brango

Archeologists don't seem to be as blasé as you about this:

> Nothing puzzles archaeologists so much as impracticality, and although the karst topography of Baalbek demands strong foundation stones, and although one big stone is easier to move than many smaller stones, the pillars holding up the temple’s podium, van Ess says, are bigger than they need to be. In fact, Baalbek is one of a series of ancient projects that are under rigorous study by the Germans for being unnecessarily large.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/baalbek-myth-megalit...

It's not perfect, but shows the same object from multiple angles.

I think any moral species would wait until we've made sufficient progress on our own then meet us at our level instead of rocking the boat by coming down demoing all their advanced tech.

From a Newtonian perspective quantum physics sounds like a complete joke. There are undoubtedly other discoveries yet to be made. I can certainly countenance that future scientific advancements could make what we think of today as being impossible as being possible without violating the laws we have discovered.

There's some odd stuff in some NASA footage you can see for yourself. But now with CGI you probably won't accept any videos you can see on youtube as being real.

But this still isn't enough for you because until you actually see one with your own eyes you aren't willing to accept it. That is excellent scepticism. However, we accept a lot of scientific reports without actually running the experiments ourselves... There seems to be a mismatch there.

Healthy scepticism is healthy, but barring a "smoking gun" that is unavoidable (i.e. an "Independence Day"/"District 9" scenario) you probably will never believe it. I suggest that's due to conditioning and how the US Gov directed Hollywood to ridicule this sort of thing in the past.

If we relax things back to "normal" and view the reports (the volume, quality of sources, corroborating evidence like multiple witnesses, radar confirmation, WW1 Foo fighter reports, etc) then the balance of probabilities seems to lie with "yes, they're here and they've been here a long time", at least for me.

I mean the Mahabarata alone does appear to contain an account of nuclear fallout and diagrams of UFOs, and that was written thousands of years ago.

There's also the publicly acknowledged reports of NASA and various governments/military conducting investigations and spending millions of dollars in the process.

Historically it would have been politically difficult for governments to come out and admit this - and when they did (like after Roswell) it was quickly retracted.

Peel back the social conditioning and reconsider the likelihood of this given all the reports.

The trouble with an app like this is that if it works and people become friends they'll probably just switch to the lowest common denominator/free platform, e.g. facebook/whatsapp to coordinate, so monetisation could be tricky. I.e. if your app is 100% efficient, people may use it once then not return.

You also have the added challenge of seeding this "two-sided" marketplace (people suggesting activities and those saying they'll attend) in every locality you want to operate in, so you'll need a compelling growth strategy. It also sinks or swims on people actually turn up for events.

Good luck - I do think Meetup sucks and could be far better, but I think you'd need a lucky break/very interesting twist to really gain traction.

The justice system punishes society by failing to adequately rehabilitate offenders. As a result many go on to reoffend. So really the current system is only punishing the next innocent victims of crimes perpetrated by released inmates.

See the difference in reoffending rates between Norway and the USA, and their different approaches to prison time. For a start, the US views the inmates as "criminals", Norway views the inmates as people who did something illegal.

Also, this post only addresses data flowing in one direction into BQ. Presumably they're then using something like Tableau or the Google/AWS offerings to build dashboards based on this data. There aren't many places for bugs to hide unless the BQ perms are wide open.

The GKE auth thing is so bad to the point we had to roll back from using service accounts to using normal API keys because there was nowhere in stack driver to add a service account key file. So the choice was either lose all our endpoint monitoring or just switch to API keys. When I opened a support ticket about this the support guy seemed incompetent. He literally couldn't understand what I was saying despite repeating myself 3 times in a way I struggled to make any clearer. It wasn't worth the hassle.

I'm running a gRPC/REST service on GKE with Endpoints and to add a new credential I needed to add the key to the service.yml file and update the endpoint. There's no way that scales. I can't wait to use AWS IAM for this instead. We had to backtrack and give out API keys instead of having anything better.

Follow this tutorial for what I was trying to do before going back to just normal API keys: https://cloud.google.com/endpoints/docs/grpc/authenticating-...

It's like GCP services weren't designed to work with each other. Just a hodgepodge of services that are fine if you can run CLI commands, but as soon as you want to get an ops team involved who want to do everything through a UI you're screwed.

Oh, and I can't tell you how frustrating it is for the k8s alpha clusters to just vanish on you. I'm a big boy. Let me decide when I want to kill an alpha cluster because, you know, I might know better than whichever engineer put that 30 day limit in.

Sorry for the rant, but as you can imagine I'm done with GCP and can't wait to head back to AWS land.

The only thing I'd use GCP for today is bigquery. For everything else I'd rather use AWS.