fallous

In fairness to the hypothetical manager, there are plenty of people with the title of programmer who are unwilling/incapable of such translation. If it were merely sufficient to speak with Area Programmer(tm) then outsourcing would be perfectly fine.

Indeed. They are also additionally constrained by their knowledge and understanding of the universe of possible solutions rather than being able to draw from the larger combined knowledge pool of themselves and the builders.

Early in my career when I encountered outsourcing initiatives I perceived them as management choosing cost over quality. A couple of decades later my view has changed on that mostly thanks to having worked more directly within the management structure of numerous companies (ranging from startup to ConglomCo Megasized).

In most cases those making the decision really believe they can achieve comparable results by outsourcing while also taking advantage of global wage differences and also converting the continual overhead of personnel into just-in-time overhead that only has to be taken on as needed. This is not unlike the devops trend towards using cloud-based infrastructure.

The problem is that the thinking that you achieve comparable results by outsourcing is woefully naive. In-house teams have a vested interest in understanding the business problems as well as filling in the communications gap between what is asked for vs what is actually desired as an outcome. Outsourced contracted labor does not share those same interests. Additionally, when you outsource technical labor you MUST have the ability internally to create very good designs, specifications, and oversight/feedback mechanisms to ensure that you're getting what you wanted rather than what you asked for via sloppy communication. For those companies that have previously had internal teams and decide to transition to external resources they almost never have someone with that ability and in fact are unaware of the impedance mismatch between their asks and the results delivered by internal teams.

Outsourcing means trading the overhead of personnel costs for the overhead of a much more complex and difficult communications burden. It is extraordinarily rare that the company that opts to transition from internal to outsourced talent has the capability or even awareness of that trade, resulting in predictably poor results.

I'm not sure I'm seeing the same comparisons that you are regarding travel distances. A Tesla Model 3 uses 24-29 kWh/100 miles (depends on drive/battery options) which would be 4-5 gallons of gasoline. That would be 20-25MPG assuming the 10kWh/gallon ICE which is pretty low for a mid-sized sedan. An Accord hybrid pulls around 48MPG, while a Dodge Charger Hellcat SRT manages an EPA combined 23MPG (hardly a typical ICE given that it puts out 707 horsepower).

A "mere 4kWh of additional power" is 67% additional power.

Indeed. That does not, however, impact the actual energy available in a gallon of gasoline.

Technically the 6kWh of energy spent on refining (or any other work) is itself subject to inefficiencies in generation, transmission, etc. It would also suffer from inefficiencies in the electrical storage and motive portions of an electric vehicle as well. And at the end of the day even if there were perfect 100% conversion it would still only be 6kWh of energy available vs 33-34kWh.

6kWh to refine a gallon of gasoline? That's not a bad conversion rate given that the energy in a gallon of gasoline is 33-34kWh.

I'm not entirely sure that certain large sites have thought through the legal implications of this kind of behavior, and no I'm not talking about "censorship!" or other free speech laws that are applicable to government rather than private entities.

Back during the late 90s all of us working on public websites knew that allowing user-contributed content was a great way to build both community and to increase the sheer amount of content, which increased advertising revenues. But there's a catch to user-contributed content... in order to avoid legal responsibility as a site owner for the user content posted on the site you can't moderate that content directly. The reason for this is the "common carrier" rule.

Common carrier essentially states that as a communications platform you are not liable for the legal implications of the communications that occur on your platform as long as you do not choose to engage in editing or moderating that content. AT&T, for example, was not legally liable for a conversation that occurred on their telephone network even if the conversation involved the commission of a crime (we're plotting a terror attack, a bank robbery, etc.) The reason they were not liable was because they did not monitor the communications on their network and did not cut off a phone call if it sounded like you were planning something illegal, evil, whatever.

The minute you, as the carrier, begin actively moderating the content (as opposed to setting up common universal rules such as site karma or user driven moderation), you are responsible for ALL of that content. You managed to remove 99.99% of all illegal communication? Too bad, you're still on the hook for that 0.01% that you missed.

This does not mean that content may never be removed by the company, it's just that they must do it under the order of a court or applicable government entity... in the same way that AT&T could not tap your phones absent a court order.

Many sites opted not to have user-contributed content due to the potential concerns regarding advertisers or their own brand reputation. Others did allow such content and later removed things such as comments and the like due to the conflict between violating common carrier and the problems that arose with advertisers and/or their brand (see Yahoo Finance comments circa 2002 or so).

Yes, the use-case and domain set the constraints. Using the wrong measurement type or abstraction either increases the complexity of the exceptions necessary to make it fit the constraints or increases the inaccuracy/errors... or both.

With regards to time specifically, I recall many years ago talking with an economics professor I had that was from Zimbabwe and he mentioned the frustration that western industrial nations had when attempting to establish business in Africa. Industrial nations long ago became dependent upon a higher resolution and accuracy of time and so when they say "2PM" they expect accuracy within a minute or two. But the African work force would often show up at 3PM and when confronted by this "lateness" they would reply "3 is the friend of 2." An agrarian or pre-industrial society has no real need for accuracy to the minute, but instead can operate quite well with human observation of the position of the sun. This impedance mismatch caused no end of frustration on both sides, since neither could really fully understand the other's conception of timeliness.

Indeed it is well-known (albeit apocryphally for most), mostly as the source of the rejoinder "the plural of anecdote is not data" which is rather more well-known among those who do analytics and is more correct at least in regards to the common definitions of "anecdote."

The plural of anecdote is "anecdotes." The singular of data is "datum."

I've raised three kids and was working with a guy who brought his sixth child to the office to take care of while his wife was away with work. His child was a month or two old and was pretty fussy and co-worker seemed to be at his wit's end. I asked him if he had tried the "off" switch, which he had never heard of. I started calmly and regularly stroking the baby's forehead from the mid-forehead to between the eyes. Kid was out like a light in less than a minute. Co-worker asked me how I knew that trick and I asked him how he didn't given this was his sixth kid.

I wonder if the "rub dust" method originated with something like this but used the dust component as a means of justification/explanation to people so that they would be focused on calmly applying the dust rather than going overboard with the stroke on the forehead due to frustration.

I think the phrase "defining deviancy downward" more closely captures the concept than "normalization of deviance." The slippery slope of redefining deviance to have lesser thresholds than the prior iteration, and it takes a series of those iterations to truly end up in a situation where the new normal would have been utterly out-of-bounds compared to the original.

Normalizing deviance is more akin to deciding that things that were obviously out of the norm are now accepted as a new normal without the gradual degradation, at least in my way of thinking.

Which of course has nothing to do with the actual political message in the original comment to which vondur was responding. Had that comment made any reference to a relationship between Boeing and a particular politician, or political group, it would indeed be fair to bring that to light.

I'm not sure that dissolving a staunch moral evaluation framework necessarily results in a dampening of outrage. Absent an objective moral framework what is left is a subjective moral framework that is not debatable and thus cannot be externally challenged as "correct" or "incorrect." If my own unassailable framework is the only vaguely truth-like metric by which to measure anything, it seems to me that outrage is the perfectly predictable response towards anything with which I disagree since anything that does not agree with my moral framework is not moral.

How is the device or software supposed to deduce your wants without your expressing them? How does it know what you can and cannot hear, and that you chose to turn down the music (rather than explicitly turn it off) because it was distracting to some other activity rather than because that was the optimal setting for hearing the music while not waking a sleeping baby in your arms? And when it decides to shout the weather rather than voice it at the same level of the music which results in waking the baby, how "smart" is that?

I'd say the mention of "hatchets" certainly fits with Rogers' era rules, and the lack of reference to a specific firearm I suspect is due partially to the fact that American forces of Rogers' time often had an ensemble of firearms that were both personal as well as issued by an authority.

That and the fact that he was intentionally setting rules for tactical and operational behaviors that are necessarily abstract.

That's kind of the point. Assuming good faith is akin to not ascribing to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence (or ignorance). Note that the incompetence or ignorance is not assigned so it may be either or both sides, which places a certain burden on you to try to evaluate and correct at least your part of that failure.

In the 90s it had that, mostly because there was a negative feedback mechanism for poorly thought-out questions. If you posted a question on usenet or IRC that obviously demonstrated you hadn't bothered to invest any effort into reading or trying to solve the problem yourself first, you were flamed.

Over time, as a more general populace joined the Internet, the ethos changed to act more as a support system rather than the more demanding expectations of the past. Presumably that was due to a recognition that newbs did not have the exposure to computing or tech that the prior generations of users had and so the intent was to be more educative so that these new users could learn to solve things for themselves. Alas, that optimism was misplaced as the majority of people are not interested in thinking for themselves but instead just looking to follow a checklist with no understanding.

The Amiga had 32 bit instructions and 24-bit address width (with a 16-bit bus width). The 1130 was 15-bit address space of 16-bit words.

Um, hole punching was used on 5 1/4" and 8" floppies, not 3.5".

Yep. Remember also that sites were paying browser makers to include their site as either the default homepage or included in the list of bookmarks.

At the time AOL was planning to shut down the Silicon Valley site and preferred to have everything in Virginia. Additionally they were already in talks with Time Warner (which internally we knew about).

There was a lot of redundancy in ops between AOL and Netscape, and AOL's talks with Time Warner made it apparent that their belief was that content and subscriber base was their future, not software... which is where I was at the time.

I was at Netscape at the time of the acquisition. When they offered buy-outs for employees that would volunteer for layoffs I gleefully waved my hand and left.

That's more the idiocy of USB-C than Thunderbolt itself.

Firewire certainly exploded in popularity post-IEEE 1394 compared to when it was a Sony controlled interface with special dispensations for Apple. The number of vendors offering Firewire peripherals as well as the innovative software built around it made it a mainstay in market segments such as video editing and external storage.

Hey, I'm willing to pay for Thunderbolt on an AMD Threadripper (because PCIe lanes matter) and I'm happy to build devices based on it (as noted, that was what I working on for a couple of years). Feel free to show me the options available to achieve that goal absent being a special preferred Intel vendor.

Amusingly, I have some history with Intel... I worked there. I've also seen how they mismanage or abandon anything that isn't core x86.

Thunderbolt, and Intel's "management" of that interface spec, is an excellent contrasting example of IEEE interfaces vs closed systems. I actively worked on a project building around TB2 (and then 3) for over two years and eventually we gave up on the entire thing due to the obscurity of the protocol, the absence of details of the Intel implementations (the only game in town at the time), and a myriad other roadblocks. By contrast I have some historical familiarity with Sony's Firewire iterations and once it became IEEE-1394 (and variants) it exploded in both popularity and transparency.

If Intel treated the original USB in the same way they do ThunderBolt, we'd still be using ADB, serial, parallel, and PS/2 interfaces on all our machines.

Because the audience does not value the "gathering of such data in as unbiased way as possible" enough to make it economically viable, so instead crowdsourcing suffices.

Local newspapers are dying largely due to a change in the audience they once depended upon. This isn't an argument about "better" in some objective manner but instead an observation of the reality of the situation.

I'd like to take the effort to thank you for staying true to the pursuit of real science and trying to demand that others meet the standards. A well-tested negative result is not a failed experiment, it is one less option to pursue.

As I've been known to tell junior engineers that ask how to become expert in some field, "the easiest way is to fail in every possible way without repeating yourself. Whatever is left is correct. Note that I didn't say that's the fastest way." Gaining new knowledge is always a combination of discovering both dead ends and possible successful paths.

I think you're missing the point that's being made in the parent post. It's not that enhanced privacy will cause advertising to implode, it's that as the industry has gained more knowledge and understanding of advertising it's becoming apparent that advertising isn't worth what they thought it was.

I saw a similar up-ending of an ad-dependent industry 15 years ago with newspapers. Advertisers for years assumed a certain value based on the circulation numbers as reported by ABC. There was no real way to directly measure that value other than inferred activity within a geographic region that could arguably be tied to newspaper advertising. With the internet advertisers began to be able to track specific value for ad campaigns based on click-thrus, cost-per-action, etc. Those values were lower than the assumed value of newspaper advertising, which began a shift in where money was spent. Combine that with the fact that ABC numbers started to show that they were far less accurate than originally assumed, due in part to gaming by the papers themselves, and revenue started seriously shrinking. The last firewall that newspaper had was classified, which quickly folded in the face of job and real estate sites and of course craigslist.

Internet advertising has been suffering the same game-playing by sites that newspapers pulled with ABC circ numbers, and as advertisers gather more and better performance data about the value of ads and campaigns they're realizing that value is less than they thought and seems to be trending down.

Regardless of whether there's more or less privacy for users/consumers, the indications are that advertising is becoming less and less valuable.