It's worth saying that Orwell was himself a communist who fought in the Spanish Civil war, he was just against stalinist communism (which he didn't see as real communism, and neither would Lenin).
I mean, that's the whole distinction between Marxism and Leninsim, right? The idea of a vanguard party that facilitates the transition to communism? I can't imagine that Lenin would look at Stalinist USSR, and say "oh yeah, we've actually transitioned to communism now".
I see middle-school kids biking home from school in my suburb and when approaching the intersection (not a very busy one, mind you), they all dismount their bikes and walk across the street. I know that's what you're supposed to do, but c'mon, they're kids.. When I was that age my friends and I would race across the street without helmets flipping the bird to the crossing guard, so it's a bit unsettling to see them all obediently get off their bikes and single-file across the street, even when there are no crossing guards in sight.
Mechanical disks are basically free in this day and age, so that's still a pretty significant savings over an SSD which is more like the price of a mechanical disk 10 years ago. You could cheap out and do a small SSD/large HDD combination, but I find that having an excessively small system drive is nothing but headaches, especially for software development where you are frequently installing different toolchains, etc. Until I can afford an SSD that is comfortably in excess of my storage requirements, then I'll stick with the HDD.
To be fair there is quite a lot of space in between "supreme performance" and "supreme bloat". We can all accept some bloat because it makes life easier for developers/maintainers. But when you push the bloat border, suddenly users need 4 cores, 8GB of RAM, and several GB of disk space for a lagging block notes app.
Sure you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but if the book has poor multi-threading, bloated mark-up, and requires everyone you share it with to download another copy of chromium...
I really get sick of people shitting on Electron just because it's the hip thing to do or whatever.
Umbrella Note is a whopping 78mb versus Evernote at 129mb. I'm not sure "another copy of Chromium" is a big deal. I'm not sure what you're talking about in regards to the bloated markup. Are you referring to HTML and CSS? I'm also not really of the opinion that a simple note taking app needs to be multithreaded. This would increase complexity in any language.
My first thought when looking at this project wasn't "oh no Electron!" My first thought was "I could actually contribute to this project," because I, like many many others, use and understand what is likely the most prevalent programming language in the world.
> I really get sick of people shitting on Electron just because it's the hip thing to do or whatever.
This sounds very much like a comment I saw where a person said that they thought most atheists were only on board a bandwagon because it was hip. How terribly offensive.
Some people genuinely dislike certain projects and have no interest in being hip when they say so.
Electron has its place as a framework. Blindly disliking every single project that uses it is silly, and I really don't mind offending anyone who does so.
By that extension if a McDonald's drive thru employee accidentally spills hot coffee on a customer, the CEO is responsible and should be charged with assault?
If they create a work situation where by cutting corners on container safety, protocols, and employee attentiveness I think they are guilty.
And in the modern security context we're pushing deadlines just to race to the latest features with almost no regard for security in the process.
Something has to change. If this kind of negligence were causing similar problems in physical realms there would be regulations.
The tech companies behind these mistakes won't have that free roam forever. Every major screw-up is a step closer to regulations and everyone will cry about it when it happens... But so many companies today don't seem like they're ready to behave responsibly.
Is that grossly negligent? No. Is keeping the coffee excessively hot for cost reasons, thereby causing the customer to receive third degree burns on their genitals and winning in court? Yes.
While I fully understand that without universal insurance in the US, it may be most expedient to go after someone like McDonald's with deep pockets, I am tired of hearing how shocking and unconscionable it is that coffee could be served at a near boiling temperature.
I make coffee nearly every morning by boiling water in a tea kettle and pouring it over coffee grounds in a Melitta filter. If I poured or spilled it on my genitals, that would be bad. Doesn't make an approximately 200F temperature incorrect though.[1]
I'm familiar with the case, that's why I mentioned it. My point was that although they lost the civil suit, there weren't any criminal proceedings against C-levels. I understand the argument of negligence being as guilty as malicious intent but it creates a sweeping blanket that's hardly fair or enforceable.
I agree with your principles in theory but it's just impractical.
The Department of Justice was able to dismantle Arther Anderson after their fraudulent audits of Enron. Lots of things that are impractical are possible with sufficient effort. And the government has unlimited resources for those efforts.
You must hold systemic negligence and corruption accountable, or it perpetuates the cycle.
A) The DOJ had been looking at Anderson for years prior to Enron due to irregularities with other major firms like Waste Management Inc. Enron was not an isolated incident.
B) They were prosecuted for the very specific crime of obstruction of justice after they were caught destroying evidence. It wasn't some backlash against a nebulous problem.
C) Their conviction was overturned!
I'm not sure you could have picked a worse example for arguing your point.
They keep the coffee that hot because customers like hot coffee. That's the main reason I get coffee at McDonalds, not because it's great coffee (though it's not bad) but because it's HOT. Half the time I get coffee at Starbuck's it's only a litte better than piss-warm.
I don't think forbidding hot coffee at drive-thrus is unambiguously in favor of safety, since not-so-hot coffee encourages people to drink while driving, which could cause an accident. Some people want to drink on their way to the office or home, and others want coffee that is still hot when they get there. The consequence of the litigation seems to be that the former group of customers is privileged, but I'm not certain that is an overall social good even if you prioritize safety - and some would of course be happy to trade off others safety for their own hot coffee.
There seems to be an unlimited supply of people always popping up to "debunk" the "myths" about the Liebeck case who seem to deflect from the fact that it is normal for coffee to be brewed at near boiling temperatures[1] that cause the sort of damage that was at issue. I could burn myself severely while draining pasta too, if I pour hot water all over my pants and don't remove them; it doesn't mean boiling water is too hot for cooking nor that say, a manufacturer of a non-defective pot is to blame.
What controls does Uber have that the "safety driver" is doing their job? When the computer gets confused or its computed probability drops below a threshold, when and how does it alert the driver. How many of these self driving testbeds have a person in the seat just for CYA and not actual safety ?
I'd like to see Uber's logs of all the other pedestrian and vehicle near misses where the computer took corrective action.
What testing did Uber do on a closed course with adversarial conditions? Ball rolls into road with a child following, pedestrians walking under a flickering street lamp, people dressed in costumes, a parade, a protest, service workers, a pickup truck with a lost load.
I don't think that would work. Driving is not a fully conscious, deliberate see-analyze-act loop. A lot of your control movements are subconscious, and you expect instant, correct feedback from the vehicle. To see what I mean - if you've ever played a racing game, try opening a racing replay/Let's play video on YouTube, pretend for a while that you're in control (use your WASD keys), and see how your brain complains about your inputs having no impact on reality.
