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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • Yeah, timestamps should always be stored in UTC, but actual planning of anything needs to be conscious of local time zones, including daylight savings. Coming up with a description of when a place is open in local time might be simple when described in local time but clunkier in UTC when accounting for daylight savings, local holidays, etc.


  • I’d say the real world doesn’t reward being actually gifted.

    More accurately, the real world punishes being below average at any one of like a dozen skillets. You can’t min/max your stats because being 99th percentile at something won’t make up for being 30th percentile at something else. Better to be 75th percentile at both.

    The real world requires cross-disciplinary coordination, which means thriving requires both soft skills and multiple hard skills.







  • Things might be different by now, but when I was researching this I decided on the Yale x Nest.

    It’s more secure than a keyed lock in the following ways:

    • Can’t be picked (no physical keyhole).
    • Codes can be revoked or time-gated (for example, you can set the dog walker’s code to work only at the time of day they’re expected to come by).
    • Guest codes can be set to provide real-time notifications when used.
    • The lock keeps a detailed log of every time it’s used.
    • The lock can be set to automatically lock the door after a certain amount of time.

    It’s less secure than a physical traditional lock in the following ways:

    • Compromise of a keycode isn’t as obvious as losing a key, so you might not change a compromised keycode the same way you might change a lost key.
    • People can theoretically see a code being punched in, or intercept compromised communications to use it.
    • Compromised app or login could be used to assign new codes or remotely unlock

    It’s basically the same level of security in the following ways:

    • The deadbolt can still be defeated with the same physical weaknesses that a typical deadbolt has: blunt force, cutting with a saw, etc.
    • The windows and doors are probably just generally weak around your house, to where a determined burglar can get in no matter what lock you use.
    • Works like normal without power or network connection (just can’t be remotely unlocked or reprogrammed to add/revoke codes if not online)

    Overall, I’d say it’s more secure against real-world risk, where the weakest link tends to be the people you share your keys with.



  • Notice that your comment is framed from the perspective of what Libertarians believe, and analyzing from that context. Mine is different: analyzing a specific type of personality common in tech careers, and analyzing why that type of person tends to be much more receptive to libertarian ideas.

    I’m familiar with libertarianism and its various schools/movements within that broader category. And I still think that many in that group tend to underappreciate issues of public choice, group behaviors, and how they differ from individual choice.

    Coase’s famous paper, the Theory of the Firm, tries to bridge some of that tension, but it’s also just not hard to see how human association into groups lays on a spectrum of voluntariness, with many more social situations being more coercive than Libertarians tend to appreciate, and then also layering Coase’s observations about the efficiencies of association onto involuntary associations, too.

    Then at that point you have a discussion about public choice theory, what the group owes to defectors or minority views or free riders within its group, what a group owes to others outside that group in terms of externalities, how to build a coalition within that framework of group choice, and then your nuanced position might have started as libertarianism but ends up looking a lot like mainstream political, social, and economic views, to the point where the libertarian label isn’t that useful.


  • I think technical-minded people tend to gravitate towards libertarian ideologies because they tend to underestimate the importance of human relationships to large scale systems. You can see it in the stereotype of the lone programmer who dislikes commenting or documentation, collaboration with other programmers, and strongly negative views towards their own project managers or their company’s executives. They also tend to have a negative view of customers/users, and don’t really believe in spending too much time in user interfaces/experiences. They have a natural skepticism of interdependence, because that brings on extra social overhead they don’t particularly believe they need. So they tend to view the legal, political, and social world through that same lens, as well.

    I think the modern world of software engineering has moved in a direction away from that, as code complexity has grown to the point where maintainability/documentation and collaborative processes have obvious benefit, visible up front, but you still see streaks of that in some personalities. And, as many age, they have some firsthand experience with projects that were technically brilliant but doomed due to financial/business reasons, or even social/regulatory reasons. The maturation of technical academic disciplines relating to design, user experience, architecture, maintainability, and security puts that “overhead” in a place that’s more immediate, so that they’re more likely to understand that the interdependence is part of the environment they must operate in.

    A lot of these technical minded people then see the two-party system as a struggle between MBAs and Ph.Ds, neither of whom they actually like, and prefer that problems be addressed organically at the lowest possible level with the simplest, most elegant rules. I have some disagreements with the typical libertarians on what weight should be assigned to social consensus, political/economic feasibility, and elegant simplicity in policymaking, but I think I get where most of them are coming from.