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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

This is an excellent read. Because it was written as a presentation, it’s quite readable.

I like the toaster example. It reminds me of this: http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/TheParableOfTheToaster.html

He mentions the Dreamliner. That project is kind of a poster child for how not to do stuff, but I suspect that many of the problems came about as a result of cultural hysteresis. The engineers and managers were good, but inexperienced in development of such a loosely-coupled project.

I agree with the premise of the talk. In the US, we are facing the same issue with manufacturing. It’s actually impossible to do some types of manufacturing in the US. We’ve crossed the Rubicon. Alea jacta est.

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Minor correction. It is a “i” and not a “j”. Julius Caesar said “Alea iacta est” when crossing the Rubicon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alea_iacta_est

Although there is the WarCry album with the “j”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alea_Jacta_Est

On https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet you can see:

"It was not until the Middle Ages that the letter ⟨W⟩ (originally a ligature of two ⟨V⟩s) was added to the Latin alphabet, to represent sounds from the Germanic languages which did not exist in medieval Latin, and only after the Renaissance did the convention of treating ⟨I⟩ and ⟨U⟩ as vowels, and ⟨J⟩ and ⟨V⟩ as consonants, become established. Prior to that, the former had been merely allographs of the latter."

So at Julius Caesar's time, I and J were the same letter that you could write either way.

> It is a “i” and not a “j”. **J**ulius Caesar said …

Why not "Iulius Caesar", for consistency? :-)

In any case, English may not be the right language to bicker about spelling and pronunciation in. It sports one of the most idiosyncratic orthographic systems in existence.

English also has a long history of butchering names, words and sounds, including its own (e.g. the Great Vowel Shift [0]). Iulius vs Julius is the least of its worries.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

Apparently it was "IVLIVS CAESAR": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Julius_Caesar_(name), https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/27145/julius...

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