jgreen10

One theory is that it's too early in the cycle to attribute the warming to El Nino (which will make things even worse), but that it's due to a reduction in SO2 in shipping fuels causing lower solar reflection and heating up the oceans faster.

However, it's hard to be sure. A discussion: https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/aerosols-are-so2-emissions-...

Decades of optimism along the lines of "something bad is coming, but we can still fix it" did way too little.

Perhaps now that it's actually bad something might happen.

At this point, geo engineering is probably the safer option compared to letting the planet spiral into an uninhabitable waste land. Of course, it should be combined with cheap and abundant renewable/nuclear energy.

Now that things are bad, there might actually be popular support for this, though we may still have to wait for the current political class to retire.

The amount of carbon emissions is simply far too large for sequestration efforts, natural or otherwise, to make a significant dent.

In the end, what the world needs is an abundance of cheap energy without proportional carbon emissions. Everything else is secondary.

Does AI completely dominate the translation industry? I suspect not, though it made translation more accessible and widely used.

When I was in university around 15 years ago, the idea of peer-to-peer currency was floating around as an evolution of the tit-for-tat idea in BitTorrent, which was still popular at the time.

The expectation back then was that peer-to-peer would continue to evolve, especially in the area of distributed computing. Clouds did not exist yet, but projects like SETI@Home were having some success in terms of sharing compute resources. A peer-to-peer network could meter you for your consumption of compute resources through a lot of microtransactions in a virtual currency that avoided traditional banks or credit card providers.

Then came the first and least efficient implementation of peer-to-peer currency: Bitcoin, which did not sell the distributed computing capacity, but used it to do meaningless computations. It was clever, since up until that point the problem of zero-cost identity had been unaddressed, but appears to have few practical applications. It is surprising to me that people view it as some kind of alternative currency or store of value and send real currency to "trusted" exchanges. You deposit money just for the pleasure of doing a transaction? Yeh, sure, you don't need to agree on a global, trusted intermediary, but you still need to trust your exchange not to screw you over.

Ethereum is closer to the original ideas behind distributed computing and peer-to-peer currency, but the Internet has largely moved on from peer-to-peer networks. Today I can instantly get all the compute resources I need in a trustworthy, secure environment, and only pay for what I use. BitTorrent has also lost a lot much of its relevance with streaming services providing a greater level of convenience.

I like the show so far. I don't mind that some people don't. Let's see what happens next.

As a software engineer, I am seriously considering going back to college and studying nuclear physics.

I believe an abundance of emission-free energy is about the only thing that can move the global economy to where it needs to be. Fossil fuels need to be out-competed with very cheap electricity. Once you achieve that, capitalism will ensure that all fossil fuel burning devices will gradually disappear. Other methods that try to fight capitalism (e.g. CO2 taxes) are ultimately losing battles, because the global political goodwill will never be there.

Solar is great, and cheap, until it's not. You need to cover vast areas of land in solar panels to power the whole country (incl. cars, freight, industry, ...), which is impractical and extremely costly, and still only works part of the day/year. It's an important part of the solution, but not the solution.

Nuclear is about the only thing that can provide continuous abundance at a reasonable cost, though we need new technologies.

The numbers in the article are shaky.

For instance, the Netherlands had a trade surplus of $76 billion in 2017, but shows up as having a trade deficit.

France does not appear in the list of Germany's export partners, but it's actually number 2.

Due to unprecedented urbanisation you effectively have runaway inflation in large cities, which is wiping out whole economic classes. Raising interest rates would be the only sane thing to do from the city perspective, but outside of the cities high interest rates would wreak havoc to the small amount of industry and jobs that remain there. I don't think any country has come up with a solution to the economic imbalance created by the flight of capital to cities.

When I'm in Russia, I find the state-controlled media surprisingly critical of government policy and very outward looking. They are clearly ignoring the elephant in the room: the country being an ungovernable pool of corruption that can only be kept together by instilling nationalism and foreign threats and an authoritarian leader, but then again, it's not like US media are really asking critical questions. With or without free press, no one wants to hear that they're in a mess. It's much nicer to think that everything is good, but the evil-doers are trying to ruin it.

Hey soneca, could you give me a transcript of the conversation between Dilma Rousseff and Lula da Silva on January 31st, 2011? If you can't, then you'll have to go to prison.

It's an irrational, unreasonable request, which makes it highly questionable as a legal ruling.

Well, applications that want to use Citus can just use whichever PostgreSQL client is available.

Well, people use MongoDB...

AGPL only requires open sourcing any modifications you make to the software when you give users direct access to a server running the software, which seems like something you would never want to do in case of a database.

You can use database servers running AGPL software in a closed source SaaS: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html

Why?

Russia and the US are more than capable of destroying the world already, but it's far harder to save it.

Well, Germany has been allowed to act as the emperor with no clothes for a while now; an economic powerhouse sitting on empty pension chests with an ageing population.

To compare pension fund assets:

    US: $46k/capita
    UK: $42k/capita
    Netherlands: $76k/capita
    Germany: $2.9k/capita

http://www.oecd.org/finance/Pension-funds-pre-data-2015.pdf

Driverless car technology will be an economic development like cars and factories. In the long run, the economic opportunity it will create is far bigger than the cost.

Don't you mean that Silicon Valley is improving DARPA-funded autonomous driving technology? Lets not rewrite history. Government funding drives most technological development.

About 2000 elderly die of starvation every year, and about 30-40,000 people die in traffic. There are many cases in which the government doesn't have its priorities straight, this is not one of them.

It was government funding via DARPA that led private companies to work on self-driving cars. Google simply hired to two winning DARPA Grand Challenge teams. The Internet is another example showing that the government is quite capable, and often necessary in driving technology forward.

The three major powers in the world today are the US, the EU, and China. The trade that makes them world powers also makes military conflicts between them unthinkable. The US needs to focus on maintaining its economic superiority and not waste its time on fighting the peanut gallery. So far it is doing a pretty good job, or rather, not as bad a job as the other two.

National football fans are not like club football fans. There is very little hooliganism in international football, nor would anyone have any energy for it in the searing heat.

and then quietly renamed Treaty of Lisbon and ratified.

It looks more like a long and steady decline that has slowed somewhat since releasing Swarm.

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=swarm%20app%2C%20fou...

Note that you should sum the two together to be fair, meaning they haven't declined much since a year ago.

The reason naming things by hash is a good idea is that you can cache them "forever", until you decide to change headers. The only benefit of a UUID over a URL is that the lack of meaning makes it less likely that people will change it later on. However, semantic naming is useful, and avoids collisions. True UUIDs require very careful use of RNGs.

SQL databases had their imminent death coming. They were stuck. However, PostgreSQL is under more active development than most other databases, SQL or NoSQL. It is new and cool technology.

In the end, whether you speak SQL or use NoSQL construct matters as much as whether you write a program in C or Pascal. You can have endless debates about form and function and you might want to see and identify with a winner, but in the end whether the tools and the community surrounding a technology fits people's needs is the only thing that really matters.

It's not. Everything is disconnected from everything, everything requires me to learn a new GUI, my devices are actively preventing me from doing things I want, using data gives me a headache, my tools don't tell me what they can do, making apps is complex, I need to use a 1970s interface to do anything remotely, my Chrome tabs crash all the time, my Android apps crash all the time, iOS is too slow to know whether it's crashed. Computing has become a little superficial in the way we use it, superficial is easy, but anything else is way too hard.

No one believes everything authorities say. Congress has a 15% approval rating ...

Something that confuses a lot of conspiracy theorists is that global issues just aren't as important as local issues to people. Having a house, doing your job, raising your kids, spending time with loved ones, and anything that directly affects your ability to do so (e.g. your health, actions of people around you) are important and have a profound impact on your life.

Sometimes the actions of authorities have a direct impact on your life as well, but mostly at a much smaller scale and with less relevance.

Treating MH370 as something that's important to anyone other than people related to those involved leads to typical thinking errors like assuming Russia would care about this plane, or that people are being deluded. The horrible truth is that the whole thing just doesn't matter much.

The difference is really just in maturity. AWS started years earlier and has had time to work out the kinks. GCE will get there, but it'll need time and experience.

They overthrew Milosevic, Taliban, Hussein, Austin, Noriega, Bosch, Gaddafi, ... Fighting guerrilla wars is the problem. Firepower obviously doesn't help in guerrilla wars.

I guess this is an old discussion, but WhatsApp seriously threatened the dominion of Facebook, a company that is valued at $209B simply for owning a significant amount of the daily attention span of consumers world-wide.

Essentially, the value of WhatsApp is based more on what it could have destroyed than on what it could have created. Advertising is kind of funny like that, since it's not a product that consumers actually want. No value is lost to consumers by switching to a platform without advertising, even though the economic damage to advertisers can be huge.