solar eclipse? ;)

> though standing in a group on the road is maybe not the brightest idea

I wouldn’t judge ravens too harshly. Insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan were notorious for booby-trapping bodies in order to take out first responders - so humans are clearly not impervious to making the same mistake.

> One must keep in mind that the United States is and near or more always has been a welfare state.

> If one must keep that in mind, may one ask what definition of "welfare state" has applied to the USA since its founding?

The contention was definitely whether it has been a welfare state ever since its founding. No judgement though - the English language is terribly poorly designed, so I can totally understand how you read it that way.

Sorry, I was responding to the “not expressed so much in code I can look at” point. All these things should be expressed in code nowadays. I’m sure some Makefiles are excessively complex - and Terraform and K8s manifests surely as well - but you should hopefully be able to hunt down some good ones.

Yeah, after wasting eight years of my life doing Latin at school I understand the basic etymology, but I’m confused because the English meanings aren’t very close. Your careful phrasing manages to get the word ‘hold’ into both of them, but ‘someone who holds a lease’ isn’t a very natural-sounding definition of ‘tenant’, and the notion that most people who make this mistake are familiar with the paradigm of teneo feels rather tenuous (plus ‘tenant’ noticeably isn’t a Latin ending, it’s apparently Old French, though transitively descended from teneo). You don’t think it’s more likely, if anything, to be that they just sound similar?

I’m not totally sure what you mean there? I’m not saying that all mentally ill people are prone to that, I’m just saying the inverse: that most people who are prone to that are mentally ill. It’s certainly a very very small subset of mentally ill people, if that’s what you mean.

> But how to build an executable I can wrap in a systemd process running on a different machine? Those are actions people do, not expressed so much in code I can look at.

The former sounds like a makefile, and the latter sounds like a Terraform plan (perhaps combined with something like Kubernetes manifests, but that’s getting more architecture-specific). These days I don’t think there’s any excuse to use the point-and-click approach for setting up infrastructure: it’s effortful, bug-prone, a security hazard, means everyone has to be trained in yet another area, and risks accidentally spending far more money than you intend (either by using surprisingly expensive services like Spanner, or by inadvertently leaving unused infrastructure running).

That said, I do agree that platforms like AWS are unnecessarily complex for the vast majority of CRUD web developers. The complexity makes sense for the small percentage of people who are genuinely setting up a very idiosyncratic and unique architecture, but the 98% of CRUD developers really need an opinionated platform, perhaps built on top of AWS/GCP/Azure and modelled on v1 platforms like Heroku, which would set up the infrastructure you need for the average web backend.

Yes, I’m not a fan of lots of what Apple does, but I don’t see how these generalised complaints about Apple are related to this case. I don’t think your comments justify the notion that Apple is obliged to hire people at a loss to provide some form of ad hoc social welfare.

I’m not sure why having the money is relevant. Plenty of companies, people, and governments ‘have the money’. The question is why it is specifically Apple who are obliged to provide welfare for this person at their own expense.

I have huge sympathy for human beings who are unable to work, and a humane society should provide for them, but I don’t see why it falls to Apple. This kind of populism (“person X or company Y should be arbitrarily forced to pay for thing Z, ultra vires, because they can”) feels like a lazy way to avoid solving a deeper societal problem which goes well beyond this one person.

Yeah, the complaining about this is ludicrous. It feels like there are increasingly two camps, one of which believes anyone fired for social justice reasons is being wronged due to some kind of cancel culture, and the other of which believes that the former never happens in any case.

The reality is some people are rightly fired, others wrongly. In this case, that person was rightly fired. Writing such inflammatory bollocks would have got you fired 10 or 20 years ago too. They burned bridges with most of the people they would be expected to work with, so it’s absurd to demand that they be protected from the consequences of their actions. This goes well beyond being fired for claiming that, say, racism against white people is possible.