bmhin

I think it's less that there are no viable alternatives and the very bleak consequences if food or power get screwed up. There's the saying "Nine meals between mankind and anarchy" that applies here. If you are messing with the food supply, you are playing with fire if things go sideways. People die, people starve, people riot.

So things have a strong incentive towards "if it aint broke don't fix it". You can argue a lot of it is in fact broken on some fundamental levels and the side effects of those two industries are massive but, at the moment, we have power and we have food (speaking for the US, not globally where that isn't the case).

The risk tolerance is very, very low. An unwillingness to accept any potential failure, regardless of impact, is frequently the single greatest problem for any change or reform.

Another side effect was that a question that might have had a perfectly fine answer that was accepted back when the question was posed in 2010, now might be very much not the right approach. I feel like I frequently see questions where down in the other answers are multiple answers posted in the intervening years with much simpler and more readable answers. Or even if there isn't some new way of performing the solution, there might just be a reason why it's become the wrong question in and of itself and an explanation for why this is the wrong road nowadays is provided.

My take here is that it is too easy to look back on what was learned in college and what you use today in comparison to it's source and conclude you've picked up way more on the job and use comparatively little from the formal education. Therefore the value is low.

Could you likely have learned everything that you got from your degree on your own while cutting out some of the less practical parts? Almost definitely. Would the person who isn't looking back with 20/20 hindsight know what to cut? I think that is less likely. Would a person without the formal structure of a degree actually gone out and learned all those same things with the same commitment? Some might be able to, but I suspect most would lose interest.

Sure your career might have ended up never touching a single networking component that you learned about in school. But maybe you loved that part and if left to your own devices would have forsaken other parts of the education to just deep dive on it. Would that be fine? Maybe. Or maybe you quite like working in the role that you find yourself in. A role that you might have shut the door to very early on without some structure.

So I think a mix of hindsight and overestimating a person's ability to just stick with a rigorous learning process that can take months and months (or years) without the benefits of peers, teachers, structure, and accountability leads to this belief.

I should mention though that as we are speaking about "value", the ROI on college in America is pretty rough. Even with all those benefits laid out, it is hard to make it too rosey in the face of a hundred thousand dollars of potential debt. Extra so due to the fact that you can acquire a portion of that debt and not even come out the other side with a degree.

> The system is not simply based on notoriety, as some kind of aggregate of follower count or likes, which would be sane and fair step in the right direction. But rather on a case by case basis, where according to the article "whitelist status was granted with little record of who had granted it and why, according to the 2019 audit.".

This was my takeaway as well. I 100% agree rules cannot be applied evenly across every user. A person sharing posts with their 300 "friends" and someone blasting messages at their millions of "followers" are frankly engaging in completely different experiences. The regular person might expect none of their comments to ever get reported and any report could be cause for something actually bad. A popular politician on the other hand might see every single thing they post reported a ton every single time.

And rather than applying rules based on say the reach (which Facebook knows) or any other metric, it seems that they just chucked people into the special people list and that's that. The article stated there are millions on that list. A catch all for all the people who are having the greatest impact seemingly. The fact that the list had considerations for potential blowback to FB is even worse. I get that in percentage terms of 2.8 billion users a multimillion person list is in outlier territory by most measures, but that group is also wildly influential and thus shouldn't be in the "too weird" category.

I'm not even opposed to a general whitelist, some people (like a President of the US) truly are gonna be really weird to apply any broader ruleset to. But a free for all and catch all bucket for anyone of "notoriety" is really bad. It should be a very special remedy that is not done lightly. The article made it seem like the policy for this particular remedy was non-existent.

Part of me thinks the solution is just to cap it. If the central conceit is "connecting people" then no person realistically knows more than say 10,000 people and shouldn't need the microphone scaled to global proportions. That'd never happen, but it seems like a root answer.

The auction house was just a terrible, awful idea. It became pretty obvious that they broke the entire premise of the game loop: do farming runs, try to get good gear that aligns with your targeted build, get real excited when that thing you were chasing suddenly falls into your lap, update build and go for more loot to realize it further. Instead you would just grind hoping for general "good" things, flip them on the AH for gold, then use that money to buy the exact thing you wanted from said AH for your build. Completely killed the little human spark from the loot roulette that basically underpins why people play it.

All very good info that as far as I know is all pretty unique to SES regarding the default/sandbox vs the upgraded production capabilities. The set up makes a lot of sense to prevent abuse and it works just fine out of the box for dev purposes. The production version also operates way more how you'd actually expect an email service to work.

All that said, I don't know of any other services that have this "production" upgrade that is needed other than maybe just the general service limits (which have always seemed more of a "protect you from yourself" situation) so it can be a touch confusing.

As someone who naturally gets feelings of aversion when I hear some solutions suggested and who works with folks who can suggest them without blinking, I honestly think "should" never enters their mind. It seems to be a pure engineering-in-a-vacuum mindset where "can" is all that matters. They envision an admittedly potentially interesting end outcome and the means to get there is just engineering. They don't think twice about how their solution just involved enabling tracking everyone's phone's location to enable it.

My and many others first thought would likely be "I don't really want to be tracked myself or have to track others" and all they think of is "We can dynamically allocate the resources based on where people are!".

> I play poker, and poker players are constantly furious that their 80% favorite hand doesn't win 100% of the time. 80% feels like a lock.

I always liked an interview by one of the designers of the game XCOM which relies heavily on showing players probabilities. Apparently behind the scenes on lower difficulties, even though they might show you 85% chance of success, they tweak it under the hood to be closer to 95% because that is where the player's emotional weighting is. They want the players to have fun and that is certainly one way to go about it.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/266891/Jake_Solomon_expl...

> You can also do hybrid approaches, e.g. continuous deployment to a QA environment, and have dedicated QA teams, while delivering to client on a waterfall schedule.

I feel like this approach lets developers still spot check and make sure their code looks good when in QA while still giving the more anxious folks who need production to be holy to have their manual button press to get things live. Ideally, your pipeline is also at that point a simple button press to go from QA out to production. It also hopefully isolates any production issues to environmental differences as you will be in the "bundled changes" territory referenced in the article.

From what I've experienced the FUD around letting things get into production rapidly really freaks out some organizations and having it hybridized is better than nothing.

It seems weird to say there are issues with connections but everything else is working fine. Like is the API technically fine on their system metrics but no one can connect to use it so it stays as green? Doesn't really help much in practice it seems if connections are having issues and everything is unusable in practice to keep them as green.

Would be similar if auth was down. You can connect to us, you just can't authenticate so can't actually do anything.

Edit: Looks like they updated the status to properly show an across the board outage

I've wanted this for video streaming too. After getting rid of cable, I'll often want to put something on in the background while I'm browsing the web or playing switch or something. I feel like almost everyone has a completely different thing they are looking for in active vs passive consumption and being able to tailor it would be very nice. Very straightforward example: I really don't need subtitled shows when I will be half paying attention at best. I also don't want to watch something that is new to me and also "good" when I won't really be paying attention.

> Inter-season gaps are bad enough in broadcast, but with season-bingeing they extend to >11 months and that's just not very attractive.

It's also a completely different time frame for the binged show. A weekly released 10 episode season that would have occupied your mental space for around two and half months before returning nine and half months later might now be something you engaged with for just two days before not thinking about it for a year.

There's a reason so many streaming shows need to have season recaps, because in the year or two it takes for the next season you've completely lost all the story beats. As you mentioned, I find myself wanting to rewatch the previous season(s) before a new one kicks off, but that becomes really onerous with 10+ hours per season.

I believe it to. Anecdotally, my old method for studying while in school was just to handwrite out notes as I read. I would not even go back to review them as the act of simply writing it out by hand was enough to retain it. Typing I feel like is much more autopilot. The amount of times I misspell or write the incorrect word while typing is way higher than anything done by hand.

That said, my handwriting is also atrocious and I would not want to ever have to disseminate something in that form over a nice, typed document.

I remember once encountering an error that had all of the above plus it presented the solution to the issue right in the error message. It was amazing and why I still remember seeing that to this day.