> This corresponded almost exactly with things I shouldn't have been doing anyway, so it wasn't too hard.
The writer appears to be saying that there is no conflict between what he thinks is right and what the general public thinks is right. This is why I suggested naive or foolish might be better terms. I love Bonhoeffer, though!
You're right that that's what the piece says. It's not what I would write now: there definitely are things that I think are right and most people don't. Instead of doing those things secretly, however, I do them and make a public case for them.
It is hard to read this any other way then - you are in a privileged position of having never been personally challenged by a lack of privacy so are fine with privacy not existing. By that reasoning you are also OK with those who are effected being silenced, because they are, for example, not cisgender, white skinned and male and could face attack for random individuals for expressing their views in public.
The challenging thing about reading books like Bonhoffer is that it compels you to questioning what your response would have been if placed in the same situation.
I don't think we'll be able to prevent the disappearance of privacy as technology continues to get cheaper and more widespread. I'm not saying "this is good", I'm saying "this is coming, adapt".
We won't be able to prevent it only if we accept it. The erosion of privacy is self-imposed, so if it brings damage and people consider it important, it will stop.
Our world is non-ideal in many ways, and there are many potential sacrifices one could make to help improve our future. Using more private technology is one of them, but so are things like avoiding flying, going vegan, switching careers to directly work on a problem, or donating to support progress in these or other areas. I think it's pretty hard to make a case that trying to hold back the large decrease in privacy is more altruistically valuable than, say, trying to keep humanity from wiping itself out (nukes, bioengineering, AI, etc).
Interesting, but those aren't very high stakes controversial opinions. People may strongly disagree with them, but they aren't likely to lead to a declined job offer, workplace difficulties or harassment. There are many stances for which making a public case is futile because people have strong emotional commitments around them. Would you still be public about them?
Yes, I would still be public. I think making a case is almost never futile: I don't think I've ever encountered a topic where there weren't some people (often the quieter ones) who cared about the arguments.
I think this is generally good advice for software engineering, accept when its not. The problem is that some bad ideas become better ideas by virtue of being popular ideas. Write a shitty framework/language/technology and you have nothing, convince a million people to use it and it becomes compelling because it has a lot of users working with it and solving problems.
Its the classic stone soup story[1]. You see this especially with software and tools that focus on front load new users making it really easy to do trivial things but failing catastrophically when you need more.
You also see the reverse of this, great ideas that don't get bye-in failing by virtue of being too niche.
100% this. People forget when using dynamic languages they are trading up front cost - its easier to write the code but harder to test. In trivial or exploratory coding the tradeoff can be good, but it is a tradeoff.
That being said, using rust can be really nice for exploratory coding. If don't worry about edge case (use unwarp()/panic!) and don't worry about memory efficiency (use clone()) it still produces fast, memory efficient code.
If you are talking speed to production ready code then rust is really productive. The rust tooling picks up a lot of errors and leads you to spending more time fixing coding issues rather then compile to test your code.
If you are trying to promote usage of the data you might want to put the dictionary under a more permissive license as GPL-3+ conflicts with a lot of other licenses. Something like Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence (V3.0)[1] might work better.
Ironic to me that it is completely possible to make pdf copies of a physically borrowed book, and at least in academia making physical copies of chapters of books was extremely common and one of the primary uses of photo copy machines.
If the people you borrowed from say its OK after the fact then yes it is OK.
If I borrow a neighbours defibrillator, without asking, to save their child it would be insane for the manufacturer of the defibrillator to sue me for not buying my own defibrillator. While in theory the neighbour could object to me borrowing the defibrillator without permission, that does not appear to be what happened. Based on IA's statements it appears that libraries are saying after the fact that they were happy for their copies of books to be loaned by IA.
I would assume from their actions these publishers hoped to make a windfall on book sales when people were no longer able to access libraries and they saw IA's actions as attacking this potential profit. I can't think of any other reason why they would peruse their current course of action.
You are loosing the investment potential of the building on your property. There is nothing to stop you buying an old house (that is essentially valued at nothing) on a property and living in it. That will essentially maintain the equity you put in.
Japan introduced taxes to remove the incentives for speculative investments in realestate. The changes mostly seemed to have worked, but it came at a high cost for the speculators.
The big issues that consistently affects real-estate around Tokyo is proximity to a station and the age of the building. The basic rule is that a condominium must be within 10 minutes walk from a station, and a free standing house up to 15 minutes walk. A house around 30 years old is worthless, and a house younger will be some fraction of its original purchase price. There are exceptions but this is a pretty good rule of thumb. Land is generally the only thing that appreciates in value and only if its in a desirable location. As a point of reference, we live in an 90m^2 home 45min from Tokyo station and it was less then the above price.
Because many of them were built cheaply to begin with and develop problems over the decades. They weren't built for long-term living, and in a sense it was the right move since Japan was developing rapidly up till the end of the '80s. (Well-built exceptions probably exist, of course.) And then there's increased earthquake/disaster risk with poorer construction.
It's something I wondered about too until I looked at descriptions and photos of >30-year-old houses on real estate sites.
I think that's more perception then reality. I live in a 30 year old house and it could easily last 100 years if properly maintained, but there is little incentive to improve the building because it will not improve the resale value.
"So if there was anything I was considering doing where if it became public I would be hurt, I wouldn't do it."
There is a great book Bonhoeffer[1] by Eric Mataxas which deals with this and a lot of other issues
1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35493109-bonhoeffer