Most of them are, even for experienced programmers, we just don't admit it ;-) They are the results from the hard work over time of one or more programmers.
However, do not let it stop you from starting something you might be interested in knowing/doing i.e. do not let self-doubt lead to paralysis. Start at your own pace and focus only on learning and not competing with others.
A good way to get started is to begin with studying prior work in the domain of your choice. For example i link to the works of Adam Dunkels in my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46441772 which you can study for your own implementation. They are all small being made for embedded systems and hence relatively easier to comprehend. Use AI tools as necessary to both understand and generate code.
Or maybe their actual problems are caused by automation, tax cuts on the rich, and a lack of social safety net that lets people live in dignity, but the media they consume mostly blames immigration and crime.
In the US, we spend about $3T on social safety net programs at the federal level, that's half the federal budget or about 12% of the GDP.
I used to live in Oakland, CA...about a mile from MLK. I can tell you plenty about the amount of crime there over the last decade. I've known lots of people from the suburbs that will try to tell me that crime is down, meanwhile I saw my neighbors getting robbed during the day (not just at night anymore).
If your only experience with these things is watching the news, you really shouldn't be talking about them. And taking police services away from the poorest parts of town is despicable.
PS It was the votes from those high crime districts that got Trump elected last year. The people down there don't watch the news. Your take is just copium because you don't want to do the real work of looking at your side's policies and fixing what is costing you voters and elections.
As somebody avowedly on the left-hand side of the political spectrum - yep. I know the crime stats. I also have seen friends of mine get robbed 3 times in 4 years, once with them in the house. (LA, not Oakland. And in the nice suburbs.) And it's not an isolated incident.
I know that the crime stats say crime is down. But that's not the lived experience for a lot of people. And unless politicians are willing to acknowledge there are issues, and do the work to tackle them, you get demagogues. Right-wing ones will use it to extol the virtues of cracking down, left-wing ones will use it to talk about the plight of the downtrodden.
Meanwhile, you still have people for whom crime is the best option, and you have people who suffer from crime. We could choose to solve those problems (independent of political leaning), and we could choose to solve both sides of the coin. But that'd probably be too rational to sell at the voting booth.
> It was the votes from those high crime districts that got Trump elected last year. The people down there don't watch the news.
[citation needed] They do get enough info through various channels to decide "Trump might fix it". And a good chunk of that is news. We can debate the veracity of info they derive, and how they make their decisions, but let's not go "poor people don't watch news". Mass media exists and has effects, across all demographic strata. Mass media is a tool of demagogues, willing or unwilling.
But that's really also the point of the article - "if people just had better info" isn't actually a workable answer to demagogues. And so debates about media consumption are mostly useless waffling. See above re "what if we instead thought about fixing real issues"
First I want to say the last election wasn't people electing Trump, it was people rejecting the Dems. Second, this entire argument from the left on crime is based upon a false reading of the stats. When people quote the single recidivism rate, they are misunderstanding how that rate is measured. The majority of people that go to prison for the first time, never go back again. A fraction of cons go back over and over again and that skews the recidivism rate. A large chunk of those repeat offenders have serious mental illness. Most of the rest view crime as either a job or a lifestyle.
I'm not sure the 'people for whom crime is the best option' is really the right way to look at it. The vast majority of people in West Oakland never commit any crimes. And ignoring these realities is what is driving populism. Articles like this one say a lot more about the author than they do about political science or populism.
When I say the people in that neighborhood don't watch the news, I'm not making a value judgement. I'm just stating a fact. They don't really care about politics. They do care if the police come when they call and they do care if they can walk the streets at least some part of the day safely.
If Dems really wanted to win an election, they would change policy. Until they do that, they will continue to lose elections. That's Democracy working, not some new or different politics at work.
"this entire argument from the left on crime is based upon a false reading of the stats" -> Not sure whom you're debating here. I'm aware of the stats, and don't think I've made points that disagree with your view of them.
"A large chunk of those repeat offenders have serious mental illness" -> 25%. A bigger problem is substance abuse, at 52%.
Your "Most of the rest view crime as either a job or a lifestyle" and my "people for whom crime is the best option" are saying the same thing. So I'm not clear why you say you're not sure it's the right way to look at it. We both agree that there are subgroups that choose crime deliberately, and based on the stats, it's still a fairly significant group.
"And ignoring these realities is what is driving populism". -> Yes. That is exactly what the article is saying. Quote: "This gives rise to a set of views among those elites, [...] which are basically out of sync with the views of the majority". You're 100% aligned with the author here.
The author explicitly says that punishment doesn't work. He implies heavily that only the academics and elites know this because its counter-intuitive.
My point is that what is driving populism is poor performance by the elites. The other side of this coin is regular folks noticing the bad performance while understanding (in this case correctly) the problem. The populism only happens when both of these things are happening at the same time (bad performance, and normies noticing the bad performance).
Fix the policy and the populism fades. But in this situation that is unlikely to happen because the author believes something that is just false. That's why he keeps going in circles about the wrong fixes, because he doesn't understand that he is just wrong in his understanding. Ironic no?
PS The stats you quote, are they all offenders or repeat offenders? Because that's basically the same mistake the author is making by confusing those two categories. I'm not sure that matters for you because you seem to understand policing is effective. For him, it breaks his entire analysis. I hope this explains my point.
Edit: the reason why your way of looking at it isn't all that helpful is that its based in economics instead of policy. There are always rich and poor, there isn't always a big increase in crime.
Yes. But also, all technologies will eventually be used as weapons. And so its important for us to understand how they can be weaponized and to consider the social cost of that weaponization.
Kitchen knives murder people. Toyota Hiluxes have powered more jihad than modern battle tanks. Our tastes, beliefs, and opinions as a society are shaped by recommendation algorithms run by facebook/instagram/twitter, to our profound detriment (personal opinion).
> And so its important for us to understand how they can be weaponized and to consider the social cost of that weaponization.
To be clear, I absolutely agree. Plenty of tech is double-edged. And Palantir very much so.
Let me restate my point. Palantir (or that class of tech products) is powerful at enabling visibility over a complex system. But visibility is not decisions, it is an input to decisions. If you had real-time telemetry from every single stomach, you could maybe automatically dispatch drones with food wherever someone is starving. Or you could use the data as a high-frequency indicator for a successful invasion. Morality is downstream of decisions not data.
No, you've only heard about one application of it. Airbus and Palantir built something so powerful they productized it and now sell it to airlines to help manage their fleet
That link is more marketing than substance. Is there any data on how well these models perform? For example, how well does their predictive maintenance work, how much risk-adjusted money savings does it provide, what data streams does it require?
> "oh it's just database joins" is about like me ripping your arms off and describing it as "chemical reactions"
This argument is both inconsistent and counterproductive.
Inconsistent as in, the harm to me from having my arms being ripped off comes from you deciding to effect the intent to harm me. No photograph or x-ray of my arms can produce the intent of wanting to harm me.
Counterproductive as in, the "good vs bad" framing is pointless because it does not help with solutions. If your solution is to ban joins, you will have a hard time gaining traction for your cause. Strategic advocacy requires understanding axes along which you may be able to produce a coherent argument and gain leverage. "Ban joins" does not help.
The root-cause of all of this isn't evil government, or data analytics, or joins, or even evil company.
Its data collection. Its privacy. If were waiting around for the day people start acting ethically, we'll experience the heat death of the universe.
Governments can always turn evil. Companies can always be compelled. People can always turn evil.
We need to not give them the ammunition. We've cornered ourselves into a situation where we sacrifice our data and privacy, and we are forced to blindly trust it will not be used against us.
If we do not collect data, we cannot have data breaches. If we do not collect data, we cannot have mass surveillance. If we do not collect data, we cannot have wiretapping.
We've simply allowed and encouraged tech companies to collect as much data as humanly possible. That starts with Google, Meta, et al. We then trust they will not abuse it.
But they certainly can, and they certainly will. What is done now cannot be undone. We cannot take back data immortalized. But, what we can do is prevent new data collection.
Use private services. Run software locally when feasible. Deny analytics. Block advertisments. Use end to end ecryption. Etc.
Palantir is still a tumor. We don't need people profiting off database joins, Oracle did that and became the most hated company on the planet. If the surveillance industry ends up resembling the other "rice bowl" military contractors, American taxpayers will suffer most. It will inevitably become a cost treadmill with infinite billable hours, Congress has seen this happen hundreds of times.
In truth, the rest of your arguement is fully correct. Palantir is often portrayed as the "hacking American businesses" group, but that's NSO. Palantir is merely buying out the data from morally-flexible telecoms and capricious cookie-laden websites. There is an uncomfortable truth about networked technology that America has swept under the rug for decades, and now we have entire businesses as a symptom of that failure. It's a sickening precedent for a free society.
I'd like to believe in a political solution to this. I've yet to see one, and the consequences of the Snowden leaks suggest we may never correct course here in America.
You're dependent regardless. You are dependent on your service provider, your hardware, your UPS battery backup, your RAID drives being easily replaced, your backups.
It reminds me of people who raise their own chickens and think they're living off the grid. But they need the materials to build the coop, the chicken feed, fencing, etc.
With my computer, I’m dependent on my supplier for the tools. There’s usually a reasonable market serving a variety of tools. With a storage service provider, I’m dependent on their rules, and there’s high friction (migration) to escape from those rules.
I can change a colo location in minutes if it’s virtual or a couple of days if it’s a rack of equipment. I can change my transit provider too. Supermicro seem to have supply problems right now, but dell don’t.
If you tie yourself into amazon specific tooling you are dependent on one company.
There’s a difference between dependencies beeded for growth and dependencies needed for continued operations. I can still watch my dvds, but every streaming operator that does sales happily takes away digital movies I “bought”
That's like saying when you grow your own tomatoes you're dependent on the weather or your capability to deal with said weather. That is true. But it misses the point. When you grow your own tomatoes and the store sells only a certain bad tasting kind, suddenly wants to increase the price by factor 10 or stops selling tomatoes at all, then the value of growing it yourself shows. And they are dependent on the weather just like you.
If you self host, you're dependent on things sure. But the point isn't to reach some hypothetical perfect state of independence, the point is to get the flavour you want, not have to deal with them changing their business model, and so on.
The reason I self host my webservers is because my webhoster decided to charge a premium for SSL certs. So much in fact that for the cost of one cert per month I could run a webserver for a year.
Then I had my mailservers noster taking decisions I didn't like, so again I went and self hosted.
Some of those things are running for a decade now and I have yet to experience the catastrophic events you mention. Sure you need to do your due diligence and know your craft, but at least I am ot affected by someone changing their business model or deciding it isn't profitable anymore.
Not sure what your point is. The ability to manufacture silicon chips will only ever be in the hands of a relatively small group of people worldwide. So of course all of us are dependent on these people/businesses to do any form of modern computing.
The question isn't how can we live without dependencies. It's how many dependencies must we have? And of those that aren't strictly necessary, what are the benefits (and costs) of breaking them?
It's also a matter of capital vs operational dependency. Intel needs to exist today to buy a chip, but my 9 year old mid range desktop still works fine and is perfectly snappy today, and I suspect my minipcs (which draw as much power as a lightbulb or two, so could easily be solar/battery powered) will also work fine for at least a decade. I can't imagine needing more computing power than an N100 provides for a home server; mine is already 99% idle. So these things will basically never be obsolete.
I suspect the actual chips will last the rest of my life at least, so even if a capacitor fails on the motherboard, the skills to replace those are considerably more common if CPU manufacturers were to fail somehow (or if new hardware became unusable due to DRM or something).
You grow the chicken feed nearby on your farm and you create materials by hand
I mean sure there are a lot of Instagram homesteaders that are obviously cosplaying but you are making the comment like you've never known anybody that lives in the deep backwoods, I mean, just spend a few years living in deep Appalachia and you'll see what I mean.
Folks don't have the same style of living you have in mind but they are probably closer to subsistence farming than you'd give them credit for. Now, these people will buy tools at Walmart, because they are just surviving and not cosplaying, but they'd also get by if Walmart disappeared. They're a lot less dependent than I am.
I don't know anyone who thinks chickens are the path to complete freedom from society. I do know many who feel that chickens and other such measures provide a level of independence from societal structures they wish not to associate with or do not trust.
Having your own infra is similar. You still need electricity, replacement components and perhaps friends with similar ideas that you can trade information/services with over packet radio links but it is certainly better than whoops, no internet for a few days, nothing works, touch grass.
It also is a nice backup in case anyone starts actively censoring (versus the passive self-censoring created by tempting people into walled gardens) the internet where I live. Being able to shitpost over encrypted packet radio and exchange files/news is certainly better than radio silence and state media.
> I think we exist to bring new things into existence. If you ask me, to the extent there is a meaning of life, that’s it. We exist to create. It lights us up in a way nothing else does, putting something new into our world—and in doing so, fundamentally changing it, in whatever way, however big or small.
I find this a rather strange, limited way of looking at our existence.
I believe there is joy in creating. I believe there is joy in just spending time with the people you love. I believe there is joy in exploring new places, people, ideas. I believe there is joy in being still and present.
We are always looking for some singular, defining thing in our lives. What does it all mean. It has to be for something.
But I disagree. It doesn't have to be for anything. It's enough to just do what brings you joy, to evolve and change, to treat others in kindness. The rest is just personal preferences.
No amount of fame or success will alter who you truly are inside. If anything, laying your happiness at the foot of external validation from others in the form of critical success or fame is a poisoned apple.
There are plenty of examples of wildly successful people unable to manage their own demons -- see Kurt Cobain or Anthony Bourdain.
