Seems like systems design is just studying a potpourri of engineering disciplines and the job entails stringing it all together the best that you can. Is there a formal theory about systems? I don't think so, and if there is, there's definitely no way to quantify if one system is "better" than another.
Since no formal theory about the field exists.. every conjecture is just opinion. So someone working in systems design won't necessarily come up with a better "design" then some other person who doesn't specifically work in the field given that there's a lack of a formal theory to prove it either way. In software these guys who do "designs" are the system architects and I think the ridicule is justified given that anyone can do it.
Category theory is the closest thing I've seen to a fundamental theory of design and I'm positive it's not well known among "systems design" engineers. Honestly it's not even that useful either because the theory doesn't include any measurement to determine if one structure is "better" than another.
I mean more like you don't need any "design" training or specific "systems" training because no actual theory about this stuff actually exists. It's bullshit.
You did 15 years of C++ so you have domain knowledge of C++ and whatever area you work in. You don't need any extra "design" training to get good at it. So a better way to say it is this: Anyone who is knowledgeable about whatever they're working on can do "design" you don't need to hire someone who's an expert in "design."
Your title "Systems Architect" is more of a symbol of your rank and years of experience then it is your ability to design.
Even though there isn't a formal theory, there definitely is a big difference between a person capable of doing good system design and one who isn't. I don't think all people are capable of becoming a systems designer or architect. It is not always required for projects, but when it is necessary it can make a great difference, putting a project on the right track from the beginning and keeping it on track, making sure it all becomes something good in the end.
I've done it enough to know that I couldn't do it while keeping my IC-type role as well. For me, personally, I approach systems design in a sort of breadth first search for a solution to the entire problem space, whilst deep-diving into particular areas where I am less certain. For other parts my experience lets me brush over details quite quickly.
However, that is quite different from an IC-type role, where you'll typically run into a multitude of practical engineering issues that can be frustrating and take a lot of time. Tool issues, cloud issues, bug hunting, smoking out every little detail, write unit tests, review others code, etc. That would completely throw your mental cycles in the wrong bucket.
I don't think you should do system design without having plenty of experience from IC-type roles though. You have to have understood so many different aspects; capabilities of the people at hand, the organization at large, tools, frameworks, technologies, etc, and be very, very willing to communicate the picture over and over again and take in feedback as the project progresses. It's technical leadership at one of the hardest levels.
But realise at the same time that even software development itself doesn't have anything resembling a universal theory, common processes or frameworks. It's all changing, being reinvented, and rediscovered on a continuous basis. It is equally true that many things even in medicine or construction aren't based on any solid science.
>Even though there isn't a formal theory, there definitely is a big difference between a person capable of doing good system design and one who isn't.
Yeah? Prove it. You can't. That's the big problem here. The only thing you can give me at best is some vague metric on some anecdotal experience. We don't even have data on this. Replace "system designers" with ICs who have the same breadth of IC experience who produces the better design? What does "better" even mean?
My personal opinion on Systems design is that it's pretty easy if you got the "IC" part down. It is largely just arrows and boxes.
>I've done it enough to know that I couldn't do it while keeping my IC-type role as well. For me, personally, I approach systems design in a sort of breadth first search for a solution to the entire problem space, whilst deep-diving into particular areas where I am less certain. For other parts my experience lets me brush over details quite quickly.
I think of system design as something that is tediously hard. It's not something that requires a massive amount of skill. But it does take a lot of time to come up with a design. It's like building the Eiffel tower out of toothpicks. Anyone with the relevant domain knowledge (as opposed to design knowledge) can do it. So yeah it does make sense you can't be an IC at the same time.
>But realise at the same time that even software development itself doesn't have anything resembling a universal theory, common processes or frameworks. It's all changing, being reinvented, and rediscovered on a continuous basis.
This is the whole point. Anything referred to as "design" is largely an artistic endeavor. Arguably much of these frameworks have been changing in a manner that cannot be characterized as "improvement". Just endless horizontal progress and endless genetic drift because we can't know if one design is better than the other.
This is the same with system designers. The skill level is horizontally stacked because we literally can't prove shit.
>It is equally true that many things even in medicine or construction aren't based on any solid science.
Medicine is a highly quantitative endeavor. All medicines go through rigorous quantitative verification for efficacy. The same is definitely not done with system designers.
I can't argue with your points about not having evidence, but I refuse to brush it off as "merely anecdotal" as well.
> I think of system design as something that is tediously hard. It's not something that requires a massive amount of skill. But it does take a lot of time to come up with a design.
Well, zoom out a bit, and imagine that this tedious and hard work where you are documenting and explaining things with arrows and boxes actually takes up most of your time. That's the birth of the explicit role.
I am also sure you can imagine people you have worked with that you would never want to have above yourself in such a role when you are in an IC-role, because they for example always come up with crazy ideas that won't work, or don't come up with ideas at all, or just brush over everything with simple arrows and boxes and assume someone else will figure the hard details of the overall picture out, and in fact in doing so will find no use for the arrows and boxes they got handed other than being some picassoesque requirements input from which you have to make real investigations and conclusions.
That's the people that aren't mature enough for such a role and I claimed many never will be.
But yes, I resonate with a lot of what you are saying.
I still disagree. It's just not that hard. I can explain by comparing it to art.
Artistry is hard and artistry is basically the same thing as design but harder.
Let's take something like say painting. Painting requires a lot of skill. Why? Two reasons. The sheer amount of ways to compose paint into a painting is astronomical. Much much much More then the amount of atoms in the universe. The amount of these paintings that would be considered "art" is also astronomical in number but the ratio of art to all possible paintings is minuscule in number and can basically be rounded to zero. This ratio and the actual huge numbers plugged into the ratio illustrate how hard artistry is.
How about building art or designs with legos? Suddenly it's easier. Why? Because the number of ways legos can be composed in a limited space is much smaller then the ways you can compose paint on a canvas. This is because lego Blocks have specific rules. Two lego blocks have a countable number of ways they can be composed, two brush strokes can be positioned with enough variation that composition is more or less infinite. This is why designing something in legos is EASIER than painting. In fact this is the part where the word "artistry" starts to transition to "design". In legos it can be said you are "designing" a structure. Basically when the skill involved with the creative endeavor becomes significantly easier we tend to transition from artistry to the word "design". It's not a hard rule but definitely a generality that exists.
I look at these constructs made by a "lego artist" and I know I can ALSO make those big constructs if I had the will and time to do it. It's a feat of enduring tedium and not much skill. But the mona lisa in oil paints? you need skill to render that.
Do you see where I'm going here? What's system design if not putting together lego like primitives? It's trivial. The only thing you need here is knowledge about how the primitives work and how they compose. That's really the only challenge.
Heck you can even write a program that has all possible "boxes" as primitives with the right composition rules and just brute force evolve a design through random compositions. Each design has what? at most 40 primitives in a typical design? Maybe 200 total primitives? Let's make it 10,000 total system design primitives just to be excessively generous. Even at that number, system design is easy enough that it's a candidate for genetic programming.
Do you think such a thing can be accomplished with pixels? Randomly generate a square of 1000x1000 color pixels until you get something that looks legit? Running it at 5000 generations per second you probably won't get anything legit before the sun goes super nova. You'll need to switch out of random walk to machine learning to get anything artistic.
Usually formal theories need a logical mathematical language to fully characterize it. I scanned the wikipedia of cybernetics and it's just not it.
Control theory or signals is the closest formal theory to cybernetics. The problem with this theory is that it only characterizes very specific systems that have ordinal values as inputs and outputs. What if the input is text? What if it's tuples of tree like tokens?
The closest theory that encompasses the intuition of what we think of when we use the word "systems" is category theory in my experience. And this theory is in fact sort of too general to be very useful.
> you consider scrolling through wikipedia a review of the formality of the field? I think you may need to consider how formal you are :)
Yeah I did. Not one math equation and two informal diagrams describing the same thing.
Most formal theories outside of programming languages use western mathematical syntax for the foundational dialect and I don't see anything related to that here. Cybernetics similar in a sense to "system design" in that it's not formal imo.
>And no, category theory is not even approaching explaining this. At all.
It does. It unifies all of mathematics at the lowest level and operate at all levels of abstraction and even recursively. Category theory can describe category theory. The problem is we have no definition in this theory about what is a better design? It's just a description of designs.
Cybernetics is fairly formalized, but a lot of research into it was dropped. Cybernetics is based on information theory and approaches systems in a probabilistic way which is in direct contrast to the AI approach of the 50s and 60s which were really about processing discrete pieces of data.
If you read cybernetics texts today, they paint a picture very similar to neural networks and the statistical methods for processing data. "Introduction to Cybernetics" by W. Ross Ashby is a decent text with a lot of good exercises. I still think there's a lot to learn here.
>It does. It unifies all of mathematics at the lowest level
This was attempted before by Russel & Whitehead before Godel proved that any sufficiently complicated system can produce non-truths and false statements that cannot be verified by that same system.
>This was attempted before by Russel & Whitehead before Godel proved that any sufficiently complicated system can produce non-truths and false statements that cannot be verified by that same system.
I never made the claim the system was complete.
>If you read cybernetics texts today, they paint a picture very similar to neural networks and the statistical methods for processing data. "Introduction to Cybernetics" by W. Ross Ashby is a decent text with a lot of good exercises. I still think there's a lot to learn here.
well unfortunately I don't see anything formal in the Wikipedia. I'll take a deeper look at that text though.
I can imagine that China also has massive infrastructure and a manufacturing environment built up over the last years that may become increasingly hard to replicate in the US. I bet there some "critical mass" for high-volume manufacturing that's needed, if you don't count subsidies. Even if it's all robots, you still need suppliers etc.
These people are pillars of their community. To have them teaching other people and leading is just disgusting from their perspective.
Look, I support gay rights, I'm the furthest thing from catholic. But I understand how many communities find homosexuality unnatural and wrong. You should respect that and NOT join that community. Just like how Catholics shouldn't enforce their ideas on the rest of the world, you shouldn't enforce yours either.
> "A group of conservative Colorado Catholics has spent millions of dollars to buy mobile app tracking data that identified priests who used gay dating and hookup apps and then shared it with bishops around the country."
> Look, I support gay rights
Not sure how you can support gay rights and also be ok with organisations spying on gay people (specifically because they're gay).
One can debate whether or not this practice should be illegal, but it's clearly wrong, even by the tenets of Catholicism itself. Why are they not also spying on straight priests using Tinder?
I mean, it’s not just any organization, it’s the anti-gay organization. At least to me, this fits more into the category of “The Vegan Society spying on its employees through restaurant checking and UberEats orders”, which I wouldn’t describe as “spying on vegans (specifically because they’re vegan)”.
Well no, that would be spying on non-vegans specifically because they’re non-vegan (in the equivalent scenario where they were tracking usage of an app that only offered non-vegan options).
Also, wouldn't that be an extremely weird and creepy thing for The Vegan Society to do? I’m surprised you’d offer this analogy as a defense of the behavior in question.
Quick correction: I’m not defending this behavior (if it happened to me I would quit the company on the spot).
“That would be spying on non-vegans…” Right, some of the signs are flipped, but the concept is still the same - an organization promoting a particular ethical standard is surveilling its members adherence to that standard.
“Weird and creepy…” Yes, certainly! But not against vegan rights, not discriminating against vegans, not “targeting vegans (specifically because they are vegan)”. I was responding to the claim that supporting gay rights is incompatible with tolerating this practice.
Spying on gay people or people in general is a separate issue to the parent comment.
My reply is more referring to the intent of the parent comment. As in how is spending "millions" justifiable to root out gay people in a catholic organization.
I’m not sure I see the distinction. Being gay isn’t a sin according to Catholicism, only having gay sex. So given that they are not acquiring sex tapes from this data, it’s difficult to see how this is anything other than harassing some gay people for being gay. (If they discover that a priest is straight, do they then jump to the conclusion that he’s having straight sex?)
Perhaps you can think of a justification for all this, but I haven’t seen a coherent one given so far in this thread.
> Being gay isn’t a sin according to Catholicism, only having gay sex.
Being a pedophile isn't against the law, only engaging on pedophiliac desires is illegal. Therefore I should be ok with pedophiles being leaders of our community and teachers. Right? Wrong.
Examining the technicalities of the rules is just pedantry. There is an obvious intent and overall meaning behind the rules.
>Perhaps you can think of a justification for all this, but I haven’t seen a coherent one given so far in this thread.
Thanks for being so polite. This is obviously against the rules here, you're saying it to trigger me.
Pedophilia has victims and pedophiles are a potential danger to children. There is no victim when two adult gay men have consensual sex – unless one of them is harassed out of his job by people spying on him.
The comparison with pedophilia is so obviously inappropriate (and liable to unnecessarily inflame emotions in the context of this thread) that it makes me question whether you're engaging with this topic in good faith.
If you do have a point to make, could I ask you to please find a way to make it without reference to pedophilia, which has nothing to do with gay priests using hookup apps to talk to other adult gay men.
> Pedophilia has victims. There is no victim when two adult gay men have consensual sex – unless one of them is harassed out of his job by people spying on him.
Not necessarily. Depending on the state, it's technically pedophilia/rape when a 18 year old female has sex with a 17 year old. Let's say the 18 year old is a virgin and kind of innocent while the 17 year old is a big burly guy and has already had sex with dozens of people. In this case, many states classify 17 year old male as the one getting raped.
The technicalities here literally mask the intent. Intent is what matters here and the circumstances here make the intent less clear in such a way that the technical law can't fully articulate true justice.
But you don't need me to explain this. You are fully aware of what I mean here. When a homosexual man becomes a teacher for an all boys school something is wrong. When a homosexual man joins an organization against homosexuality something is also wrong. It makes perfect sense for organizations to spend money to get rid of these people.
>The comparison with pedophilia is so obviously inappropriate (and liable to unnecessarily inflame emotions in the context of this thread) that it makes me question whether you're engaging with this topic in good faith.
I throw this right back at you, your response is not in good faith. You're trying to start something here. I think you're very intelligent and attempting to deliberately turn this conversation into a witch hunt against me.
It is also not inappropriate from many peoples perspective including the people in the article. Homosexuality from the perspective of many conservative and religious groups is Just as deviant as pedophilia. From this reasoning, it makes sense why such a group would form to weed out homosexual priests. Unfortunately, the technical wording of the catholic rules on this matter doesn't govern their intents and feelings about it, and thus they act on their feelings rather then the rules themselves.
It's not about whether the existence of these groups is right or wrong. It's whether these anti-homosexual groups exiling a homosexual who joined their group is right or wrong.
I'm sorry to say, it's right. Those people shouldn't have joined in the first place. If you're not supporting and acting for the principles of this group you shouldn't join. Bottom line. The intent of the action is right, the intent of the people joining the group IS NOT.
I also flagged your post. Despite me giving you a good faith answer, I still consider your answer as someone who is obviously trying to start a witch hunt and get me banned. You are not acting in good faith; you have an agenda and your answer is manipulatively hiding that fact. This type of behavior is a hundred times more vile and insidious then someone who is just trolling (and I'm OBVIOUSLY not).
I recommend we end the conversation here before it gets out of hand. Good day.
Edit: This sentence here was ADDED to your response AFTER I made this reply:
"If you do have a point to make, could I ask you to please find a way to make it without reference to pedophilia, which has nothing to do with gay priests using hookup apps to talk to other adult gay men. "
Obviously you're trying to retroactively change what you wrote so others seeing it will misconstrue your intent. You could've just responded to me instead of trying to change what you wrote earlier. Complete garbage.
Paragraphs and paragraphs about pedophilia when you could just have chosen another analogy to make your point. Apologies for the late edit (which I made without having seen your comment), but I hope you can see what I'm getting at here. There has to be a better way to make your point than this.
Again, even if Catholics somehow see homosexuals as being deviant in a way comparable to pedophiles (and I hope that most don't!), homosexuals clearly don't present the same danger to others that pedophiles do. This is why the analogy fails for me, and I'd rather you found another one.
I have no interest in 'getting you banned', by the way.
Edit: On closer reading, I am surprised to find this sentence in a comment from someone who earlier claimed to be a supporter of gay rights:
>When a homosexual man becomes a teacher for an all boys school something is wrong
I think perhaps we are now seeing your true point of view.
> Paragraphs and paragraphs about pedophilia when you could just have chosen another analogy to make your point. Apologies for the late edit (which I made without having seen your comment), but I hope you can see what I'm getting at here. There has to be a better way to make your point than this.
Except if you read ANY of the paragraphs you'll see that it's relevant. Many Catholics view homosexuals in the same way they view pedophilia (with disgust) and don't want homosexuals in leadership positions. I'm sorry this analogy is apt and you know it from your other comments. Live with it.
>I have no interest in 'getting you banned', by the way.
Then don't accuse me of not commenting on good faith. Don't point fingers. Accusations and attacks on someones character as if they're in violation of the rules here can get people banned.
>I think perhaps we are now seeing your true point of view.
What view? That homosexuals are the same as regular human beings with ulterior motives and incentives? What? you think I should just assume that if someone is gay then he's a paragon of moral goodness? If a man who loves sushi goes to a place that exclusively sell sushi it is reasonable to assume he wants sushi. It is reasonable to question that act.
If that man went to a food court that happens to have sushi then it's reasonable to assume otherwise. But such is not the case when a gay man becomes the leader of a boy scout troop. He may have good intentions, but it is highly highly reasonable to assume he does not.
>Edit: On closer reading, I am surprised to find this sentence in a comment from someone who earlier claimed to be a supporter of gay rights:
I support gay rights in the same way I support human rights. I don't give you or gay people special treatment. If a gay person commits a crime he's a criminal. Your statement here is trying to put me in a box. It's like you're saying that If someone can even just assume that a gay person could have the proclivity of doing something unethical then how could that person be a supporter of gay rights? Impossible!
> But such is not the case when a gay man becomes the leader of a boy scout troop. He may have good intentions, but it is highly highly reasonable to assume he does not.
This portion of your comment is unreasonable. Girl Scout troops welcome male leaders, including heterosexual male leaders, without any insinuation of pedophilia or child sexual abuse.[1] There is no evidence that child sexual abuse is more of an issue for homosexual males than it is for heterosexual males,[2] and therefore no legitimate reason for you to suggest that homosexual male leaders of boy scout troops are more problematic than heterosexual male leaders of girl scout troops.
Male leaders tend to have daughter(s) or family in the troop thus the incentives are aligned. A single male is rarely the troop leader.
There is a reason to suspect a single heterosexual male joining a girl scout troop for the same reason you'd suspect a single male joining an all female yoga class.
There's a degree of common sense here that's being deliberately ignored. If a pedophile who's never acted out on his desires becomes a scout leader it is completely logical and wise to question his intentions as it is to question the intentions of a male girl scout leader or a gay boy scout leader.
You have to look at circumstance and evidence and nuance. You can't just build simplistic logic of "this exists and therefore the following must be completely true". No. Life is much more complex such that if your own child was part of a troop and ANY person who matches the profile of the characters described above MUST be questioned for the safety of your child.
> Male leaders tend to have daughter(s) or family in the troop thus the incentives are aligned. A single male is rarely thie troop leader.
Gay male leaders can also have son(s) or family in boy scout troups. The Boy Scouts of America stopped prohibiting gay individuals from becoming members in 2013 and stopped prohibiting gay scout leaders from holding memberships in 2015.* The majority of homosexual males are not pedophiles, just as the majority of heterosexual males are not pedophiles, so your reasoning is faulty. There is no legitimate reason to view homosexual males with any more suspicion than heterosexual males in scouting.
If you think it would be ok for a school to fire a teacher merely for being gay (as suggested by “it makes perfect sense for organizations to spend money to get rid of these people”), then you don’t support gay rights. In some instances US courts have even ruled against religious schools that have done this:
If you absolutely insist on making this a discussion about pedophilia (even extending your unpleasant insinuations to gay men who are boy scout leaders), then I’m calling it quits here. The subject of the article is gay priests talking to other adult gay men on dating apps. Even if a significant number of mainstream Catholics think that being gay is equivalent to being a pedophile (which I doubt), then that is still no reason for the rest of us to make such an association.
> If you think it would be ok for a school to fire a teacher merely for being gay (as suggested by “it makes perfect sense for organizations to spend money to get rid of these people”), then you don’t support gay rights. In some instances US courts have even ruled against religious schools that have done this:
I suggested no such thing, it's just more manipulation from you. This is what I suggested: I suggested that it's extremely strange for a gay man to be teaching at an all boys school and it's highly reasonable to suspect that his intentions are unethical.
If I could read the mind of such a teacher and I can see his intentions are good, by god I will fight for that teachers right to work there. Barring that I can only make the best logical judgment given the information that I have and that judgement is either the teacher leaves or I put my kid in another school/classroom.
>If you absolutely insist on making this a discussion about pedophilia (even extending your unpleasant insinuations to gay men who are boy scout leaders),
I never insisted on such a thing. I am simply clearing my name on the accusations you continue to pile on to me one after another. You accuse me of using pedophilia as some sort of deliberate inflammatory weapon, all I did was point out that I AM NOT. There is no insistence that we continue the conversation along those lines.
I want a discussion but apparently I can't have one because your attitude is combative and accusatory. It's characteristic of activists of gay people and many many activists nowadays. They use accusatory tactics of boxing people into horrible labels like "racist", "misogynistic". It's largely an effective tactic, but it's so effective that many times it's used as a mechanism to gain power and dominate others.
Activists like you don't want to engage in meaningful discussion, you just want to dominate. To achieve these goals what you do is misconstrue your opponents intention, you throw away all nuance and deliberately try to simplify your opponent and his actions so that he or she will fit into the box you want him in. When you successfully do this then you execute your main weapon of calling him "racist", "sexist" or any other horrible term that carries a history too horrible to justify using such words with such frivolity.
So what I'm doing is I have to continuously CLARIFY what I am saying. I have to reemphasize the nuance behind what I am saying so that I protect myself from being nailed onto that label. You literally attempted to do this to me earlier.
>Even if a significant number of mainstream Catholics think that being gay is equivalent to being a pedophile (which I doubt), then that is still no reason for the rest of us to make such an association.
I never said the "rest of us" have to make that association. I am simply saying why it makes sense for Catholics to want to root out their leaders who engage in homosexual behavior. Personally, I don't care if a gay man is elected mayor but it makes sense to me why a catholic doesn't want a priest to be gay. I am also saying it's justified for such priests and leaders within the catholic community to be fired.
> I suggested that it's extremely strange for a gay man to be teaching at an all boys school and it's highly reasonable to suspect that his intentions are unethical.
Your suspicions are unreasonable. As I mentioned before, heterosexual male teachers are not automatically viewed with moral suspicion in all-girls schools (second example: https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/the-perils...), so it is unreasonable to automatically suspect that homosexual male teachers in all-boys schools are unethical. You are applying a double standard to homosexual males that society does not apply to heterosexual males.
Those teachers may be married and/or have daughters. A single male SHOULD be questioned.
> You are applying a double standard to homosexual males that society does not apply to heterosexual males.
Again simplistic logic. A double standard does not preclude it from being true. You have to see motive. Your link isn't evidence for anything. Can you read the minds of those teachers? Do you know if anything happened behind closed doors?
By virtue of once being a young single heterosexual male with no children I know how these men think. A high school teacher at an all female school is not only fighting external forces of how he's perceived but the internal forces of his instincts. If an attractive female HS student makes a move, the temptation is real.
Typically for males, though, the consequences of such violations are a hundred times more severe then if a female did it so you tend to see female teachers violate this rule more regularly.
> Those teachers may be married and/or have daughters.
Homosexual male teachers may also be married and/or have sons. Your entire line of reasoning is invalidated by your refusal to consider homosexual males in the same light as heterosexual males.
> When a homosexual man becomes a teacher for an all boys school something is wrong.
No, that is incorrect. There is nothing wrong with all-girls schools having heterosexual male teachers (example: https://girlsschools.org/advocacy/blog/2017/01/10/all-girls-...), so there is nothing wrong with all-boys schools having homosexual male teachers. You posting this sentence undermines your claim that your comparison of homosexuality to pedophilia (two things with wildly different acceptance rates among Catholics and among people in general) was in good faith.
>But I understand how many communities find homosexuality unnatural and wrong. You should respect that and NOT join that community. Just like how Catholics shouldn't enforce their ideas on the rest of the world, you shouldn't enforce yours either.
Catholics do enforce their ideas on the rest of the world, as many Christians in positions of power do. Especially in the US. Especially recently, with the surge of extremist anti-LGBT and anti abortion laws, all predicated philosophically on Christian doctrine. People who find homosexuality unnatural and wrong should not be respected, or simply let be, any more than virulent racists or anti-Semites. Tolerance for the intolerant only leads in the extermination of the tolerant.
>"Tolerance for the intolerant only leads in the extermination of the tolerant."
This is awfully hyperbolic, I cannot take it seriously because it comes across as an indictment of tolerance and an endorsement of intolerance as a moral imperative. Granted, I'm sure the implication is that it would be a 'righteous' kind of intolerance, but it is rooted in absolutism nonetheless.
> I cannot take it seriously because it comes across as an indictment of tolerance and an endorsement of intolerance as a moral imperative.
It's a very simple concept, described by Karl Popper in a single straightforward paragraph, commonly referred to as the Paradox of Tolerance. It's one of those lessons that came out of the aftermath of the Holocaust, which for some reason people go through great pains to refuse to comprehend.
That's fine - should you ever find yourself as part of a demographic that some other group wants eradicated, feel free to defend to the death their right to organize and recruit and argue for that, and tolerate their hatred as much as you like. In fact, just out of principle, make sure they have access to as many platforms as they want and can gather as much political power as possible. Maybe even try to engage them in debate, despite the unequal power dynamic between truth and lies (particularly in the modern ecosystem of engagement-driven social media and manufactured reality) - sunlight is the best disinfectant after all.
I'm still not convinced, and I've definitely heard and examined the Karl Popper paradox you mentioned. There's some strong insinuations in your response, but the main point of contention I have is this notion that by merely letting an idea/stance exist there is culpability and support for 'eradication'.
>"That's fine - should you ever find yourself as part of a demographic that some other group wants eradicated."
How do you know I'm not?
>"In fact, just out of principle, make sure they have access to as many platforms as they want"
Just having a platform, or being on lots of platforms, does not guarantee an ideology will succeed or spread substantially.
>"Maybe even try to engage them in debate, despite the unequal power dynamic between truth and lies"
Refuting lies is difficult, but it is still worth doing. I think its better than giving up and using force.
Strict export controls on information. People from countries that are subject to export controls aren't allowed to see certain things or work on certain projects.
I'm not sure how big a presence Intel has in China these days, but my impression is that it's small and it shrunk quite a bit when Intel got out of the NAND memory business.
Anecdotes have a degree of unreliability and a degree of reliability. Outright dismissing an anecdote as completely baseless and invalid is highly, highly unwise and a sign that the person is not logical.
First off, anecdotes have extreme speed. You can get some sort of answer much faster and at a hugely lower cost then a "study".
Second, studies are not to be trusted either. There's huge incentive to doctor these things and with the replication crisis this "doctoring" has been shown to be common place.
Third, even an "honest" study can be wildly off depending on the data gathered and most of the time these studies only find correlative associations rather then causative (most people don't even know how to conduct a causative experiment).
A good example of this is smoking Cannabis and Tobacco. Depending on the time both were deemed healthy to consume by research via multitudes of biased research and and a lack of unbiased studies.
But with a little anecdotal common sense it's easy to see that breathing burnt plants into your lungs is likely just bad overall.
The problem with this is that the taglines enforce a theme even when the circumstances change.
Your healthy community is experiencing homelessness and a housing affordability problem along with every "themed" community around you. Does it make sense to stick with the original theme? No. It doesn't.
The problem here is that by owning property you buy into that theme. Any divergence from that theme is harmful to what you bought.
The only way forward is eminent domain.
But at the scale of current property ownership there's going to be huge backlash from property owners. If people who don't own property organize in numbers that dwarf the total amount of property owners then that could generate enough conflict towards social change.
But that level of organization won't happen until the desperateness hits a sort of criticality. We're still far from that so I'm safe. But make no mistake I know the moral action that we must take, and me sitting on my property is not it.
You have to look at age and location. If you characterize the whole US you're including people who are much older and people who live away from very urban areas.
Among older people and in small towns and villages the housing problems, are of course, much milder.
It's like we're LLMs ourselves... generating different flavors of UIs to interface with chatGPT. That's what I think of when I see the proliferation of chatGPT UIs that hit the front page.
Inevitably, human behavior that's similar to an LLM is ripe for replacement by an LLM due to the abundance of behavioral data.
Absolutely. That’s a very exciting thing. These tools are forcing us to confront who we are.
Interestingly, LLMs (so far) are similarly limited, they can only ingest/digest so much data at a time, so we are trying to figure ways around it.
Just like humans, soon there will be lots of specialized LLMs, ones that do only certain types of law, or only one programming language, or even just one codebase, etc.
LLMs don't force me to confront who I am any more than a dog does when I see them eating. LLMs generate copycat ideas. So do I. Dogs eat. So do I. Neither of these cause me any kind of identity crisis.
Sure, not everyone in the world will be forced to ask themselves what they truly are.
However. Can dogs write too? Can they write better code than you? Can they write better letters/documents/proposals/essays than you?
Because ChatGPT can.
If you apply that at a global scale, as quickly as it is happening, it’s easy to imagine that pretty soon there’s going to be a big change in the way we interact with technology and how we view ourselves in the world.
Do you have anything constructive to say? I worked at faang for 3 years, donated 90% of what I made to charity before changing my life to work at a place with half the salary.
Don't assume things and don't comment here with bland reddit one liners. Only say something if it's constructive.
Since no formal theory about the field exists.. every conjecture is just opinion. So someone working in systems design won't necessarily come up with a better "design" then some other person who doesn't specifically work in the field given that there's a lack of a formal theory to prove it either way. In software these guys who do "designs" are the system architects and I think the ridicule is justified given that anyone can do it.
Category theory is the closest thing I've seen to a fundamental theory of design and I'm positive it's not well known among "systems design" engineers. Honestly it's not even that useful either because the theory doesn't include any measurement to determine if one structure is "better" than another.