If there was real appetite to solve the climate problem, we would have a fleet of nuclear reactors coming online right now.
904 karma · joined May 14, 2020
Micro grids with multiple redundancies make the size perfect for a community project.
I'd start there. A team of good engineers can outperform that Billion dollar spend any day. It seems Facebook spends a LOOOOOOT more on operations fiefdoms than any other social network out there including TikTok.
NASA has lost the plot with space exploration. They haven’t moved manufacturing efficiency or payload mass by any meaningful margin in decades.
We could have had 10 or more JWSTs up there by now for the cost of the overruns and total cost of salaries and overhead.
I’d like them to be a lot more introspective than they are at present. Like, “Yeah, these images are cool, but we could have done a much better job if we had better project management to stick to a budget”
I’d expect you to know the difference.
Your point about wanting to read articles written for you by others is certainly possible. The very fact that such a desirable outcome drives you to Google and nowhere else should suggest the complexity of the problem they’re solving and how there isn’t really anything else out there doing so well.
>Ideally as few as possible should profit from this process.
Why?
When you accepted a job offer in the software industry, did you stipulate that your mission is to write code for your employer and you will be charging as little as possible for that privilege? Minimum wage should get you by just fine, right?
I hate fully grown adults behaving as though anyone except them making a profit is somehow evil.
Lol, this is a “offer up your sacrifices now, I have pressure from up top”
A search engine like Google isn't just a search engine as the author describes it. It is a very integral part of the economy of the internet and just labelling a simplistic interpretation of the present state as "Evil" with an academically poor write up of what a viable alternative is does little good.
The ad supported free internet is one of the most important business models the world has arguably ever seen. Very few can argue with the fact that poor kids in developing countries over the past two decades and longer have had their lives changed beyond anyones wildest dreams thanks to the free resources at the tip of their fingertips.
On the same note, much of the wealth accumulation in the developer community has been on the backs of this very business model. The immense demand for dev talent and the astronomical salaries paid out is a consequence of the difficult financial choices made by so many before us.
When i read absolutely low-effort activism such as the text in the link about how(paraphrasing) 'sEaRcH eNgEnEs mAkE mOnEyY" and thus they are bad. I'm astounded at how intelligent people who can write code can simultaneously be so fucking moronic in their grasp of economics.
The web is an ecosystem. There are always going to be incentives that don't fit your moral compass that are getting optimized for and against. The answer isn't to burn it all down and shit all over a business model because it apparently doesn't fit your childish understanding of the ideal. By all means, compete, but atleast try to understand the various actors and participants in this complex web of entities and what role they're playing in the flow of investment, content, data and economic activity that is far more nuanced than "wEb rEsUlTs wIll B beTtTeR iF nOT oPtImiZeD fUr $$$ "
Face fucking palm
The thing to watch here is, the knockover effects and 2nd, 3rd order effects. When there is a gas shortage in Germany. . . Everyone suffers. A much higher portion of their GDP goes to compensate. When gas prices go up in the US, a section of the population “suffer”, but there is a lot more economic tolerance built in.
Similarly, holding the passport of a country doesn’t automatically make someone a geopolitical expert
I mean no offense at all, I’ve simply observed way too many instances of online discourse beginning with “as a citizen of ____” to establish credibility in areas that don’t really benefit from citizenship.
The constituent factors of the trade imbalance being spoken about here is a sharp rise in energy costs. For decades, Germany has led the EU in repressive energy security policies including a heavy focus on shutting down existing Nuclear facilities that typically have >90% uptime in favor of cyclic sources.
For example, less than 10% of installed renewable capacity in Germany right now is usable: https://twitter.com/burggrabenh/status/1543388878584823810
Thanks to which, Germany is presently generating 72% of their electricity through very dirty and very expensive coal https://twitter.com/bjornlomborg/status/1543190255477706752
Is this a bad thing? Depends. Germany is a manufacturing heavy economy where energy prices are obviously a major part of input costs. So there is certainly an argument that at some level, this is unsustainable.
In the long term, if the economic growth within Germany is able to offset the additional "expense" incurred , then it will not matter a lot. The US routinely runs a trade deficit, but the US economy is one that the world holds at envy for the reasons that it is able to do so. There is plenty of domestic consumption and growth that offsets the massive trade deficits and in a simplified way, the US imports deflationary prices from the rest of the world and exports technology (I said highly simplified)
For Germany, they don't have the luxuries that the US does. The question that is crucial now is how long can Germany sustain these deficits while their domestic economy re adjusts or is able to find deflationary forces from energy security etc. If they are unable to do so, then, by definition, they are fucked.
App Tracking Transparency was the primary reason for the ad behemoth to slow down leading to the domino effects we're seeing here, but clearly , in your mind, there's an alternate set of facts running.
One might reasonably argue this is interference in US elections.
These sly actions may have good intent, but people deserve to know if, for example, a rogue administration has ever used the authority against someone they might have simply disliked.
Eye, finger tracking, touch haptics, variable focus, incredible performance optimized rendering, you name it. The tech talk given by John Carmack , that he went on stage and just winged without slides is one of the highest density talks i've heard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti_3SqavXjk
It would have been their iPhone moment, but Zucccc bungled it with his hateful pursuit of Apples perceived slow walking of their App review. That enmity concluded with the App Tracking Transparency move, without which, we would have been still seeing record breaking ad numbers today.
You CAN NOT attract top tier talent easily to a dumpster fire and they know this. You can't be giving away free food, ice cream, no performance reviews for two years during the pandemic and shipping 10s of thousands of office equipment to each individual employees homes for two years during the pandemic, continue to approve aggressive hiring plans and laying out $10 Billion dollar outlays for the fucking Metaverse and then turn around and say to the employees you hired that "You guys suck"
I would just call it childish, but this asshole deserves no benefit of doubt. It's downright disgusting.
We’re talking some Walmart/Severence level cringe everyday. “Five things successful leaders do that you should too” etc
I kept going down the rabbit hole of these posts and realized what a huge bubble it is, underwritten solely by the immense pre-AppTrackingTransparency advertising model. I’ll admit, for a short while, I wanted to have a job like that without any real work but later realized how hollow and short sighted it was to think that way.
It's on him if his strategy was so wrong.
Just go on LinkedIn and search for “Director, Operations” at meta. I know of directors who have gotten there simply by hiring two “layers” of management under them.
This is a company that has paid well above market for Ops “talent” and the MBAs that dot the insides of the firm do very little. Nonexistent support, hacked accounts everywhere, no one cares. This isn’t an engineering problem, it’s a bad bad political problem within operations.
1. Toss it out. All of it. In the present form, it is worthless. 2. Make privacy regulation simpler, not ten million pages and bureaucrats who are RIGHT NOW, abusing the power that all Europeans have entrusted them with. 3. Enable independent oversight. Consultations with technical committees of technology companies, Judicial reform to ensure there is no legislating from the bench, independent whistleblower handling to investigate abuses of power such as the CNIL case. 4. Separate the legislative, executive and punitive functions with very tight rules. We have assholes in Brussels so married to the idea that all tech is bad that they rebelled against the moves by the European Parliament to codify data transfer laws between the EU and US during Bidens visit. I mean, there is a limit to short sighted thinking. 5. Stop the political uncertainty with the multiple changes and the sheer amount of idiotic bureaucracy with multiple conflicting regulations where EVERY SINGLE FUCKING THING is a crime and instead, pick the most pressing issues: Cybersecurity, Data Handling, Data Sharing etc. It's ridiculous that we have 10,000 people obsessing over cookie banners while malicious hackers pilfer 100s of millions of peoples data because of a lack of political will to focus on cybersecurity.
On privacy legislation, my biggest gripe with the GDPR is it HAS DONE FUCK ALL for privacy. Apple has done more with the changes to iOS than the entire fucking EU with GDPR.
I am advocating for MORE effective legislation, not more INEFFECTIVE, burdensome, regressive regulation that enshrines the concentration of powers and makes innovation impossible.
1. Enlarge the definition of privacy legislation to cover EVERYTHING! Do you realize that EUROPEAN Intel agencies are not covered by the GDPR right now? While American Intel agencies are and Chinese Intel agencies are not even mentioned or challenged? How is that good for privacy when Huawei is essentially taking much of European market share while being run by a Govt enslaving a million Muslims in Xinjiang? 2. Make it less reliant on pure punitive measures and more an incentive+punitive set of objective measures to give companies the opportunity to innovate towards solutions. Right now, the stance by Europe has made only investing in lawyers the most appropriate choice. That or leave. No middle ground, no consultations, simply make villains of tech companies and that is the legacy of many regulators there. 3. Term limits on regulators. Limits and regulation on the people enforcing privacy legislation to ensure a balanced mind. Right now, go on Twitter and see the deranged rants of many of the people in these agencies who delight at the market share loss of Facebook or openly express glee whenever there is a bad press cycle outside of privacy for any of the companies they're supposed to be entrusted with passing judgements on. This is not a democracy. It's shameful. 4. Incentives that MINIMIZE liability for companies that meet objective standards that are reasonable. Right now, the approach is to hit them with the biggest stick you can find and hope and pray that it works out.
Many more, but along the same lines.
>I suspect that something about the GDPR must have bitten you quite badly
I've seen people simply struggle to achieve success that other parts of the world take for granted. This is TODAY . . in EUROPE of all places. You need to realize that bad political decisions are bad for everyone. I don't have skin in the game other than the feeling of watching someone drive off a cliff. So many people i speak to/interview/engage with from Europe who are young as SO very bright and talented and it's amazing to see how the very people they elected piss away time, resources and money on depleting the economy that these kids are going to grow up into for personal vendetta.
No one in their right mind will argue that the GDPR does a great job. It is very flawed legislation that will set the privacy movement back decades.
It doesn't matter post that statement what your conclusions are. You have opened up every business to a liability of 4% global earnings or 20 million Euros WHICHEVER IS GREATER. . .at the sheer discretion of some illiterate fucks like yourself in Brussels.