Dan Kaminsky Profile picture
Aug 25, 2019 6 tweets 2 min read Read on X
If you want to understand why Linux achieved “world domination” — how it unambiguously wrecked, and rendered irrelevant — Windows and OSX in the cloud, it wasn’t exactly technical superiority.

You choose them, you spend all your time fighting fiddly licensing bugs.

Once.
Nothing is more expensive than having to ask permission.

Nothing is more desired, by some.

@nVidia, you don’t need to bind your ****ing control panel to a single motherboard. It’s ok.

I can hack around all this, and will.
Though repeatedly abandoning working APIs is also a thing.

Oh, Software.
The problem with enforced licensing is it’s a feature set for making sure things don’t work.

It’s hard enough getting things *to* work. It’s a little like a restaurant making sure *some* people get food poisoning, or a surgeon leaving room to let a few patients die of infection.
You can make any case you like, board man gotta get paid, but the unambiguous avoidance of these licensing structures in software looks *exactly* like how we’d treat those providers.

I’m at the end of a thirty hour sprint with a Surprise Fuck You and friendly or not, not *now*.
It will be a 20-30 hour sprint to unbreak this, which of course reflects why software is so hard to predict schedules for. But when intent shows up, so do consequences. I’ll totally get over it, others absolutely never do.

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More from @dakami

Dec 19, 2020
The problem with algorithms is that abject stupidity can seem smart when separated from context.

Older COVID patients are ~100x more likely to die if infected. But the residents are spending *months* in COVID wards, *intentionally*.

They’re much more likely to get infected.
Now, these twenty something residents may not die quickly. But we don’t have the complete data on “Long COVID”. Hasn’t been long enough.

Early data is not good. Up to 30% are ending up with chronic respiratory disorders.

“It’s like if 40 pack-years of smoking was contagious.”
The algorithm that only looks at short term fatalities misses both the decidedly non-random exposure probabilities and the preliminary findings on Long COVID.

You know who did not miss those factors? The residents.
Read 9 tweets
Dec 19, 2020
@jeffiel Jeff,

Nobody stays where they’re hated. We are hated, taken completely for granted as tax dollars and despised as invaders otherwise. I’m an actual SF native who has spent most of his life here. It deserves to lose tech, full stop.

You know why we can go?

No mortgages. Oops.
@jeffiel Where was leadership when it came to letting tech put down roots?

The NIMBY bullshit here is so extraordinary, it can be seen from outer space. Literally. Here.
@jeffiel By comparison. Note how things change.
Read 11 tweets
Dec 18, 2020
wait for it
queen on a mean
Read 4 tweets
Jan 5, 2020
You can’t vouch for your own bug. You will always see it as the most beautiful bug that ever did bug. Doesn’t matter if you’re the one who does the thing, or even if you’re right. If it needs a vouch, recuse yourself. It’s ok. It’ll hold up on its own, or not. Learn either way.
On the flip side, be careful whose vouches you do trust. Review boards have drama that has absolutely nothing to do with you, starting from the reality that they can’t accept all the good talks. No room.

People in such situations sometimes get shitty. Don’t take it personally.
You absolutely need external calibration. You’ll eventually notice our culture (for *many* definitions of our) has a positive feedback problem.

A rule of thumb is, don’t seek approval from those who reject everything. What can you expect?

No easy answers here.
Read 48 tweets
Jul 7, 2019
Hypothesis:

At the microprocessor scale, moving data and computation are not actually different things. You’re always moving bits. You’re sometimes changing them.

Bits may fly straight to RAM and back, or spin inside the CPU. Either way, distance traveled.

Coding is routing.
All models are wrong, some are useful. I think this unified view of computer engineering is interesting. Explains the enormous effects of locality, smaller processes, etc. Shorter distances.

Faster clocks? Bits don’t have to fly as far. Less power per bit. Lighter spins faster.
You could argue this is just another formulation of the time/memory tradeoff, but I think that says recomputing bits on demand is different than restoring them from memory.
Read 23 tweets
Jun 28, 2019
It's why we talk about them as concentration camps.

Somebody thought about how to make this experience more miserable, to children. Somebody optimized.

Local actors extrapolate. "Well, clearly we're not supposed to be nice to these kids. We'd have resources if we were."
"Nobody could have foreseen"

Bullshit. We know exactly where this is now, and exactly where this is going, and that's why we're calling them concentration camps.

If someone did this to your kids, you'd lose it. You'd be right to.

Stop kidnapping kids. We can't handle 'em.
It's true that people have been crying wolf about Nazis.

Does not mean there aren't wolves.

Doesn't mean people were born wolves. We've got a wolf breeding ground, here. We've got a Nazi factory, here.

If we can't fix this, we can't fix anything. "We" are not in charge.
Read 7 tweets

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