Why do you think the trade-off is so small? Schooling has suffered for kids all over the world (as in the article), not to mention the obvious social and economic costs we're paying, and those effects might be felt for years. I'm not saying that there is a right or wrong answer, but it seems strange to handwave away the costs as if what we've already paid has been trivial, not to mention all the costs that will follow.

This. Hardware interlocks and formally specified behaviour of systems has been a thing for many decades, and they really work. A similar situation applies to vehicle ECUs and controls -- when it was mostly (electro-) mechanical with very limited 8-bit microcontroller assistance, the system behaviours could be well understood and certain safety properties could be proven. However, adding in more powerful general purpose compute capabilities significantly increases the difficulty of that verification process. It's not impossible, with formal provers like Agda, Coq, Fstar and others. But if management handwaves that away in favour of throwing a Raspberry Pi in with control software running in NodeJS to get it done quicker or make phoning home or whatever easier, all bets are off.

This. It also plays (negatively) into the performance review / promotion loop. As AmiMoJo points out, if an employee thinks that the only way to be valued and promoted in a company is to act like a stereotype rockstar coder, then they will often stop co-operating and helping their teammates and instead focus heavily on high-visibility "ownership" activities.

I actually see a fair amount of this where I work, with people making a Big Visible Fuss over "best practices", or going ham on some project they can stick their name on. A couple of years ago I was bitten quite badly at a performance review where they acknowledged I'd done lots of things that helped the team, and contributed a lot to our codebases, but because I didn't have my name attached to any "big ticket" projects, it was hard to justify a strong review. That's not to say I deserved a great review, but more that the focus in these reviews is quite two-dimensional and counterproductive for morale. I came away feeling like I'd been punished for doing what I thought was the right thing, and the alternative approach was to climb all over everyone with fake-confident ownership efforts, regardless of whether it's best for customers or the business as a whole.

There was an article a while back called something like "On Being Glue" that touches on this and highlights the extreme lack of appreciation for glue-type activities that should be valued in companies. The assertions made by the Netflix CEO above just serve to emphasise this unhealthy way of thinking about programmers.

"Seriously. Apart from self-righteous know-it-all contrarians, who hates OOP?" That seems more like a rhetorical question intended to discourage anyone from actually providing a genuine answer, but I'll try anyway. I don't *hate* OO, but having had some exposure to functional programming styles over the past 10 years or so, I've gravitated towards preferring immutability by default, and find it easier to reason about my programs when they're not so full of implicit state. Instead, I try to keep most of my state in simple data structures and operate on those days structures with normal function calls. This also has the side effect of generally being easier to test and (sometimes) refactor, since I'm less likely to end up with a very complicated web of dependencies between objects.

And here I thought the harrowing part was the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians, including babies and children who had nothing to do with the war. But sure, let's feel bad about the technical difficulties encountered by the guys who dropped the bomb on them.

"Why would a computer manufacturer build upgrades when it can sell you a new machine at a higher profit?" ... To build and protect their brand name and reputation and avoid permanently losing past and new customers?

It just says that they do virology research on bats. What part of that is evidence that COVID-19 escaped from the lab? It doesn't even say that this particular virus was studied there.

No it hasn't. If I steal some guy's wallet and toss it into your car, it's not yours. In this case, it's more like the cops tossed their own wallet into the car without the guy's consent, so I don't think they should be entitled to call foul if he keeps it.

*say, not day. Thanks phone.

The first two lines of the summary day that the device was attached without a warrant authorising it. Where did you read the exact opposite of that?

I don't think the theft part would stick, since *they* broke the law by willingly placing *their* device in his possession. That's a bit like shooting someone, then suing them for theft of a bullet.

"Newton's Law in full force." I'm a big fan of Newton's theory of evolution.

"Everyone over 50 in the U.S. is advised to take B12 supplements and meat and dairy only contain it because animals are fed or injected with supplements..." That's not true. B12 is produced in the gut of cows by a bacteria that lives there. We produce vitamin K the same way.

No, but I've been running a couple of machines with NVidia cards with the nouveau drivers for about 8 years. Accelerated OpenGL has never worked, and I had to switch my laptop to the binary proprietary driver since Ubuntu 19.04 because nouveau now crashes, often irrecoverably, when switching resolutions (e.g. to watch a video or play Minecraft in full screen). The open source Radeon drivers seem in much better shape.

It's not explained by this study, but there have been several others that demonstrated how the human body's nutrient sensors (especially insulin and mammalian target of rapamysin - aka mTOR) respond to reduced carbohydrate and protein intake over different periods of time. Insulin reduces and stabilises relatively quickly and mTOR takes a little longer (usually 24-36 hours of fasting) to switch to fasting mode. There seem to be numerous benefits far beyond losing weight due to reduced caloric intake, such as improved mitochondrial efficiency, reduced inflammation and autophagy (a sort of garbage collection process within the body). It also seems to be the case that fasting triggers a switch to driving energy from body fat. This is probably the same mechanism that allows people to lose weight on ketogenic diets even if the overall calorie intake is the same as before. It would have been nice if in this study they had controlled for caloric intake to exclude that from the equation, but on the other hand I guess it helps to show that intermittent fasting makes it easier to do calorie restriction, even if that's not really necessary.