I did not mean it like that. I meant it as a personal opinion. I am not writing articles or pushing for a single solution for everyone.
I believe every system has strengths but cannot be universally used in any society.
> Are all builds handled automatically by a Continuous Integration server?
Are two very different indicators. And both are, least in my mind, equally important.
One measure the holistic approach to source code including everything necessary to produce a functional system. Checkout, build, use.
The other is a measure of how much care is given to the overall process of software engineering. How much automation the tests receive, how much attention is given to deployment etc.
Software construction must be tied intimately with the software code itself for thousands of good reasons. Too many times have I seen a team jump onto the CI bandwagon; abandoning all notions of build scripts to let this new shiny thing perform it's magical incantations to build and package the system. A checkout alone is no longer sufficient to gain a fully functional system one can test locally, the CI becomes in an integral part of the software code but without the process the rest of the code receives (reviews, versioning, source control etc).
With the multiplication of commercial tools flaunting how easy it is to automate all this that one does not even need a programmer anymore, I fear software construction will become harder and harder to do without the help of these external systems.
So yes, do team have a single operation to build (that is construct) a workable system is still very much relevant.
And yes, do team use continuous integration to automate their test and delivery process is also important.
Disposable goods are not cheap, they are in fact very expensive. They are perceived as cheap because a very large portion of the true cost is hidden, externalized. Creators have no incentive to create things that are easily recyclable because they are not responsable for what happens to it at the end of it's life. To close the loop one must integrate the economics of garbage management as an integral part of the product being designed on equal footing with production, distribution etc.
Taxing pro-rated to the recyclability of a product, tax break on repairs, second-hand markets and other means to give a product a longer life. Make practices like planned obsolencence illegal, criminal even. I'm no expert but there are a great many solutions, implementing them however might require a lot more political good-will than most of our leaders are ready to spend.
These moves are also a bet on the future: a bet that the future cost of disposal stays high, so that increased costs earlier in the lifetime are justified.
The future is discounted for a reason, however. The future is probably wealthier, has better technology, and can reap the reward from investment today. It takes not just political good will, but a leap of faith to make the bet on spending now instead of later.
For planned obsolescence: here's another way to look at it. For a designed lifetime, we can coordinate across all the inputs to a product and select the right tradeoff between cost, quality and longevity. If we don't have a designed lifetime, the actual lifetime will only be as long as the shortest-lived part that can't be economically replaced. Making everything economical to replace means compromising on design, and often quality: a phone that plugged together like Lego would be substantially worse than our current integrated devices in weight and size.
(The idea of building something without a designed lifetime seems a little bit crazy to me, from an engineering perspective. It frames a whole bunch of decisions and trade-offs. I think it's better to put stuff into more people's hands rather than keep things expensive and exclusionary, which would undoubtedly be a side-effect of outlawing designed lifetimes.)
> and select the right tradeoff between cost, quality and longevity
That's the crux of the matter. What's the "right" tradeoff?
With things like waste disposal an externality, often times the "right" tradeoff is one that encourages frequent replacement. At best, this encourages a materialistic (wasteful) culture. At it's most cynical, this is a way of padding corporate profits by encouraging recurring revenue.
Don't get me wrong -- this is the rational choice when all incentives are towards maximizing shareholder value. I think the question is what principles do we want guiding the choice of the right tradeoff?
- how do you prove planned obsolencence? That sounds like a witch hunt waiting to happen
- integrating garbage management as part of the product - so that entail would subsidies for biodegradable and taxes for unrecycleable materials? Lets say a coke bottle is recycleable. It is now up to the consumer to recycle it. A television has many parts, some unrecycleable, some recycleable. Its often more expensive for a consumer to recycle it than to just dump it.
We have to question whether it is feasible to implement a circular economy in our current old-fashioned system.
If you suppose this is the only system possible then you must assume so and fight within those constraints.
I propose, though, that new types of high-tech economic/political/social protocols/structures/systems can make it much more practical to achieve these types of goals, such as costing in externalities.
The problem as I see it is that we still run our society _manually_ like a big game of Dungeons & Dragons. New decentralization technologies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. show that it is possible to begin to automatically organize and regulate on a large scale.
These more sophisticated high-tech systems, when integrated into society, will make it much more realistic to track and integrate external effects into a company's bottom line, for example.
This requires changing overall core social organization into a high-tech process.
What's worrying is not so much that the petition to be considered as Mass surveillance... but that the petition coupled with data obtained through mass surveillance. Who knows what kind of flag it will raise signing this petition will have when coupled with a ton and a half of seemingly unrelated data.
What recourse one has to proove wrong some top-secret algorithm once said flag has been raised ?
Paranoia is extremely contagious and often countered with more paranoia.
that's just it, ask 100 people what "advancement" and "Moving Humanity forward" and you'd likely get 100 different definitions. Same goes for hapiness.
There is one reason that can make it harder for "experts" to teach a subject that others may teach better.
Best I can explain this is from a personnal story. I used to do rollerblade... I mean a lot of it. It was my main mean of transportation ans I could do easily 20-50km per day. Obviously after a year or two of this I got pretty good and many of my friends would ask me to teach them how to do it. And I did, relatively well, they got the hang of some subtelties of breaking and turning.
However, I noticed that as time went on, I found it more difficult to teach it. It got so natural for me that decomposing the movements in their atomic parts was difficult.
I cound identify two factors that contributed to me going from a decent teacher to a lousy one while at the same time I went from a decent rollerblader to a pretty good one.
For one, the abstraction went from a concious one to a subcouncious one. I no longer had to think about doing it right, I just did.
Second I had not taught anyone for a while, so I did not keep in touch with how I built these abstractions in the first place. Both together contributed in me forgetting how to build these abstractions.
To teach one does not have to be a foremost expert in a field but just ahead of the target audience to be in control of the material they need to absorb. The greater the difference in knowledge between the target audience and the teacher the harder for the teacher to "bring down" his thaught processes to their level. That is unless you
1 - were teaching the whole time between getting from pretty good to expert. This way you've kept contact with the different steps and breakdown you'va had to go through yourself while learning. Here is probably where most have had their bad experience when an expert tried to teach them but miserably failed at it.
2 - are a natural pedagogue, in other words you are a genious at making things around you look simple. I think Richard Feynmann would be an stellar example of this.
That being said, as a corrolary to point 2 above, there are people that are just bad at teaching reagardless of any other factors.
where X is any number of lines necessary for implementing the ONE thing that function should be doing
Any attempt to replace X with a concrete number will invariably sacrifice simplicity for the sake of that number.