I wish that more people understood that if they're very wrong/openly lying about the history of scientific achievement, they're probably in the wrong about their conclusions regarding the future of science as well.
And that's Eru (and perhaps you) here. Pubic science continues to make fantastic moves forward, with one notable example being nearly ALL the meaningful research and engineering moving us towards nuclear fusion being based on public research. Historically, major contributors to research almost universally had significant government funding.
It's true that we can gesture to AI research recently as a fruitful place for private research, but even orgs like Deepmind took government grants. Deepmind's publicly called for governments to fund AI research, as have many other (private) researchers.
In any event, taking tax money and giving it back to the betterment of society as a whole is one of the most uniformly good things that could be done with tax dollars. Science consistently betters society as a whole, and it's almost impossible to identify in advance what theoretical or practical breakthroughs in any given field are about to become significant.
> In any event, taking tax money and giving it back to the betterment of society as a whole is one of the most uniformly good things that could be done with tax dollars.
Have you considered taxing less in the first place? So that there's more money for eg private research?
> Deepmind's publicly called for governments to fund AI research, as have many other (private) researchers.
Company in sector X calling for more government spending on sector X seems hardly like news?
> Have you considered taxing less in the first place? So that there's more money for eg private research?
You really think that if the government axed the NSF/NIH, and cut taxes but corresponding amount, the private sector would somehow take all those tax cuts and invest in scientific research?
And the other factor is that private research is going to be geared towards that which is 1) less risky and 2) has some eventual commercial application. Many areas of scientific research are not like this. e.g. basically all of astronomy, and a good chunk of particle physics. The commercial applications have been pretty much zero.
AI is getting a ton of investment by the private sector now, because it is expected to have commercial application.
> basically all of astronomy, and a good chunk of particle physics. The commercial applications have been pretty much zero.
So far
We must point this out because it's critical to the argument of funding science, basic research, and mathematics. It's easy to lose sight of the time frame or where inspiration was drawn from but it's easier to see with silly examples.
Like who would think studying origami would have ever been useful. The people originally studying it had no direct applications in mind. Yet it is now one of the most powerful tools in engineering. Not just used in satellites but also plays a role in additive manufacturing, robotics, and more.
Or look at Markov. Dude had no interest in applications whatsoever. He invented Markov Chains and revolutionized science purely to spite a rival. It took time for people to see the utility but we wouldn't have our modern AI system without it or even search or even the internet.
Private research is great, don't get me wrong. But they're too focused on right now. You don't get revolutions that way. You get revolutions by thinking outside the box. You get revolutions by straying away from the path that everyone else is doing, which is much more risky. You get revolutions because you do things just for fun. Just for curiosity's sake.
Since Leibniz basically the only funding for this kind of work has come through governments. It's also been declining as we are demanding more and more for people to show the value of their research, which just makes government funds like private ones. I'd warn against taking that path. It's a reasonable one, it makes perfect sense, and it is well intentioned, but it is also ignorant of history.
You're either wrong or lying about the idea that famous mathematical discoveries have not been financed by governments historically.
You're either wrong or lying about the idea that this is, at scale, lottery ticket mentality. The modern scientific apparatus has flaws, but despite those it's a marvel of modern distributed resource allocation and cooperation rarely rivaled in human culture.
> Have you considered taxing less in the first place? So that there's more money for eg private research?
Sure, but this wouldn't obviously lead to outcomes for the public good. Even if we handwaved away IP and secrecy expectations in your scenario (is the abolishment of IP in your calculus? If not your task is even harder), there are obvious challenges you'd need to overcome:
1. How will non-experts vet the meaning or potential of research to select allocation? How will they even learn the option space to choose from? This is an incredible knowledge burden on the market that has profound implications on what can be researched. I see very little evidence that the public at large can do this, and I ask for an existence proof.
2. Even if you can get past #1, what then keeps outcomes aligned with the public interest? This is the same general objection most people have to Hayek's "the noble purpose of the rich is to have their tastes direct society" idea: the outcomes are mostly around consolidating power.
More broadly, everyone accepts this pooled resource methodology is superior. Even many anarchists[1] don't oppose collectivist resource pooling and management so long as it's voluntary and done in ways tha minimizes hierarchical extent and implications
What you're suggesting is that wealth redistribution is somehow morally wrong for the wealthy, but many of the wealthiest people are wealthy in appreciable part because of the way their endeavors have interacted with redistributive endeavors. Musk and Thiel, as living examples, both have benefitted enormously from redistribution. So why was it good for them, but now it's bad? Why isn't having an explicit force to counter economic attraction bad, given that we can provide and measure its existence?
American science supremacy is not a thing I'm interested in defending. However, it's undeniable that America's redistributive methodology has lead it to be the science capital of the world for generations, and Americans have definitely benefitted from this status more than the infinitesimal sum of money committed relative to their budget. What value are you offering in return? It seems like a "trust me" story at a time when we see not just an attack on science funding but an attack on the idea of a consensus reality contradicting corporate profit motives (e.g., Climate change, RFKs attack on medicine).
I don't know how you get around these objections. I don't even know where you go to find an example of all this working in a purely private methodology that's not counterfactual. It seems like a lot of moral grandstanding and "trust me bro" from out here. You should make these arguments somewhere we can find them if you want us to believe the conclusions.
> Company in sector X calling for more government spending on sector X seems hardly like news?
Indeed! You're the one trying to paint it as bad, misguided, incorrect, or immoral? Even private companies benefit from public research grants. Whatever the pejorative you want to attach, the burden is on you to suggest something better.
[1] Please note we're using the historical definition here in the tradition of Goldman, Bakunin, Malatesta, Chomsky and Carson, etc.
In the interest of historical accuracy, Newton's work was directly and indirectly subsidized by his government as was the university he attended (that later gave him partial scholarship). He invented Calculus while isolated due to the plague, but had already graduated by then with those scholarship bucks from a university chartered by the British government.
A lot of his work occurred while he was what we'd now call a tenured professor of mathematics, again at a universe with an impressive amount of money being donated directly by the British government.
In general, the history of higher learning is the history of governments (or the wealthy people who constitute them) funding research and facilities. You may not like it, but you shouldn't misrepresent history just to make your preferences sound more normal.
There's also that the Royal Society [0] sponsored some of Newton's work (and Newton was even President of it for a time). That was a group also chartered by the British government (and some centuries financed by it more than other centuries).
(Leibniz had a more complex web of patrons over the course of the decades, including parts of German and French governments and even briefly being a Royal Society fellow. Some of Leibniz's patrons did include private [rich] donors, but it is said that Leibniz was the last scientist/mathematician to find patronage in that way/the last time in history that private donors had shown much interest in direct science/math patronage.)
If you like these kinds of games but find SPD to be a little too mechanically simple and lacking in build diversity, you may also enjoy DCSS (dungeon crawl stone soup) and my personal favorite: Frogcomposband.
You can play the later at angband.live, and it's an exceptional game with incredible depth and variety.
And BTW, if I can figure out how to do Eclipse CDT and get the source code running in an IDE, so that I can do LOTS of fun things with class skills, you can to! Because the last time I did C/C++ was 1998.
Also, Remnants of the Precursors (java) you can do some fun things. I got "doomstars" half-implemented, a race skill that marks planets with resources or artifacts (archaeology bonus), and lots of other fun things.
I really like open source games, half the fun is hacking them.
I have yet to download nethack from the net and hack it though.
I agree about SPD. While it's great for a mobile game and looks gorgeous, I find the gameplay somewhat shallow for a roguelike.
If I have a monitor and keyboard at hand, I prefer to play the likes of ADOM (classic version, not Ultimate), Brogue, Legerdemain, Sil, DCSS, etc. which offer more depth, strategic complexity and meaningful choices, IMHO.
Haven't tried the frog one, will do at some point.
There was a Nintendo DS port of Stone Soup that I really loved. Had some great times provoking monsters into fighting each other while I hid in the shadows.
And look at how well it's going for Claude. Their primary claim to fame is being called "an annoying coworker" and that's it.
Why would anyone look to form a contract with Anthropic right now? I'd say they're in danger here, because their models and offerings don't have clear value propositions to customers.
Google's strategy for search ux is decidedly not "nimble and rapid" and I don't understand why anyone with first hand knowledge would ever suggest that.
It is gated on a lot of things, especially relative to early days of the company. It's just that browser compatibility isn't generally one of those things... They still handle that by the belief they can roll back quickly.
Relatively speaking, you can still undo the change to the front page faster than you can, say, roll out a new version of a desktop application, especially if the change fixes an active fire.
For one, that "deprioritize a competitor" is not clear at all. Why would that be so? Isn't it far more likely, given the rarity of these events, that a test regression occurred or some other subtle issue rather than assumed malfeasance?
For two, that "next update in 12 hours" is user comms. For me, at least, google.com works fine both on curl and my browser. That's a fairly normal cadence for big companies.
On the larger point about "nimble and deploying rapidly", the people who generally brag about "being nimble and deploying rapidly" almost never serve an even 1/100th the audience the size of Google.com does, and it's really questionable if, at that scale, you actually want to risk global regressions even on trivial bugs.
So I don't know what that user is talking about, and I agree with you that they are obviously not that.
That approach may be antithetical to the modern startup engineer frantic to prove their stock's hypothetical worth to their investors, unconcerned about trivial revenue loss from frontpage issues because of whatever latest node.js drama nuked their continuously deployed website. But the fact that "the landing search page is broken for 1% of users in a rare but public use case" is news at all is because Google's approach for search sets our expectations that this won't happen.
I think the parent comment's point is: if this were affecting a version of Google-branded Chrome with similar market share, do you think we would still be getting "next update in 12 hours"?
I remember an internal mantra in Google along the lines of "if you break something in production, roll back first, ask questions about how it happened later, even if you think it's a simple fix". It feels telling that this is not what is happening in this circumstance.
They're the only one (I can find) with "Mobile" inside the parens; bet you money the issue is a badly-formatted regex tripping over the paren / symbol combination and thinking that UA describes some deny-listed crawler somewhere (or falls off the end of recognizable UAs and trips a fallback to "Vend nothing").
Since they're always testing on Chrome Desktop, and Chrome Mobile emits an almost-identical UA string, my previous statement holds: issues with Chrome mobile are generally more likely to come up in testing on Chrome Desktop than issues in Firefox Mobile are likely to come up in testing on Chrome Desktop.
Hi. I helped write some of the internal postmortem and manage the data plane side of the team that responded to this.
Please allow me to reassure you: No. Absolutely not in this case. Not even slightly.
Any engineer can tell you customer configuration contents can cause bugs in configuration pipelines, but that's multiple layers away from this issue in our particular case.
Well, part of this is on us. Let's think on the reasons Gmail is so popular:
1. It's very easy to get to.
2. It has incredibly fast search that has 0 setup.
We have never really even tried to address problem 1 as an open source community. Networks, name lookup, and VPNs remain incredibly complex topics that beginners cannot hope to wrestle with. The best we have is .mdns which either works magically or perversely refuses to work.
Similarly for free text search, the software world simply hasn't delivered a lego-like solution for email search. You CAN rig up any number of open source projects but it is neither easy nor instant. And even other professional products like Apple Mail struggle with a mere gigabyte of email.
Despite the fact that it's 2021 and every successful email provider aggressively solves these problems, the open source world still debates about the utility of ubiquitous search or pretends that local networking isn't a pressing problem.
"We have never really even tried to address problem 1 as an open source community. Networks, name lookup, and VPNs remain incredibly complex topics that beginners cannot hope to wrestle with."
I kinda disagree. It's probably easier than ever to set up your own mail server, in some abstract sense. You can get a virtual machine, use docker, heck, someone can hand you a complete image that you just have to bring up and set up with some config.
The problem is, it literally doesn't matter how much the 'open source' community comes together, it simply can not provide a turn key solution as good as
Desired email account: [________]@gmail.com
Password: [________]
Verify Password: [________]
[X] I agree to have all my data used in arbitrary ways
It's not possible. There is no way to set up a server that easily, even in principle.
Or at least, not in a sane way. I can set up a site where you feed me your credit card number and pick a domain name, and I set up your AWS account for you, register your DNS name for you, configure DNS, and stand up everything you need and set it all up... but then we've got a split ownership interest. I can hand it all back to you, but you don't understand the setup. I can give you root on the system, but when you change anything, my automation stops working.
>It's not possible. There is no way to set up a server that easily, even in principle.
I partially agree, but I think we could get a lot closer than we are now. It feels like the main reason this isn't possible is because you need to go through a registrar to get a DNS name, and that's tricky to do as part of a FOSS project. Maybe you could integrate with the APIs of a few registrars, but... it's not ideal.
As far as the "run thing on server" side of it goes, though, projects like Sandstorm[0] have gotten really far re: making it a simple process. I stood up this instance of Etherpad with a few clicks on a web UI, for example: https://sandstorm.terracrypt.net/shared/aR2HXaoLSkLuXLhhAQon...
Sandstorm in particular doesn't quite work for mail servers just because the software is heavily oriented towards webapps, but there's no reason a similar system couldn't work in principle.
The involuntary back burner started designing "how would I set this up as a business", and I definitely ended up with setting up docker containers. Sandstorm, unfortunately, is an example of being a bit too ahead of its time... sandstorm has a lot of stuff in it that just isn't that big an advantage to me vs. being in a Docker container. (I'm aware of at least some of the differences, but... it's just not that helpful to me for the most part.)
I think something that could be like sandstorm but using docker containers might be a good thing, but there's still the "you need to hand me your credit card if you want me to register a domain for you" which is a big barrier vs. the screen I showed above. A credit card off the top is already 4-6 entry fields, and everyone knows to be a bit nervous about entering those....
> It feels like the main reason this isn't possible is because you need to go through a registrar to get a DNS name
I can't agree, getting a domain is much easier than it is to configure the abysmal shit that is Postfix+Dovecot+WebGUI. God forbid you want proper search as well.
Basically all of that could be done programmatically though. There are sane defaults that can be used for these things; projects like Mail-in-a-Box do most of that heavy lifting for you. (When all you want is a basic SMTP/IMAP/webmail server... a standard config can work just fine.) It doesn't even necessarily have to be done through a command line.
What can't so easily be done programmatically is DNS registration, because it involves money changing hands and there's no standard "registrar API". You'd have to either support an arbitrary number of differently-shaped APIs of different registrars or pick a "blessed few" to support.
Realistically, you could support half a dozen DNS providers and get a LONG way towards making it easier to roll your own.
GoDaddy, GCP/google=domains, AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean and a couple others would provide enough for a LOT of people. Especially since godaddy and google domains include dns, and DO doesn't charge for it.
I've setup a script to make it easier to manage a handful of dev domains (commit to a repo, and it updates via build/event pipeline) with DO.. was surprisingly easy. I don't think doing similar for the biggest cloud/dns providers would be all that hard to integrate.
Another issue that needs to be solved is 'bad actor'. Basically someone gaming the system and overloading it with spam. There is no real nice neat way to fix that. Instead it is a mishmash of blacklists/whitelists/blocklists and sorta intelligent alg filtering. Getting that all filled and working is not trivial either. Oh its 'doable' but kind of a pain for even someone with decent experience at it.
To add to that; with re-assigned IP's, widespread port 25 blocking /most/ ISP connections won't allow you to run an email server on a residential connection.
Agree 100% on both of these, and #2 is seldom listed as a big issue. Had IMAP addressed search in a better way, I think it would have made a huge difference.
Of course, it's not simple to set up a mail server that stays clean of spam RBLs, or that is Gmail-acceptable out the gate. But that's just the bar that got set as people went to Gmail because of the lack of other good alternatives.
I think the best approach to breaking the Gmail hegemony is to replace email with something better. Some features I think such a system should have are:
1. End to end encryption
2. search as a first-class feature
3. decentralized/federated
4. standard minimal rich text format (maybe something like markdown), instead of an inconsistent subset of html
5. Fix some of the legacy limitations of email, like having to be ascii safe, line limit of 70 characters etc.
6. Possibly make it easier to have an identity that isn't tied to your service provider
The big questions are how would you get the general population to switch from email, and what to do about spam.
4 there's already a standardized rich text format for emails, called "enriched text" defined originally in rfc 1563 almost exactly 27 years ago, and last updated in rfc 1896 about 25 years ago.
It supports many things that markdown does not (setting font families, sizes, and color for one example), and nobody uses it anymore.
Another point is that markdown is still pretty readable as plain text, whereas html, or "enriched text" are a little harder for humans to read if it isn't specially formatted.
1. GPG has a lot of problems. Perhaps the biggest of which is that there isn't a critical mass of people who use it, and it is pretty difficult to us at all, much less to use correctly.
2. I have tried several MUAs and haven't found one that IMHO "doesn't suck." Although search isn't always the problem. (The biggest problem I've run into is actually getting them to work with logging in using an SSO method like SAML or OIDC). And this point was specifically in response to the parents statment that "Had IMAP addressed search in a better way, I think it would have made a huge difference."
3. Not sure what you mean by that since email _is_ decentralized and federated. Meaning, if you use gmail as your email provider you can still send messages to people using a different email provider. As opposed to say something like Signal or Whatsapp, where you can only message people using the same service as you.
4. Well, some subset of html has become the de facto standard for rich text in emails. Although what subset that is depends on the client...
6. Different issue from what? It is a very real complaint I have with email. Changing your email address is a pretty big pain, possibly more so than changing your physical address or phone number. For many people, myself included, the thought of having to change my email address is a pretty good motivation for staying with the service I currently use. Now it is possible to use your own domain with many email providers. But doing so is beyond the technical skills of most people, and costs more for essentially insurance in case you stop liking your current email provider some time in the future. Unfortunately, I don't know of a good solution for this. At least not one that is scalable.
Yeah, none of the IMAP server authors really thought of search as a first-class feature, nor did they seem to want to do the development to build the backend support. Resource constraints were also an issue back then, as well as a client-first approach. Most large mail servers only had enough resources to run the IMAP and POP services themselves; adding search index maintenance would have overloaded their CPUs. (Not that they couldn't have added more CPU, but this was all pre-cloud.)
Most of spam problems could be solved if mail software came with sane defaults. Sane rate-limits, sane IP reputation, sane security rules, some backscatter protection. Something. Most setups are so widely open because good configuration is arcane knowledge.
I use offlineimap/mu4e over Exchange account at work, in parallel to a personal Gmail account. Would not say now that Gmail has a perceptible edge there.
Seriously, mu4e search on modern hw is incredibly fast (and I have a 10 year work email archive).
I wonder if many folks who only joined the world of software development after DVCSs (and indeed, just VCSs) became popularized can understand why Fetchmail was not trivial to fork and fix.
1. It's very clear that his office has no qualms with filing cases that include untrue statements.
2. It's also the case that this group of claimants is strongly associated with a government official who is very angry at companies and has been trying to attack a communications law from every angle he has. One cannot help but wonder at the timing of all this.
It may very well be true. Sadly, we have to be skeptical now.
And that's Eru (and perhaps you) here. Pubic science continues to make fantastic moves forward, with one notable example being nearly ALL the meaningful research and engineering moving us towards nuclear fusion being based on public research. Historically, major contributors to research almost universally had significant government funding.
It's true that we can gesture to AI research recently as a fruitful place for private research, but even orgs like Deepmind took government grants. Deepmind's publicly called for governments to fund AI research, as have many other (private) researchers.
In any event, taking tax money and giving it back to the betterment of society as a whole is one of the most uniformly good things that could be done with tax dollars. Science consistently betters society as a whole, and it's almost impossible to identify in advance what theoretical or practical breakthroughs in any given field are about to become significant.