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Comment Re:That's 12-year-old thinking (Score 1) 37

The problem is that you can ALWAYS get around rules. It isn't possible to make perfect rules for anything above a minimal level of complexity - that's just a variant of the Turing-Church Halting Problem.

So you are forced to invert the dynamics. There's no real alternative. Instead of you creating a high level of complexity that the departments will work their arses off to avoid, you force the departments themselves to create the regimens that they're prepared to live with. But you have to do so cleverly. They will always create regimens that mean they do the least work necessary (because that's cheap on resources and they will ALWAYS consider this sort of extra work to be an imposition) and have the least amount of culpability.

So you need to meet three conditions:
1. The department can't evade the bits they're actually able to do
2. The department CAN pass on work they're not equipt to do, but ONLY if it's their responsibility to oversee the department they pass it onto
3. The department IS inescapably culpable for failure to either do the work OR ensure that others do it

You do NOT need the frameworks for each department, and should not attempt to draw those up. Those will be departmentally-specific and timeframe-specific. Far, far better have people who actually know the specific context do that work. No department likes to look like it's being forced to do anything, so making the actual detailed specifics internal, you're utilising their psychology. They're not being "forced", they're defining their additional responsibilities and duties. From a psychological angle, they're much more likely to be receptive to this perspective.

But because the departments are all internally writing their own management protocols, YOU DON'T HAVE TO. You only need to have a framework which obliges them to write up what they will request. This is MUCH lighter and, because it is much lighter, it is far less prone to have failure points where generic ideas don't work for a specific type of work.

If we want to look at this in software terms, only an idiot would write an overly-restrictive langauge that imposes a strict model of thought regardless of the type of work. If you want to provide a high level of confidence in correctness, you don't try to impose it through a myriad of complex hurdles and rigorously controlled APIs. You achieve it by incorporating contracts (function X is guaranteed to take in data meeting these requirements, and is guaranteed to deliver data meeting these other requirements). Contract programming is much, much lighter on the development process, doesn't impose on the programmer, and yet creates a very high level of assurance. Mostly because programmers aren't working to try and cheat with irritating APIs.

In Linux terms, you want a lightweight virtual layer handling filesystems in general, the filesystem policies should be handled by the filesystem not the main kernel. You want the main kernel to be doing as little of the work as possible. As soon as it is heavy and micromanaging everything, you're going to end up with something slow and unstable, that really can't do a whole lot.

You want to push the complexity to the edges, that's where complexity belongs. The bit that changes slowly, can't handle special cases, has least visibility into what is needed, and is really a very blunt instrument wants to be lightweight. One reason for having things like Common Law and Case Law is precisely because the legal system figured all this out centuries ago.

Comment Re:I don't think it would matter (Score 1, Interesting) 37

I disagree. It actually needs less regulation.

The siloing of knowledge and duties is why it was always somebody else's problem. So you simply take out all the regulations that obligate siloing and replace all of that kerfufle with a single rule: "If it's on your plate and nobody else has published that they've done the work so far, it's your responsibility, silos be damned, and failure leaves you liable".

That's it.

That's all we need. A removal of siloed thinking and a duty to complete all of the scheduled work regardless of whose toes it tramples.

That would have solved the problem. But, because departments never like to give up powers they obtain, a side-effect would be that departments would be proactive. They wouldn't walk down piers, looking for strange things. Rather, if they heard of strange things that are their department, if they don't want to be shamed, then they need to ask the company for more information. Because then it's on their plate and not that of a rival department.

The other benefit of using this approach is that it isn't about the special cases, it's about the general problem that underlies all of the special cases of this sort: nobody takes responsibility until it's already a disaster.

If a department is liable for pretending the problems aren't there, then the department wil CYA. If the only way to do so is to do all the outstanding work, regardless of title, then that work will get done. If the only way to get it done right IS to give it to the right department, and they're on the hook until that has happened, you're damned right it'll happen.

I've worked in the public sector, I've seen the paranoia and closed-mindedness first-hand. That's not going to go away. So you solve the issue by exploiting those traits, since you can't eliminate them.

Comment Re:As much as I despise social media (Score 1) 99

These activities alone should disqualify a site from Section 230 protections.

Removing section 230 protections isn't the fix. Once you start opening that door there's no closing it. It absolutely will be done unfairly. Algorithmically displaying content has legitimate uses. The question is, how do you regulate only the harmful ones? I like seeing what I'm looking for, so I want algorithmic content, I just don't want the algorithms to be designed to make me feel bad.

Comment Re:In which 3rd world country can we store the was (Score 1) 71

DEF systems on heavy vehicles work, but they're fairly, well, heavy.

They aren't. There's a reservoir, a pump, and an injector, besides the SCR. But the SCR is already present, it's just a little different in systems with DEF.

Among other thing, they use electrical heat to get up to operating temperature.

That's for freezing conditions. There's a resistor in the reservoir, big whoop.

Then there's the issue of needing the fluid. For earthmoving equipment and railway locos, they'd rather not deal with that and have gone with complex EGR systems with liquid cooling instead.

Cooled EGR is not an either-or to DEF. You can have both.

Comment Re:Child harm? (Score 3, Interesting) 99

Indeed, it's extremely laughable to think that Muslims are all Democrats, when they are part of a conservative faith. It's exactly like believing that evangelical Christians are all Democrats.

Unfortunately, most people aren't going to take the step to figure out that their conservatism is just like the conservatism of the people rejecting them.

Comment Re:As much as I despise social media (Score 1) 99

Whether you like it or not, social media is the new public square.

We can and should regulate how the creators of social media networks take advantage of their positions of authority and control. There is absolutely, positively, and in every other way no reason why we can not or should not do that. There is no principle under which a hands-off approach makes sense.

Comment Re:In related news, (Score 1) 99

If it is known that social media harms kids, then doesn't the state share some of the blame? Why is there no law?

The gears of justice grind slowly. This is by design. When you go fast, you break things. And also, no. The state didn't make them do it.

If it is not known (or only recently came to light), can you really blame the social media companies?

Yes, you could. But that's not the case. They know and have known. We've talked about that here a bunch. They willfully conduct psychological experiments on users and monitor the impact.

If the harmful effects were known to the companies and they kept it quiet, then you'd have a case, morally speaking.

That's why there's a case... no, wait, thousands of cases.

Facebook willfully psychologically manipulates people into vulnerable emotional states in order to increase engagement, they take advantage of that by knowingly spreading false information and have actually reduced the number of people they have working on reducing the false information and replaced them with automated systems which produce false positives which punish users who are conforming to their rules and standards, but seemingly do nothing to prevent actual violations.

Comment And if LPCAMM2 is too slow, use it as a swap file (Score 1) 73

And before you complain about LPCAMM2 being much slower than the high-bandwidth RAM on the CPU package: It's perfectly fine to design a system with a non-uniform memory access paradigm, treating the memory behind the LPCAMM2 interface as a RAM disk. That way you have 8 GB of high-bandwidth DRAM swapping to 16+ GB of somewhat lower-bandwidth DRAM, and the soldered-in SSD lasts longer because it doesn't have to (ab)use its intake buffer to hold the swap file.

Comment Re:Oh great! (Score 0) 24

A thing that often gets missed is that a lot of Adobe's users are extremely non-technical. They did not learn how to use graphics software, or DTP software; they learned how to use Photoshop, or InDesign. My mother was not a stupid person, but she was basically allergic to technology, and yet she managed to transition from doing physical pasteup with hand-done separations to working on a Macintosh and using Illustrator and Pagemaker. (This was long ago enough that Aldus was still a thing, and the Macintosh was a IIci with 5MB and a 8*30 non-GC card to run the Mac Two-Page Mono display.) And while InDesign is not quite as easy to use as Aldus Pagemaker was, because it does more stuff now, it's still quite comprehensible. I've used it for some projects, and it was still easy enough.

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