blq10

You are very much missing the point. If you read the one thousand page postmortem on the invasion of Iraq - lots of blame to be placed on civilian leadership and intelligence.

A few: The core reasoning (WMD) was the CIA misinterpreting Saddam grandstanding to his generals as a serious WMD program. This was due to the CIA having an insufficient grasp of the local situation, largely due to the fact that we had only infiltrated isolated parts of the regime and couldn't corroborate.

Slightly before Obama's election, the US forces were effectively ordered to stop patrolling and attempting to take and hold territory in order to reduce the American bodycount for political reasons - this allowed forces outside the green zone to maintain continuity of operations and simply wait for us to get bored and leave.

Similarly, lack of a clear set of objectives, and lack of frank expectations setting with the US population lowered the ability of the DoD to prosecute the war in a winnable fashion.

These aren't small nitpicks, these are core reasons why the GWOT didn't go so well - and almost none of them have anything to do with defense procurement or military mismanagement.

Evaluating a business is tough.

VC is like that because many of them missed many boats of very profitable startups in 2001 thru 2010, where "stupid business trick, now with software!" was almost always an OK bet.

AI is the new dot com, which means we are at least one more bubble away from mass usefulness

Again, the Black congressional representatives (which, due to districting were mostly representing Black people) were rather openly upset with him...for not going even harder.

That is difficult to square with Nixonian plot to use the carceral apparatus to keep Black people from gaining power.

I guess it does track with revisionism to make anything we currently disagree with to be a product of original sin.

Ehh, sort of.

The congressional black caucus were ardent supporters of the war on drugs https://www.wnyc.org/story/312823-black-leaders-once-champio...

So I'm pretty sure that whatever motivation Nixon had, the Black community in the United States wasn't a big fan of drugs and wanted them gone.

The state does not like those drugs because society does not like those drugs, and in the case of certain drugs, like heroin and other harder drugs we have decided that it is rational to attempt to keep them off the streets rather than agree to legal use.

It's fun to declare it "things the state doesn't like", but I legitimately don't see anyone legalizing meth or heroin anytime soon.

No it will not. Larger incomes are only larger because of industrial machinery, the same process that makes it more expensive to buy "organic' is what drives income up.

Software engineering is so well paid due to these dynamics.

Breakneck capitalism, so to speak is why I can get almost any material , consumer or professional, delivered to my door in a few days - including things that would be considered exotic a year ago, at a tenth the price they would have been (even adjusting for col).

Corporate raiding is nothing new, and financialization does let it happen at a pace that it couldn't previously - but just saying "but that's capitalism!" is quitting

Worker owned collectives have the same problems, people want to acquire power and then use it to be ahead when strategies fail and someone has to take responsibility.

How do you prevent that looks different in a market economy than a planned one (planned ones having more widespread but also more small scale corruption issues like these) - but you still do need to do the work to prevent it.

I unironically disagree with this, structured data is incredible and powerful.

But an important part of the early internet was "its Just Text".

And in fact, the reason why JSON is so great is that if you want to use it as Just Text it works just the same!

It's a translation layer between systems that really demand highly structured data and flexible systems where as long as you can thunk about it, you can get from anywhere to anywhere else with a few simple programs that are on every machine in tbe known universe.

Alternatively, you have gotten used to Google providing you free services out of the goodness of their heart.

This model was sustainable when the internet was adding millions of users per year, but as internet access reaches saturation - Google must do something.

I'd prefer if it was "pay for your email" - but internet users have been openly hostile to paying for anything for 39 years

Livelihood of employees is also a false start, unionization and the accompanying high wages are also a significant factor in the disparity between Western industry and China.

So the ideal blub language will be whatever language is too new to really be the legacy thing with tons of black magic you just have to know, but also too old to include tons of new ideas in language design the programmer has to grapple with.

Old languages force you to understand really core issues because the stack is 1m+ lines of code and you need an operating model for all that magic.

New languages do the same thing, but it's because half the really good stuff is <experimental>

Python and JS are in the current sweetspot, go is up next, and after that, Rust.

Nobody cares about invisible good solutions, because invisible solutions are simple - and developers are to one degree or another, rated on the degree of complexity they can deal with and how smart they can be. It is common here to understand the cleverness behind just doing the dumb thing, but it is not common in many places.

Top talent does not exist.

This problem exists at big tech and startup, in companies that spend fractional multipliers of the average salary on engineers as well as those who pay poorly.

In this environment, if your solution is "hire better people', you can't- there isn't any

Price discovery was brought up, but think about it this way - if Good A is plentiful in Market A and scarce in Market B - prices will be very high in B but cheap in A.

Robber Baron Capitalist comes in and says "hey wait a minute, there's money to be made!"

He starts buying goods in A, then selling them in B.

This is a very, very stupid idea, your 5 year old could have it. So that means as soon as Business A figures it out, B , D, E, and F aren't far behind.

The net for people in Market B is that now they don't pay the previous scarce price, but something closer to Market As, and more people can afford the good. This means that someone does all the work of building out all that logistics for us, simply to exploit the price differential.

This is a half of a good idea, but frankly every road mile traveled, airline flight, walk to the grocery store creates some number of dead people - I find this reaction from SF to be concerning because we appear to be placing higher standards on AVs than we are on humans.

Problem being that despite the fact that getting your content hoovered by socials is stealing ad revenue - Facebook etc al have declared themselves the only sites on the internet that matter, and if they aren't linking to you you don't matter.

Something does need to be done about this, this is something - whether it's the right something or not is debatable, but I find the idea that this is just smug news orgs getting their justified comeuppance silly.

People willing to take risk on Wish because they are spending frivolously and would like to spend less frivolously.

Scams are high, but not so high that you won't usually get what you asked for.

The list of things the commenter you're replying to brought up, in addition to "be attractive", is table stakes for receiving an iota of romantic attention from women.

We talk a ton about unrealistic beauty standards, "men talking, women listening", etc - but I have to wonder, maybe the world where women marry people one income decide above them is almost guaranteed to be a world where men are just more competitive in the workplace, even at the expense of running over their female colleagues. The incentives curve says that to expect anything at all of women, you have to be successful, ideally wealthy. So, you get the behavior the incentives curve tells people to enact.

An incentives curve that is set, ironically, by women

What would a college that aimed to teach Web Development as a specialty actually look like?

People look down on bootcampers, but it always feels to me that 99% of what is taught in university programs is similarly only useful in specialized situations. The actual good thing is having had to sit down and write a lot of code before anyone lets you touch anything.

What does such a program look like for Web?

"Two junior devs and a keurig" - that will totally wreck the system by refactoring it to "modern patterns" without bothering to understand what it actually did. But it's OK, they're younger and therefore better. Thus, the cycle begins anew.

Similarly, however - urban cores want suburban business without having to deal with the low tax revenue of actual bedrooms. The city of Chicago is instructive, the city is (very slightly) subsidized by suburban consumers and tax revenue. The big trick here is making suburbs without allowing the endless continuation of exurbs

Yeah see this is the problem - urbanist aesthetics demanding everyone live a very particular lifestyle, which includes a lot more than just urban living hamstringing projects.

We do that, it's called imprisoning people for a very long time.

This is generally unpopular among liberal and left leaning spaces, and is only marginally popular in right leaning ones.

Those changes are not ones that would be politically popular in the same groups that are demanding urbanism.

You need transit to be safe and clean so you get ridership from people who are middle class and up, and urban living to be a safe, clean, desirable experience.

This is very challenging, because the combination of increased policing and social programs needed to get there would not be plausible under either Democrat or Republican administrations.

Point of order, all infrastructure in the United States is ruinously expensive. There are zero forms of transport infrastructure other than private shuttles that maintain fare box equilibrium

I've spent a decent amount of time in Singapore, where forget biking - if you're quick you can rock most of the way across the city state on foot.

It's really cool, but Singapore isn't exactly a model for the world.

Similarly - you should consider that Copenhagens all bike infrastructure both supports and is supported by the society around it, and a lot more would have to change than just the surface level things that you find good to make it happen.

We are talking about crossovers here, which are all almost universally modeled after the Outback, the only station wagon brand that is still actually producing cars.

Slightly raised car like vehicles with a full fold down back row, I can and have moved regular sheet ply in one.

The big place it shines for compute tasks is workloads with high variability.

As long as you can select a p99 for timeouts that's sane, lambda does a really good job handling highly heterogeneous workflows in general.

So if a request could take 10ms or multiple minutes depending on Reasons(TM) - lambda makes a lot of sense because you don't have to overprovision for theoretical peak demand, and a swamp of expensive requests is isolated from your cheap requests.

It makes it a lot clearer where logs, alerts, etc are coming from and it makes them easier to test - because the process flow of a given instruction is in the architecture.

Verifying that the call patterns between the functions are correct is challenging sometimes - but it helps there to have the architecture mapped out visually.

I think serverless could be the right fit, something like detectors seems ideal. Theyre somewhat isolated individually, etc etc.

I kind of want to take a Crack at what Prime Video did except serverless from a green field perspective, and I'm willing to bet I wind up provisioning a RedPanda cluster or similar and having them feed detector lambdas. The bottleneck and cost here appeared to be storing intermediate results and the orchestration. Orchestration is solved by using something like SQS or what have you. Intermediate results are somewhat harder depending on size - but I think you could get there and it'd be an interesting exercise.