There are people certain the earth is flat, the moon landings were fake. That certainty doesn't impress me. So I'm just really not sure what the point is.
The point was that science doesn't allow for certainty, by construction. We're not certain the sun will rise tomorrow, we're not certain the speed of light is a limit, we're not certain that F=ma or that E=mc².
Those that want certainty have to look to religion, or to pseudoscience. And they will certainly be wrong.
Bingo. People who think science is fact dont understand science.
The actual fact is, we humans really don’t know much about the universe and indeed there may be truths and knowledge that we’ll never know the answer to. Like… why the fuck are we here? Where did all this stuff come from. Sure we have theories and have logical conclusions but at the end of the day… we are tiny and the universe is mind bogglingly huge. It is peak human arrogance to think we truly know anything at all.
It’s very humbling to realise how little we actually know. What we do know… we know. We are masters of electro-magnetism, chemistry, etc… but when it comes to the big questions it’s all a shot in the dark.
I imagine one example is the imposition of their values on LGBTQ/trans/etc. It’s very much a “stop you from having personal freedoms” padded with very, very weak strawman arguments for why they’re protecting themselves or kids from imaginary bogeymen.
Thank you for illustrating my point. I dedicated entire following paragraph to explaining that you're not free if exercising your lawful freedom costs you your job, but you didn't even read it. It's not that you didn't understand it, you didn't even read it. Literal syntax error.
To answer your follow-up question: I understand "freedom" as "freedom to". This trivially includes "freedom from" through "freedom to choose not to participate in something".
You're not wrong, but I'm also constantly surprised at places where devs will inject complexity.
A former project that had a codec system for serializing objects that involved scala implicits comes to mind. It involved a significant amount of internal machinery, just to avoid writing 5 toString methods. And made it so that changing imports could break significant parts of the project in crazy ways.
It's possible nobody at the beginning of the project knew they would only have 5 of these objects (if they had 5 at the beginning, how many would they have later?), but I think that comes back to the article's point. There are often significantly simpler solutions that have fewer layers of indirection, and will work better. You shouldn't reach for complexity until you need it.
> Who would have thought someday a new engine rises in this climate, and then who would have thought it would be a small team, without a trillion dollar giant behind them pouring hundreds of millions into its production?
Anybody who has ever worked on a large enterprise software team. Anybody who has ever worked in this scenario will believe this. Computing history is full of 2-10 people teams beating giant well funded teams to the punch.
This mostly occurs because work expands to fill the time and resources allowed for the project (Parkinson's Law), and large companies have almost unlimited amounts of both.
Exactly, and to add to that: people who work on the stuff they personally like tend to do thing faster than people who work on stuff because they have to (like it is often the case in large enterprises).
It also helps that working on a browser engine is "easy" in the sense that you are developing to a known target and there are increasingly decent test suites available. It helps a lot with keeping motivation alive since there's a persistent drip feed of low-hanging fruit and it'd easy to quantify your productivity and you don't get super stuck, vs. having to innovate or greenfield stuff. Teams of skilled volunteers excel at this, and makes for fairly easy contributor recruitment to feed that team. Making a browser engine is almost the ideal case.
The breadth of the task is staggering, but there is a real shot at posting the necessary endurance given the circumstances, being thrifty and given time.
Before you reach for the downvote button for talking out of my arse and calling what the Ladybird folks doing a (qualified, specific) "easy", when we at KDE created KHTML which later begat WebKit, for many years - kling might remember! - our IRC channel topic was "which mozilla bug do we emulate today?", so I've seen it happen once before! Ladybird can succeed; consider contributing.
I guess it makes sense. Almost nothing could be easier to dog-food, and if you get stuck you can always read how Blink, WebKit, and Gecko implement something.
You're describing classical liberalism. The meaning of the term liberalism in the US switched to social liberalism back in the great depression (unless specified with a qualifier). It has remained roughly constant for as long as most people on this site have been alive. Though I will grant that the policies social liberals support have changed since then.
