"Architects look at thousands of buildings during their training, and study critiques of those buildings written by masters. In contrast, most software developers only ever get to know a handful of large programs well—usually programs they wrote themselves—and never study the great programs of history. As a result, they repeat one another's mistakes rather than building on one another's successes.
It's worded a bit strongly, but it encourages critical thinking about downloading dependencies, how vetting should work, and where the human factor comes in. I think the top comment was right that some security researchers will audit packages no matter what, but it's good to not take that for granted.
That and also employees don't have the same power. Employees fundamentally have less autonomy. If you have to work inside someone else's box all the time, you're not going to want to work as hard.
I buy it that this guy is incredibly important in the history of aerospace engineering and the weapons industry, but the article seems like it's making an overly strong claim that the trajectory of American and Chinese tech development was so affected by Qian Xuesen. There are, after all, many other people involved in both trajectories. Would Qian have been so successful in China if the economic and political incentives to listen to him had not been there? Had Qian stayed in America, is there a guarantee that the infrastructure necessary to support his doctrine on technological development would have been available?
I visited the office near University Avenue, once, many years ago. I found the freezer full of ice cream, the fragrant gaming room, and the heavily used bunk beds very disturbing. I'm not surprised they encouraged employees to spend one night a week there.
We had a few smart people in national security, but they're getting fired. The Navy Secretary was just forced out. There's nothing that can help when the problem is upper management.
I clicked through on the link that the article said showed that bromine was impossible to recycle. The abstract says "Here we propose a catalytic strategy that enables the selective and mild-condition conversion of all organobromides present in wastes into renewed bromides for Br recycling. It employs Ullmann-type reactions enabled by inexpensive Cu(I), simple ligands and hydroxides in DMSO–H2O solvent. This strategy achieved >95% bromide yields at a temperature ≤120 °C for complex real-world Br-laden wastes."
I'm sure it would take a long time to make this process fit for mass bromine recycling, but it's a bit hard to take the rest of the article seriously.
Near the beginning, the paper states that humans are extremely unusual in the rates of paternal investment that fathers do. With most species, the male dips out. Men don't always spend a lot of time on children, but they do have the wiring for it. It seems to be one of the many traits that sets humans apart from other species.
So they would be better people if they didn't care about anything? Maybe, instead of getting mad that Palestinians are getting support that you think normal Iranians should get also, you could be constructive, and offer Americans some advice on how to pressure the Iranian government to stop the killing?
Yeah and the people paying other people to write code won't understand how the code works. AI as currently deployed stands a strong chance of reducing the ranks of the next generation of talented devs.
Well, in the literal sense it would be neutral to be transparent, but "political" in the sense that the White House is using means "you're being mean to me."
That IS what Biden was trying to do though with the CHIPS Incentive Act. He was trying to onshore production of semiconductors in a partnership with TSMC. Didn't do him any favors, and Harris lost the state of Arizona anyway. Americans had the choice between a party that was serious about trying to onshore some manufacturing and a party that wasn't, and it made the wrong choice because vibes, basically.
I too have read Never in Anger, the ethnography mentioned in this blog post, and the way I found it was by reading a survey of egalitarian societies called Hierarchy in the Forest, by Christopher Boehm. Many of the personality traits that the author seems to think are special about people who share the East Asian phenotype are actually common amongst fiercely egalitarian societies. It is normal to highly police socio-emotional expression and to regard angry tribe members with suspicion. The !Kung San live in a hot climate and are like this. The Montenegro Serbs live in the Balkans, a rather different climate, and are also like this. I finished Hierarchy in the Forest with the strong impression that no member of any modern society could tolerate the lack of personal expression required to suppress any would-be chiefs.
This person could've spent a lot less time going down a rabbit hole with a couple introductory anthropology classes and by asking themselves if there were any societies with these same traits in a warm climate. It is poor scientific reasoning not to check for examples of this personality type in hot climates. Not exactly PhD material.
There's also this implicit conclusion that venting must not work if the levels of aggression don't change, but the article did say that blood pressure dropped. I thought the paragraphs on venting to friends didn't make much sense to me either--honestly, if something terrible happened to a friend, and they didn't vent to me about it, at least a little, I'd be wondering if we were still friends.
My friend's father got pancreatic cancer. His chemotherapy was delayed because the hospital was full of covid patients. Now he's dead. People who get mad about being harangued to take the vaccine are failing to see the whole picture.
My parents went through the Cultural Revolution, which involved being sent to a labor camp for a couple years, having various relatives harassed into committing suicide, and even though everyone in their age cohort experienced equally horrific things, I could tell something wasn't right about them, even as a kid. They, however, would not think of themselves as traumatized. I don't know about your case in particular, but in general, I think psychological injuries tend to leave a mark, even if they are normalized, and even if the sufferer is not necessarily aware of them.
Aren't children supposed to be better at learning new languages than adults, though? There's supposed to be a critical period where language acquisition is much easier.