I disagree. Here's a reasonable definition of economic efficiency:
Maximize societal benefit per tax dollar spent.
Find one policy in which this does worse than the status quo in the United States. If you want an easier task, change it to:
Maximize long-term economic growth per tax dollar spent.
I still suspect you cannot find an example of how this is worse than current policy. For instance, on the environment, the only path that makes sense on a 20-30 year timeline is to internalize the costs of externalities. That would force cleaner energy or environmental remediation, which would save lots of costal cities in the US, and lower losses due to crop failures and cities burning down. It'd raise the price of gas by maybe $1-2 vs pre-Iran prices.
Speaking of which, we'd never have gone into Iran because there was no economic story for it.
Education is cheaper than prisons and also leads to higher expected growth. Universal health care lowers wasted work on insurance paperwork (which is currently > 33% of US health care costs).
Then there's stuff we wouldn't do: How exactly does policing bathroom gender policies grow the economy again? Allowing food manufacturers to add known poisons to food? Jailing farm workers + their children?
I actually agree with most of your policy list. But I think the reply misses my point. I'm not saying efficiency gives worse results than the status quo. I'm saying it can't produce any results until you've made moral choices first. For instance if the goal is maximizing long-term growth per dollar, why not cut retiree benefits and disability support? Saying we shouldn't is a moral judgment, not an economic one.
The entire series of interviews with various language designers by Ryan Peterman is really great and a highly recommended watch.
It gives an insight into how they thought/think and what we can learn from them.
While watching the series i was stuck by the fact that they often only focused/reiterated the conceptual basics and building on top of them in a step-by-step manner. Whereas if you watch interviews with programmers (even famous ones) you will often see a lot of fancy talk about the complicated features of the language etc.
I believe "Experts" have a way of modeling domain knowledge in their mind in such a way that they intuitively know what is the "wheat" and what is the "chaff". This is what we need to learn. Scheme can do a lot with a minimal language and so can C++ on the other end of the spectrum. So then what constitutes "Programming"? It is simply an expression of Intent via syntax supporting abstraction of state/behaviour.
Qubes can be viewed as a Xen distribution, rather than a Linux distribution [1]. You may find the Qubes FAQ a good starting point (I'm reading it now because of your question, so thanks).
Being right is not the most important part. If you're right but don't convince anyone, you've made no difference.
Theo was right that virtualization is a comparatively shoddy security boundary. At the same time, it's flexible and capable in ways that now define the shape of modern IT.
Could we have replicated that by other means? If yes, then it's on Theo and other knee-jerk critics that they never proposed a better approach and settled for insulting people. If not, then maybe virtualization was a necessary evil. Or maybe everyone else is an irredeemable idiot, but again - if we reach that conclusion, is the world better off?
I did not claim it was most important, but he clearly called out issues that haunt us still, because we did not fix the basic initial issues ( and we are actively making it worse now with AI slop -- we because, while I use llms, I am not arrogant enough to offer my contributions to emulation, virtualization and other foundational stuff ). The point is that he called it and all of us should do some soul searching as to why his words were ignored. Because if he was ignored because 'he was mean about it', the we are kinda screwed long, because anyone with a brain that can comprehend the issue, will likely have little patience for anyone, who can't see it or won't want see to see it for some contrived semi-social reason.
They aren't, they're one of the people who latch on longstanding and neutral syntax (em-dashes, "it's not $foo") as a proof of LLM text. I don't blame them because HN has a lot of people trying to pass gen AI stuff as their own, and you need quick heuristics... but I'd encourage people at least do it right. Pay for Pangram or something.
"HN: Professionally identifying 230% of posts from 2017 as LLM generated".
That said Panagram is trash for the opposite reason. Not that some people talked like LLMs before LLMs, but now a lot of people talk like LLMs because of LLMs.
I don't really know as the argument is mainly about how stupid people are... The technical argument is one paragraph ended with an insult, not much to make an educated and civilized opinion.
<< You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a
worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating
systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around
and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes.
Allow me to start by saying that you are wrong about 'mainly about'. The argument starts with an insult, but insult is minimal and it moves directly into the technical details. But, note that how much you are wrong about the paragraph, because what you want to focus is the insult. You are so wrong about it you effectively invert the proportions of presence of technical data to insult..
But is the world a better place with that particular understanding being the norm. Would we, as a whole, be better served if function was what actually mattered? Wouldn't that be nice?
No, they added incorrect anti-tampering code. It's wrongly detecting secure app spawning giving each app their own address space, memory tags, etc. via exec as tampering.
If I own a restaurant and buy bread from a supplier — BreadHub.
And 99% of the bread that I get is good but 1% of the loaves, they forgot to add flour. Consistently, for years, they always have loaves missing a key ingredient that I still end up paying for.
I can be pretty sure that BreadHub have a pretty major internal issue, and should probably be questioning their competence, regardless of their “scale”, and without any knowledge of the “problems they’re solving”
I’m not saying users don’t have a right to be pissed or aren’t justified in looking at other options.
I’m saying that GH is operating at a huge scale with (probably) lots of technical debt and a forced migration to new infrastructure.
I would be (and am) highly critical of leadership. I’m not going to make strong assertions about ICs without knowing their context. I’ve worked at a company with a sterling reputation for engineering excellence where brilliant ICs were kneecapped by poor leadership.
I think a lot of us, at one point or another in our careers, have worked with potato leadership that can be short-sighted or political. It isn’t a comment on the engineers.
I mean, the leadership brought it on themselves. For a few years they encouraged sloperating Copilot. Before that, they were encouraging Github Actions usage.
Now the scale problems they're facing is because of those 2 actions of theirs. They didn't have to encourage such growth to turn a profit, and they still don't have to provide gratis services to slopware bots providing 0 value for society.
I don't think this is an apt analogy. The bread makeup is still there, as far as I'm aware, no users have lost any data or are missing "key" ingredients.
An outage is more like a shipping issue with the supplier, if it's owned wholly by them.
Are you saying the dough is fine but 1% of the batch wasn't cooked? Or rather, that 1% of batches isn't cooked, taking your entire downstream activity down until a new batch arrives?
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