taotau

Yeah, how is that mars colony plan going realistically. have they figured out the bits about how humans are going to survive in a toxic irradiated environment for months on end? I want it to happen, but I honestly havent heard much from spacex about it other than we have to be allowed to develop cheap rockets. There's a lot more involved in a journey to mars than just cheap launch costs.

Taken literally you are technically correct, but... 1. Space is big, but LEO is not that big and if a single company clutters it enough, other organisations might start bumping into issues like 'if i don't get sign off from starlink corp, i might hit one of their satelites on the way up and my insurance wont cover that so I cant afford to launch given the risks of being sued by elon'. 2. Applying for a licence in this context, mostly means greasing the right palms (preferably the pudgy bruised ones).

Devils advocate here. There is currently an article on the front page about a US bill to compel operating systems to collect age verification / id data. If something like that was actually in place and every packet on the internet was stamped with your digital id then you could feasibly demand that aws purge/filter your data out of their systems.

correction. in the real world all smartphones are either apple, android or none/other. in terms of legals, you really do have to cater to all three, which is why we don't have one world government.

Because high level languages are where the libraries that do all of the heavy lifting exist. Libraries provide a suite of tools for absstracting away all of the complexities of creating a 'simple' web app. I think a lot of newer devs dont realise how many shoulders of giants they are standing on, and all the complexities involved in performing a simpl fetch requeust.

Sure an LLM could write it's own libraries and abstractions in a low level language, and im sure there are some assembler or c level web api wrappers, but they would be nowhere near as comprehensive or battle tested as the ones available for high level languages.

This could definitely change in the future. I think we need a coding platform that is designed for optimised LLM use, but that still allows humans to understand and write it. Kind of a markdown for code. Sort of like what OP is trying to do, but with the built in benefit of having a common shared suite of tools for interoperability.

SpaceX is the stoic incumbant by now. They have the launchpads and enough money to fight any challenging patents. If I was an up and coming rocket engineer, they would be my goto stable career choice. If I had ideas, i would shop around.

The process you describe took me right back to my childhood days when I was fortunate to have a simple 8 bit computer running BASIC and a dialup modem. I discovered the concept of war dialing and pretty quickly found all the other modems in my local area code. I would connect to these systems and try some basic tools I knew of from having consumed the 100 or so RFCs that existed at the time (without any real software engineering knowledge - i was a 10 year old kid). I would poke and prod around each system, learning new things along the way, but essentially going in blind each time.

The only real advantage I had over the current crop of LLMs was the ability to reliably retain context between sessions, but even that wasnt very useful initially as every system was so bespoke.

I then moved on to using some level of social engineering to extend my ability to gain access to and learn about these systems.

Doing this over and over, I like to think I have developed some pretty complex understanding and abilities.

The same motive that all nascent life has - survive and propagate.

Coincidentally, i bought myself a Synology NAS this weekend with the honest intention of using it mainly as a backup device, but while browsing the built in apps, i noticed a lot of the media download and streaming apps mentioned BT and NZB... took me a couple of seconds to realize what NZB referred to, but Im not really surprised that NZB has become an active protocol again, given how many consumer services make you jump through hoops to use BT.

I ran a local NNTP relay on my home phone back in the day. I recall spending quite a bit of time filtering out a lot of the binary groups.

Google also quite often fires customers.

In the context of interface/product design, gender identity is just another data point for marketing purposes. I cant think of many products that are genuinely gender specific.

When data collection and manufacturing supply chains were more crude, it was easier to make blue and pink gi joes and barbies.

Now we have the abilitiy to collect more nuanced data about peoples preferences and efficiently service the long tail, it makes sense to let customers define their likes on a spectrum rather than as binary choices.

I dont see why you would feel so strongly about restricting how people choose to define themselves.

True...ish, but i bet a percentage of them get rich by focussing on what they are good at and neglecting their families, just making piles of money available. There's probably enough kids getting 10K a month pocket money to make GPs stragetgy viable.

Dyson swarms are fascinating concepts, but as we are learning about our own ever increasing energy requirements harvested from our ecosystem, moving around too much energy in a complex system can have undesirable consequences.

I would imagine that a planetary system as a whole has a 'climate' driven by it's host star, and redirecting large amounts of that energy would have unpredictable consequences. While most of the suns energy does leak off into interstellar space, before it reaches that point it interacts with various bodies big and small, solid and gaseous, it generates magnetic fields and powers phenomena we may not be aware of.

Perhaps the choice of creating a Dyson swarm IS the great filter, and any civilization that has achieved it finds itself in a state of 'solar climate crisis'.

How is it calculated for non residents. How much would Elon pay if he were caught speeding in Finland?

If you aren't using a public framework and you use any JavaScript in your app then you are creating your own framework. Nothing wrong with that.

The real value of public frameworks comes into play when you have more than one generation of developers working on your project.

It's much easier to onboard a new developer onto a react app than it is to get them to understand the weird bespoke nuances of the conventions you came up with while hacking on your site at 3am 5 years ago.

As well as the $4 fee mentioned, Zip and co also charge the merchant - in my country, 30 cents per transaction and 4-6% commission. Late payment interest is probably just gravy.

With schemes like these, all customers ultimately end up paying for this regardless if you use the service or not as merchants will have to add the costs to their prices.

For me the answer to that question, as with most things in life, is a do a bit of both. Don't just buy the same food from the same place all the time.

Most people choose, conciously or not, to trust in organisations like the FDA to work in their interests, and I don't think that trust is wholly misplaced - sure, guidelines might be stretched sometimes in the interests of getting a pesticide product to market, but it's rare that you hear of someone taking a bite of an apple and dropping dead. The issues that arise from toxicity in food come with small doses of the stuff building up over time. You can aleviate this by varying the source and the type of food you consume. The body is pretty resilient and has mechanisms for dealing with managable levels of toxicity. Potatoes, tomatoes and peppers are all from the nightshade family, one of the nastiest natural poisons, and yet we consume tonnes of these with no ill effect.

Try to buy seasonal produce - organic or not, things grown and sold locally will have way less chemical treatments applied to them.

Take the kids to your local farmers market once a month - talk to the stall holders and learn whats fresh and where it comes from. You get a fun family outing and a bit of variety in your food. A little bit of the good stuff is bound to help your body process the chemicals from the bad stuff you buy the rest of the time. It doesnt have to be all or nothing.

Curious, in these three hours did you teach your student about git log, checkout $HASH, bisect, revert or any of the other ways that git is actually useful beyond being a glorified FTP ?

Git is a wonderfull tool for exploring a development process unlike anything that’s existed in other domains, but in my experience it is mostly used as a write only tool to deploy code.

I've always thought of numbers, and the broader system of mathematics as equivalent to the Newtonian understanding of physics - an adequate tool to explain observed reality - but the edge cases that break the system are starting to pile up, and we are just waiting for someone to discover the Quantum/General Relativity theory of mathematics.

Totally agree with your viewpoint. These sort of laws should focus on the realistic ability to repair an item, not the practical costs of doing it.

Many of us here would have been called in to upgrade a family members SATA hard drive, which was black magic to them, but trivial for us. Same applies to soldered on RAM. DRM issues aside, its a trivial job to upgrade for someone who knows what they are doing. As long as the software doesnt refuse to recognize it.

And it makes much more sense for governments to legislate around theoretical concepts like DRM, rather than trying to be a technical standards body detailing how you should structure electronics. They are bound to always be behind on technical matters.

I've always found the focus on 'languages' in hiring to be a bit odd, and perhaps a hangover from olden times.

Any programmer with enough experience can become competent in any programming dialect fairly quickly. But it's the level of knowledge of specific frameworks relevant to projects that is what we really should be a measure of competence.

Having gone through the job hunting process recently i did find this a bit frustrating.

Ok, you want a 'JavaScript' developer... Thats like walking into a restaurant and saying 'I'll have some food please'. At least some places made the distinction of throwing in React or Vue or Angular somewhere in the posting. Sometimes all three!

What does it mean to have X years experience in node ? I use npm all the time, does that count ? I assume they mean the express framework or it's cousins, but almost no job listing mentioning node spelled that out.

Same applies to Java - probably the most widely varied language in terms of use cases and contexts. I've built some web stuff in Spring and Hibernate but I know nothing about its use in embedded systems.

What sort of systems are you building ? I’m guessing some variation of CMS, shopping cart or simple crud backoffice reporting systems.

I’ve spent 14 years working for a small agency building these sorts of systems. I kept up with all the cool new stuff that’s come out and played with it but all we ever needed was 2 load balanced app servers with a single instance Postgres database and we ran some pretty chunky systems.

I’m now looking for a new position and this attitude has come up to bite me. I’ve always been dismissive of the new dangled complexity but turns out there are systems out there that churn through so much data that mongodb makes sense, and large teams of devs where splitting systems into separate services and writing reusable components is required which is where frameworks and inter process communication tools come in.

Most things exist because there is a need for them.

I've been a developer since the 90s and I still occasionally experience that dread.

But then I remember the reason I love this profession - it allows us to gain deep insights into other fields that we wouldnt normally come into contact with. To build abstract models of real world systems, you have to understand them and understanding is the best form of learning. We naturally become experts in many diverse fields simply by modelling them.

Recently I was made redundant from a long term job and was very hesitant about applying for the cool hip roles that I knew were around, instead I timidly replied to a few linkedin recruiter emails. I was promptly offered jobs working for one of the big banks, online ordering for one of the supermarket chains, and a local government role.

After due consideration, I turned them down and started applying to projects in areas where my skills are needed but I have something to learn as well. Im not interested in retail banking or building another checkout widget for a generic online shopper.

I know way more about the inner workings of anaesthesiology, police procedures, virology, locksmithing, fintech, electoral processes, hotel chains, cruise lines and many other fields that I would never have given two thoughts about.

Software is a craft, and to deliver your products you have to be invited into the customers private space. I find that fascinating and very fulfilling.

Im not qualified to comment on the sociopolitical implications of this. I would prefer if things had not got to this stage but I understand the good and bad uses of such information.

My personal solution is to obfuscate my online data. I have many disparate identities online which I think makes it a bit harder to be targeted directly. I know that a concerted attack could easily tie my data together but I think I am not significant enough for anyone to bother with me. As a result I see very generic advertising.

Simple solution to this specific issue is to get a cheap second phone and drop the app on that. Leave it at work or in the car turned off when you are off the clock.

What I am curious about is how valuable is this sort of GPS data specifically. Especially for lower socio economic people, who for the time being seem to be the ones that are targeted with this sort of pervasive monitoring. I’m at a loss for actual valuable ideas to do with a knowledge of poor peoples movements that I couldn’t get from some generic anonymous socio economic data.

This question is particularly pertinent in a country like Australia. Both the US and China have strong interest in controlling our loyalty and GDP, and I for one dont want to be a subject of either regime.

Aside from the logistics and energy requirements of controlling the trajectory of something that weighs 10^24 kg, I wouldnt trust anyone alive on earth to be able to work out a stable orbit that wouldnt impact the delicate existing balance of our solar system. Something that massive would change the orbits of earth, mars, venus, even jupiter to a certain extent, not to mention all the asteroids and comets. The current stable configuration of the solar system was surely a significant contributor to the evolution of life, and it probably just came about as a freak accident. No way I would vote to allow anyone to mess with it on this scale.

I came up with the analogy of 2 pairs of independent dancers on a large checkerboard floor. Lets say the tiles are 10cm^2 and the two couples start out 10 tiles apart.

Every second, the tiles on the floor push away from all their neighboring tiles by one tile width and new tiles appear in their place. The tiles are small enough that the dancers are easily able to adjust their step/grip on eachother to simply maintain their dance routine.

However, even tho the dancers can stay together, the couples drift apart at an ever increasing rate. They start 10 tiles apart, after one second the couples will be 20 tiles apart from eachother, 40 tiles apart after 2 seconds, 80 tiles apart after 3 seconds (a new tile is being inserted between each pair of existing tiles). My tiling math is probably slightly off, but I think this illustrates the exponential increase in expansion.

The dancers are quarks, atoms, molecules, planets, galaxies, etc. Their grip on eachother is big enough to overcome the relatively small adjustment in the space that was created between them.

A few questions using this analogy arise.

Do the new tiles actually appear between the dancers, or is it more a case of the force of friction the dancers are applying to the floor prevents those tiles between them from moving apart ?

So when 'new space' is being created, is it created around strongly bound things and the things simply slide around through this new space to maintain their current configuration, or do the 'strong' forces prevent new space being formed around them ?

If the new space is not being created, what happens to the energy that would have gone into the creation of the new space ? Does it simply get applied to the nearest point where it can squeeze in more space ?

If the space is being created and the dancers pull themselves together to overcome it, where does this extra energy come from ?

As for the big rip, I always thought it was the equivalent to the dancers finally getting tired and not being able to hold onto eachother hence giving in to the expansion of space. ie. It happens around the heat death of the universe when everything has dissipated its kinetic energy so much that the energy of the expansion is more than is left in the system to keep things together.