You've got some good points, but on some others my experience does not match yours. I think you might have drank too much of the Koolaid.

1) ecosystem. Agree with you here. It's one of the compelling reasons to use java IMO. It's had time to develop a mature and full feature ecosystem. Sometimes the libraries you find aren't great, but you can usually find something.
2) performance. I don't see java programs performing any faster than golang programs, and I work in both languages. I have seen some golang libraries that made newbie mistakes and were not performant, but they also didn't claim to have reached version 1.x and claim they were stable. Pure go programs run faster than pure java programs in my experience. Java is a pig when it comes to memory usage. golang is much more parsimonious.
3) "write once, run anywhere". This does not match my experience. I've had constant problems with jar portability. I'm not the only one. It's become a running joke in the industry. "compile once, debug everywhere". For cross platform work, I've gotten better results recompiling a java app on a new platform if that's where I want to run it. The java build ecosystem is mature enough that this usually isn't too hard though as long as I've got access to the source code.

I think your dig on python is kind of a cheap shot. You're comparing a compiled language to a scripting language. Compiled language always wins the performance race on that one over an interpreted language. But python is great for standing up prototypes quickly and proving out ideas, concepts or algorithms. So, prefer developer time to machine time. Python isn't the right tool for everything of course. It's just another tool in the toolbelt. Choose the right tool for the job. For some jobs, it's java. For some jobs, it's python. Know how to use them both, and when.

But for your punchline, that you should say Fuck You to oracle, get off of their proprietary JDK and move over to OpenJDK instead, I'm in complete agreement. Cheers.

Tim Sweeney may come off as a bit of an asshole in this article, but he's got a point.

The intent of the "Find My" app may be good but the results have already been super creepy, not just hypothetically but in real life
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...

There's probably a counter argument there: that example is shoddy police work, not the fault of the app.

But there's a counter counter, which is that the "Find My" feature contributes to a surveillance culture which has some obvious and demonstrable downsides.

Mod parent up please. This is informative.

This article kind of pissed me off and my first instinct was to jump in and rage-post. But I read through a bunch of the responses and there is really a lot of thoughtful and useful stuff here. Having read it, I'll try to post something useful instead of raging.

Full disclosure: I live in Montana. You can drive 650+ miles and you're still in the same state (Plentywood to Lima). Does range matter here? Yes it does. I've personally started a vehicle (with an internal combustion engine) when the temperature outside was -25F (not including windchill), and driven it over a mountain pass through 10 inches of snow during a blizzard. Does the range reduction due to inclement conditions matter? Yes, it does. When you're in conditions like that, if you run out of gas, or juice or whatever, and have to get out and walk, you can be in a life threatening situation. Brushing those concerns off as range anxiety flabbergasts me. It's like brushing off the fear of Death as anxiety. I guess that's possible, but you've got to be a lot more Zen than I am.

So, I know I'm an outlier. The population of MT just broke 1 million in the last census so really we're all outliers. It makes sense to optimize for the most frequent use cases first. The range obsession might just be a dick swinging contest but it still helps us. It might help everybody else too.

If you can make electric vehicles that have the same range as ICE vehicles, then you can make EVs be a viable drop-in replacement for ICE vehicles. But you can't do it for just 90% of use cases, you've got to do it for *all* of them. If you have that, then you can replace the current fleet of ICE vehicles. And you can rip out the current infrastructure that supports ICEs (gas stations, fuel tankers & probably a lot of refineries) and collapse down to just one infrastructure. Maintaining 2 different infrastructures in parallel is clearly inefficient. Once we can collapse down to just one infrastructure that supports vehicles, we can make the whole economy more efficient. Everyone can potentially benefit.

Just my 2 cents. YMMV.

p.s. The stuff I've read about EVs in the Nordic countries is really encouraging to me. I look forward to the day when EVs will be able to handle all the use cases for things I do in the place I live.

Sun Tzu says otherwise. His writings are the first time I encountered the concept of doomed spies. And this is China we're talking about after all.

In this case, I agree with you though. This one doesn't seem to me to be a spy deliberately sent to his death in order to spread misinformation or misdirect the enemy.

I think you're dead right to point out the problems related to cheating & game ecosystem corruption. There's a lot of real-world money on the line and it's already a problem.

Riot has actually written some pretty interesting things on this subject in their dev blog. Even if you're not into games, there's plenty of data science in there to geek out on.
https://www.leagueoflegends.co...
https://www.leagueoflegends.co...
https://technology.riotgames.c...

As to the size of the ransom request, I think a lot of the people commenting on this news don't understand how big video games and esports have gotten. Here's some numbers

Hollywood, US box office
https://www.the-numbers.com/ma...
worth 12 billion-ish in 2018.

All E-sports global
https://www.the-numbers.com/ma...
https://www.statista.com/stati...
worth 1.4 billion-ish in 2022

So, it's less, but the fact that it's even in the same order of magnitude is incredible.

E-sports is just a fraction of the global video game market, but it's getting bigger.

The article mentions modification (or at least an alteration in rendering) of 20 year old files. How is that possible? Is it by modifying the application installation via an update? If so, can you get the functionality you originally had in the 90's by using an old, non-networked desktop installation of Photoshop?

I agree in principle with your proposal to hold CEOs accountable. The last couple of sentences from your second paragraph seem to suggest an ex post facto law, though. I'm uncomfortable with that.

Wow. Thank you for the quotes. That's some of the most insightful stuff I've read on the internet in a while. I don't have mod points, but I see I don't need them since you're already at +5 insightful.

For my own, less eloquent contribution, I would say that money can be a means to an end. It should not be the end itself.

I think that the idea of nuclear armageddon is a bit overrated. I read a book years ago called The Medical Consequences of Thermonuclear Warfare, and I'll admit that some of it was beyond me (like forecasting which kinds of cancer to expect from fallout), but my takeaway was that if humanity detonated all of it's existing nuclear in a full on nuclear exchange, we would nuke ourselves back to the dark ages. The human race would survive. Don't get me wrong, that's terrible and I don't want to live in the dark ages, but it's not the extinction level of destruction that I'm talking about.

w.r.t. "we don't even have a perspective" and " equally bad", call me a fan of life but regardless of the fate of the human race, whether we make it or not, I'd prefer if life continued on this planet even if we were not around to witness it. Your perspective seems to be "if we all checked out, I don't care what happens to any other living thing here". I disagree with this.

"But we're still here so far" - I agree with this. There's reason for hope.

Am I the only one who responds to this development with both hope and terrible dread?

Carl Sagan discussed the idea of moving asteroids in a Pale Blue Dot, chapter Marsh of Camarina.

Given enough time (not civilization time, or species time but geological time or possibly astronomical time), the prospect of us getting hit by another asteroid capable of causing extinctions is not a matter of if, but of when. So we must develop this kind of technology to save our species from extinction.

But the same kinds of technology that can be used to deflect an asteroid can be used to redirect an asteroid - into the capital of your current political enemy. The worst case scenario I could think of prior to reading this book was world war III, full thermonuclear exchange, and blasting our civilization back into the dark ages. But the technology he was considering is far more powerful. Think about the meteor hit necessary to blast the moon out of Earth's mantle. If you could intentionally cause that kind of catastrophe (and that's where this technology goes if you take it to it's logical conclusion) then the damage is to liquefy the entire crust of the Earth and exterminate all life on the planet. All of it. Every human, mammal, bird, amphibian, reptile, fish, plant, fungus. Even every bacteria and virus would be expunged.

If we do develop this technology, and we allow the same kinds of geological timeframes, then there will be another psychopathic leader like hitler who would be willing to use a weapon like that in the course of total war, even against their own land (scorched earth: better to burn the German fields than let the Russians have them). And given some more time, it becomes again, not a matter of if, but of when such weaponized technologies would be used, to the annihilation of the human race and perhaps all life on earth.

So we must develop this technology or we'll be destroyed. And we must not develop this technology or we'll be destroyed. Damned if you do, Damned if you don't.

Sagan was ultimately an optimist and he thought "let's develop that shit". That came with the caveat that we had to make sure that the doomsday scenario had a 0.00% of ever occurring in the future. And that meant changing the Human Race to prevent the possibility of a future hitler ever arising. So, we need to alter ourselves in such a way that we put aside our petty differences of one country against another, one race against another, to become one race: the Human race. To love that black person or that brown person or that white person . . . or if not love, at least tolerate. And have even the idea of pushing the nuclear button be impossible. The idea of deliberately altering the human race in this way troubles me deeply, but I think that Sagan's reasoning was sound and I reluctantly have to agree with him. We're in a very dangerous stage right now, between our animal past from which we evolved out of the darkness, and our wiser, future selves, which we must become or die.

The Human race has to grow the fuck up.

Thanks JD. Always a pleasure to read your posts.

I think you're ahead of me on the physics, but this does remind me of the last time I read the Dancing Wu Li Masters. I think that claimed that the physics of Niels Bohr were ahead of those of Einstein, but that ultimately they were compatible. I still have a hard time getting my head around Schrodinger's box and the idea that the act of observation changes physical reality, but AFAIK, it's stil sound science.

The extension of the ideas of Niels & Schrodinger suggest other ideas to me, ideas about an inversion. The linked article suggests that reality does not exist, but what if it's more complicated than that? What if this observer relationship means that the participation of consciousness in space time is generative and creates reality?

Damn it. I'm not phrasing this right. There were other animals here before us. It's vain to claim that we 'created' the world by observing it with our consciousness after they had already been here for a few billion years. I do still think that there is something there though, in that idea of consciousness participating in reality, and vice versa.

Cheers,
H

Yeah, I browsed through the storyboard on google photos too. Pretty cool stuff. I've seen the documentary 'Jodorowsky's Dune', and that included some of the images in the storyboard, but I think this google photos album has some images I've never seen before.

I also skimmed all of the comments on the google photos album. The guy that put this album together, Alberto Gaytan, says clearly and directly that the images do not represent the complete content of the storyboard.

So, the claim made by the original article in https://www.morningbrew.com/ that "The book is already public" is false. The contents are not publicly available, not in a complete form. The original author should have spent a bit more time doing research before throwing shade.

I disagree with you on that point. From what I remember and what I read, the Soviets lagged behind us in tech and weren't above engaging in espionage to catch up. I'd suggest the following for an intriguing read:

https://babelniche.com/2011/12...

"CVAX...When you care enough to steal the very best"

I do agree with your position on immigration.

I had no idea. Thanks for the heads-up. That's awesome. I think I'll be purchasing that soon.