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DaveFlater's comments

DaveFlater | 2 years ago | on: Does Wayland really break everything?

My Wayland performance experience was that it broke Nvidia at a time when Nvidia was supposed to be working. The reason it didn't work was down in the weeds of this version of Mesa and that version of Nvidia, both of which were recent, and the bottom line was that X performance still exceeded Wayland's.

Security has always been a hard sell to end users because the costs are immediate and tangible while the benefits are in the future.

DaveFlater | 2 years ago | on: Does Wayland really break everything?

The pertinent question is whether the user sees anything valuable in exchange for what Wayland does break. If users are to accept breakage, it has to be in a tradeoff for something they want. That incentive has not appeared. That means that the market for Wayland is actually not users but distro builders (c.f. systemd).

DaveFlater | 2 years ago | on: Show HN: Chrome Reaper

Keep reading. It's surely open source, but the license is mixed due to reuse of previous work that was CC-By 3.0 and similar.

An R package that I did was blocked from CRAN solely because they wanted me to choose a license from a fixed menu and I legally could not. Such policy creates a perverse incentive to not acknowledge previous work or to rationalize about the point at which the code is so mutated that it is no longer derivative.

DaveFlater | 2 years ago | on: Show HN: Chrome Reaper

It was incidental to software metrology. CPU utilization is a measurable quantity. The question is what can we do with that.

DaveFlater | 2 years ago | on: A mathematical formalization of dimensional analysis (2012)

Related work for those who are into this: Álvaro P. Raposo. The Algebraic Structure of Quantity Calculus II: Dimensional Analysis and Differential and Integral Calculus. Measurement Science Review, 2019. doi:10.2478/msr-2019-0012 Full text available at the DOI and on ResearchGate.

DaveFlater | 2 years ago | on: Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear

It's not really a competition. Ramping up nuclear will not make fossil fuel burning go away. You just have two sets of problems.

Both industries have a track record of allowing "can't happen" events to happen. Oil & gas gave us climate change disasters, Deepwater Horizon, Exxon Valdez, and so on. Nuclear power gave us Chernobyl, Fukushima, and a bunch of other incidents that pale in comparison.

Big oil took control of their political situation. Nuclear power never did. So we get political hyperfocus on the risks of transporting nuclear waste while tanker trucks are exploding on a daily basis.

Hydropower has limited opportunities and known costs. The other shoe has not yet dropped on what happens with a massive scale-up of other energy sources like wind, solar, maybe fusion...

DaveFlater | 2 years ago | on: Robert's Rules of Order

I participated in several standards organizations that used Robert's Rules. They were FAR more effective at getting stuff done than the other organizations I've been involved with.

The key contribution of Robert's Rules is right in the name: order. Everyone has a chance to speak, but in an orderly fashion. No shouting down. And when enough has been said, you vote on it and move on. One party who refuses to cooperate cannot hold the proceedings hostage forever.

DaveFlater | 2 years ago | on: No one wants simplicity

"The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay." — Tony Hoare

It is impossible in practice to persuade people to pay the same amount for a simple, reliable product that they would pay for a complex, unreliable one with more features. Reliability is a promise, and they have to trust. Features can be demonstrated now, so less trust is involved (or so it appears).

And then the features stop working.

DaveFlater | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: Anyone using or working on a life dashboard?

Like many others, I have looked at the subproblem of whole-life scheduling and concluded that it can't be done well. On the one hand, a scheduling system has to implement a simple model or the overhead of working with it makes its net value negative. On the other hand, you have to deal with the fractal complexity of real life situations and priorities all the way down, and no simple model can represent it all accurately.
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