nnq

We should get better at creating mixed-ecosystems and cross-language libraries... the JVM was a step in the right direction but most new development completely forgot about that!

Once the wheels are in motion you can only accelerate by breaking off sub-projects/teams... but if you're at a point where this can accelerate you, it means you were already slow-as-hell :|

> Records are the impl of dataclasses

This is ofc backwards/reverse of any sane logic that would start with value types and after invent references (eg. in this case probably would've mean introducing a new composed-primitive type)... but then again, it's Java, at least they got the strings being immutable part right from the start.

I mean, the US is (a) a developed country with modern health-care, (b) there is no common 'old parents living in same home with some of the adult children' situation you have in Italy + Eastern Europe, (c) there are no norms of common physical contact like 'kissing on meeting' (see France, Italy, northern Romania etc.), (d) the population is generally very dispersed (compare US density with areas of Western Europe or China) and (e) there is prevalent use of personal cars instead of public transport (as opposed to Western Europe and China, again), which should further diminish transmission.

US stats look worrying for everyone on Earth, it almost looks like a wild difference in viral strains or some other important but unknown factor.

This is not eye-candy it's minimum s I need to get work done!

This is as low as a bar I can imagine but last time I checked from the mainstream Linux DEs, only a version of KDE/Plasma (can't stand KDE, so was a no-go out of the bat) had this.

We need to invent a drug that increases people's ability to detect irony.

It's like trying to put a car into orbit or smth...

If we were to admit there really is such thing as "qualia", there's not reason you wouldn't ask the same question about non-biological software or hardware systems... electronic hardware or biological hardware can have same computational qualities.

But since OBJECTIVELY there's no such things as qualia (the concept only exist SUBJECTIVELY), it could only exist by definition for "a person/subject" eg., in this context, a neural network large and complex enough to get close to a human-like intelligence level!

A dragonfly nervous system is probably simpler than some of the the largest artificial neural networks models...

notebooks are about non-linear execution

sure, there's enough rope to hang the whole neighborhood in that, you can totally f things up with no chance of recovery by doing that, or end up with data you have no idea how you got at and no way to re-trace 100% deterministically your steps

but if you have some discipline, stick to read-only-wrt-db, and you just delete whole notebook when things stop making any sense, it's... magical to have all that power and freedom at you finger tips, without having to keep much stuff in your working memory since you can dump it in a var or cell anytime, and mix your text notes through the code too!

It's not for everyone, but I love this beautiful chaos :)

I very often use jupyter to "pop open a shell intro a production service and start interactively debugging stuff live" (over an ssh tunnel, no public open ports and other security considerations, mind you).

It's amazing the feel you get the first time when you open a notebook that acts like a live REPL to smth. like a Django app and you start investigating and trying out stuff by just stitching snippets of code together in a notebook that imports your app and uses its db!

Now I code all API services regardless of tech they use so I can easily "pop open a jupyter REPL into a running system importing app code and running it agains its db".

Interactivity and REPL-driven-development-and-debugging is awesome if you have good discipline to contain the chaos and keep your notebooks aggressively short-lived (any useful code will be refactored and copied into its place in the regular codebase, most notebooks get deleted before merging a branch into dev/master).

Nowadays I'm mildly annoyed if a project is on one of those "ancient" 3 but ≤3.6 Python versions and I can't use the nice features in 3.7+...

That's hyperbole. Affinity products are quite close. Artists with more of a "hacker" mindset who can improvise a bit around missing features can also get by with open-source alternatives like Inkscape and Gimp.

Oh, and the new-user friendliness of Adobe products is abismall. I've never seem something more user-hostile than Photoshop - it imposes a brain-breaking mental model copied from the era of dark-room photo-effects or smth. and doesn't accept that everyone wants vector + raster in the same one software.

If the industry would not be so high-pressure and artists would have time to learn more tools and play with stuff instead of crunching to meet deadlines, stockholm-syndrome-software like Adobe's would die off... it only survives because that +10% productivity + extra 15% productivity for using the same tool as all the others and all the examples give overwhelmed and overworked artists an extra 25% they can't say no to!

Remote and automated warfare, coupled with more and more controlled/closed borders (we'll have these after COVID + economic crises) lowers the perceived cost and increases the benefits of using chem and bio weapons. Paradoxically, the better you'll be "prepared for a pandemic virus", the more in-control and confident you'll feel about indirectly using such weapons.

That's why we have to keep the world open and connected! And don't do the stupid thing of over-investing in surveillance and control that will only create dangerous illusions of being able to "safely" play with such "toys"!

This really should be implemented!

Train conductors are practically isolated from the passengers and quite safe.

They should increase their staff levels in these times!

It's the same brand of broken-mindedness that brought us the "only sick people should wear masks" and other wrong-think measures that increase transmission and make everything worse!

NO. Global data about who interacts with who and where should NOT be available to anyone. Especially NOT to HEALTHCARE orgs, I couldn't imagine less trustworthy and skewed-incentives institutions! At least you can trust that a country's secret service like your NSA would keep most of that data safe (as in "safe even the eyes of from judges & prosecutors unless you have a national security issue" etc.). Like in I'd rather have +10k deaths from preventable contagious diseases per year and take the chance of being amongst them then having this on a wide scale.

> civic trust in our community organizations and institutions was built up over time

You have no reason to trust anyone and anything. Stop doing so.

> a responsible institution

There's no such thing. Any institution should be considered thoroughly corrupted in the absence of evidence to the contrary.

> our secret agencies are actively planning to exploit this

It's their job to do so! If you want to provide solid security in globally connected world the "protectors" need to be a bit above the law - it's OK as long as what they collect stays in their archives and you prevent them from holding political or financial power.

The point is to build societies that can function TRUSTLESSLY and where everything is SECRET BY DEFAULT unless explicitly shared.

That's the only way to have an open society! Sure, in small isolated pockets you can have your "trust" in institutions and stuff.

Otherwise it's a choice between:

(1) accept framework of trustlessness + secrecy-by-default + broad exceptions for security agencies mostly as long as they DON'T share data with anyone (no, not even to "save lives", unless you're taking more than thousands...)

(2) drop the global interconnectedness, drop most free travel and work (I don't mean relocation - you'd also need to drop the kind of temporary travel that can't be easily monitored!), move to a more localist society - here you can have trust in the institutions of your own "pocket" that you voted for yourself.

Unfortunately it seems that the pendulum will now swing towards (2) as you seem to say you prefer - ...too bad, I'm sure we could've made the global-village thing work too :( probably we need to try again when tech advances a few extra steps, eg. neural-interfaces + pervasive-AI + usable distributed financial tech. and use the tech properly to make the openness and interlinking irreversible!

Most people have no idea WHY they are doing what they are doing! Like the actual true long-term business objective of a task etc. Successful task completion usually requires only technical details and immediate organizational ones. Fake goals are easy to sell to investors and board members by expert manipulator sociopaths (the kind of people explicitly hired and selected for top executive roles).

You can make immense progress towards a goal you know nothing about. You can't leak a secret you don't know.

That's kind of how human societal evolution works, only the bigger goals are evolved/emergent instead of envisioned by some dark conspiratorial cabal. But you can't rule out the latter.

As a society we need to maintain some "immune reaction potential" against nefarious manipulation by entertaining unlikely conspiracy theories too!

Natural-ADE shouldn't thwart development of a live/innactivated-virus vaccine though. But would immensely slow the dev of RNA or protein ones since you'd have to test through a lot of candidate variants until you find one that is not ADE-inducing...

Otoh, a population of naturally-immune survivors is a living library of antibody cocktails that are know to work. If I were more conspiracy-theory inclined, I'd say the UK gov. has knowledge along these lines and they are willing to sacrifice some of the gen. pop. knowing that (a) it will take a looong time to a good vaccine, so better for the economy if they get natural immunity faster than everyone else, also lots of arbitrage opportunities on international markets once they're first to recover, and (b) they bet their "living library" of good antibodies will maybe make them a leading producer of safe vaccines.

Now, if this COVID bugger does ADE with naturally induced immunity... that's BAAAD! Natural evolution would have no reason to optimize in that direction, and genetic lottery is probably not likely to produce this. You get the conclusion and geopolitical consequences... it's something something about that doomsday-clock striking a certain hour...

DISCLAIMER: I'm not an expert on the topic, or any other topic in general. Just another expert-generalist currently doing mostly software thinggies but having some old and rusty biomedsci background...

Not yet!

> amateurization is correlated with benign consequences for being wrong

Not that simple I think. it's correlated with either (1) as you say, not so bad consequences for being wrong, (2) being able to quickly check/measure both an individual's actual skill and the possible consequence of their decision before implementing thee, or (3) "rollback"/undo-ability - if something wrong happens, there's a relatively cheap way to undo the consequences and try again a different thing.

You can't easily measure skills in medicine or law (you can't create simple and fast tests/exams yet for such areas). You can't really simulate either by running a mental experiment or by running some software the consequences of decisions in medicine or law. You can try but it will fail horribly most of the time. And there's no "undo" after someone dies or stays wrongly in jail for X years.

I think that, paradoxically, as fields get more technical and precise, they will become more open to amateurization, because skills will be easily assessable and outcomes predicatable before deploying a scenario in the real world.

Of course, this will happen concurrently with AI/ML-replacing humans in these areas, so the amateurization if it will ever have time to happen will probably be a footnote in history, dwarfed by the bigger story of mostly getting humans out-of-the-loop...

But the humans that will remain in the loop will likely be more and more expert-generalists, eg. the "platinum level" version of "amateurs"!

Ofc you can low-tech your way into it by just delivering drones in shipping containers and hiding them close to potential targets... Also, cheap ass drones + bio-warfare would make a killer combo, if you knew you won't get nuked if you implement it...

WHY?! You'd end up with stuff 3-5mm thicker, but basically the same weight. Let's drop the "thinner" fetish once and for all, nobody cares about some mm of "wasted" space (that usually improves cooling anyway) inside a devices case and it being a bit chunkier, as long as it's almost just as lightwieght!

Fffs, let's go back to getting gold plated or diamond encrusted laptops and watches for showing off status! That's way better than the thinner/lighter nonsense...

Sure, getting smth. thinner bc technology actually improves (eg. displays) is cool, but shaving micrometers by packing everything close together is stupid.

(Oh, and we could start fixing our brains to think the same about cases for... people! Eg. housing. Like in kill the micro-apparments disease, there's enough room on the planet for all to leave confortable... in bigger rooms, and with chunkier laptops if that makes them more recyclable. "Space" IS mostly "free" ya know - very little of Earth's surface is actually usable for stuff like agriculture, energy production, mining etc.)