This is unreasonably rosy. Acidification of the ocean and ecological breakdown from overly rapid environmental change appears likely to cause a catastrophic failure of the food chain. Rapid change is necessary. The status quo is not OK.
The last 3 technical roles I've been in over the last 8 years or so used realistic technical tasks for the technical tests. It was grounded in actually making something useful work. Intensive CPU/memory optimization is usually the last thing to optimize in a system which is inefficient. When you do get to it, you do it on a case-by-case basis with careful reference to the latest work on efficiency in that particular sub-domain, not by instantly recalling university lectures from 20 years ago. And by the way, the right solution for CPU/Memory optimizations is never linked lists. I think the best technical test you can do is pay your potential candidate to come and do a ticket with your team. You actually get to see what working with them is like, as well as practical ability. Failing that, give them some time to create a practical solution to something a bit tricky, and see what their overall approach is like, when given time to do it with stackoverflow etc. available to them, because that's what real life is like.
Getting asked to do any kind of fancy datastructure algorithm from memory would put me off your company. It has very little correlation with any real-world task. I'm very experienced and get a lot of shit done with high-load systems requiring careful resource management, but I couldn't be bothered with this. My portfolio should show you that I can do things.
The energy we use starts out as kinetic (wind, water), or heat (solar, thermal), or chemical, etc. We then use and it get it to do work, which in most cases converts much of it back into kinetic energy, and where there is inefficiency, heat, but even that part can end up in sinks which can find themselves ultimately back in places where heat already resided.
While I was reading this post, I found the bright background was straining my eyes, so I turned on my dark-mode browser plugin, and then I found I could continue reading more comfortably.
> thermodynamic limits impose a cap to energy growth lest we cook ourselves .. I’m talking about radiating the spent energy into space
Huh? This seems to be a critical premise for establishing a crisis, yet it's incoherent and essentially imaginary.
Ok, some ways we use energy have poor thermal efficiency. Light bulbs are the classic example, but look at the improvement from incandescent bulbs to LED's. Most uses of energy just move heat around within the environment, and if anything that would tend towards thermal equilibrium (a sort of microcosmic 'heat death'?), not "cooking".
> "Cyber-insurance is a common necessity today as identify theft, malware and cyber-attacks are frequently being performed against high-value blockchain and crypto-currency companies."
Except they're not banks, and not intended to store your funds long-term.
Even in your ideal experimental scenario, the laws of probability state that before the 10,000,000,000th such study is completed, we will see a case where the findings turn out to be incorrect.
We learn by experience, and we build weightings, and both our gut reactions and careful conclusions are simply the ones which win the confidence ratings. Logic may be an exception by virtue of it's mathematical nature, but any facts involved are not, and we fall back on judgement calls most of the time even when we think we're being logical.
Something working with neural networks has helped me to come to terms with is that we are probabilistic creatures, and even things we call facts are things we simply feel very confident about. Science itself is a process of increasing confidence in an outcome, not an exercise in certainty.
2) I enjoy the truism that we cannot act lovingly when we are on the defensive. It's more abstracted from the biology, but perhaps that helps it capture the nuances of reality.
Sure, but it's a hyper-idealism which rejects the absolutely the idea of allowing a non-inclusive worldview of an individual to rule. Judeo-Christian is the author's specific worldview, but that's incidental to the stance.
This tells us that people think SQL is good, but it's unfortunate that this is attempted, because the good thing about SQL is how well it corresponds to its data structures. Attempting to imitate SQL's form, rather than its principal of correspondence, has been counter-productive and prevented the reproduction of its merits. Case in point: Cypher.
I believe that free will is possible. Our conceptions of existence are limited by our perspective; that of a causative (and, OK, possibly random) reality, but it's possible that our wills are interfaced with super-dimensional spirits (souls, if you like). The fact that we cannot conceive of an existence which is not causative does not mean that our spirits do not dwell in one. One way of approximating such an existence is to consider it as "timeless". This timeless spirit may then, in a sense, exercise influence on our wills throughout our entire lifespan, simultaneously (perhaps through a quantum interface). You could call this deterministic, but how is it deterministic in any meaningful sense if our choices are "determined" by a spirit which is, by definition, our essential self, free of circumstantial preconditions?
Thank you for honestly sharing your perspective. Unfortunately a fear-based approach reliably creates what it fears. If the proponents of a culture want others to do adopt their culture, they may do so by inspiring others through their compassion, generosity and self-sacrifice. This is the trust-based approach. Unfortunately it is rarely done because it is counter-intuitive and requires systematically setting aside all anger, forgiving when forgiveness is not deserved and making oneself vulnerable. Both approaches often result in casualties, but while one results in people dying attempting to enforce their will on others, the other involves people dying in an attempt to show compassion. The latter is profoundly persuasive in favour of the giver of compassion while the former incites profound hatred.