vog

Indeed, it's a pity that the author placed so much focus on a cool looking font that they forgot to take basic properties like "good readability" into account. Form should follow function, not the other way around.

This is far from meaningless, because if you are too far below those 3.5%, you'll fail to make a change for the better, despite having a good cause with no real opposition.

Those 3.5% are encouraging for all social movements, who suffer (and/or have friends/family who suffer) from some issue in the system, have perhaps developed a good plan out of it, but think they are too small to make a difference.

Okay, fair point.

But then, why prescribe the most expensive placebos where you co-finance societal harmful behavior, rather than just prescribing the "harmless" placebos that are not homeopathy, which are usually even cheaper and don't have any ideological overhead?

To those who downvoted: Would you dare to explain your disagreement?

Contrast this with advertisement, which actually does work even when people know that it is ads, and which still does work on people how know how ads work.

Also, contrast this with psychotherapy, which usually does work even better if the patient understands how it works, because it enables them to become an active and more effective part of the therapy.

This is an incorrect summary of the placebo effect. The placebo effect does require the patient to either believe it is effective, or at least not knowing clearly it is ineffective.

This is why clinical studies don't tell neither group (neither the treated group nor the control group) who is in which group, to not spoil the results.

And also, this is why homeopathy puts so much effort into spreading the belief they are effective despite all odds, up to the point of trying to convince people to abandon basic scientific principles.

While I hear this argumentation a lot, I still struggle with this:

If you have "mild problems, which would normally heal on their own", buying no medication at all would be even cheaper.

And from an ethical point of view, the idea of financing a whole (homeopathic) industry that uses your money to produce fake science, even with a single cent, should make one shudder, shouldn't it?

To me the "natural way" has always been to write portable code in the first place. From time to time, you'll find that parts of it are not portable, so you fix it, and along that way to learned something new about portability and apply it to future improvements on your code as well. Over time, you'll find fewer and fewer portability issue as you get better and better at writing portable code in the first place.

I'm not saying that this is the best way to do this, but to me this was always the obvious thing to do. As a somewhat extreme example, I'd never write a graphical user interface in pure Win32 API and expect it to be even remotely portable by some additional layer. I'd rather use Qt (or GTK, or Dear ImGui, or whatever) for native UIs even for programs that are (for now) meant to be only run on Windows.

To me personally, this has the additional benefit that I can do most of the development and testing in a non-hostile environment (e.g. Debian), then running a cross compiler (e.g. via MXE) and only do the final testing on Windows (well, usually first Wine, then some Windows VM), but at that last stage surprises are extremely seldom.

I have always suspected this to be the case, but it is great to see it confirmed and well-explained in detail by an almost-authority in our field.

I wonder if in the near future we'll see a similar article regarding security - "You Can't Buy Security".

From the announcement:

> "We will continue to improve this new solution and are already working on an IPv6 only solution for cloud servers, too."

I'm eagerly waiting especially for this! The cloud servers are pretty cheap, but costs for IPv4 addresses make a significant part of the monthly cost. The Hetzner cloud server would be much more interesting if they weren't each tied to a public IPv4 address.

It took a while for me to fully appreciate the OpenSSH approach to portability:

They primarily develop OpenSSH purely for OpenBSD, using all (including non-portable) facilities of OpenBSD, including crypto and whatnot.

Then, a separate team manages the "portable" version of OpenSSH, which add stubs and does everything else needed to make OpenSSH compile on as many operating systems as possible.

I'm aware that OpenSSH is not the only project using that approach to portability. Nevertheless, I think it is fair to say this is an unusual approach used only on a minority of projects.

I was always puzzled on why they are doing this. This always struck me to be "just" a side effect of project politics and historically grown project structures.

But over the years I started to see some interesting benefits of that approach as well. I'm still not convinced by this model, but I have to admit that, more generally speaking, the OpenBSD project does many things against the mainstream, but quite often they turn to be right.