For a lot of things the problem is essentially a problem of scale. Those "ancient human tribes" who did so much better were tribes of 100-200 people, and it's actually not that hard to "do the right thing" with a relatively small group of people.
Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly similar problems. Details differ and some things are better (and others worse!) but overall: it's not that different.
I don't know about all the individual topics that are mentioned. I'm not an expert of blood cancer and I'm guessing the author isn't either, but ... maybe it's not that simple? The "Preclinical proof-of-concept study" from August 2023 doesn't really sound like "we've solved it, end of story" to me.
"We could fix everything, we just don't" seems far too simplistic. "Everything" encompasses quite a lot, and "I looked at this for a few hours/days and I figured it all out" is classic mistake that people make. Almost everything is conceptually simple. Actually doing it tends to be harder because all those details you didn't account in the high-level overview often do matter.
If your solution would work except for some reason, then you don’t actually have a solution. A drill that works in space except for all that vacuum and radiation isn’t actually a space drill. It’s a space drill for some alternate reality, meaning the one you’re not actually in. You haven’t solved the problem. You’re not as good of a problem solver as you think you are, sorry. Stop acting like you’ve solved it. You haven’t.
In the exact same way, any solution that would work “except humans” is a non-solution. Maybe it’s a near solution, or a solution for a different time. But it’s not one right now.
When you find yourself getting angry at the world, it’s worth considering that just maybe you’ve made the approximately easiest mistake in problem solving: underestimating the difficulty of the problem (especially someone else’s problem).
If I ranted and raved about how it’s a crime against humanity we don’t already have underground moon bases, you would just think I’m unhinged. Sure, it’s theoretically possible, but problems don’t get solved at the speed of my imagination.
“But if we had perfect coordination…” yeah, well, if it didn’t take so much energy to leave Earth’s orbit, we’d do it more often. But it does, so we don’t. We also don’t have total software security and all cancers cured. I’m sorry. Everyone is doing their best.
I agree, factually, with almost all the content of this article, although I find its tone a little grating.
There's a joke online - "nobody speaks more confidently than a 15 year old who has smoked weed twice explaining how to smoke weed to a 15 year old who hasn't smoked weed before" - nobody writes an angrier blog post than someone who has watched two YouTube videos about a subject.
Doing the work to improve society is boring and slow. It's talking to people in the community. It's local politics. It's generational shifts. It's a warm smile to the older person in the store, in the hospital, as we try to move the needle ever so slightly in the right direction.
There's a default assumption that progress is inevitably slow, but I don't think it's obvious that it has to remain that way. I think it's worth challenging our assumptions and really trying to dig in and figure out why certain processes are slow, and if it's possible to do anything to improve upon them.
Lately I've been asking researchers why progress in their field seems so slow from the outside, and if they could explain what kinds of barriers prevent them for going faster. From what I've learned so far, the barriers are usually institutional and political, they're rarely slowed down by technical reasons.
> We could be running fiber-optic cable to every house in America, and we even know how much it would cost.
That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much. Of course we can fix everything, we could also do everything in the universe, but the question is at what cost? So here's my modest proposal:
> I am here to remind you that it will only get worse unless we do something.
The problem isn't painful enough. Have you ever had a tough time convincing your team to address some looming problem, the problem actually manifests, and surprise! It becomes top priority.
COVID was a great example of this. When the problem is painful enough we as a society can do a lot. So maybe instead of the Sisyphean task of "fighting the good fight", maybe we just ... make it more painful first?
> > We could be running fiber-optic cable to every house in America, and we even know how much it would cost.
> That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much.
No it doesn't, and we already paid for it at least four times over. The large-scale ISPs (and even small-scale ones) have been given $400,000,000,000 by Congress since the 1990s until now to bring broadband Internet to people in America. They still didn't get it done. They didn't get it done because they used the money to buy back stock and give themselves bonuses after wiring up a few hundred thousand homes at most: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...
And the reason we paid for it at least four times over, is because the Pentagon commissioned a study some time ago on the amount of money required to bring a strand of fiber-optic cable to every home in America. They estimated it to be around $50,000,000,000 to $100,000,000,000.
There are a lot more problems we can solve with more severe punishments and more certainty of being punished. We can solve even more with re-instituting shame in our society. This idea that nothing is shameful is not only disgusting, but objectively stupid... and we can see where it's led us.
> When the problem is painful enough we as a society can do a lot.
For example, we lie about how the problem came to be, institute a censorship framework to prevent scientists from discussing it, spend months preventing solutions from reaching the consumers because we can't figure out how to issue permits, institute policies guaranteed to make the problem much worse, rally against solutions that could make it less bad because it allows us to take cheap shots about political opponents, lie about various aspects of the problem because it looks to us more convenient if people behaved as if they believed the lies, institute draconian policies that make absolutely no sense but allow the politicians to declare they are "serious about it", allow the same politicians to blatantly and constantly violate the same policies, dial the censorship to 11 to suppress public discussion of these policies, spend enormous amounts of money on things that do not work, distribute even more enormous amount of money to fraudsters, because we don't have time to bother checking who needs help and who doesn't, and so on, and so forth...
Yeah, you are right, as a society we did a lot. We shouldn't have done most of it, but there's no denying it, it is a lot.
> What they don’t tell you is that we already have solutions for a lot of problems, we just don’t use them. Sometimes this is because the solution is too expensive, but usually it’s because competing interests create a tragedy of the commons.
If you have a solution that can't be used because it costs too much money or other societal concerns, then you don't have a solution.
Part of making a solution is finding something that works in the real world and not an idealized world.
There’s a difference between “too expensive given the budget constraints we have imposed on ourselves” and “too expensive for any society to afford”. The author is asking us to step outside of the current political constraints and simply question whether these problems are truly as insurmountable as our political system makes them.
As for “other societal concerns” there are always societal concerns with anything. There were societal concerns with Social Security and free education for kids. Turns out those are good ideas despite the fact that they’re not free. In fact if you suggested them today a lot of people would shoot them down as infeasible. I don’t have any kids but I pay for other kids to learn to read. I’m not retired but I pay into social security.
When engineers are not subject to licensure, don't be surprised when management, pushed by bean counters, let the bean counters make the decisions.
Subject engineers to licensure, including ethics clauses, including clauses for building for repairability and minimum expected product lifetimes. Legally protect engineers from dismissal or retribution for invoking these clauses. Then see how much crap we continue to build.
And then, sadly, you’ll most likely get beaten by some foreign country’s slap-shit-together-and-ship-it junk. Because people don’t think in terms of TCO and product lifespans, they see that “-30%” and “$X.99” and buy things that possibly even unable to do what they really need them to do, because ad made a different impression.
Solving junk requires much more than licensing and certifications (unless somehow it’s done globally, worldwide). It also bridging the consumer awareness/competence gap somehow.
That'd be great. It can also finally define a standard for things like clean code, development cycles and and design patterns. Companies keep claiming to promote these things but it seems to be just a lot of equivocations.
Note that this will make society's ability to build things even worse.
The UK has gotten worse and worse at large scale construction over time as laws and rules and culture have gotten more conservative. Near me a small bridge is being widened. This takes a year and a half and £160 million, partly due to well intentioned rules. For example, one that says you need to have two attendants guiding traffic at every location people could get to the site, which means 12 very bored men standing around all day doing nothing at the two intersections at the edge of the build site.
Rules made from our ivory towers can't take into account all the factors that will actually occur in our fractally complex reality, particularly as times and situations change.
The impossible task gets even harder when second and third order effects come into play. For example, if a license is required to work, that license can be lost if something ever goes wrong and firing for not approving something is impossible then a second order effect could be that engineers will have every incentive to never approve things, requiring every safety feature rather than taking the time and effort to determine which are needed in the situation. The third order effect is a gradual shift of engineering culture towards being more conservative, as being more than average levels of risk taking means you can't just point at what everyone else does and say "Best practice!".
You have a lot of faith in the bureaucrats who are supposed to dream up and enforce those rules.
There are honest and competent civil servants, of course. But they are a precious and limited resource for any society, and should only be expended on the most critical tasks.
I'd rather have those people work on important stuff (say, criminal justice), than arbitrate microwave popcorn buttons.
No, we can’t “fix everything” because not everyone agrees that these are problems which need solving, or that your proposed solutions are actually an improvement.
I feel like most people go through this thought process around junior year in college. “If only they would put me in charge, I could fix everything.” Yes, the world is not that simple, what a surprise…
> your proposed solution is actually an improvement.
Whenever we try to improve anything in this world (software, hardware, humans, society, laws, constitutions), we measure a bunch of things beforehand, then we measure again after implementing the change. If it's faster or cheaper or lighter or taller or some measurable amount different, we can quite easily determine if the changes have in fact improved upon the way things were.
In the case of many things at a societal level, it's not difficult to compare to other countries that have already implemented a bunch of these things to see the likely outcomes.
Exactly this. We could build a network of commuter trains, but not everyone thinks that commuting as a life style is the future they want, so they comprehensibly don't want to pay that with their taxes. We could build enough houses to give housing to everyone, but many people don't want their neighbourhood turned into a concrete jungle or a "bad" neighborhood at their expense, so they would vote against a candidate with radical plans about housing. We could elect representatives choosing from a multiparty system with multi-preference, but many countries that do have large coalitions that regularly transition into government crises every time one of the parties thinks they'd have a better chance on a new election.
I find this kind of reasoning more and more frequent on the Internet: someone starts their rant with "we all agree that A is bad", while in reality 1) we don't even all agree that A is a problem 2) we don't all agree that, A being a problem, it is worse than the alternatives 3) sometimes, saying "A is a problem" is the only socially allowed take even if you don't care / don't think it is
I'd like to point out that computer security was solved in the 1970s after lessons were learned by the Military during the Viet Nam conflict. We've blamed everything except our operating systems, which are fundamentally flawed because they don't incorporate Capability Based Security[1].
Things that are not capability based security, but people seem to think they are, include:
App Permission flags on your smartphone
Windows 8 UAE
SELinux
AppArmor
Group Policies
Every major operating system has a capability model (eg SELinux or Group Policies). Mobile operating systems have had capabilities from the jump, but still get hacked.
(That being said, capabilities are great, we should use them and they do help. If you're not familiar with this pattern, look it up, it's worth knowing.)
Contrary to the tweet, I would classify "build nuclear" as equivalent to the programmers pulling out the plugs to smother suggestions for obvious progress.
This can be seen most clearly in Australia, where very much despite, not because of the previous government, renewables are toppling records weekly and offering the opportunity of a lifetime to the Australian people.
Meanwhile, News Corp and the ousted government, almost exactly at the time they lost all control pivoted to suddenly advocating nuclear as a tactic to slow the rollout of renewables.
I have some problems with the way modern software is changing, but I don’t think it is QA related, more a race to the bottom with perpetual beginner focused UX.
But as far as the author is referencing QA is there a good measure of quality over time?
My recollection of consumer software started 30 years ago, and it was incredibly unstable. BSOD frequently, my uptime is far far better now. Save frequently, because you will probably lose your document at any moment; I still reflectively ctrl-s even though I can’t remember my last document crash.
It references the image exploit in the article, that’s bad, but I got MS Blaster simply connecting to the network.
Coordination problem is not a simple or easy one. Totalitarian/dictatorship answer to it of course exists, (not sure if author implicitly suggests it), with a lot of obvious downsides.
For example dictatorship really sucks if you have to open a new market, to the detriment of incumbents, of course.
Hand-picking winners and manual resource allocation works remarkably bad in most contexts. Fall of USSR and what followed it is too recent, too bright examples to ignore.
So, while the question asked is really, really, interesting and i am sure we can do better, "just do" isn't really an answer and oversimplification. Resources are finite. Talent can't be applied everywhere at once, there is not enough talent. Why this solution (higher education for everyone) and not that (education reform with changed focus)? And so on.
I think author knows this better than me, single article has to focus on something, and in general "something needs to be done" is a sentient i can agree with
"We actually have a cure for blood cancer now, by the way. Like, we’ve done it."
Proceeds to link to a highly experimental and complicated treatment that was only tested in vitro and in mice. Yes, it is plausible that it could work in humans, but further clinical trials are absolutely needed.
I don't trust the author's judgment if he can look at something like that and label what he sees "we have a cure for blood cancer now".
If the author is so incapable of seeing and understanding finer details, I am not suprised by the angry and frustrated tone of his article.
Yeah, there is a lot of inefficiencies in current systems, often result of lobbying of special interest groups. No doubt about that. But a hypothetical author's autocracy would likely look much worse. For a smart person, he is way too gung-ho about what needs to be done.
The solution to the collaboration problem is achieving collective intelligence, e.g. making a crowd smarter than the sum of their parts.
I'm part of a small group who are working on algorithms for achieving that. We're applying system's thinking, game theory, bayesian statistics, computer science to find an algorithm that creates collective intelligence.
I have not bough anything in Amazon since 3 years ago, and honestly, it was because I was given an Amazon card as a present, otherwise it would be 6 years ago.
I go the extra mile to do that. I do because I hate the commingle inventory, and because I think is getting to big.
I see no impact at all on my behaviour. My friends, avid amazon consumer see me like a strange person for not buying there. I don't evangelise neither I go the extra mile to explain the situation more than "Jeff Bezos doesn't any more of my money".
I could repeat this situation with any single measure that we as individual can take. They are basically worthless.
Increasingly, I suspect the real value of type systems is that they force slower, "more correct" development, allowing you to "win the argument" with Management over taking the time to Do Things Right. They put a floor on code quality (albeit, IMHO, a pretty low one - you can also royally fuck up a type system) - preventing the worst excesses of rushed development.
It seems like the point of this article is we could cure cancer if we wanted to. It’s just a matter of incentives.
That’s not true. It’s not a money or effort hurdle, it’s a knowledge and technology hurdle.
Now one might argue that with enough money the knowledge and technology hurdle could be overcome, but I would disagree.
There are too many elements that are missing - biological tools, chemical probes, analytical techniques, laboratory procedures.
Sure money could advance those, but we don’t know which ones we need. One key (of many) to curing cancer could be the discovery of some mammalian cellular pathway. But we don’t know it exists so how would you find it? And even if it was discovered, you might not know it’s important.
Science often advances by the intersection of seemingly unconnected discoveries. You don’t know they matter until you do. It’s not a matter of just finding a specific area.
Our economic system controls the schedule and actions of essentially every human on the planet. When they get up in the morning. What kpis they have to meet to stay employed or bring food to the table.
It transcends nations through trade treaties and competition, trillion dollar companies have “no choice” but to lay off workers to placate “shareholders” expecting infinite growth.
And we know it is stripping the planet of its resources at a completely unsustainable rate, poisoning our very environment, some times burning the equivalent of entire forests for as simple reasons as “decentralized crypto NFT defi product scam”
Game designers know better than to make a game with a single high score, and even better than to allow players who amass the score to use it to pay for new rules.
Players know better than to continue playing a game that’s entirely and utterly broken for them.
[+] [-] arp242|2 years ago|reply
Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly similar problems. Details differ and some things are better (and others worse!) but overall: it's not that different.
I don't know about all the individual topics that are mentioned. I'm not an expert of blood cancer and I'm guessing the author isn't either, but ... maybe it's not that simple? The "Preclinical proof-of-concept study" from August 2023 doesn't really sound like "we've solved it, end of story" to me.
"We could fix everything, we just don't" seems far too simplistic. "Everything" encompasses quite a lot, and "I looked at this for a few hours/days and I figured it all out" is classic mistake that people make. Almost everything is conceptually simple. Actually doing it tends to be harder because all those details you didn't account in the high-level overview often do matter.
[+] [-] travisjungroth|2 years ago|reply
In the exact same way, any solution that would work “except humans” is a non-solution. Maybe it’s a near solution, or a solution for a different time. But it’s not one right now.
When you find yourself getting angry at the world, it’s worth considering that just maybe you’ve made the approximately easiest mistake in problem solving: underestimating the difficulty of the problem (especially someone else’s problem).
If I ranted and raved about how it’s a crime against humanity we don’t already have underground moon bases, you would just think I’m unhinged. Sure, it’s theoretically possible, but problems don’t get solved at the speed of my imagination.
“But if we had perfect coordination…” yeah, well, if it didn’t take so much energy to leave Earth’s orbit, we’d do it more often. But it does, so we don’t. We also don’t have total software security and all cancers cured. I’m sorry. Everyone is doing their best.
[+] [-] Fripplebubby|2 years ago|reply
There's a joke online - "nobody speaks more confidently than a 15 year old who has smoked weed twice explaining how to smoke weed to a 15 year old who hasn't smoked weed before" - nobody writes an angrier blog post than someone who has watched two YouTube videos about a subject.
Doing the work to improve society is boring and slow. It's talking to people in the community. It's local politics. It's generational shifts. It's a warm smile to the older person in the store, in the hospital, as we try to move the needle ever so slightly in the right direction.
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|2 years ago|reply
Lately I've been asking researchers why progress in their field seems so slow from the outside, and if they could explain what kinds of barriers prevent them for going faster. From what I've learned so far, the barriers are usually institutional and political, they're rarely slowed down by technical reasons.
[+] [-] kevmo314|2 years ago|reply
That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much. Of course we can fix everything, we could also do everything in the universe, but the question is at what cost? So here's my modest proposal:
> I am here to remind you that it will only get worse unless we do something.
The problem isn't painful enough. Have you ever had a tough time convincing your team to address some looming problem, the problem actually manifests, and surprise! It becomes top priority.
COVID was a great example of this. When the problem is painful enough we as a society can do a lot. So maybe instead of the Sisyphean task of "fighting the good fight", maybe we just ... make it more painful first?
[+] [-] grecy|2 years ago|reply
The world will be a wonderful place when schools have all the funding they need and the Air Force must hold a bake sale to pay for new fighter jets.
The US spent $8,000,000,000,000 on the "war on terror" [1], while 21% of adults are illiterate [2]
[1] https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar
[2] https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/literacy-statisti...
[+] [-] cbozeman|2 years ago|reply
> > We could be running fiber-optic cable to every house in America, and we even know how much it would cost.
> That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much.
No it doesn't, and we already paid for it at least four times over. The large-scale ISPs (and even small-scale ones) have been given $400,000,000,000 by Congress since the 1990s until now to bring broadband Internet to people in America. They still didn't get it done. They didn't get it done because they used the money to buy back stock and give themselves bonuses after wiring up a few hundred thousand homes at most: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...
And the reason we paid for it at least four times over, is because the Pentagon commissioned a study some time ago on the amount of money required to bring a strand of fiber-optic cable to every home in America. They estimated it to be around $50,000,000,000 to $100,000,000,000.
There are a lot more problems we can solve with more severe punishments and more certainty of being punished. We can solve even more with re-instituting shame in our society. This idea that nothing is shameful is not only disgusting, but objectively stupid... and we can see where it's led us.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] croes|2 years ago|reply
Was it?
How many fought against social distancing, masks and vaccines?
Same with climate change, how many fight against necessary measures.
[+] [-] jnsaff2|2 years ago|reply
Is it though?
Or is it that there is not enough profit for someone to make from running fiber to every home?
To be clear I’m not trying to lead with the question but actually ask something and that the difference might be useful.
[+] [-] smsm42|2 years ago|reply
For example, we lie about how the problem came to be, institute a censorship framework to prevent scientists from discussing it, spend months preventing solutions from reaching the consumers because we can't figure out how to issue permits, institute policies guaranteed to make the problem much worse, rally against solutions that could make it less bad because it allows us to take cheap shots about political opponents, lie about various aspects of the problem because it looks to us more convenient if people behaved as if they believed the lies, institute draconian policies that make absolutely no sense but allow the politicians to declare they are "serious about it", allow the same politicians to blatantly and constantly violate the same policies, dial the censorship to 11 to suppress public discussion of these policies, spend enormous amounts of money on things that do not work, distribute even more enormous amount of money to fraudsters, because we don't have time to bother checking who needs help and who doesn't, and so on, and so forth...
Yeah, you are right, as a society we did a lot. We shouldn't have done most of it, but there's no denying it, it is a lot.
[+] [-] bawolff|2 years ago|reply
If you have a solution that can't be used because it costs too much money or other societal concerns, then you don't have a solution.
Part of making a solution is finding something that works in the real world and not an idealized world.
[+] [-] janalsncm|2 years ago|reply
As for “other societal concerns” there are always societal concerns with anything. There were societal concerns with Social Security and free education for kids. Turns out those are good ideas despite the fact that they’re not free. In fact if you suggested them today a lot of people would shoot them down as infeasible. I don’t have any kids but I pay for other kids to learn to read. I’m not retired but I pay into social security.
[+] [-] solatic|2 years ago|reply
When engineers are not subject to licensure, don't be surprised when management, pushed by bean counters, let the bean counters make the decisions.
Subject engineers to licensure, including ethics clauses, including clauses for building for repairability and minimum expected product lifetimes. Legally protect engineers from dismissal or retribution for invoking these clauses. Then see how much crap we continue to build.
[+] [-] drdaeman|2 years ago|reply
Solving junk requires much more than licensing and certifications (unless somehow it’s done globally, worldwide). It also bridging the consumer awareness/competence gap somehow.
[+] [-] someguy5281|2 years ago|reply
That'd be great. It can also finally define a standard for things like clean code, development cycles and and design patterns. Companies keep claiming to promote these things but it seems to be just a lot of equivocations.
[+] [-] concordDance|2 years ago|reply
The UK has gotten worse and worse at large scale construction over time as laws and rules and culture have gotten more conservative. Near me a small bridge is being widened. This takes a year and a half and £160 million, partly due to well intentioned rules. For example, one that says you need to have two attendants guiding traffic at every location people could get to the site, which means 12 very bored men standing around all day doing nothing at the two intersections at the edge of the build site.
Rules made from our ivory towers can't take into account all the factors that will actually occur in our fractally complex reality, particularly as times and situations change.
The impossible task gets even harder when second and third order effects come into play. For example, if a license is required to work, that license can be lost if something ever goes wrong and firing for not approving something is impossible then a second order effect could be that engineers will have every incentive to never approve things, requiring every safety feature rather than taking the time and effort to determine which are needed in the situation. The third order effect is a gradual shift of engineering culture towards being more conservative, as being more than average levels of risk taking means you can't just point at what everyone else does and say "Best practice!".
[+] [-] eru|2 years ago|reply
There are honest and competent civil servants, of course. But they are a precious and limited resource for any society, and should only be expended on the most critical tasks.
I'd rather have those people work on important stuff (say, criminal justice), than arbitrate microwave popcorn buttons.
[+] [-] badcppdev|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avalys|2 years ago|reply
I feel like most people go through this thought process around junior year in college. “If only they would put me in charge, I could fix everything.” Yes, the world is not that simple, what a surprise…
[+] [-] jnsaff2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quickthrower2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grecy|2 years ago|reply
Whenever we try to improve anything in this world (software, hardware, humans, society, laws, constitutions), we measure a bunch of things beforehand, then we measure again after implementing the change. If it's faster or cheaper or lighter or taller or some measurable amount different, we can quite easily determine if the changes have in fact improved upon the way things were.
In the case of many things at a societal level, it's not difficult to compare to other countries that have already implemented a bunch of these things to see the likely outcomes.
[+] [-] curtisblaine|2 years ago|reply
I find this kind of reasoning more and more frequent on the Internet: someone starts their rant with "we all agree that A is bad", while in reality 1) we don't even all agree that A is a problem 2) we don't all agree that, A being a problem, it is worse than the alternatives 3) sometimes, saying "A is a problem" is the only socially allowed take even if you don't care / don't think it is
[+] [-] mikewarot|2 years ago|reply
Things that are not capability based security, but people seem to think they are, include:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security[+] [-] maxbond|2 years ago|reply
(That being said, capabilities are great, we should use them and they do help. If you're not familiar with this pattern, look it up, it's worth knowing.)
[+] [-] bawolff|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|2 years ago|reply
This can be seen most clearly in Australia, where very much despite, not because of the previous government, renewables are toppling records weekly and offering the opportunity of a lifetime to the Australian people.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/21/nuclea...
Meanwhile, News Corp and the ousted government, almost exactly at the time they lost all control pivoted to suddenly advocating nuclear as a tactic to slow the rollout of renewables.
[+] [-] rileymat2|2 years ago|reply
But as far as the author is referencing QA is there a good measure of quality over time?
My recollection of consumer software started 30 years ago, and it was incredibly unstable. BSOD frequently, my uptime is far far better now. Save frequently, because you will probably lose your document at any moment; I still reflectively ctrl-s even though I can’t remember my last document crash.
It references the image exploit in the article, that’s bad, but I got MS Blaster simply connecting to the network.
No punting people with ping of death anymore.
[+] [-] Towaway69|2 years ago|reply
Isn't the increase in attack surfaces for ransomware actors an indication of decline in software quality?
Software has become incredibly complex and interdepended.
[+] [-] hamilyon2|2 years ago|reply
Coordination problem is not a simple or easy one. Totalitarian/dictatorship answer to it of course exists, (not sure if author implicitly suggests it), with a lot of obvious downsides.
For example dictatorship really sucks if you have to open a new market, to the detriment of incumbents, of course.
Hand-picking winners and manual resource allocation works remarkably bad in most contexts. Fall of USSR and what followed it is too recent, too bright examples to ignore.
So, while the question asked is really, really, interesting and i am sure we can do better, "just do" isn't really an answer and oversimplification. Resources are finite. Talent can't be applied everywhere at once, there is not enough talent. Why this solution (higher education for everyone) and not that (education reform with changed focus)? And so on.
I think author knows this better than me, single article has to focus on something, and in general "something needs to be done" is a sentient i can agree with
[+] [-] inglor_cz|2 years ago|reply
Proceeds to link to a highly experimental and complicated treatment that was only tested in vitro and in mice. Yes, it is plausible that it could work in humans, but further clinical trials are absolutely needed.
I don't trust the author's judgment if he can look at something like that and label what he sees "we have a cure for blood cancer now".
If the author is so incapable of seeing and understanding finer details, I am not suprised by the angry and frustrated tone of his article.
Yeah, there is a lot of inefficiencies in current systems, often result of lobbying of special interest groups. No doubt about that. But a hypothetical author's autocracy would likely look much worse. For a smart person, he is way too gung-ho about what needs to be done.
[+] [-] manx|2 years ago|reply
I'm part of a small group who are working on algorithms for achieving that. We're applying system's thinking, game theory, bayesian statistics, computer science to find an algorithm that creates collective intelligence.
Latest creations: https://social-protocols.org/global-brain/ https://social-protocols.org/social-network/
Contributions welcome
[+] [-] erremerre|2 years ago|reply
I go the extra mile to do that. I do because I hate the commingle inventory, and because I think is getting to big.
I see no impact at all on my behaviour. My friends, avid amazon consumer see me like a strange person for not buying there. I don't evangelise neither I go the extra mile to explain the situation more than "Jeff Bezos doesn't any more of my money".
I could repeat this situation with any single measure that we as individual can take. They are basically worthless.
[+] [-] RangerScience|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Towaway69|2 years ago|reply
Development pace is set by the competition.
Edit: and if there is no competition, the longer it takes, the longer it will take to be profitable.
[+] [-] refurb|2 years ago|reply
That’s not true. It’s not a money or effort hurdle, it’s a knowledge and technology hurdle.
Now one might argue that with enough money the knowledge and technology hurdle could be overcome, but I would disagree.
There are too many elements that are missing - biological tools, chemical probes, analytical techniques, laboratory procedures.
Sure money could advance those, but we don’t know which ones we need. One key (of many) to curing cancer could be the discovery of some mammalian cellular pathway. But we don’t know it exists so how would you find it? And even if it was discovered, you might not know it’s important.
Science often advances by the intersection of seemingly unconnected discoveries. You don’t know they matter until you do. It’s not a matter of just finding a specific area.
[+] [-] hatenberg|2 years ago|reply
It transcends nations through trade treaties and competition, trillion dollar companies have “no choice” but to lay off workers to placate “shareholders” expecting infinite growth.
And we know it is stripping the planet of its resources at a completely unsustainable rate, poisoning our very environment, some times burning the equivalent of entire forests for as simple reasons as “decentralized crypto NFT defi product scam”
Game designers know better than to make a game with a single high score, and even better than to allow players who amass the score to use it to pay for new rules.
Players know better than to continue playing a game that’s entirely and utterly broken for them.
But humans … oh well
[+] [-] Daz1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hehhehaha|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nurettin|2 years ago|reply