_verandaguy

I'd like Up-Goer Five-like language to be used everywhere.

Isn't it legally a bank? It provides chequing and savings accounts (registered and unregistered), and it's even CDIC-backed on at least their managed products.

I would expect the integration into the Interac network (itself a sort of consortium of the big banks that provides a number of debit-adjacent services) will mean that adoption by the big players will be pretty quick.

Parts of this read like the early internal monologue sections of Cryptonomicon. Terrible or not, it's distinctive.

What does that have to do with devops?

I'd really love to see a version of this that wouldn't get gutted between wild swings in government sentiment towards corporations (goes for a number of countries, though certainly the US more than most).

    > they will be taking a lot of people's 401k's with them

The US needs to stop allowing this kind of thing to happen, where the economy gets so hyper-concentrated in a few companies that they can hold the entire country's (and arguably much of the world's) retirement savings hostage.

We had that happen in the late 90s/early 2000s with Nortel. Before they collapsed (and infamously devastated their current and former employees' pensions in doing so), Nortel represented a THIRD of the TSX. The TSX responded by capping any individual stock at 10% of the exchange's overall value, with a forced rebalancing in the event that cap is struck.

At this point, that 10% is probably higher than it should be, since it doesn't account for entire extremely-well-funded sectors being caught up in a hype cycle like AI's, the sum of whose component stocks could easily exceed 10%.

Thank you!

@dang: title's off; the blog post is titled "How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth."

The how is operative, I think, since it changes the title from being about the process of how Google determines a name when it's there, to being about Google acting as some kind of rogue despot that goes around naming bodies of water.

What seems better to you, seems a bit nightmarish to me. If I'm going for a walk, the last thing I want to have on my mind is dealing with CRM software in any way.

This really reminds me of that scene from Wolf of Wall Street where Leo's selling penny stocks out of a strip mall office. "I never ask people to judge me on my successes, I only ask them to judge me on my failures, because I have so few" or something like that.

Sleazy.

I'm going to assume ignorance rather than snark here.

A natural monopoly is one where a product or service is:

- Widely considered fundamental to the public good (and in most cases, has very inflexible demand, meaning that people will often pay any sum to access it)

- Whose cost overheads are either fixed or grow slower than the variable costs (meaning that the investment required to scale the service not accounting for costs that scale with individual usage benefit from economies of scale)

- Easy to be gamed for profit in the hands of a profit-driven entity (either in the form of extortionate pricing directly, or cost-cutting on things like infrastructure maintenance; a good example here is how PG&E has infamously failed to maintained their power lines in California, leading to large-scale wildfires)

In the modern day, the best example of these are public utilities: water, power, road networks, public transit.

In these cases, the latter two points are used to justify public ownership, which in turn defeats the third point.

Right, but why do things this fast to begin with, especially for a product that's already publicly available?

I don't want to use a product that shifts under me as I use it several times a day. I want a product that actually moves slowly and works very reliably.

As an end user: why would I care about how many hundreds of releases a month are being pushed if maybe 1% of them have features I care about?

Speed is not the product.

Just because you make questionable choices in sourcing information doesn't mean this should be the norm.

This is a ridiculous take. University isn't the gatekeeper for information, it's a place where learning and academic study happen; these are separate dimensions of the broader concept of knowledge.

Teaching people how to think critically, how to contextualize information (both notionally as well as concretely within a given field of study), and how to develop new ideas within a field (both solo and collaboratively) have always been the value add; I say this as a university dropout who didn't appreciate this at the time.

Independent learning will only go so far if you don't know the questions to ask, and that's something you get through sustained exposure to an environment that nurtures that.

I'll mention as well that rolling back learning institutions is a very dangerous line of argument, especially in the age of misinformation, disinformation, and pervasive news-as-entertainment leading to both societal divisions and the erosion of critical thinking.

The blog post is advocating against this.

This comment is remarkable in its lack of nuance. There's a huge spectrum of, let's call it, aggressive speech, ranging from trying to organize against an oppressive figure or class, to just punching down against people and groups who have either done nothing to the author of that speech which warrants an aggressive response, or where the target of that speech is already a victim.

My opinion is that free-speech absolutism is a policy position that causes much more harm than good, and which erodes social cohesion. There should be perpetual debate about where we as a society accept where the line is between speech which is allowed and that which is disallowed.

And to wit, on the tea party analogy: how's that working for the US now?

Cost of deployment is a massive consideration in our not-yet-post-scarcity society.

It takes billions to certify a nuclear power plant, and it takes billions more to re-certify it every few decades, to say nothing of the costs of modernization.

To be clear, I consider myself generally pro-nuclear power, but let's not ignore the massive upfront and ongoing capital and operational costs that really undermine this idea that it's free power.

Sure, but it was unfortunate to pick the one dude who is well known, if for nothing else, for dying through means other than defenestration.

Which is itself a side effect of the US media treating most news as a spectacle, combined with the US (historically, but especially currently) being a phenomenally good place to be incredibly rich because much of the government will in a way that many developed nations would not allow.

I'll disagree, I think AI meaningfully changes the definition of a bad coworker because its main interface emulates talking to another human being closely enough that some people value its conversational input equally or more highly than that of actual human beings.

I think that this is exacerbated by many LLMs defaulting to placating, complementing, and otherwise reinforcing biases in their users, and it will often produce just enough evidence to make its (and its user's) position seem compelling, while that evidence is often either tangential, orthogonal, or straight-up hallucinated.

Humans aren't perfect vessels for information, but working on a reasonably-qualified, healthy team, a degree of respectful professional disagreement has always been the norm, and that covers both cases where the disagreement comes from a genuine matter of opinion, as well as cases where one colleague cross-checks anothers' assumptions and finds some of them to be wrong. That's the process.

Speaking on a handful of these that I'm familiar enough with to opine on:

- Photography hasn't erased other visual arts. Both require a separate skillset; both have their uses and their enthusiasts. Photography benefits from having a lower skill floor, in my experience doing it, and this in turn has led to commercial photography eclipsing commercial painting (barring things like painting buildings) as a viable business model, largely.

  I'm not sure if we're better or worse off as a society for having gone through that shift.

- Television is arguably not a net positive in society (I won't say net negative yet, but there are some reasonable arguments for that position). It enables a form of passive consumption that allows bad arguments to come through as persuasive through the gradual (on the scale of months and years) numbing of critical appraisal of the media being consumed.

  This has more- and less-pronounced areas. In the US (which is geographically close to me and which has an outsize proportion on my own country's culture), Fox News is an excellent example of how TV can erode critical thinking.

- Smartphones arguably reproduce and amplify this problem, and tack on others: they make it increasingly easy to dissociate from daily life, and make it easier to continue consuming content from actors increasingly interested in steering conversations in one direction or another (on the most benign end, it's influencers trying to get you to buy things, which obviously has negative economic impacts on an individual scale; on the more overtly harmful end, they serve as a hardware channel for less-regulated or unregulated extreme and hateful content).

  Just like with TV, smartphones have clear benefits and utility in daily life. They aren't abjectly bad inventions, but they have a serious societal toll, and it's difficult to ignore that.

- In aviation, the first generation of (relatively modern) automation did lead to a high number of accidents and loss of life. American Airlines flight 965, in 1995, is a well-studied case of an over-reliance on flight automation before it was widely understood among pilots what the limits of these early-modern incarnations of autoflight were.

  In the wake of that accident, many aviation regulators instituted or began requiring that manufacturers and airlines formalize training and operational procedures that protect thoroughly against this sort of cognitive gap.

I think that last example (and many aviation accidents) are an interesting example to study in the context of software. Aviation's extremely and conspicuously responsive to accidents, often requiring procedural and hardware changes as a result of these. They can be as simple as a software patch, or as complex as the redesign of a component because a human factors analysis found that it could be confusing under stress.

In software, we like to think that we're a serious industry, sometimes. We spent much of the 2010s going in what I found to be a good direction: the development of IaC, the popularization and standardization of tools like Git, registries for vulnerabilities like the NVD, and even the development of languages like Rust which address historical technical shortfalls of high-performance, low-level languages like C; but we always fell short, industry-wide, on matching these toolchain upgrades with technically-rigorous procedures.

For every borrow checker, there's vibe coding.

I mean, it's just shifting the value conversion in the other direction, isn't it?

Pi is a naturally-emerging concept: it's the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. It just so happens that a lot of useful stuff we do in math operate on that ratio, not on either on the individual values (at least, not those alone).

I'll qualify this from my POV (which may be different than GP's).

Go's historic maintainability strong suit has been its simplicity and consistency. The syntax is, relatively speaking, lightweight, the language invites complexity through composition, and information density for any unit of code is typically quite low (which isn't necessarily a bad thing).

In my opinion, though, these are all drawbacks, and Rust addresses all of them. It's syntactically and semantically much heavier, leading to its oft-maligned steep learning curve. It has, uniquely among the major languages, I think, a syntax for expressing variable lifetimes (with its own unintuitive semantics). It stuffs lots of abstraction into a hodgepodge of terse semantics and punctuation.

It sucks to read, until you get really used to it. Then it tends to read really quickly, and, at least for me, it's easier to reason about a conceptually-broad piece of logic if I don't have to jump between different locations in a file, a module, or a package to do it.

With Go, I find it more difficult to get into a flow state, and easier for my eyes to glaze over when looking over large diffs.

It's not lost on me that these are purely subjective arguments, though. My preference remains with Rust, and that goes back to before I used LLMs.

I'm also aware that Go is very prescriptive about how you write it; it's explicitly opinionated, and Rust doesn't have that. It means that most Go code bases will look more alike. I consider this an anti-feature; I believe code should be able to conform to the problem space or product and a good team will find the best way to do that.

LLM-driven writing's been a big part of this trend, unfortunately.

That's correct. What I meant was that if my bot writes defective code for whatever reason, I am responsible for that (though conversely, if I get more done because of the bot, anthropic gets the praise).

I think this is a logical extension of the workplace rule of "you own what your bot writes;" it's hypocritical not to hold corporations to the same standards as individuals (I say, with terminal naiveness)

Fun related fact, many dates -- for example, birth dates on headstones -- of people born in countries observing Eastern Orthodox Christianity will have the prefix O.S. (old style) to disambiguate dates using the original Julian and either the Georgian or Revised Julian calendars which were in effect at that person's death.

It's also a false equivalence fallacy to compare people to stocks. Historical precedent is a strong predictor of human behaviour.

The wealthy have been using their wealth to consolidate power for essentially as long as the concept of material wealth has existed, and the exceptions to this are far outweighed by the cases which conform to the rule.

Historical precedent (both recent and not) shows that concentrating wealth and then giving those wealthy few an inordinate amount of political power does not end well for those disenfranchised by this system.

It is not reasonable to give the benefit of the doubt on the basis of Lutke and his ilk maybe being benevolent dictators if given largely unfettered access to the levers of power.