StephenMelon

Never had random reboots or graphical artifacts on screen before on OSX but my iMac has been very unstable since the High Sierra update. I’m lucky I’m not using that machine for work or I would be raging on a daily basis.

I’m not an “Apple are doomed”-er but this is the poorest Apple OS release since the black screen of death that plagued iOS8.

You seem to generally get about 3 years of use from an iOS device before the CPU can’t really keep up with the OS updates. I couldn’t recommend upgrading an iPhone 6 to iOS 11 as my wife’s 6 Plus has basically become unusable.

Maybe part of the problem is that no-one in Cupertino will be using a 3-4 year old iPhone or a 2012 Mac on a daily basis?

If you can’t do an experiment in your own environment, you improvise. Humans have done experiments in space that couldn’t be done on earth, so an advanced aquatic species could do experiments above the surface, given enough time, intelligence and inclination.

Intelligence might also take different forms, so an ocean-sized equivalent of a termite colony comprised of specialised molluscs that were collectively intelligent and had selectively bred themselves into specialised roles for millennia could achieve a great deal?

Well making Flash work on mobile is one potential use for quantum computing I guess? :D

Why are you downgrading then? Isn’t that a bit like buying an iPhone X and waiting several years excitedly in line for 5S?

Sounds a bit like doing the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs?

Seriously though, you can probably redo a typical 20 Man Year project in 2, given how much of the development process is usually taken up by missed requirements and re-work, IF you have a bombproof specification and a well-drilled team of stars.

The part I’m not quite getting though is how a battery software issue impacted on wider productivity? Couldn’t they get them in-place and then patch the software after the fact?

The original riddle about the tree in a forest is intended to illustrate the difference between philosophical idealism and materialism.

A dog whistle depends on the concepts of dogs and whistles, which don’t exist outwith the human semantic framework.

Historically, science has been heavily materialist but quantum physics has brought idealism back to the table.

Another thought experiment is 2 people at opposite ends of a room that contains a total vacuum. Ignoring breathing difficulties, if one spoke to the other, would he make a sound?

A sound is by definition something heard by someone. An unobserved universe doesn’t make sense, trying to conceptualise one would be like arguing about what colour a ganabreeshlach is.

Great to see the Scottish Government leading on renewable energy again. I was worried that adding over 30 million cars to the grid would cause problems but having looked into it it looks like it would add less than half a percentage point onto UK energy consumption at current utilisation rates.

I do wonder how it will affect the PCP market though as the future value of petrol and diesel cars will presumably become more difficult to predict?

I think that the belief that all cultures are equal is usually a mistake based on fuzzy thinking. The underlying thought is that “all cultures have value”, which mutates into “all cultures have equal value in terms of increasing insight into how humans interact with the world and each other” and this gets universalised via a mental shortcut into “all cultures have equal value” and then anyone who questions it gets shouted down.

Additionally, cultures are porous, overlapping aggregations of chaotic, abstract and mutating human created concepts which resist analysis almost by definition.

Assessing a culture based mainly on its economic expediency seems like a startlingly narrow criteria?

The capitalism system itself fails the universality test, because a person wouldn’t be equally happy to be on either side of a table with Jeff Bezos on one side and an unskilled immigrant on the other.

Arguably slavery never went away, it’s just that the slavery franchise was disguised/rebranded and then extended as social mobility was slowly rolled back.

“Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy” is problematic because it can be rephrased as “Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be (successfully exploited by those who control capital) in a (specific type of) advanced economy (which is rigged in favour of those who are already wealthy and/or educated/connected/privileged in a particular way for historical reasons)”.

As a parent, I can vouch for the fact it’s difficult to successfully raise children but there are many other possible ways to support the young in becoming net contributors to society because there are clearly many viable cultural alternatives to the nuclear family that could thrive under a system other than the kleptocratic oligarchy of late US neoliberal globalist vulture techno-capitalism.

Wax argues competently but is guilty of a slight lack of imagination as most conservative thinkers are; the preference to move backwards towards a solution based on a mythical idealised point in the past, letting their preferred outcome dull their analysis of their cognitive biases.

Unfortunately shutting down debate seems to be the favoured approach of those who are over-engaged with identity politics at the current time. It’s almost as if the left have been infiltrated by self-loathing alt-right 4chan agent provocateur trolls who are so scared of choice and diversity that they want to speed a “return” to a totalitarian hegemonic monoculture by getting the left to do their work for them. I think that the actual situation is maybe more prosaic, a case of undergraduate courses teaching critical theory without first teaching the fundamentals of critical thinking (with social media is turning the heat up across the board).

It is clear that cultures can be valued against one another only when metrics can be agreed. Wax seems to unsafely assume that there is a consensus on metrics and I think there is a need for more science and philosophy in that area before real progress can be made.

There is such a thing as legitimate authority based on domain knowledge but cultural legitimacy doesn’t seem to quite work in the same way. New generations will experiment with solutions to the problems (and privilege) they are faced with in their time. The debate has become more shrill as the web has accelerated change and revitalised sub-cultures, and conservatism will act, as it always has, as a speed brake on change.

I see a lot of comments on satire links that clearly demonstrate that large numbers of people can’t always spot satire. That possibly says more about the current cultural and political climate than it does about people’s gullibility though.

Have you examined your cognitive biases recently? It seems like you may stuck in a bit of a “deregulated free-market capitalism good, EU bad” loop that is preventing new information reaching you.

The author’s point seems to be if you assess the cost of everything and the value of nothing, the market will price poor, unskilled workers who don’t have the finance to sue as disposable in the grand scheme of things. No-one actually verbalised “if we get this wrong, it won’t matter, because they’re poor” but that’s the dynamic that has been set up nationally and globally.

The EU energy efficiency regulations are aimed at protecting the global environment, not individuals. The health and safety legislation is supposed to protect individuals. Are you suggesting that the buildings would not have been renovated if not for EU regulations? That seems extremely disingenuous.

I agree, the devil is going to be in the almost infinite edge cases, the visual negotiation that goes on between drivers at box junctions, dealing with bad or aggressive drivers who ignore right of way or tailgate, ethical decisions in all the “Kobiashi Maru” no-win situations (extreme weather, black ice, highway pile up, mechanical failures).

An advanced AI may well be able to identify whether an object coming towards the windscreen is a bird, bat, leaf or a rock, but what will its intuition be about how much of a problem it is likely to be? Should it swerve to avoid a raccoon and risk whiplash for passengers? Should it aim to avoid large insects if the owner is vegan?

Also, people are very used to mild lawbreaking. We expect a cab driver to double park and let us out the car if there are no available parking spaces, but would an AI be authorised to bend the law or would it have to find the nearest parking space, which may be 5 blocks away and could be taken by the time it gets there?

I suspect we will get autonomous drone-like flying cars long before we get full autonomy in city centres or rural areas, because flying through a mostly obstacle-free space with an ability to avoid collisions on 3 axis seems much more reachable?

Unfortunately, not everything has an objectively correct answer (aesthetics! ethics!) and so what you are saying kind of reinforces the point that diversity of viewpoints is vital to group problem solving. A group with the same blindspots will all make the same mistakes.

In my experience everyone has a natural mode of working and the conundrum for management is do you try to get people to change (to become all-rounders) or do you develop people in the direction they are already headed and therefore encourage specialisation? In my experience it’s sometimes better to let people be the best “them” they can be, than to try and require them to change and lose their uniqueness.

I think most developers naturally become more cautious with experience (the bitter experience of debugging long into the night usually), while some never grok maintainability or documentation but can still be highly productive net contributors if you have a great testing team between their code and your customers

Arrogant and condescending to whom? I said that both types were necessary to succeed exactly because I know the “over-thinking” types can be just as destructive to a software business as hackers who only think short term. My point is that you either identify and hire only unicorn-perfect developers, which you will probably never be able to find enough of, or you build a process that balances the strengths and weaknesses of your varied team members against each other, so that you get a workable happy medium between “move fast and break stuff” and “move slower than the market requires and don’t break stuff” in leiu of being able to hire one infallible genius after another.

There are 2 types of “good” programmers, who both think the other type is useless.

The first is the “rockstar” developer type who is great at prototyping, hitting deadlines no matter what and delivering functionality, albeit full of bugs. They will write 80% of the code and will drive the support team up the wall by breaking the build, causing customer issues in production, security holes and basically seriously degrading the code base. But their boss will love them because they deliver the shiny when required.

The second type are the ones who can sort out the mess created by the first type without making things even worse. They tend to be less visible, less well paid and less in demand but every company needs them.

The whizz kids and the grown-ups basically. Companies who only have the first will burn bright but not be able to scale. Companies who have only the second type tend to move too slowly to get to market or pivot.

So ideally there is a symbiotic relationship between the two types and someone who is a combination of the two is very rare indeed, because the first either needs an ability to place limitations on awareness of the big picture (and it’s very difficult to create a blind spot on demand once you have experience) or they need to be incredible at both analysis and full stack execution. Those people are few and far between so a process that gets the best out of the two types is, in my experience, the way that most companies work.