planck01

Spying among allies has more impact than you think. There are similar levels of public outrage, but obviously you can't boycot allies without damaging relations more. So measures won't be pubically visual. But it will lead to a degraded confidence and all kinds of cooperation will be reduced and cold shouldering will happen. However subtle and only when a countries own interest is not hurt too much.

That's not always an (easy) option. Especially if kids are involved.

How do you mean 'was largely ignored'? It was headline news for almost a year during the snowden period. It still is discussed occasionally and both us and uk are trusted less by eu countries because of it.

>cultural fit, values alignment

I thought this mattered, but this mostly leads to more of yourself. When we ignored those factors these didn't seem to matter much for team quality - at least at our company. People find surprising ways to relate to and get along with colleagues. You do get a bigger pond to fish from.

In software development I always see 'talent' as correlating to a combination of three things: iq, conscientiousness (personality trait) and a formal education in computer science / mathematics or adjacent like physics.

First definition I find of religion: "A set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs."

Almost every atheist will reject religion, given what religion typically is and which is captured pretty well in the definition above.

"To complicate matters, numerous studies over the past few decades have reached what seems a counterintuitive conclusion: that all psychotherapies have roughly equal effects."

The article gives a number of possible explanations for this, but not the obvious one: that the effect of psycho-therapy right now might not be more than a placebo effect. I wonder why this could not be the case.

And...back to AMD?

Is Hadoop still the way to go for big data solutions? My feeling based on my social bubble is that less and less solutions are built on it. The recent stackoverflow survey seems to indicate it is not very popular anymore.

A defining feature of a black hole is that because of it's gravity nothing will escape it, not even light. This clearly doesn't hold for atoms. They can be bombarded by photons and electrons and split and fused.

It's true. They work for free, because they really want to help you fix your problem. Until you depend on them. The you'll have to pay as much as they think you can pay.

Why not try all of the above? The mess you mention is unfixable. Mars is very very far away, but worthwhile. The SETI and other research is worthwhile as well. Even if it is a null result, you learn something. R&D itself makes us learn somethings.

If you won't do this stuff until other important problems X & Y are solved, you will never do the interesting things and progress will stall for the species.

It's not enough to reach zero on carbon emission. There is way too much in the air already that we need to get out of it and somehow bind it to the (sub)surface of our planet to keep it out. And we need to find a way to do that on scale and in an economical viable way or it will never happen.

Uptime of years? How does that work, security wise?

Summary: Many round trips of small api requests can add up a lot of latency. An often used tactic is to bundle requests. Even better is to locally cache data when possible.

Is this news for anybody here?

I think the Otherland series by Tad Williams about VR should be definetely be on the list. And ready player one as well.

I am surprised Dgraph isn't mentioned as an example. It is the most starred graph db on Github, and I think it is the best one in terms of performance and scalability.

Do you know of any successfully semantic RDF graph databases, I guess with OWL support? Because I personally don't. If not, it probably is rightfully too much an academic niche to be discussed in the article.

It can't be complete and all there is, because it doesn't explain everything we know exists. To simply quote wikipedia:

"It does not fully explain baryon asymmetry, incorporate the full theory of gravitation as described by general relativity, or account for the accelerating expansion of the Universe as possibly described by dark energy. The model does not contain any viable dark matter particle that possesses all of the required properties deduced from observational cosmology. It also does not incorporate neutrino oscillations and their non-zero masses."

Generations are basically agegroups that share for a part the same cultural experience, e.g. the same mass media, cartoons, educational trends, etc. Research shows that these overlaps in culture lead to several predictive trends in behavior and opinions.

It's normal you don't associate personaly with every trend. Especially if you lived in some local bubble or if you are on the edge of some defined group. That doesn't matter and I would just ignore it. This isn't about any specific person.

We could if we really wanted to and would pay for it. But we don't and probably won't. Too much disconnect between action and eventual long term consequence. Not enough global political support.

Life and existence itself are meaningful. Short as it may be. Given that you will be dead for more than a billion times a billion years at least, why would you rush to that inevitable end instead of wondering for a short while about life and death and the peculiar universe we find ourselves in now?

You're right. We need two things.

One is carbon-sinks. This can be done by permanent new trees. Or by replacing trees and use the old wood or plastics for buildings. Or make carbon based usables and permenantly bury their waste in deep landfils that don't let out co2. Or by new techniques for sequestering carbon from air. Planting trees and letting them die is only temporary.

Second and most important though is getting more heat out of the planet than in. Focusing on carbon is one thing. But reflecting energy to space also works, e.g. by white roofs, or mirrors, or heat conducting materials that send off energy in frequencies not absorbed by clouds and co2/water/methane.

If performance matters in any way than Dgraph and Neo4J are much much better. Jena is a relic of semantic web past which you need if you want to do academic stuff like ontolgies, Owl, Sparql and inference. But hardly for building 'real' applications for actual users and datasets.

I think that thinking around the Fermi Paradox has the fatal flaw that we think our current technological boom can be extrapolated. We have the feeling that the Kardashev scale, even type 1, is attainable. I'm more technological pessimistic and think it is not attainable. I think the technological boom will peter off, because of hard insolvable questions limited by nature and energy and money. We are enthusiastic now because of past progress and progress we see we can still make. But we will get in diminishing return time and slow stabilization before too long. And progress will become hard until impossible.

Humans will never colonize this galaxy. It's too hard, too expensive, and too pointless. And neither will other intelligent civilizations, of which I guess a small handful at most will exist in the lifetime of our galaxy. Maybe some galaxies do exist where a civilization lives that put everything of their energy on spreading within their galaxies. But even they will not be able to spread to other galaxies. The acceleration of the universe and the extreme distances and nothingness forbids that.

You can also turn co2 into trees. More lowtech, but more useful than coal that's created with energy that should be buried as nobody will do that (next to the others usages mentioned which are mostly consumables and hardly viable co2 sinks).

Couldn't we achieve negative carbon emission simply by build all houses from wood?

Cut down all grown trees and replace them by young ones. The houses act as carbon sinks. The young trees capture more co2 than the old trees. Easy.

Takes little technology, but does take up land. Probably we need all alternatives too, but this seems low hanging fruit to me.

"suddenly that no longer serves a narrative the left wants to tell"

Except that that was also reported mostly everywhere. Also, one sided 'evil-looking' harassment is news that is more interesting to most people because it might signal some trend. No-one (left or right) would have found a word-fight between evenly-wrong grey characters very interesting if that was the story in the first place. Because it just isn't.

That doesn't make the mainstream press left-biased. I think it actually isn't.

Oracle is not the bad guy because of being closed source. Oracle is the bad guy because they will stop at nothing to screw their customers over and extort the hell out of them.

I've experience with them taking out functionality we were using out of their enterprise edition (replication) and then trying to sell it in a separate product for millions. And then their start offer is 10 times the eventual agreed figure because of us being 'loyal customers' , which means they first try to get a 90% to 95% margin at least. I have experienced them buying software company of a software product we were using and then greatly increasing the prices while they are unable to support the product, because they laid of all the original engineers. Also no upgrades ever anymore.

Even though they have some good products (well: the database and their gis capabilities), much of what they touch turns into shit. Also given their extortion methods, I nowadays try to avoid them as the plague. That's why they are the bad guys. Never mind their licenses.

The Semantic Web is dead. It was never really something. Even the regular decentralized Web has mostly died. It was replaced by mega corporations' walled gardens. 95% of content is in there; in Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Netflix, Reddit, Twitch, Medium and a few small others. The rest is a skeleton barely being touched. The Semantic Web isn't even necessary or useful anymore, even if its technology were good.