Wow that post is bad. The author clearly never actually attempted to understand what POSWID actually means and where it is coming from. Perhaps, instead of looking at Twitter, they should have opened Wikipedia. Or, better yet, Stafford Beers books (though admittedly, he was a pretty atrocious writer).
The follow-up is slightly better. But still not very convincing, IMO. They get far too stuck on a literal interpretation. Of something that self-describes as a heuristic.
The phrase does not make more sense even if we go all the way back to Beers. I certainly don't feel alone in not understanding how he went from his (fair) observation that "[There's] no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do" to his more controversial conclusion: "The purpose of a system is what it does (aka POSIWID)".
Surely, there were many more sensible (but perhaps less quippy) stops between the two.
Being quippy is the point. That's how aphorisms work: creating a short, pithy distillation of a complex argument, that you can then use pars pro toto to make a point.
I certainly agree that POSWID is easily (and perhaps frequently) misused. But that doesn't invalidate it in general.
For it to be a "narrative", there would need to be an additional claim that this specific case and context, which is factual, generalizes to most unrelated cases. That is not in evidence. Thinking that this was an attempt to create a narrative is a failure of reading comprehension.
This insistence that acknowledgement of facts has an ideological narrative is a pernicious strain of anti-science thinking.
To be clear, I have no skin in the game here. I thought the point you made sounded plausible and as I have zero experience or expertise, I wouldn't argue against it.
I just thought it's ridiculous - and kind of funny - to deny making the claim you literally made. I'm not sure you have a lot of legs to stand on, accusing others of "anti-science thinking" and a "failure of reading comprehension" when asking us to ignore the clear, textual evidence of that contradiction.
> For it to be a "narrative", there would need to be an additional claim that this specific case and context, which is factual, generalizes to most unrelated cases.
Says who? That seems a very narrow and unusual definition of what makes a "narrative", bent to your purpose. It seems to me, a "narrative" in common parlance just means "telling a story" or "relaying a sequence of events". I honestly have never seen someone use the word to imply generalization (doesn't mean no one ever did, of course).
In any case, given that you responded to a comment talking about the two examples of Texas and Hawaii with an example about California and an "actually", it seems pretty fair to me to say, that you even fulfilled this artificially narrowed definition.
I mean, come on, you have got to admit that you have at least been unclear, if you didn't intend to make this argument. Instead of just defensively flinging insults.
"This insistence that acknowledgement of facts has an ideological narrative is a pernicious strain of anti-science thinking."
That is very well put. This should be added to the general list of fallacies in argument, and like the other ones (the slippery slope, hasty generalization, Post hoc ergo propter hoc, etc.) more general awareness should exist about these.
The current wave of anti-science, anti-logic, rejection of objective data, etc. is like nothing I've experienced in my lifetime. This is a subjective observation, maybe it has always been this way and I never paid attention because I was caught up in whatever I used to be caught up in.
> it's a known problem and civilization hasn't collapsed.
Waiting for civilizational collapse to justify regulation seems like an unhelpful standard TBH. In fact, I would argue that it's one of the main problems we are having right now: that we know our current trajectory will lead to civilizational collapse, but aren't willing to change course.
1. I'm not a driver, much less in a country with toll roads. But is it common to have per-vehicle customized toll prices? I would expect to pay a fixed per-car, per-use fee.
2. How is this dependent on privatization? Every car is registered. So it seems pretty easy to enforce taxes on cars. And to do so based on model, weight, whatever you want.
In other words, from what I can tell, making people pay their fair share seems simpler in a public system, if anything. It certainly doesn't require privatization.
FWIW I have little skin in the game, as I said, not a driver, so I would probably benefit both by having to pay less tax and by reducing overall car usage.
> But, like, this is exactly as easy with every single other language that I can think of.
I mean, not exactly. Rust (or rather Cargo) requires you to declare binaries in your Cargo.toml, for example. It also, AIUI, requires a specific source layout - binaries need to be named `main.rs` or be in `src/bin`. It's a lot more ceremony and it has actively annoyed me whenever I tried out Rust.
> The second part "Running go install at the root ./.." is actually terrible and risky but, still, trivial with make (a - literally - 50 year old program) or shell or just whatever.
Again, no, it is not trivial. Using make requires you to write a Makefile. Using shell requires you to write a shell script.
I'm not saying any of this is prohibitive - or even that they should convince anyone to use Go - but it is just not true to say that other languages make this just as easy as Go.
> declare binaries in your Cargo.toml, for example. It also, AIUI, requires a specific source layout - binaries need to be named `main.rs` or be in `src/bin`.
It does not. Those are the defaults. You can configure something else if you wish. Most people just don’t bother, because there’s not really advantages to breaking with default locations 99% of the time.
I think one other major part is that, compared to e.g. make the build process is more-or-less the same for all Go projects. There is some variation, and some (newcomers I want to think) still like to wrap go commands into Makefile, but it's still generally very easy to understand and very uniform across different Go projects
> Bluesky's architecture was pretty much dictated by the premise that anyone needs to be able to see any post on the entire system, regardless of whether they have any connections with the author. That algorithmic entertainment-style feeds need to exist. You do need that firehose and other expensive infrastructure for that, there's no going around it.
Exactly this (that people want it at least - I don't think that means it needs to exist). And I think there would be a lot less frustration in the discourse of ActivityPub vs. ATproto, if we could collectively agree that you can't get this in a decentralized system. In a dense network, the number of edges scales with the square of the number of nodes. It's just not feasible to have a network that is both dense and has a large number of nodes.
I think "I prioritize virality, recommendation engines and network density, thus accept giving control over the network to a centralized and profit-oriented entity" is an entirely reasonable tradeoff to make. I just don't understand why BlueSky users don't seem to accept that it's the tradeoff they are making.
absolutely. it’s even in the design paper, when they discuss the AppView the authors say it’s “less decentralized than alternatives” and yet you can’t say that without bsky fans getting mad.
Uhm correct me if I'm wrong, but… you can sell your stake and leave at will, with zero exit tax? So really, the only thing that the exit tax prevents is the company leaving the country. And you know, every time someone brings up taxing the rich, people object that this would cause capital flight. Well, capital flight is exactly what the exit tax prevents. The capital stays in the country.
And likening that to the Berlin wall, where people literally got shot dead, is honestly pretty disgusting.
> You could, of course, sell or wind down your company, which would solve all problems outlined here. But this is not an option for most entrepreneurs.
Yes, it is literally an option, you dunce. There is no law requiring you to keep ownership of a business. You might not like that option very well, but it is an option, which is infinitely better than the denizens of the GDR got.
Man, this post got my blood boiling with its callous stupidity.
> AI is really good at generating repetitive patterns, like plain types, or code that implements a certain interface. If you reduce the cost of creating the verbose code [at write time] we can all enjoy the benefit of reduced complexity [at read time] without resorting to generics.
Though humans are very bad at reviewing repetitive patterns. I'd much rather review a single generic implementation, than 10 monomorphic ones, that look the same, but where I can't be sure and actually have to check.
So unless you are making the argument that generated code doesn't require review (compliance auditors would disagree) I would personally still much rather have generics.
The follow-up is slightly better. But still not very convincing, IMO. They get far too stuck on a literal interpretation. Of something that self-describes as a heuristic.
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