Betteridge’s law of headlines would say “No”, but this isn’t a headline. It’s a tool that analyzes how truly decentralized cryptocurrency networks are. And yet, the answer still appears to be “No”.

Which network is the least centralized? Check the results and let us know what you think.

Cedric Chin, writing about the famous adage that says “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

At some level, this is self-evident. Goodhart’s Law is about as pithy and about as practicable as “the only certainty in life is death and taxes” and “hell is other people.” It is descriptive; it tells you of the existence of a phenomenon, but it doesn’t tell you what to do about it or how to solve it.

There are more useful formulations of the law that help solve it. Some organizations use this narrower, more actionable form:

When people are pressured to meet a target value there are three ways they can proceed:

1. They can work to improve the system
2. They can distort the system
3. Or they can distort the data

With that framing in hand, Cedric goes on to describe how you can solve for these three ways and design incentive/measurement systems that work.

I almost brought up the Law of Demeter on Go Time a couple weeks back:

That being said, sometimes you just have to follow the other person’s path until you realize when it doesn’t actually work for you. I’m totally fine with cargo-culting some sort of rule… I was gonna say the Law of Demeter, but that one’s too hard to explain. What’s a very simple – DRY, right?

See how quickly I abandoned ship there? Ok, it’s not that hard to explain. I just didn’t feel like taking the time to explain it when it wasn’t even my point. Good thing Double Agent Caleb Hearth did a nice write-up on Test Double’s blog about it!

Todd Gamblin, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, joined us to talk about Moore’s Law, his work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the components of a micro-chip, and High Performance Computing.

M.G. Siegler goes way out on a limb with some BIG predictions of things that could happen this year, Simon Willison’s year-end roundup is a must-read and perhaps the only thing you have to read to get up-to-speed on the state of the LLM, Allen Pike describes a method for magic, Tom Critchlow thinks small databases are magic & James Stanier agrees with me about Parkinson’s Law and the usefulness of deadlines.

Shay Banon, the creator of Elasticsearch, joins us to discuss pulling off a reverse rug pull. Yes, Elasticsearch is open source, again! We discuss the complexities surrounding open source licensing and what made Elastic change their license, the implications of trademark law, the personal and business impact of moving away from open source, and ultimately what made them hit rewind and return to open source.

Marcus Buffett writes his younger self programming advice, Swyx asks and answers whether or not DevRel is dead, the Ghost team opens up their ActivityPub server, Pongo is like MongoDB but on Postgres, Jack Kelly is funding Ladybird because he can’t fund Firefox & Hyrum’s Law.

This week Adam went solo — talking to Kyle Wiens, Founder and CEO at iFixit, about all things Right to Repair. They discussed the latest win here in the US with Oregon passing an electronics Right to Repair law to allow owners the right to get their stuff fixed anywhere as well as limit the anti-repair practices of parts pairing. They also discussed the history of the DMCA, the challenges posed by Section 1201, the challenges of recycling products with glued-in batteries, the need for producer responsibility, the future of repairability, repair scoring systems to inform consumers, and so much more. Did you know that iFixit funds its advocacy work through the sale of its tools and parts? So cool.

On Monday, October 30, 2023, the U.S. White House issued its Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. Two days later, a policy paper was issued by the U.K. government entitled The Bletchley Declaration by Countries Attending the AI Safety Summit, 1-2 November 2023. It was signed by 29 countries, including the United States and China, the global leaders in AI research.

In this Fully Connected episode, Daniel and Chris parse the details and highlight key takeaways from these documents, especially the extensive and detailed executive order, which has the force of law in the United States.

Well, the end of Moore’s law has forced YouTube to make its own video chip. General purpose processors weren’t cutting it for specialized tasks like video transcoding, and after a 10 minute meeting with YouTube chief Susan Wojcicki, the company’s first video chip project was approved.

The obvious motive for building your own chip for a specific purpose is cost savings, but that’s not always the case. In many instances, big tech companies are simply looking to create a strategic advantage with custom chips. Consolidation in the chip industry also plays into the equation, as there are now only a couple of custom chipmakers to choose from in a given category making general-purpose processors that aren’t great at specialized tasks.

Google said the Argos VCUs delivered a performance boost of anywhere between 20 to 33 times compared to traditional server hardware running well-tuned transcoding software.

A fun post from the Grafana blog for your Friday enjoyment:

It started as all good projects do … with Rick Astley.

After seeing the project about how to Rickroll your friends with Grafana — in which a seemingly innocent hyperlink surprises users with the music video for Astley’s classic “Never Gonna Give You Up” rendered with Prometheus and Grafana — a question arose: Can Grafana run Doom?

Thankfully, this post breaks Betteridge’s law of headlines. The answer to the question is a resounding yes!

Paul Orlando joins Jerod to talk through some unintended consequences that occur when systems operate at scale. We discuss Goodhart’s Law, The Cobra Effect, how to design incentive systems, dependency management decisions, the risks of autonomous vehicles, and much more along the way.

In a copyright decision that will undoubtedly have ripple effects on the software industry for years to come, the Supreme Court of the United States held that:

Google’s copying of the Java SE API, which included only those lines of code that were needed to allow programmers to put their accrued talents to work in a new and transformative program, was a fair use of that material as a matter of law.

This quote pulled from the linked opinion by a hacker news commenter drives right in to the heart of the matter:

“Google copied approximately 11,500 lines of declaring code from the API, which amounts to virtually all the declaring code needed to call up hundreds of different tasks. Those 11,500 lines, however, are only 0.4 percent of the entire API at issue, which consists of 2.86 million total lines. In considering “the amount and substantiality of the portion used” in this case, the 11,500 lines of code should be viewed as one small part of the considerably greater whole. As part of an interface, the copied lines of code are inextricably bound to other lines of code that are accessed by programmers. Google copied these lines not because of their creativity or beauty but because they would allow programmers to bring their skills to a new smartphone computing environment.”

You may be wondering why this is a good idea. Thankfully, the README starts by answering that question:

• Leverage web technologies: Use all of CSS, Canvas, SVG, WebGL, etc.
• Leverage programming: Use variables, functions, APIs, math and algorithms to create new effects
• Leverage React: Reusable components, Powerful composition, Fast Refresh, Package ecosystem

If you want to see it in action, the announcement video for Remotion was written in Remotion itself. (Because of course)

At this point, we may need to adjust Atwood’s Law, which states:

any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.

I think a s/JavaScript/React/g would do the trick…

Dave Kerr joins Jerod to discuss the various laws, theories, principles, and patterns that we developers find useful in our work and life. We unpack Hanlon’s Razor, Gall’s Law, Murphy’s Law, Kernighan’s Law, and too many others to list here.

Marko Saric, who you may remember as the only content marketer we’ve met who runs Linux:

Most GDPR consent banner implementations are deliberately engineered to be difficult to use and are full of dark patterns that are illegal according to the law.

I wanted to find out how many visitors would engage with a GDPR banner if it were implemented properly (not obtrusive, easy way to say “no” etc) and how many would grant consent to their information being collected and shared.

Is this more proof of Cunningham’s law, which says, “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.”

Update: as some keen HN commenters have pointed out, it looks like the rust program is not actually equivalent to the go program. The go program parses the string once, while the rust program parses it repeatedly inside every loop. It’s quite late in Sydney as I write this so I’m not up for a fix right now, but this post is probably Fake News.

Read Christian’s post then have fun in the comments and discussions on HN and Reddit analyzing his hypothesis, which includes a repo of code to backup his ideas.

I’m pretty sure that, given the state of the world and the focus on Zoom right now, they will rectify this, but until then…“the only feature of Zoom that does appear to be end-to-end encrypted is in-meeting text chat.”

“They’re a little bit fuzzy about what’s end-to-end encrypted,” Green said of Zoom. “I think they’re doing this in a slightly dishonest way. It would be nice if they just came clean.”

Without end-to-end encryption, Zoom has the technical ability to spy on private video meetings and could be compelled to hand over recordings of meetings to governments or law enforcement in response to legal requests.

Jared Nelsen tells a story that we’re all too familiar with. Nothing new there, but the analysis and concluding thoughts are worth sticking around for. My favorite:

There is a fundamental mismatch between the public square’s claim that companies are absolutely desperate to hire software engineers and the brutal reality of being a software engineering candidate. These do-or-die high pressure coding challenges seem like more of a hazing mechanism rather than a valuable evaluation tool. Using them is like hiring a police officer by shooting at him before you ask him what he knows about the law.

Colin Lecher reporting for The Verge:

Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law AB 730, which makes it a crime to distribute audio or video that gives a false, damaging impression of a politician’s words or actions.

While the word “deepfake” doesn’t appear in the legislation, the bill clearly takes aim at doctored works. Lawmakers have raised concerns recently that distorted deepfake videos, like a slowed video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that appeared over the summer, could be used to influence elections in the future.

This is the first (but likely not the last) piece of legislation aimed at fighting the potential impact of GANs Gone Wild.

It’ll be interesting to watch this game play out. I think the only long-term, sustainable solution will emerge from the same arena where the problem began: technological advances.

Joel Marcey shares his story and some background on what a developer advocate is and how to be success as a developer advocate.

I am a believer in the pop-culture version of Occam’s razor, or the law of simplicity, where the simplest explanation is usually the right one. A developer advocate is exactly what its title implies — an advocate for developers.

A successful developer advocate can go both deep and broad. They can own a technology stack but also run programs that span an entire open source program office…

A successful developer advocate is able to quickly ramp up on new technologies, sometimes with no background in the space previously, and be able to understand how those technologies may fit into the overall open source ecosystem.

For the entrepreneurial type: this is a great dive into the fundamentals of product-market fit by @sparkszilla. The whole read is worth it if you’re interested in raising funds in the future. The heart of the article stems from three axiomatic theories:

• Rachleff’s Law of Startup Success: Rachleff says, “The #1 company-killer is lack of market. When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins. When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins. When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.”
• Rachleff’s Corollary of Startup Success: “The only thing that matters is getting to product-market fit.”
• BPMF and APMF: The lives of startups are divided into two categories, before product-market fit (BPMF) and after product-market fit (APMF).

And the Vohra questionnaire to see if you have PMF is one I’ll keep on hand for the future. 👌

From Conway’s Law, to The Law of Leaky Abstractions — you’ll find links to laws, theories, principles, and patterns useful to developers — curated by Dave Kerr.

Conway’s Law — This law suggests that the technical boundaries of a system will reflect the structure of the organization. It is commonly referred to when looking at organization improvements, Conway’s Law suggests that if an organization is structured into many small, disconnected units, the software it produces will be. If an organization is built more around ‘verticals’ which are orientated around features or services, the software systems will also reflect this.

Jeremy Keith starts off his 24 Ways article by reminding us of Murphy’s Law. What does this have to do with the web you may ask?

A service worker is a Murphy-battling technology that you can inject into a visitor’s device from your website. Once it’s installed, it can intercept any requests made to your domain. If anything goes wrong with a request—as is inevitable—you can provide instructions for the browser. That’s your opportunity to turn those server outage frowns upside down. Take those network connection lemons and make network connection lemonade.

Just as we design 404 pages, designing a pleasant offline experience is important.

There’s some seriously interesting thoughts shared here for building out a multi-CDN strategy. Having had issues with how to best use and leverage a CDN to get the best performance benefits, I can see how having a multi-CDN implementation would allow us to choose the right CDN for a given region of the world, as well as a whole host of other options based on things like cost, performance, and of course redundancy for when things go wrong. Murphy’s law, right?

This summer, the 2018 World Cup set an all-time streaming record – tripling its own 2014 record – with over 22 Tbps measured by Akamai at peak, but the event wasn’t smooth sailing for everyone. In a highly competitive market, and in an age where streaming failures make headlines, redundancy and quality of experience have never been more crucial for content publishers.

Drop a comment below if there are other resources out there on this subject that we should check out.

I find it a bit odd that so many of these terminal-focused tools/libraries are written in JavaScript. Why is this? Atwood’s Law, perhaps?

In this “groundbreaking decision,” the Feds here in the US are now saying that hacking DRM to fix your electronics IS legal. This is a big change from when we recorded The Changelog #221: How We Got Here with Cory Doctorow.

The new exemptions are a major win for the right to repair movement and give consumers wide latitude to legally repair the devices they own.

Jason Koebler says this on Motherboard:

New copyright rules are released once every three years by the US Copyright Office and are officially put into place by the Librarian of Congress. These are considered “exemptions” to section 1201 of US copyright law, and makes DRM circumvention legal in certain specific cases. The new repair exemption is broad, applies to a wide variety of devices (an exemption in 2015 applied only to tractors and farm equipment, for example), and makes clear that the federal government believes you should be legally allowed to fix the things you own.

Finally, an article that breaks Betteridge’s law of headlines!

Elixir is known for being a language made for building distributed applications that scale, are massively concurrent, and have self-healing properties. All of these adjectives paint Elixir in a grandiose light. And for good reasons! But is Elixir also a language that can be used for the more mundane tasks of this world like scripting? I think the answer is a definite yes.

I’ve been writing Elixir for a few years now, but when it comes time to script something I still reach for Ruby. Case in point, our data import routines for changelog.com (which y’all know is an Elixir app) are written in Ruby.

Why do I do this? Familiarity plays a big part. Also I find Ruby to be highly ergonomic for such tasks. Having said that, this article will make me consider trying Elixir for my next script.

Betteridge’s law of headlines declares: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” But first, let’s see what CJ Chilvers has to say (emphasis mine):

We’re just numb to the Buzzfeed-ification of podcasts, even (especially?) in outlets like NPR.

Then came popular YouTuber CGPGrey (one my favorite podcasters) and his Project Cyclops. In short, this is a well-known, well-liked podcaster who is now advising people to stop listening to podcasts. He has promised to stop listening himself as well — he will only create.

Nothing against any of the people involved in this article, but all of it feels like an overreaction. If you feel that a podcast is wasting your time or that it’s not the quality production you want, the solution is simple: unsubscribe. You don’t go and start a movement calling for everyone to stop listening to podcasts. That’s just — as Jerod Santo put it when we were chatting about this story — asinine.

In further irony, GCPGrey still wants you to listen to the podcast he’s creating, obviously.

A fun read, but does it fall pray to Betteridge’s Law of Headlines? 😏