You give too much credit to VCs, startup business reporters and the editors here.

First result on Google:
>The average American family uses more than 300 gallons of water per day at home. Roughly 70 percent of this use occurs indoors. In addition, there are other miscellaneous uses of water in the house which may be very significant, depending on the degree of water conservation by the household.
So 2 magnitudes off...

If you could get thrown in jail just for using whatsapp instead of another app for business communications, you'd probably demand a higher salary to stay in the industry. The result is that either you pay more for the same level of service or pay the same for worse service. Rules aren't free.

I don't aim to convince you, but you have seem to an axe to grind.

Maybe you can let me know once you've achieved something of note in designing useful systems, if it were so easy, and perhaps I'd be more receptive to your comments.

You seem to have a strange devotion to disparaging programming with no evidence and zero effort to respond properly to arguments so it's a waste of time to engage with you further.

Let me just note to other people that may see this that designing and contributing to core components of complex, scalable systems is in no way easy. In my industry there are many ex-mathematicians (PhDs and occasionally ex-professors), and they don't all do well in software engineering. My company is currently a small, nimble company in a very competitive industry that pays better than FAANG; here, there's a strong correlation between years worked as a software engineer and ability to contribute. It's really difficult for young children to perform at the same level of even our worst performing engineers.

Um, it's well established that proving certain properties about languages is quite a mathematical practice, even if it doesn't resemble anything in say number theory or abstract algebra. Building a compiler isn't a lesser form of logical thinking compared to building a version of set theory. Proving that this and that code should not cause a race condition is often easier, but it can also be a fairly intricate logical exercise, sometimes no easier than proving various statements in mathematical logic, as logicians a century ago used to do. If you try to justify a claim that "this commit isn't going to add any bugs" in a complex codebase, at a certain level of rigor it becomes clear you can often transform it into a proof in some form of modal logic. The fact you don't always have to invoke theorems or lemmas just means that certain deductions are readily available from everyone's mind and commonly used.

I don't know why you're opposing so vehemently the concept that programming can resemble mathematics. Seems that you think mathematics is fundamentally a "higher" form of thinking at all levels. Proving publishable theorems in algebraic geometry is certainly much more difficult than writing a crud app, but mathematics can also include coming up relatively simple things such as the formula for roots of second-order polynomials, and even relatively advanced material can be considered trivial given enough background knowledge, such as strong enough theorems.

This is not to say someone who can write a crud app, or even architect Google's search engine, can also prove that there is no general algebraic solution for quintic polynomials have not general algebraic solution. Programmers are mostly not at the level of even an amateur mathematician in mathematical research. But I don't see a reason why one can't think programming thinking intersects with mathematical thinking in a very meaningful and natural way. I don't see how programmers may be "dumber" than mathematicians necessarily mean they aren't doing something that resembles mathematics. A novice undergraduate mathematics student often isn't able to perform substantial mathematics research, but when they do their problem sets, they are, certainly, engaging in a mathematical activity.

You might not write a proof down and a QED at the end, but you always have to understand the correctness of your program in the form if an implicit logical proof. This gets clearer if you have to justify your pull request to someone else; you need to communicate why your program is correct, and the language used for that can be considered mathematical, even if quite informal.

Yes that's probably why they were fired, but I'm arguing how that's wrong, and in principle GP's opinion is harmful for a healthy weather forecasting service.

if there's even a 10% chance of "severely" bad weather and lives are at stake, it's appropriate to issue at least a warning, and I think if the only cost is postponing fireworks it's well worth it.

There's a gulf of difference between eating only vegetables and fruit and getting protein from non-meat sources...

>Google initially refused to allow it on the Play Store, claiming it wasn't possible to estimate the speed of a passing vehicle using AI alone, however this claim was later proved wrong.
This is pretty flamebaity, the reason you can't estimate it accurately is that you need to first understand scale. Speedcams have lasers or LIDAR so that they can measure the distance between the cam and the vehicle, and then. The phone with a camera couldn't do that with high accuracy, there's just not enough information to infer distance correctly. The app is going to produce too many false positives.

Yeah, the article is a sizeable wall of text but is ultimately devoid of content.

For 100TB, it seems the regular cost is $1000 per month. I think that's already a fair amount to effectively donate to a school.

For schools that take 100TB to store one scientific experiment, the experiment probably already costs more than that storage, not to mention they're probably already very privileged schools.

As if English majors can do any better...

To be fair though, the best engineers have to be able to navigate ambiguity and uncertainty. An engineer who can only work with well-defined specs is always going to be just a cog.

You make very good points.

If people are unable to get any English education before university.

Also if people don't communicate outside classes that teach Shakespeare or middle ages literature.

Also if English majors really focus most of their time on teaching anything about communication in a business context.

I don't know what kind of people assumes a university can't teach or train communication skills without an English department. Must be those who have never had a university education.