All forms of government no matter how big or small are fcorrupt. That’s how it works—they/them who bends the will of the masses wins. Either that’s done by manipulating folks into believing the next candidate will “take their pain away”, or by inflicting pain for non-compliance. Or they change the rules: voter suppression, censorship, etc and pretend they “won the election.” Or they just murder the opposition and blame it on Santa Claus.
It's plainly fallacious to say there is no difference in corruption, conduct, and outcomes of different governments and different forms of government. To say 'all governments are corrupt' is the same as saying 'all people are violent'; but some are murderers, some got in shoving matches with their siblings when they were 12, and there is the entire range in between.
Well it’s hard to say at the scope of world powers. Maybe small, local governments there’s less. But let’s be honest here, and consider the atrocities of yesteryear. They span the gamut, and they span democracy through authoritarian regimes. The only difference is how it’s conveyed/portrayed to citizens, and how quickly /easily it is for any single party to gain control of a nation.
I agree that some systems are better than others, and there is still hope for better ones to come. But let’s not kid ourselves into believing China has done anything terrible that the USA has not already done in spades.
These 'it's all the same' arguments are obviously false, beyond the meaningless truism that 'nobody's perfect!'.
> it’s hard to say at the scope of world powers
No it's not, at all. Some governments and forms of government are far more corrupt than others. Nobody compares Sweden or the US with Russia or Nigeria.
> They span the gamut, and they span democracy through authoritarian regimes. The only difference is how it’s conveyed/portrayed to citizens ... let’s not kid ourselves into believing China has done anything terrible that the USA has not already done in spades.
Nobody's kidding anyone; unless you look back centuries, China does things - such as in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, Tienanmen Square - that the USA never does. There's no comparison. The USA is not about to round up the populace of a region and put them in torture and reducation camps.
This might be true in tech world but in local economies does not make sense. How can folks “switch jobs” every two years when there may not be equivalent opportunities in many cases?
I’d also like to point out that while many tech folks are just as fickle with their jobs as they are with programming languages, there is a lot of benefit to holding one’s post and trying to build a better company, too.
That being said at some places stagnation can happen and then it’s obvious to switch jobs, but stability can offer many benefits over arbitrary switching for more money.
> I’d also like to point out that while many tech folks are just as fickle with their jobs as they are with programming languages, there is a lot of benefit to holding one’s post and trying to build a better company, too.
Why? Why should I spent my time/energy at a company that doesn't pay me what I'm worth? I've played this game before and it's not worth it. I've been on committees, I've organized events for work, I've worked on building team/company moral, written surveys and studied survey results, planned meals/outings, etc. That company did not reward that behavior at all and not matter how hard I pushed they wouldn't move on certain things (remote work being top of list but also treating all employees with dignity/respect). All I got was tiny "cost of living" pay increases (3% or less) even as my contributions increased at a much faster rate. I left that job and got a very sizable "raise" and I recommend other people do the same thing. You (often) have zero equity in the company and thus zero incentive to change it for the better, life is way to short to toil away for someone else's gain when they don't reward you for your effort.
Of course each situation can be unique. I wouldn’t recommend staying at any place that overworks employees or unfairly compensates them.
I am referring to tech folks arbitrarily switching jobs JUST for a pay increase, every year or two years. What’s left behind many cases is in maintainable code where people shrug it off as “someone else’s problem.”
There is an easy way for businesses to fix that though: Pay people more. If you compensate people for what they worth they will stay, if you don't they will leave. I don't think it's a good idea to shame people into staying in a job where they are being paid less than they could earn on the open market. Also why should I stay indebted to a company that won't/can't pay what I'm worth? Loyalty died a long time ago. There are no pensions or other incentives to stay and businesses lay people off at the first sign of trouble. If a business can fire or lay me off without warning then I'm not going to feel bad about leaving (and often giving 2-4 weeks notice).
Nowadays everything is layers on top of layers. File systems from regular partitions and RAID to LVM then to ZFS/Btrfs. Virtualization of OS systems to KVM/Qemu to containers.
Operating systems function now in general is to provide a means for running arbitrary systems on top of the metal. It’s astonishing what one can do with cloud-init and a base Linux install these days. I can botch up all the layers above and quickly restart without installing anything on the base system install.
Granted, there’s always special cases but I see that “stable core” over which anything can run to be the target. Just look at the M1 chip—designed to run virtualized architectures efficiently.
So, to reiterate my point, Operating systems should target virtualization/abstraction features as efficiently as possible so it doesn’t matter which OS or workload folks run, or where it’s running (cloud, IoT, desktop, laptop, server, etc).
An additional area requiring research is security. Process obfuscation of some kind to prevent tampering etc there are still work to be done.
And then pee on the floor and do jumping jacks, run in circles, then read a magazine, then install an upside-down lectern in the living room only to realize... you forgot the television.
Honestly all websites should support a no-script, static version to prevent 90% of the webs BS. We used to be able to view sites with JavaScript disabled and actually things would work.
Also, instead of arbitrary cookies why not standardize authentication/authorization security mechanisms to avoid having those stupid cookie pop ups.
At this point there are common web pattern which separates the essentials from the BS—so why not get rid of the BS and keep the good stuff?
Man—all I can say is most tech companies suck these days in that way. Bought a Samsung “smart” tv and a couple months later got an update—now it’s showing McDonalds ads. Like WTF I paid $500 for a TV but that’s not good enough?
It's the consumer hardware industry as a whole. The combination of heavy competition on street price and a dearth of salient new features (my mid-tier TV from 2017 is effectively identical in features to its modern counterparts) has encouraged the manufacturers to supplement the one-time revenue from sales with ongoing revenue from advertising, spyware and kickbacks from the subscription streaming companies.
I had a similar feeling installing Gentoo on my graphite iMac in 2004. Except in my case I received so, so much help from the IRC channel, particularly Joseph Jezak (JoseJX) who helped me with some very deep problems I had involving patching X to start on the iMac because it hadn't been used on my model before.
I saw just now that JoseJX went on to do Google Summer of Code with Gentoo in 2006 to work on the X.org Configuration Tool.
I believe it took me most of the high school summer to get X working. In the meantime I got to use links CLI web browser, IRC, and instant messenger clients (AIM etc) for 2-3 months until GUI was functional.
I became completely comfortable in command line as a result. It's sad to me that I can't help students replicate a simklar experience today because the internet seems largely unusable in a text-only browser now.
Those communities are incredibly for new users. For me it's been critical to have others around who can get me past roadblocks while I work hard to genuinely learn on my own.
And yes, the Gentoo docs were superb. The forum and IRC had incredibly patient people who genuinely loved helping people of all skill levels.
If someone was running a non Ubuntu distro on a personal laptop, I used it as a proxy for some amount of technical ability and it was mostly justified.
> The first computers filled up an entire room and look where we are now...
So, in how many decades do you project that a house will cost $300, and will provide shelter for half-a-million people?
Why compare to computing, which is a discipline that's less to a century old, when you can compare to any other millenia-old-industry, some of which have seen revolutionary improvements, some of which have seen minor incremental improvements, and some of which have seen serious cost and/or quality regressions over that period of time?
The web is the way for universal exposure. Regardless of speed it’s the only standardized, universal and widely used interface.
WebAssembly will be the ticket there—once it’s developed a bit more.
That being said, nothing compares to native. You could have shitty hardware by today’s standard with amazingly performant software if there weren’t so many damn layers in-between.
People are fickle with hardware though and we devs need things to slow down a bit to appreciate the nuances of each device!
