Assassination is a Leaky Abstraction

Comments

• DashboTreeFrog@discuss.online ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  it is the right moment for everyone who builds systems of control to reflect. It’s the right moment to pierce those layers of abstraction that allow you to get through each day, and question why it’s so financially lucrative for the system you’re building to exist.

  Because there is no abstraction as leaky as a man waiting outside your hotel at 6:45 in the morning with a gun and murderous intent

  Amazingly written article, last line giving me chills

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  • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This one also a bit chilling:

    A data scientist can tell most of someone’s life story given their zip code, and we try not to think too hard about why that’s always the most predictive feature in the model.

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    • General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Elvis Presley is able to answer that one, and he’s been dead for almost 50 years. Makes you understand why his fame is so lasting, unlike the teen heartthrobs of later decades.

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  • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Someone please make a not that posts articles from this author.

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    • jabathekek@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      substack.com/@davidcoleman717969

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• peopleproblems@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s the right moment to pierce those layers of abstraction that allow you to get through each day, and question why it’s so financially lucrative for the system you’re building to exist.

  I’m glad someone said it because this thought popped in my head yesterday. Been thinking about the consequences of my system, and really if it brings benefit to the users, but also who it affects indirectly.

  So far, I’m ok with it. There is part of it that adds some safety for the business, the users, and people affected indirectly. But it still has a profit motive and that’s the uncomfortable part.

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  • dhork@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    There is nothing wrong with making a profit. People have to be paid, after all, and that includes the ownership who put the money at risk in the operation to begin with. The problem is when making a profit becomes the only motive.

    Every company is established with the purpose of offering a product or performing a service that makes their customers’ better or simpler. If is successful, it grows from nothing to something in a relatively short period of time. Then it gets the attention of the Investor Class, who shovels money into it with the expectation that it will sustain that growth. Now, the focus is on Building Shareholder Value, and the customer is seen as a necessary evil toward that goal.

    The worst thing that ever happened was when we decided that public corporations had a duty to maximize shareholder value above everything else. It renders all those mission and vision statements irrelevant. No matter how much the CEO says the firm’s goal is to make the world a better place through selling stuff, we all know it’s a lie. Their goal is to enrich tthemselves, at our expense.

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    • peopleproblems@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I added an edit to clarify my reflection.

      It’s one of the reasons I couldn’t go into the defense industry. Not just working on weapons that are deadly to enemy combatants and innocents; but making profit off of doing so.

      If there becomes a point in my career where it’s clear that my work doesn’t make things better, then I know I’ve made a mistake.

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    • Kichae@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      If the people putting money in deserve to be paid for that money, it can be treated as a fixed term loan, with an established interest rate. That makes it a business expense.

      Profit is what’s left over after everyone is paid for their work, and the costs of materials, housing, and maintenance - invluding the maintenance of debts - are covered. It’s either what you’ve over-charged your customers, or underpaid your employees.

      And that’s wrong.

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    And that’s one thing I like about the projects I work on. Nothing I’ve built has been directly responsible for profit, it has just supported other profit centers.

    My current project helps us sell our main physical product by making the supporting software easier to use vs competitors. Yeah, the features highlight the benefits of our product vs competition, but the user is free to use any competitor they want, and we even have an open-ish API so they can make their own interface. We charge for it, but it’s far from turning a profit since the main point is to be something our sales team can bundle with the main product.

    We build software for reports, simulation, design, etc, and the entire goal is to be useful, not extract profit. We charge for computationally heavy features, but that’s more to prevent abuse (i.e. keep costs reasonable) than anything.

    My company also has direct competition and who has decided to go with the lockin approach, and customers seem to appreciate us as an alternative. The business itself isn’t particularly ethical, but it’s necessary, so it helps me sleep at night.

    That said, our end goal is to replace good (but dangerous) jobs with automation. and that will be complete once we plug the leaks in our abstractions, and that’s a little sad. So it goes I guess.

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• Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  First time I’ve heard of the “Leaky Abstraction” concept, makes a lot of sense. Good metaphor too.

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  • naught@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The Hacker News crowd uses this phrase every other sentence so it was almost humorous to see it used here. I thought this was a shitpost

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    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yup. Fortunately, I’ve been away from HN long enough that I didn’t immediately avoid the article, and I’m glad I didn’t.

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  • CodexArcanum@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I first heard of it from Joel Spolsky’s blog and wikipedia also credits that article with popularized the concept. In it’s original formulation, it was based on remote procedure calls being hidden in APIs. Because a remote computer call has all these limits of latency, packet/info loss, and possible connection loss, it is impossible to make a perfect abstraction that allows the programmer to treat the remote call as though it were local. The reality the abstraction tries to hide “leaks” in those fundamental limits.

    All of contemporary global society is such an abstraction; that’s one of the principles of post-modernism. When you buy clothes online an entire invisible work force of shippers, manufacturers, resource procurerers, and more lies beind each article of fabric.

    Pressure from climate change, tariffs, global war, and more are straining the foundations of society and the comfortable abstraction is starting to crack.

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• Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Good article

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• pr06lefs@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  More precisely, medical business strategy is a leaky abstraction; the assassination is the leak.

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• thisphuckinguy@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Damn good article

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