Phiwise_

Precisely. These headline repetitions as arguments do get tiring after a while.

I don't see how the largest nuclear non-disaster in world history prompts a comparison between the US and the country that built the people's chandeliers and couches so large that the head of the planned economy had to give a speech declaring them too difficult to move in and dangerous to hang to be tolerated. Oh, and also their actual disaster killed an infinite multiple of people.

I'll be happy to compromise with you, though. If you support nuclear in spite of Chernobyl, I'll support the death penalty for any capitalist that oversees a nuclear meltdown not caused by an ICBM despite your lack of knowledge about the history of the USSR, and nature of communism. I might even support burning at the stake or something if that's what it takes to make the obviously correct decision for human progress. McCarthy wrote that link decades after Three Mile and Chernobyl. He wouldn't have done so if he didn't also know what I'm relaying to you now. Received opinion is the least grounded kind.

EDIT: Lol I missed what thread this was in. Again, was Three Mile Island a Thorium reactor? We'd all save so much time if questions were directed to Google instead of me.

The value equivalent of that was invested into computation technology long before even a half-MIPS machine was produced. Its funders had the foresight to look beyond the present day.

This is exactly correct, and only a tiny fraction of the immense amount of hand calculation and clerical work computers replaced in short order.

(Well, long order, actually. Short order once the technology ripened on its like fifth iteration)

Indeed, it is practically impossible today. If only there was some way to change a regulation in a day...

>Uranium

Please google Thorium and Minor Actinide Incineration.

>Chernobyl

The manifest incompetencies of a literal Communist government are none of the US' concern.

Where are the copyright lawsuits, then?

Please click the link before commenting.

(Then click a little more haha)

If obscene means "I dislike demand for X personally", then sure. But if the actually useful definition of "demand for X will unavoidably collapse society" is used, then you need to actually read the second link.

There has not been such a thing as an "Obscene Energy Denand" for half a century, especially not for something that has a chance to turn out to be the most impactful labor-saving technology since the electromechanical computer. The US has the blueprint [1] to step-increase electrical generation at a lower bound of five times, with zero environmental impact, and continue growing for many generations longer than the world population is expected to increase, sitting on the shelf collecting dust for whenever it decides to use it.

In light of this, articles with this sort of headline are just scaremongering nonsense. McCarthy didn't tolerate this intentional ignorance [2], so we shouldn't, either.

[1] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1212086

[2] http://jmc.stanford.edu/commentary/progress/nuclear-faq.html

Isn't OBS an open-source screen recorder, plus a lot more? What's the distinguishing factor here? It'd be nice if that was the title instead.

>Avoid absolutist language. It's not "the main problem", it's "a problem". (Unless, of course, you can defend the claim.)

I've started thinking this advice counterintuitively causes as many problems as it solves. I try to do it regularly (just had to stop myself now, unlike the author), but find that instead of the neutral, self-divorced report of discoveries academic style is designed to foster I just as easily end up with the overall structure still being my own opinion as drafted, but now much harder to read smoothly as it's clogged up by generic self-depreciating hedges and unjustly short summary references to other work I don't necessarily agree with anyway. It's also not how real science and study is actually done; Feynman famously did most of his progress on his work however he liked, and then only moved it to the formalisms of "academic research", so to speak, if he found most of what his hunch was looking for. I've been wondering whether it would be better to try out the other way and see if it can be made better instead of fighting it to find the right compromise of ingenuine humility. Perhaps write your own opinions on your sleeve, but use something like an asterisk to indicate a stylistic hedge you'd apply to something you only mostly know, or haven't completely reviewed to the same detail as the produced info that inspired you to the thesis, so the reader sees just where your head's at and makes up their own mind on whether it affected your conclusion too much, instead of having to guess between lines of alternatives or pull it out through teeth of qualifications. Plus whatever you seriously don't know a bit of and don't want to commit to will stand out all the more. Maybe pick out a less-used unicode punctuation for it, like the tombstone, or perhaps number them in the margins like mathematicians do with equations. As a bonus you could then attach an appendix as a numbered list that focuses as deep as you'd like on alternate possibilities and gaps in knowledge without drawing out the piece itself.

When I was learning music, my teacher insisted on giving just as much mental energy to the rests as to the notes, because even nominally the right melody loses its impact if it's allowed to sloppily over and underrun its rhythm, and doubly so for the harmony. A lot of "informational" style I try to read or write feels like just a long, flat run through the notes and chords its author needs out of an avoidance of expected criticism for expressing anything not buried under neutralizing boilerplate as uninformed, arrogant, or unsupported, but the reality is that sometimes that's how the sausage is made, and we do pupils and fellows trying to understand our work no favors when we put a curtain between them and the man at the machine.

Over a hundred years ago, Babbage might have said:

>We already have machines that are generally intelligent and require as much energy as a few coalgas lights. Why wouldn’t it be eventually possible to replicate them in brass and steam?

My understanding of the argument of this article is that the conceptual design that replicates intelligence is what the industry has failed to generate today. Simply stating that it might be possible to create is failing to engage; the massive increase in compute power from Babbage to McCarthy didn't give us AGI, because they didn't figure out the right design to reason about anything in even a hundred times a human's energy consumption. If from McCarthy to today we still haven't actually found the proper recipe it just might be worth considering the point the article's making in spite of our other advancements since then.

Again, yes this is all very similar to the things I think as well.

>That level of self-regard is narcissistic to such a degree that I have screeched so far past horror that I've looped around to arrive at a grudging respect.

It'd be nice to find someone complaining about narcissism at some point who doesn't also have too much self-regard to proofread their opening paragraph.

Yes, counting all the work well before release was why I said "well over" for just 3 years over.

Shen is well over a decade old: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3026384

Is emergency rationing and price hikes an indicator of a shortage or of "reduced waste"? As for "less water-intensive agricultural uses", again, shifting to a less desired product to rescue your margins after your costs increase is a step backward for the prosperity of your customers, not forward.

Of course it is. Usage naturally stops growing during a supply shortage concomitant with a contraction of the original primary consumer. If your goal is prosperity, consumers tightening their belts is a negative signal, not a positive coincidence.

The population of CA, meaning the number of people who need water for drinking and growing food, has doubled in the past decades. Meanwhile, the state budget has ballooned to six times what it was circa 1985.

Choosing to starve because you just picked the last fruit off the low-hanging branch is plainly irrational, especially since reservoirs are an aquaculture investment, not a burn pit to shovel money into. The smart business decision is to build wherever gives the best balance between comparative cost and usefulness, regardless of absolute cost, and then make whatever the cost is back through selling the rescued water. If the ruling class is generally right that the state is still a desirable abd growing place to live outside of the regular desperation for more water then this is about as close to a guaranteed return as these things get.

Keep moving those goalposts. It really makes you look like the reasonable side of this conversation.

Again, my understanding is that the 10x study was done on reviewed devs writing necessary and best-practice code in a cooperative setting with the same tooling, so this is still irrelevant to discussing the topic. Of course no one who wants to encourage velocity thinks you shouldn't invest in tooling that will automate long tasks for you. We should learn and cheat. My irritation is with suggestions that there's nothing serious to learn, not that I think there's nothing to cheat on, which is an unconnected topic anyway.

How long have you been programming? Odds are Martin's been doing it longer. In fact, my understanding is that if you're the average dev, Martin was consulting with companies that found him valuable longer, and developed for longer than that.

I've never understood this insistence some people have on outright refusing to acknowledge someone who wrote a styleguide they disagree with have the ability to turn on a computer. This isn't just in reference to Martin, either, and it's doubly weird because half of them seem to rest on describing style as mostly to entirely subjective in the same breath. It's just a book. Merely don't follow it and it can't hurt you, even if it's somehow "the one wrong preference". It's not going to kill your cat.

This article is uninformed nonsense, as per usual on this topic. When the 10x study was published, it referred to tested, quality code (and assembly code, at that). Reminds me of another article from a while back where a 0x engineer who spent his time on other maintenance, code reviews, and testing without logging his work one sprint made similar complaints about wanting productivity, as if the rest of his team thought freeing up their time to develop their task was reducing their velocity somehow. At best this type of glorified blogspam is clickbait, and at worst it suggests a strange desire to disregard hypercompetence instead of trying to learn from and emulate it.

And besides, if it genuinely (again, clickbait) takes you 100x longer to code something with tests as it does your colleague without them, there might be something deeper going on there. It could be worth trying to learn from them anyway, even if their code has a few bugs you would've caught.

Uh, is there an explanation of what this is supposed to be?

Do you know what the definition of the word "conspiracy" is?

>So in your experience, how does one find employment opportunities in 2024? Is it all about networking? Are things just really tough in the IT world lately?

I'm much newer to this industry than you so don't have any personal info to share, but the data does seem to show it's not just you, and that programming and IT are in the trough of a contraction right now. Indeed seems to have around only three quarters as many available (US) positions "floating" right now, so to speak, as it did even in Feb 2020, which was before the tech crunch and explosion most agreed was temporary and unsustainable; it's also markedly lower than the whole (US) economy, which is at least still positive (although I'd also guess without looking Indeed is more heavily used by the tech industry than the economy as a whole). It seems job hunting in the tech industry is going to be tougher for a time, and more intentional networking and hunting opportunities than before will be necessary: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1hG1R

>they didn’t allow me to use my emoji domain name(s) as my handle.

Not that I've been trying to keep up, but this is just about the first Bluesky decision I've heard that I 100% agree with. The usability line needs to be drawn somewhere.

Personality testing in applications is hardly a new phenomenon. It was first popularized in the 50s, and has been resurging in lower paying or less technical industries for years to decades. William H Whyte's opus "The Organization Man" (1956) will be very informative to anyone looking to learn about why these tests are appearing in our jobs (especially with the current market), especially I think the fifth section, "The Organization Scientist", which is about research and technical workers interfacing with the broader corporate bureaucracy, even though in the context of the time it focuses on chemical and engineering researchers. This interview summarizes the broad strokes of the book: https://www.thirteen.org/openmind-archive/sociology/the-orga...

The Appendix, "How to Cheat on Personality Tests", should also be required reading for anyone entering the career hunt. This is one of its opening paragraphs to see its usefulness:

>By and large, however, your safety lies in getting a score between the 40th and 60th percentiles, which is to say, you should try to answer as if you were like everyone else is supposed to be. This is not always too easy to figure out, of course, and this is one of the reasons why I will go into some detail in the following paragraphs on the principal types of questions. When in doubt, however, there are two general rules you can follow: (1) When asked about the world, give the most conventional, run-of-the-mill, pedestrian answer possible. (2) To settle on the most beneficial answer to any question, repeat to yourself: a) I loved my father and my mother, but my father a little more. b) I like things pretty well the way they are. c) I never worry much about anything. d) I don't care for books or music much. e) I love my wife and children. f) I don't let them get in the way of company work.

It could be updated a bit for the culture of 70 years later, but the general pattern is clear and easy to follow. Looking at the book and interview again, it's striking just how simultaneously insightful and down-to-earth Whyte was; the universal appeal comes from his investigation being both concretely practical "to the nth" and humanistically aspirational "to the nth". He didn't allow his important work to become either a watered-down compromise or an off-kilter harangue, and was too exacting to be unduly impressed either by the "death-rattle" sloganeering of his time's protestors ("Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate" to "The Ascent of Stan","Love is all you need", etc) or by the benevolent assurances of the time's testers ("The Pipe Line", "The Fight Against Genius", "Society as Hero"). His prose is also excellent. They just don't make social scientists like they used to, and the field is worse off for it. Physics envy and/or the paper mill may have distracted from an old societal good that could be a huge boon today.

Indeed. It's always frustrating to encounter these "Well if your arguments are right then how come they sound false to me?" discussion of Soviet history, even on what are supposed to be more measured and thoughtful platforms like HN. Doubly so when the argument is just that the Stalin-era secret police committed an atrocity.