Having to attend multiple what happened after the fact post-outtage report meetings......
A modified XKCD fits here - https://www.reddit.com/r/Progr...
What I've noticed is that most every project turns into an infrastructure project at some point due to the developers being expected to do what was 5 different jobs pre-cloud and be experts in all of them.
The pollution from a gallon of gasoline has been reduced 99% since the 1960s.
- Wouldn't this put the pollution reduction effort far into the diminishing returns side of the equation?
- How much more pollution can be removed from a gasoline burning vehicle?
- Would drastically improving the quality and lifespan of existing vehicles reduce pollution? This is not just making them lighter and measuring pollution for the first few thousand of miles driven, it is for the expected lifespan of the vehicle including manufacturing and disposal pollution.
The article is about some EU asking for more internal combustion vehicles on the road in the future.
Here is the 99% pollution reduction from the US EPA https://www.epa.gov/transporta...
reducing-air
Accomplishments and Successes of Reducing Air Pollution from Transportation in the United States
Congress passed the landmark Clean Air Act in 1970 and gave the newly-formed EPA the legal authority to regulate pollution from cars and other forms of transportation.
New passenger vehicles are 98-99% cleaner for most tailpipe pollutants compared to the 1960s.
The EPA page does have this "Air pollution and cars were first linked in the early 1950’s by a California researcher who determined that pollutants from traffic was to blame for the smoggy skies over Los Angeles."
Then again, smog like conditions have been reported a hundred years before Los Angeles was even built - https://www.latimes.com/enviro...
Los Angeles Times - The sordid tale of L.A.’s forever war on smog - Oct 1, 2023
"Four hundred and one years earlier, the first “smog report” was entered into the log of the San Salvador, a galleon captained by the Iberian Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo. He and his crew were the first Europeans to lay eyes on California, and what they saw on Oct. 8, 1542, off the coast of what is now Los Angeles"
Easily stated here is that there are enough people who cannot have a political or social discussion with anyone who does not 110 percent agree with their own beliefs.
Those people resort to personal attacks and repeated discussion ending tactics as a way to prevent any discussion with ideas disagreeing with their own ones.
You should be able to discuss politics and social issues with your neighbor, disagree on them and still remain good neighbors. That is being civil and and being an adult..
It's easier to avoid and exclude from conversation those people which resort to name calling, shaming, seeking to be the moral judge and arbiter of all right (agree with me) vs wrong (anything which disagrees with me, even if not immoral), and using flowchart "logic" to dismiss any counterpoints (e.g., guilt by association, guilt becase of some 150 year old wrong done by someone else).
The loss of paper checks and attempts to prevent paying in cash by slowly reducing coins in circulation (pandemic, removing the penny) are a loss of freedom in a couple ways:
- There are decades of laws, regulations, and court cases around paper checks, their handling, protections for customers, stores and banks which pre-date the internet and big data. While they are disparaged as "outdated and inefficient" by corporations, politicians, political lobbying firms, hedge funds, banks, etc. they server as inertia to prevent more fine tuned control and profile building over an individual person.
- The loss of older payment methods lets the same set of hedge funds, securitization firms, lobbying lawyers, politicans and big tech get laws passed that reduce an individual's freedom and privacy. Those groups would be able to lobby to rewrite a new set of laws and regulations which are even more favorable to the large institutions and less favorable to individual persons.
- Predictive profiling and monitoring of individuals who have not violated anything
.
Challenge: Rewrite this with the same level of outrage, victimization and implied violation for a woman gym 'influencer' recording the slightest glance by any man at the gym for likes on social media where the man smashes here phone or smart glasses.
Simply stated, the psychological industry has a monetary profit motive in getting more people on daily maintenance medicine.
Each person on a daily maintenance medicine means 2 to 4 office visits per year allowing a psychologists to have a steady stream of paying customers.
Factor in that each of the "needs accommodation in school" requires a battery of expensive paid testing and you have a large amount of, mainly insurance money, supporting an entire industry and thousands (tens of thousands?) of people working in that industry.
It's about mental health, disabilities, and quality of life; so when does the profiting off of those cross into greed?
If the person was treated, heals and is OK after 6 months of treatment, then how would the psychologists stay in business?
This is not a dismissal or downplaying of conditions and treatments. It's a question of is treatment or profit and where is the line between the two.
The legacy media industry having less companies producing the same old retreaded tire declining quality movies and TV shows would be a good thing.
The real computation here which I'd like to see is the net present value of the 10 year future royalties of existing media shows in the company being purchased back catalog.
It does appear to be the same playbook as private equity doing the buy company by borrowing money from others, cut costs, lots of people lose jobs, sell of any assets you can for a quick buck, pay yourself a huge management fee, and then leave the acquired company to fail or limp along with all the debt.
These articles appeal for a number of reasons:
- They are easy to write
- They are safe and free of politics
- They can fill lots of space and fill lots of words
- They let the author wrap what is essentially a 'top 10 gift idea products' into a news article
- They require the 'serious news reporter legwork' of searching social media for posts
- The article could go viral, launch a news reporter's career, and be the first one that thousands of future articles reference on the same topic
I agree with the offline and physical products are better take here and that the 30 years of trying to monetize each and every product use forever via advertisements and microtransactions is a large net-negative to the quality of life.
Conjecture that (degree X) with an applied AI minor would be a better combination.
Conjecture 2: Some company, with a stock market capitalization of $2+ billion today, will announce an AI induced failure causing an AI induced collapse in its share price and bankruptcy before 2033. I'd expect it to be when they apply AI to commodity trading with success for the first 5 years, then increasing the AI's impact afterwards. How would a company explain the AI, it's commodity trading rules, risk management and validate it's testing in non-production to the company's financial auditors?
Wondering how long before they rediscover all of the findings of the early 1980s US Department of Defense work with formal specification languages used for specifying computer systems?
Wikipedia - Larch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Related skit:
Monty Python - The Larch
Voice Over: (and CAPTION:)
'NO. 1'
'THE LARCH'
Photo of larch tree.
Voice Over: The larch. The larch.
Voice Over: (and CAPTION:) 'AND NOW...NO. 1...THE LARCH...AND NOW...'
If I remember right, the Microsoft dataverse and PowerApps (PowerBi,
Too big to fail is the most correct guess here given that the large number of government databases around the world are vendor locked into decades old Oracle legacy systems.
It's the "if I owe you a $100,000 dollars, I have a problem. If I owe yo $10 million dollars, you have a problem." in action.
Oracle had one claim positive for it back in 1998, was that it was bigger, faster and could run higher transaction loads than just about any other database system (excluding IBM mainframe ones) when compared to the competition.
It has lots of negatives, cost, need for high-end expensive DBA skills, poor programming environment, built-in legacy code in SQL queries for high performance, and vendor lock-in.
It's gone sideways for nearly 30 years and, speculating here, is more like of a slowly disappearing mainframe than anything else.
It would help greatly for this research to extract the snippets on the soldiers and to tag, in place, the original source documents with contextual tags that could be expanded to give contextual examples in other areas.
Soldier's background, diet, daily activities, battles, role in the battles, equipment, common hardships, as well as what they did before and after military services.
The endless programming language holy wars going back to the pre-internet 1990 Usenet groups just seems to never die and is an infinite word and 'news' / blog article generator.
This is not a question of which language is better. It is a sequence of trade-off questions depending on the programmers, development team makeup, organization/company makeup and commercial software vendor self-promotional sales angle.
1. Is the language simple enough for beginners ready for their first 1000 line program?\
2. Is the language, in terms of syntax and grammar, simple enough that most, if not all, programming constructs can be remembered without a visit to the documentation?
3. Is the default programming environment, IDE, and built-in tools simple enough for a beginner to use? That is without needing to learn a packaging manger, one or more configuration file languages (xml, json, yaml,
4. Is the larger ecosystem friendly to new developers, or is their a prrice of admission that only the highest order programming constructs/patterns/language features are allowed in programming style/conversation?
5. Is there a coherent set of built in libraries with at least the same functionality as the C standard library, POSIX (unix), some parts (collection classes) of C++ STL?
6. Is there a compelling reason to use the language over using one of the existing widely used languages? The "it's more compact, more elegant" retort from early adopters omits the evaluation of the language's higher business risk that it will be unworkable in 5 years, and that few, if any, people will want to work on it after 5 years, since the early adopters have moved on to the next new thing.
The "don't buy the first model year of a new car" applies and is used by many organizations.
If money can't buy happiness, I guess you'll just have to rent it.
