It’s worth noting that the author of Zen and the Art literally went crazy in pursuit of this.
I don’t mean this to say “you have asked a bad question”, but rather to say, “you have asked so large a question that a man once went insane in trying to answer it.”
I asked the question because i thought it was good manners to do so. Actually I'm strongly convinced that quality describes how a thing fits the preconceptions about that thing.
As testable example, I'm largely unable to tell the quality of beer as i never enjoyed any of it, and thus could not have developed a preconception of how a good beer is supposed to taste.
Trappist quad ales feature a high alcohol content, which makes them sweet but somehow not cloyingly so. Robust Belgian yeasts generate a surprising amount of effervescence, which keeps things light despite the heavy doses of malted barley, and produce esters that generate flavors of banana bread and dark stone fruits that compliment latent notes of burnt sugars and caramel.
That’s a pretty standard description of some of the best ales on the planet (produced by monks in Belgium), if anyone’s curious.
That description has no comparisons and no baseline definition of beer quality. Why do those things make them better than other ales, especially when most of that is subjective? For some people, high alcohol content, sweetness, effervescence, and heavy doses of malted barley are bad things when it comes to beers. All beers have flavor notes, though flavor notes are notoriously ephemeral and suggestible.
I’m familiar with Belgian Ales, I used to like Chimay, and have sampled many others (though not Westvleteren yet). These days I prefer something less strong. The story about Trappist monks is intriguing, but what does it actually mean? Obviously Chimay and several other Belgian Trappist ales are enormous commercial productions that ship beer globally. They are just beer factories doing a huge volume of beer business. The narrative about monks is intended to give people the perception of quality, but it doesn’t actually demonstrate anything, it’s just a narrative.
>Pirsig had a mental breakdown and spent time in and out of psychiatric hospitals between 1961 and 1963. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and treated with electroconvulsive therapy on numerous occasions
>Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values is a book by Robert M. Pirsig first published in 1974.
I'm afraid you're romanticizing the relationship between Pirsig's books and his life. That someone is losing touch with reality doesn't warrant anyone to deconstruct their biography at will and reconstruct it to suit their own narrative.
While it may be true that Pirsig's mental breakdown had nothing to do with what went into the book, the facts you have presented here do not particularly support that conclusion.
If his mental breakdowns had been, say, in 1976 and 1978, that would have supported it much better. But someone working on the philosophical underpinnings of a book for over a decade before the book is published is not at all unreasonable.
My primary memory of the book is that the author specifically ties together the quest for meaning and the loss of mental health, even within the book itself.
How about empirical instead of objective? I think objective vs subjective can be a false dichotomy in terms of quality.
For example, when my phone connects to WiFi as soon as I get home every time, correctly, for the last many years, that's very strong empirical evidence of quality.
I disagree that objective vs subjective is a false dichotomy with regards to quality. Not because I believe it is false, mind you, but because I don't believe they are a dichotomy; they are actually two essential axes when perceiving and discussing quality. And each of those two axes are measured empirically and valued ethically and aesthetically.
The subjective axis of quality concerns values. What do you value the most in a mobile phone? Is it battery life? Is it photo quality? Is it durability? Is it features? Is it security? Is it screen size? Is it repairability? Is it social approval? Is it free software support? Is it less effort due to habit?
The objective axis of each of those values (and their subvalues) can be empirically measured. Some of them trivially, such as screen size or battery life. Some are harder to measure but still quite easily, such as features, photo quality, or repairabilty. Others may end up in a quagmire of subvalues, some of them subconscious, but could ultimately be measured empirically with great effort (social approval, security, habit...)
What often happens is that, when debating quality, people make the mistake of using empirical arguments about objective characteristics without realising that they are disagreeing on their ultimate subjective preferences. Subjective values can of course be debated, sometimes successfully. However, I am never going to convince an average middle-class American teenager to prefer a Fairphone over an iPhone empirically proving its repairability and support for FOSS Android alternatives, and they are never going to convince me to prefer an iPhone because it's cooler and it takes awesome photos.
Going back to the main topic of the article, I believe that ultimately the problem is that the market has over-fitted and heavily optimised for specific axes of subjective preference, due to their alignment with profitability and ease of development, together with an inefficient feedback loop, to the detriment of large numbers of consumers such as myself who value less intrinsically profitable characteristics.
According to the Kano model what is perceived as quality changes over time for a product category.
Ten years ago your phone reliably connecting to WiFi was a "Delighter" over the course of time it turned over a "Want" into a "Must Have".
I'd say empirical evidence of quality is strongest in the "Want" phase but if something is considered a given and ubiquitously fulfilled, can it still function as a strong empirical indicator of quality?
'Correctly' being dropping IP bound VPNs so they can be reestabilished on the cheaper network, or transfring with no distruption even if it incurres cost?
Yes, there is a number of models for quality. If you read: "What Does Product Quality Really Mean?" by David A. Garvin, you'll find that intended purpose is only one of a number of quality metrics you could concern yourself with.
In the less obvious cases quality can be something you can't really explain, but you'll recognize it. There's also the option of viewing it from the manufacturers view, and forgo the user-centric view altogether. In that case we view the quality as "How well do we make the product", according to standard and specifications. So you could have a product that's absolute trash, but it follows specs precisely and you have zero manufacturing defects.
I think this rant is out-of-place here, type "\x1b[:<=>$t" and check for yourself. It parses correctly. You do learn about the allowed character ranges for CSI sequences from ECMA-48 only, not from the Microsoft docs, so i guess the author did their homework.
That tells me that you are writing from ignorance, as for starters that's a truly pathetic test that even misses one of the characters that I explicitly mentioned above, let alone thoroughly tests the full range that the specs define. I had an actual poke around the parser code, in contrast to your superficial experimentation. (-: One can, with knowledge, actually find the point where the only three unusual characters that you in fact tested are special cased.
The comment correctly identifies the 0x30-0x3f range as parameter bytes and the following as intermediate bytes. Both the range and the names for the bytes are matching ECMA-48 Chapter 5.4.
But you seem to think that everyone except yourself is incompetent, are you trying to make up for something?
Of course they are. There's a file with all of the special cased constants in, named constants.ts.
Your superficial test tested all three of the special cases in the PRIVATE_OPENERS array, which is what the parser.ts code actually checks. DEC's question mark, which is special cased yet further off on its own, is in reality another "private opener", too, and it isn't limited to DEC (e.g. XQTMODKEYS), and neither does DEC not use the other non-digit parameter characters (e.g. DECDA3).
(There's a hypothesis that DEC's own state machine didn't care where these marker characters were, as it was a simple state machine that had to fit in ROM and probably just set a bitflag. A mistake that we're probably all still making is assuming that they only take effect when in the very first position.)
STRING_OPENERS is another widespread special casing that people do, treating ESC plus a few characters as special rather than handling all of the 7-bit aliases for the C1 characters as the general case.
You seem to think that people who share what the mistakes are and where they themselves have made these very mistakes over the years, to help other people not make them and so that the world continues to remember this hard-learned stuff, is somehow worthy of ad hominems, straw men, insults, and vilification right off the bat. That's a very poor show and you should be ashamed.
> people who share what the mistakes are and where they themselves have made these very mistakes over the years, to help other people not make them and so that the world continues to remember this hard-learned stuff
But then we have this in your post:
> That tells me that you are writing from ignorance, as for starters that's a truly pathetic test
and
> I had an actual poke around the parser code, in contrast to your superficial experimentation.
Perhaps you really did intend for these lines to be helpful and informative? If so, I encourage you to have a moment of empathy for your interlocutor and ask yourself if talking this way is actually the best way to communicate and pass on this hard-earned knowledge.
> ad hominems, straw men, insults, and vilification
I didn't see this from the other poster. I did see it from you. As a disinterested third party, I'm just telling you, you come off way worse in this exchange. Good luck out there buddy.
That's some interesting feedback, thanks for sharing. I'll see what I can extract and apply from it. Please bear with me, this is only my initial take on the whole concept (and as you point out, it isn't that trivial). Didn't have much examples to be inspired by, but we're on our way anyway.
Wouldn't it be feasible to add a tiny battery or capacitor? Assuming the radio doesn't need to transmit continuously it can be powered via those which are then powered by the "forever battery".
Me neither! I was suggesting to use "Posix" instead of "Linux" because it properly separates GNU/Linux or other Linuxes from Android. Posix is what Android isn't but what MacOS is. What people erroneously try to call "Linux" because they don't have a better word.
It is possible if you restrict yourself to an subset of markdown. It works pretty well, actually, i have two awk scripts that take in a subset of markdown and generate either HTML or LaTeX.
I have not yet seen AI doing a critical evaluation of data sources. AI willcontradict primary sources if the contradiction is more prevalent in the training data.
Something about the whole approach is bugged.
My pet peeve: "Unix System Resources" as explanation for the /usr directory is a term that did not exist until the turn of the millenium (rumor is that a c't journalist made it up in 1999), but AI will retcon it into the FHS (5 years earlier) or into Ritchie/Thompson/Kernigham (27 years earlier).
The bug is that LLMs are fundamentally designed for natural language processing and prediction, not logic or reasoning.
We may get to actual AI eventually, but an LLM architecture either won't be involved at all or it will act as a part of the system mimicking the language center of a brain.
That's true for browsers, but Google controls both the Android OS and Google Play Services, giving them access to hardware identifiers on Android smartphones. Given the broad adoption of Android devices and the potential to correlate data, this is not a case of "making stuff up." Even if your MAC address is spoofed/randomized, the remaining data points are still sufficient to track you.
Of course the author got confused about which number means which. This is what you deserve when you use US dates but try to make them look like ISO by using dashes, but still fuck up the ordering and padding.
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