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

They gave up their privacy when they stepped out of their front door.

I remember a story on Slashdot from around the turn of the century, an audit of servers at the Pentagon found that the most common Admin password was Password, the second-most common was P@ssw0rd.

At my first real IT job in 1996 if you knew the birthdate of of the children of 4/5 of the users you knew their password. I wasn't allowed to insist on a change in the user training.

Ok. If you don't have any position at all, this is pretty pointless.

My understanding is that the exports are going out under the Belt & Road Initiative, so as much as possible is done with local labor (so the opposite of IMF/World Bank programs), and local people are trained to manage it as well. This is one of several reasons why Belt & Road is replacing IMF infrastructure funding throughout the Third World, rather than having KBR come in and build facilities to support the foreign extraction industries and then abandoning the project to decay they're creating both the technical and financial underpinnings of sustainable public infrastructure. (This is not coincidentally the way Gate Foundations projects work.)

The Chinese build nuclear reactors in around six years from breaking ground to connecting to the grid. They've licensed 30 of them to be built in the last three years, and are exporting 15 more. Unfortunately we're not allowed to buy their tech.

I'm sure it will be the Baptists, they specialize in going into cultures that they don't understand and insisting that theirs is the only way to live, like this moron:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

He's the 2018 winner of the Darwin Award.
https://darwinawards.com/darwi...

You joke, but having something definitive allows researchers to work filling in the gaps. The decipherment of Linear B was accomplished only after Alice Kober figured out the coding for 'and'. Now instead of a few big long stretches of text that you don't understand you have more pieces of smaller stretches which you can compare and contrast.

cash, gold and jewels are physical and can have size limits to stole in bit quantities, bank transfers take time and may trigger alarms or blocked, crypto can be stolen quickly, transferred to multiple accounts and get some cash out before even someone suspect you were kidnapped. that is why they are better targets

Likely a lot more of the traffic is coming from smart TVs, vacuum cleaners, irrigation systems and the like.