The flooding story actually predates the bible: https://www.thetorah.com/artic...

Floods were quite common a long time ago, and different cultures have various flood stories: https://www.pbs.org/independen...

In more recent decades we have been experiencing, especially in modernized countries, by the construction of dams. It is now very difficult, politically, to construct new dams, and artificial lakes, because they change the local ecology which can be very controversial. What we need is to adapt and improve our water management as a way to mitigate the impact of climate change.

On the original topic, I agree that 'planting trees', and other 'carbon neutral' schemes, is just virtue signaling and not the answer. Maybe if it were offset by a large factor such as 50x: you produce 1ton of carbon in the air, then you need to offset this with 50 tons of tree planting.

I'm actually wondering how many miles per human intervention the Waymo cars are actually capable. That's not something they advertise and was not a required disclosure to the California DMV when I read the regulation a few years ago. As long as the cars are still being confused by unexpected condition or stuck when the 4G/5G data connection is lost, the tech cannot work at consumer scale. I see a similar issue with the use of LiDAR which does not work under crowded conditions.
Tech demos at small scale are one thing, but there is a big gap to reach before it can be used to replace all human driving.

Not a case of acquisition followed by layoffs, but key employees leaving to start TotallyNotTheSameCompanyWithANewName Corp has happened before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

My trash is picked 3 times a week on Tuesday mornings. One truck picks up the regular trash, and kitchen waste (compostable stuff from the kitchen). One truck pick up the recyclables (cardboard, plastics, glass and metal cans). One truck picks the yard wash (grass, leafs, etc...). Maybe that's what 3 times a week mean?
I do live in California.

They pull over until there is a connection again. One of the many reasons they only get used in areas with very good 4G/5G connectivity.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/b...

I do not know about Cruise specifically but the 'software' on self driving vehicles can include very large models that can be tens of GB. It is easier to do it over an ethernet cable or swap the ssd drives. I used to work for a, now defunct, self driving car startup.

AFAIK all of them are, in a way, semi-autonomous remote controlled drones.

Double the cores does not double your disk io, it depends what the bottleneck is.

The other poster with 16 cores, that posted 6h before you, says it takes them 36m. The number of cores is not everything when building larger projects. There is a lot of disk io involved and the disk cache can have a big impact depending on how much spare RAM is available for caching.

I second that. I used to build the OS for the Windows based Treos for Palm in 2005-2007 and that was technically horrendous to deal with. At least we drove the builds through Cygwin so that we could have a semblance of sanity with shell and python scripts instead of just BAT files, but damn every time I need to deal with a windows machine, more and more rare fortunately, I get PTSD.

FYI the company behind Ubuntu is called Canonical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I'm basing this only on my own observations. I think that countries with reasonable patents tend to have more innovation than the ones with weak patent protection. When you think about it, it is fair for an investor to expect for their research costs to have a fair lead on the market in order to be able to expect to get their money back, and then some additional profits. These additional profits are then re-used by the investors to backfill the losses in other ventures that do not pan out, and to be re-invested on other patentable research. Of course these investor do also pocket some of that money and blow it on whatever they like, but it does not mean this is evil.

I think one of the current issues is that the length of patents exclusivity should probably be different between industries. For software the duration should probably be shorter than for traditional physical products since software evolves much faster.

Now that pyenv works very well, if you do any serious python development you should install a python interpreter and environment that is separate from the OS provided interpreter. This will allows you to better control your third party dependencies without clashing with the ones installed by your OS package manager like yum, apt, dnf, ...

We install python on our containers and development desktops through pyenv and this way we are sure that everyone has the same version of the interpreter without having to worry of differences between OS versions. We tried to get the one from the OS vendor, that was a crapshoot, using brew was subject of randomness depending on what the user wanted to install that week, with pyenv we have the correct version, everywhere.

Most python code that was written for Python 3.7 will run just fine in 3.12, a few things that were already marked as deprecated will not work though.

We work mostly with Go and Python, and the Go release cycle is more aggressive with releases getting security back ports for about 12 months. We have to upgrade to a new major release twice a year, and we do have some compatibility issues almost on every Go release.

Kubernetes has a new release 3 times a year with deprecated APIs on regular basis.

With python we upgrade once a year and most issues we have are related to third party SDKs that are too opinionated about their own dependencies. We do have breaking changes, but mostly we find pre-existing bugs that get uncovered thanks to better type annotation, which is vital in larger python projects.

Not fixing bugs is still better than pulling the plug completely on $5k hardware. My Kindle Paperwhite from 2012 still works just fine even if the OS upgrades ended years ago.

Former Googler here, from before it became Alphabet.

When I worked there, Google was proud to be a company run by engineers and not by sales, and sales was pretty much non-existent.

One of Google problems is that their ad revenues from their main projects is so profitable that they have a huge amount of disposable money that they need to re-invest on R&D, any R&D. Next issue is that the internal politics and promotions are all based around doing new things and there is very little professional growth to be expected for making a product actually work well and be usable by the general public.
The devs that built the product will switch to a newer project within 2 years of product launch to go on an other project that is promotion worthy while the remaining staff gets no hope of recognition.

This is why you see all these product announcements, that are just experiments that are thrown at the wall, some will stick (GMail, GCal, Maps, Chrome, ...), but if they do not get massively profitable they get no TLC from the better staff and they get canned.