zenkat

Check out Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" for an interesting take on this dynamic for nation-states and political economies. His core thesis is that dominant powers rise as new players leverage new technologies (especially energy technologies), build complex interdependent economies centered around those technologies, but then wither and fall as they spend increasingly more on military power to monopolize and defend the chokepoints of those technologies. When a new more efficient technology comes along, they are doomed to irrelevance as they fail to capitalize on those technologies, and new players swoop in for dominance.

He gives examples of the Dutch and wind power (sailing); Great Britain and coal; and America and petroleum. He also predicted China's ascendency as the next player willing to leverage new technologies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great...

I was fascinated by "At Home In The Universe" back in the 90s. But this seems like a rehashing of the same ideas, without new evidence or theory. Anything new here?

Yes, really wanted an "About" page. Cool viz, but what is it showing?

Housing is cheap in West Virginia because it's currently experiencing the largest population exodus in the US.

https://apnews.com/article/al-state-wire-west-virginia-lifes...

Does anyone have a similar compendium specifically for software engineering disasters?

Not of nasty bugs like the F-22 -- those are fun stories, but they don't really illustrate the systemic failures that led to the bug being deployed in the first place. Much more interested in systemic cultural/practice/process factors that led to a disaster.

"And yet, here we are in 2023 and self driving cars still don’t work."

LOL. Someone should tell the California CPUC that:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/10/23827790/waymo-cruise-cpu...

One of the safety training stories at the lab I used to work at was about a chemist who set his lunchtime hamburger on the shelf in the fume hood while running reactions with a potent methylating agent. Slow painful death over the course of a week. Definitely put the fear of god in me.

Pop-culture tangent: Does anyone know if Slotin's story was the inspiration for Dr. Manhattan's orgin story in _The Watchmen_? Many resonances between the two.

Interesting perspective, considering ad revenue is down nearly 60% y/y.

If they are "working hard at becoming profitable", it doesn't seem to be working.

LOL. Copernicus & Galileo didn't "doubt" the geocentric model, they provided scientific evidence that it was incorrect. You see how that's different, right?

"I'm not trying to question climate change, I'm just wondering if this overwhelming scientific evidence might somehow be wrong, despite any evidence to the contrary ... and I'm just as brave as Galileo for questioning established orthodoxy, too!".

Sure, buddy. Tell me all about it.

There's plenty of easy-to-find evidence out there that shows that the speed and magnitude of these changes are not only unprecedented in human history, but geologic time scales as well. It's also crystal clear that these changes are caused by the massive increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations caused by humans burning fossil fuels. This is sorted by both theory and massive amounts of evidence. Good primers exist all across the web, http://climate.gov/ is a good starting point.

"But wait, maybe this is all just natural cycles" is borderline willful denial at this point, especially on a well-informed site like HN. Might as well ask if maybe the earth is flat after all.

The post goes into this in some detail. In human languages, the embeddings for specific concepts seem to follow very similar geometric relationships no matter what language. If that holds across species, then you could use geometric similarity to map animal embeddings to human concepts.

Also, since chatbots just output "meaningful" strings of tokens based on a string of input tokens, you can build a chatbot that can "talk" to animals without us necessarily being able to understand it. But sure how useful that would be, but interesting nonetheless.

So the Outer Richmond is a "wealthy hyper-gentrifed neighborhood" now? Or the Mission? The Sunset? SOMA? Dogpatch?

Sure, I mean if you're able to afford to live in those neighborhoods, then you're doing OK. But it's a bit rich to call them "hyper-gentrifed".

Sorry if it came across that way, wasn't my intent.

I live in the city, and travel through all parts -- including the less desirable parts. I ride down Market every day. I go to the central library at Civic Center. I do bike loops through Candlestick. I frequent bars in the Tenderloin.

So no, it's not just because I can avoid "crime-ridden areas". It's because I don't find those areas fundamentally unsafe.

I think that says more about Hacker News than SF. There's a level of hate for the city here that I don't understand. Feels a bit like a vendetta sometimes.

I've lived in SF for almost 30 years. I agree 100%. Sure, there's a lot more sad/ugly homelessness in the post-covid era. The shantytowns out by Candlestick are depressing. The Tenderloin continues to be a mess.

But do I feel less safe? Absolutely not! The neighborhoods (where most people live) are just fine. I regularly walk home from the bars at midnight without a care. It's simply not a problem.

Compare back to the mid-90's, when there was active gun/gang violence in the Mission corridor ... quite frankly, I feel far safer today than I used to.

I love the concept! Modern interrupt-driven workflows are horrible if you want to get real work done, designing for focus time is a great idea.

How is it with privacy, PII, and sensitive data? Is all processing done locally, or is data uploaded into the cloud?

Radar data at 7:40pm shows flurries over the East Bay and Santa Cruz hills.

I would definitely ask ChatGPT what the best keyboards are, summarizing their strengths/weaknesses, and then use that as the starting point of my search.

Comparison shopping is a major PITA with current sites, clicking back-and-forth between various product pages and review sites, and trying to distill it down to a few relevant choices -- things that ChatGPT's excellent abilities at summarization could really help with.

Projection. It's always projection.

What is the trick for making them work? I tried a few times and gave up -- just couldn't get even close enough to iterate & improve.

Honest-to-goodness, real, face-to-face, unmediated human connection. So much of social/media tech has become a poor substitute for this basic human need. Friends. Family. Community.

Live music jam sessions is currently how I'm creating this in my life. I've found a group of dedicated amateur musicians, we get together and perform for each other. It's a lot of fun. :-D

100% this.

The former President was caught red-handed hiding top secret documents at his freakin' vacation home, with probable intent to commit espionage against the United States, including disclosure of sensitive human intelligence assets ...

And Hacker News has it's knickers in a knot because the FBI warned a social media company that the Hunter Biden story might be a Russian psyops campaign?

Seriously people?

For me, the primary concern isn't about Art as an economic activity. It's about what happens to human society when communication becomes divorced from human meaning.

The original purpose of art (and language) was to communicate the thoughts & views of one human mind to another. It's a fundamental need, the essence of being human, the cornerstone of culture and society.

DALL-E and GPT-3 are about to unleash a tidal wave of content that no longer performs that function, simply because _there is no human mind at its source_. What happens to us then, when we are constantly receiving an overwhelming babble of voices that appear on their surface to be meaningful, but lack any true meaning at their core? What happens to our voices, our relationships, our society?

Wow, people on the internet really will argue about anything.

@kqr, thank you for your insights. While it's not exactly relevant to my problem domain (self-driving cars - lots of essential complexity there!), it's still generally useful advice.

Software is expensive to write, but it's even more expensive to maintain. That's why my favorite projects are those that delete large amounts of now-useless code. Not writing it in the first place is an even better alternative.

OP here. Thank you for all of the great suggestions! I've compiled all the references into this spreadsheet: <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kgFSWp7rM3ZegweXAoMN...>

From my perspective, the top "must-reads" are:

-- John K Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design

-- Titus Winter (et al), Software Engineering at Google

-- Hanson and Sussman, Software Design for Flexibility

Other interesting titles that caught my eye:

-- Peter Naur, Programming as Theory Building

-- Scott Wlaschin, Domain Modeling Made Functional

-- Yehonathan Sharvit, Data-Oriented Programming: Unlearning objects (upcoming)

-- Nick Tune, Patterns, Principles, and Practises of Domain Driven Design

-- Robert L. Glass, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

-- Donald Reinertsen, The Principles of Product development Flow

-- Eric Normand, Grokking Simplicity

100% this.

I casually read a huge amount of interesting technical/business info on the web. But when I want to use that knowledge later (say in a business presentation or technical design), it's nearly impossible to find the original webpage! I can remember the basic idea, but I can't turn it into search terms that are precise enough for Google. ("What was the name of that programming law about tearing down fences?")

What I want is the ability to constrain my searches by pages I've personally visited. Even better would be able to "star" pages to say "this is good, rank higher in future personal searches".

Has anyone built that yet? Why or why not?

But Google indexes the whole web. I want a search that works just over the articles I've read.

"What was that article I read a few months back that talked about why you should be able to explain why a fence exists before tearing it down?". It works be perfect for the discussion I'm having with my team right now, but I can't remember the name of the stupid law or where I came across it .

Google is useless in these situations. I need an index contained by my prior search history. Had anyone built this yet?

What's even more hilarious is that "Web 3.0" has already been used for another (failed) evolution of the Internet -- the much-hyped switch to the "Semantic Web" of the 2010s.

Wait, it's not a parody meant to mock the whole crypto/web3 space as a bunch of shameless pseudo-libertarian get-rich-quick hucksters?

Poe's law strikes again!