I cannot really tell satire apart from genuine opinions anymore.
(But I do hope it was satire, if not, cooling satelites was/is a big issue and they only have very modest heat creation. A data center would be in a quite different ballpark)
You're annoyed to the point of overreaction I'd say. I assume julia's devs use symbols that are culturally set already. Not just random glyphs for no good reason.
I've seen this in math, I come the dev land around java peak, where it was a holy trait to write runComputationThatIsMaybeSafeOverArguments(...), because that's where they though information was. In math they lived in the opposite side of things.. names were few and concision was more important. Also structural thinking made names really unimportant, mostly redundancy and waste of time, the domain and properties were.
Sure, just try to properly document what it does. There are some characters that are easily confused at first glance even for native speakers, so be sure to use some common sense.
Yellow belt is limited to 15-items/sec, Red 30/sec, Blue 45/sec. Trains are more complicated, but intersections are usually limited to 20 to 40 trains/minute, depending on intersection design.
This means that even a train track is going to be limited to ~30ish trains/minute (not because of the track itself, but because it will be bottlenecked by some intersection down the track somewhere).
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Mixed just allowed you to utilize those belts more efficiently. For any base smaller than 45-science per second (among the 6 endgame sciencies: red, green, blue, purple, yellow, and white. Military isn't really needed once your defenses are thick enough), aka: a 0.45 rocket-per-minute base or smaller, a __single__ blue belt can theoretically support all of your labs.
Of course, sushi belts require combinators, counting of items, and more. Its a bit complicated. But if you sushi-belt, you get some simplicity benefits (at the cost of combinator complexity).
No, the little hump during the war is caused by the fact that before and after the war there were various groups sampling sea surface temperatures with various techniques, but during the war only the Americans kept recording these temperatures.
From the article, at the very end:
"Whether this effect could have provided a significant contribution to the global warming of the Earth during the last century is an open question. The researchers around Sami K. Solanki stress the fact that solar activity has remained on a roughly constant (high) level since about 1980 - apart from the variations due to the 11-year cycle - while the global temperature has experienced a strong further increase during that time. On the other hand, the rather similar trends of solar activity and terrestrial temperature during the last centuries (with the notable exception of the last 20 years) indicates that the relation between the Sun and climate remains a challenge for further research."
It would be nuts if high solar activity spurred abundant food and thrust humanity into the electrical age. There's gotta be some big trigger why we suddenly have all this tech within 200 years after 100k years of modern humans walking about as cavemen
For the trigger in the last 200 years, it is just fossile fuels. Having all this energy provides us with enough food and comfort to survive, thus lot's of spare time and spare manpower dedicated to research and improving tech. It also feeds all these machines we are making.
Going back to renewable will be tough (but is mandatory). We are a species that has been high on cocaine for a couple of centuries and we just realized that it slowly killing us, and it is running out anyway. Our only option is to sober up.
"all this tech within 200 years after 100k years of modern humans walking about as cavemen"
I think that is a misconception. Research and development was done for millenia, and everything is build from the previous. That is how we arrived here and today.
The picture you paint; no technology for 100k years and then suddenly technology out of nothing (or a single event); is just wrong.
It is a common misconception and I wonder where it comes from.
We had writing, pack animals, various types of "primitive" technology for many thousands of gears. Then boom. Within 300 years we go from horses to leaving the planet. There's been more technological advancement in the last few hundred years than all of human existence.
We hit some kind of tipping point based on previous development, or some other trigger that hasn't been identified
Zooming in on an exponential curve doesn't change the shape, is the idea, I think. Nor does it show a discontinuity or inflection point.
I'm not saying I know for sure this is the right characterization of the history of human technology, but I think the typical alternative to your view is that it is.
Sadly not much. The stratosphere is getting colder, while the troposphere is getting hotter, and the overall energy the earth is getting from the sun is sensibly the same. See https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-of-change/Solar (it was a quick search)
Notice the Modern Maximum starting around ~1800 which is also when all the graphs of global warming show increases; whereas normally the industrial revolution is blamed.
The climate warms and cools quite regularly. The Earth warmed 6 celcius over the last 20,000 years without our help.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian about 115,000 years ago it was 1-2 celcius warmer. Which is roughly what is currently being predicted as part of climate change by 2100.
Author here. I'm not entirely sure, I'll try to work it out. One thing I am sure of is that we need to get rid of the professional engineering management class. It's a parasitic institution.
Let's be real here for a moment. Software engineering, in general, is the most thing-oriented profession available. It attracts people who are incredibly thing-oriented. Most lack the want or ability to manage other people. This double track is specifically to give prestige to people who are amazing engineer but also can't look strangers in the eye.
Most engineers are bad at engineering too. That's just the natural distribution of all professions. Managers are not special, their incompetence is just felt more directly and viscerally.
To be honest, he did fine given the context, but Linus had some issues that would have quickly jeopardized his managing career in almost any companies.
I do not think this is true at most big companies. I have had plenty of managers who are as disagreeable as Linus. At least Linus is usually correct, not true of many managers who no longer understand the technical details.
In recent years, even Linus realised that it was a problem with Linus and took steps to fix it.
There's no way in hell any of us would be ok with our managers treating us the same way Linus treated other engineers. It worked because he's a genius and he controls the Linux project. You had to play by his rules or not at all. Google doesn't have the same advantage - it's not the only game in town.
I am not intimately familiar with Linus beyond his product Linux and his famous rants, so I can only grant you his aspy-ness.
I think Linus's handling of the Linux kernel is an excellent example of stellar technical leadership in a parallel track. It is what technical companies should look like. Engineers do their thing without worrying about administrative tasks like HR bullshit, salary negotiations, hiring, firing, and fights over who makes the coffee.
To be fair, the majority (vast majority?) of people who get paid to work on the kernel do in fact have to endure HR bullshit, salary negotiations, etc.; they're just doing it with Intel HR or Qualcomm HR rather than Linux Foundation HR.
that is definitely something I have felt in the past (as an engineer having to deal with parasitic managers)
I have since found that like there are good and bad engineers, you can have good and bad managers.
I now find myself thinking about management as if it were the command chain in an army, and I would be hard pressed to imagine how an army composed of a general and thousands of privates, with no layers in between, would ever be able to accomplish anything.
You don't abolish the chain of command. You abolish management as a separate organization with its own incentives. For example, Linus is a leader but he is not a manager. In engineering this is what you want.
The only way it changes is if someone gains enough power to make the change. And almost by construction engineers do not have that power. So it would take an exceptionally self-less manager. I
Or else an engineer who agrees who by luck or skill gains extraordinary power, implements this new power structure, and achieves such astonishing success with it that firm owners have no choice but to take notice and demand similar reforms at their firms. Or some third way I'm not seeing.
A.k.a. nothing like what the blog envisions is likely to happen.
How about if an engineer founds a startup and dictates that this is how it'll be done there, and the startup ends up succeeding? That would fit your second scenario: "an engineer who agrees who by luck or skill gains extraordinary power, implements this new power structure". I think we have seen cases of engineer founders who were in a position to do that kind of thing.
The blog post links to a story about Larry Page "firing" all the project managers; while they didn't exit the company, they were moved to another organization, and it seems Page got his wish of "no managers" in his organization for some time, until there were problems and complaints and "eventually" they started hiring more managers. If he had a fully workable approach in mind, it seems he could have implemented it for long enough to demonstrate its success.
> How about if an engineer founds a startup and dictates that this is how it'll be done there, and the startup ends up succeeding? That would fit your second scenario: "an engineer who agrees who by luck or skill gains extraordinary power, implements this new power structure".
Yes, arguably this is how we got to the current state of affairs, particularly thanks to Larry and Sergey, and the cross pollination and following-on of their approach. What I question is the likelihood of someone with this viewpoint reaching that level of power.
Assuming the structure produces better products and better incentivizes the team, it should have a competitive advantage. Build a startup based on similar management principles. If multiple startups attempt it, a few may succeed and serve as an example to follow.
I would say the top business leadership is to blame. The CEOs for example. They permit the engineering management class to be mediocre-performing parasites, they don't really understand how to measure their performance or the performance of the teams under them.
It's the cluelessness of the top management that enables this horrible principle/agent problem. It's as if you had a stock broker who would give you reports every month about how well he's doing, but you aren't capable of understanding whether your assets are increasing or decreasing, and you don't know how to add up the numbers for yourself or care to learn how. And it's their own fault for, in tech organizations, not caring enough to be taught how to manage their managers better.
Note: it may even be that some things are difficult to measure, but I don't see even a reasonable attempt to vet the engineering management class.
Another note: I'm not sure top leadership looks for any qualities in "management" other than "seems like someone with a rough attitude that will push people hard", even if they're pushing people hard without knowing what the people are even doing. It's a "whip-holder" role rather than any kind of attempt to make work more efficient.
no, you're SOL on that one, but fortunately strategy games don't (usually) have very high spec requirements. I have geforce now and used Stadia before, and use them to play the high-end games I have on steam that I wanted to play but would never bother getting an actual machine for. A decent gaming rig is worth more than I'm willing to pay for, so this is a good compromise.
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