4WIW

Not to nitpick but: trituim is 1 proton and 2 neutrons, otherwise it would be helium

Looks like this opinion doesn't matter much: the last operational nuclear plant in California is closing in a few years.

Moron. Don't hire him.

In a weird way, all this cancel madness could end up in a good thing. People who are still capable of critical thinking, they will seek alternatives to Big Tech and hopefully, these alternatives would come up. Telegram is growing like crazy, Signal is getting "slashdotted". Another round of the distributed social media is coming?

I think you are misinterpreting the article. Whether you are Apple or not, you have to prioritize.

If you are doing 2 features, and cannot both well enough, then it's better to do one (important) extremely well and one (less important) just to get by, than do two mediocre features. In the former case, you will get at least some happy users who will talk about you and hopefully get you more sales. In the latter case, nobody would vouch for you and mediocrity will drive you into oblivion.

The "glass half full" perspective here. The OP misses one hugely important factor: cost and hence availability of computing resources.

During the recent history of computing, the technology improvement opened new possibilities at each step:

- Punching cards: allowed more people share mainframe,

- Video terminals: allowed faster turnaround of mainframe jobs,

- Mini-computers: gave more people access to computing,

- PCs: got even more people into computing,

- Commodity hardware in datacenters: more people could develop services and more people from general public could get access to applications and data,

- Cloud: more people could afford to build applications,

- Microservices: bigger teams could collaborate on increasingly sophisticated services,

- Serverless: reduced the burden of capacity planning and service distribution and further lowered the barrier of entry into backend application development.

Each statement above comes from personal experience and I am looking forward to what new possibilities the future brings.

I would expect deaths of despair to be slow-moving and not follow peaks of infection, as is with excess mortality:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...

To make this code clearer:

    def get_users(f) -> Tuple[List, List]:
       return (logged_in_users(f), logged_out_users(f))

    def user_count(f) -> int:
       return len(get_users())

Now it's clear this is just wrong code. To fix it:

    def get_users(f) -> List:
       return logged_in_users(f) + logged_out_users(f)

    def user_count(f) -> int:
       return len(get_users())

Some people may remember: first there were video terminals with light-on-dark to conserve fluorescent layer of CRTs, IBM PC continued the tradition and then Apple Macintosh came out with white background. Apple's argument was that people's eyes were trained for black-on-white print and it was one of the distinctive features of the platform then.

There must be a reason why the print developed as black-on-white, maybe people preferred it this way.

So pick what you prefer: paper-style or CRT-style.

Would love for this pointless hack to be abolished. One less reason for confused aliens to declare our civilization an evolutionary dead end and vote for our recycling.

Starlark is not configuration, it's a Turing complete "feature-challenged" programming language. If this is what you mean by dynamic configuration, this looks like an unfortunate outcome of someone's urge to try on humans what they learned in the PL class (or in SW methodology class :-) ). After suffering few thousand lines of a bloody mess created in this language, I can certainly say that Python, or Java would have been much better in this context. Pants (Twitter's version of Bazel) looks much better architected system in this respect.

The problem with what you call the principle of lesser power is that people fail to accurately predict "suitability" of their solution and choose wrong tool for the job. They start with "I just want to set a couple of variables" and end up with full-scale development system with IDE, debugger and profiler, badly designed and partially implemented.

Hah...Terraform is called "Infrastructure as code", so it's HCL language is "code", not configuration, at least by my definition.

The whole point of configuration is that it's not code.

I use a simple litmus test: can your system work at least to some extent with empty configuration file? If not, you went too far and need to simplify.

Thanks for sharing. There are often good reasons for creating DSLs, internal or external.

However I argue that I haven't seen many cases where configuration DSL were well justified.

By configuration here I mean something that describes differences between different deployed instances of the same code. If you take all deployed instances of the existing system and see what is minimal amount of configuration to describe these, you would usually find that very little information, just a few lines would be enough.

The rest of configuration file complexity comes from the designer's attempts to predict the future extensions. My point is, these should be resisted for the sake of future generations of maintainers.

Creating languages is fun but writing code in a half-assed language created by brilliant but not too experienced engineer with no real support for anything, is not! Then, when this engineer leaves your company, you are left with a mess to clean up...

IMO better strategy would be to reduce config files to absolute minimum and let the code that reads them handle all the complexity. Whatever is your main language, it is better supported than any of this.

This is a new situation, and is going to stay with us for a while, if not forever. Instead of complaining about "good old days" of water cooler culture, wouldn't it be better to take this as an opportunity to adapt, learn new tricks and enjoy the advantages, of which there are many? We'll have to anyway. Or else...

Most of the discussion here focuses on The Famous Document which I think is missing the point. TFD could be totally right, or totally wrong but the lawsuit is about wrongful termination and discrimination and has only remote relevance to the document.

Would be interesting to hear the opinion of the people with legal experience: what are the merits of the lawsuit?

My personal unqualified opinion is that they will settle out of court for wrongful termination. Since white males are not protected class, the discrimination case is much weaker.

It is much easier for Google to settle this lawsuit than to deal with hundreds of others they would get should they kept Damore on payroll.

I think regardless of the merits of TFD this lawsuit is a good thing because companies would be less inclined to punish people for objecting groupthink.

I think the author mixed this up with his second visit. Not a big deal IMO.

> To really understand something you have to observe it in minute detail and ideally experience it.

Call me squarehead but I refuse to "experience" life in North Korea, not even close to this.

Also, I think if I were ordinary North Korean experiencing all the atrocities of the regime I would be really bothered by this act of "observation"; it feels quite a bit like being an animal in the zoo cage being stared at by the bored public.

How's that "not starving"?

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

It may be that our biggest collective luck was that the alarm happened at the time subcolonel Petrov was on duty. He was an analyst, maybe even chief analyst of the unit, he authored the playbook for the officers on duty; being on duty wasn't his main job (source: https://cont.ws/@adviser095/717098 ), he would go on duty from time to time.

Due to his knowledge of the early warning system he was more likely to cast doubt than a regular officer on duty. Several factors looked suspicious: 1) The reported starts (5 in total) happened from a single base in the US which didn't make sense from the military point of view: the US would have put themselves at a grave disadvantage by sending just a few missiles; 2) They had visible light and infra-red visuals on the US territory and none of them checked out and 3) It would have been highly unlikely for the war to start suddenly, without any prior escalation.

Like other officers on duty, he had college education as an electronics engineer and additional 2 years of special training. All this probably helped him make the right decision.

This is not to take away from the importance of Mr.Petrov's heroic personal contribution: he definitely deserves recognition (which he didn't get from the Soviet Army and his own country BTW). Still I would also like to hope that we are all collectively not as stupid as to go caboom just because of the single fluke in the satellite system.

"On one side is Mr. Kalanick, who is plotting a comeback". One this phrase is enough to realize that Mike Isaacs is a Benchmark fanboy and he is expected to advance their side of the story, just as he did in the last months/years. Move on, no journalism here, just leaks and propaganda.

I see a case of clueless police here, not the "evil police". They don't apply excessive force and are generally respectful. They execute dumb instructions the best they can; what they don't know is that for this particular child the experience could be 100x more traumatic than for a neuro-typical child, and this child shouldn't have been arrested in the first place, even if he misbehaved.

Instead of blaming police I would see this is an opportunity to educate everyone on the autism and how to properly deal with it. Especially given the fact that April is the National Autism Awareness month.

People talk about diversity and inclusion a lot, in the context of gender or race or anything; I have never heard "diversity specialists" talk about neuro-diversity even though this impact major part of the population. This has to change.

I agree with you about the bravery of women who came out with their stories and thank them for stirring this public discussion.

However in the context of TFA, the campaign to make Uber employees quit is an _action_, and it still based on accusations (however credible they may sound). This sounds a whole lot like a witch hunt. In enlightened modern-day Silicon Valley, that is.

By all means, if crowdsourcing can work in this case, that would be a great positive example of community taking responsibility.

"collective goal"? What's that, and what collective do you represent here?

Here is an amazing opportunity for somebody "independently wealthy" to make a real difference: set up a fund that pays for close-captioning of any free content coming out of Berkeley.

What can be worse than premature optimization? Premature generalization :-)

What is so special about efficiency? Efficiency is just one of the concerns the software development orgs are facing, together with cost, utility, usability, deployability, maintainability and so on. The tradeoff between these (and the ability to choose this tradeoff correctly early in the cycle) often defines the success of a project or an organization. Focusing on one while disregarding others can be lethal.

YMMV. Watch your controls.

I think the key to the growth mindset is to help in maintaining the feedback loop: work & effort -> reach your goal -> feel happy. The "fixed mindset" breaks the loop in a way that no matter how hard you'd work you'd never reach that goal because only "gifted" reach it and you are not gifted enough.

Another extreme is "false growth mindset" that also breaks the feedback loop but in a different way: no matter the results, you will still get praise for "effort", so there is no point in trying harder.

"Growth mindset" is helpful but it is not a magic replacement for hard work and learning to deal with frustration.

1. My argument was about "National Socialism and any other ideology out there", you focused only on the first part. Even if you filter out unethical ones (not sure how, but let's say you can), there would still be too many to try, and not sure why should we keep trying theories instead of letting the society evolve in a natural way.

2. Specifically about giving communism a fair trial despite all past failures because it is "ethical": no thanks. I find its principle of "dictatorship of the proletariat" unethical and proven disastrous.

3. Stalin disappearing his political enemies was rooted at least in part in Lenin's cornerstone principle of "democratic centralism" which was critical ingredient for the success of the communist revolution. Trying to decouple the two doesn't do history justice.

You can say the same thing about National-Socialism or any other ideology out there. There are just not enough countries to try them all on, and I am not sure why should we...