What I Read This Week: 2021-30
Late by a day.
-
We Need To Talk About The Insecurity Industry
In technology as in public health, to protect anyone, we must protect everyone. The first step in this direction—at least the first digital step—must be to ban the commercial trade in intrusion software. We do not permit a market in biological infections-as-a-service, and the same must be true for digital infections. Eliminating the profit motive reduces the risks of proliferation while protecting progress, leaving room for publicly-minded research and inherently governmental work.
-
The Assange Case Is Collapsing – But it Remains a Travesty of Justice
Watching the US government’s case against Julian Assange is like watching a levitation act at the music hall. You can see that the object floats, but you’ve no idea how. If normal gravitational laws applied, the Assange case would have crashed to the ground already.
-
What this means is that by year 10, over half of your final portfolio value is already baked in. Why? Because the future compounding of these first 10 years of investments is greater than the compounding on the next 30 years of investments. It might seem crazy, but it’s true.
This means that if you save well enough in your first 10 years, your last 30 years of savings matter far less. Of course, these three decades will contribute to your final portfolio value, but technically they contribute less than the first 10 years do (under the assumptions above). This is why “Go Big, Then Stop” can be such an effective way to think about savings, especially as a young person.
-
Back to the ’70s with Serverless
I don’t agree with author in various points, but their remark on how little interactivity do the serverless systems offer is something worth sharing. The worst offenders in that regard are CI systems due to which I often find myself in a dreadful commit-push-observe cycle. Why can I not run them locally? Thankfully some third-party support exists, e.g. nektos/act.
-
This commit message of mpv-player/mpv
Another week, another gem of a rant.
Imagine they had done this for certain other things. Like
errno
, with all the brokenness of the locale API. This simply wouldn’t have worked, shit would just have been too broken. So they didn’t. But locales give a delicious sweet spot of brokenness, where things are broken enough to cause neverending pain, but not broken enough that enough effort would have spent to fix it completely. -
An explorable explanation of how ships ship.