> It was not immediately clear if that happened, or to what extent. AP journalists inside Gaza saw no immediate evidence of Netanyahu’s speech being broadcast on phones there.
> His point is not that black people are less capable but that DEI policies [cause] looser standards
These ideas are equivalent. The belief that employers are lowering their standards in order to include more black people is based on the idea that any additional black person hired must necessarily be less competent than a hypothetical white person who could have been hired instead of them; that is, white supremacy. In Kirk's words: "You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously."
They don't believe that there are black people who are qualified but weren't hired because of, for example, discrimination, because they don't believe "discrimination" exists per se, they just think of not hiring black people as logical meritocratic decision-making.
No they are not equivalent. This came up with James Damore too.
Let's say there's a pool of 20 candidates, 10 male and 10 female. Since more men than women have an abiding interest in engineering, let us posit that 40% of the men are top prospects for the job, and 20% of the women are equally high-quality workers. The company is trying to fill 6 roles and has an internal mandate to hire 50% women. To serve that mandate, 1 unqualified woman will be hired, at the expense of 1 of the qualified men.
You can apply the exact same logic w/r/t race. Yes, there are legacy-of-slavery reasons why fewer blacks than whites are qualified for any given technical credential, but those are upstream of hiring decisions, and are not the job of e.g. airlines to solve, especially not at the expense of lowering standards for a crucial position like pilot.
This response is very confused. Lack of interest in the field would result in fewer female applicants, but you're describing equal numbers of applicants. This situation where women are half as likely as men to be qualified is just sexism.
The idea that airlines are passing on qualified white candidates to hire unqualified black candidates to fill a diversity quota, because there aren't enough qualified black candidates to fill it honestly, is a white supremacist conspiracy theory. Real life DEI programs don't let them do that. To a white supremacist, any number of black pilots is "just a few too many" to have hired honestly, and so there must be some hypothetical white people being "stolen" from. See GP.
Something I've noticed from automatic palette mappings is that they tend to produce large blocks of gray that a human artist would never consider. You can see it in the water for most mappings in this sample, and even some grayish-brown grass for sRGB. It makes sense mathematically, since gray is the "average" color, and pixel art palettes are typically much more saturated than the average colors in a 24-bit RGB image. It looks ugly regardless.
CAM16-UCS looks the best because it avoids this. It gives us peach-and-pink water that matches the "feel" of the original image better. I wonder if it's designed to saturate the image to match the palette?
Distorted Face getting in means that Open Eye Crying Laughing Face still has a chance. Maybe we could get some Deep Fried Variation Selectors with it too.
Here's a question to ponder: Why aren't American convenience stores already like Japanese convenience stores? I distrust cultural explanations because humans are basicly the same everywhere. Given the choice, quite a lot of people would prefer a Japanese-style 7-Eleven over an average American convenience store. I think this is the key:
> Challenges include the difficulty of transporting fresh food to locations in the United States far from city centers. In Japan, the average convenience store receives multiple fresh-food deliveries per day. [...] In the United States, Mr. Dacus said, fresh food often means hot food that can be frozen and cooked on site, eliminating the need for multiple daily deliveries.
Japan is a much more urbanized country, with more foot traffic to support impulse stops to buy a snack. Even outside of pedestrianized areas, it's a shorter trip to get supplies from a central regional location to individual stores.
My local high-quality American convenience store chain is QuikTrip. If you go to their Wikipedia page and check the map of their stores, you'll see they have stores in Arizona and stores in the Carolinas, but they have no truly rural locations. It's all islands surrounding major metro areas. This suggests that the transport time from some central distributor is a major factor in where they put stores.
Perhaps allowing preorders for a day or two might have helped spread the load? Or at least moved it earlier so that the checkout load didn't overlap with the load from users downloading.
I was thinking about this for the recent GMTK game jam, which crashed itch.io.
Is it really such a bad thing for your launch/event to crash a platform? Nobody is going to decide not to buy Silksong after all because it's so wildly popular it brought down Steam. It generates a great deal of positive headlines. To me it seems like a good problem to have.
1. That's Valve's prerogative, not the developer's. If they're not partnered with Valve they may not have had the option to enact pre-purchases. [1]
2. The game has no DRM and Steam preorders (in my experience) download the game files so people can play instantly on launch day. (They call it 'preloading'). For a game as highly anticipated as this, it'd likely just be cracked, leaked and pirated the moment preorders came live.
I thought they already did something like this. I recall some people complaining because the naive decryption process would double the required hard drive space while the bundle was unpacking on release day.
Pretty sure they already do it. I've also noticed that if you have a fast connection (like 1 Gb/s down), it might be faster to download the game when it releases than it is to preload it and then decrypt it, since the decryption process is quite slow.
I've heard this is part of why major infrastructure projects in America can be so expensive. A city builds one subway line, and everyone working on the project has no experience, so it takes a long time and is expensive. The expense convinces people to oppose any more projects, so the city doesn't build any public transit for a decade(s). By the time they're ready to build another line, all the experience has evaporated, so the new line takes a long time and is expensive. Repeat forever.
There's an example of this in railway electrification: if you scroll down to the graph in https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5801/cmselect/cmtran... it shows that the UK tends to do electrification as occasional big projects, whereas Germany has consistently done about the same mileage every year for decades, presumably with the same institutions maintaining their expertise and just moving on to the next bit of track. Their costs are a quarter of the UK's...
I don't think you can conclude from overall performance of a complex system that a particular aspect of it (the way of electrifying tracks) is done wrong.
From what I understand, the problems in the German railway network stem predominantly from growing demand meeting the results of chronic underinvestment in infrastructure. That does not automatically mean that all of the work should be done in big chunks instead of continuously. They still could be doing some things right, and I think it is worth pointing that out. I find it more interesting and productive than blanket dismissal.
Iirc that is mostly an issue of the scheduling and not the construction itself. The operator is also known to have reliability problems with many train types (not necessarily the stops or tracks themselves).
Not Just Bikes did a YouTube on Seoul South Korea that brought this point up. They’ve got costs down because they’re working on it continuously.
As a tech writer people have a lot of experience but they never turn it into institutional knowledge because it’s never written down.
Ay best it’s tribal knowledge passed by word of mouth.
I know some people refuse to document things because they are hoping for job security but that never happens. Or sometimes for revenge for getting rid of them. But many companies survive despite those efforts.
I'm not good at writing documentation, and you can't pay me enough to care about it, sorry. I've tried enough times, and nobody reads it, or it becomes out of date by the time anyone reads it, and I don't see the personal ROI. I'll write notes for future me, and put them somewhere others can read it, if you don't make that onerous. Otherwise, if you want documentation from me, you need to have someone else drag the information out of me and write it down. But, I've only rarely been in organizations that care enough about documentation to do that, so there you go.
There's always a lot of talk about how documentation is important, but there's never budget for a tech writer (well, you must have found some, as you've taken tech writer as a title, but it's not often available) or a documentation maintainer.
Writing / English were my worst subjects in school. Yet I have written internal, dealer, and customer facing documentation because I was the only one knowledgeable on the subject and there was no tech writer.
Now I work where there is a tech writer and still create internal, dealer, and customer facing documentation, because I am the only one with the knowledge on the subject matter. Some things are filtered to the tech writer so tech writing has been reduced.
Simply, don't call me or contact me for simple questions. Give me a real problem that others cannot solve. Some people like customer service or being able to be the one that helps. Documentation allows me to not be that person and focus on other things.
There is only two ways to communicate to a person on how to use that tool only you created. 1) Showing them how to do it. 2) Giving them documentation so they only contact when needed. Option #2 takes time to save time in the long run that can be diverted else where.
Documentation is part of any product design and software based solution. That new feature time is design, implementation, QA, documentation, and release.
The "why" can be so important... like you said, I can read the code, but I can't always divine the original author's intents...
Anecdote:
I once (well, many times, but especially this one time) inherited a completely undocumented codebase from a previous "lone wolf", mad genius type of programmer. Most of the stuff he wrote was completely inscrutable at first but really kinda genius once you figured it out.
But one day I was tweaking one of his heatmaps showing solar production on a rooftop from "off" to "a little" to "a lot" to "this is broken", and his color gradient code was a magical one-liner doing strange math as hex operations. It usually went from blue to red to yellow, but would sometimes "overflow" into other strange colors that made no sense. I spent a few hours simulating different edge cases and getting back colors I could not reasonably explain — and which would confuse our users. I talked to my coworkers about it, who mostly insisted "Well, I don't know, but he was a very smart guy, so we should probably just trust him and move on". That was unsatisfying, and didn't really help me close the customer ticket that I was trying to solve.
I kept bugging my boss about it, and after a few days of back and forths and seeing my simulation, he finally agreed to let me reach out to the original programmer (who had long since left the team). I finally got my answer a few hours later. He said, "Oh... that was just some random throwaway gradient I thought looked pretty, lol. I was lazy and wrote it in a hurry and, yeah, it probably bugs out on all but the simplest cases, and doesn't conform to any color standards... glad he caught it."
Sigh, lol... that took several person-days to resolve, when it could've been a simple // #TODO: Use a better gradient system someday
> I’d love to know what you think documentation means.
I'd say effective documentation lets the user know enough about the system that they can work on the system without needing to contact the previous person (or people) working on the system. Or at least, so they can get started and only ask 'good' questions.
Something like descriptions of what the system is supposed to do, what it actually does if it differs significantly :D, maybe motivations. Descriptions of the data, and like where does it come from, where does it go, where did it come from (Cotton-Eye Joe?). If the system runs into problems often, a list of common issues and how to fix them, etc.
My day job is product developer and I have written hundreds of pages of documentation. The key is to write it as you go along. Not to wait until the release is ready to go!
> The key is to write it as you go along. Not to wait until the release is ready to go!
OTOH, if you commit to not writing documentation, you don't need to write it when the release is ready either. :) I usually work on server side software that doesn't escape my org, though.
Oh, this is an area I know something about. I work on railway software in my day job.
Broadly speaking you are correct. Expertise like mine is rare and fleeting mostly because you can only really build it long term by working at a company which can convince international clients to take them on. Even large countries tend not to have more than a handful of trains being built on any given day of the week.
This is one place where having a business located in a nation long known for its relative neutrality, calmness and international trustworthiness can pay off. All of the Nordics are good at this, really.
This is also the reason Olkiluoto Nuclear Plant Unit 3[0] cost so much.
Nobody had built a nuclear reactor in ages. The last ones were from the 80's and this was a completely new technology (EPR). There was no institutional knowledge.
It didn't help that the French attitude to building was to "just slap it up real fast up north and use it as a reference to get REAL customers". They didn't figure in the fact that STUK (the Finnish radiation authority) is _really_ fucking good at what they do and don't cut any corners for any reason resulting in the French having to build many parts twice because the first attempt was subpar.
That makes sense. It seems like during the continuous "building up America" period of the late 40s through mid 70s there was no problem of getting shit done at reasonable cost, because of continuously available institutional knowledge.
Once large infrastructure projects become sporadic in nature, you begin to run into issues.
The solution has to be continuous stimulus, but that also runs into problems of corruption and capture by special interests (the longer the stimulus, the more incentive there is for 3rd parties to appropriate funds).
Somehow, other nations have managed to figure this out. Of the developed world, seemingly only Americans are resigned to the belief that such things are sadly impossible.
That's because we're richer and can object. The Europeans get bulldozed by their governments. It's why they're always protesting some online ID law or some "show your photo ID to browse Wikipedia" shit but no one listens to them.
Texas and Utah in the US also have similar online age verification laws. Texas is the second richest state in the US by GDP per capita, but even that was not enough.
It has far more to do with respect for private property due to the existence of a class of sophisticated, politically literate professionals capable of opposing development. Europe and Canada are similar; the extent to which this retards the economy is more obvious in Europe. It isn’t hard to build a road when you can just expropriate all the land and completely disregard environmental impacts.
Robert Moses did a lot of bad that we don't want to repeat. We have gone too far the other way but those big projects often did come at high cost - but the cost wasn't dollars
Robert Moses was a governance problem. The biggest issue with him is that he was the smartest guy in most rooms, but nobody could control him. 1915 attitude in 1960 was an issue.
There’s strategic bidding as well. Specifications cannot cover every conceivable occurrence over the course of a 4 year construction project, so contractors can structure their bid to be low upfront with big pick ups later for change orders when issues arise.
Only a if the government people in charge care and know. My friends in the federal contracting space are either starving or backing the truck up and looting the place.
Thank you for bringing this up. This is profoundly true for big projects (toll roads/transport) and small infra projects (e.g. community solar). The length of time that it takes to develop things like this, combined with the turnover and the sheer amount of context that single developer has to have to be successful with it, is one of the driving forces in why development is such a difficult/risky business.
It's one of the most consequential problems imaginable to solve, particularly as the US begins to realize that we need to compete with decades of China's subsidized energy and industrialization/manufacturing capacity.
Taking it a level deeper, what most don't realize is that infrastructure is an asset class: before someone funds the construction of $100M of solar technology, a developer will spend 2-5 years developing 15 or so major commercial agreements that enable a lender/financier to take comfort that when they deploy such a large amount of cash, they'll achieve a target yield over 20+ years. Orchestrating these negotiations (with multiple "adversaries") into a single, successfully bankable project is remarkably difficult and compared to the talent needed, very few have the slightest clue how to do this successfully.
Our bet at Phosphor is that this is actually solvable by combining natural language interfaces with really sophisticated version control and programming languages that read like english for financial models and legal agreements, which enables program verification. This is a really hard technical challenge because version control like Git really doesn't work: you need to be able to synchronize multiple lenses of change sets where each lens/branch is a dynamic document that gets negotiated. Dynamically composable change sets all the way down.
We are definitely solving this at Phosphor (phosphor.co) and we're actively hiring for whoever is interested in working at the intersection of HCI, program verification, natural language interfaces and distributed systems.
Not just that, it can be worse when different companies worked on different parts of the subway. It results in no overall vision and desire to see subway network as a whole to make it efficient and convenient to get from any part of the city to another.
Not just that, it can be worse when different companies worked on different parts of the subway in the city. It results in no overall vision and desire to see subway network as a whole.
"Ultra-processed food" is the new term for "junk food" for people who thought it needed three more syllables.
They're both vague you-know-what-I-mean terms, and don't have any place in research papers, which really ought to be asking more specific questions. Are ultra-processed foods bad for you? You might as well ask whether "yucky foods" are good for you, or what the health effects of "appetizers" are.
If you want to know if white bread or artificial colors or emulsifiers are unhealthy, ask that question directly instead of using this vague proxy category.
I am aware of the Nova classification. "Vague" was the wrong word for me to use. "Overly broad" is probably closer to what I mean. Just read Group 4's definition. If "ultra-processed" can mean a million different things, then it doesn't matter that you've precisely defined all the things it can mean, your study will still be conflating a million independent variables.
If you think emulsifiers are unhealthy, conduct a study on emulsifiers. If you think the absence of Nova group 1 foods is unhealthy, study that. I am questioning the value of studying foods with emulsifiers OR no group 1 ingredients OR added sugar OR were extruded OR were moulded OR which have "sophisticated packaging" OR have fruit juice concentrates OR hydrogenated oils OR etc. etc. etc., as if they formed a single scientifically meaningful group.
Ignoring that medieval peasants were likely highly active and regardless had a short, brutish life, the flours at the time shared little in common with modern flours.
Medieval flour would have had the entire grain -- the bran, germ and endosperm -- ground into the resulting product. The product would be high in fibre and nutrients, and with a ratio of good fats as well.
Modern flour separates out just the starch endosperm and discards the rest, then refining it to an ultra digestible product.
Nutritionally the former is healthy. The latter is not great, especially for people with a caloric surplus and a sedentary lifestyle, where it's just a massive glucose blast as that flour is 75% almost immediately turned into blood glucose.
My comment said higher processed. The enriched, bleached, white, non whole wheat flour is highly processed.
Putting it into bread products with flavor enhancing additives and shelf life enhancing preservatives like you see in the hamburger buns at the store would make it ultra processed.
> Are we going to have a discussion on the ultra-processed diet of the medieval peasant?
Are you intentionally missing the point? A medieval peasant processing whole wheat into flour and then making a recipe out of it without added sugar and preservatives is a lot less processed than modern white flour production that goes into hyper-palatable foods on the shelf.
The average pizza that kids or adults consume is not from fresh, hand-made flour like a medieval peasant. It’s from the industrial process and it generally has flavor enhancing additives (sugar). We’re talking Domino’s pizza for most people, not an artisanal handmade pizza with freshly ground flour.
>It’s from the industrial process and it generally has flavor enhancing additives (sugar).
Just had to jump in on this. We have gotten way too accustomed to calling out sugar as a particular villain in stories like this, and it misses the forest for the trees. It makes it easy to think that removing sugar suddenly makes a product healthy. In the same way that we as a society went through that very foolish period where we thought "low fat" made a product healthy.
An average pizza dough for a large pizza has about 270g of 00 white flour. 75% of that flour is glucose chained into starches, or about 202g of glucose.
The same pizza dough will have around 1.5 tsp of sugar, or about 6g of sucrose. About 3g of that is glucose.
So in that pizza dough people will often shriek and point at the 3g of glucose courtesy of the sugar, blind to the fact that the flour added an enormous 202g of glucose. Glucose that will end up as blood glucose extremely rapidly (the body close to instantly cracks starches of refined flours into individual glucose molecules).
I've harped on here about this a lot, but sugar is simply not the big problem people think it is, at least relative to many diets where it is absolutely dwarfed by the glucose contribution of simple carbs. And to be extra clear, such a meal is perfectly fine if you're highly active and follow it up by a game of soccer or a hike or some other venture that uses that glucose to feed muscles. But for the average person it's followed by doing nothing, and their already insulin resistant body goes through trials to deal with the flood.
It depends on the amount. In that example the sugar clearly isn't a problem, but if you're eating multiple donuts where you're getting 50g of sugar, then youre getting 25g of fructose.
And overloading your liver with fructose is linked to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, visceral fat and inflammation - just like drinking alcohol
> It was not immediately clear if that happened, or to what extent. AP journalists inside Gaza saw no immediate evidence of Netanyahu’s speech being broadcast on phones there.