The whole billing delay is so confusing. Last year I had a ballpark $500 bill that I thought my insurance should have covered. About 4 months later, I got a second mail that indicated I only had a $30 co-pay. I clearly got a bill that said I owed $500, no indication of anything pending. I no longer pay any medical bills until someone contacts me about late payment, because almost every single time the insurance covers all or most of it and I don't want to have to fight to get my money back.
Around here, they can't discharge you without first stabilizing, making sure you're capable of taking care of yourself, and they require your signed consent to discharge.
In my limited experience, technical ability and communication are inversely related. I've had an ex-mechanical engineer for a manager and he was great. He understood the value of planning, fleshed out specs, and other basics of making any project work. He was not very good at the abstract reasoning needed for tech. Nearly every senior software engineer is great at reporting that they're behind schedule, full of bugs, and the customers keep calling to complain. The best programmers are horrible at giving any updates about their projects, but their projects are done on time and of impeccable quality.
If you want to be a highly paid programmer, better learn how to communicate that you're technically inept in a way that gets you promoted.
The non-emergency police number is for all kinds of mundane things like where to drop off my old drugs, finding out when and where their self defense training is, reporting complaints, telling them about a good/bad experience you've had when dealing with the police. It's a non-emergency number and they're civil servants. I'm sure they could relay a message to the fire house.
I rarely need to do sustained typing and find it more useful to type in bursts. My hands cross all over the place because it's faster. While one hand is preoccupied, the other one can be doing something rather than waiting. Maybe if I was transcribing, sustained WPM would be beneficial, but I have to think before I type, and proof-read, and change my words.
I find typing too structured to take good notes. And I can't draw very well on a smooth surface, I need some resistance, like that of paper and a felt-tipped pen.
But battery technology really hasn't evolved at that fast of a pace
An average increase in power density of 10% per year or 2.6x over the past decade.
much of the gains we've seen in how long you can go before needing to recharge a laptop or a phone have more to do with CPUs and other components increasing their efficiency.
Don't forget about everyone being obsessed with "slim". Cellphone is made 25% slimmer while having 25% more capacity in one generation. "QQ, batteries are not getting better fast enough, just look at my cell phone". My cellphone with a case is slimmer than my cellphone without a case from just a few years back, yet the battery storage has gone from 2AH to 3.5AH. Do you have an agenda against battery tech developing too slowly?
From what I've read, the batteries are expected to maintain 100% of their rated power for 10 years, assuming a full rated battery cycle every day. You could replace the battery after 10 years, but it should at least still hold 80% charge and expected to be at 100% and down to 80% after 20 years.
From the Midwest here. High humidity and 70f can feel down right hot. I have trouble sleeping when it's 60f and 100% humidity. Get all sweaty and sticky. It's like you feel cold and hot at the same time. Horrible.
There was a recent study about cal in vs out and given the same food to the same demographic of people, there is an up-to 50% deviation. Someone may absorb 50% more and someone may absorb 50% less. They did this by placing the people in a small isolated room with IR cameras and other sensors, then measured energy entering and leaving the box in all of its forms, including analyzing the bio waste.
I'm glad BTRFS is still coming along. Having only ZFS is annoying for something that should be the norm. I do have some issues with BTRFS fundamentally. A simple example is "btrfs balance". It is fundamentally impossible to do this safely without having to re-write all of the data, which means it's literally impossible to do with a drive more than 50% full. The fact that BTRFS supports this means it is potentially silently corrupting your data at least during this operation. If BTRFS is claiming to be something, then not being that, I can't trust it. There are things that BTRFS do that are dangerous and they don't seem to make sure people are aware or they're not aware themselves.
I'm more excited about the 802.11ax Wi-Fi part of the announcement. I think 802.11ax is going to be game changing for people with latency or many device issues with their wifi. Beam forming in the 2.4ghz is also going to be a god-send, not to mention reduced sensitivity to interference and reduced chance of interfering.
"5G" is currently a collection of potential technologies, each orthogonal to each other, but each amplifying the benefit of the others. There has been "5G" testing in a city near me. The technology used was 3 out of the 5 or so potential techs. I would classify this as more of a "draft 5G". There is a very good chance that the definition of 5G will be set by whomever gets to market first.
If they have 10-20 years of skill invested and suddenly that entire segment of the job market goes away, they can get a job, but they will be starting over from scratch.
Assembly is how programmable computing units work. Once you learn how computing works, learning a new language is easy. A language is just a problem domain specific short-hand for assembly. It only took me a few days to catch up in SQL to specialists who had been doing it for a decade or more. I may not have known all of the details of replication and other specific features, but I was better at writing high performance queries, debugging query performance issues, and architecting schemas. I also have the benefit of not needing to use server traces or query plans to figure out why a query is running slowly. I just pretend that I'm the query planner and based on the information supplied, what decision would I make about combining the sets.
SQL is just short-hand for set manipulation. I just think how I would solve the issue if I was writing a custom program in ASM, then I translate that into SQL. Easy-peasy.
I do this for all languages. Once I understand the problem the language is trying to solve, understanding how the language works is trivial. There is rarely more than one good way to solve a problem. If I can solve that issue myself, then my solution is probably the same as whomever implemented the language. I am coming from the angle of performance. Understanding some languages is not useful because maybe they're just scripting languages where I don't care about performance, just a main goal of quickly clobbering together code to get something done.
Any civilization capable of inter-stellar travel should be able to easily extract a seemingly limitless supply of resources from the host Star. No one in their right mind would even attempt to extract resources from planets. Sorry if science is ruining science fiction.
Based on currently measured measure of error of flatness of the Universe, the Universe is at-least 250x times larger in radius than the Observable Universe, making the Universe at least 60,000x more volumetric than what we can see. That the minimum. We're guessing the Universe is actually perfectly flat, making it infinitely large. If there was FTL transportation, then a potentially infinite number of aliens civilizations, would have the ability to get to us.
Killing another species is easy for any space faring civilization. The technology required to spread through a solar system is barely less than the technology required to create a death-ray reflector around the host star that could destroy life nearly every line-of-sight star system in the host galaxy in only thousands of years. Why leave home?
Resources should never be a reason for aliens to attack. The simplest setup is a Dyson swam of habitats around the host star, and all of the resources needed are siphoned from the star. Pretty much unlimited energy and resources, and impossible for a natural disaster that could wipe out the society. This is probably the best way to fill the Universe. From star to star, setting up trillions of habitats, each capable of supporting millions of humans for hundreds of thousands of years without refueling or new resources, and a near limitless supply of fuel and resources next door.
This is all possible with current technology("just" an issue of scale... heh), we just need vastly more energy and resources, which will take time and a concerted effort. The current recommend way is to start building a Dyson swarm of energy collectors by strip mining Mercury. It's not only close to the Sun, but it has less mass, making it easier to get the swarm off of the planet. And boy do we mean "strip mine the planet". Literally destroying the planet. After some point, we'll have enough energy from the swarm to generate magnetic fields that could form the plasma atmosphere of the Sun in a way that allows us to extract materials. Once we hit this point, access to energy and resources will explode.
Regardless of Google's definition of an "acceptable ad", it will always be a subset of all ads. If you want more control over your ad blocking, install an extension.
Elon said he thought there was about a 50% chance of the Falcon Heavy blowing up on the pad and even less chance of making the payload into orbit. There was a reason there was no payload of real value.
The complexity of modern problems often precludes any one person from fully understanding them
This is because what they call the "best" are not people who are good at solving problems, but people who have made so many mistakes, they can be classified as specialists or highly experienced. Experience doesn't mean you can solve problems, it means you've encountered a lot of problems and probably made a ton of mistakes along the way.
In several of my programming books about architecture and project management, they make a clear distinction between people who can solve problems and those who are experienced. They tend to be very exclusive sets, in the sense that someone masterful at solving problems rarely stays in the same problem space long enough to be considered an expert because they want to solve new problems, not the same old drivel. 6 month later when the predicted problem is noticed,
the specailist chalks it up to "tech is hard" and memorizes that "thin provisioning is bad" for this domain. Still doesn't understand what thin provisioning actually is.
People who like solving problems are constantly looking for a challenge. If you hire experts and specialists, this is the opposite. You're not hiring highly talented people, you're hiring highly knowledgeable people. But knowledge is useless without the wisdom to use it.
A highly knowledgeable specialist in Data Warehousing purchases a $200k RAID-10 SAN device with 15k spindles and huge peak throughput numbers. But the wise inexperienced recent college grad points out that the reason their $200k sled of cheetah drives is slow for their application is because the f'n brochure says "optimized for thin provisioning". The specialist has no idea what "thin provisioning" is because it's outside of their domain and ignore that critical bit of info.
Really. This happened to me. I was the college grad and the specialist had recently worked with the like of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft as a consultant to their data warehouse projects, and came highly recommended. It was a joke. The first week I worked along them I was learning a lot. Don't get me wrong, they had an extremely useful set of knowledge and experience and did a very good job explaining the reasoning behind certain decisions and corner cases to watch out for. But for some reason, this person could not apply their own wisdom. They said to watch out for certain situations, yet they led you right into them. They had zero foresight.
This is not the only time I've seen similar situations. I've been included on the design aspect of many projects, and many times I have brought up "what about X, that could be a problem if such-and-such is how the final system is architected". Only to get a canned response like "We're following best practice" or "Here's option A, B, and C if that occurs". Then I respond back with "But if you assume that situation X has occurred, then option A, B, and C are not feasible because of Y and Z". I get brushed off, and guess what happens. What I predicted.
The single biggest issue I see with nearly everyone is their lack of fundamental understanding of the difficulty of any given problem. They don't realize that if something is a CPU hard problem, you might be able to make a space trade-off, but only in certain circumstances and the space trade-off is going to have some scaling factor. And this can be predicted without knowing anything about the implementation because it's a fundamental issue. Many people see technical problems being solved with magic boxes, some of which they created. Instead of understanding, they create simplistic internal models typically expressed as rules of thumb or best practices. When something goes wrong, they chalk it up to "programming is hard" or some drivel, they create some horrible work around to their flawed design, and they get a pat on the back for putting in 80 hours a week on a problem that should never had happened.
Sounds like a good business strategy to keep the foundation viable for decades to come. Find something the world needs, invest into it, then run a charity to buy the products the world needs and give those products away. Sounds like a tax evasion and profit scheme a large charity could benefit from. I am not arguing for or against, I'm just saying the reasoning is non-malicious and very reasonable, but I cannot speak for the intentions or effectiveness.
Toasters are a gateway appliance into toaster ovens. You've never lived until you've cooked a small pizza in a toaster oven in a fraction the time of a full sized oven.
Woosh. No one cares about CO2 levels at a point on Earth. We only care about average levels of the entire Earth. There has not been such a dramatic change on CO2 levels over the past many tens of millions of years. The last time there was even remotely such a change, it was along side a mass extinction event, and even that change was quite mild compared to what is going on now.
And ruin the future Saharan biosphere? You do realize that the Sahara desert turns into a very lush water drenched almost tropical area every 25,000 years or so. It will have even more fresh water than the Great Lakes. Covering it in salt would not be good for the animals further south as they'll no longer have a place to move to when the desert starts to move south as the Earth tilts.
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The whole billing delay is so confusing. Last year I had a ballpark $500 bill that I thought my insurance should have covered. About 4 months later, I got a second mail that indicated I only had a $30 co-pay. I clearly got a bill that said I owed $500, no indication of anything pending. I no longer pay any medical bills until someone contacts me about late payment, because almost every single time the insurance covers all or most of it and I don't want to have to fight to get my money back.
AC is 5ghz only and N is optional.
Around here, they can't discharge you without first stabilizing, making sure you're capable of taking care of yourself, and they require your signed consent to discharge.
In my limited experience, technical ability and communication are inversely related. I've had an ex-mechanical engineer for a manager and he was great. He understood the value of planning, fleshed out specs, and other basics of making any project work. He was not very good at the abstract reasoning needed for tech. Nearly every senior software engineer is great at reporting that they're behind schedule, full of bugs, and the customers keep calling to complain. The best programmers are horrible at giving any updates about their projects, but their projects are done on time and of impeccable quality.
If you want to be a highly paid programmer, better learn how to communicate that you're technically inept in a way that gets you promoted.
The non-emergency police number is for all kinds of mundane things like where to drop off my old drugs, finding out when and where their self defense training is, reporting complaints, telling them about a good/bad experience you've had when dealing with the police. It's a non-emergency number and they're civil servants. I'm sure they could relay a message to the fire house.
I rarely need to do sustained typing and find it more useful to type in bursts. My hands cross all over the place because it's faster. While one hand is preoccupied, the other one can be doing something rather than waiting. Maybe if I was transcribing, sustained WPM would be beneficial, but I have to think before I type, and proof-read, and change my words.
I find typing too structured to take good notes. And I can't draw very well on a smooth surface, I need some resistance, like that of paper and a felt-tipped pen.
But battery technology really hasn't evolved at that fast of a pace
An average increase in power density of 10% per year or 2.6x over the past decade.
much of the gains we've seen in how long you can go before needing to recharge a laptop or a phone have more to do with CPUs and other components increasing their efficiency.
Don't forget about everyone being obsessed with "slim". Cellphone is made 25% slimmer while having 25% more capacity in one generation. "QQ, batteries are not getting better fast enough, just look at my cell phone". My cellphone with a case is slimmer than my cellphone without a case from just a few years back, yet the battery storage has gone from 2AH to 3.5AH. Do you have an agenda against battery tech developing too slowly?
From what I've read, the batteries are expected to maintain 100% of their rated power for 10 years, assuming a full rated battery cycle every day. You could replace the battery after 10 years, but it should at least still hold 80% charge and expected to be at 100% and down to 80% after 20 years.
From the Midwest here. High humidity and 70f can feel down right hot. I have trouble sleeping when it's 60f and 100% humidity. Get all sweaty and sticky. It's like you feel cold and hot at the same time. Horrible.
There was a recent study about cal in vs out and given the same food to the same demographic of people, there is an up-to 50% deviation. Someone may absorb 50% more and someone may absorb 50% less. They did this by placing the people in a small isolated room with IR cameras and other sensors, then measured energy entering and leaving the box in all of its forms, including analyzing the bio waste.
I'm glad BTRFS is still coming along. Having only ZFS is annoying for something that should be the norm. I do have some issues with BTRFS fundamentally. A simple example is "btrfs balance". It is fundamentally impossible to do this safely without having to re-write all of the data, which means it's literally impossible to do with a drive more than 50% full. The fact that BTRFS supports this means it is potentially silently corrupting your data at least during this operation. If BTRFS is claiming to be something, then not being that, I can't trust it. There are things that BTRFS do that are dangerous and they don't seem to make sure people are aware or they're not aware themselves.
I'm more excited about the 802.11ax Wi-Fi part of the announcement. I think 802.11ax is going to be game changing for people with latency or many device issues with their wifi. Beam forming in the 2.4ghz is also going to be a god-send, not to mention reduced sensitivity to interference and reduced chance of interfering.
"5G" is currently a collection of potential technologies, each orthogonal to each other, but each amplifying the benefit of the others. There has been "5G" testing in a city near me. The technology used was 3 out of the 5 or so potential techs. I would classify this as more of a "draft 5G". There is a very good chance that the definition of 5G will be set by whomever gets to market first.
If they have 10-20 years of skill invested and suddenly that entire segment of the job market goes away, they can get a job, but they will be starting over from scratch.
Assembly is how programmable computing units work. Once you learn how computing works, learning a new language is easy. A language is just a problem domain specific short-hand for assembly. It only took me a few days to catch up in SQL to specialists who had been doing it for a decade or more. I may not have known all of the details of replication and other specific features, but I was better at writing high performance queries, debugging query performance issues, and architecting schemas. I also have the benefit of not needing to use server traces or query plans to figure out why a query is running slowly. I just pretend that I'm the query planner and based on the information supplied, what decision would I make about combining the sets.
SQL is just short-hand for set manipulation. I just think how I would solve the issue if I was writing a custom program in ASM, then I translate that into SQL. Easy-peasy.
I do this for all languages. Once I understand the problem the language is trying to solve, understanding how the language works is trivial. There is rarely more than one good way to solve a problem. If I can solve that issue myself, then my solution is probably the same as whomever implemented the language. I am coming from the angle of performance. Understanding some languages is not useful because maybe they're just scripting languages where I don't care about performance, just a main goal of quickly clobbering together code to get something done.
Any civilization capable of inter-stellar travel should be able to easily extract a seemingly limitless supply of resources from the host Star. No one in their right mind would even attempt to extract resources from planets. Sorry if science is ruining science fiction.
Based on currently measured measure of error of flatness of the Universe, the Universe is at-least 250x times larger in radius than the Observable Universe, making the Universe at least 60,000x more volumetric than what we can see. That the minimum. We're guessing the Universe is actually perfectly flat, making it infinitely large. If there was FTL transportation, then a potentially infinite number of aliens civilizations, would have the ability to get to us.
Killing another species is easy for any space faring civilization. The technology required to spread through a solar system is barely less than the technology required to create a death-ray reflector around the host star that could destroy life nearly every line-of-sight star system in the host galaxy in only thousands of years. Why leave home?
Resources should never be a reason for aliens to attack. The simplest setup is a Dyson swam of habitats around the host star, and all of the resources needed are siphoned from the star. Pretty much unlimited energy and resources, and impossible for a natural disaster that could wipe out the society. This is probably the best way to fill the Universe. From star to star, setting up trillions of habitats, each capable of supporting millions of humans for hundreds of thousands of years without refueling or new resources, and a near limitless supply of fuel and resources next door.
This is all possible with current technology("just" an issue of scale... heh), we just need vastly more energy and resources, which will take time and a concerted effort. The current recommend way is to start building a Dyson swarm of energy collectors by strip mining Mercury. It's not only close to the Sun, but it has less mass, making it easier to get the swarm off of the planet. And boy do we mean "strip mine the planet". Literally destroying the planet. After some point, we'll have enough energy from the swarm to generate magnetic fields that could form the plasma atmosphere of the Sun in a way that allows us to extract materials. Once we hit this point, access to energy and resources will explode.
Regardless of Google's definition of an "acceptable ad", it will always be a subset of all ads. If you want more control over your ad blocking, install an extension.
Elon said he thought there was about a 50% chance of the Falcon Heavy blowing up on the pad and even less chance of making the payload into orbit. There was a reason there was no payload of real value.
The complexity of modern problems often precludes any one person from fully understanding them
This is because what they call the "best" are not people who are good at solving problems, but people who have made so many mistakes, they can be classified as specialists or highly experienced. Experience doesn't mean you can solve problems, it means you've encountered a lot of problems and probably made a ton of mistakes along the way.
In several of my programming books about architecture and project management, they make a clear distinction between people who can solve problems and those who are experienced. They tend to be very exclusive sets, in the sense that someone masterful at solving problems rarely stays in the same problem space long enough to be considered an expert because they want to solve new problems, not the same old drivel. 6 month later when the predicted problem is noticed, the specailist chalks it up to "tech is hard" and memorizes that "thin provisioning is bad" for this domain. Still doesn't understand what thin provisioning actually is.
People who like solving problems are constantly looking for a challenge. If you hire experts and specialists, this is the opposite. You're not hiring highly talented people, you're hiring highly knowledgeable people. But knowledge is useless without the wisdom to use it.
A highly knowledgeable specialist in Data Warehousing purchases a $200k RAID-10 SAN device with 15k spindles and huge peak throughput numbers. But the wise inexperienced recent college grad points out that the reason their $200k sled of cheetah drives is slow for their application is because the f'n brochure says "optimized for thin provisioning". The specialist has no idea what "thin provisioning" is because it's outside of their domain and ignore that critical bit of info.
Really. This happened to me. I was the college grad and the specialist had recently worked with the like of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft as a consultant to their data warehouse projects, and came highly recommended. It was a joke. The first week I worked along them I was learning a lot. Don't get me wrong, they had an extremely useful set of knowledge and experience and did a very good job explaining the reasoning behind certain decisions and corner cases to watch out for. But for some reason, this person could not apply their own wisdom. They said to watch out for certain situations, yet they led you right into them. They had zero foresight.
This is not the only time I've seen similar situations. I've been included on the design aspect of many projects, and many times I have brought up "what about X, that could be a problem if such-and-such is how the final system is architected". Only to get a canned response like "We're following best practice" or "Here's option A, B, and C if that occurs". Then I respond back with "But if you assume that situation X has occurred, then option A, B, and C are not feasible because of Y and Z". I get brushed off, and guess what happens. What I predicted.
The single biggest issue I see with nearly everyone is their lack of fundamental understanding of the difficulty of any given problem. They don't realize that if something is a CPU hard problem, you might be able to make a space trade-off, but only in certain circumstances and the space trade-off is going to have some scaling factor. And this can be predicted without knowing anything about the implementation because it's a fundamental issue. Many people see technical problems being solved with magic boxes, some of which they created. Instead of understanding, they create simplistic internal models typically expressed as rules of thumb or best practices. When something goes wrong, they chalk it up to "programming is hard" or some drivel, they create some horrible work around to their flawed design, and they get a pat on the back for putting in 80 hours a week on a problem that should never had happened.
Sounds like a good business strategy to keep the foundation viable for decades to come. Find something the world needs, invest into it, then run a charity to buy the products the world needs and give those products away. Sounds like a tax evasion and profit scheme a large charity could benefit from. I am not arguing for or against, I'm just saying the reasoning is non-malicious and very reasonable, but I cannot speak for the intentions or effectiveness.
Toasters are a gateway appliance into toaster ovens. You've never lived until you've cooked a small pizza in a toaster oven in a fraction the time of a full sized oven.
Woosh. No one cares about CO2 levels at a point on Earth. We only care about average levels of the entire Earth. There has not been such a dramatic change on CO2 levels over the past many tens of millions of years. The last time there was even remotely such a change, it was along side a mass extinction event, and even that change was quite mild compared to what is going on now.
And ruin the future Saharan biosphere? You do realize that the Sahara desert turns into a very lush water drenched almost tropical area every 25,000 years or so. It will have even more fresh water than the Great Lakes. Covering it in salt would not be good for the animals further south as they'll no longer have a place to move to when the desert starts to move south as the Earth tilts.