Where did it mention that they were unable to get imagery of the drones or recover one? If the thesis is that this may be a foreign incursion, I very much doubt that they’d broadcast that they’d captured one.

Bragging about it is a good PR and inspires confidence in your citizens -- even if you didn't actually capture anything. It's rather mystifying that they didn't try to present a strong face after this incident.

Back during the cold war, Daily Mail wrote a completely made up article about communist spies infiltrating sleepy English countryside villages, and people started calling up to report the spies they have seen on the streets. It became such a big deal that the government pressured MI5 to go and do something about it, so they "captured" and kicked out of the country a dozen or so communist spies found across the landscape of Britain, to a huge fanfare and celebration in the newspapers. Only years later it came out that that operation was entirely made up too, no one was actually ever found, captured and extradited anywhere, it was entirely just to satify the government and the public(who were riled up by a completely made up story in a trash newspaper).

That’s how you lose trust, if it later is revealed that they didn’t.

I wish this effect would be lasting long enough for the next round of finding weapons of mass destruction or defending nation building overseas.

Any information given would reveal what they can do, and by extension also what they can't, so to me it's perfectly understandable if they keep everything under wraps.

It escalates tensions for no readily identifiable reason. Like we’re not looking to pick a fight with China or Russia right now, and saying “hey y’all we captured a Chinese drone” sounds like a great way to push public opinion over a precipice and create a crisis that serves the interests of quite literally no one.

There's one country they've not been so thrilled to publicize when they've acted against us in the past.

See: The USS Liberty Incident.

Not saying that's what's going on here. But it is the exception to the rule you posit.

You are not capable of interacting simultaneously with millions of people who regard you as anything approaching a source of truth.

Anyone who’s old enough to have a 20 year military career is at least a millennial.

Furthermore, most people panicking about dnd and raves have exactly zero experience with either. Almost everyone has experience with social media and a lot of the criticism of it comes from things people directly observe from their own personal experiences. It’s not like this is a completely uninformed mass hallucination like the satanic panic of the 90s.

Low-code is just good libraries and good frameworks. My hot take is that anything “low code” beyond that is just an aggressively user-hostile config interface.

Most(all?) self code self-hosts, which is extremely valuable. There no shortage of smart people who can creat complex tools (see Excel for examples) if hosting it wasn't currently such a ridiculous prospect.

My version of low code is writing HTML pages with a big script element full of vanilla JavaScript, and putting them in this one git repo we have which gets deployed to a web server.

Obviously it's not actually low code, it's 100% code, but it creates a space without a lot of the complexity and ceremony of 'real' software development. I don't write tests, I don't future-proof, I don't set up deployment or monitoring machinery, I don't worry about anything except solving a small, well-defined problem quickly.

It's definitely not a good approach to everything. But it's quite common for one of my users to say something like "I need a dashboard showing how the current reactor temperatures compare to the averages for yesterday, and also the available cooling water for each one", where that's all data we have existing websocket feeds for, and I can get that to them very quickly without it becoming formal feature development.

Lack of testing and monitoring means the products often break. But when they do it's typically benign - the page doesn't load, or shows no data, and if a user needs to use it, they'll complain, and I can fix it.

If a page ever got too complicated, or too critical, I might want to port it onto real software. But that hasn't happened yet.

Reactor temperature monitoring is surely the exact area of software engineering (along with medical software) where you'd want the most robust processes isn't it? If your solution says everything is fine when in fact it's not, someone will have a big problem on their hands.

I'd argue that is actually the hard part of software engineering. Sure, I can learn the basic syntax of a new coding language in a week or so, but learning all the deep frameworks to do non-trivial stuff, conventions, deployment, and how to diagnose bugs can take years to become expert at.

Much of this feels like needless complexity, but its ubiquity in almost every stack points to something fundamental, in my opinion: the classic 80/20 rule. That last, irreducible 20% complexity is where the dragons lie. Expectations for software have grown, and boundless flexibility is table stakes.

Cardio in the mornings. I used to work out mainly at night, and I still lift in the afternoons, but going on a jog or bike ride right after getting up is amazing. No matter how shitty it is outside or how much I do not want to drag myself out of bed, being outside and active for 30-ish minutes at the start of the day makes a huge difference.

There are a lot of things in life that would be trivial if everyone was really good at what they did, had the most perfectly pure of intentions, and were omnisciently aware. Unfortunately that’s not the world we live in, and even farther from the companies most of us work for. Good technology is about figuring out shortcuts around hard problems, and “large groups of people trying to coordinate their activities across space and time” is a hard fucking problem.

Try teaching or tutoring for a while, either something academic or not. You get the chance to talk to groups, it’s going to be a topic you know well and are comfortable with, and you’ll get lots of chances to refine your techniques.

I think the author kind of has it backward. Most people I know (specifically younger people that I work with) that struggle with perfectionism are afraid to fail enough to master something. They end up king of the bunny slope because they don’t want to do something imperfectly, so they stick to the easy stuff and eventually give up. Like being really really good at something requires, like the author said, that you continue to do things at the outer limits of your abilities, and if you’re doing that you’re going to spend the majority of your time performing below the standard you set as perfection. If you have a healthy relationship with failure and imperfection, that drives you forward, and if not it stops you from progressing.

The point of the Stasi wasn’t to find/prosecute dissent, it was to create an environment that prevented it from occurring, spreading, or gaining traction. The Stasi existed to sow the fields of popular politics with salt through creating an environment of paranoia.