pbourke

Seems like you’d have tons of applications for an orbital assembly capability

Not everyone is able to do that, for a number of reasons:

- not capable of using a mobile app or website for ordering

- low language proficiency

- not able to be at home to accept delivery during the day

- don’t have a means of payment compatible with online ordering

- live paycheck to paycheck and depend on going to the store “on demand” to make essential purchases (such as on payday). Often after normal delivery hours.

> in the west buying stuff usually requires no human interaction at all

And then you step foot in a car dealership, and you might as well be in a souk

“High technology within broken human systems” is how I’d describe much “cyberpunk” writing. Reading tons of it as a younger person has made the present feel eerily familiar.

The most unrealistic part of most science fiction for me are not the warp drives and teleporters, but the human civilization that has found its way to post-scarcity.

> It's like a fucking Joy Division video here from October through April. :-D

So people used to the Pacific Northwest would fit right in.

Do the hospital executives of ThedaCare (the original employer) think this will improve their chances of recruiting anyone 2 years from now? Irrespective of the insanity of the ruling, it’s an abject failure of leadership to pursue this course in the first place.

> land space

They’re living on a boat, so wouldn’t that be literally zero land space?

> I guess I have never seen the "cart return" thing as something you do out of politeness.

I see it as something you do as a participant in civilization.

> pay off all debts

Why would you pay off your debt if you thought civilization was going to collapse?

With all of these train robberies we’re going to need some Pinkertons

> The only significant thing that passed was an infrastructure bill

The American Rescue Plan passed in March 2021

The Fed controls monetary policy, and it’s still mostly independent of the administration. Trump often seemed displeased with Fed Chair Powell. Also the bull market started before Trump’s inauguration.

I don’t think you can blame Trump for the division in the country. For exploiting it: sure. But he didn’t create it.

I think that Democrats seriously misread the temperature of the country after the 2020 election. They thought they were granted a progressive mandate when really the voters wanted stability and competence with perhaps incremental progress on certain key issues. All evidence points in this direction, starting with the 2018 midterms when a slate of moderate candidates gave them a House majority (despite all the noise about a few celebrity progressive candidates). The moderate labor Democrat Biden was the nominee over Sanders and Warren, etc.

This posits that politics remains “politics” and does not devolve to widespread bloodshed. I don’t have a sense for how likely that is aside from “more likely than when I grew up.”

> Could anyone in 1990 have predicted the smartphone, let alone 1922?

Yes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton

C++ was quite common back in the day. Amazon began as a C++ monolith (obidos).

> It was going to run on every device in my kitchen, and they were all going to talk to each other. Instead the first niche it found was J2EE

The first niche was applets. A managed language with a batteries-included library, familiar syntax and cross-platform GUI story was a new thing at the time.

> The Netherlands was fully capable of transitioning from a nation of car dependent choked cities to a bike first micromobility haven in 30 years. The only thing stopping the USA from doing the same is the enormous government subsidies paid to car owners to keep the roads paved.

The Netherlands is smaller than New Jersey and has twice its population - its one of the most densely populated countries. Comparing it to the 3rd largest country on earth is risible.

In the 90’s I worked at a Canadian company that developed a CNC machining training simulator. We produced some professionally narrated training videos for a new release of the software and sent them off to the publisher. A few days later our US publisher got in touch to have us re-record all mentions of the “zed axis” as “zee axis”.

There are some echos of trading systems (control cycles, publishing telemetry streams, small-world distributed systems).

I was also reminded of James Gosling’s VJUG talk about the Liquid Robotics onboard software for autonomous ocean vehicles:

https://youtu.be/EgUctRxaiLs

Some people are switching to the “book time with me” apps, which seem to be a better way to handle this.

You typically don’t have access to Google when you’re taking a test. The onus should be on the test writer to ensure that what is tested is math knowledge and not math knowledge + some random facts about gardening.

PEs, architects and lawyers all need to pass standardized tests in order to enter their professions. You have to study for these. Expecting preparation is not the end of the world.

These are poorly worded questions. Half the issue with “word problem” test questions is that they assume a cultural context or knowledge. The questions should explain themselves more (what is edging?) or choose a better context.

> Nope, the worst thing a corporation can do is try to sell me something I don’t want.

I think poisoning your water supply with benzene might be a bit worse.

What a great story, thanks for sharing.

> I haven't seen reports recently of any large migrations to Ada, Pascal or even C++ or other old (20yo+) language.

Things are quietly rewritten in Java and C# all the time. I’m sure it happens with C++ as well since the more recent quality of life improvements have landed in that language.

I feel lucky that at 44 I still get a thrill when something runs as expected for the first time or when tests go all green. I still enjoy working with software in the general sense and learning new things in my areas of interest. Organizations, however, and the environments that they create (both human and software) are a different story ...

There have been plenty of new backend approaches since the term Web 2.0 was minted. The important change was a shifting from one request per view to multiple requests that comprise a view: it was the client/server interaction patterns that were important.

The fact that you build your “web 3” application using Web 2.0 techniques (SPAs, etc) tells me that web 3 is not a thing. It’s another type of backend, and the web is designed to have those appear in perpetuity.

Web 2.0 was a hokey name, but at least it was a new approach to building web apps, built on the techniques and technology that preceded it. Web 3 is ... not that.

30% less severe with twice the rate of spread does not seem like a good tradeoff. You have an exponential increase in cases but a linear reduction in hospital admissions.