Four short links: 5 February 2020
Go to Rust, Underinvestment in Quality, Ad Tech Report, and Mission Creep
- Discord Switching from Go to Rust — memory management proved a deciding factor: Go’s garbage collector versus Rust’s compile-time ownership of memory.
- What Happened with DNC Tech (Rabble) — a lot of background and context, but the crux is: the decision-makers refuse to use free software, alienating the progcoders/ragtag communities. They also refuse to fund projects between cycles to build reusable platforms. Best pithy comment: underinvestment in quality is still the median software project experience by William Pietri.
- Out of Control — Norwegian Consumer Council report on the ad tech industry. Many actors in the online advertising industry collect information about us from a variety of places, including web browsing, connected devices, and social media. When combined, this data provides a complex picture of individuals, revealing what we do in our daily lives, our secret desires, and our most vulnerable moments. This massive commercial surveillance is systematically at odds with our fundamental rights and can be used to discriminate, manipulate, and exploit us. They’re filing lawsuits against companies, too.
- Morning Report: Smart Streetlights Are Experiencing Mission Creep — it’s my theory that once something is shown to be possible with bits, it will happen because there’s such diversity of motivations in the world that someone wants it to happen, and it’s nigh impossible to prevent things without physical restrictions. Not everyone can put cameras and other sensors into streetlights, but once they’re there, we’ll see every application of that data justified. It’s the Tragic Inevitability of Software, which we’re only beginning to appreciate.
