marktangotango

SFFWA is a well known professional organization, that has been around a long time, why would one not accept the gravity and import of this news conference and announcement? I mean, the details are plainly presented! Is any institution to be trusted or taken at face value? Are we all to be completely bereft of common sense and decency in face of such rampant equivocating and hand waiving!

Splinter of the minds eye may not have been the best novel, have mercy please!

I find I don't think of hackernews as a community anymore, haven't in a long time. To me what I read here is 50-75% of intentional argumentation and spreading of what's essentially FUD by people who are drawn here by the sites popularity, and who are just a likely to be on a payroll or otherwise promoting an agenda.

It's the small percentage of genuine people with reasonable, coherent things to say that keep me coming back. It's a trope, but the quality of discourse has declined markedly in recent years (imo).

> In the mountain village where my uncle and father were born, a single deed could mark or stain your family’s reputation for generations, placing you in a hierarchy that, if only enforced by gossip or shame, might still decide the fate of your progeny. I am not sure that’s still true, but my father held on to that notion until his death, in part because it was taught to him by his father, who had learned it from his father. This is why they had to leave the ancestral village and move to the capital, my father would say. Though neither he nor his siblings had committed shameful acts, they longed to start over in a new place where the generational burden was less weighty.

I’ve often reflected on this reality that seems to have been lost for most of humanity. At least urban dwelling folks, although I’m sure it persists in a lot of rural areas. The desire, need, instinct to be in the “in group”, not excluded was a matter of life and death for all of humanities existence. Bullying, cliques, and tribes (political parties, sports fans, programming language zealots, ...) make more sense when viewed from that angle (imo) and not likely something we’ll easily overcome.

The author totally misses the real problem with jvm desktop apps, deployment. Either the jvm is bundled with the app or some other (platform dependent) hack has to be employed to ensure a correct version of jre is on the machine. Microsoft manages this nicely with .net btw.

I was disappointed by the content of the article as well, I was hoping for something about the incredible amount of insight and wisdom offered freely, as well as the give an take you allude to.

I think this is the relevant part about the robotic aspect being discussed

> Cold War doctrine envisioned engaging the enemy along what’s called the Forward Line Of Troops, or FLOT. In the new concept, according to a briefing at the conference, a Forward Line Of Unmanned Aerial Systems (FLUA) will fly ahead through no-man’s-land into enemy-held territory, followed by a Forward Line Of Robots (FLOR) on the ground, followed in turn by the Forward Line Of (Human) Troops. The unmanned systems will flush out the enemy, stumble into meeting engagements and ambushes, take and receive the first hits, and map the enemy position for the human troops coming along behind them.

Patton famously told his scouts to “go down that road until you get blown up then, report back”. Presumably robots would be assuming this role going forward.

People always allude to this, and it's true an adversary could (probably, maybe) sink one aircraft carrier. That same adversary wouldn't sink a second.

There was reporting recently were he followed Kushners plan to open the economy and lay the blame for spreading covid at the feet of the state governors for poor implementation. That "blaming the governors" part never really happened that I saw.

Read up on Italian courts and prosecutors for some perspective.

The US eleven aircraft carrier battle groups tend to disagree.

I agree it can be very meditative. I actually seek these types of jobs nowadays.

Mongrel 2 used zeromq to proxy to workers. I don't know how popular that ever was in practice.

Of the three main types of micro/diy renewable energy solar is the least dependent on geographic features as you say. Wind requires high ground in a preferably high wind corridor (try using google maps drive around dodge city Kansas). Micro hydro requires a stream or spring with high head and a lot of flow.

I spent a lot of time researching land in my area to find either of these and they just don’t come available very often. Certain areas are well suited for one or the other obviously, Kansa for wind, Appalachia for micro hydro. But with solar you can put it any damn place.

A fourth way is burning agricultural waste or wood (net zero carbon emissions) to run a steam turbine to generate electricity. I don’t know if anyone really does this in practice. It takes quite a lot of fuel (and storing the fuel) to generate meaning full power continuously. Plus high pressure steam is dangerous.

This is the reality of how the bettors move the lines (ie odds on offer), large bets or a lot of small bets will move the line. In effect the final line at kickoff (or whatever) is kind of a distilled, crowd sourced expectation for the result of the match. The key is to identify advantageous lines when the major books publish them and place bets before the "public" moves the line.

The ruby community always seemed to be unusually gregarious and extroverted. This is of course my impression over the years, and anecdotal but I really doubt a similar effort directed at (any) other community would be as successful. That’s all IMO, I could not imagine java developers being as supportive for example!

Vinge presents some interesting ways to measure progress toward the singularity in this talk I found very interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_luhhBkmVQs&feature=emb_logo

I read it as such and assume most reasonable people did as well. I personally think online discourse would be much less noise if the Principal of Charity were more widely applied, as opposed to wanton application of the Principal of You Are Trivially Wrong and I Will Prove It.

User/application density is the real potential win for serverless IMO, that no one ever really talked about (to my knowledge) and noisy neighbor was the problem to be solved. The real world indicator would have been hosting costs going to zero and 10-100x apps multiplexed onto the same "real" server substrate. Instead everyone is perfectly happy paying for cloud vm instances. In hindsight I guess "function as a service" wasn't the complete solution I thought it was.

Gameboy advance emulators emulate 32bit arm, plenty of those around.

Dunkin’ Donuts donuts are an abomination, unedible, atrocious. It’s no surprise to me you don’t see them as much, I’ve been waiting for that particular chain to die for quite some time.

I vaguely recall trying to write fixed point math functions using sdcc for a gameboy homebrew project a long time ago. I’d compile and run via an emulator. Good times!

I agree with this 1000%. Projects (note not programs or individual source files!) are simply easier to grok (maintain, enhance, debug, refactor) with statically (and strongly) typed languages than dynamic IMO.

Five years ago when switching jobs I’d pursue “full stack” positions because I’d done a fair amount of front end dev in the past. No more, me personally, I’m backend all the way. Dynamic typing (vanilla js) is just harder; more time consuming more cognitive load, IMO.

> Old-style COBOL translates trivially to or from very brain-dead imperative style code with lots of goto.

Provided the target language supports "goto", and "fall through PERFORMs" :)

>If you can look past the syntax, modern COBOL is a decent enough compiled language, with most of the stuff you'd expect.

Probably < 1% of production Cobol uses any syntax newer than Cobol 85!

Don't forget to include 'EXEC SQL'. For IBM mainframe Cobol, how many progrmams DON'T depend on the mainframe environment specific features/services? Probably zero or close to it. I think the environment for other vendors (Microfocus, Accucobol) is a bit more forgiving, I don't have experience with them so can't say for sure.

Another, maybe more subtle mainframe pecularity is how it maps dataset (ie file names) names to 'dsnames' (Cobol source code construct) at runtime, tied together by JCL.

I'm curious how this works under the hood, looks like it's added as an annotation processor, and the DSL is embedded in specially formatted comments, but not in annotations. This implies to me the annotation processor is processing the comments in a source file? I did not know annotation processors could do this! Also implies comments carry through to the compiled .class files which I did not think they did either (runtime bytedcode weaving)?

That did certainly happen, but prices were not depressed for any significant amount of time either! Particularly at the timescale of housing transactions. It can take several months to close on a house for example.

Does anyone have more recent experience? Is this still the case?

> Two junior engineers are hired for about the same cost and are pushed to 60+ hours a week. They'll do literally anything you tell them to. Non-engineer management sees a win but then eventually gets mad about codebase issues like it's unrelated

The “lord of flies” cultures these teams become can be astoundingly horrible and toxic. Imagine a lot inexperienced people trying to one up each other, no one providing any direction whatsoever. I happily left one such team not long ago!

RHIDE + djgpp ftw!

I used to be in the habit of emailing myself links to read later. I once had an email arrive at my gmail account 3 months after I sent it. That's like what 1000 years in internet time? :D