All of which would improve almost immediately with competition.

I have posted here for maybe five years. But I felt a twinge of nostalgia, so I decided to check out the latest headlines.

So I see this headline and I go: This is totally crazy, so nothing has really changed about the world during my absence.

So then I see your comment and I go: This is totally crazy, so nothing has really changed in the discourse, either.

The competition-porn security blanket was a cute idea back in the early 1980s. I was there when the Apple II, the TRS-80, and Commodore Pet were busy trying to set the world on fire. And I've watched the evolution of this space very carefully ever since. As a blue-blood digital native it's the main story of my life and times. My fascination with digital electronics began in the early 1970s. My attitude when the original home-computing toys arrived wasn't: Where did this come from? No, it was: Where have you been all these long, painful, pining year?

This was all supposed to set the world free. That's the story we always tell entering into a new age.

What do I see around me now? Five or so trillion dollar corporations dictating nearly every damn thing about this technology is developed, how it is delivered, and how it is consumed.

This is the house that competition built.

What were these companies competing for all these long years? What was the final brass ring? I'll tell you, and it should be obvious: To gain the monolithic scale to collect monopoly rent not just from their products, but also from the very context in which those products are rendered relevant to our psyches.

Sure, competition is a magic growth hormone, considered narrowly. But surely there's enough water under the bridge at this point that "considered narrowly" ought to be consider harmful. No?

So let's step back and not consider competition narrowly. What are the systemic realities of naive faith in competition?

The systemic reality is that competition injected at the bottom (a good thing) merely kicks the can down the road. The corporations then compete to rise above the discipline of competition. Maybe we double down and inject competition again, this time bigger, purer, bolder than before. Then the cycle repeats again. This time with even bigger corporations competing to rise above competition as titans, behemoths, and leviathans.

Is the government succeeding at taming these giants? Do Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook practice all that much legitimate competition? Here's a skill-testing question. Which of those five corporations is not known for commanding a primary vertical? Google has search and YouTube and the gated Android store. Scratch one. Amazon has AWS and the gated Kindle store. Scratch two. Apple has the iPhone and the gated iOS app store. Scratch three. Microsoft has government workflow integration and the PC gaming community. Scratch four. Facebook has social. Scratch five.

Even to define these verticals as duopolies requires athletic feats of imagination. I happen to use YouTube as my main social platform, and I've never had an account on Facebook. Do I strike you as a typical consumer? Or the 1% of the 1%?

I'm not just speaking here in cliche. I'm extremely well versed on free market principles, free market principles, and the theory of systems, including economic systems and human discourse systems. I spent over 500 hours consuming neoliberal podcasts featuring every possible flavour of neoliberal guest.

On a parallel track, over the past year I traced pretty much the entire evolution of postmodern thought from Hegel and Marx forward to the present times. There's actually quite a lot of neoliberal theory I'm sympathetic toward. I wish I could say the same for postmodernism, but that's another can of worms.

I like much of neoliberalism, but I'm not stupid. I can see the world plainly as it exists plainly before my eyes. We injected competition, it was wonder and vigorous for many decades, but finally and we got was monopoly on a larger scale than we've ever seen before.

What do you suppose the host talks about after conducting over 500 hours of interviews with hundreds of different guests, on mostly the same small set of topics?

Here's an eternal theme: If only we did it right, this time.

You see, every attempt to reform the world that lead to the world remaining the same as ever, only more so, shared the same universal flaw: We didn't go big enough to make $purity cure $horse. This is the one true universal excuse. It was used for socialism. It was used for market capitalism. It was used for every darn thing in between.

So the silver lining in creating worse monopolies than we've ever had before is that we forced them to make us a lot of nice toys in getting there. So I guess we have actually reformed monopoly to some degree. Once upon a time, monopolies came into existence without hardly making anyone a new toy worth having.

Okay, so what's another topic that burns eternal when you discuss the same small set of neoliberal principles for 500 hours?

Education reform. Sound familiar? It surely must. You see to be an expert, with an expert diagnosis, which in your unique genius you've managed to distill down to one word. Competition. Quite the magic trick there, I must say.

Here's a small thing. Charter schools, as normally implemented, are yet another government program. It's a government program with an extra degree of freedom inside compared to the normal landscape. But it's still a government program.

How do Charter schools mainly compete? For the quality of the parents. They often say that they are neutral. But then the application process is so arduous, that only the most truly devoted 1% of parents make it all the way through. So many meeting you have to attend with the school admissions people. What kind of family can organize that? Either a family with means, or a family with fervent devotion to the educational cause.

The vast majority of superior Charter school outcomes comes from this factor alone. Education concerns human capital. Nothing improves human capital like a sorting hat that selects only the right people, for whatever metric you wish to optimize.

Actual value-add in education has mostly proven to be a long unicorn hunt. You can figure out who your best students are easily. No matter how you teach, your best students will remain your best students. For the rest of your students, things are far more hit and miss. One teaching method might connect with one student, whereas a different method might connect with a different student. Neither of these were A students to begin with. And rarely do they become A students at the end. (There are of course some spectacular exceptions if you pray at the alter of N=1.)

Because building a school with better human capital is so much easier than improved the human capital you're stuck with, almost all the best charter schools have mostly done the former. Mostly. There are marginal gains to be had by getting the rest right. Marginal.

So what happens? The schools get good at lying about the reality that they are competing for human capital, and make a big story about how they've improved the capital of their students during their time at the school.

I think it's Finland that has gone furthest in education reform. This was also a competition for human capital, but they moved this into the teaching ranks, rather than the student ranks.

Education is very nearly the hardest degree program in Finland to get into. It would be maybe a small step down from medical school. Dullard teachers in Finland are rare birds. The students have far less class time, are given far less formal homework, but they work hard anyway, and consistently score highly in the world tables.

South Korea does everything exactly the other way. Stories are written about high school students in Korea jumping out of windows. After you sleep through most of the official school day, off you go to the second, private sector school day. And all they ever graduate are narrow technocrats. It's a disaster on wheels.

Blowing smoke up the ass of competition sure beats having to know something about the real world. Makes you sound smart, without typing your fingers off, like I've just done.

Which is why I finally moved on from Slashdot to greener pastures.

Not to mention no dedicated hardware LED to indicate that the microphone/camera sensors have been switched by software into an active state. I generally keep my phone inside it's leather sheath and not in the same room. Close enough to reach in a few steps if it beeps, not close enough for rogue candid camera.

No one who actually cares about their privacy is using Chrome anyway.

You've missed the entire ball of wax. People care about privacy, but they get systematically priced out of the conversation.

People who "actually" care is just doublespeak for those who are too stubborn to allow themselves to get priced out of the conversation.

I've been immersed in the software profession since the 1970s. I once won a math prize. I even won a writing prize. I spent much of the 1990s reading Applied Cryptography for light entertainment. I understood that there ought to be side channels in the time domain concerning caches and speculation long before these began to emerge. (Peter Wright's book from 1988 had already impressed upon me that exploitation of side-channels was a going concern.) I figured that smarter people than me must have poked into this, so it probably wasn't as bad as it appeared to be. I was wrong. If anything, it was even worse than I intuitively suspected.

In summary, I have all the cognitive tools in the world, and security still makes my head hurt. To "actually" care is a Sisyphean standard in the modern IT landscape.

"Just" install Firefox. Seriously. That's the full cure?

If you can even do that much. I have family members who work for the government. They are only allowed to use Edge, which just Chrome with an additional layer of sheepskin, draped over top of a wolf with twice as many teeth. So they drive Edge for 35–45 hours per week at the office (only one of my four family members lucked into the nearly mythical short government work day) and then they come home to drive something completely different, just to show that the "actually" care about their privacy.

If greater society actually cared about people actually caring, then the government IT environment would permit the use of alternative browsers, at least within reason. Greater society does not actually care about people caring, so this is entirely verboten.

Unless this: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice — 18 November 2021

How long did that last in Munich, at the other end of Germany?

LiMux was a project launched by the city of Munich in 2004 in order to migrate from Windows to a desktop infrastructure of its own, based on Linux. By 2012, the city had already migrated 12,600 of the total of 15,500 desktops, until in November 2017, the Munich City Council resolved to reverse the migration and return to Microsoft Windows-based software by 2020.

The LiMux lead on Wikipedia used to also include this sentence:

The city reports in addition to gaining freedom in software decisions and increased security, it has also saved Euros 11.7 million (US$16 million).

Now you can only find it burried deep in a ==Timeline== section, as a single line item:

23 November 2012 — Savings from LiMux environment over 10 million euros.

Ironically, there's a copy edit flag on the entire section stating that "this section is in list format but may read better as prose".

Am I going to sign up for the apparently Sisyphean task of keeping that comment about security and privacy and savings prominently displayed in the LiMux article lead, where it belongs? No, I'm not. Because I "actually" don't care, according to your doublespeak usage of the word "actually". Because to "actually" care is to have infinite resources in all directions and no concern whatsoever over painting yourself thin.

Intelligence is a dumb word. I prefer cognition. Cognition is modular. Intelligence is an attribute of the whole system. Cognition is an engineering domain. Intelligence is a judgement domain.

So, three minutes of exercise a month is better for your health than zero minutes a month.

give the user something to do while loading in the background

Something more productive than minesweeper?

Is this principle oriented toward true productivity, the cult of merely looking busy, or the need for constant distraction felt by those living lives of quiet desperation?

Here's the first AUDIT question from GDS 2021 Global Report

How often do you have a drink containing alcohol?
* Never
* Monthly or less
* 2 to 4 times a month
* 2 to 3 times a week
* 4 or more times a week

Approximating a year as 52 weeks divided in 12 months and converting to milli-drinks per day, the available ranges are:
* 0
* (0,33]
* [66,132]
* [286,429]
* [571,infinity)

THREE large discontinuities.

Doh!
Double doh!
Triple doh!

It's not even specifying standard drink volumes. If you drink from an old-fashioned jug balanced on a bent elbow, "one" drink could be as much as an entire gallon.

I'm Tired

" 'I hate saving money,' said no one ever. Microsoft Edge is the best browser for online shopping."

Don't know if this is exactly current, because nothing on the internet has a reliable publication date any more (recentism is the latest stupid fad).

Sean Chittenden is an Engineering Manager at HashiCorp. He is a long-time participant of the FreeBSD and PostgreSQL communities and a 15+ year veteran of large scale web infrastructure.

At HashiCorp Sean is focused on the enterprise delivery of HashiCorp's tools (i.e. Consul, Nomad, Terraform, and Vault) and making the world of operations a better place.

Prior to HashiCorp Sean's notable recent projects include designing and building Groupon's internal Database-as-a-Service offering.

Oops. The T x argument is fatuous.

Some people hate the ternary operator in C/C++. If the enemy of your enemy is your friend, then these people can welcome themselves to the PHP fan club for life.

In a sane language:

a = cond0 ? value0
  : cond1 ? value 1
  : cond2 ? value 2
  : value3;

Lemme translate that for the anti-ternary bigots:

T my_data_switch (T x,
          bool cond0, bool cond1, bool cond2,
          T value0, T value1, T value2, T value3) {
  switch (max3(cond0<<2, cond1<<1, cond2<<0)) {
    case 4: return value0;
    case 2: return value1;
    case 1: return value2;
    default: return value3;
  }
}

For brevity, I assume cond values are all 0/1 without adding any double bangs (aka !!).

What PHP actually thinks you wrote:

a = ((cond0 ? value0 : cond1) ? value1 : cond2) ? value2 : value3;

But, no, if you had actually meant this, it would be more like:

a = ((metametacond ? metacond0 : metacond1) ? cond0 : cond1) ? value0 : value1;

Now that's a damn hard thing to actually mean, but it was the default parse in PHP during the horrible years I actually used this language, and I doubt it has changed since. Even if you did intent to mean that, you'd be better off using Boolean operators.

At the time that PHP was invented, the ?: operator had been around since the early C language in the mid-1970s. Should they defer to greybeard expertise and use the long established parse? Of course not! This is the glorious 1990s, boys and girls. Bricks and mortar and the common sense used to compound mortar are all totally passe, gone and done with.

What I'm not entirely certain about is cause and effect. Is the ternary so widely despised because of PHP or even without PHP's ineffable contribution?

The nested data switch is hardly difficult to read if properly formatted on the page. Put parens around your conditionals if they contain anything other than a simple variable name. (I've been known to write (0) or (1) just to maintain this rule when I substitute constants in during a debug run.) Anyone familiar with a data first language like APL or Erlang or R or nearly any functional language would have any trouble reading a nested ?: data switch.

I almost made my brain hurt to have to write down what PHP thinks you mean with its totally non-standard FUBAR horrible terrible very bad no good parse.

PHP.net recommends avoiding stacking ternary operators. "Is [sic] is recommended that you avoid 'stacking' ternary expressions. PHP's behaviour when using more than one ternary operator within a single statement is non-obvious."

Reformatted so that "stacking"was not inside an already "-quoted string. (So PHP it makes my head spin.)

Imagine for a moment that C started out the same way as PHP.

int a = b * c + d * e;

"Dennis Ritchie recommends you avoid 'stacking' arithmetic operators" would have soon circulated in mimeograph.

I've always been partial to APL's evaluation rule: right to left, no exceptions. You get Horner's rule with no parens and many other goodies as a direct result.

In APL, you also get alternating sums for free.

-\1 2 3 4

Translates to the vector result (commas added for readability):

1 , 1-2 , 1-2-3 , 1-2-3-4

Translates to:

1 , 1-2 , 1-(2-3)) , 1-(2-(3-4)))

by the strict right to left rule.

APL is glorious. It's like living on planet Vulcan. Once you've received the Vulcan mind-meld, you can never entirely return to plain old planet Earth again. God forbid a true Vulcan ever visits planet PHP. Shudder. Unfortunately, I'm half human, so I'm not allowed to partake in the ritual of the Vulcan brain bleach, and my short experience with PHP continues to persist in the smoldering ruins of my once-pristine memory banks.

Question 9:

The Omicron variant was found in 4 fully vaccinated individuals. You should:

(A) Keep looking.
(B) Do nothing, it will all end well.
(C) Keep repeating this number out loud until something interesting happens.
(D) Blame the government.

This entire thread is worthless if 90% of the comments are assuming that "core team" is the A Ark and "moderation team" is the B Ark, only it's the other way around.

This is why I dimmed on Slashdot: huge worthless conversations about worthless conversations because the actual Slashdot submission failed to clarify terms from the outset. I'm all for a giant worthwhile conversation about worthless conversations (who doesn't love piling on?), but I'm not sticking around for worthless about worthless.

[*] Formally the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B.

... because you're not the customer, you're the product ...

GAAA! Larry Tesler invented ctrl-v, and Infinite Eyeball September continues to make it famous.

By early 1973, PARC had established development of the Xerox Alto, the first computer system designed around a GUI, and Tesler accepted an offer for a position splitting his time between two groups.

Some of Tesler's main projects at PARC were the Gypsy word processor and Smalltalk. While working on Gypsy, Tesler and his colleague Tim Mott started writing ideas down envisioning the future of interactive computer use, considering current text-based user interfaces would move to GUIs with icons representing documents, and to develop ease-of-use. From there, the two developed the basic copy and paste function, now a standard feature in computing.

Tesler also established the idea that computer interfaces should be modeless, where all actions are available to a user at all times, rather than modal, requiring the user to enter a specific mode to perform them.

The problem with this aphorism is that the world is rarely this black and white. Maybe it was okay while most of the world hadn't caught up to the idea that there was more than one way to view the customer. Yeah, so the world is slow off the mark sometimes. How about we split the difference and settle on three decades? I'll even round up to 1973+30=2005, today only.

Quote Investigator:

In 1973 the artists Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman broadcast a short video titled "Television Delivers People".

        Commercial television delivers 20 million people a minute.
        In commercial broadcasting the viewer pays for the privilege of having himself sold.
        It is the consumer who is consumed.
        You are the product of TV.
        You are delivered to the advertiser who is the customer.
        He consumes you.
        The viewer is not responsible for programming—
        You are the end product.

There's that happening year again, 1973. It seems you're about 15 years overparked in the ctrl-v parking lot on this concept, even by my extremely generous terms.

Stop Saying 'If You're Not Paying, You're The Product' — 20 December 2012

Derek Powazek has an excellent take on the pithy and dismissive phrase that many often use to argue that free services treat users worse:

It's pithy and clever... and wrong. Powazek dismantles the claim eloquently. He attacks the underlying assumptions in that statement. He highlights that "free with advertising" has been a pretty big business for a long long time, in which there's no indication that users were treated as "the product" or somehow treated poorly.

And then there's the key one: this is not an either/or situation:

I've worked for, and even run, many companies in the last 20 years with various business models. Some provided something free in an attempt to build an audience large enough to sell advertising, some charged customers directly, and some did a combination of both. All treated their users with varying levels of respect. There was no correlation between how much money users paid and how well they were treated.

I would not myself argue that there's no correlation. I would be more likely to argue that there's some correlation (generally decreasing) though sometimes that decrease has an unusually long lag time, especially for rapidly growing companies who become the new shiny in an M&A bidding war. (In which case, move over, you're not the product, because the whole damn company is the product.)

In any case, I'm old enough to actually remember 1973. But thanks for reminding me, surely not for the 1000th last time.