averros

Thank you, I guess. I've been a practicing software engineer for over 40 years now, and watching the decline of my profession over the decades is quite painful.

Nope. Dijkstra was and still is right.

The newfangled ways of teaching how to code managed to produce a generation of really poor-quality software "engineers" producing atrocious slow and buggy bloatware.

You cannot be a good engineer if you reason with analogies and metaphors instead of understanding how things actually work, at multiple levels, and knowing what and when can be abstracted and which lower-level details are important and should not be ignored.

So... if you want to become a decent software engineer, start with learning digital electronics and assembly. This way you won't need "metaphors" for arrays and such - because you will know that a static array is just multiplication by constant followed by addition to a constant and dereferencing of the resulting address.

This kind of confusion happens in newspapers and other coroprate media so often that one is left to wonder if it is intentional. After all, the fear porn sells.

Economy is NOT a social construct, fabricated or not. Economic laws are direct consequences of physical laws (i.e. scarcity is the result of Fermi statistics which makes material things to take space and of the no-cloning theorem which means the material things cannot just pop into existence because somebody wished them), or otherwise rather tautological mathematical statements (for example the first welfare theorem or the law of comparative advantage). Economy doesn't require humanity or consciousness to exist, it's a resource allocation and optimization algorithm.

So is political means of acquiring wealth - this is known as intra-species aggression and is common to all social species; this is another, older, and less efficient, algorithm for resource allocation.

Basically, every time politicians and their enforcers barge in to "fix" things they break the efficient algorithm (aka "market economy") to replace it with the older one (aka "the biggest ape gets to boss others around"). And, yes, it doesn't make any economic sense. "Bailouts" are nothing more than taking from many people by force and giving to few politically-connected ones. It's just indirect form of force: instead of simply looting, they print more money - but everybody else is prevented by force by doing the same, so they have no choice but to see the value of their money to decline and be transferred to the recipients of new money.

Of course, people DID build ternary computers.

The most notable of these is Setun' (I had a chance to play with it at Moscow State University).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun

You still don't get accurate data if you just count bodies.

The issue here is every death is attributed to COVID-19 if the virus is present even if the actual reason is some other underlying health condition. Given that most victims are elderly and had serious pre-existing conditions this leads to massive mortality rate over-estimation.

You also cannot reliably compare EU/US data with Chinese: initially most deaths and cases of pneumonia in China were attributed to other illnesses. Secondly, Chinese government is notorious for flat-out lying in their official stats.

Not really. When programming was done by real engineers (rather than "coders", "developers", or horribly misnamed "software engineers") - with proper engineering discipline which involved deliberate design and documentation rather than "agile" hacking, it was more reliable. By far.

My personal recent experience of actually doing software the old-fashioned way involved writing correctness critical high-performance code for a major data warehouse vendor, which mostly stayed with zero known bugs in production - greatly contributing to the vendor's reputation as reliable and dependable place to keep your data in.

And how do I know what the old-fashioned way to write code is? Well, I've been writing code professionally for nearly 40 years.

Just don't mention the elephant in the room: the Cantillon effect which is primary reason for the wealth flowing from working classes and savers to the bankers and the managerial class. Entirely courtesy of artificially low interest rates created by central banks and lax controls on monetary emission (i.e. fractional reserve shenanigans) by private banks.

Why stop at plants? If someone chooses to take whatever substance it's no one else's business (unless others have to pay for the medical treatment afterwards... but that is easily solved by NOT making others pay). The actually dangerous drugs - the ones (SSRIs, notably) which have suicide as a side effect, sometimes resulting in people going on murderous rampages - are quite legal and widely prescribed. Go figure.

No, LinkedIn works to establish the network of professional connections which stays with you even when you got a job.

Now, I'm not sure if these are of any worth (I never got anything useful out of LinkedIn... either people trying to sell me something, or colleagues I know already).

I've heard of people (of gold digger kind) using LinkedIn as a dating site.

Because if homosexual behavior is genetically-determined (or inalterably biologically determined) the gays can argue that they are being discriminated for what they ARE, rather than for what they CHOSE to be. There's a large number of laws which prohibit voluntary behavior of one sort or another even if there are no direct victims (drug use would be one example) so the proponents of restricting homosexuality would have it easier to argue that there's an overriding societal concern which justifies this voluntary behavior. (The existence of laws creating "victimless crimes" is an accepted part of modern legal systems, sadly, but no one other than hard-core libertarians actually oppose the concept.)

The Left tries to sanitize history...

Probably because history clearly shows that their cult is apt to turn into mega-murder. Like National Socialists' did.

I certainly did read it :)

TV shows are notoriously bad sources of information about the real world. In the real world if the police has anything solid which they believe points at you as the perp, they will arrest you first (possibly after watching you for a while). Extracting information from you is so much easier when you are intimidated and fearful - as anyone would be after marinating for a few days in a cell.

Talking to the police before you get arrested is just plain stupid. Let the lawyer do the talking. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRNc3Qic-Ks

Oh, woes. How people ever managed to develop any software before github?

The future missiles are going to be shiny.

As in "mirrors".

The BIG SECRET of directed energy weaponry is that there's a very simple and cheap method of reducing absorbed energy by orders of magnitude - reflect it in arbitrarty directions (or even towards the source if one wants to be naughty).

The sensors (which have to absorb EM radiation to function) are vulnerable, but can be easily protected by shutters for the duration of attack. Modern inertial navigation units are well capable of providing precise guidance without any external data.

Facebook currently enjoys essentially the same legal protection from liability arising from the content as do post and telephone companies (this is known as "common carriage"). The legal reasoning for such protection is that common carriers do not look into content of what they ship or transmit and merely provide a content-neutral service for the public.

This protection should not apply to the corporations which do exercise editorial control (or, as it happens, de-facto censorship) over the content they transmit, since they're no longer common carriers but rather publishers.

And, of course, the government is already heavily involved with Facebook - just not overtly but in the worst clandestine and unaccountable way imaginable. Anyone who thinks a company executive is going to deny anything spooks ask for is rather naive.

If compiler speed is your problem, then you're not doing development right.

Tweaking the code until it produces something which looks right (and/or passes the tests) as the primary means of achieving correct operation is guaranteed to produce poor quality code.

The only way to produce correct and reliable code is to do that by design and deliberation. Tests merely check a tiny part of the input vector space; they are safety against brain farts and gross errors. If you build code carefully, you spend most of the time thinking and compilation is something which happens not too often.

Having a slow compiler teaches to be careful; rapid-fire hack-compile-test-fix-compile-test-fix cycle positively encourages sloppiness.

Another reason why compilation can be slow is simple bloat, indicative of poor architecture or poor design or use of inappropriate tools. If you need to write 200 KLOC and most of that code is variations on the same theme, you needed to start by finding or designing a DSL which takes the repetitiveness out or doing some other form of meta-programming.

The reason why most coders (who came to an interview) cannot code is simple: a decent coder gets a job after a few tries. A pretender (in my experience, a degree from IITs or some other degree mills from the same part of the world strongly correlates with that) would go to hundreds of interviews only to be rejected util he hits an equally incompetent interviewers. The pretenders are way over-represented in the pool, and simple programming tasks do an admirable job of filtering them out without much loss of time.

As somebody who wrote all of the above (and a lot more) I call B.S. on this one.

The amount of unique stuff in each subfield is not that great, and if you have a wide and solid base in different subfields, picking up the unique ideas and techniques isn't that hard or time consuming.

But after a generalist has it, he is a lot more productive and creative because he often applies stuff from other subfields to come up with better/novel solution to the problem at hand - something a specialist cannot do.

...oh, and there's also the issue of time domains and time sources having different spectral shapes of their noise.

Basically, everyone who has a clue about time standards uses TAI for internal representation in non-relativisitic applications.

In other news: most software is brain-dead and most software engineers lack basic education in pretty much everything other than composing tons of terminally boring code out of a few LEGO shapes provided by programming languages.

The kids are just spoiled brats. If they wanted to combat inequality the option of donating their allowance to a charity or simply giving it away is always here for them. But, of course, the kids want to force OTHERS to be "charitable" and equitable. Little hypocrites.

Here's a good rule of thumb: if you are a mentally competent adult and are forced to do something, this something is not in YOUR best interests.

A propos: the "herd immunity" line of argumentation is totally red herring, since the Western rate of immunization is way above of what is needed for herd immunity to be effective (defined as driving pathogen reproduction rate below one - note that reproduction rate is NOT the same as infection rate). So is the "recklessness" line of argumentation, since the chances of actually getting infected and suffering serious consequences of that are rather small. It's way more reckless to cross a street once a day.

We should have the "Say No to Totalitarians" day. A free society can tolerate some amount of foolishness - both because not doing so implies reduction of humans to livestock, and because fools sometimes turn out to be right.

Well, producing solar panels and such also requires energy input, and these do have limited lifetime. What is the real full-cycle energy conversion ratio is?

Secondly... continuous distillation doesn't necessarily require lots of energy, since a lot of it could be recycled with counterflow heat exchangers and heat pumps instead of plain heaters (i.e. hot output and hot waste are used to heat up input to close to the proper fraction boiling temp, and the output and waste are only slightly warmer than the input mix). It still needs energy input to deal with losses and entropy reduction from mix to separate fractions, but this is also true about using any sort of membrane-based separation.

It degrades energy density of the fuel (by volume).

In other words, today's gasoline in US takes you 4% less distance than gasoline from 70s.

It also creates problems with internal corrosion (which is why it is not used in aircraft fuels), though modern auto engines are designed to deal with that (and are more expensive because of that, too).

Airplanes have differential braking (in some models there's no other way to steer on the ground, in most the nose or tail wheel is turned by the rudder pedals), and the brakes are controlled by pressing rudder pedals by toes (rather than pushing them in by heels which moves rudder). This reduces the need for pedals from 4 to 2.

Never mind that in a performance landing (such as short field) you use not only brakes but also yoke/stick (2 degrees of freedom) for one hand and throttle for another. The exam standard for commercial pilot is to be able to touch down on a designated 100ft stretch of runway with centerline between main wheels). Add to that your usual wind, turbulence, and thermals on the approach path which make every landing different, and you'd realize that what ground drivers do isn't very exceptional, and that one could train to get proficient in juggling a lot more controls at once:)

Well, TANSTAAFL.

Inflation takes wealth from savers and people on fixed annuities (such as pensions) and transfers it to spendthrifts and fools who took on loans they're not able to pay. This proposal is quite asinine, so it must be rather popular.

Moar conspirology! It used to be Trump in cahoots with GRU. Now it's <s>reptiloids</s> Assange.

Since when leaking the evidence of shady dealings is something immoral? Really, why outrage at Assange who is merely a messenger rather than at people whose deeds were so embarrassing so the leak is widely seen as damaging?

How about simply not doing stuff which will cost you an election if made known to general public? Nah, too hard.

It's a usual CS graduate failing, actually - to think that only asymptotic time complexity matters.

A competent programmer understands that in many cases there are much faster ways of doing things with small chunks of data than asymptotically-good algorithms - and that these cases could be performance-critical if executed often.