ninalanyon

That reminds me of Kernighan's law: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place."

Which leads to this:

"If you write code at the limit of your intelligence, you won’t be able to understand or troubleshoot it later."

https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/kernighans-law/

GDP is irrelevant when discussing the well being of the ordinary person. A more relevant measure would be median income together with purchasing power parity.

US median income is just over 19 k international dollars, Poland is just under 9 k. Still a big difference but just over a factor of 2 instead of over 3.5.

See https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...

> Every generation believes it is living through the end of something.

I'm not sure my generation thought that (I was born in 1955). Not in the South of England at least. Growing up there in the late fifties, sixties, seventies, I feel that most of us were looking forward most of the time and anticipating good times. At least most people I knew at the time. It was a time of accelerating change and a great deal of it was undeniably positive.

Is that really HR or a reflection of the social environment in your specific country. I never found HR to be a problem in Norway.

Electricity distribution, mainly transformers from 10 kVA to 500 MVA and more.

It takes a long time to design and a lot of material to make a big transformer and they last for decades. They are critical infrastructure so when one fails you want it replaced or repaired quickly but they are too expensive (millions of dollars/pounds/euros) to keep a spare unit idle for decades and the lead time for a new large power transformer might be six months or even longer. So repair makes sense, especially if it can be done on site because moving a big metal box full of oil, steel, and copper that weighs hundreds of tonnes is a major logistical exercise.

This isn't something that can be done by a company that 'moves fast and breaks things' and disappears next year.

Make sure that you have as thorough a specification of what the system is supposed to do as you can.

Then define the version control system and the build process, specifying the dependencies, and so on.

Think about any opaque blobs in the system and try to eliminate them so that you have plain text source code so that no tools are needed to read the code.

Make sure that the build process runs entirely locally and never fetches anything from outside.

Simplify everything, use only tools and languages that are well understood and supported.

The real problems are not strictly technical but social: how do you prevent loss of the code, the tools, the specification, how do you maintain the expertise needed to maintain it. How do you ensure that all those things that are obvious to you now are written down in all their gory detail so that your great grandchildren will not apply their new and different preconceived ideas to the system?

Document all this on paper as well as electronic storage, make sure that version ids are recorded on every page as well as being available to the user of the machine or program.

In the industry in which I worked for the last thirty years of my career it was not uncommon to have things come back for repair after fifty years use and to be able to consult the original drawings and bill of materials so that exact replacement parts could be made.

> include jail time for the decision makers

This is much more important than the fines. But really it should be widened to include not only those who made the decision but also those who implemented it (software developers, designers, project managers) and those who benefited from it (executive officers, shareholders).

Anyone involved with the company who knew what was going on and did nothing to hinder it is culpable to some degree.

> , if she had a career that's probably hosed

Why? She hasn't committed a crime so why should her career be damaged?

As far as reasoning abilities goes it would seem so.

What does handwriting have to do with fonts?

That was my point. The idea of replacing teachers with AI is itself dystopian and and I'm quite sure rife with unintended consequences.

That would depend on which country I was in. Where I live it would probably be at least 20 USD per hour. But I live in a country (Norway) where unemployment benefits and protections against becoming unemployed in the first place are strong.

Oh, I agree with you.

I was just wondering about the motivation of the professor in question and whether they had really properly thought through what they were doing and the effects it might have together with whether any effort was being made to rectify the state of the education system that caused the problem.

Professor? So this was at a university? What point was he trying to prove? And did those who failed the test go on to somehow magically develop the critical thinking skills that they were lacking?

Sounds like a cheap stunt if it wasn't immediately followed by both remedial teaching and a shake up of the teaching at the institutions that had so signally failed those students.

Oil production is subsidised.

My ancient 2015 Model S 70D would do that 300 mile journey with less than an hour of charging in the middle. A new car with much less time for charging.

I've just done a thousand mile journey from UK to Norway in that car. It was not a big deal to charge on the way and would be less so in a newer car.

Which one?

> persistent need to prove that vision can replace a bog standard IR rain sensor (it still cannot).

I have 2015 Model S 70D and rain sensing seems fine to me, is it worse on later models?

How does it know whether you want to go forwards or backwards?

It might be great where you are but it definitely isn't where I am in Norway, nor was it in quite a few of the rural places I visited in the UK this summer.

If they are going to be put out of work by AI then they will be cheap to hire.

Most likely there is no quality control for the security process so no one has noticed that the swabs aren't working properly. Most such processes do not have any QA or QC as far as I can tell and the people actually doing the work have no interest in the effectiveness of the process or influence over it.

> it just has a lot more water

What? France has had to shut down or down rate nuclear power plants because of a lack of cooling water.

Of course. But the fact that it has a price reduces the size of the market and hence the amount of theft.

> evidence that handwriting in cursive is better than handwriting normally?

Perhaps I'm too old for this conversation but surely cursive is writing normally?

> pretend that plea deals are coercion

That's exactly what they are.

The contrast is so low it's unreadable. Saved me from wasting time reading it, I'll go and waste my time elsewhere :-)

In my opinion it is necessity and immersion that drive language learning best.

If you don't actually need it it's hard to be disciplined enough to put the work in when there so many other calls on your time.

For me immersion is the only thing that really works. I can plug away at the grammar and vocab ad aeternam without making a den in the task but having to use the language to order a beer or food or talk to people who don't speak your language to get things done works much faster.

The picture showing a thumb typing makes it clear that anyone with long fingernails is going to find it difficult to use.

> My local town gives you two free visits to the garbage transfer station per year.

Where I live in Norway the recycling station is open three days a week and I can take stuff there free as often as I like up to 2 000 kg of stuff per year.

It has never occurred to me that there would be a limit on the number of visits. Or have I misunderstood?