Posts by Brewster's Angle Grinder 3279 publicly visible posts • joined 23 May 2011
I found some stats. Twitter turned a profit in 2018 and 2019.
So it was possibly to turn a profit managing the service conventionally. At least it was, till it got loaded up with debt. Now it's toast.
But it will be bought out of bankruptcy because that userbase is too valuable.
..."some of the most talented and brightest computer scientists and engineers" but claimed this is just a "fraction" of the total workforce and those in general sale, marketing and admin functions should be paid in line with other tech businesses.About how many failed tech companies could you say, "great product, but nobody bought it"? And about how many successful companies can you say, "shit product - it was just hype and marketing"?*
You don't just need engineers. You need marketing and good admin. And you get the best bees with the sweetest nectar. If you want to be best of class, you need to be best of class in all flowerbeds. (Nor do you want the talent going to your competitors.) It all smacks of short-termism and lack of understanding.
Declaration of interests: I'm principally a coder and have zero affiliation with Google.
* Maybe Google falls into this camp. Discuss.
Do the APIs include "advice about platform changes or alternative options or non-train related problems which affect the journey"...?
While I'm here: one of the advantages of Twitter over email and websites, is it's done in public. If $BigCorp ignore my email, nobody knows. If they ignore my tweets: everybody can see. Though that doesn't really cover the use case we're discussing.
The question is: why are you/they using twitter for that role? I don't mean that in a disparaging "you ought be doing this with just a sed script" kind of way. But that functionality could be handled by a mailing list, a web site (ideally with an RSS feed), or even usenet. So what is is it specifically about twitter which makes it much more suited than other methods?
Have you seen the A.B. Original version featuring Mr Paul Kelly himself? It's bit old now so has lost some of its relevancy. But his performance is still great. Definitely stay for the harmonica solo and the wolfish grin at the end, and the sheer of joy of people have fun making music.
So 11,000 people did nothing wrong. And now they are going to be scrambling to put food on the table because one man's an idiot.
(Yes, that 11,000 no doubt includes people with marketable skills, possibly your mates, who will easily find another post. But they'll be plenty of low level peons. And nobody is hiring - only firing their own.)
"Building more homes and tackling NIMBYism would probably help, too."
How much NIMBYism is there going on in big, popular cities, like the ones you cite? Should every last speck of green be built over? Should everybody have to commute ninety minutes from the suburbs?
This really is zero sum: there's a finite amount of space in city centres. The civil authorities have decided the balance of homes to hotels they want. But big tech is circumventing those decisions on an industrial scale.
Santa on his slay with his elves looks suspiciously like a Disneyfied Wild Hunt. He departs from his otherworld to ride the earth for one night of the year. It depends on your local geography as to who you think leads the hunt. But Old Nick, rather than Saint Nick, is not unknown.
"I've just realized : on Mars you'll never see a shooting star."
I think you will. Back of the envelope:
Wikipedia says shooting stars "...become visible between about 540 to 860 kilolinguine above Earth. They usually disintegrate at altitudes of 360 to 680 kilolinguine." And claims, "The highest atmospheric density on Mars is equal to the density found 250 kilolinguine above the Earth's surface..."
All of which suggests there is enough atmosphere on Mars to render them visible, albeit at a lower altitude and so over a small area. (But, hey, it's a smaller planet.) Some of the colour is dependent on the atmospheric composition, so they may look different.
It's actually quite hard to launch meteorites into space. This link suggests: "a minimum crater diameter of ~25km, even before the effects of atmospheric drag on Earth-launched projectiles is considered." and then goes on to suggest ejecta probably don't achieve the necessary escape velocities which "...questions the potential existence of terrestrial meteorites." We've not found any that have dropped back to earth - though they'd probably burn up and be hard to recognise if they survived.
But supposing it's possible, your bacterium has got to survive the impact and launch. It will then be on a ~20cm "pebble" (ibid) where it has to survive the vicissitudes of space for hundreds of thousands of years (for an earth-moon journey), or probably a few million years (for an earth-Mars journey).
It's then got to survive the entry and impact onto Mars, and land in just the right place.
The trouble with that argument is that it's possible to construct blacks holes (non-rotating, uncharged, no accretion disk) where you can pass "through" the event horizon and never know - even the tidal forces are too weak for you to realise you've crossed the point of no return.
So they have to postulate other, empirically-unfounded reasons why this couldn't happen. We've no clue whether he's right. I wouldn't say it was a bad bet. But then I wouldn't have said Johnson getting elected as PM for a second time, weeks after he left, was a bad bet either. Maybe we don't live in that universe. We need a working theory of quantum gravity to know.
I'm with you on this. I'm annoyed by people who set deadlines and then complain that stuff arrives five minutes before the deadline expires. It's human nature. As a perfectionist, I get stressed before submitting and will naturally use all the time available to make sure it's perfect. (I've one more day, so I'll put it on the side today and look over it again tomorrow.) If you need more time to process it, set the deadline earlier.
And the trouble with these de facto deadlines that close before the formal deadline is that I have no idea how long you will need. Everybody is different. It can vary according to the individual who is handling the request that week/month/cycle, or even what else is going on in their life. I kind of expect it in the touchy-feely departments, but you'd expect more rigour from engineers. If you can say I can run the CPU at xGHz I expect to be able to do so. Likewise, if the deadline closes on Y, I expect to be able to submit up to Y without whining. If you need more time, make a smaller merge window.
The whole world works smoother when your expectations are is in black and white and I don't have to try and second guess you.
The biggest killer was smallpox (up to 50% mortality) not measles.
But the diseases we brought were, in the main, exquisitely adapted for human hosts. We are not going to run into an alien organism selected for the quirks of the human the immune system. We don't even know if they'll be RNA/DNA or, if they are, whether they'll use the molecules in a way that's compatible with life on earth. And the same works in reverse.
If there is life there, it's living in rocks and soils, not in fleshy things, and in conditions rare on earth. So it seems likely any pathogen, even if accidentally fatal, won't be able to spread effectively - again, in either direction. Indeed, there are millions of species of soil microbes on earth, most of which are poorly studied, and many of which can't live without other species of soil microbes, few of which are pathogenic to anything.
Precautions will have to be taken. (All space probes are sterilised to prevent unintended visitors hitching a ride and taking root. Although I wonder whether standards will be adhered to as space travel becomes widespread and commercialised.) But there won't be a repeat of what we saw when the largely disease-free New World came into contact with the disease-riddled Old World. The worst case would be something like an invasive species where one planet's lifeforms out-competes another; H.G. Well's red weed taking over.
"They go where they are told, and they hit who they're told to hit."
It's not beyond the bounds of programming for an AI to recognise a human and refuse to hit it. Okay, some days it'll mistake the human for a bicycle. But if it stops it most of the time, that's a win. It could be law 1, part 1, "A robot may not injure a human being..."
And it will be hard to hack if it's fundamental part of the model that does collision avoidance and motion control.
The specific platform might go away. The content won't; it will just move somewhere else.
And the idea of single global BBS where specific boards are constructed dynamically around tags seems to good too die. Perhaps the next incarnation will do it better. Perhaps it will do it worse.
TL;DR Twitter might die but it will be reincarnated.
Finding out panspermia is right will be like finding out every major human civilization is descended from Atlantis; a bunch of quasi-mystics and cowardly scientists who ran away from life's rich complexity get to say, "I told you so."
(I could maybe settle with us having a native biota that is merciless obliterated in the Great Oxidation Event by cyanobacteria that have hitched a ride from Mars. I'm not sure they get bragging rights for that. Better, yet, if our native prokaryotes survived - perhaps they are the archaea - that would be almost cool, even if it magnifies some of the flaws I'm about to list.)
But fundamentally, panspermia is a useless idea. It makes it even harder to uncover how life got going. It means we don't get to look at a different path evolution has taken. And it adds another---very small---coefficient to the Drake equation - so you better hope Putin doesn't press the button because, if life has to evolve on one planet and be transplanted to another, we probably are alone.
However if life evolved separately on Mars, the universe will be teaming with life. And we will get to see other solutions; even if they turn out to be a boringly similar RNA/DNA, we will have learnt something about what is possible and what life might look like elsewhere.
Go smaller still: halophiles. It just depends whether prokaryotic forms could emerge and whether they could adapt as Mars dried out. We just don't know enough about how life emerged on Earth to be certain. (And I will be so pissed off if they share a genetic link with us and the panspermia whackos are proved right.)
There are tremors and a liquid core. And I'm not sure the generation of magnetic fields is well enough understood to say the how stationary the core is. But I'm sure convection would be possible without the rotation necessary for a dynamo and a global magnetic field.
And anyway, I guess they're talking about a small amount of heat warming the bottom of the ice enough to melt it but not the burn through. The article points out such phenomena are not unknown on earth. And there are things which might be geysers (but probably aren't) or mars.
The amazing thing is that there are two mobile OSes and that we haven't all settled on the lowest common denominator: Android. Even today, if you walk into an office and find a PC, the chances are it's running Windows. It's surprising that mobiles haven't similarly coalesced around one platform and that Apple retains mass market appeal.
I download tarballs off the internet all the time. It's part of being a dev. If I unzip them in ~/x I expect them to stay there. That's part of the contract with any archiver.
Checking these files meet that contract is exactly the sort of thing computers excel at. It would be very easy for me, a human, to miss some dots in the middle of the path string, especially if they are hidden by some Unicode shenanigans or terminal escape sequences.
Tell me a use case for trying to extract absolute paths or paths in parent directories. As a common courtesy, unarchivers should block this unless you swear on your mother's grave it's what you want.
Think less of /etc/passwd and more of messing with .bashrc to run scripts that download malware etc...
I spend most of my time in GC'd languages these days. It's like pair programming with the dumbest programmer in the office, and assigning them the task of inserting code to deconstruct objects and free their memory... *sigh*
I take your point that ARM weren't exactly a fresh-faced upstart with barely a die to their name. (You could say they were very upwardly mobile.) However the people who've moved from Intel to ARM are exactly people who would happily move to RISC-V, as soon as it's ready. ARM doesn't have a padlock on the datacentre like x86 did/does. That was the big shift. If you've done that recently, you should have good understanding of how to repeat it.
And, speaking of Intel lock-in, how is Windows on ARM these days...? Still bumping along the bottom...? Actually, Apple's emulation, is very impressive, if Microsoft can get it that fast, there's no reason it shouldn't take off; old apps are unlikely to be demanding of the hardware. But I don't know how much of Apple's speed comes from their unique architecture. (One charitable reviewer thinks Windows-or-ARM is ready for the stratosphere.) Still, the argument about the datacentre applies to PCs too. If Microsoft have figured it all out, it shouldn't be too hard to get Windows on RISC-V...
The good news for ARM is that they have close to the same lock in on Android that Intel have on the PC. Not withstanding the occasional x86 mobe, or apps being largely java, I can't see that moving away any time soon.
"I wonder how many kilowatts of power an airplane takes to fly 30 people 200 miles, and how that power will be supplied..."
The amount of power it takes to fly 30 people is not affected by the range. If it takes 1600kW to fly them 10 miles, it will also takes them 1600kW to fly 1000 miles.
As to how it will be supplied, I assume they charge the batteries up beforehand, rather than spool out a very long cable that's attached to the plane.
"...but happily collected a lot of money from them in salary and payoff, only to raise his not very new "concerns" once his bank account was well stuffed..."
I imagine he could have earnt equivalent sums elsewhere.
And I imagine he thought the executives wanted to fix the problems, and wanted his expertise to help with that. Whereas, in the end, it turned out he was hired as a fig-leaf.
" I found strange they were ready to pay seven millions without anything in exchange."
My presumption is he's contractually entitled to that amount, and that if they don't pay, he'd sue and get the money. And because he's legally entitled to it, there's no way they can force an NDA on him.
But, as pointed out, an NDA is just another form of contract. Break it and you get sued for whatever remedies are set out in it. Being compelled to testily would be a valid defence - as would whistleblower statutes.
"It's constantly been held back by shortsighted self-serving politicians and, well... idiots."
While there is a lot of that to go around. We're also held back by the science. It's one helluva hostile environment outside the safety of Biosphere 1. And your body rather likes gravity. A Flash Gordon Future is not on the cards.
Still, this is epically cool and should be done.
I've only skimmed the judgement, but it's clear the defendant has gone well beyond installing a ring doorbell.
But my reading (para 127, para 134) is that just installing an ordinary ring doorbell would be fine - except issues around the microphone (para 137). You can only have the audio on as needed to converse with someone; keeping it on 24/7 would likely be unlawful.
Anyway, your honour, I said that the police or ICO wouldn't intervene, and that you would have to hire your own solicitors, which is what appears to have happened. And most of us know a helluva lot of unlawful data processing goes on and would fail if it ever came to court. It's beyond the means and time of most of us to remedy.
So you want something that will do bold, italic, have an outline mode, and a word count. But somebody else has a slightly different set of essential features. And somebody else a third set. And that's why word processors end up so big. Everybody only uses 5% of the features. But everybody uses a different 5%.
Also, JournoWrite seems really niche. The outline feature is in such huge demand that Microsoft has relegated it to an after thought and Libre Office don't implement it. And then you turn down Scrivener which maxes out the same feature.
It's nice you've found something. If I get hired to do journalism, I might look at it. But it's not my niche. (Or probably that of most of your readers.)
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