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justanotherc

168 karma · joined January 9, 2020

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justanotherc··on Elizabeth Warren Calls for US to Create a CBDC
The article covered CBDC is about two sentences and then moved on about regulating bitcoin for the rest of the article. Two separate topics, amd the title isn't really at all what the author spent time writing about.
justanotherc··on Tanks can survive against cheap, shoulder-fired missiles
"Modern steel technology" is not what tanks boast as their primary defense these days. Armour technology uses reactive armour on top of steel armour, which can repel conventional explosives.

But shoulder fired anti-tank weapons have moved on from conventional explosives as well -- javelins for example contain 2 warheads -- one to predetonate the reactive armour, and a second charge to penetrate the regular armour.

Its a continual arms race, neither tank nor ATGM can claim dominance, and one hasn't moved beyond the other in a meaninful manner yet.

justanotherc··on Technical debt as a lack of understanding
I tend to agree with him. It takes too long to tell that story. In a boardroom meeting type environment people don't have time or the attention span to settle in for story time. You need to be able to illustrate your point in 3 sentences or less.
justanotherc··on Why American cities can’t keep up with infrastructure maintenance (2017)
Yeah probably tough and expensive to transition existing neighbourhoods to this model... but is abandoning the current infrastructure and starting fresh more expensive than maintaining the already expensive existing infrastructure? Don't know.

I do know London, England is build on top of many many layers of obsolete sewer systems from a millenium of city living. Sometimes its best to abandon and rebuild.

justanotherc··on Why American cities can’t keep up with infrastructure maintenance (2017)
Sorry I thought it was fairly obvious we were only talking about suburbia because the article itself points out urban areas are funded just fine. Its suburbia where the cost/tax ratio is out of whack.
justanotherc··on Why American cities can’t keep up with infrastructure maintenance (2017)
No. Re-read my comment. Suburban areas only. Try to keep up before you get all salty and make yourself look dumb.
justanotherc··on Why American cities can’t keep up with infrastructure maintenance (2017)
I'm not a well expert, but from what I've read is that chemical runoff could get into shallow sandpoint wells, but if you drill a 200ft deep well, that water is millions of years old.
justanotherc··on Why American cities can’t keep up with infrastructure maintenance (2017)
Forget the dirt road. Rural solutions for water/sewage/power work because their viability is not dependent on close geographic proximity. Its apparent that the urban solution being applied to suburban areas is not viable, so why not flip things around the other way?
justanotherc··on Why American cities can’t keep up with infrastructure maintenance (2017)
I'm not talking about everyone moving to the country. I'm talking about localizing power/sewer/water infrastructure in medium density areas like suburbs. If you read the article you understand that its the suburban sprawl that is the expensive areas to maintain. High density downtown cores fund themselves just fine.
justanotherc··on Why American cities can’t keep up with infrastructure maintenance (2017)
But its not the high density that's expensive (the downtown core is actually the profit areas), its the medium density with sprawling suburbs that is what us so expensive to maintain for the very reason that localized infrastructure may work -- space between homes.
justanotherc··on Why American cities can’t keep up with infrastructure maintenance (2017)
I'm not talking about everyone moving to the country, I'm talking about bringing localized infrastructure to suburban sprawl. I doubt that would work in high density urban areas, but why could it not work in suburbs where every house is sitting on a 60x120ft lot?

Its those areas that the article describes as the expensive areas because everything is so spread out.

justanotherc··on Why American cities can’t keep up with infrastructure maintenance (2017)
Yeah that's what I'm wondering... could decentralised water/power/sewer distribution scale? Like maybe not EVERYBODY has their own well/septic, but maybe every 5 houses or whatever share one?
justanotherc··on Why American cities can’t keep up with infrastructure maintenance (2017)
Why don't we just stop building all this infrastructure, and move to a micro-community or individual model?

My parents' farm is on a well and septic, and a dirt road. Water purification is done with a UV filter. The infrastructure costs are almost nil.

We are in an age now where houses don't even need to be on the power grid -- a set of solar panels and a lithium battery makes traditional power distribution obsolete.

If it costs a typical suburban house $10k a year to maintain infrastructure, that's outrageous. Move to individually or community based infrastructure.

justanotherc··on Regular cannabis use were associated with poorer cognitive performance
Please read the second part of my comment before just repeating what you already said
justanotherc··on Regular cannabis use were associated with poorer cognitive performance
Well not if you ask him as he would tell you his grades were highly correlated to his smoking habits. Obviously its a non scientific anecdote, but my point is I thought it was well established common knowledge that marijuana affects cognition.
justanotherc··on Regular cannabis use were associated with poorer cognitive performance
Is this really all that groundbreaking? I had a teammate in highschool remark that you could pinpoint in his grades the times when he started/stopped smoking weed.
justanotherc··on NASA has patented a new route to the moon
So I don't understand, any space farer who takes this route will be sued for patent infringement?

Lol. I'm going to patent a driving route to Walmart. I'll be rich.

justanotherc··on Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes
> We started putting armed police in schools to defend against school shootings. Not to intimidate students.

Tell that to the 8yr old who had his elbows cuffed painfully behind his back by the school officer because he misbehaved.

justanotherc··on Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes
What does the NSA have to do with Canadian law? Last I checked we weren't the 51st state...
justanotherc··on Data isn't just being collected from your phone, it's being used to score you
Evidence constructed in parallel is not admissible, therefore my point stands. So what's your point?
justanotherc··on Data isn't just being collected from your phone, it's being used to score you
But they have to establish reasonable suspicion, wuch they also have to justify in court in order to investigate you further.

They can't just say "he had a bad score, so I pulled him over and found weed". If they did that, the stop would be unjustified and the whole case would be thrown out.

justanotherc··on PHP the Wrong Way
Maybe, but non-abstracted code is not DRY, becomes difficult to maintain, and is time consuming to write.

So a good programmer will start to abstract those things, and at that point you're going down the road of creating your own framework.

justanotherc··on PHP the Wrong Way
So you just have one giant file full of unrelated procedural utility functions that you include to your new projects?
justanotherc··on Data isn't just being collected from your phone, it's being used to score you
The justice system has built into it the requirement to justify allegations against you though. By design everything in the justice system is transparent or its not admissible. So an opaque "score" of any sort wouldn't ever be acceptable evidence.
justanotherc··on Cryptography is not magic
"Crypto is not magic."

"Don't roll your own crypto because its basically magic and you'll screw it up unless you're a cryptographer".

Umm... ok...

justanotherc··on On Interviewing Programmers
Yeah, I don't see having a monoculture as really that terrible, depending on the type of work being done. It can be more efficient and have less interpersonal conflict than a workplace where everyone has a different perspective, gets offended by things the other person doesn't intend to be offensive, requires more communication to get on the same page, etc.

As you sarcastically pointed out, diversity for diversity sake is a false virtue IMO.

justanotherc··on Weighing a Car with Tire Pressures
Lol, my question to that would have been how do you get the 747 on the aircraft carrier?

That's actually a harder question than getting the weight of one... which makes the entire exercise ridiculous.

justanotherc··on Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
I agree. The shell, just like all other programming languages, allows you to trade the time spent learning a domain specific skill for an easier method of doing things.

Using the batch operations example -- if you know shell scripting, you can save yourself time doing things manually -- but you need to have already traded in the time to learn Shell scripting.

GUIs allow you to reduce time spent learning a domain specific skill at the expense of overall efficiency.

justanotherc··on Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
I think he's partially right, and you're also partially right.

Learning to code is an extremely high barrier to wntry, but its also highly transferable. If you can write Python, there's tons of jobs you can get writing Python, and with a little extra work, you can pretty easily transition to another language with a whole other world of opportunity.

The problem with these "visual" languages, is its a lower barrier to entry, but its still takes a detail oriented person, and ends up being very specialized, so there's less opportunity to leverage that to another job. So if you're a person than can learn a visual language effectively, you might as well go the extra 30% and learn to code in a "real" language.

justanotherc··on We use too many damn modals (2018)
Modals are good for when you need to show a new blocking state without losing the current state. There are many valid reasons for that scenario. Even for modal inception.

Use them for that purpose, no need to swear them off completely.

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