My standard is that software should appear to work instantly to me, a human. Then it is fast enough. No pressing a button and waiting. That would be great.
That is probably the correct measure. If “The Promise of Computing” is ever to come true, people must never wait on computers when interacting with them.
Waiting is ok when it comes to sending batches of data to be transformed or rendered or processed or whatever. I’m talking about synchronous stuff; when I push a key on my keyboard the computer should be done with what I told it to do before I finish pushing the button all the way down. Anything less is me waiting on the computer and that slows the user down.
Businesses should be foaming at the mouth about performance; every second spent by a user waiting on a computer to do work locally, multiplied by the number of users who wait, multiplied by the number of times this happens per day, multiplied by the number of work days in a year… it’s not a small amount of money lost. Every more efficient piece of code means lighter devices are needed by users. Lambda is billed by CPU and RAM usage, and inefficient code there directly translates into higher bills. But everyone still writes code which stores a Boolean value as a 32-bit integer, and where all numbers are always 8-bytes wide.
What. The. Fuck.
People already go on smoke breaks and long lunches and come in late and leave early; do we want them waiting on their computers all of the time, too? Apparently so, because I’ve never once heard anyone complain to a vendor that their software is so slow that it’s costing money, but almost all of those vendor products are that slow.
I’m old enough that I’m almost completely sick of the industry I once loved.
Software developers used to be people who really wanted to write software, and wanted to write it well. Now, it’s just a stepping stone on the way to a few VP positions at a dozen failed startups and thousands of needlessly optimistic posts on LinkedIn. There’s almost no craft here anymore. Businessmen have taken everything good about this career and flushed it down the toilet and turned teams into very unhappy machines. And if you don’t pretend you’re happy, you’re “not a good fit” anymore and you’re fired. All because you want to do your job well and it’s been made too difficult to reliably do anything well.
I think this also derives naturally from another really interesting observation. The surface of Mars, that apparent desert, is 2%+ water by weight. [1] I say "+" because later studies have shown it to be even moister. So this is really interesting in the context of the movie/book "The Martian" because this surprise came out after the book was released.
A huge part of the plot is about him getting water which he ultimately does by extracting it from fuel, but it'd have been trivial to get it from the soil itself. If you can excuse the butchery of measurements, even just the 2% level is moist enough to extract a liter of water per cubic foot of soil! For more consistent measurements, that's 35 liters of water per cubic meter of soil!
I suspect when we finally get boots on the ground and can start doing real research and exploration, we're going to find more surprises than we could ever imagine.
We may have to decontaminate the water, which might be full of azides or other things. On the flip side those compounds may be useful for industry or fertilizer in the long term.
The resources for subsidies come from printing new money (which is possible by having the world reserve currency), and then spending that new money for deliberate purposes instead of just giving it to the banksters to bid up the asset bubbles. In an imaginary world where we had a Congress that served the People and a mentally competent President, of course.
Who gets subsidized is indeed political, but I don't see a way to sidestep that since there's centralization as soon as you take action to prevent the currency from deflating.
To be clear, the US is not unique in its ability to do this. Many other countries would benefit from understanding it! In the UK we have a government wanting to build a growth strategy around finance. It's like a parody that nobody gets (yet).
But Congress doesn't actually decide to print new money? When they decide to spend they have to raise taxes or issue debt (treasuries).
The federal reserve, on the other hand, controls interest rates and other mechanisms which actually result in money "bring created" for practical purposes.
Yes, that is one of the mechanisms that has hamstrung us from being able to appropriately respond to the economic effects of offshoring. It can obviously be changed.
Or the mechanisms themselves might not actually have to be changed if we could cast off this myopic political red herring about "the deficit". What we perceive as the balance sheet of "the government" needs to include The Fed, Fannie/Freddie, etc. Treasuries owned by other countries are the equivalent of a big savings account. Treasuries owned by the Fed are the same as all the other other debt owned by the Fed - monetary creation / monetary inflation.
Nobody says it is effective, only that it is possible.
One way could be to send the message to the market that a certain area is strategically important and any startups will have access to extremely cheap loans and not have to worry about natural resources or personel.
Then follow up on those promises, take a step back, watch the Cambrian explosion that follows and when the businesses seems to have grown legs simply scale back funding and watch them fight it out. One could even say that is exactly what has happened in the world several times over. It is not unique to China.
Darwin saw sexual selection as so important to evolution and that he discusses natural selection and sexual selection as different types. Of course sex is part of nature.
One bright spot is that I find it much easier to avoid ads in my media than in say the 1990's. There is usually a higher paid tier with no ads. Youtube, X, HBO, etc and ad blockers on the web. I'm off of Google search with Kagi. I mostly use services that I pay for an much prefer that model.
But everything going to LLMs will make it harder to see/know about the ads. Google search was great when it first came out and then SEO happened. How long before you (NSA, CCP, big corp) can pay OpenAI to seed its training data set (if this is not already happening)?
In rural Colorado there is a law that makes subdividing lots under 35 acres very difficult. There are lots of areas in the mountains that have expensive housing. You are allowed to build one 15,000 sqft house but not ten 1,500 sqft houses on the 35 acres. Would love to have something like this in Colorado.
>In rural Colorado there is a law that makes subdividing lots under 35 acres very difficult.
Those sorts of laws are often to protect farms and ranches from being turned into subdivisions are generally a good thing if you want a stable food supply.
Same. I am living on about 40 acres in the 4 corners area and I'd really like to put in more infrastructure. Currently I have a bunch of non-permitted (built in the 90s) cabins together in one corner, running off of solar. I'm planning on building a septic and a cistern for this set of buildings and a larger, more permitted house on another part of the property this year.
I could have 6-10 tiny houses on this property and not have folks seeing each other, and I have the cash to just put in everything necessary. As written, the codes are not friendly towards that idea. I am still going to put in some RV hookups, at least- those are much less regulated than dwellings. My neighbors certainly aren't in a position to do the kind of complainaing that would lead to more attention from the county, and I'm at the end of a long series of oil field roads.
While I am an anarchist, I do understand the county's need to prevent folks from creating dangers to themselves and other folks. I just wish that everything didn't need to be massively profitable for some investors before variations on codes and planning could be grante.
That doesn't really scale though. Once you have ten houses, you'll start thinking about how it really should be 100 houses and they should build a better road to service everyone and then you'll want power and phone and internet, and before long all of the natural areas are just subdivisions.
There is a reason 80%(?) of the world almond crop is grown in California. It has a great climate for almonds, a lot of land, and water to support the trees. We need to trade something for our IPhones besides the promise of future dollars (debt).
reply