Brilliantly put - thanks! Software development is a world community, with people joining us from every nation in the world that has a credible CS program in any university. Far from being a race to the bottom, salaries remain high, and most devs these days live someplace where the money they spend in turn does wonders for the local economy (and local tax base).
Maybe it's just from high school in the 80s, but I'll always think of my community as "us geeks, who stand together against the jock menace".
Sure, sure, 300 years of technology have it all wrong and a few "recent studies" show one more way for hipsters to be "smarter" than everyone else. (There's no doubt serifs add redundancy, which helps when only fragments of letters remain, but that's difference from text being low-effort in small amounts in poor conditions, vs low effort in large amounts in good conditions.)
To mock your most absurd claim further (your last one): you can make sans-serif letterforms distinguishable, barely, with 5x3 pixels to work with. In the once-common 8x7 pixels fixed-width you can make sans-serif pretty clear and not too horrible - gods know I stared at that for enough years. Go ahead, try to make a serif font work for that! You'll end up with an extra hook here or there that helps a bit, which is to say you'll end up with the clever sans font MS uses in Visual Studio, with a serif on an i here and an l there but that's about it.
The one field that will never vanish (barring the coming of the Singularity) is software development. When your job is "automating stuff that hasn't yet been automated", you're not going to be automated out of a job. Specific technologies, frameworks, and languages fall by the wayside, but if you're not big on continuing self-study, this field is not for you.
Ah, here it is (PDF warning). It was linked from that blog post. Teach me to post before coffee!
On the general subject of badgers, we definitely do see cause for concern. It is at this point well-known among frequent Internet users -- including us -- that the rapid proliferation of "badger, badger, badger" leads -- inevitably -- to mushrooms and, if left unchecked, a very frightening snake, in a vicious cycle with no apparent end. That definitely seems like a concern worthy of the attention of a large UK government agency like DEFRA. We have and offer no official position on the proposed DEFRA response to the badger menace that you outline in your letter.
They actually fight back against takedown notices. They know they're a US site and give 0 fucks what foreign governments think of your content. They have a sense of humor (anyone have the link to their response letter about badgers?). Seems perfect for you.
Not to disagree in principle, but don't confuse "readable" (ability to read for hours without strain) and "legible" (ability to make out each letter at all).
Serif fonts are readable: great for reducing strain from hours of reading under good conditions. That's why they're used for books (except some crazy tech books that get it wrong), newspaper text, magazine text, and so on. Serif fonts are perhaps over-used in blogs, from a desire to look more like a newspaper, I suspect, for text too small for the screen resolution to really make it work, but for eReaders and such that devote all possible space to the text, allowing for larger fonts, it's the obvious choice.
Sans-serif fonts are good for remaining legible under highly difficult conditions. That's why they're often the choice for billboards, for headlines (designed to attract you close enough to read the text), for advertising text (to make the big text easier to read from across the room, and the small print unappealing to read) unless the advertiser's style trumps other font choice concerns. Sans-serif was the only practical choice in the early days of computing, and so some people still see them as "technology fonts" - ooh, it's high tech, it should be sans-serif. Sigh.
Helvetica is a particularly demanding san-serif font. It's sort of the worst of both worlds for screens - it demands high DPI, but it's still less readable than a proper serif font. In a totally Apple move, choosing style over practicality, they pick the font that's famous for being the most stylish (at least among hipsters) over practical concerns (e.g., one-button mice, you're holding it wrong, bendy-phone - all style over practicality).
Let's put this another way. If that is a priority, I doubt I'm going to be interested in working for them.
Clearly they're focusing on the wrong thing, usually brought on by elitism
I've never cared much about a candidate's education, nor has any hiring manager I've worked with, but HR drones do for your first job, because for your first job they have nothing else to filter on. That's a big deal when you're trying to break into the field.
Even more important: the big software companies, which are the best places to start at (long term, career-wise) only actively recruit from schools they see as "top schools". Overt elitism in full force. But your first job isn't about being picky about the day-to-day, it's about launching your career.
While that may be true in some areas; not having a college degree greatly reduces your employment chances, especially in technical fields.
In the field of software development, which is the topic at hand, it only matters for your first job (unless you work for the government). Getting that first job is a bitch, however.
To put it a different way: a CS degree is a sort of crap filter. Succeeding in the field without any degree at all is a better sort of crap filter, because no one cuts you any slack.
But you won't make it far as a dev without some serious self-education, just like the guy with the CS degree won't make it far without some serious forgetting of BS learned about performance of code that runs on a whiteboard (fortunately for the latter, many forget the day after finals).
Of course, most of the matter in the universe is dark matter, but of the part that's "atoms", that's still almost all hydrogen, a bit of helium, and trace impurities like us. The universe seems likely to end in a "big rip" before running out of hydrogen.
Even if you have to lift zero, you're still better off on the ground.
Sure, a solar panel on the ground might do better than one in orbit needing to send the power down. Except in the artic, or at night, or if you can't afford enough ground nearby, or you just think the ground is pretty the way it is and don't want to pave it over with panels.
No power source is "renewable" in that sense, which is why no one ever uses the word in that sense. When people say "renewable energy", they mean to include solar power, i.e., fusion. Given that all (non-dark) matter in the universe is hydrogen, with a few rare impurities here and there, we're unlikely to run out.
It's ambiguous terminology around "cold" fusion. Muon-catalyzed fusion is cold in one sense, but still quite hot in the sense of being radioactive. The current wave of fraudsters claim no dangerous radiation, and offer no explanation for why that should be so.
Given our track record for thinking we've come to a final complete understanding of nature, only to realize we were completely wrong, I'd say it's a pretty egotistical perspective to say that we actually know exactly the "barriers imposed by properties of matter" to a high degree of certainty FOR ALL TIME.
Sure, but that's no reason to believe obvious fraudsters like the cold fusion guys, or supernatural hucksters,
Further, we've never "realized we're completely wrong" since the Enlightenment (Aristotle didn't do science, he just wrote down some stuff people said - no testing). Physics is about predictive models. Newton remains right, within the bounds of the experiments he was able to perform - to depart from Newton, you have to depart from human scale physics.
We know there are no unknown forces that have any effect at human scale, because very accurate experiments have been done to look for them. New physics can only happen at very large scale, or at very small scale, meaning very high energy, or involve new forms of matter that doesn't interact with normal matter.
We will no doubt keep discovering new physics, but it will be ever-farther from human scale!
Climate science could easily be reproducible. A researcher could claim "I have this model that can accurately predict temperature changes". He could the explain the model to others, and others could accurate predict temperature changes. This hasn't happened yet, but it could. One day.
The availability of fresh water is limited only by available power (and he cost thereof), so Lockheed obviously want to profit from peace as well. Those greedy pigs, wanting to profit without a war!
Mankind has never used less power, over all, though regions have faltered. Power = standard of living. As more heavy industry becomes robotic over time, power becomes the primary cost of, well, everything. Efficiency will of course keep getting better, but that just leaves room for more!
It makes sense for PG&E - it's about NIMBY, not cost. They put a lot of effort into how to prevent the sat from becoming an orbital weapon.
Anyhow, give the new companies a chance to bring the price of launches way down - I expect the can shed an order of magnitude off launch costs. Further, it's only a matter of time and robotics until it becomes feasible to drag asteroids into orbit, so that we don't have to lift bulk materials, which won't help photoelectric solar, but solar thermal is dead easy to make, and simple robotics could make the "panels" (pipes and mirrors) in space, dramatically reducing what needs to be lifted. We'll likely have fusion by then, I expect, but you never know.
There's no reasonable solution today for non-fossil baseload generation. I personally have no problem with natural gas, but lots of people do. And we shouldn't abandon coal/gas/ancient nuclear for just one replacement technology, lest the unexpected bite us.
I also really like orbital solar following PG&E's design strategy, but it's still in shadow many hours each day. I doubt we have the tech yet to make the Asimov Orbit practical ("hovering" over the poles, thanks to solar sails), but that's also an eventual option, and might be practical before fusion, if fusion's history is any guide.
No, not the government running it itself, but creating a public utility company to run it. In many places water/sewer is one-to-one with local government, but it's a real company, not a part of the government, just with prices (or sometimes profits) set by the city. If we can do it with plumbing, we can do it with fiber.
>Disaster preppers have a saying, "two is one and one is none," which might also apply to 24x7 base load energy sources that could sustain us beyond the age of fossil fuel. How does a non-nonsensical saying apply to energy? Explain yourself.
Monoculture is bad. Choosing one form of baseload generation to emphasize is bad, because however great it looks on paper, if some horrible problem emerges 10 years later, you're screwed. If all new powerplant construction for decades were split between 2 technologies, and one of them proved problematic, we have a "shipping, tested solution" to migrate to immediately. Expensive, but possible. All of which is even more true when it comes to designs that aren't yet production ready.
> I too was happy to see Skunkworks' Feb 2013 announcement and the recent "we're still making progress" reminder. I was moved by the reaction on Slashdot: a groundswell of "Finally!" and "We're saved!"
How did we move from crazy people sayings into nuclear energy? This is the worst written summary on/. in a very long time.
We need something not-fossil-fuel based that can be used by any city anywhere. (Yeah, yeah, solar and wind have their upsides, but there are plenty of cities where both are nonsense.) Fusion would be wonderful, but we should use "maybe oneday fusion" as any reason not to also pursue sane, modern fission designs. And regardless, we should pursue 2 unrelated technologies, because monoculture is bad.
Insightful list, but you forgot 5. "Crack cocaine". That's a huge factor. The death toll from that drug was vast, much of the peak in crime was due to it, and many people who were otherwise using criminal activities to make ends meet were killed by it. I saw a lot of that first-hand in the 80s, when I delivered pizza for a living. Pizza drivers were a good target for supporting one's drug habit in the early stages.
Sure, which is why "last mile as a public utility" is the best answer. Let the local government deal with a utility, much like water and sewer, that just maintains the pipe, and the cable/phone/isp companies can then buy access to the backend. But that makes too much sense to ever happen.
No one competes because of government-granted monopolies, is the thing. If would could either treat the last mile as a public utility, or at least stop granting specific providers monopolies, the problem would sort itself out in short order.
Slashdot Mirror
Brilliantly put - thanks! Software development is a world community, with people joining us from every nation in the world that has a credible CS program in any university. Far from being a race to the bottom, salaries remain high, and most devs these days live someplace where the money they spend in turn does wonders for the local economy (and local tax base).
Maybe it's just from high school in the 80s, but I'll always think of my community as "us geeks, who stand together against the jock menace".
Sure, sure, 300 years of technology have it all wrong and a few "recent studies" show one more way for hipsters to be "smarter" than everyone else. (There's no doubt serifs add redundancy, which helps when only fragments of letters remain, but that's difference from text being low-effort in small amounts in poor conditions, vs low effort in large amounts in good conditions.)
To mock your most absurd claim further (your last one): you can make sans-serif letterforms distinguishable, barely, with 5x3 pixels to work with. In the once-common 8x7 pixels fixed-width you can make sans-serif pretty clear and not too horrible - gods know I stared at that for enough years. Go ahead, try to make a serif font work for that! You'll end up with an extra hook here or there that helps a bit, which is to say you'll end up with the clever sans font MS uses in Visual Studio, with a serif on an i here and an l there but that's about it.
The one field that will never vanish (barring the coming of the Singularity) is software development. When your job is "automating stuff that hasn't yet been automated", you're not going to be automated out of a job. Specific technologies, frameworks, and languages fall by the wayside, but if you're not big on continuing self-study, this field is not for you.
Ah, here it is (PDF warning). It was linked from that blog post. Teach me to post before coffee!
On the general subject of badgers, we definitely do see cause for concern. It is at this point well-known among frequent Internet users -- including us -- that the rapid
proliferation of "badger, badger, badger" leads -- inevitably -- to mushrooms and, if left unchecked, a very frightening snake, in a vicious cycle with no apparent end. That
definitely seems like a concern worthy of the attention of a large UK government agency like DEFRA. We have and offer no official position on the proposed DEFRA response to the badger menace that you outline in your letter.
nearlyfreespeech.net.
They actually fight back against takedown notices. They know they're a US site and give 0 fucks what foreign governments think of your content. They have a sense of humor (anyone have the link to their response letter about badgers?). Seems perfect for you.
Not to disagree in principle, but don't confuse "readable" (ability to read for hours without strain) and "legible" (ability to make out each letter at all).
Serif fonts are readable: great for reducing strain from hours of reading under good conditions. That's why they're used for books (except some crazy tech books that get it wrong), newspaper text, magazine text, and so on. Serif fonts are perhaps over-used in blogs, from a desire to look more like a newspaper, I suspect, for text too small for the screen resolution to really make it work, but for eReaders and such that devote all possible space to the text, allowing for larger fonts, it's the obvious choice.
Sans-serif fonts are good for remaining legible under highly difficult conditions. That's why they're often the choice for billboards, for headlines (designed to attract you close enough to read the text), for advertising text (to make the big text easier to read from across the room, and the small print unappealing to read) unless the advertiser's style trumps other font choice concerns. Sans-serif was the only practical choice in the early days of computing, and so some people still see them as "technology fonts" - ooh, it's high tech, it should be sans-serif. Sigh.
Helvetica is a particularly demanding san-serif font. It's sort of the worst of both worlds for screens - it demands high DPI, but it's still less readable than a proper serif font. In a totally Apple move, choosing style over practicality, they pick the font that's famous for being the most stylish (at least among hipsters) over practical concerns (e.g., one-button mice, you're holding it wrong, bendy-phone - all style over practicality).
Let's put this another way. If that is a priority, I doubt I'm going to be interested in working for them.
Clearly they're focusing on the wrong thing, usually brought on by elitism
I've never cared much about a candidate's education, nor has any hiring manager I've worked with, but HR drones do for your first job, because for your first job they have nothing else to filter on. That's a big deal when you're trying to break into the field.
Even more important: the big software companies, which are the best places to start at (long term, career-wise) only actively recruit from schools they see as "top schools". Overt elitism in full force. But your first job isn't about being picky about the day-to-day, it's about launching your career.
While that may be true in some areas; not having a college degree greatly reduces your employment chances, especially in technical fields.
In the field of software development, which is the topic at hand, it only matters for your first job (unless you work for the government). Getting that first job is a bitch, however.
To put it a different way: a CS degree is a sort of crap filter. Succeeding in the field without any degree at all is a better sort of crap filter, because no one cuts you any slack.
But you won't make it far as a dev without some serious self-education, just like the guy with the CS degree won't make it far without some serious forgetting of BS learned about performance of code that runs on a whiteboard (fortunately for the latter, many forget the day after finals).
Of course, most of the matter in the universe is dark matter, but of the part that's "atoms", that's still almost all hydrogen, a bit of helium, and trace impurities like us. The universe seems likely to end in a "big rip" before running out of hydrogen.
Even if you have to lift zero, you're still better off on the ground.
Sure, a solar panel on the ground might do better than one in orbit needing to send the power down. Except in the artic, or at night, or if you can't afford enough ground nearby, or you just think the ground is pretty the way it is and don't want to pave it over with panels.
No power source is "renewable" in that sense, which is why no one ever uses the word in that sense. When people say "renewable energy", they mean to include solar power, i.e., fusion. Given that all (non-dark) matter in the universe is hydrogen, with a few rare impurities here and there, we're unlikely to run out.
It's ambiguous terminology around "cold" fusion. Muon-catalyzed fusion is cold in one sense, but still quite hot in the sense of being radioactive. The current wave of fraudsters claim no dangerous radiation, and offer no explanation for why that should be so.
Given our track record for thinking we've come to a final complete understanding of nature, only to realize we were completely wrong, I'd say it's a pretty egotistical perspective to say that we actually know exactly the "barriers imposed by properties of matter" to a high degree of certainty FOR ALL TIME.
Sure, but that's no reason to believe obvious fraudsters like the cold fusion guys, or supernatural hucksters,
Further, we've never "realized we're completely wrong" since the Enlightenment (Aristotle didn't do science, he just wrote down some stuff people said - no testing). Physics is about predictive models. Newton remains right, within the bounds of the experiments he was able to perform - to depart from Newton, you have to depart from human scale physics.
We know there are no unknown forces that have any effect at human scale, because very accurate experiments have been done to look for them. New physics can only happen at very large scale, or at very small scale, meaning very high energy, or involve new forms of matter that doesn't interact with normal matter.
We will no doubt keep discovering new physics, but it will be ever-farther from human scale!
Climate science could easily be reproducible. A researcher could claim "I have this model that can accurately predict temperature changes". He could the explain the model to others, and others could accurate predict temperature changes. This hasn't happened yet, but it could. One day.
The availability of fresh water is limited only by available power (and he cost thereof), so Lockheed obviously want to profit from peace as well. Those greedy pigs, wanting to profit without a war!
Mankind has never used less power, over all, though regions have faltered. Power = standard of living. As more heavy industry becomes robotic over time, power becomes the primary cost of, well, everything. Efficiency will of course keep getting better, but that just leaves room for more!
It makes sense for PG&E - it's about NIMBY, not cost. They put a lot of effort into how to prevent the sat from becoming an orbital weapon.
Anyhow, give the new companies a chance to bring the price of launches way down - I expect the can shed an order of magnitude off launch costs. Further, it's only a matter of time and robotics until it becomes feasible to drag asteroids into orbit, so that we don't have to lift bulk materials, which won't help photoelectric solar, but solar thermal is dead easy to make, and simple robotics could make the "panels" (pipes and mirrors) in space, dramatically reducing what needs to be lifted. We'll likely have fusion by then, I expect, but you never know.
There's no reasonable solution today for non-fossil baseload generation. I personally have no problem with natural gas, but lots of people do. And we shouldn't abandon coal/gas/ancient nuclear for just one replacement technology, lest the unexpected bite us.
I also really like orbital solar following PG&E's design strategy, but it's still in shadow many hours each day. I doubt we have the tech yet to make the Asimov Orbit practical ("hovering" over the poles, thanks to solar sails), but that's also an eventual option, and might be practical before fusion, if fusion's history is any guide.
No, not the government running it itself, but creating a public utility company to run it. In many places water/sewer is one-to-one with local government, but it's a real company, not a part of the government, just with prices (or sometimes profits) set by the city. If we can do it with plumbing, we can do it with fiber.
>Disaster preppers have a saying, "two is one and one is none," which might also apply to 24x7 base load energy sources that could sustain us beyond the age of fossil fuel.
How does a non-nonsensical saying apply to energy? Explain yourself.
Monoculture is bad. Choosing one form of baseload generation to emphasize is bad, because however great it looks on paper, if some horrible problem emerges 10 years later, you're screwed. If all new powerplant construction for decades were split between 2 technologies, and one of them proved problematic, we have a "shipping, tested solution" to migrate to immediately. Expensive, but possible. All of which is even more true when it comes to designs that aren't yet production ready.
> I too was happy to see Skunkworks' Feb 2013 announcement and the recent "we're still making progress" reminder. I was moved by the reaction on Slashdot: a groundswell of "Finally!" and "We're saved!"
How did we move from crazy people sayings into nuclear energy? This is the worst written summary on /. in a very long time.
We need something not-fossil-fuel based that can be used by any city anywhere. (Yeah, yeah, solar and wind have their upsides, but there are plenty of cities where both are nonsense.) Fusion would be wonderful, but we should use "maybe oneday fusion" as any reason not to also pursue sane, modern fission designs. And regardless, we should pursue 2 unrelated technologies, because monoculture is bad.
Insightful list, but you forgot 5. "Crack cocaine". That's a huge factor. The death toll from that drug was vast, much of the peak in crime was due to it, and many people who were otherwise using criminal activities to make ends meet were killed by it. I saw a lot of that first-hand in the 80s, when I delivered pizza for a living. Pizza drivers were a good target for supporting one's drug habit in the early stages.
Sure, which is why "last mile as a public utility" is the best answer. Let the local government deal with a utility, much like water and sewer, that just maintains the pipe, and the cable/phone/isp companies can then buy access to the backend. But that makes too much sense to ever happen.
No, there's a movie about it: the smart rats all escaped to some farm. They're fine.
No one competes because of government-granted monopolies, is the thing. If would could either treat the last mile as a public utility, or at least stop granting specific providers monopolies, the problem would sort itself out in short order.