AI can be a great tool. It can make our children (and us) lazier, but not necessarily stupider. Short video platforms OTOH certainly make our children stupider (and depressed).
I've had a bit of practice, but I don't have the right gear for this level of soldering. It took maybe an hour to solder in 2 components, after many failed attempts. Persistence beats intelligence?
In a world of international tensions, governments tend to favor their mega-corps and monopoly. It is a way of weakening your adversaries. It is commercial war.
When I started working, more than 25 years ago, we had one team meeting per week (1 hour), very few other meetings. Cellphones were getting mainstream and people had these funny ringtones, but since communications were expensive, phones were not ringing often. The office phone was ringing even more seldomly. We had no ticketing system. Managers just trusted you for doing your work. When going to someone else desk we would start with "may I disturb you?", and the answer may have been "give me five minutes". We had like 2-3 emails a day. It turns out someone had the radio in the office. That was in Belgium and the radio was in Flemish. This was not a big deal since I do not understand Flemish. Despite being rather cramped, I remember this office as quiet. It was not a large open-space though.
I cannot remember the turning point. Of course "agile" did a lot of damage, then ticketing systems, the illusion that developers are swap-able, and now constant notification stream.
> When I started working, more than 25 years ago, we had one team meeting per week (1 hour), very few other meetings.
When I worked 25 years ago, I had the same experience. But software was way simpler than today. The scale and complexity of current software requires a level of organization and communication that was not needed with simpler needs.
Most software run on a PC with probably no internet connection. Updating the software required to send discs by mail. Everything was slower, and probably more robust. Maybe banking was closer to what we have now, but it was still slower and there were way less transactions.
In contrast, my last 3 jobs required backend services available 24/7 to serve millions of users worldwide. We had many data providers, and we provided services to dozens of big corporations. We had teams dedicated to just integrate to all the partners, wallets, data providers, etc.
Increased complexity requires more communication and more meetings, and more time dedicated to synch all that development. If anyone wants old-style ways of working, with more time coding and less meetings I would recommend to go to small companies with limited reach. Their problems are going to be easier managed by a few developers that can focus on creating new things instead of getting up to date with all the complexity that a big corporation requires.
25 years ago internet was as good as everywhere at work and schools in the civilized world and was starting to ramp up in homes. CDs or DVDs were indeed still used for large sets of software and documentation, like stacks of MSDN discs. We even had distibuted source code version control, though it was often only synchronized accross the ocean (e.g. using SERI) overnight.
Personally i like the fact that there are interruptions at work. Working is often a social business and activities like rubber ducking, whiteboarding or live code explanation with living people works wonders for me. It should happen even more.
The people who were coding 8 hours a day, very often were writing yet another framework that they personally came up with to solve a problem, but without duscussing its requirements. More often than not they were making the wrong thing, making too clever things or over engineering.
TBH, I think covid and the push towards Zoom and others had a similar outsized effect. It made synchronous meetings nearly "free" for many more people.
Pretty similar to my first couple of jobs. We didn’t even have email. To document when something was done, we printed a diff and wrote a memo, which went into a file (i.e. a folder in a drawer) for that project.
I am working in a company that never did the whole agile thing and stuck to project management approaches from the last century. I never thought that Id ever miss Safe and crunchy SCUM.
I think a lot of those problems you describe are less to do with agile, and more to do with communication technology,
I would tend to think it uses Earth's magnetic field. Magnetizing or demagnetizing a moving mass would make its potential energy vary inside Earth's magnetic field. This may occur without reaction (I am not sure about this, my physics courses are far away and magnetic material physics is not that easy). Once they varied the potential energy of the moving mass, they would actually move it inside Earth's magnetic field, leading to a reaction force. The reaction force would be greater in one direction because of the cyclic magnetization/demagnetization.
And if the satellite's orbit is not perfectly circular, you may even be able to gain altitude by moving a mass at specifics times, like a kid on a swing or a skater in a ramp.
From the top of my head, for about 300 nuclear power plants around the globe, there have been 3 core meltdown accidents. It is a 1% catastrophic failure rate. It is quite bad!
Whatever the circumstances of these accidents, human nature and unexpected events allowed them to occur. Just like every accident, you can say after the fact they could have been avoided. However it is impossible to revert the consequences of a core meltdown at human time scale.
I am not anti-nuclear at all. But I certainly wonder what kind of organization is required to operate it safely.
Meanwhile coal power alone is causing 60 deaths per day (20k per year). And that’s a conservative NIH number, not a biased nuclear industry estimate.
3 meltdowns in the past 60 years with minimal loss of life (even including Chernobyl, an outlier for so many reasons), is a massively safer alternative than the status quo.
Solar, wind, and nuclear are all within error of each other in that counting. Three points on that:
1. Almost ALL of that is due to Chernobyl, which has to be recognized as an outlier for multiple reasons. Both in that it should never have happened, and that had they a containment shield it wouldn’t have been any worse than 3MI or Fukushima.
2. Both wind and solar have a lot of industrial and resource extraction costs & pollution that are not being counted here.
3. Land use and environmental impact are a far worse story for wind and solar.
1. I am with you in that nuclear plants should not explode.
2. Yeah, and nuclear plants have a lot of costs which are not accounted, like the already mentioned unaffordable insurance costs that are passed on to the taxpayer in the event of an incident.
3. Land radiation and environmental impact are a far worse story for nuclear in case of an accident.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a supporter of burning fossil fuels. I am discussing which technology should be used to generate electricity. And I consider renewables to be the more pragmatic strategy. Mostly not because they are cleaner or cheaper, but because they are more decentralized, can be built quicker and are easier to replace. I am pro nuclear power plants as long as they are built far away from where people live, including the waste disposal.
Edit: to be more clear, my long term earth vision is: everything runs using electricity. No coal, no other fossils are burned. Electricity is mostly generated using wind, water, solar.
Solar & wind are not as decentralized as you think when you consider resource extraction. I think SMNR would meet your criteria for safety and a distributed grid.
Social media platforms are no more closed circles. They are platforms for advertisers and "click fishers". And people engage with content which revolt them.
As a consequence social platforms, and low quality newspapers, have converged to show the bad news from all over the world. There is no shortage of them. This affects people's morale, confidence. Have you noticed how people you talk to can be very concerned about seemingly minor events that occurred on the other side of the world, to which they cannot change anything, and which should not change anything in their life?
Turns out today I have cut access to Youtube, Google Play to my 12 years old daughter. Internet is limited to a whitelist of sites, with only Wikipedia for now. She had turned phone addict in an unmanageable way. Blame Youtube and Tiktok. Unfortunately she needs a smartphone for school, she would otherwise have a dumb phone.
Of course there is wonderful content on Youtube. But the "shorts" is a literal trap for kids. As for the adults (well, me) it is just painful to see the list of trending videos, such that I seldom go and never stay. This is a stinky place. Ask the dictator in me and I would say blocking Youtube makes more good than bad.
You americans are strange. Your government makes arbitrary arrests, illegally searches phones, massively de-funds science and health projects, and only a handful of people demonstrate.
Now a company wants the identity of the companies it works with because it distributes their software, and it looks like a massive "scandal". Well at least I am realistic that the "scandal" is only within certain circles.
Google always knew the identity of companies whose software it distributed (via Google Play), now it also want to know the identity of software developers it has nothing to do with. Get your facts straight next time before writing a snarky comment!
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