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When I learned to program (before 9/11) there was a big emphasis on assembly language and using low level interfaces to communicate with other hardware. The idea was that everyone studying computer science should understand every aspect of the CPU down to the register and operation level, and then be able to design logic gates to replicate that functionality if needed.

Now we have CPUs that are fundamentally undocumented, unknowable, and untranslatable. The entire infrastructure of the network, the telecoms, and the cpu design itself has all been subverted to the needs of the national security complex or corporate advertising.

I'm not sure what computer science even means anymore. Everything I learned is completely useless.

The data is wrong for at least five or six cases near me, the county seems to be missing or just wrong.

Why present a splashy tool like this if it just has bad data? This is irresponsible.

Yes, after we eliminate all the trucking jobs in the county which are one of the last remaining decent jobs for unprivileged people, then the robberies will really take off. Better come up with a log(n) solution to those dirty poor people with bedsheets before prioritizing anything else, because there will surely be robberies.

Maybe instead of intentionally creating a nightmarish hellscape so we can fix the robbery problem we just take a step back for a minute? What are we actually building? For whom?

The libertarian tech monoculture is the problem, not the solution. If you knew the history of the industry or Kansas over the past 30 years you'd realize you're exactly backwards.

Deere and similar companies got the idea to create this "perfect walled garden monopoly tractor" from Steve Case. AOL was the first to really lay out the pattern so many other industries (and Google and Amazon and Apple and other monopolists) have now emulated.

This isn't about innovation or disruption, it's about consolidation, power and monopoly. There are lots of smart people trying to innovate in Kansas right now, for the most part they are getting absolutely crushed by massive corporate concentration.

Calling it a "victimless grift" as this writer does is just naive and silly. The thousands of people who got laid off while Adam got billions in golden parachute funds is the very definition of the word victim.

Just because we've grown accustomed to decades of golden parachutes and widening income inequality and excessive equity based compensation to dodge taxes at the high end doesn't mean any of this is normal or victimless. The victims are everyone who isn't an executive.

Everyone is getting tired of the bullshit industrial complex that so many companies seem to tread in. If you have zero plans for profitability, zero plans for sustainability, zero ideas for actually creating a new useful product or service then you shouldn't be forcing a semi-fraudulent IPO through the door that is s transparent cash grab for the stakeholders.

This is a good thing. The number doesn't always need to go up. Especially when it's all bullshit.

Ambitious or half-assed? You'd have to know literally nothing about gaming to call Stadia ambitious.

Yeah it's funny how he was the only corrupt CEO in all of corporate America during that time. So weird how nobody else besides him and Martha Stewart ever got prosecuted for insider trading despite it happening ALL THE TIME EVERY DAY EVERYWHERE.

Yes, Qwest (the telecom, formerly US West) resisted and fought tooth and nail to not cooperate.

Their CEO was prosecuted to hell and back for daring to do this, and the company was forced to sell to a competitor. Nobody even remembers his name anymore, few people even remember Qwest.

It's kind of hilarious that they still spend money on the PR team to push these stories about how important and sanctimonious cash is while at the same time printing billions of dollars every night and just transferring to any bank or hedge fund that wants it in the overnight repo market.

A whole set of theatrics for the commoners who still use cash, meanwhile we just press some buttons and poof a billion dollars appears out of thin air in your account (if you're rich enough).

Yeah this piece really hit the peak of "lie to everybody and just keep pushing forward on bullshit" startup sentiment that was really big 10 years.

It was a really dark time, we're still cleaning up those messes today.

It seems like Boeing (and the FAA and the industry more broadly) have been hiding behind the veil of the "zero commercial accidents" streak for however long that was happening while aggressively trying to coverup serious problems.

It's great that everyone is finally doing a deep dive to figure out these problems. We need more of this, more critical thought and curmudgeons and people who assume the statistics are wrong.

It boggles my mind how terrible the web is becoming on lower end connections. I have about 200ms of delay to most servers and about 5Mbit of bandwidth, and many major web pages take over 30 seconds to load if I don't block most of the assets.

It's insane that webpages are now loading megabytes of data across hundreds of http requests before the images even start downloading.

I've completely given up on the mobile web since I can't block things the way I need to. It's just unusable. It's a platform that just flat out doesn't work anymore for lots of people in remote areas.

The news here is that all telecom equipment is required to have back doors built into them, the "crime" is the manufacturer sometimes using this too.

I don't know if this is hugely revelatory or surprising, it has been common knowledge that all the telecoms are effectively government entities for a long time now. It's still just a bit surreal to see it all spelled out in black and white in the WSJ.

It really seems like this might be the start of the collapse of an incompetent monopoly. Lots of new business opportunities here, this is a rare event.

It's a bit surreal having multiple trillion dollar companies all of a sudden. Meanwhile, the tent city that used to just be under the bridge near downtown keeps spreading, it's up to a few hundred tents spread across almost two blocks now.

Not sure why I keep thinking about those two things together.

This is really cool, I had no idea these exist and are somewhat affordable. For example: https://www.amazon.com/Resqlink-PLB-375-Personal-Locator-Buo...

I'm going to pick something like this up before my next Wyoming adventure.

Bzzzzt, try again. I can fit both kids and carseats in the back of my old tiny 2 door VW GTI.

Shouldn't this link to the article?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-737max-idUSKBN1Z90...

It's just a diamond, they are not very interesting unless you believe the TV commercials that tell you they are super important and special. Carbon is carbon.

I'm just laughing at 800 MILLION YEAR OLD ROCK. Like you know how old all the rocks are right?

You think because the employees weren't executives and they were talking to eachother it's all ok? What on earth are you talking about?

Boeing employees should be in prison, there shouldn't be bail while awaiting trial. This is a act of willful negligence and deceit and coverup that killed hundreds of people. It's one of the biggest crimes ever in the history of our country.

I also refuse to complete captchas because I'm not interested in giving a trillion dollar company my free labor to help train their models.

I'm really close to just defaulting JavaScript off entirely, the web is becoming so much worse by the day.

I've complained about many companies that are devoting even more resources to buybacks on this very forum, including Chevron, Texas Instruments, Google and Oracle. Google in particular has been the trendsetter, everyone else is trying to keep up with their buybacks.

This news story is about Boeing, so yes I'm going to talk about Boeing here.

Do you work in defense or aerospace? You seem to be taking this personally for some reason.

No, the current buyback madness (at least at these levels) is a very recent invention of the past decade and quite abnormal. We can go back to reinvesting in companies and employees and research tomorrow if we want to.

But this would require boards and executives who didn't want to just grant themselves huge amounts of equity while buying back stock. So far not many boards are standing up for this.

I'm almost there, after reading about how much Boeing has spent on stock buybacks (5x all of R&D over the past six years) I think I'm going to start looking into which model typically services a route and avoid all modern Boeing planes.

Boeing made a lot of executives super rich with buybacks and equity compensation, this led directly to the shoddy engineering choices.

Not everyone is a young male with minimal obligations to take care of other humans.

So you're arguing that we'd all be better off without MCAS? And that this whole thing is the fault of regulators?

If so, this line of thinking is utterly absurd.

Nobody in Kansas is wasting their time trying to dig a pointless hole to China, they are all pinching every penny and coming up with every hack, innovation, and shortcut they can to get by.

The fact that you think people who failed must be stupid or slow learners says a lot about your worldview.

This is 90% of science these days, just keep tweaking numbers in the model until it fits with what you want to see. The why and the how is not really something we have the capability or tooling to tackle.

I got bored with physics really quickly when I realized this is what everyone does.

I don't understand the distinction? Why is it important?