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Both can be true—

We need to be the change we want to see.

There are significant structural issues in society that present headwinds for average people trying to build a fulfilling life.

Transportation is like farming and yielding ownership of critical industries gives foreign adversaries too much leverage.

I’m with you though. If humans could just get along we could build an amazing world.

Oligarchs would use the robots to kill people instead of a pandemic. A virus carries too much risk of affecting the original creators.

Fortunately, robotic capability like that basically becomes the equivalent of Nuclear MAD.

Unfortunately, the virus approach probably looks fantastic to extremist bad actors with visions of an afterlife.

Do you actually need to simulate at that minuscule level of detail?

Or is it possible for a system to be built that can approximate biology similar to how LLMs approximate cognition without true understanding and reasoning?

This is not preprogrammed replay. Replay would not be able handle even tiny variations in the starting positions of the shirt.

That's an extreme position to take that rests on the claim that sponsorship/advertising is objectively bad.

Media & journalism have been underpinned by advertising for over a century. Tons of educational and informative services are available to the public for free because of advertising. Sponsorship has built art galleries, hospital wings, research centers, etc.

In this case, there's a relatively innocuous logo on a robotic lander that is 230k miles away on a desolate rock. It's not like this is a billboard in a nature preserve.

Can you elaborate on “properly tweaked”? When I use one of the Stable Diffusion and AUTOMATIC1111 templates on runpod.io, the results are absolutely worthless.

This is using some of the popular prompts you can find on sites like prompthero that show amazing examples.

It’s been serious expectation vs. reality disappointment for me and so I just pay the MidJourney or DALL-E fees.

It is the only book I wish I could forget completely.

Serious advice: think twice before reading The Road if you’re susceptible to doom and gloom about the human race.

Please back up the claim "climate models has a terrible track record" and qualify the word 'terrible'.

Casting blame is a common denier tactic [1] used despite the models being useful and accurate [2].

The "whataboutisms" you mention are another common tactic. [3] Blaming EV batteries is a red herring; they have much lower lifecycle emissions than gas-based engines. [4]

[1] https://skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm [2] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-mo... [3] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/global-sustainabilit... [4] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/07/electric-cars-have-much...

These are all generally highly reviewed can lead to interesting discussions:

Gattaca - interesting take on genetics/DNA discrimination

Europa - hard science fiction, maybe a bit slow for a 12 year old

The Net - older movie but the concept of digital exile resonates today

City of Ember - post apocalyptic civilization that lives deep underground

First Man - dramatization of Neil Armstrong and the first moon landing (not realy "fiction")

Arrival - first contact situation, tastefully done

Contact - another first contact situation that explores how politics, skepticism, and fanaticism react

The Martian - easily as fun as the book

The Prestige - competing magicians in an industrial age setting

The Hunger Games - extreme class divide in a future setting

Jurassic Park - the original not the sequels

Stargate - wormhole travel to another planet (be careful with the TV shows though, SG1 on streaming has full frontal nudity and "not ok" scenes which were obviously not on the broadcast version and a total shock when we watched it as a family)

District 9 - has some graphic gore and language, so it might be 14+, but is an interesting look at aliens as refugees

Contagion - a look at how a pandemic could play out. Premiered before COVID.

The Maze Runner - interesting setting and look at group dynamics

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids - fun setting

The Village - scary movie with a sci fi twist

Galaxy Quest - comedy

Short Circuit - old movie that deals with AI sentience

Innerspace - another old one, but has some fun concepts

Based on the GIF, I thought it created an animated video.

Even when the .PNG downloaded I thought for sure it’d be an animated PNG.

If I’m doing some content creation, I probably already have an image editor, in which case I can create this effect myself or would prefer an integrated plugin to do it.

Motion graphics is much harder, and there’s more demand there to add some sparkle to a static image. OP, have you considered that angle?

Magic means “hidden complexity”, AKA “abstraction”. The negative connotation is that sometimes you can’t figure out why your software is behaving a certain way and what you need to do about it.

The positive connotation is that you write less code with less cognitive overhead.

Generally I prefer ASP.NET over things like Spring and Ruby on Rails because it has less magic, despite being clearly inspired by both of those.

Here’s a concrete ASP.NET example: You can put an [ApiController] attribute on your controllers and it can change the structure of error responses, among other things. [1]

I don’t agree with some of the other parent points. For example, the comments on “multiple dependency injection container” —- ASP.NET is pretty prescriptive on DI patterns. That sounds like someone made a decision to add complexity, which is on them.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/66546105

Can you elaborate on “is in no way a typical hosted ASP.NET app”?

I get that the machinery under the hood is different (ie. Kestrel web server may not get used). However, we typically don’t care about those details. Our ASP.NET code runs in 3 separate places (containers, servers, Lambda) and the only difference between all 3 is a single entry point file.

Do you mean because Lambda is only serving one request at a time and has a more ephemeral host process lifetime?

It’s a minor signal, but it’s still a signal.

If someone only lists “Angular”, it could be Angular 4 from 2016 or something more relevant.

Same thing with .NET— the version can imply Windows-related experience (.NET Framework) vs. something more cloud native (.NET 6).

The annual cadence simplifies our planning— we can preview features a year ahead and prepare for the LTS release. It also shortens the feedback cycle for Microsoft which has to be useful.

From a recruiting standpoint, it allows me to start conversations. I don’t take points off if candidates haven’t worked on the latest version, but one of my go-to questions is “What features in .NET X are you looking forward to using?”.

In an industry of constant change, it’s a negative signal if you don’t know anything about the current version of the platforms you use. Many, many candidates don’t.

Serverless.

Running an ASP.NET app in AWS Lambda is just a few lines of code. However, all of a sudden startup time becomes important for both performance and cost.

These investments by Microsoft and others[1] allow .NET to remain relevant and viable for modern use cases.

[1] https://github.com/awslabs/dotnet-nativeaot-labs

Can you name other development platforms of similar scale/depth that don’t have this issue?

Compared to the whirring treadmill of frontend web development, I find .NET to be pretty easy to keep up with. Good IDEs (ReSharper or Rider) really help with the new language features (which are opt-in).

Outside of that, the ecosystem is large enough that there are quality blogs/articles/podcasts to stay current without sinking a ton of time into doing so.

Serverless hosting (ie. AWS Lambda) makes ASP.NET a primary use case for AOT because cold startup times cripple performance and increase cost.

I suspect they’re just not ready yet and targeting the easy use cases (console apps).

“sexy”, definition:

1. Arousing or tending to arouse sexual desire or interest.

2. Highly appealing or interesting; attractive.

3. Having sexual appeal; suggestive of sex.

While #2 might be the intent, there are much better alternative choices for links that I could

* send to my 10 year old niece who is interested in tech

* share with co-workers or on company forums

* use without hassle from automated filtering/proxy/scanning tools for a TLD that is associated with adult content

Mars advantages continued:

3. Available water, required for any human/plant/animal life

4. 2.3 times the gravity of the moon

5. CO2 in atmosphere could be converted to O2 for breathing or methane for rocket fuel

I’m not picking on you specifically, it sounds like you do a lot of desktop .NET development and there are legitimate complaints there.

However, “too invested to switch now” reminds me of .NET/C# developers that don’t embrace change and/or don’t swim in other waters.

Some folks with a traditional Microsoft/Windows/.NET Framework mindset have real trouble with these things:

“Windows and Visual Studio”

Rider, Linux, Docker, bash terminals, and MacOS are all things that can improve your ability to solve problems with .NET. I’ve met dozens of people that refused to even try a different OS/IDE and fail to gain the benefits of those tools and the broadening effect they have on your perspective.

”too many frameworks”

This complaint sometimes stems from an unwillingness to learn web/mobile frontend technologies. On the server-side, ASP.NET continues to simplify— you can write an API now in one file with a handful of lines of code. [1]

“limited core libraries”

The first party support in .NET is already pretty comprehensive. Some folks have an aversion to using open source packages, but this is exactly how you get things like YAML parsing in most other languages. Microsoft’s move to open source has been awesome. You can literally interact & contribute with the team’s that make the framework.

”command line first”

This sounds like a feature to me. This allows for automation and is easier to document without a series of screenshots. Having a common CLI allows a team to mix their preferences of IDEs/tools.

”async everywhere which makes everything multithreaded, prone to deadlocks and hard to debug”

I disagree. async/await makes it easier to write readable code without deadlocks or many of the other pitfalls of multithreaded programming. It is not inherently multithreaded either [2].

Since it’s ‘everywhere’ and thus fundamental to writing C#, it’s my first interview screening question. A large number of candidates, with a lengthy .NET background fail to articulate any issues with calling “.Result” or “async void FunctionHere()”. IMO, you have to deliberately avoid understanding such a ubiquitous language feature.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/mi... [2] https://blog.stephencleary.com/2013/11/there-is-no-thread.ht...

Aside from labor replacement and the implied capital efficiency, are there other benefits automation can bring to solar installations?

I thought 100k HP was either too incredible or a typo. Then I looked it up:

“You def don’t want electric pumps on a rocket engine! Raptor turbopumps alone need 100,000 horsepower per engine. That’s not a typo.” —Elon Musk

x 32 engines. Amazing! For comparison, this is an internal combustion engine with 100k HP:

https://www.zmescience.com/science/biggest-most-poweful-engi...

How does a single metric from a highly specialized runtime environment indicate a tech stack is dead?

There are things you can do right now [1] to mitigate these cold start issues.

Going forward, ahead-of-time compilation will be an option. [2]

Aside from cold starts, note that the improvements in .NET make ASP.NET Core one of the fastest web frameworks. [3]

The article: > “.Net has almost the same performance as Golang and Rust, but only after 1k iterations(after JIT).”

Additions like async/await and nullable reference types make it easier to write bug-free code, which for a lot of folks is a better trade off than “speaking to the hardware directly”.

.NET also runs natively on a bunch of platforms now, including ARM.

I’d call all of that continuous improvement. Perhaps even reinvention?

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/ready...

[2] https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/tree/feature/NativeAOT

[3] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=test&runid=5...

Lambda only has default support for the LTS releases of .NET, which is 2.1, 3.1 and the upcoming (November 2021) .NET 6.

The only way to run .NET 5 in a Lambda that I know of would be custom runtimes or containers. Is that what do you mean by “switched to using Docker images”?

This article describes the containerized performance of .NET in Lambda and the cold starts are dramatically (~4x) worse.

https://www.kloia.com/blog/aws-lambda-container-image-.net-b...