pavelrub

It's not a "car" - it's a flying car, and therefore doesn't need neither wheels nor roads. It can indeed also be type of an airplane or a helicopter - those descriptions aren't conflicting. I don't really understand the source of your confusion - are you equally perplexed that pineapples aren't actually apples, and sweet potatoes aren't real potatoes?

Not at all. The only observation I'm making is that {ways without layoffs} ⊆ {ways without layoffs} U {ways with layoffs}. Everything you can do in a universe where layoffs are outlawed you can also do in a universe where they aren't. The difference is that in the former universe you have less options, and therefore less paths to success. None of that means or implies that layoffs are always the "best" option.

Because it removes degrees of freedom. If there are N ways to achieve goal X, and some of those ways include layoffs, then removing those ways from the space of possible strategies will reduce the probability of companies achieving X.

What would be the rationale behind that? This clearly places limitations on a company's ability to optimize for achieving its goals, and ultimately stifles innovation. At the very least the long term impact of those downsides needs to be incorporated into any sort of social calculus. Would you prefer to live in a world without Teslas or SpaceXs, as long as employees are "taken care" of by their companies? This isn't necessarily even a false dilemma - it's entirely conceivable that certain ventures would require some kind of a layoffs strategy in order to be successful. Nor is it indicative of anything being wrong with "the state of the company" as you claim, unless you define it as such.

I find it entirely unconvincing that optimizing for "employee care" is overall more beneficial to humanity, including for the long term well being of the exact same employees and their families, than the alternative.

When people say that doing X has "negative value", they usually mean that it has negative value compared to not doing X, not compared to some imaginary solution that doesn't exist in reality.

If the choice is between cheaper housing with a longer commute, or expensive housing with shorter commute, it's completely unclear that the latter is more beneficial to humanity than the former, even if we only consider the number of deaths caused by each scenario. At the very least you haven't presented any evidence that this is so.

Spending less on housing has tremendous value for the people who benefit from it, including the ability to pay for better medical treatment, and lead an overall happier life. It's unclear what evidence you have that the net effect would be an increase in the overall number of deaths, or - more importantly - human suffering.

Other than that I do not really understand your "astonishment": you've artificially constructed a personal axiom that has never applied to human society - namely that people should care equally about every casualty, regardless of circumstances or causes, or the impact of those causes on society as a whole - and are then surprised that others don't follow this model.

I tested the ones with circles and squares, and Google definitely doesn't understand them.

I find in interesting that, to the question of "can someone explain in plain English what is Design Thinking?", your answer is a link to a Stanford crash course, and some story about a company that produces vapes, with a link to a long-winded article about them.

This makes me strongly suspect that Design Thinking is indeed BS.

Sure, but that's simply a single point in favour of Dynamo in what should have been a comprehensive analysis of strengths and weaknesses with respect to the required use case.

If they chose DynamoDB simply due to this strength (ignoring for the moment that the same thing can be achieved with native functions in Aurora), while ignoring the other things that ultimately turned out to be more important, then this again points to a flawed analysis. It's hard to see how serverless is to blame for this.

Connection pools always worked quite well with Lambdas, as long as the connection pool was initiated in the global scope of the running code, and not within the handler function. See [1] and [2]

[1] - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/running-lambda-...

[2] - https://blog.spotinst.com/2017/11/19/best-practices-serverle...

Not sure I understand this. Why did they choose Dynamo? And what does serverless has to do with this?

This seems like a simple case of people choosing the wrong tool for the job, without really understanding its limitations or capabilities.

> say, switching between Oracle, MS SQL and Postgress.

That's because those are all relational DBs that use SQL. If they chose some other NoSQL DB they would likely have encountered similar "peculiar" strengths and weaknesses. And I'm still not sure what this has to do with serverless - they could've have easily implemented a serverless architecture with MySQL or Postgress on RDS instead of Dynamo. But they chose not to.

Is every collection of negative or positive stories about X, in close proximity to each other, is always a "media campaign" governed by some hidden interests?

This is the same kind of logic as thinking that everything some CEO does is a "marketing ploy", or that every terrorist attack is a false flag operation.

I'm not sure I understand. What brand change? Wyamo is the name of the company. Waymo One is the name of the service they are launching.

This is factually incorrect. I suggest you read Pinker's "Enlightenment Now" to understand that the world, even outside of the West, has been getting significantly better in pretty much every metric since WW2, including scale and number of wars. The only difference is that today it is much easier to get exposed to the existence of various conflicts that nobody in the West would've even been aware of in the past.

> Eventually the US needs to come to terms with the massively destructive impact it has had on the world since WW2

Is this a joke? The world since WW2 is the most peaceful it has ever been in human history. The economic and military superiority of the US is one of the main reasons why this is so. 



> It is all too easy to justify it as “our meddling” is for the greater good and “others meddling” is evil and undemocratic. There is no distinction.

There is an obvious distinction: different countries seek to promote different, and opposing, interests. The world Russia seeks to create is very different from the world the US seeks to create. Instead of thinking this is about the universal morality of “meddling”, you should ask yourself: in which world would you prefer to live in?



That aside, it’s obvious that the US foreign policy has very often been very poorly designed. But claiming that we should be as upset about US meddling as about Russian or Chinese meddling is quite absurd. People in the West are upset about Russian meddling precisely because it is Russian, and promotes Russian interests that go against Western values, not because they think “meddling is wrong” in some universal sense.



> Imagine if China instigated a coup in a Middle Eastern country. The outrage would be massive.



Indeed. Why would anybody living in the West would want Middle Eastern countries controlled by China? That this would be met by outrage is a testament to the positive influence the US has on the world. I would much rather see the ME countries turn into western-style democracies through US meddling, than into Chinese puppets through Chinese meddling. That the former can’t be achieved, and any attempt of achieving it will likely be counterproductive, is a separate matter.

But it seems to me like you are misconstructing the issue: you seem to think that when people oppose "Chinese meddling", they do it because they believe foreign meddling is universally immoral, and they are therefore hypocritical when they don't similarly condemn US meddling. But that’s simply not the case: People want meddling that promotes the kind of world they want to see, and don’t want meddling that goes against it. There is nothing hypocritical about this.

Not at all. His viewpoint makes sense simply by understanding that US military superiority over countries like Russia and China is significantly better, to the entire western world, than any realistic alternative.

> Does a user benefit if Google facilitates government spying?

Yes. Chinese users will most definitely greatly benefit from having a censored Google in China instead of having just a censored Baido.

The only people who won't benefit from it are self entitled 20-year-old Google employees across the ocean who in reality don't give a shit about Chinese people, what they want, or how the average Chinese person feels like, but care a lot about appearing righteous in front of their peers.

I find the idea of rich western individuals debating in their exclusive social club the theoretical moral faults of allowing to give the Chinese access to modern technology extremely condescending, and completely disconnected for any actual concern or understanding of real people. It's obvious that all of those people would feel better with themselves if people in China rotted for eternity with their existing tools, as long as they don't have to hear anything about it.

I find it far more hilarious that you think the US, or any other country, should strive for a balanced playing field between it and its enemies, or that the world would actually be a better place because of that.

Those approaches aren't mutually exclusive. You can easily learn theorems and math concepts using Anki and then apply them in practice.

You can learn words in foreign language using SRS and then use those words in conversations, when reading, watching a movie, etc.

I don't see any value in the purist approach your propose.

Also:

> So when we use this sort of spaced repetition we're trying to artificially "warm up" the cache in our brains.

No idea what this means. It is no more artificial than actively seeking out people to talk to just because you want to learn a new language, or forcing yourself to prove theorems just to better remember a mathematical concept.

The "challenge" to Huawei are legal steps those countries are taking to block Huawei from spying on them, not some argument about the universal morality of espionage. Interpreting this as hypocricity is a result of a conceptual confusion: countries exists to defend their interests, not to enforce a level playing field. Of course it is in the interest of the US to be allowed to do things that others countries aren't allowed to do. For example: the US wants to have nuclear weapons while preventing potential enemies from getting nuclear weapons. Does this seem equally "hilarious" to you?

What's hilarious about that? It's obvious and natural that countries would seek to protect themselves from being spied upon, while at the same time attempt to spy on others. Do you expect the US to say "we are spying on some other countries so we are totally ok with others spying on us"?

Now you are simply posting incorrect or misleading information. There is no existing implementation of Grover's algorithm on quantum hardware that demonstrated any speedup over classical computers. In fact the largest implementation of Grover's algorithm to date, on ibmqx5, has an unusable error rate.

> Literally the only difference between the state of the art and quantum supremacy is scale.

This is simply incorrect. At the moment it's unclear that quantum supremacy can be achieved at any scale whatsoever, and it's certainly possible that it's unachievable even in principle.

It’s not particularly important how you define the term “quantum computer”, nor have I presented any definition of a "quantum computer" that you can disagree with. The point is that, as I wrote before, regardless of your definition - currently there is no discernible advantage of quantum computers over classical computers in the only metric that matters: computational power. This is what people refer to when they talk about the impossibility of QC. Nobody has demonstrated that physically realizable quantum computers can solve BQP problems in polynomial time, or provide any superpolynomial speedups over classical computers, and there is certainly no proof that this is simply a matter of scale.

They are classical computers in the sense they are are no stronger than classical computers - they provide a different physical implementation, but computationally can't achieve anything that a classical computer can't. Everything those "quantum computers" do can be simulated with a classical computer. The entire motivation behind the development of QC is supremacy, and the existence of those "quantum computers" alone doesn't provide any proof that supremacy is possible - so it is definitely not just a question of scale.

Google already has a 72 qubit processor (Bristlecone), but whether they or anybody will be able to demonstrate supremacy in the current, next, or some future generation is entirely conjectural. The main limit is error correction, and there are theoretical arguments (Gil Kalai) for why achieving supremacy might be impossible.

The "quantum computers" we have are classical computers with very weird hardware. The thing everybody is trying to achieve is quantum supremacy - this hasn't been achieved or demonstrated yet, and might never will be.

> "we should maximize utility because that's better than less utility

Depending on how you define "utility" - this is either a meaningless tautology that doesn't say anything at all, or a subjective belief that can be easily challenged by equally subjective alternatives.

Well if that seems plausible to you then it's only further proof of how misleading the wording is, as the actual study makes no claims about people forgetting a year of education.

I disagree. "A year of education" is mostly about gaining knowledge. It's obvious that air pullution can't possibly make you forget one year of such knowledge, and I have no idea in what other intuitive way this can be interpreted that makes any sense to the average person. If it's meaningfull to someone then it's only because he understood it wrongly.

The point is that deer being active at night isn't an indication of street lamps disrupting their ciradian rhythm. It's possible that those street lamps do affect it, but the behavior you saw isn't evidence of that.