You're conflating forgiveness (and letting someone move past a mistake) with forgetting, but the two aren't the same. You're also creating a strawman argument with:
The kind of people who come out against this are the "You shall be judged, forever guilty" kind.
Ironically, burying past mistakes is one of the things gives them power. Owning up to a mistake is in itself powerful, and disarms people who would use things from your past against you.
Except we can't learn from it or move on anymore. Anything you say at any point in the past can be brought up in an attempt to ruin your life now.
Yes and no. I mean, in some ways that has always been the case, so ultimately this boils down to whether or not the Angry Online Mob gets to rule or not.
For awhile there would be immediate hysteria if anything bad from your past was uncovered, and you'd get blackballed and shamed. While the hysteria is still happening, there are some signs here and there that people are getting tired of the mob and are starting to stand their ground a little. The Kevin Hart example was interesting because he did stand his ground for a bit, so that was encouraging.
Put another way, I agree that it's not right for every little mistake to be used as a weapon against you for the rest of your life, but the opposite extreme of being able to erase your mistake and force everyone to pretend it never happened is no better. And IMO it's worse - the former sucks but having to deal with it can at least lead to great strength, the latter coddles people towards less responsibility.
there needs to remain a reasonable ability to make it difficult for new people to find out
Why?
The words we said were really said. The things we did really happened. No amount of pretending or trying to force everyone else to pretend otherwise will change that.
The right to be forgotten laws seem like an offshoot of the same mentality that has a lot of people obsessing with their social media presence - that desire to keep up airs and cultivate that my-life-is-always-great image. And then when their real selves slip through the mirage and they post something stupid, they scramble to take down the incriminating selfie or the post ranting about someone - they want to delete any record of their mistake. Right to be forgotten laws are an attempt to bring that same fakeness concept to the real world.
We are still new at having access to tons of data about someone at our fingertips, and right now we (collectively) are not very good at handling it (see the recent incident with Kevin Hart). One way to handle it would be to let people selectively rewrite history to get rid of the parts they find embarrassing. This seems futile and harmful. Another way to handle it - and one that we seem to be inching towards if we can just hang on a little longer - would be to get better at remembering that people change over time and that everyone makes mistakes, and that actions have consequences.
Companies are not people and there is no particular reason they should be allowed to retain data about people without their consent.
On some level I kind of agree, but there is also no particular reason they should be prohibited from it either. "Data" is such a broad thing - for as long as companies have existed in any form, they have been able to retain data about people without their consent. The fact that it's easier to get more data now or cheaper to store more data doesn't in itself represent any fundamental difference.
Rather than trying to force companies to not collect freely available data or trying to force everyone to pretend certain data doesn't exist (both of which are futile), it seems better to focus on forcing companies to disclose what they collect or who they give it to.
That's great and all, but the whole problem with that argument is that the "right to be forgotten" laws are bonkers.
If you do something in public (whether in cyberspace or meatspace), then it's absurd to expect that, on demand, you can require all the rest of the world to pretend you didn't do what you did, that you weren't there, etc. If I'm painting in a public park and you're standing in the scene I'm painting, can you require that painting to be destroyed? Of course not.
I totally get the problems that those laws are trying to solve, but they are ultimately ineffective and do more harm than good. They are trying to replace personal accountability and a tough skin. Choices have consequences, and forgiveness is not dependent upon everyone pretending the past never happened.
Everybody does stuff they regret and wish everyone would forget, but life doesn't work that way. Own it. Learn from it. Move on.
Actually, dealing with DST is incredibly complex in many cases, ditto for leap time. Not only are the rules complex, the right way to handle them is sometimes subjective (i.e. in terms of what you present to users). It's far more complicated than mapping between UTC and local time.
No offense, but it sounds like you were harping on something without truly understanding the problem. Using UTC is simple, but it doesn't solve most of the awful headaches of dealing with DST.
But above all, you're missing the larger point, which is that lumping together everyone on the other side of the line, whether they be just a shade over or the most extreme, is a really terrible political strategy (doesn't matter if you lean left or right)
It isn't? It seems like it works really really well. Getting "your base" really fired up with a good turnout is the key to winning elections these days. Much of the middle is apathetic and doesn't turn out to vote, and people who don't vote at all might as well not exist.
I think the fact that it is a strategy that is being used is not the same thing as it being a good strategy.:) The closeness of recent presidential (and the upcoming midterm) elections says that the exact opposite is true: both sides try to rile up their base and then hope they can eke out a win.
One problem is that it's hard to keep your base whipped up over time (which means it's also expensive). Another is that if your base is similar in size to the other base, the result comes down to razor thin margins. About 1 billion USD was spent by candidates in the 2016 US election and the result was nearly a coin toss (Clinton lost Michigan by 0.3%, NH by 0.4%, Wisconsin by 1%, PA by 1.2%, etc.) - those margins are too close to predict (within just about any prediction's margin of error), so it's not a reliable approach.
Gallup polling shows less than 30% say they are Dems, less than 30% say they are Reps, and over 40% say they are neither. That's a huge potential pool of votes if you can come up with a message that resonates with them. But if you demonize the extreme and then imply that everyone on the other side is the same, you're creating enemies from potential allies.
The sentence is actually an assumption from your point of view too. Even though I agree that the majority of people tend to be cluster together in the middle, the bell curve you are talking about may not be what you think. In other words, the bell curve you are talking seems to be focusing only the majority in the middle. However, in reality, it may be leaning toward one side than the other. If you say 90% of the population are in the middle of the bell curve, it is still correct if the tip of the bell curve is half way through to one side. I highly doubt that if you draw a line divided at the tip of the curve, you would see close to 50-50 as your assumption seems to indicate.
Oh I don't disagree - I'm not making any assumption about that at all. I'm simply talking about the relative sizes of the groups - those generally at the extreme ends of the political spectrum versus the rest. The extremists are relatively minuscule in number. Heck, if you don't even look at extremes, but just look at who considers themselves solidly one way or another, neither party has anywhere near a majority (unaffiliated voters outnumber registered D's or R's).\
No, it is not. The far-right in America is represented by the 30% who watch fox news and attend Trump rallies.
You're making the two-fold common mistake of (1) assuming everyone on the other side of the divide are all the same and (2) assuming everyone on the other side holds the most extreme views. The reality is far closer to a bell curve - on either end you have a tiny portion of wackos, while a huge majority clusters around the middle.
Less than 1% of the US watches Fox News (https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/the-top-basic-cable-networks-for-july-2018-are/372335 vs https://www.google.com/search?...).
I don't know how big Trump rallies get, but in a quick search I couldn't find any with more than a few thousand, but even if you're generous and assume an average attendance of 10k, about one tenth of 1% of the US attends Trump rallies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_post-election_Donald_Trump_rallies - 50-ish rallies in 2018 * 10k/rally).
Further, attending a rally or watching Fox News are not things I'd do, but they don't make someone be "far right" any more than watching CNN/MSNBC and/or attending a Clinton rally make you "far left".
The far-left by your notion believes in radical ideas like balanced budgets and providing a social safety net which prevents Americans from victimized by the wealthy.
Really? I told you that? When?
No, the far-left by my notion supports antifa, worships at the altar of identity politics and safe spaces, preaches tolerance of any view that matches their own and harsh intolerance of everything else, and disincentivizes every form of honest work (either through the most extreme guaranteed safety nets or blatantly unfair progressive 90%+ tax rates).
But guess what? I don't believe everyone left of center holds the most extreme views. Everyone left of center is not an antifa nutjob. But the same is also true of those right of center - there is a short distance of opinion between the vast majority of the people in this country.
Just because moderates are on the opposite side of the spectrum that the current American right, does not in any way may the far left.
You're deluding yourself, but if you can provide some citations, go for it.
But above all, you're missing the larger point, which is that lumping together everyone on the other side of the line, whether they be just a shade over or the most extreme, is a really terrible political strategy (doesn't matter if you lean left or right). It all but guarantees that nothing gets done. If you want to win elections and steer the country, then a far better strategy is to move from "you voted for candidate X? You are by definition evil/stupid! There is nothing more to say!" to "wow, the extremes are nutty! Forget 'left'and 'right', let's form a coalition made up of even-keeled people".
This is a winning strategy, but will always be beyond your reach as long as you continue with your present mode of thinking.
If you are going to pass over the far left by saying it's not 'substantial', then the same could be said of the far right. It's the same on both sides: both extremes are absurd but both represent a tiny slice of the demographic that generally leans left or right. Both sides get a disproportionate amount of airtime relative to the number of people actually in those extreme groups.
How often is that claim really made? And if ever, how often is it actually made by developers? The only time I've ever heard that claim put forward is like you did: right before shooting it down.
Automation is part of what makes development fun (there's a certain thrill to replacing something tedious with a "machine" that does it for you).
Frequently here on slashdot whenever people speak of automation costing jobs. Inevitably some developer will claim that they won't be the ones being ousted.
Are you sure? For kicks I checked a few stories (https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/18/04/24/2333259/a-study-finds-half-of-jobs-are-vulnerable-to-automation, https://hardware.slashdot.org/..., and https://slashdot.org/story/18/...) and didn't find really anything at all to suggest that "software developers claim they are immune to automation".
In fact, if comments on those articles is any indicator, on slashdot it's typically the software developers who are in the "anything can be automated" camp. And really that makes sense - who is more likely to see where automation can go, the people who have decades of first hand knowledge and experience of progress in automation (software developers) or people who have relatively little direct experience with automation in their day to day job (a lawyer or an author maybe)?
Maybe you had a prior bad experience with a deluded dev or two, but I think what you said was overly broad - or maybe my anecdotal experience is just the exact opposite of your anecdotal experience.;-) Have a good one!
How often is that claim really made? And if ever, how often is it actually made by developers? The only time I've ever heard that claim put forward is like you did: right before shooting it down.
Automation is part of what makes development fun (there's a certain thrill to replacing something tedious with a "machine" that does it for you).
> 1) the bot has to synthesize the patch faster than the human developer
I guess this is ok if it's faster in the sense of "the bot has to fix the bug faster than the human developer gets around to it", but in general I don't think this speed requirement needs to be that strict. If it's some latent bug waiting to hit us in production, for example, I don't care if the bot is slowly poring over code for days on end and brings a bug to my attention. Likewise, in any large project there are always tons of bugs that might not be that hard to fix, but it really is just a matter of getting around to them, so having some bot take a crack at them could be a good thing.
Nope. Well, maybe if you have to hire a lawyer, but Apple has gobs of lawyers *in house* (see e.g. https://www.businessinsider.co...) - they are already paid for.
For Apple, the monetary cost of filing an endless stream of motions to delay for one cause or another is minuscule.
Welp, regardless of whether or not the case has merit, he's screwed on many levels:
1) "Eastman, who is representing himself in court" 2) Apple has more lawyers on staff than many companies have it total employees. 3) Even if he somehow had a strong enough argument to compensate, they'll win just by drawing the case out indefinitely so that he can't afford to keep pursuing it.
Zero-based counting in computers has evolved from a useful efficiency trick during an era of scarce resources into an almost elitist vestigial organ that needs to be chopped off. All it leads to is more intense thought processes and off-by-one bugs.
Actually, the opposite is true - zero-based indexing can help eliminate off-by-one bugs (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...). It's also not true that the reasoning for it is efficiency (in addition to the wikipedia article, see Dijkstra's take on it - http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users...)
Slashdot Mirror
Don't know if you're the same AC or not, but you are conflating forgiveness with forgetting.
You're conflating forgiveness (and letting someone move past a mistake) with forgetting, but the two aren't the same. You're also creating a strawman argument with:
The kind of people who come out against this are the "You shall be judged, forever guilty" kind.
Ironically, burying past mistakes is one of the things gives them power. Owning up to a mistake is in itself powerful, and disarms people who would use things from your past against you.
Except we can't learn from it or move on anymore. Anything you say at any point in the past can be brought up in an attempt to ruin your life now.
Yes and no. I mean, in some ways that has always been the case, so ultimately this boils down to whether or not the Angry Online Mob gets to rule or not.
For awhile there would be immediate hysteria if anything bad from your past was uncovered, and you'd get blackballed and shamed. While the hysteria is still happening, there are some signs here and there that people are getting tired of the mob and are starting to stand their ground a little. The Kevin Hart example was interesting because he did stand his ground for a bit, so that was encouraging.
Put another way, I agree that it's not right for every little mistake to be used as a weapon against you for the rest of your life, but the opposite extreme of being able to erase your mistake and force everyone to pretend it never happened is no better. And IMO it's worse - the former sucks but having to deal with it can at least lead to great strength, the latter coddles people towards less responsibility.
I hope you can forgive that silly blunder. :)
Oh, no problem at all! Of course people will forgive your mistake, even though a record of it still exists.
there needs to remain a reasonable ability to make it difficult for new people to find out
Why?
The words we said were really said. The things we did really happened. No amount of pretending or trying to force everyone else to pretend otherwise will change that.
The right to be forgotten laws seem like an offshoot of the same mentality that has a lot of people obsessing with their social media presence - that desire to keep up airs and cultivate that my-life-is-always-great image. And then when their real selves slip through the mirage and they post something stupid, they scramble to take down the incriminating selfie or the post ranting about someone - they want to delete any record of their mistake. Right to be forgotten laws are an attempt to bring that same fakeness concept to the real world.
We are still new at having access to tons of data about someone at our fingertips, and right now we (collectively) are not very good at handling it (see the recent incident with Kevin Hart). One way to handle it would be to let people selectively rewrite history to get rid of the parts they find embarrassing. This seems futile and harmful. Another way to handle it - and one that we seem to be inching towards if we can just hang on a little longer - would be to get better at remembering that people change over time and that everyone makes mistakes, and that actions have consequences.
Companies are not people and there is no particular reason they should be allowed to retain data about people without their consent.
On some level I kind of agree, but there is also no particular reason they should be prohibited from it either. "Data" is such a broad thing - for as long as companies have existed in any form, they have been able to retain data about people without their consent. The fact that it's easier to get more data now or cheaper to store more data doesn't in itself represent any fundamental difference.
Rather than trying to force companies to not collect freely available data or trying to force everyone to pretend certain data doesn't exist (both of which are futile), it seems better to focus on forcing companies to disclose what they collect or who they give it to.
That's great and all, but the whole problem with that argument is that the "right to be forgotten" laws are bonkers.
If you do something in public (whether in cyberspace or meatspace), then it's absurd to expect that, on demand, you can require all the rest of the world to pretend you didn't do what you did, that you weren't there, etc. If I'm painting in a public park and you're standing in the scene I'm painting, can you require that painting to be destroyed? Of course not.
I totally get the problems that those laws are trying to solve, but they are ultimately ineffective and do more harm than good. They are trying to replace personal accountability and a tough skin. Choices have consequences, and forgiveness is not dependent upon everyone pretending the past never happened.
Everybody does stuff they regret and wish everyone would forget, but life doesn't work that way. Own it. Learn from it. Move on.
From what is known, it really is due to Fortnite. See e.g. https://www.recode.net/2018/6/...
As a programmer you need to be able to speak the most popular language of the web which is PHP
No, you don't.
Eh, ok? That doesn't simplify the problems caused by DST at all.
Actually, dealing with DST is incredibly complex in many cases, ditto for leap time. Not only are the rules complex, the right way to handle them is sometimes subjective (i.e. in terms of what you present to users). It's far more complicated than mapping between UTC and local time.
No offense, but it sounds like you were harping on something without truly understanding the problem. Using UTC is simple, but it doesn't solve most of the awful headaches of dealing with DST.
But above all, you're missing the larger point, which is that lumping together everyone on the other side of the line, whether they be just a shade over or the most extreme, is a really terrible political strategy (doesn't matter if you lean left or right)
It isn't? It seems like it works really really well.
Getting "your base" really fired up with a good turnout is the key to winning elections these days. Much of the middle is apathetic and doesn't turn out to vote, and people who don't vote at all might as well not exist.
I think the fact that it is a strategy that is being used is not the same thing as it being a good strategy. :) The closeness of recent presidential (and the upcoming midterm) elections says that the exact opposite is true: both sides try to rile up their base and then hope they can eke out a win.
One problem is that it's hard to keep your base whipped up over time (which means it's also expensive). Another is that if your base is similar in size to the other base, the result comes down to razor thin margins. About 1 billion USD was spent by candidates in the 2016 US election and the result was nearly a coin toss (Clinton lost Michigan by 0.3%, NH by 0.4%, Wisconsin by 1%, PA by 1.2%, etc.) - those margins are too close to predict (within just about any prediction's margin of error), so it's not a reliable approach.
Gallup polling shows less than 30% say they are Dems, less than 30% say they are Reps, and over 40% say they are neither. That's a huge potential pool of votes if you can come up with a message that resonates with them. But if you demonize the extreme and then imply that everyone on the other side is the same, you're creating enemies from potential allies.
The sentence is actually an assumption from your point of view too. Even though I agree that the majority of people tend to be cluster together in the middle, the bell curve you are talking about may not be what you think. In other words, the bell curve you are talking seems to be focusing only the majority in the middle. However, in reality, it may be leaning toward one side than the other. If you say 90% of the population are in the middle of the bell curve, it is still correct if the tip of the bell curve is half way through to one side. I highly doubt that if you draw a line divided at the tip of the curve, you would see close to 50-50 as your assumption seems to indicate.
Oh I don't disagree - I'm not making any assumption about that at all. I'm simply talking about the relative sizes of the groups - those generally at the extreme ends of the political spectrum versus the rest. The extremists are relatively minuscule in number. Heck, if you don't even look at extremes, but just look at who considers themselves solidly one way or another, neither party has anywhere near a majority (unaffiliated voters outnumber registered D's or R's).\
You are simply saying that people should just lie down and let the loudest, most extreme faction have control.
LOL, this may be one of the best reading comprehension fails I've ever seen.
I'd only add that the concept that says, 'you're either left or right', is false.
Agreed. Or even, it's that very mentality that has exacerbated the problem.
No, it is not. The far-right in America is represented by the 30% who watch fox news and attend Trump rallies.
You're making the two-fold common mistake of (1) assuming everyone on the other side of the divide are all the same and (2) assuming everyone on the other side holds the most extreme views. The reality is far closer to a bell curve - on either end you have a tiny portion of wackos, while a huge majority clusters around the middle.
Less than 1% of the US watches Fox News (https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/the-top-basic-cable-networks-for-july-2018-are/372335 vs https://www.google.com/search?...).
I don't know how big Trump rallies get, but in a quick search I couldn't find any with more than a few thousand, but even if you're generous and assume an average attendance of 10k, about one tenth of 1% of the US attends Trump rallies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_post-election_Donald_Trump_rallies - 50-ish rallies in 2018 * 10k/rally).
Further, attending a rally or watching Fox News are not things I'd do, but they don't make someone be "far right" any more than watching CNN/MSNBC and/or attending a Clinton rally make you "far left".
The far-left by your notion believes in radical ideas like balanced budgets and providing a social safety net which prevents Americans from victimized by the wealthy.
Really? I told you that? When?
No, the far-left by my notion supports antifa, worships at the altar of identity politics and safe spaces, preaches tolerance of any view that matches their own and harsh intolerance of everything else, and disincentivizes every form of honest work (either through the most extreme guaranteed safety nets or blatantly unfair progressive 90%+ tax rates).
But guess what? I don't believe everyone left of center holds the most extreme views. Everyone left of center is not an antifa nutjob. But the same is also true of those right of center - there is a short distance of opinion between the vast majority of the people in this country.
Just because moderates are on the opposite side of the spectrum that the current American right, does not in any way may the far left.
You're deluding yourself, but if you can provide some citations, go for it.
But above all, you're missing the larger point, which is that lumping together everyone on the other side of the line, whether they be just a shade over or the most extreme, is a really terrible political strategy (doesn't matter if you lean left or right). It all but guarantees that nothing gets done. If you want to win elections and steer the country, then a far better strategy is to move from "you voted for candidate X? You are by definition evil/stupid! There is nothing more to say!" to "wow, the extremes are nutty! Forget 'left'and 'right', let's form a coalition made up of even-keeled people".
This is a winning strategy, but will always be beyond your reach as long as you continue with your present mode of thinking.
If you are going to pass over the far left by saying it's not 'substantial', then the same could be said of the far right. It's the same on both sides: both extremes are absurd but both represent a tiny slice of the demographic that generally leans left or right. Both sides get a disproportionate amount of airtime relative to the number of people actually in those extreme groups.
How often is that claim really made? And if ever, how often is it actually made by developers? The only time I've ever heard that claim put forward is like you did: right before shooting it down.
Automation is part of what makes development fun (there's a certain thrill to replacing something tedious with a "machine" that does it for you).
Frequently here on slashdot whenever people speak of automation costing jobs. Inevitably some developer will claim that they won't be the ones being ousted.
Are you sure? For kicks I checked a few stories (https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/18/04/24/2333259/a-study-finds-half-of-jobs-are-vulnerable-to-automation, https://hardware.slashdot.org/..., and https://slashdot.org/story/18/...) and didn't find really anything at all to suggest that "software developers claim they are immune to automation".
In fact, if comments on those articles is any indicator, on slashdot it's typically the software developers who are in the "anything can be automated" camp. And really that makes sense - who is more likely to see where automation can go, the people who have decades of first hand knowledge and experience of progress in automation (software developers) or people who have relatively little direct experience with automation in their day to day job (a lawyer or an author maybe)?
Maybe you had a prior bad experience with a deluded dev or two, but I think what you said was overly broad - or maybe my anecdotal experience is just the exact opposite of your anecdotal experience. ;-) Have a good one!
Eh, he's claiming that some broad segment of "developers" claim something and that this is evidence they are wrong.
How often is that claim really made? And if ever, how often is it actually made by developers? The only time I've ever heard that claim put forward is like you did: right before shooting it down.
Automation is part of what makes development fun (there's a certain thrill to replacing something tedious with a "machine" that does it for you).
> 1) the bot has to synthesize the patch faster than the human developer
I guess this is ok if it's faster in the sense of "the bot has to fix the bug faster than the human developer gets around to it", but in general I don't think this speed requirement needs to be that strict. If it's some latent bug waiting to hit us in production, for example, I don't care if the bot is slowly poring over code for days on end and brings a bug to my attention. Likewise, in any large project there are always tons of bugs that might not be that hard to fix, but it really is just a matter of getting around to them, so having some bot take a crack at them could be a good thing.
Nope. Well, maybe if you have to hire a lawyer, but Apple has gobs of lawyers *in house* (see e.g. https://www.businessinsider.co...) - they are already paid for.
For Apple, the monetary cost of filing an endless stream of motions to delay for one cause or another is minuscule.
Welp, regardless of whether or not the case has merit, he's screwed on many levels:
1) "Eastman, who is representing himself in court"
2) Apple has more lawyers on staff than many companies have it total employees.
3) Even if he somehow had a strong enough argument to compensate, they'll win just by drawing the case out indefinitely so that he can't afford to keep pursuing it.
Zero-based counting in computers has evolved from a useful efficiency trick during an era of scarce resources into an almost elitist vestigial organ that needs to be chopped off. All it leads to is more intense thought processes and off-by-one bugs.
Actually, the opposite is true - zero-based indexing can help eliminate off-by-one bugs (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...). It's also not true that the reasoning for it is efficiency (in addition to the wikipedia article, see Dijkstra's take on it - http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users...)
I read through the docs and was really liking what I was seeing... right up until the part that it says arrays are 1-based. Ah well, nevermind then.