I work in a manufacturing plant. I am not a programmer, but I work with several supporting my projects on the manufacturing equipment. I find it wild that they stay in the front office building all the time, and are generally resistant to coming out on the plant floor and seeing the physical stuff being made because of their programs. That’s the best part IMO!
I work at a multi-bilion dollar company that would crash to a halt if our Cobol + assembly language Unisys system written in the 80s went offline. It’s hard to predict what will become difficult to replace, but some code has extraordinary staying power.
If you define failed movements as either “not wars” or “not dedicated”, sure. A recent depressing example I am assuming is definitioned out of your view is Hong Kong, which is firmly under the control of mainland China. A slightly more distant example is Northern Ireland, which is firmly part of Britain.
It’s kind of like how many people are afraid of geese. An angry goose can give significant bruises and is basically impossible for an average person to restrain without killing the goose, so the only option is to run away. Because the easy win of breaking the goose’s neck is not on the table for most people.
The US lost in Afghanistan because the goal was to turn it into a functioning democracy, and the local culture did not support that. If the goal had been “winning”, the Army was entirely capable of slaughtering the large majority of the population and then importing settlers to numerically overwhelm the remnant population. Like our ancestors did to the Native Americans.
Lumafield scanned 1,054 batteries – around 100 from each brand – and found 33 of them had a serious manufacturing defect known as negative anode overhang. The defect “significantly increases the risk of internal short-circuiting and battery fires” and can reduce the overall life of the battery,” according to Lumafield. All 33 of the batteries with the defects came from the 424 sold by low-cost brands or brands selling counterfeits…
For two of the counterfeit brands that were reporting impossible specs, the percentage of tested batteries from those brands that were found to have the defect were even higher – upwards of 12 and 15 percent. None of the name brand OEM batteries were found to have any problems…
Defects like negative anode overhang and bad edge alignment don’t mean an affected battery is guaranteed to explode or catch fire, but they can increase the risk of those incidents occurring, particularly when combined with other factors such as being left in a hot car or an accidental drop causing additional damage.
I have read some analysis that right-wing propaganda gets the most engagement when there are liberals in the community to provide the “liberal tears”. Yes, there is a core group happy to be in an echo chamber with only imagined liberal tears, but the majority find substitutes unsatisfying. Potentially the diminishing of non-right content volume will also diminishing the right content by making the comments less interesting.
The increase in diagnosis has happened in less than one generation. Genetic drift from altered reproductive behavior would take multiple generations. The speed of the diagnosis shift rules out social changes to mate selection and childbearing rates.
VBA for Word is bad, but VBA for Excel graphs is worse. At small companies that can’t justify the cost of any software outside Office, people will go to great lengths to get Excel to support data analysis. Not being in that situation anymore is one of my top satisfaction items with having changed jobs from a small to a large company.
I used to work at a place where one of their test machines generated a cert in Microsoft Word with test results. They were having their lab technicians manually type in something like eight fields of information to flesh put the cert. I managed to hack together a Word VBA plus Python script to interface with the OpenOffice database I had set up so the techs only had to type in one field, and the script filled in the rest.
It was kind of a monstrosity under the hood, but it worked pretty slickly, and given the available tools I was glad the option existed.
Thanks for sharing. I’m glad you are feeling less miserable now.
Before it was collected as a compendium of official parts, sure, but most of the individual books (both the ones that made it into the current version and additional ones that ended up being rejected) were around. The Old Testament ones were already written down, and most of the Gospels were at least oral tradition very early on.
I believe it was over one hundred years before the Gospels were all written down, and early Christian sects had passionate disagreement over which texts were official or hearsay, but it’s not like they were completely without religious texts.
Mob violence has been a thing for all of human history. Before humans, even: chimpanzee groups, if they get large, will split into two groups. After a few months apart, if the groups encounter each other, the stronger group will murder every individual in the weaker one.
I think we had settled on a regulated and normalized system in pre-internet media that moderated the mob violence tendencies. Our current polarization is not really that social media created this new thing in society, it’s that it removed the guardrails in traditional media that were suppressing natural human tendencies. I hope we can figure out and implement some new guardrails sooner rather than later.
Our brains are hard-wired to be susceptible to specific patterns. Ancestral humans who stayed in good graces with their social group, even when the leaders of that group were factually mistaken, survived at higher rates than humans whose respect for facts drove them to reject or be rejected by the group. The details of which and to what degree we have these triggers override our rationality varies by genetics and environment, but we are all susceptible.
That a very significant percent of humans respond to their system by adopting specific harmful behavior is not something we can fight by moral condemnation. Labeling them as bad people is unproductive. If the goal is to actually reduce the harmful behavior, addressing the system - not the individuals - is the only effective strategy.
Automation replaced hand knitters, and people in that career suffered for a generation, but most people now value mass produced socks more than they value paying a premium for hand knit. Automation replaced telephone operators, and people in that career suffered for a generation, but no one now wants their phone call to be manually switched by a person.
The pain of automation is real and lasts the length of the career of everyone impacted, but the societal benefit lasts many generations. More support is needed for people who are displaced, but I don’t see fighting the technology as the effective way to achieve that.
If you don’t say anything, they assume you agree with them. It’s a fine line between letting them know you (maybe respectfully) disagree, vs. actively debating, but in some cases I think it’s worthwhile to try to let them know you aren’t inside their bubble. Agree outright dickishness is unhelpful, but so much depends on the specifics of the relationship and circumstances of delivery.
There are shades of gray. I consider burying it in well managed landfills (what is done with the very large majority of plastic in developed countries) significantly more environmentally responsible than dumping it into the local river (what is done with most plastic in many developing countries) or ocean (fishing nets, cruise ships).
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By what metric? Recycling gives a new use to discarded materials, so the material might be 100% not-discarded, but new energy is still consumed in the recycling process. This is why reducing and re-using are more powerful levers than recycling.
There is also the detail of whether a material is truly “re” cycled back to the original use, or is “down” cycled to a use with less rigorous technical requirements.
I hope the AI-chat companies really get a handle on this. They are making helpful sounding noises, but it’s hard to know how much they are prioritizing it.
OpenAI has acknowledged that its existing guardrails work well in shorter conversations, but that they may become unreliable in lengthy interactions… The company also announced on Tuesday that it will try to improve the way ChatGPT responds to users exhibiting signs of “acute distress” by routing conversations showing such moments to its reasoning models, which the company says follow and apply safety guidelines more consistently.
Not in my lifetime. I do hope leaders emerge who can harness the modern levers to our brains in a constructive way, but even if that started next year at the midterms, the decades of work ahead just to get back to the institutional knowledge and regulatory protections that existed last year exceed my life expectancy. The hope is that happens so my nieces and nephews will benefit.