Closer to one third, we just had about another third or so not get off the couch.

Sugar?! You mean Corn Syrup right? Know why they don't use cane sugar? Tariffs on cane sugar to push corn by midwest farmers it seems.

They aren't real big on thinking into the future. See Solar and wind cuts. See pushing older experienced folks out of Govt into early retirement while firing the young ones - who needs expertise? Let's make these lower paying Govt jobs unstable so we can't get anyone to take them! You can cut off airplane engines midflight and it'll still fly too - for a while.

Let's ignore clean air\water regulations and get rid of people who monitor food production processes. Look at what they're doing with vaccinations, what could possibly go wrong in a few years? Tariffing everyone around while claiming they're going to build production here with hardware that has to be built elsewhere and imported? That's just big brains at work! We all know who pays those tariffs, but they sure are excited about that new income stream aren't they? It's a tax.

Falling birthrate, aging population, but we want to see GDP continue to rise? Let's kick out motivated foreign workers! Oh, you wanted them, to come in legally? How about funding the fucking system to allow that and streamlining it so people walking hundreds of miles with no money have a chance in hell making it through before starving. I've watched people marry citizens and "get legal", it costs them quite many thousands and they're usually on their 3rd kid by the time the paperwork clears - literally. I wonder how long it will be before we're bailing out farmers - AGAIN.

I agree. Sadly, software engineering is not engineering. Nobody, out side of safety critical systems, analyses the program structure and makes valid correctness claims for it as part of their quality process.

Software is at a stage that architecture went through before structural engineering really became widely adopted towards the back end of 19th century.

While we have pretty good tools these days that could do formal verification of our software, the process is incredibly time consuming. Moreover, all formal verification can ever do is show conformity to the specification. The specification can, of course, still be wrong. The move from the informal world of business to the formal specification of a system leaves a lot of room for mistakes.

How does a buyer of software know whether one piece of software is higher quality than another? Is there any real way for them to independently judge the quality of the code in most purchases?

My final thought to reflect on is that acceptable quality is enough quality and for most users that is reached fairly quickly. People will tolerate software that is really quite buggy. Games developers are actually giving us relatively deep insight in to that part of the economics. They still make money shipping games that are basically broken.

This point about game development is quite illuminating I think. The reason that most software is quite buggy is fundamentally an economic question - not an engineering question. Generally speaking, people are not prepared to pay for quality. They want enough quality that the software isn't a false economy - and we as an industry largely supply software of that quality.

It's one of these things I find online, especially talking to Americans, is this desire to believe in any wild conspiracy theory that crosses their mind.

A vast conspiracy within the Democrats to deliberately turn off their own power to hurt Trump's re-election chances is just laughable. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Who did it? How? and Why? I'm not convinced your why is good enough.

Between 160,000 dead American and him saying "it is what is" - he doesn't need a giant conspiracy to take him down. He can do that all by himself.

My state locked down just a few days ago. Georgia just now locked down after their governor realized it could be spread asymptomatic (funny since guess where CDC is headquartered). Florida, just locked down. Multiple states in the midwest STILL not locked down. Ask anyone in the medical profession what they're thinking. I know someone on a response team and he's had nothing but bad news increasing by the damn day and we are about 3 weeks from peaking. Prepare for a rude fucking awakening.

You've nailed it and me without mod points - thank you for laying it out so clearly. I missed the latest press rally and his comment about the exchanges, how does this man live with himself? We are so badly fucked and his sycophants haven't even realized it yet. This virus isn't going to check their party before infecting them and this man's legacy is going to be pretty terrible - for all of us. Be safe my friend...

Full attention?! The man was out holding rallies and playing GOLF! You know, that thing he claimed he wouldn't have time for if elected. He was being told declare a health emergency as far back as January but preferred to ignore the situation and cry hoax. Can this man not do two things at once? You've admitted he blew the response to this and the public officials who were dedicated to this task were all disbanded to boot. He'd gotten lucky to this point bullying any problem that came along but it turns out you cannot bully or payoff a damn virus, his luck has run out and so has ours.

There's a stack of bodies at this man's feet and it's disgusting you'd try to give him a pass. Don't be surprised if one of those bodies isn't a loved one of yours, you can pretty much bet most of us will know of someone who's died from this when it's all said and done.

Didn't he say he "knew it was a Pandemic" all along? History will NOT be kind to this man, nor should we.
https://nypost.com/2020/01/26/...

No, it's not a service but some asshats have built plug-ins that allow you to stream from torrent servers rather than watching from local resources. Kodi developers have been super pissed about this and don't allow discussion of it but that hasn't stopped people from developing them and even selling hardware with Kodi and this crap installed. But sure, the media people think it's Kodi who's at fault - morons every one of them...

So you mean the exact thing that Plex facilitates? Seems to me this has been done already so I'm not sure where you're going with this. JellyFin and Emby also manage to do this without issue.

You didn't actually buy it according to them though - you just got a license and paid for the media. To add insult to injury there's been whining about not allowing secondary sales although with streaming services that seems to have died down as they prefer streaming to physical media from a DRM perspective.

Or you could just use a more modern language that is expressive like Python, but doesn't require you to use a different language to optimize bottlenecks. Like Julia, or Swift.

Some references to Julia as a ML language, including its GPU and automatic differentiation capabilities:

Blogs:

Building a Language and Compiler for Machine Learning

DiffEqFlux.jl â" A Julia Library for Neural Differential Equations

Why Numba and Cython are not substitutes for Julia

Papers:

Fashionable Modeling with Flux

Effective Extensible Programming: Unleashing Julia on GPUs

Dynamic Automatic Differentiation of GPU Broadcast Kernels

Automatic Full Compilation of Julia Programs and ML Models to Cloud TPUs

Don't Unroll Adjoint: Differentiating SSA-Form Programs

DiffEqFlux.jl - A Julia Library for Neural Differential Equations

Confederated Modular Differential Equation APIs for Accelerated Algorithm Development and Benchmarking (about differential equations, not ML, but describes how Julia's architecture permits very modular algorithmic designs that custom-compile down to efficient implementations)

JITing Python is not really a substitute for Julia. Essentially, due to Python's language design, you can't JIT arbitrary code, only a subset, and it won't do dependent compilation (JITting through all your package dependencies to give you a custom-compiled version of user code and all the libraries it depends on).

I have no idea what you're talking about. Julia doesn't isn't any harder learn than Python. The statement that "you can't just pick it up and go" is just bizarre; the syntax is different from Python, but if you're learning Julia from scratch it's not worse than learning Python from scratch. It's true that their threading model is still in flux, but that's not really anything having to do with the language design.

Your complaint seems to boil down to "Python is the 'standard' approach, and therefore anything else is designed wrong and hard to learn".