Getting Windows up and running isn't necessarily easier. There was a recent review of a handheld Windows device that needed unauthorized hidden driver updates to get performance to match Steam OS. The only way to avoid this type of stuff is to get a Laptop with Ubuntu or Windows preinstalled.
I find it hard to parse the middle of your post. Are you saying Wigner's article, which is what all the "unreasonable effectiveness" titles reference, is silly?
If that is what you are saying I suggest that you actually go back and read it. Or at least the Wiki article:
By means of contrast: I think it's clear that mathematics is, for example, not unreasonably effective in psychology. It's necessary and useful and effective at doing what it does, but not surprisingly so. Yet in the natural sciences it often has been. This is not a statement about mathematics but about the world.
(As Wittgenstein put it some decades earlier: "So too the fact that it can be described by Newtonian mechanics asserts nothing about the world; but this asserts something, namely, that it can be described in that particular way in which as a matter of fact it is described. The fact, too, that it can be described more simply by one system of mechanics than by another says something about the world.")
Yeah it's silly, I don't mean it in any mean spirited way.
> Wigner's first example is the law of gravitation formulated by Isaac Newton. Originally used to model freely falling bodies on the surface of the Earth, this law was extended based on what Wigner terms "very scanty observations"[3] to describe the motion of the planets, where it "has proved accurate beyond all reasonable expectations."
So despite 'very scant observations' they yielded a very effective model. Okay fine. But deciding they should be 'unreasonably' so is just a pithy turn of phrase.
Something can be effective, and can be unreasonably so if it's somehow unexpected, but I basically disagree that FTs or mathematics in general are unreasonably so since we have so much prior information to expect that these techniques actually are effective, almost obviously so.
I am not discussing the FT case. But as regards Wigner's article, the core thing he points out is that while we are used to the effectiveness of maths, centuries after Newton, there in fact is not any prior grounds to expect this effectiveness.
And no, this is unrelated to whether math is invented or discovered. If anything this is related to the extreme success of reductionism in physics.
As a general point of reflection: If an influential article by a smart person seems silly to you, it's good practice to entertain the question if you missed something, and to ask what others are seeing in it that you're missing.
That's quite the double standard. You extrapolate from one single Rust bug, but insist that "it's hard to tell" and you need completely unrealistic levels of empirical evidence to draw conclusions from the reported C bugs...
FF is plenty competitive on the technical and feature front. It's market share is not a reflection of technical merit.
What's more, next to Linux itself it is maybe the only case I can see where a major piece of user facing software is kept competitive with the Apple/Google/MS tools.
LibreOffice or Nextcloud are technically far further behind Office and Google's online offerings.
Which therefore begs the question: Who else is in a position to do this?
At first glance, Moz with Firefox + a suite of self-hosted team and productivity stuff that works well in Firefox would make a ton of sense...
Worse, it's ridden with spyware, and is merely a honeypot for security-aware people that are not sufficiently paranoid to check any of the claims. Like, those VPNs from YT ads that use your IP to give AI companies residential proxies, the same kind of scam.
Spin up Wireshark and take a look at activity of Firefox. Try to shut the browser up. It won't work.
Even if they weren't a Google's proxy company, they would lose to standards commitees being infested by Google, and would have to play the "best luck catching up" game by constantly supporting new versions of JS, APIs and CSS features that nobody needs (except Google's YouTube will use them to stop you from using an adblocker).
FF is governed by ex-Oracle managers at the moment, singing the Google's song. Don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower.
"Ubuntu will apply security updates automatically, without user interaction. This is done via the unattended-upgrades package, which is installed by default."
Right, but it's a minor annoyance, get rid of it with:
sudo apt-get remove --purge unattended-upgrades
(doesn't trigger removal of anything else, and you'll enjoy 420kb of additional disk space).
OTOH the real issue with Ubuntu is snap(d). Snap packages definitely do auto-update. You may want to uninstall the whole snap system - it's (still?) perfectly possible, if a little bit convoluted, due to some infamous snaps like firefox, thunderbird, chromium, or eg. certbot on servers
Or just use Debian or any snap-free fork for the matter.
Eh... mainstream physics by numbers is not HEP and definitely not HEP Th, and there are plenty of serious physicists somewhat critical of the field, and more so of the way it presented itself over the last decades.
And while I disagree with some of the criticisms and some of the style of the crtics, it's not like you get an honest appraisal from Greene (and Witten).
Maybe you haven't been paying much attention in this space. Google found empirically that error density in _unsafe_ Rust is still much lower than in C/C++. And only a small portion of code is unsafe. So per LOC Rust has orders of magnitudes fewer errors than C/C++ in real world Android development. And these are not small sample sizes. By now more code is being written in Rust than C++ at Google:
But don't take my word for it, you can hear about the benefits of Rust directly from GKH:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX0GH-YJbGw
There really isn't a good faith argument here. You can make mistakes in Rust? No one denies that. There is more C code so of course there are more mistakes in C code than in Rust? Complete red herring.
I would expect that the largest factor is cultural, and of course it's possible to inculcate safety culture in a team working on a C or C++ codebase, but it seems to me that we've shown it's actually easier to import the culture with a language which supports it.
Essentially Weak Sapir–Whorf but for programming languages rather than natural languages. Which is such a common idea that it's the subject of a Turing Award speech. Because the code you read and write in Rust usually has these desirable safety properties, that's how you tend to end up thinking about the problems expressed in that code. You could think this way in C, or C++ but the provided tooling and standard libraries don't support that way of using them so well.
I also think that the largest factor is cultural. But my conclusion from this is not that one should import it with a new language while pretending achieving similar results is not possible otherwise. This just gives an excuse for not caring for the existing code anymore, which I suspect is one reason some parts of the industry like Rust ("nobody can expect us to care about the legacy code, nothing can be done until it is rewritten in Rust")
Of course highly correct C code is possible [1]. But ADA makes it easier. Rust makes it easier. You can write anything in any language, that is _not_ the argument. How could you plausibly advocate for a culture that invests a lot of effort [1] into making codes correct, and not also advocate for tools and languages that make it easier to check important aspects of correctness? A craftsman is responsible for his tools. Using subpar tools with the argument that with sufficient knowledge, skill and an appropriate culture you can overcome their shortcomings is absurd.
Rust is also often not the right tool. I looked at it fairly deeply some years ago for my team to transition away from Python/C hybrids, but settled on a fully garbage-collected language in the end. That was definitely the right choice for us.
The thing is. There always was a strong theoretical case that Rust should improve software quality (not just because of the fact that you have a lifetime system). The only reasonable counterpoint was that this is theory, and large scale experience is missing. Maybe in high quality code bases the mental overhead of using Rust would outweigh the theoretical guarantees, and the type of mistakes prevented are already caught by C/C++ tooling anyways?
The (in recent years) rapid adoption of Rust in industry clearly shows that this is not the case.
What about qmail? No one runs qmail and no one is writing new C with that kind of insanely hyperconservative style using only world-class security experts.
And it still wasn't enough. qmail has seen RCEs [0, 1] because DJB didn't consider integer and buffer overflows in-scope for the application.
Perhaps because qmail is an anomaly, not Android? To remain relatively bug-free, a sizeable C project seems to require a small team and iron discipline. Unix MTAs are actually pretty good examples. With qmail, for a long time, it was just DJB. Postfix has also fared well, and (AFAIK) has a very small team. Both have been architected to religiously check error conditions and avoid the standard library for structure manipulation.
Android is probably more representative of large C (or C++) projects one may encounter in the wild.
So you can't, and if a "dumbass" like me can understand the importance of empirical evidence but you can't, maybe read up on rational thinking instead of lashing out emotionally.
I find this highly annoying. Here we've had very tasty wheat based slices that can serve the same purpose as sliced salami/meats on bread, and didn't try to muck anything in particular. But they disappeared from the shelves while the stuff branded as Vegan Salami seemingly does well.
I guess for casual buyers having a familiar reference point is just crucial.
The crusade against gluten probably did it. Tofu lives as un-refrigerated grey blobs and tempeh never even made it to the shelf, probably because of hormone-disrupting soybeans. But hyper-engineered single cell meat? Now that’ll sell.
This is really frustrating to me, it's hard to find seitan outside of Chinese shaokao (BBQ skewers) restaurants. There's a local brand of wheat-meat that even runs a deli that's pretty good, but people are so afraid of gluten.
> In case the sarcasm isn’t clear, it’s better to leave the warts. But it is also worthwhile to recognise that in terms of effectiveness for driving system change, signage and warnings are on the bottom of the tier list. We should not be surprised when they don’t work.
I thought I had read it. :) I thought the three `* * *` at the bottom was indicating I was about to start reading suggestions for the next article. So definitely a "Woosh" moment for me :D
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