They do have a massive canal network (portions of it dating back over 1000 years) and a lot of coastal shipping. Whether it would add 8% I would have no idea but it would undoubtedly be larger than in the US.

No, this is a real thing. One of the first sectors to move heavy equipment to electric was mining, now they have entire mines which are all-electric and mostly-automated. Driving a mining truck or running an excavator is pretty much no-brain work, jobs fit for robots. This guy lives and works in China and writes mostly about the business environment (with occasional digressions). All of his articles are accompanied by lots of links to other reading.

https://kdwalmsley.substack.co...

The mining company deployed a fleet of one hundred fully autonomous electric trucks.

Huawei built a 5.5G network and designed algorithms specifically for open-pit coal mines, with localized maps. As a result, the smart trucks operate at 120% efficiency compared to human operators.

As more intelligent mines come online and electrify, enormous savings in fuel costs will be realized. Diesel fuel typically accounts for up to half of all operating costs for mining operations; mining trucks consume up to 100 liters (30 gallons) of fuel per hours, and overland fuel transport and storage in remote areas drive capital investment needs higher.

Even with antifreeze, attempts to thaw bodies prepared that way have resulted in massive widespread organ cracking.

Seriously, WTF are you babbling about? First off Uighur is a single ethnic group, they're not multiracial. Transgenderism is barely a thing in China at all, and since Uighurs were mostly Muslim for the last 700 years there would be even fewer among them. You appear to be absurdly poorly informed.

I suppose the alternative is you were trying to do some wokeism/racial slur. It that's the case your troll-fu is weak and laughable.

The article states that they don't know the cause. They found a correlation between ultraprocessed foods and poor health, but they don't know what exactly in those foods causes the negative effects. They also cite scientists who criticize the definition, as some foods considered to be healthy are in the ultraprocessed category. So the article addresses both of your concerns.

Cripes, anyone who had been paying attention for the last quarter of a century could have predicted the "invasion of Ukraine". How many "red lines" did NATO think it could cross before Russia finally felt forced to act?

Troll? Really mods? OK, whatever.

The new law (according to the article) still allows the re-sale of tickets, but not for more than the original price.

AI and modeling is making robotics useful across a wide range of disciplines, very suddenly. Where before you might need years and scores of prototyping attempts to get a functional restaurant dish washing robot today videos of humans doing the job can be fed to the AI, a prototype designed in the computer, and then thousands of actions and exceptions modeled in a few days before ever cutting a piece of metal.

When people who aren't smart enough to do anything more complex than wash dishes are laid off, where are they going to go?

They may as well just said, "Chinese technical universities have outpaced American universities in everything."

This guy lives and works in China and writes about the business environment there (with occasional digressions). All his articles are lavishly supplied with links.

https://kdwalmsley.substack.co...

This has happened suddenly, but decisively, that Chinese universities now dominate the world rankings for the hard sciences.

The Nature Index is a comprehensive ranking of over 18,000 universities and colleges from around the world, and the scores are based on quality research output. These tables are sortable, as well, by scientific discipline. For example, in Physics, the United States didn’t show up in the top 10 ranking at all.

Sichuan University in Chengdu, across all scientific and engineering disciplines, is now ahead of Stanford, MIT, Oxford, and University of Tokyo.

Here are some other takeaways. 8 out of the top 10 research institutions are Chinese. Zhejiang University is in that bunch, and where Liang went. Of the top 50 universities, 26 are from China. US has 14. Have you ever been to Xiamen? Me either. But they have a university in Xiamen that’s ahead of Cal, Columbia, Cornell, and Chicago. I know about all of those. Half the top 100 are Chinese. . .

can i see your code to see what assumptions did you make on early stages, that you never bother to go back and fix?! :D

who said that that flow (dev->qa->staging->prod) didn't happen?

how many people had bugs in prod that didn't show up in the previous steps? how many people had problems only hours after deploying to prod?

you can't not always test all conditions, dev and qa may not have the amount of users/access/info to really replicate a problem, staging may read the prod DB, but not trigger the conditions, maybe they are intermittent, require a special corner case, etc

in this case, a prod DB change is ALWAYS harder to test, and even if you replicate the DB, make the changes and still get the prod updates in real time, you may not trigger the issue. As they said, sometimes the file reach the 200 entries, other time it was lower. Everything can be fine until certain problem show up and you end with a cascading, runaway problem. staging may not have real life load for that runaway problem to show up!!

even adding canary deploy or traffic shifting deploy could help, but we already know that cloudflare already do that... but again, DB is harder, most DBs can't have a cluster of multiple masters with different configs, so it is hard to have a master DB in the old config and a master DB in the new config so both app versions can use their own DBs... much worse if those DB need to have performance!

so talk is easy, but there is not perfect solution.

Several years ago a datacenter went dark because the extremely redundant multi-ups, generator setup, different power sources, very complex setup that was build to never fail... failed due to a small problem that a simple setup would not care, but the extremely complex setup cause a small cascading issue and in the end totally failed. Yes, it may be possible to fix that, but maybe we are adding just another layer that can act strange and cause itself another cascading problem.

Similar the Iberian power failure a few months ago, all systems were distributed, redundant and like... a small issue and cascaded out of control

you can not predict all possible problems and the more complex the system is, the harder is to predict and control them

i don't care if 1/4 of the internet goes down, i care about my site.

do the CF downtime was bigger or smaller than a downtime on my side?
can i replicate their features even, to get a similar service?

So while this downtime is always bad, all sites have some downtime... maybe i was luck , but was little affected by this
either way, no, i can not really replicate the cloudflare solution locally, the costs would be huge, more people, more servers, more knowledge and still would not reach the same level. Just the bot detection and CDN is more than worth the downtime... that again, i would also face sooner or later on my side, with my own solution

sure downtime is bad, but we can also mitigate that, we can have a fallback config that bypass cloudflare (domain must not be hosted in cloudflare, of course, so you can change it) if something goes very wrong. people with more money can have even multiple cdn

as for the rest of the world... go outside, touch grass! it is not the end of the world you can't talk to chatGPT or view some tiktok videos, accident happen, people should adapt, relax and move on

well, what the conference was simply telling is that people that brag they own a fortune in crypto are putting themself at risk... and we all know some people that do that, right?! :D

toyota hybrids are perfect (yes, complex beasts, that i agree), but they work fine and zero problems ( i know, i own one with 13 years)
most other brands just rushed to hybrids and fall in to mistakes and problems... but even those improved a lot