Reminds me of a massive book, 1,474 pages on ornithology, I once came across while researching something esoteric about duck borne influenza. The book was evidently indexed by someone who did not think much of the author's writing. Buried in the B's was this entry:

birds, for the. pgs 1-1474

The "struck by duck" ICD-10 code is similar, perhaps even written by the same over-worked index and code flunky.

Clearly the transcriptionist responsible for that particular ICD-10 code had a sense of humor. That alone, and of itself, does not detract from the overall utility of the work.

An alternative occurs to me: map makers will sometimes deliberately publish an inconsequential error somewhere in the map so that they can identify when another publisher has stolen their work. Perhaps it is the same with those who publish ICD codes to protect their income stream from digital piracy.

That is fine for future pandemics. It cripples our ability to plan a rational response to the current pandemic. Trading consistent data for a greater amount of inconsistent data is currently a very bad deal.

Remember when you used to buy popcorn at the movie theater? Treasure that memory.

Did you ever experience a Disney World or other amusement park? How will you ever describe that to some kid that was born last year, when they are old enough to understand your words?

We are in a slow motion train wreck. Don't waste your time trying to tell others about how we should design safer rail cars; worry more about how to protect each other from the coming impact.

Ah! The problem of more reporting leading to less information!

Let's do a thought experiment:

Our National Home Economics Standards Board [NHESB] (less formally known as the Home Eck Board) sets a requirement that all home bakers in the USA must report the amount of gluten they use each week in their Betty Crocker recipes, and how many dozens of cookies they produce each reporting period. After a few months this settles into a pattern where some bakers consistently report the amounts in grams while others consistently use apothecary grains. This is workable because the bright boys at the NHESB recognize a high gluten:dozen ratio infers that the gluten is being reported in grams and they do indeed know how to use a gram to grains conversion table. It is possible to determine over time whether American home cooked cookies are becoming more or less gluten free. No problem.

But then the NHESB changes the reporting requirements. Now the gluten needs to be reported by volume rather than weight. But again the mode of measurement is not specified. So some home bakers report in ounces, but some are using dry ounces while others are reporting in liquid ounces. And still others are using the troy ounce numbers from their kitchen scales to determine the ounce volume of the standard dissolved flour solution they pour into the cookie dough. And then there are households where Mom bakes a lot of cookies, who report in pints--- but are these wet pints like so many per liter, or dry pints like so many per bushel?

Everyone is reporting their usage accurately, but without any standard measure, there is no way to assess whether American kids are getting more or less gluten in their cookies. It is a mess. And when you start talking about cookies that are warm (or even hot!) from the oven, it is, in deed, a hot mess.

And don't get me going about the NHESB's treatment of daily sodium ingestion levels....

Coming back to the original problem:

A sure way to fuck up the ability to do reasonable statistical studies over time is to force arbitrary changes in the measuring process without fully documenting either the old way or the new way. To say it differently, we are often better served by reporting that is self-consistent over time than by increasingly detailed reporting that sacrifices consistency.

Well you're not, at 12 cores loaded you're thermally limited and tests show no difference to speak of at all. You get a slight boost to single threaded performance but overall this is the dullest upgrade in ages and creating a whole new XT line for it is silly. Should have just called it 3910X, 3810X and 3610X, at least then they'd get points for honesty.

Jurisdiction is not the only kind of power. China has repeatedly shown that they don't care if you're an American speaking out in America, if you're badmouthing China they will do what they can to make your life miserable. Of course they'll wrap their demands in weasel words and so will the corporate chain and your business partners but the real message is "STFU or we'll lose our business with China". Like any negotiations will be mysteriously stuck in a quagmire that'll equally mysteriously resolve itself once you're relieved of your position or the partnership is terminated.

To be honest Taiwan's problem is that the had delusions of grandeur, in 1971 when they lost their seat on the UN Security Council they themselves strongly refused any division of China and the creation of an independent Taiwan. Instead they forced it into a vote of who was the "legitimate" owner of China's seat and long story short they lost. If they wanted independence back then, they probably would have gotten it. Their problem now is that China has flipped the script on them, because they were pouting over the loss of the mainland China they never cut their losses and got their independence so now China wants them to answer to Beijing.

They don't realistically have much political or public support in Taiwan though. China is pressuring every other nation to recognize China's claim to Taiwan if they want to have relations with China, but that only makes it a hostile territory they could occupy at great cost - and probably not without an actual shooting war with an army supplied by the US military. My guess is they're eyeing the situation in Hong Kong waiting for the right moment to say status quo is no longer an option, it's either independence or submission and we choose independence. They must see that there's no future in trying to appease China.

Write no, compile yes. He's pulling code from all the subsystem maintainers (lieutenants) to create the master branch. And they again are mostly pulling other people's patches. They're supposed to make sure it's clean and tested before it reaches Linus but that's not always what happens. If it breaks or he finds bad code it goes back down the chain of command again so they can fix their code again and resubmit.

In rocket science I'd say 10+ launches is well into established already. The Falcon Heavy got their military certification after just three launches. The SLS is still planning to launch crew on their second flight. I suspect your sig is very relevant here:

My guess is one faulty part or installation brought the mission down. This was not a violent failure, the rocket just lost engine power and stopped. Which means it's probably the QA department and not the design department that needs to get to work.

Funny, I wish I had more of the first bit. Not my fuck-ups but the best times are those where I've been living in the moment and let go of all the rational, dull downers like that this junk food isn't good for me or that partying this hard will give me a hangover tomorrow or that this vacation is burning a hole in my wallet. Like I know that I'm overall fairly rational and got my shit in order, can't I get a break when I have a few excesses without that nagging party pooper in the back of my head. It's okay to have a plan for where you want to be five years from now but it's also important to accumulate happy memories on the way.

Bad employees also tend to think they're irreplaceable and they're as common as bad managers. The difference is that bad employees are the manager's problem, a bad manager is your problem. Unless you become the manager, then you see the other side of that equation. I don't mind taking on a tech lead position but if I went into middle management I'd probably end up strangling someone. I have the feeling I'd be one of those technically bright but horribly micromanaging bosses who'd rather be doing my underlings job than doing mine. Which would be mostly herding cats, running interference and communicating upwards, downwards and sideways in the hierarchy.

Intel drank that kool-aid and decided to make a CPU architecture where practically everything was exposed to the compiler, it's called IA-64 aka Itanium. They soon found out that a design grounded in reality beats ivory tower theory. ARM is also CISC with micro-ops these days, some instruction complexity is best left hidden. Forcing the compiler to deliver micro-instructions only hurts performance.

The reason I use whitelist and blacklist is that they're not the same as what's allowed/denied. If you implement say a spam filter and somebody wonders why something does or doesn't get through then "it's whitelisted" or "it's blacklisted" are complete explanations that someone has overridden the regular spam filter that'll also allow and deny emails. If the rules are exhaustive there's no reason not to be more direct. I have no strong opinion about master and slave, I tend to use manager/worker anyway since that's been the most relevant structure for me. But as long as people don't go crazy on the euphemisms we'll be fine. Rudolph/reindeer anyone?

Ads are quite effective for the things you know relatively little about and in general we don't have the time or interest to research most things in our life. For these types of things I often don't even consider alternatives, it's like I have a problem and product X will solve that problem so I buy X and the problem is solved. Now maybe product Y or Z was better or cheaper, but I just reached for the first possible solution. That way I can get on with the rest of my life so I consider this rational even if it's sub-optimal.

What's the first thing that pops into your mind? It's a brand that you've seen a lot, with a memorable catchphrase or jingle. We like to tell ourselves that we don't care about the ads, but the practical reality is that we'd never bother seeking out their store on our own. If they didn't advertise they wouldn't be on the radar. At the grocery store a big poster with an introductory offer can be the difference between "meh, I'll buy the usual" and "okay, I'll give it go... doesn't cost me much to try". Notice the lack of enthusiasm, if I had that I'd buy it anyway. Ads is limping it in.

There's nothing wrong with PGP as such, but one feature/flaw depending on how you look at it is that if the key is compromised your entire communications history with everybody can be decrypted if they have the encrypted messages. Which is not unlikely if it's sent from or received by any of the big free email providers, even if you "delete" them they could probably be recovered if you get them to dig through backups for you. The ratchet algorithm that Signal (and others) use is using something almost, but not entirely like session keys for the communication. Basically you update the send/receive keys continuously so only the keys to decrypt the next message is available and then they're discarded. That way nobody can do back and decrypt old dialog, what's gone is gone.

That's not how it works at all. If you got four people in a line-up there's a 1/4 = 25% chance you'll find the right person by coin toss. If I can make a tool that's right half the time I've doubled that. Along the way we're redefined the question from how hard the underlying problem is to how successful we are at it.

If I could make a machine that'd give me the lottery jackpot numbers half the time I'd be ecstatic. Sure, I'd only win every other week but given that it's one set of winning numbers and hundreds of millions non-winning numbers each week I'd gladly take the 50% failure rate.

If you take a database of ~10000 celebrities, your coin toss would have 0.01% accuracy by luck. Modern facial recognition algorithms get about 99.8% so like ten thousand times better. The problem is they want to find your face in a database of 640 million photos. One needle and 639.999.999 straws.