Many other comments make the case that more diverse experience will make you better. And they are damn right.
However, what will really make you better a better programmer is having to fix your own code 15 years after you made it while having to keep it backwards compatible. The best programmers have that experience and write code knowing that they probably will be held responsible for it years in the future.
That's in sharp contrast with what some others here say; they have obtained a lot of experience by switching jobs often. People that do that may very well be the best programmer ever, but knowing they can just go work somewhere else next month will make them behave much less responsible w.r.t. the futureproofness of the code. They may know better, but acting accordingly is a different matter entirely.
That used to be very true, but it is increasingly becoming less true as Chinese wages are rising and regulation is increasing while automation is becoming more accessible. Production is increasingly moving back to the US and Europe and these tariffs are only going to speed that up. This may end up being a major problem for China. Or it may not because they own half of Africa, are sitting on a ridiculous pile of cash and they are increasingly selling their stuff to their own people.
These tariffs are not here for any good reason, though. They will probably disrupt US markets more than Chinese markets.
Apple never really led the way. They've always mostly been busy demonstrating that it's much faster and easier to create a closed ecosystem than an open one. Good for them.
Trees use photosynthesis to obtain the required energy for converting CO2 into C. And sadly, photosynthesis is wildly inefficient. Unfortunately, even PV-based solutions will outperform them easily. I'm afraid the inefficiency of photosynthesis will in the long term prove to be a major risk for the survival of trees:|
I don't have a clue and I didn't RTFA either, but I'm still going to comment.
In my brain, smells can activate memories that have been dormant for ages. Along with these memories, strong feelings can come up too. Usually nice feelings. This is much more so with scent than with the other senses (at least to me). I think this can taint any research on the physical effects of such smells tremendously.
I can imagine this to play less of a role in mice; they likely have less complex memories and less memories. Also it is probably easy to find a bunch of mice that have never smelled lavender before and thus do not have any memories attached.
That's a bit of an odd way to state this; my guess it that they just didn't bother to look any ealier. I'm pretty sure that just about anybody looking at their shit through a microscope in the 1990s would have been able to find plastic in there as well. Probably people professionally looking at shit have encountered endless heaps of plastic in shit already. No surprises here whatsoever.
Component size has nothing to do with this; it's about component integration. Repairability requires components that can be replaced independently from each other. ICs are the primary example of grouping components. A reasonable level of repairability requires limiting integration of components and often even requires the introduction of mechanical connectors over plain old soldering or glue. I think considering ICs different is super arbitrary; they're just components effectively glued together for economic reasons, just like most solutions that negatively affect repairability. Why would ICs be ok but would we complain about other integrated components just because they happen to be large enough to be visible to the naked eye? Component size is a super arbitrary criterium AFAIC.
(...) it would be in the best interest of politics to enforce that things have to be repairable (...)
With rules like that, it would have been quite difficult to introduce the IC. How do you repair an IC?! The primary reason these days that things are becoming increasingly difficult to repair, is further integration and minimization. While in some very specific cases (I'm thinking about batteries or exposed/vulnerable parts like cameras and screens), it may make sense to be able to repair things, in general it does not make sense; repairability makes things more expensive to make, it makes parts larger and therefore it requires more materials and thus is bad for the environment.
If we're going to enforce anything, let's do it specifically for things that make sense. But enforcing that "things" have to be "repairable" would not be in anybody's advantage.
Dead insects don't decay within a year. In fact, many may take much longer than a few years, some parts effectively not decaying at all. So the effect of any missing insects quickly adds up over the years. However, most insects eat other living things that are probably just as effective at being a carbon sink when they're not eaten by insects.
Therefore, I'd say the missing insects don't really have a big direct effect. It might just as well be the other way around; insects help organic matter decay. They play an important role in freeing up CO2 from dead material. So the effect might just as well be the opposite of what you think it'd be.
That's only in some countries where languages with so many odd characters are spoken that they cannot easily switch to a normal US English layout like most Europeans do.
Boy. Forgive my English, but it's just that I'm one of the first generation of humans that's in the process merging with the native English people that followed a different migratory path and now dominate the culture of our planet:p If feel as if this may be very well be the final big merger of human families on this planet, though.
I keep finding this a weird thing to say; obviously, us and Neanderthals procreated with great success. Therefore we have been the same species, we just followed different migratory paths at different times and later merged again (probably with all kinds of conflicts because that's human nature). "Humans having sex with Neanderthals" thus makes no sense. It's as odd as saying "humans having sex with Caucasians". It makes no sense because we are are the same species. We may not all be Neanderthals like we're not all Caucasian or Asian but we probably all are Congoid. And we definitely are all humans. And so were Neanderthals. Let's stop this weird display phrenology and just call Neanderthals what they were: an interesting group of pretty plain humans.
Proportional to what? You probably mean proportional to the general population. For tech companies that should scare the hell out of anyone since what graduates from university is not a proportional representation of the general population at all....
the people who complain about excessive political correctness
You bet. Here we are. Oh no we aren't. Because who's complaining about excessive political correctness in this regard? I don't think anybody is. Because the code is not about "political correctness". It is about something much simpler: treating people with respect. Nobody is challenging that. Nobody on the LKML that feels uncomfortable about this code complains about excessive political correctness. What is being complained about is excessive Code of Conduct. The Code of Conduct does not add anything - it is actually narrower than what the code used to be - "Be excellent to each other" - while it does explicitly include a list of examples of what NOT to do. A list so obvious that it can only be meant for people that are REALLY stupid. At the same time it is oddly specific. That makes it have an extremely passive-aggressive tone and it is very difficult NOT to read as an accusation and insult addressed at those it is about, even if it was never meant to be!
On top of that, this code fails to address the problem, which has nothing to do with a lack of a proper code. The code was perfectly clear but it simply was ignored, even by Linus himself. He has now made the change, which should be more than enough to start holding other people to "Be excellent to each other". No new code needed for that. Because the code was fine already.
And if now that we could finally start uphold the code and found it lacks in areas, then that would have been a perfect reason to update it from within the community. But we didn't even try and immediately came up with a CoC created by an "outsider" that clearly lacks support from those that should uphold it, even if those people totally agree on what it says. It's all so counterproductive...
Please provide the calculation you've used to substantiate "It's not going to be worth it".
I'm pretty sure it's going to be massively expensive, but whether it is worth it is mostly going to depend on how much stuff we want to launch into space, which is going to depend on launch costs etc. etc. etc.
We simply cannot know this. But history has shown us that even the most ridiculous exploration and colonization usually pays off in the long run. There's no reason to assume the moon is going to be any different.
Also, once again, let's not forget that a kilogram of just about anything is worth at least $1240 in low earth orbit (at current Falcon 9 launch prices). The higher up you go, the more valuable it gets.
Could be. Except for one thing: everything is in a much shallower gravity well. It costs about 6 times less energy to get something out of Earth's gravity well from the moon than it takes from the surface of the Earth. Since you also have to take quite a bit of fuel to launch things into space, the practical difference is significantly higher, perhaps 10s or even hundreds of times higher (disclaimer: total guess). A moon-based shop for water or rocket fuel (=water split in half) would therefore economically be a no-brainer. Everybody that would want to leave Earths gravity well would buy your stuff.
A major additional advantage in the long run would be that it is much easier to launch stuff from the moon using a rail gun or space elevator, which could finally provide electrically powered launches, which would be a total game-changer.
Mining the moon is an economically sound no-brainer.
I don't think it's necessary for a popular solution. It's just easier to get there because you don't need to talk to other people about APIs, you don't need to write an RFC and you don't get a barrier for your users to go elsewhere.
But it's not necessary. Just look at the success of http, smtp, dns etc.
It wouldn't be. Signal is merely a stopgap. It's much better than Whatsapp, but it's still a central - and thus vulnerable - solution. What we need is a distributed solution. A set of protocols and a shitload of implementations. That's how the Internet was meant to be and there's no reason whatsoever this approach cannot work for "social" stuff. I hope the guy dumps a few billion into that and takes down Facebook, Twitter, Signal, Telegram, Instagram, Soundcloud and all other centralized crap along the way.
(...) LLVM Code of Conduct and its decision to participate in this year's Outreachy program to encourage women and other minority groups to get involved with free software development (...)
There's nothing in the Contributor Convenant that says anything about the do's and don'ts of gender discrimination, which a "program to encourage women" clearly is. The Contributor Convenant does not have a problem whatsoever with discrimination, as long as it is brought in a happy way...
Note that there's a legal basis allowing gender discrimination in (most countries of?) Europe, as long as the discriminated gender is not men. But does a similar thing exist in the USA?
Your comment made me look into the Contributor Convenant. This is obviously not going to work in highly complex real contributor-driven projects like Linux.
In the interest of fostering an open and welcoming environment, we as contributors and maintainers pledge to making participation in our project and our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.
Most of these are perfectly applicable. But "level of experience" in combination with a not strictly defined "harassment-free experience" is just not going to work here. The harassment-free version of "Your code is utter crap. Please get an education before contacting us again." is going to take much longer to write than the quick version. I can see another problem with religion; many religions are not a "harassment-free experience" to begin with, but that's probably not what's going to be the problem here.
(...) Apple invented the touchscreen phone as we know it. (...)
No they didn't. They did something else entirely, but it's so invisible that apparently nobody thinks of it. We had touchscreen smartphones well before the iPhone came out. And if you leave out the phone, we already had a comparable feature set back in 2000 with devices like the Sony Clie. None of that was revolutionary. What WAS revolutionary about the iPhone was the introduction of App Store (with the iPhone 3G). That's what made the iPhone the success it is and created the ecosystem needed to sustain it. They also introduced the iPhone at exactly the right time w.r.t. the state of battery, touchscreen and networking technology and Internet penetration. So if you're going to give credit to Apple for their inventions (which they deserve - don't get me wrong), let's do it for the right reasons: The App Store and perfect timing. The rest is just high-quality copy-catting.
Slashdot Mirror
Many other comments make the case that more diverse experience will make you better. And they are damn right.
However, what will really make you better a better programmer is having to fix your own code 15 years after you made it while having to keep it backwards compatible. The best programmers have that experience and write code knowing that they probably will be held responsible for it years in the future.
That's in sharp contrast with what some others here say; they have obtained a lot of experience by switching jobs often. People that do that may very well be the best programmer ever, but knowing they can just go work somewhere else next month will make them behave much less responsible w.r.t. the futureproofness of the code. They may know better, but acting accordingly is a different matter entirely.
That used to be very true, but it is increasingly becoming less true as Chinese wages are rising and regulation is increasing while automation is becoming more accessible. Production is increasingly moving back to the US and Europe and these tariffs are only going to speed that up. This may end up being a major problem for China. Or it may not because they own half of Africa, are sitting on a ridiculous pile of cash and they are increasingly selling their stuff to their own people.
These tariffs are not here for any good reason, though. They will probably disrupt US markets more than Chinese markets.
Apple never really led the way. They've always mostly been busy demonstrating that it's much faster and easier to create a closed ecosystem than an open one. Good for them.
Trees use photosynthesis to obtain the required energy for converting CO2 into C. And sadly, photosynthesis is wildly inefficient. Unfortunately, even PV-based solutions will outperform them easily. I'm afraid the inefficiency of photosynthesis will in the long term prove to be a major risk for the survival of trees :|
I don't have a clue and I didn't RTFA either, but I'm still going to comment.
In my brain, smells can activate memories that have been dormant for ages. Along with these memories, strong feelings can come up too. Usually nice feelings. This is much more so with scent than with the other senses (at least to me). I think this can taint any research on the physical effects of such smells tremendously.
I can imagine this to play less of a role in mice; they likely have less complex memories and less memories. Also it is probably easy to find a bunch of mice that have never smelled lavender before and thus do not have any memories attached.
But I'm just speculating :)
(...) found for the first time (...)
That's a bit of an odd way to state this; my guess it that they just didn't bother to look any ealier. I'm pretty sure that just about anybody looking at their shit through a microscope in the 1990s would have been able to find plastic in there as well. Probably people professionally looking at shit have encountered endless heaps of plastic in shit already. No surprises here whatsoever.
Nor would you need to insulate yourself as the temperature here ranges between 68 degrees Fahrenheit and 86 degrees Fahrenheit (...)
I highly doubt that; temperatures in the Fahrenheit-range are found only in a handful of territories on Venus' planetary neighbor.
Component size has nothing to do with this; it's about component integration. Repairability requires components that can be replaced independently from each other. ICs are the primary example of grouping components. A reasonable level of repairability requires limiting integration of components and often even requires the introduction of mechanical connectors over plain old soldering or glue. I think considering ICs different is super arbitrary; they're just components effectively glued together for economic reasons, just like most solutions that negatively affect repairability. Why would ICs be ok but would we complain about other integrated components just because they happen to be large enough to be visible to the naked eye? Component size is a super arbitrary criterium AFAIC.
(...) it would be in the best interest of politics to enforce that things have to be repairable (...)
With rules like that, it would have been quite difficult to introduce the IC. How do you repair an IC?! The primary reason these days that things are becoming increasingly difficult to repair, is further integration and minimization. While in some very specific cases (I'm thinking about batteries or exposed/vulnerable parts like cameras and screens), it may make sense to be able to repair things, in general it does not make sense; repairability makes things more expensive to make, it makes parts larger and therefore it requires more materials and thus is bad for the environment.
If we're going to enforce anything, let's do it specifically for things that make sense. But enforcing that "things" have to be "repairable" would not be in anybody's advantage.
Dead insects don't decay within a year. In fact, many may take much longer than a few years, some parts effectively not decaying at all. So the effect of any missing insects quickly adds up over the years. However, most insects eat other living things that are probably just as effective at being a carbon sink when they're not eaten by insects.
Therefore, I'd say the missing insects don't really have a big direct effect. It might just as well be the other way around; insects help organic matter decay. They play an important role in freeing up CO2 from dead material. So the effect might just as well be the opposite of what you think it'd be.
That's only in some countries where languages with so many odd characters are spoken that they cannot easily switch to a normal US English layout like most Europeans do.
A huge increase in meat-eating would probably be one of the best approaches to solving our climate problems once and for all.
Boy. Forgive my English, but it's just that I'm one of the first generation of humans that's in the process merging with the native English people that followed a different migratory path and now dominate the culture of our planet:p If feel as if this may be very well be the final big merger of human families on this planet, though.
I keep finding this a weird thing to say; obviously, us and Neanderthals procreated with great success. Therefore we have been the same species, we just followed different migratory paths at different times and later merged again (probably with all kinds of conflicts because that's human nature). "Humans having sex with Neanderthals" thus makes no sense. It's as odd as saying "humans having sex with Caucasians". It makes no sense because we are are the same species. We may not all be Neanderthals like we're not all Caucasian or Asian but we probably all are Congoid. And we definitely are all humans. And so were Neanderthals. Let's stop this weird display phrenology and just call Neanderthals what they were: an interesting group of pretty plain humans.
(Or am I missing something here?)
Proportional to what? You probably mean proportional to the general population. For tech companies that should scare the hell out of anyone since what graduates from university is not a proportional representation of the general population at all....
I see Google has also learned from the Nghia Hoang Pho situation what the value of casually running a malware collection service is :p
the people who complain about excessive political correctness
You bet. Here we are. Oh no we aren't. Because who's complaining about excessive political correctness in this regard? I don't think anybody is. Because the code is not about "political correctness". It is about something much simpler: treating people with respect. Nobody is challenging that. Nobody on the LKML that feels uncomfortable about this code complains about excessive political correctness. What is being complained about is excessive Code of Conduct. The Code of Conduct does not add anything - it is actually narrower than what the code used to be - "Be excellent to each other" - while it does explicitly include a list of examples of what NOT to do. A list so obvious that it can only be meant for people that are REALLY stupid. At the same time it is oddly specific. That makes it have an extremely passive-aggressive tone and it is very difficult NOT to read as an accusation and insult addressed at those it is about, even if it was never meant to be!
On top of that, this code fails to address the problem, which has nothing to do with a lack of a proper code. The code was perfectly clear but it simply was ignored, even by Linus himself. He has now made the change, which should be more than enough to start holding other people to "Be excellent to each other". No new code needed for that. Because the code was fine already.
And if now that we could finally start uphold the code and found it lacks in areas, then that would have been a perfect reason to update it from within the community. But we didn't even try and immediately came up with a CoC created by an "outsider" that clearly lacks support from those that should uphold it, even if those people totally agree on what it says. It's all so counterproductive...
Please provide the calculation you've used to substantiate "It's not going to be worth it".
I'm pretty sure it's going to be massively expensive, but whether it is worth it is mostly going to depend on how much stuff we want to launch into space, which is going to depend on launch costs etc. etc. etc.
We simply cannot know this. But history has shown us that even the most ridiculous exploration and colonization usually pays off in the long run. There's no reason to assume the moon is going to be any different.
Also, once again, let's not forget that a kilogram of just about anything is worth at least $1240 in low earth orbit (at current Falcon 9 launch prices). The higher up you go, the more valuable it gets.
(I should have included this obligatory xkcd-reference https://xkcd.com/681/ )
Could be. Except for one thing: everything is in a much shallower gravity well. It costs about 6 times less energy to get something out of Earth's gravity well from the moon than it takes from the surface of the Earth. Since you also have to take quite a bit of fuel to launch things into space, the practical difference is significantly higher, perhaps 10s or even hundreds of times higher (disclaimer: total guess). A moon-based shop for water or rocket fuel (=water split in half) would therefore economically be a no-brainer. Everybody that would want to leave Earths gravity well would buy your stuff.
A major additional advantage in the long run would be that it is much easier to launch stuff from the moon using a rail gun or space elevator, which could finally provide electrically powered launches, which would be a total game-changer.
Mining the moon is an economically sound no-brainer.
I don't think it's necessary for a popular solution. It's just easier to get there because you don't need to talk to other people about APIs, you don't need to write an RFC and you don't get a barrier for your users to go elsewhere.
But it's not necessary. Just look at the success of http, smtp, dns etc.
It wouldn't be. Signal is merely a stopgap. It's much better than Whatsapp, but it's still a central - and thus vulnerable - solution. What we need is a distributed solution. A set of protocols and a shitload of implementations. That's how the Internet was meant to be and there's no reason whatsoever this approach cannot work for "social" stuff. I hope the guy dumps a few billion into that and takes down Facebook, Twitter, Signal, Telegram, Instagram, Soundcloud and all other centralized crap along the way.
(...) LLVM Code of Conduct and its decision to participate in this year's Outreachy program to encourage women and other minority groups to get involved with free software development (...)
There's nothing in the Contributor Convenant that says anything about the do's and don'ts of gender discrimination, which a "program to encourage women" clearly is. The Contributor Convenant does not have a problem whatsoever with discrimination, as long as it is brought in a happy way ...
Note that there's a legal basis allowing gender discrimination in (most countries of?) Europe, as long as the discriminated gender is not men. But does a similar thing exist in the USA?
Your comment made me look into the Contributor Convenant. This is obviously not going to work in highly complex real contributor-driven projects like Linux.
In the interest of fostering an open and welcoming environment, we as
contributors and maintainers pledge to making participation in our project and
our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body
size, disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression,
level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal
appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.
Most of these are perfectly applicable. But "level of experience" in combination with a not strictly defined "harassment-free experience" is just not going to work here. The harassment-free version of "Your code is utter crap. Please get an education before contacting us again." is going to take much longer to write than the quick version. I can see another problem with religion; many religions are not a "harassment-free experience" to begin with, but that's probably not what's going to be the problem here.
(...) Apple invented the touchscreen phone as we know it. (...)
No they didn't. They did something else entirely, but it's so invisible that apparently nobody thinks of it. We had touchscreen smartphones well before the iPhone came out. And if you leave out the phone, we already had a comparable feature set back in 2000 with devices like the Sony Clie. None of that was revolutionary. What WAS revolutionary about the iPhone was the introduction of App Store (with the iPhone 3G). That's what made the iPhone the success it is and created the ecosystem needed to sustain it. They also introduced the iPhone at exactly the right time w.r.t. the state of battery, touchscreen and networking technology and Internet penetration. So if you're going to give credit to Apple for their inventions (which they deserve - don't get me wrong), let's do it for the right reasons: The App Store and perfect timing. The rest is just high-quality copy-catting.