pvdoom

Climate engineering is pretty risky, and in the current stage, so small scale, by the time we are able to actually do something it will be too late. And relying on just investments and market also wont get us there fast enough. Nuclear is definitely part of the solution, but also much more targeted regulations that outright limit fossil fuels, and initiatives that reduce/ban cars, rewild massive swats of nature, massively scaling down overproduction of goods, and also pushing for reduced consumption in the global north.

Lol, reading this in a call booth at work sure is something ...

Yes, absolutely

Re: first law ... one thing I have been thinking a lot lately is just how much like gardening software is. But in gardening we are not afraid to trim the plants and put them in shape as we go. In software we end up just adding stuff on top, without regard for the overall design. There is this bias towards always adding rather than removing things, and the key to keep things in order is to remove things, to say no, etc.

I think we can look into the notion from complexity theory of attractor states. If you want to make a change, you need to shift your system enough that it moves into another state.

In more normal words - the codebase will fight your changes. And that means that small incremental changes may not be enough, and you will need at least a few big leaps.

During the USSR, the Soviet government pushed the cyclic script on populations that speak very different languages, sometimes forcing them to abandon other scripts, i.e. arabic. Same during the Russian Empire.

Some Central European countries adopted the Latin script as a part of their alignment with Rome, and thus making a stronger political alignment.

Scripts and languages are very powerful political tools. In many cases what script a language uses is not a coincidence but a result of conscious choices and policies at some point.

Well, rental as another profit-driven thing, that has multiple consequences - it removes property away from people, it prevents people from getting their own place, it creates concentration of wealth, it drives policies that favour landlords, etc - i.e. big real estate corporations, and landlords generally have a lot more lobbying power than poor renters.

A primary root cause of homelessness is lack of affordable housing.

Nah, I think that is still a consequence. The root cause is the fundamental assumption that homes should be a commodity that is bought, sold and rented out for profit, rather than something that everyone needs for survival. We should be looking at ways to limit the market here, or finding ways to not treat houses as a commodity, or something for rent-seeking

An alphabet is connected to a language. And controlling the language and its writing, especially related to religion is a very powerful tool. How you do communication, what culture is relevant for you, etc. And that happens even today - just think of the role English plays, and then American cultural artefacts. And compared it to French at the turn of the 20-th century

So, author boils everything down to anti-Western politics a 1000 years ago and insists Cyrillic just got lucky that it spread so wide.

It's a mix of accurate and inaccurate. It is based on a 1000 years old anti-western politics, but also anti-Eastern politics. And it didn't just get lucky, but there was a massive, massive effort on part of the First Bulgarian Empire to spread it via missionaries and the like, which is what set the foundations for its later use up North, where later the Russian Empire became a thing and so on ...

During the time we are talking about politics and religion are one and the same ...

It's a bit more complicated. The OG cyclic was the the Glagolitic - which is very different from the greek alphabet. The proper Cyrillic, while based on the greek alphabet, was developed then specifically and consciously as a political project against Byzantium, as of course the byzantines would much prefer to use greek for church and business ...

It's a different you.

I think some inhibitions or blockers fall off, and you kind of run on dream logic. I had some major surgery and my sister was supposed to come in and help out right after it. She came right as they were bringing me back in to the room, and apparently I was commandeering the doctors to give her space and make her a coffee cause "Im a fucking queen, and you will do as I tell you"... I don't remember any of it.

I think there is some nuance to it.The absolutely best thing for clean code for me has been taking courses in academic writing. But also why would it activate just the language centres of the brain - especially if you are asked to predict what a piece of code would do. I think comparing to say a planning task would be more akin...

My sister is in SF, and even though she nominally makes a little more than I do, I end up having much more disposable income, and can afford a lot more things, which is ... weird feeling

Yup, which is probably one of the reasons why those third places get undone

Yeah, its more of an ideal vs reality thing ....

Ideally it's should be a balance between customers and business

Nah, I think for it to be a proper third place, revenue and business should really really be secondary to everything.

Nah, thats not Denmark, thats a particular racist government

55% personal income tax rate?

That's not really correct. It is more like 36%. And also it is more complicated than that, as the more you earn the higher it gets, but it's roughly around 36%. The 55% is for example for secondary incomes, etc. what we call a B-kord

Well do remember that a lot of the recycling plastic, personal responsibility, carbon footprint thing was literally made up as a marketing gimmick by fossil fuel ...

There is something to be said there about power in society, ruling classes, interests and that German dude with the beard

Maybe then we shouldn't be putting technologies like the internet in the hands of profit-driven companies. Most of the internet driven technology is inherently un-monetizeable, but also very useful, and ads are actively detrimental to the quality of the product. I doubt the users have much say in this to be fair.

I had the exact opposite experience :( Stating things like "what is this shit"or "This is an absolute dumpster" was taken as demoralising colleagues ...

Interestingly enough, what survives as pumpkin spice today used to be an incredibly popular spice mix - powder douce - going back to the Middle Ages, and used on everything from apple pie, to roast meat, to wine. Mulled wine is basically pumpkin spice wine.

I've been rather nerdy on Operations Research. It seems that today it's a mostly unknown field limited to few companies. Maybe it turned out to be too difficult for ordinary managers, who just wanted dashboards, maybe people weren't really ready for it, maybe it got crushed by the agile industrial context ... but if you look at writings from the 70s and 80s it seems that there is an agreement that for an OR department to be truly successful it would require a mandate to truly transform the business and disrupt common power structures - which is why instead they often get relegated to just doing dashboards. Over time they became data analysts and then the data scientists of today.

I personally think that there is a LOT of very useful stuff in the field.

one may make good progress tuning one part of a system only to discover that a larger constraint prevails as the true bottleneck.

In my latest job this was exactly the case. We were modernising a good old big ball of mud. And we made very decent progress on a part that was supposed to read from an API. That was nice but turned out that the API itself is poorly designed, and the vast majority of problems and slowdowns are coming from the other side. And the true bottleneck was that the team responsible for data was not very well prepared, so there was little design, poor coding, etc. And what really turned out to be the bottleneck is that the entire department just has a problem with processes and with hiring and retaining qualified people, and with ups killing the existing ones ...

Sadly, most of modern management refuses to make these changes, and too many folks in the trenches don't want to take ownership of their work and just want to be told what to do.

Interestingly enough this is something I see in management books and operations research books going back to the 70s. It's a lesson that hasn't been learned.

As for the ownership - I think that makes a lot of sense. People in the trenches know very well that they don't really own the thing, but are just at best responsible for it. I think that is perfectly fine, and the whole "ownership" language tends to obscure very real power dynamics.

- Be very mindful of the "level of recursion" you are trying to express - i.e. how many trees to include when it should be a forest.

- Look into the C4 model - that is great for expressing architecture.

- Have a Miro board with multiple versions and working charts.

- Make at least one that reflects the full process, and one chart that reflects the relationships between components.

- Keep it simple, and avoid creating DoD style monstrosities. if you find yourself in that situation it means either you are mixing up recursion levels, or are not very clear on the purpose of the chart and the audience.

- Boxes and arrows are enough

- I personally have benefited from UML style charts, others hate them.

- Domain Driven Design and Event Storming style maps are also very clear way to express things.

- Most importantly - remember that an architecture is not a static thing, but a living, changing and ever-evolving thing. Like a garden.

Should each owner run around and tell each employee globally how to do their job, what is the goal, budget, restrictions, rules, timelines etc?

Of course not, but there are many useful ways to organise this. Hell you can still have managers, but make them elected from the body of workers. It's more that because of the first thing you said (with which I agree) these managers are basically cops or wardens.