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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)P
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1774
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3 yr. ago

  • Huffman, a native Texan, brought his wife, three daughters, and their family Husky, “Baby,” with him to Russia. The couple also has three sons from prior marriages who opted to remain in the United States.

    The 3 sons are smarter that mom and dad. I hope mom wises up fast enough to get the daughters out. Dad is not long for this world.

  • Your own source cited numbers even suggest the majority of people admitting to murder are the one that did the murder, and you're trying to use that as a defense to your point?

  • they admitted they did it because they wanted to discredit Bush.

    He sounds trustworthy so I guess we’ll take that at face value

    Detective #1: "We have the murderer. He admitted to killing the victim."

    Detective #2: "What kind of fool are you to believed that?!"

  • Rather used copies of real documents that had their kerning adjusted to appear false.

    Can you cite a source on that? I remember back then seeing an interview with the person that made up the docs and they admitted they did it because they wanted to discredit Bush.

  • They are blind, not obtuse. Norton ≠ Notion.

    I'm not that poster, but I made the same mistake when reading the headline.

  • I don't. I'm asking by applying what we know of physics in our universe, and assuming the same physics work in others (a big assumption I know). As in, I'm asking if my application is correct.

  • If our universe exists inside a black hole, does that mean it would be potentially subject to collapse if "parent" black hole loses matter converted to energy and lost to the "parent universe" via Hawking radiation? Would this be our "big crunch"?

  • Dan Rather was forced out at CBS for revealing Bush’s embarrassing Texas air national guard service.

    I'm no fan of Bush, but Rather used documents that turned out to be false. I don't think Rather knew that at the time, but you're omitting a hugely important piece of those events.

    To quote Omar from The Wire: "If you come for the king, you best not miss".

  • Ooooorrrrrrr…I could buy physical media, and rip my own permanent copy, which never expires, andwhose cost is a one time purchase.

    How do you know what to buy? There are all kinds of shows I watch (before knowing anything about them) that aren't worth buying.

  • I’m on my 4th read through of the wheel of time

    Do you actually read all the way through? I'm not sure I could take reading that much of Faile again. She made me nearly write off Perrin because of how much time he spent on her.

  • …but, just because we’ve gotten ahead of trouble and found solutions thus far, doesn’t mean that an unintended bit of code, or hardware fault, or lack of imagination can’t cause consequences further down the road.

    Absolutely true.

    I guess my thought is that the benefits of our rapid growth outweigh the consequences of forgotten technology. I'll admit though, I'm not unbiased. I have a vested interest. I do very well professionally being the bridge of some older technologies to modern ones myself.

  • There are a lot of ifs in my examples. It may never happen and we’ll get the advantage of all the ideas that are able to be made reality through accessibility. However, it’s better to think about it now rather than contend with the eventually all at once when a catastrophe occurs. You’re right that doom and gloom isn’t helpful, but I don’t think the broader idea is without merit.

    There are some actual real-life examples that match your theoreticals, but the piece missing is the scale of consequences. What has generally occurred is that the fallout from the old thing failing wasn't that big of a deal, or that a modern solution could be designed and built completely replacing the legacy solution even without full understanding of it.

    A really really small example of this if from my old 1980s Commodore 64 computer. At the time it used a very revolutionary sound chip to make music and sound effects. It was called the SID chip. Here's one of the them constructed in 1987.

    It combined digital technologies (which are still used today) with analog technologies (that nobody makes anymore in the same way). Sadly, these chips also have a habit of dying over time because of how they were originally manufactured. With the supply of these continuously shrinking there were efforts to come up with a modern replacement. Keep in mind these are hobbyists. What they came up with was this:

    This is essentially a whole Raspberry Pi computer that fits in the same socket in the 1980s Commodore 64 that accepts the input music instructions from the computer and runs custom written software to produce the same desired output the legacy digital/analog SID chip built in 1982. The computing power in this modern replacement SID chip replacement is more than 30x that of the entire Commodore 64 from the 80s! It could be considered overkill to use so much computing power where the original didn't, but again, compute is dirt cheap today. This new part isn't expensive either. Its about $35 to buy.

    This is what I think will happen when our legacy systems finally die without the knowledge to service or maintain them. Modern engineers using modern technologies will replace them providing the same function.

  • Gotcha, thank you for the extra context so I understand your point. I'll respond to your original statement now that I understand it better:

    I ALSO think the author would prefer more broad technical literacy, but his core arguement seemed to be that those making things dont understand the tech they’re built upon and that unintended consequences can occur when that happens.

    I think the author's argument on that is also not a great one.

    Lets take your web app example. As you said, you can make the app, but you don't understand the memory allocation, and why? Because the high level language or framework you wrote it in does memory management and garbage collection. However, there are many, many, MANY, more layers of abstraction beside just your code and the interpreter. Do you know the webserver front to back? Do you know which ring your app or the web server is operating in inside the OS (ring 3 BTW)? Do you know how the IP stack works in the server? Do you know how the networking works that resolves names to IP addresses or routes the traffic appropriately? Do you know how the firewalls work that the traffic is going over when it leaves the server? Back on the server, do you know how the operating system makes calls to the hardware via device drivers (ring 1) or how those calls are handled by the OS kernel (ring 0)? Do you know how the system bus works on the motherboard or how the L1, L2, and L3 cache affect the operation and performance of the server overall? How about that assembly language isn't even the bottom of abstraction? Below that all of this data is merely an abstraction of binary, which is really just the presence or absence of voltage on a pit or in a bit register in ICs scattered across the system?

    I'll say probably not. And thats just fine! Why? Because unless your web app is going to be loaded onto a spacecraft with a 20 to 40 year life span and you'll never be able to touch it again, then having all of that extra knowledge and understanding only have slight impacts on the web app for its entire life. Once you get one or maybe two levels of abstraction down, the knowledge is a novelty not a requirement. There's also exceptions to this if you're writing software for embedded systems where you have limited system resources, but again, this is an edge case that very very few people will ever need to worry about. The people in those generally professions do have the deep understanding of those platforms they're responsible for.

    Focus on your web app. Make sure its solving the problem that it was written to solve. Yes, you might need to dive a bit deeper to eek out some performance, but that comes with time and experience anyway. The author talks like even the most novice people need the ultimately deep understanding through all layers of abstraction. I think that is too much of a burden, especially when it acts as a barrier to people being able to jump in and use the technology to solve problems.

    Perhaps the best example of the world that I think the author wants would be the 1960s Apollo program. This was a time where the pinnacle of technology was being deployed in real-time to solve world moving problems. Human kind was trying to land on the moon! The most heroic optimization of machines and procedures had to be accomplished for even a chance for this to go right. The best of the best had to know every. little. thing. about. everything. People's lives were at stake! National pride was at stake! Failure was NOT an option! All of that speaks to more of what the author wants for everyone today.

    However, that's trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist today. Compute power today is CHEAP!!! High level program languages and frameworks are so easy to understand that programming it is accessible to everyone with a device and a desire to use it. We're not going to the moon with this. Its the kid down the block that figured out how to use If This Then That to make a light bulb turn on when he farts into a microphone. The beauty is the accessibility. The democratization of compute. We don't need gatekeepers demanding the deepest commitment to understanding before the primitive humans are allowed to use fire.

    Are there going to be problems or things that don't work? Yes. Will the net benefit of cheap and readily available compute in the hands of everyone be greater than the detriments, I believe yes. It appears the author disagrees with me.

    /sorry for the wall of text

  • And if you were really lucky you were able to hide or conceal all the evidence of what you were doing to get into that state without your parents finding out. Brothers tell no tales.

  • Oh thank goodness! I was looking for those!

  • since every cell in a person’s body dies in less than 7 years, by the time of the next term, no cell will have been alive having served the first term and therefore, it’s allowed.

    There are a couple tablespoons of cells that live our entire lives in our brain so that argument should be rejected too. I would expect the GOP rebuttable is that GOP candidates have no brains and therefore their original argument should be valid, which I admit on its surface would be tough to refute given the large body of past behavior of GOP Presidents.

    I would then have to argue that the the Qualifications Clause set forth in Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the US Constitution requires Presidential candidates to be at least 35 years, and they've just admitted their brainless candidates are 7 years old or less so they would not be be eligible to run for President of the USA.

  • Now, with the advanced automation in building these, combined with the increased difficulty of repair(fine-work soldering, firmware debuging and the like) it makes way more sense to just replace the whole thing.

    The other valid component to your argument is the cost of labor now. It is more expensive to maintain a staff of people to perform repairs and manage the logistics of transporting units to service than it is to simply lose 100% of the wholesale value of the handful of items that fail within the warranty period. Labor, especially skilled labor, is really really expensive in the western world.

  • I think the author was referring to the makers of the device not understanding what theyre making, not so much the end user.

    Just to make sure I'm following your thread of thought, are you referring to this part of the author's opinion piece or something else in his text?

    "This wouldn’t matter if it were just marketing hyperbole, but the misunderstanding has real consequences. Companies are making billion-dollar bets on technologies they don’t understand, while actual researchers struggle to separate legitimate progress from venture capital fever dreams. We’re drowning in noise generated by people who mistake familiarity with terminology for comprehension of the underlying principles."