>> most the grass feed cows are raised in fields that used to be rain forests in Brazil
> Evidence for that rather large claim?
While most cows in Brazil are grass-fed, about half are raised on former rainforest:
"Nearly 50% of Brazilian livestock are raised in fields that used to be rainforest."[0,1]
"Most cows in Brazil, the world’s largest beef exporter, are grass-fed."[2]
See also:
How beef demand is accelerating the Amazon’s deforestation and climate peril[3]:
> Cattle ranchers in the Brazilian Amazon — the storied rainforest that produces oxygen for the world and modulates climate — are aggressively expanding their herds and willing to clear-cut the forest and burn what’s left to make way for pastures. As a result, they’ve become the single biggest driver of the Amazon’s deforestation, causing about 80 percent of it, according to the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.
Cattle Ranching in the Amazon Region[4]:
> Cattle ranching is the largest driver of deforestation in every Amazon country, accounting for 80% of current deforestation rates. Amazon Brazil is home to approximately 200 million head of cattle, and is the largest exporter in the world, supplying about one quarter of the global market. Low input cost and easy transportation in rural areas make ranching an attractive economic activity in the forest frontier; low yields and cheap land encourage expansion and deforestation. Approximately 450,000 square kilometers of deforested Amazon in Brazil are now in cattle pasture. Cattle ranching and soy cultivation are often linked as soy replaces cattle pasture, pushing farmers farther into the Amazon.
With the right algebra (PGA2D which adds an additional dimension whose unit vector squares to 0), rigid body physics simulation with collision detection/response can be implemented in < 50 lines of Javascript: https://bivector.net/PGADYN.html
Basically in PGA2D, rotations, angular velocity/acceleration, torque etc automatically get handled by geometric product of multivectors. The additional dimension makes all rotations centered at origin, which makes them compose much more nicely.
people want to copy google because 1) they like smart, complex things 2) they want to work on complex things.
nobody got an award and praise for choosing the simplest thing that could work, doing that and building a service that is so reliable that nobody knows it actually exists (ie no problems or incidents).
also, the tragedy of software development is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease and that pyromaniacs are working as firefighters. and are rewarded and promoted based on their firefighting skills.
in contrast a well build house, with proper fire retardant materials, sprinkler systems and proper ventilation is meh and not exciting.
I worked in the ad industry for years and made good money doing it. I now work, unpaid, on a FOSS passion project.
What I would advise is treating each job as a college course which you also happen to be paid for. For me, this meant not allowing myself to become emotionally invested in the work, taking good notes about what I learned each day, and looking for a new job (typically with a raise) once those notes were sparse for too long.
There's a practice in radical acceptance I came up with a few years ago that changed my life completely. I want help in clarifying these instructions. Comments with example triggers, attempts to craft non-judgmental responses, and clarification of instructions would be very helpful!
----------------
I call this a Self-Healing Reality-Untangling Gesture (SHRUG). Here's what I did:
1) Choose to believe it's possible to joyfully abandon all judgment.
2) Choose to do so for some internally/intrinsically motivating reason(s). I chose to do it for science and for learning Nonviolent Communication.
3) Every time one hears, thinks, or reads a word with an opposite (the "trigger word", do this:
While performing a gesture that conveys uncertainty (I literally shrugged my shoulders while putting my hand out, palms up), say something following this speech pattern: "meh...<trigger word>...<opposite of trigger word>...meh...<reframing of what was said in terms of descriptive observations without words with opposites/judgment, related non-blaming/judgmental feelings coming up related to the observations, and the underlying human needs being expressed through the feelings>...<request for confirmation that the reframing was accurate>."
Notes:
A) It's very helpful to familiarize yourself with Nonviolent Communication and to identify feelings and needs. And if not, carrying around a list of feelings and needs (I find longer lists to be more useful to gain deeper nuance...if anxiety arises around long lists, sit and breathe through it...take time and patience with the process...learning new things often comes with initial frustrations and anxieties until one gets comfortable with learning new things without judgment/expectations. In a sense, discomfort from the long lists is good fortune because it gives an immediate thingt o practice with: "meh...long...short...meh...this human body is complex. I feel uncomfortable with not knowing what some of these words even mean and with taking time to process myself this way. I'm needing patience, to learn more about my feelings and needs, and self-compassion. This is definitely meeting my need for challenge and I can learn to enjoy the process, which can help meet my need for effectiveness in the context of learning."
B) If one recalls a time in the past when one encountered a trigger and didn't SHRUG, then immediately SHRUG
C) Maybe this can be done silently in the head or through writing, and I did it aloud. My thinking around this is the brain gets to process the SHRUG through both the initial thinking as well as through hearing it being spoken. Could maybe string all the things together, so writing it, internally speaking it, and externally speaking it.
D) Let people know you're doing this, unless you're wanting to also learn how to navigate people offending themselves because the initial part of the process involves dismissal of something they've said.
Another example trigger phrase: "That site's UX is so cool!"
Response: "meh... cool...uncool...meh... I'm noticing novel design patterns that are the opposite of dark patterns and feel grateful someone's out there meeting the need for mindfulness through their designs."
Another example: "I don't like seafood. "
Response: shrug "meh...like...dislike...I can learn to enjoy eating food that nourishes this body"
I'm noticing there may be a more nuanced and broader description of the shrug than documented here, based on my examples. I'd love help trying to tease it out. If people share examples of judgments they're wanting to let go of, I'm happy to give my own reframings to help clarify the general pattern. Coming up with really clear instructions most people can understand is something I want to do in the coming days ago I can really spread this thing around.
Do this every day for a month and then let me know what effects the process has had. I'm the only person I know who's done this and it was incredibly transformative. Especially helpful in accepting things a person under the age of 3 might do. I don't want to go into detail about the effects I experienced because I'm wanting to see what happens without setting expectations.
Feel free to reach out to me through social media, email, and/or phone for support.
>>> "Being agile means having no long term plan."
I believe the angst against agile is it doesn't have a definitive viewpoint but is a reaction against what it sees as the evils of waterfall. Without definite processes, we get scrum.
From my viewpoint, the issue is that scrum has a flawed understanding of Toyota Kaizen which it based itself on. Yes, in a Toyota factory, team members are expected to be able to perform any tasks required on the assembly line. But, the architecture Toyota uses, to enable this agility is limiting. For example, Toyota's TNGA architecture says there will only be five modular platforms to choose from; instead of the 100+ choices in the past [1]. Furthermore, Toyota is known for "boring" but reliable cars. It avoids all bleeding edge technology and prefers to make incremental improvements to its existing tech stack. That is to enable interchangeable workers; Toyota limits its car platforms and standardizes "cross cutting concerns".
Toyota Kaizen is diametrically opposite of agile in IT. Toyota standardizes, simplifies, and makes incremental changes to its tech stack. Agile in IT means ditching today's platforms/architecture/frameworks/toolsets and jumping on the latest fad du jour.
asktom.oracle.com --> I fully free Q&A portal where you can ask Oracle Database employees for help. Furthermore, it offers regular "Office Hours" live webinars and an entire course of learning Oracle Database: https://asktom.oracle.com/databases-for-developers.htm
>"My favorite is always the billion dollar mistake of having null in the language. And since JavaScript has both null and undefined, it's the two billion dollar mistake." -Anders Hejlsberg
>"It is by far the most problematic part of language design. And it's a single value that -- ha ha ha ha -- that if only that wasn't there, imagine all the problems we wouldn't have, right? If type systems were designed that way. And some type systems are, and some type systems are getting there, but boy, trying to retrofit that on top of a type system that has null in the first place is quite an undertaking." -Anders Hejlsberg
The Union of Concerned Scientists has posted a great blog series "Role of Regulation in Nuclear Plant Safety." It's written by Dave Lochbaum, a degreed nuclear engineer who worked at American nuclear plants for 17 years. I think it's a better overview of NRC action and plant safety than any one incident. I've collected all the links here.
They have been very transparent what the strategy is. Long term, since this won’t go away in just a few months the restrictions must be sustainable. Take into account the overall health and well-being of the people, don’t worry only about COVID-19. Only do what there are scientific evidence that it actually makes a difference. Make sure that the spread is slow enough so the health care system doesn’t get overwhelmed.
My entire perspective on "writer's block" shifted after surreptitiously stumbling on Jerry Weinberg's book "The fieldstone method". I very rarely now start with a blank page and very rarely beat myself up for "writer's block".
In a nutshell, the book describes how the act of writing can be broken down into many stages: sometimes you are collecting "fieldstones" (i.e. research), sometimes you editing, and sometimes you are synthesizing. Regardless, there's always something to do that moves you forward.
The above describes what is today called program synthesis, i.e. generating a program from a complete specification. There is a parallel discipline, of inductive programming, or pgoram induction, which is the generation of programs from incomplete specifications, which usuall means examples (specifically, positive and negative examples of the inputs and outputs of the target program). Together, program synthesis and program induction, comprise the automatic programming field, which has advanced a little bit since the 1980's, I dare say.
Inductive progamming is very much a branch of machine learning and that's the reason most haven't heard of it (i.e. it's machine learning that is not deep learning). The main approaches are Inductive Functional Programming (IFP) and Inductive Logic Programming (ILP, which I study for my PhD). IFP systems learn programs in functional programming languages, like Haskell, and ILP systems learn progarms in logic programming languages like Prolog. And that is why neither is used in industry.
That is to say, both approaches work just fine - but they're not going to be adopted anytime soon (if I may be a bit of a pessimist) because most programmers lack the background to understand them and they can't be replaced by a large dataset.
A quick introduction to Inductive Programming is on the wikipedia articles:
I suggest to follow the links to the article's sources and to search for IFP and ILP systems separately. Two prominent representatives are Magic Haskeller (IFP) and Aleph (ILP):
Been making music on and off for the past 20 years. Over the years, I've tried many ear training apps but there was little progress after hours of frustration.
A couple of months ago I found a very different method. The idea is is to internalize pitch by singing. For example, you play a triad on the piano and then sing the 3 notes individually. Or you train yourself to sing an interval. Say you're working on fifths. You play a C in the piano and then sing G, then play D and sing A, etc. I saw results within the first hour.
If anyone is interested I can try to find the video where I got this from.
Another method I can recommend is transcribing music by ear. You'll be amazed how quickly you will be able to find notes and then chords once you get more experience.
This is probably going to sound weird, possibly cheesy, but cottonseed got something out of that post, possibly more than I intended to convey, so I hesitate to follow up for fear of taking that away.
What I think I was getting at then, and certainly believe now, is that some people grow with the code, learn from many of their mistakes, and do the long quiet job of expunging their worst errors as they go. Their code is the best proof that they could accomplish a rewrite, because it already is a rewrite. They just didn't need to stop the world to do it, or at least not all at once. Perhaps a month here and a couple weeks there.
For the rest of the time it has been like the Ship of Theseus. All of the parts are new, and yet it is the same ship.
Meanwhile the rewrite guys are continuing with their mess and hoping they get a do-over, putting off things hoping for Some Day. And on that magical day, all of the bad habits of the entire team (management included) will correct themselves overnight.
Bad habits are too hard to break. The best of us know that you don't abstain from bad habits, you crowd them out with new, better ones. But that takes time, practice and determination.
If you want to condense it down to nothing new under the sun, that's fair, and I would offer that I wanted to believe the rewrite folks were onto something, but at the end of the day, breaking down the problems and using relentless refactoring seems to be the only thing that works, without changing the definition of success to achieve victory.
I used to believe that every company gets one rewrite, but only because I have seen that most places have the patience and the stamina for a little bit less than a single rewrite, but I was on the fence about whether they were a good idea anyway.
Trouble is, I could never put my finger on why, other than that it never seemed to fix the problem. It was a bit like moving to a new city to start over and finding out you brought all your problems with you.
In the last couple of years I have begin to figure out what I know in a way I can articulate. The people who have the skills and discipline to take advantage of a rewrite don't need a rewrite. It's a short distance from that skill set to being able to break the problem down and fix it piece by piece. They just need permission to fix key bits, one bite at a time, and they've probably already insisted on the space to do it, although they may be clever enough never to have said it out loud. They just do it.
Then you have the people who don't have the skills and discipline to continuously improve their code. What the rewrite buys them is a year of nobody yelling at them about how crappy the code is. They have all the goodwill and the hopes of the organization riding on their magical rewrite. They've reset the Animosity Clock and get a do-over. However, as the time starts to run down, they will make all of the same mistakes because they couldn't ever decompose big problems in the first place, and they lack the patience to stick with their course and not chicken out. They go back to creating messes as they go, if they ever actually stopped to begin with. Some of them wouldn't recognize the mess until after its done anyway.
In short, people who ask for a rewrite don't deserve a rewrite, and would squander it if they did. It's a stall tactic and an expensive dream. The ones who can handle a rewrite already are. They never stopped rewriting.
Now, I've left out all of the problems that can come from the business side, and in many cases the blame lies squarely with them (and the pattern isn't all that different). In that case it might take the rewrite for everyone to see how inflexible, unreasonable and demanding the business side is, and so Garbage In, Garbage Out rules the day. But the people with the self respect to not put up with it have moved on, or gotten jaded and bitter in the process.
> Evidence for that rather large claim?
While most cows in Brazil are grass-fed, about half are raised on former rainforest:
"Nearly 50% of Brazilian livestock are raised in fields that used to be rainforest."[0,1]
"Most cows in Brazil, the world’s largest beef exporter, are grass-fed."[2]
See also:
How beef demand is accelerating the Amazon’s deforestation and climate peril[3]:
> Cattle ranchers in the Brazilian Amazon — the storied rainforest that produces oxygen for the world and modulates climate — are aggressively expanding their herds and willing to clear-cut the forest and burn what’s left to make way for pastures. As a result, they’ve become the single biggest driver of the Amazon’s deforestation, causing about 80 percent of it, according to the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.
Cattle Ranching in the Amazon Region[4]:
> Cattle ranching is the largest driver of deforestation in every Amazon country, accounting for 80% of current deforestation rates. Amazon Brazil is home to approximately 200 million head of cattle, and is the largest exporter in the world, supplying about one quarter of the global market. Low input cost and easy transportation in rural areas make ranching an attractive economic activity in the forest frontier; low yields and cheap land encourage expansion and deforestation. Approximately 450,000 square kilometers of deforested Amazon in Brazil are now in cattle pasture. Cattle ranching and soy cultivation are often linked as soy replaces cattle pasture, pushing farmers farther into the Amazon.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/meat-consumption-linked-to-t...
[1] http://www.cbra.org.br/portal/downloads/publicacoes/rbra/v42...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-17/saving-th...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/27/how-beef-...
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20180928055440/https://globalfor...