simplotek

Monetary cost is one thing, but no parent can simply pull their kids out of school right now and expect them to have a decent transition to another school.

Rental contracts aren't typically reviewed each month, and in some places with high demand it's not possible to just find an apartment in a couple of weeks.

As Amazon frames their return to office, it's impossible to be met by some people.

> The S-team had those numbers. Then they sent out an email saying "we know you all can't wait to be back in the office!". They simply don't care what you think or want.

What baffles me is that forcing all full remote workers to return to the office with such short notice and in this time of the year is something that's impossible to do without huge monetary and human costs for the worker. After all, does Amazon expect their workers who have spouses and children to force them to abandon their job/school and move back to comutting distance to the office without any support?

> That description of how it functions is true, but it did fool a lot of people, and now we have to explain why.

I see your point, and I agree. Nevertheless, these misdirections seem to boil down to a broad temptation to succumb to appeals to authority. People might be falling for ChatGPT misfires just like they fall for fancy talking bullshit artists, but that's hardly a failing of clever auto text generators.

> The problem is that it gets past many people's filters because its phrasing sends a lot of intelligent/rational/professional signals, as it was engineered to do. Nobody is used to picking smart-sounding text apart word by word to make sure they agree with it, except maybe academics, and that's the vulnerability it reaches us through.

I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill. To me ChatGPT is basically a clever way to interpolate and extrapolate coherent text based on user input and its training set. If the training set is lacking in some areas, it underfits the output.

I've tested ChatGPT in a couple of engineering fields I'm familiar and I expected the service to respond poorly, but even though it returned nonsense in some areas I thought were low-hanging topics, such as the release year of an international standard, overall its output was very impressive and very entertaining.

Perhaps it's the engineer in me talking, but it's pointless to waste time waxing lirically about human nature. Tools like ChatGPT might one day be superb expert systems and teaching tools, but like any expert system and learning tool you need to corroborate the results by yourself. Human nature has zero to do with this.

You don't have less war by stopping victims from defending themselves. You just get to improve the odds that the attacker is successful.

> Switzerland has always been aggressively neutral (...)

No, I don't buy it. This time around they went to the extent of refusing to sell ammo for their own weapons arguing they'd be used in a war.

They are outright destroying their arms industry by arguing that they cannot even be used by their owners to defend themselves.

This goes way deeper than this neutrality scapegoate.

> The list is extensive to say the least.

Sometimes I wonder if the Swiss newfound love for a weirdly biased neutrality, which goes to the extent of destroying their own military gear instead of selling it to Ukraine, is rooted in appeasing certain Russians who stashed their fortunes in financial institutions such as Credit Suisse.

> The impossibility of "exactly once" is a theorem, not an opinion.

It's quite likely that your definition of what "exactly once" means differs from the one followed by MQTT. As this issue was documented years ago, I doubt this is a relevant argument to have, unless we want to feel smart by criticising others.

https://www.eejournal.com/2015/05/28/is-exactly-once-deliver...

Yes it was a typo. My fingers are also experiencing an outage.

AWS seems to be having problems. Again.

https://downdetector.com/status/aws-amazon-web-services/

There goes the argument that AWS is a solution to those wanting many 9s of availability.

> The scale of absurdity was difficult to measure with that one.

I have been told that one FANG which recently underwent a firing round barely took a break from their hiring rounds, and already started sending emails asking for volunteers for interviews even to teams which have just been decimated.

One more story for the absurdity bucket.

It's also worth noting that sources such as this article from The Economist[1] show that Sweden endured waves of excess deaths of up to 6% that neither Norway nor Finland reported, and instead show only residual variations.

From the article:

> Countries in northern Europe have generally experienced much lower mortality rates throughout the pandemic. Some Nordic nations have experienced almost no excess deaths at all. The exception is Sweden, which imposed some of the continent’s least restrictive social-distancing measures during the first wave.

[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

> Is an incomplete picture that forget most relevant factors. For example that France and Spain receive more than 80 millions of international tourists each year and this factor have to be corrected to compare countries.

Why do you feel that tourism is relevant?

> Only focusing on mortality from COVID ignores the very real detrimental health, mental-health, business and societal effects of lock-downs, so the long term benefits to the common man are very much more in their favor.

Are they? This reads as petty reasoning of someone who refuses to admit they were wrong even though that data screams in their face, and instead try to grab hold of nonexistent data to justify their personal beliefs.

It's like the "COVID vaccines kill more than the disease" crowd, who keep on moving their "the end is near" calendar date to avoid admitting they were simply pathologically wrong.

> On the other hand they totally blew the power grab opportunities (...)

This reads like a rebranding of the whole "Fauci wants to take over as dictator" conspiracy theory.

Anyway, can you point out exactly a single country ever where enforcing lockdowns had a positive impact on public perception and elections?

If anything, conspiracy theorists who tried to push anti-science rhetoric failed to capitalize from it, specially as their electorate ended up dying disproportionately.

It also didn't helped their cause that politicians who were radically against basic public health measures ended up being caught double- and triple-vaccinating themselves while preaching the opposite.

> Lock downs became a political tool early on, (...)

Anti-establishment politicians tried to attack basic public health measures to turn them into political battles, primarily because they knew that supporting them was a political liability. Thankfully, they failed, and now all they have left is nitpicking about Sweden while the people most vulnerable to their propaganda are now disproportionately hit by the disease.

It saddens me that society learned nothing and these sociopaths still have traction in some circles.

> You would be wrong about SATA being faster than SSD.

SATA is the computer bus interface, while SSD is the generic name for a storage device that more often than not comes with SATA interfaces.

SATA was not a hard requirement, just the one that I felt was the most popular.

> Also, SSDs are much larger and cheaper than RAM.

SSDs are not cheaper per GB if you already have RAM sticks lying around. Nevertheless this is besides the point, if the goal is to have low latency temp storage when you already maxed out on RAM.

> You don't have to buy a whole new computer to add RAM to it, unless you're already hitting the limits of the motherboard

Right.

Do you think that anyone interested in using RAM drives and willing to spend money on hardware wouldn't have already considered using freely available software RAM drive?

> Why would you need to buy a new computer, if you just need more RAM?

No one presented such use case in this discussion.

> I recommend that you consider buying a lot of RAM, and using a RAM drive instead.

That suggestion makes no sense. It's one thing to buy a SSD/PCI interface that allows you to plug in your RAM sticks. It's an entirely different thing to buy a brand new computer.

Your suggestion is like "do you need more disk space? Just buy a new computer."

> RAM requires constant power. If you lose power, you lose data (more-or-less instantly).

It's perfectly fine for some uses, mine included.

> I'm going to go out on a limb and say the approach you're considering is practically infeasible.

To each his own, but I know for a fact that hardware RAM drives were indeed sold in the past, and after posting this Ask HN I've stumbled upon companies marketing them.

https://ddramdisk.store/2023/01/19/the-ddr4-pcie-x8-lady-has...

I have RAM sticks already lying around, so the cost per GB in this scenerio would be zero. Also, I presume that a SATA interface to store data in RAM might have better performance than the average SSD.

> (...) because it was not written in the modern way or it was not very generic or whatever.

Premature generalization is a well known problem and a never-ending source of complexity. I lost count of the times I had to push back on PRs of clueless developers who felt the need to generalize one-liners that pop up twice in the whole project, and for that their proposal was to add a strategy pattern, ultimate replacing two expressions with three classes.

> Maybe once those plans were noticed, they would have been resisted and thwarted by people who wanted to retain their power within the organization.

I'm perplexed by the mental gymnastics you had to resort to to try to deflect any responsibility from Musk, let alone the despair to omit any reference to the extremely poor judgement and outright incompetence it takes to pull this sort of stunt, and instead fabricate this theory where this impulsive shot in the foot was actually a brilliant plan to thwart entrenched interests.

Occam's razor and Musk's track record reject this hypothesis. Musk f-ed up, just like he keeps on f-ing up, like the recent shit fest of Musk posting a stream of brain dead and profoundly I'll advised tweets trying to publicly smear a employee with disabilities.

> (...) for a route that’s already served by air and road options in a state with stagnant population (...)

Mass transit systems have some peculiarities that private transportation systems don't have, such as creating mass demand and concentrating it on specific spots. Each train stop is a natural generator for demand for housing and services in volumes that urban sprawl does not, and this leads to more affordable housing with shorter commutes and with far better services that lead to a far better quality of living.

But this potential to be realized needs urban development that takes advantage of it, which require investment.

I'm not sure if the figure is $1T but there are examples in the world where railway operators get their main source of funding and incentive to grow their network by being granted favourable conditions to invest in real estate surrounding new train stops.

> (...) and declining usage of existing public transit.

I'm sorry, the US is notorious for having self-sabotaging public transportation services, designed to pay lip service for the need to provide mobility alternatives,but actually designed to be impactical and outright hostile to commuters.

If the US learns basic lessons from the many case studies from throughout the world, nothing stops the US from benefiting from identical adoption rates seen outside of its borders.

> It does not have a credible chance of hurting the rhino.

I don't follow. What exactly leads you to believe that lobbing nukes at an invasion force's staging area and/or neighboring military bases "does not have a credible chance of hurting" the invader?

I'm not going to go off on a tangent on a discussion on Taiwan, but I don't believe none of your assertions is grounded on reality. Ukraine is doing magnificently on the battlefield, specially given Russia planned their invasion to be a 3-day event with frontline soldiers packing parade uniforms and riot gear and Russian generals booking restaurants in Kiev in advance.

To attest to Ukraine's prowess, Russia's ruling regime is now afraid their defeat spells the collapse of Russia and consequently it's fragmentation.

In the meantime, the west already lined up a massive plan to rebuild Ukraine, not to mention it's already in the process of joining the EU. There are countries who had a far less favourable postwar setting which rebounded quite well.

If Taiwan has any lesson to take from Ukraine, that lesson is that fighting for its independence pays off.

> Ok, they reveal them. What is next? Nukes are not magic.

I'd wager that if you're amassing forces to conduct an invasion and midway through you discovered your target has nukes pointed at you, the very least you'd do is rethink your strategy and put a pause on operations.

> If China does invade, then it seems likely that North Korea would also invade SK, forcing the US to fight on at least 2-fronts, or 3 depending on what Russia is doing.

You mean just like what the US did during the 90s and 2000s?

> Reality going forward is Taiwan is going to have to look at HK or UKR and decide if they want to be just another Chinese city or glassed island that will never recover.

Ukraine is holding out extremely well and poised to achieve an unconditional victory. It's victory comes at a price, but one that any free and independent nation prides itself of paying.

> Promises made to appease the British as a condition for the handover.

Care to explain what point you believe you are making?

> Hong Kong was seized by a colonial interloper. Why would China take orders from someone who took their land?

The British Empire precedes and was multiple times longer than PRC's rule of mainland China. If you're wanting to play the legitimacy game, by your own measuring stick the UK still has more legitimacy over the rule of HK than the PRC.