> BTW the reporter looks like Cotten Hill if he was real, and actually fought in all those wars. I'm quite surprised they had him hosting the video. I'm curious what decisions led to this.
I hope positively surprised :) That's Paul Carter - he's a regular presenter on the BBC, particularly their tech show "BBC Click". Here's a nice interview (https://disabilityhorizons.com/2019/09/paul-carter-journalis...) he gave to Disability Horizons a few years ago about his experiences.
And one of the interesting (and hard) computer science problems is how to turn an arbitrary einsum expression into the most efficient series of operations (transpose, matmul, etc.) available in hardware kernels. This is mentioned in the post under "How Contractions Are Actually Computed".
There was actually a lot of pushback against the austere aesthetic by government ministers - they wanted fancy looking photo banners and pretty things. This was pushed back on in the name of making something functional the prioritizes users.
Honestly this sort of climate & environment tokenism frustrates me - spending a lot of energy trying to reduce and elimate things that barely matter (or even actually make things worse by displacement), while ignoring the big ticket items. At best it's innumerate, at worst it's greenwashing.
But nobody was doing that in this thread. Walteweiss was just pointing that Netflix DVD service closing has a significant positive side - less trash generated. Pointing it was called as "innumerate".
There are bigger problems for sure but there is also "there are bigger problems" fallacy (aka fallacy of relative privation).
I replied in the other comment, but I thought I’ll mention you as well. I agree that this is a tiny drop into the ocean, but I thing it’s still a positive change.
How much plastic does this actually produce? The DVDs are reused multiple times, as are the boxes. They are comparatively unlikely to end up in the environment, since they are in a closed and controlled environment - people are unlikely to just throw them out in the garbage. Packaging may be an issue. But there are many better ways to reduce plastic pollution - for example just driving a few miles less per year, or driving a lighter car: Tires are a much bigger source of plastic pollution and they shed microplastic directly into the environment and water runoff: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/tires...
I'd rather have people kick back on their couch and watch a Netflix DVD instead of feeling great that they saved so much plastic, and then smugly drive their SUV to the next shopping mall.
I wonder if the total amount of energy required to stream the same movie from a datacenter across the country might even lead to more CO2-emissions in total. The internet isn't carbon neutral yet.
Harry Nyquist isn't exactly an unknown engineer who doesn't have his own achievements, though - not sure why people are saying he would be fired in a modern company!
"In an effort to avoid naming everything after Euler, some discoveries and theorems are attributed to the first person to have proved them _after_ Euler."
I agree with you 100%. Management does not have an eye for software that is easy to maintain and continue to make money on 5 or 10 years down the line. Most management is thinking short term, how do I get money in MY pocket right NOW. Who cares how the business does in the long term, they'll jump ship and move on. It is the engineering that often makes a difference for long lived companies, it's just that usually the engineers and/or management isn't around long enough to reap the rewards. I try to balance engineering with product cost (I'm lucky enough where I can see the "numbers"). I try to give more to the clients that pay more, or at least create something that I can reuse in the future, while making sure what I deliver is stable and not a big ball of spaghetti to make the next developer/engineer cry at night.
> ... 5 or 10 years down the line. Most management is thinking short term,
Woe is us. Five or ten years is not considered short term
> . I try to give more to the clients that pay more, or at least create something that I can reuse in the future, while making sure what I deliver is stable and not a big ball of spaghetti to make the next developer/engineer cry at night.
I am not sure about the "...who pay more". As I am currently woefully underpaid I am more sympathetic to that view than once I was, but, I still view myself as a professional, and I act with professional ethics.
Partly that means speaking up when I see a project going near the rocks. I do not make too much fuss, but I do say it out loud.
That has cost me plenty. Our industry is full of people who are very good at one thing or another, but do not know their limits.
Part of my "being professional" is knowing my own limits.
I am in 100% agreement and the same thinking as you are. I never take the shortcut route unless it is absolutely warranted, such as a solution I know is meant to last only a few months. I have been very loud, and have effected quite a bit of change over my years, if only in a way that allows my boss to believe that I will no longer be a part of his operation if he restricts my freedom and personal ethics. I am highly underpaid, but I make sure to take that out in personal freedoms where it is worth it to me. I no longer answer phone calls or texts after hours unless they are going to directly damage the business, and my ability to continue having a place of employment. I take regular vacations, and mental health days, sometimes just to spend time with my son (went through a divorce where I still can't tell how badly it affected my son, although luckily went through a moderator rather than the attorneys/courts to settle things).
It is important to know what you can and can't get away with, and my clients don't pay the cost of the business I'm employed by making bad decisions. Where I am able to, I strive to provide a product that is better than the average, in the hopes that I've developed a solution that can possibly benefit the company or myself in the future in regards to software quality or speed (along with stability) of deployment.
What was remarkable is how Facebook's Threads app jumped straight to being full of advertisers and hucksters - they didn't think that maybe the right way to bootstrap a social network would be to make it full of authentic conversations, at least to start with.
> they didn't think that maybe the right way to bootstrap a social network would be to make it full of authentic conversations, at least to start with.
I doubt that any social media platform owner wants authentic conversations - even initially.
Instead of giving arguments, I refer to Paul Graham's essay "What you can't say":
If people were really authentic in their conversations, they would be in real trouble quite soon - and the social media platform on which these really authentic conversations are posted would be, too.
So, what social media companies do is enforce some kind of "editorial policy" (moderation) which makes the conversations that don't become censored still feel "somewhat authentic" to many visitors, so that this bluff only gets busted after some time in which the platform's owners can make sufficient money.
There's a lot of middle ground between the stilted language of a corporate ad-read and people screaming slurs in a COD lobby. If you can't speak authentically without running afoul of the bare standard of human decency that is generally expected, the world's probably better for it if you don't speak at all.
I had forgotten about that essay. Quite appropos in these times (probably in all times, but there are a few current topics that immediately spring to mind).
Because it was seeded from Instagram, a platform which promotes people who look good (like myself, of course) not necessarily people with anything interesting to say. "Authentic conversations" was never a possibility.
Lol, I think their plan is to still federate with Mastodon specifically to pad out their vapid platform with content. They were just too much of a self imposed rush to capitalize on Musk and his stupidity, to do it before launch.
Facebook doesn't care about the tiny amount of content on Mastodon. And it's the wrong type of content anyway. Mastodon is for misfits, nerds, anarchists, Tumblr-style far-left politics, doomers, weirdos and very bad artists.
Instagram and Threads couldn't be more different. It's commerce. Beautiful people. Beautiful places. Shopping. Mainstream pop idols. Grifting influencers. Celebrity gossip. Lifestyle. Fashion. Interior design.
Facebook prefers the latter group as this is where advertisers thrive. The typical Mastodon user would have an anxiety attack when they see an ad.
The guardian likes to ignore this, because it doesn't suit its reporting angle much, but England has 1.8x more population density than Germany and 3.6x(!) more than France. This means by simple maths far less available land per capita. Overall the UK comes in closer (but still ahead) of Germany but this is largely due to Scotland, which is a significant proportion of the UK landmass, but has very few people.
The government ban you mention only applies to England, which already has almost half of the UK's onshore wind despite having by far the least space for it. Making complaints that the rural population of England, already under pressure due to soaring population density, doesn't want their remaining rural spaces covered in wind turbines when plenty of other good options exist requires quite a bit of mental gymnastics to justify.
Population densities in people/km2: England 424, Scotland: 68, UK overall 272, Germany: 232, France: 118.
Landmass in thousands of km2: England 130, Scotland: 77, UK overall 242, Germany: 357, France: 551.
The main reason we don’t get more of it is a handful of rich land owners not wanting an “eyesore” on their estates and using their influence to get that result.
Social media owners wanted all the benefits of superscale communities with none of the responsibilities - it isn't surprising that moderation got worse.
Reddit vaguely has a workable approach with subreddits, but it's still high variance, and they have to discourage long-lived comment threads.
I hope positively surprised :) That's Paul Carter - he's a regular presenter on the BBC, particularly their tech show "BBC Click". Here's a nice interview (https://disabilityhorizons.com/2019/09/paul-carter-journalis...) he gave to Disability Horizons a few years ago about his experiences.