Then you're misinformed. Again. But since your position is one of being proudly so, rather than seeking to understand unfamiliar notions, I'm leaving this link... and the conversation. If that's TL;DR, feel free to Ctrl+F it for "oil" and then "tobacco".

Bye.

I'm replying to both your comments together here:

I normally would answer way more sarcastically than I'm going to, because I believe you misunderstood me. Notice, first, that I included a very deliberate "almost" there, so it's evident it isn't literal 100%, but as close to 100% as possible; and, second, that I wrote in a hyperbolic style, and it always surprises me when people, especially older people, who presumably had better Literature classes compared to younger folk, either don't recognize it, or show unfamiliarity with its convetions and purpose.

Which means I agree with for the most part, as I see most of your text as expanding on what I had myself reduced to a single line, rather than refuting it. But not with everything. I'm going to reply specifically to these last bits, so assume what I don't reply to I'm in agreement with.

I work for a civil engineering lab that applies standards published by international and national standards bodies. Those standards acknowledge that not all components of a process can be tested, but they make sure quality is kept extremely high while keeping costs manageable. Such standards exist for all engineering areas, and at the national level are enforced by national laws. They do exist for software engineering too, e.g., by ISO/IEC, but for the most part they're entirely optional, there being no legal enforcement, and the vast, vast majority of software development companies and departments with companies, not to mention individual developers, don't follow them.

In a world where software development was treated as a real engineering, following such standards would be mandatory. There would be legal requirements for audits by national accreditation agencies. Purchaseable software would need to include certificates of compliance, being otherwise forbidden from being sold. There would be paper trails showing that all components used in any purchasable software are similarly certified. If the industry wanted to use free software, it'd need to organize and bankroll accreditation for those packages before integrating them. And any unaccredited free software would only be allowed to run within highly restricted sandboxes.

For an analogy, consider how anyone who knows electronics can build, say, their own UPS, but they cannot sell it to others unless it gets UL certified and, if they plug their makeshift UPS in their wall outlet, and it causes a fire and the house burns down, the insurance company will almost definitey refuse to pay for damages, as the user willingly and deliberately plugged in non-certified device into their outlet.

Which is to say:

Is not how the software development industry operates. It should be the case, and I'm advocating for it to become so, but right now, with extremely few exceptions that only prove the rule, it just isn't.

Yes. What you describe isn't a bad world; it's a world in which computer technology advances at a slower pace compared to ours.

There'd be disadvantages compared to ours, in that we'd likely be at something similar to, say, the late 1980s technological level right now, and wouldn't achieve what we currently have at least until the end of this century, maybe the beginning of the next.

On the flip side, there'd be advantages at the social level, with technology integrating into daily and professional life at a pace much more compatible with the way human cognition feels at home.

And it'd help with your later point:

In that alternative timeline, GCC 15.x would be dealing with hardware families orders of magnitude more stable and predictable. Its supported languages would be different from ours, in that all of them would have been designed to facilitate standards compliance with a goal for accreditation. Things would be so much solid that GCC's released version numbering might even follow TeX's scheme of adding digits of pi, and there'd likely be only a few digits more than TeX's current v3.141592653.

I'd like that world. But, as I said, there are many for whom it'd be Hell on Earth. I think these only have this reaction because they're used to how things are and can only see the downsides, not the upsides.

Either way, this conversation changes little. The big players will never accept being regulated and forced to follow engineering standards, and they have all the laws money can buy, so it's at best a fun speculative exercise, and little more.

All true, but see, what you described as worst practices by the least competent of civil engineers is still orders of magnitude more careful, deliberate, and well-thought-out than software engineering's best practices.

The analogy is thus apt because the equivalent in software engineering would be designing a bridge such that, if one single brick is removed from one wall, suddenly only a car can pass in either direction, and if a screw is then loosened on the other extreme of the bridge, the entire bridge crumbles.

Or then, consider the process of designing the bridge itself. If it were like software engineering, the civil engineer would project it by building a small skeleton bridge and checking if it supports the weight of a car, then breaking that bridge and building another one with the materials of the broken one with a pedestrian walkway, then breaking this one and building with its materials plus glue a third one that supports two cars with a pedestrian walkway, then breaking it and...

Or, to put it another way, the core method of developing something in software engineering is via trial and error, with senior engineers being remarkable for the fact that they need to build and break a slightly smaller set of prototypes than junior ones, just a few hundred versus tens of thousands, for every design. Which is to say, software development is at most a craft.

In a few centuries, with luck, it may improve enough that it'll reach that bare minimum you described as typical of bad civil engineers. And then, with a few more, raise above that bare minimum.

That isn't exactly a trait of the economic system, but of lack of professional standards for software engineering, so the point calling it an engineering at all is an offense to actual engineers.

Consider all engineering disciplines, from civil and electric to bioengineering. In all of those the same two forces exist. And yet, civil engineers don't, say, design bridges as fast as possible with zero regard for quality and resources. Why? Because they're personally responsible for the outcome of their engineering and, if it causes issue, can be personally sued, both civil and criminally, and lose their license to work.

That utter lack of personal responsibility is what makes software engineering an "engineering" in name only. Had their practitioners to abide to similar ethical and professional standards required from actual engineerings, and the moment an employer came telling them to ship it as is because fuck quality, and they'd retort for the employer to go fuck themselves, as they won't do a shitty job and risk losing their license to program professionally.

Evidently, a world in which software "engineering" were a real engineering discipline would be very different from ours. There'd be less software, it'd cost more, and it'd be efficient, rock solid and almost 100% guaranteed bug free, even for the most irrelevant of apps. Some would hate it. Other would love it.

That's catastrophism by politicians and journalists. If anyone gets their science news from either, they're stupid.

As for predictions by actual scientists, in papers peer-reviews by other actual scientists, and published in actual high-quality scientific journals, predictions have been proven remarkably accurate, with some discrepancies in some metrics. And, from among these few discrepancies, some predicted slightly worse outcomes than were observed decades later, and others predicted slightly better outcomes than were observed decades later. Which goes to show there's no bias, that actual scientists are trying to be, you know -- the shock! the horror! -- accurate.

Who would have guessed, amirite?

So, thanks for the conspiratorial theorizing rehashing, but it's wrong.

Again.

You say you're independent, but you refer to far-right propaganda as fact, which suggests you're not as independent as you believe yourself to be.

Furthermore, the aspect of you referring to Biden's center-right policies as being "radical left" and "extremist" suggests you're more accurately positioned somewhere between the hard-right and the far-right. Sure, the center-right, seen from the perspective of the hard-right, is to their left. But being to the left of the hard-right is very different from being on the left.

It's quite telling how immensely to the right the whole Overton window of American politics is when a lame party such as the DEM, with its grand total of zero left-wing policies, is considered as not only "the" left, but even as the "extreme" left. Go figure...

Ah! A GB News regular, I see!

Are they still following the old trick of taking one single isolated event, and talking about that one single isolated event non-stop for ten years straight to give the gullible the impression that one single isolated event happened twenty thousand times?

Nope, see Alexandr Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics.

They don't want to, but they want to cause the impression they want to. The more afraid individual NATO countries are they're going to be invaded, the more the invest in their own military strength, and refuse to share their stockpile of weapons and ammunitions with Ukraine, after all, what if they need those stockpiles? Better to hard them in fear a future hypothetical war, than to spend it on the current real war that, if won, would stop the future potential aggressor cold.

Hence, threatening NATO countries is an extremely effective psy-op for Russia. And European leaders are quite the idiots for not perceiving that's what's going on.

Ah! Another American whose history lessons were limited to learning that, I dunno, George Washington once cut a tree and that the US saved the world all alone twice! Nice!

Me, I'm quite amused when I see the US doing such things for roughly the same reason I'm amused when I see its pseudo-conservatives destroying its welfare system. The result will be, respectively, what happened to the British Empire and to China after WW2. As the old saying goes, never interrupt your adversary when he's doing something stupid! ;-)

It's not hard to understand. Three things have been happening all at the same time in Europe, and each one of these are, all by itself, of the kind that prompts governments to go into authoritarian mode. All three put together make this exponentially more the case:

a) Risk of Russian invasion.

Russia has already been attacking NATO countries via invasion of their airspace via drone fleets and military aircraft, plus several cases of cutting oceanic data cables, and other forms of harassment, including explicit verbal threats against several members.

Preparing for war requires managing citizens morale. Completely free flow of information is detrimental to this effect, since either true of false (propaganda) content telling citizens the war is going bad can become a self-fulling prophecy. Hence, governments see the need to start implementing all the technology needed for effective control of information flow right before and during a war if it happens.

b) Rise of internal threats.

First and foremost, the far-right parties on those countries have been growing in popularity and power, being financed as a 5th column by Russia. If victorious, they will fracture the EU, weakening them all against aggressors. Additionally, European leaders fear losing power and, in the extreme, losing their lives and freedom to far-right extremists.

As such the see the curbing of those propaganda efforts as absolutely necessary for the survival of their, well, everything.

b) Betrayal by a former major ally.

The US has sided with the enemy of Europe, Russia, on a number of fronts, having been undermining the European effort in the buffer zone between Europe and Russia (aka Ukraine), helping to fund the above internal threats, relentlessly pressuring European countries on all economic fronts, and actively threatening to invade and conquer European territories, meaning what was a risk of a war on a single front has grown into a serious risk of a two-fronts war. Additionally, the US controls most of the information exchange technology Europe uses, meaning it can advance the propaganda mentioned above way more effectively than Russia alone could, and get intelligence on Europe at levels Russia alone absolutely wouldn't be able to.

As such, transferring control of information channels from US national security associates to European ones became urgent, with an immediate need to reduce as much as possible the power the US has to advance those contrary goals, which again requires controlling information flows.

Hence the recent push.

Notice I don't agree with any of the above. I'm of the "the best counter to bad speech is more speech" school of thought myself. But that's what I see as the core motivations behind this movement.

As for the US, it's trying to implement a Fascist political regime. As any such movement, it uses the tools of freedom to raise, then once in power destroys those tools. As such, what we're observing over there is much simpler than what's going on Europe, even if the end result, if it arrives at its goal, is pretty much the same.

And other countries are following so many variations of the same issues.

It's in the name.

Summary of the entire silly discussion:

a) If one favors cats over birds, cats are pets, birds are food.

b) If one favors birds over cats, birds are pets, cats are pests.

Options not included in the discussion, but welcome to make things even livelier:

d) If one favors both birds and cats, both are pets and cats walk with bright red collars and bells so the cats can roam freely and the birds can survive.

e) If one favor neither, all are hunting targets.

f) If one favors dogs, they need come and say something offtopic.

g) If one's a fundamentalist Christian nutcase, all animals are automatons whose existence serves the sole purpose of pleasuring humans, and they won't be in Heaven because they lack souls.

h) If one's a Muslim, cats are clean and you're a sinner.

i) If one's...

Etc. etc. etc.

Kinda. The US had no officially designed language from July 4th, 1776, to February 28, 2025. English was the most used language, but not a legal requirement.

Since March 1st, 2025, there's an Executive Order signed by Trump determining that English is the official language of the United States. Executive Orders are valid until a President cancels them, so we can presume that at least in the period from March 1st, 2025, to January 20th, 2029, the US will indeed have an official language. Coming January 21st, 2029, depending on who was elected for President, it may cease having one, thus going back to its traditional approach.

To make this truly a new default would require a more permanent law than an Executive Order, preferably a Constitutional Amendment. That's unlikely though. So we may well see a situation in which the US alternates having and not having an official language in timespans of 4 to 8 years each.

Let me get this straight: you're actually, for real, in favor of hidden fees, so a business can tell you that you owe them $x more than you agreed to pay for, and now you're obliged to pay?

The right-wing ones too.