This is an interesting angle, and I could see how the prospect of reducing the flow of oil to China, and also to teetering democracies in Europe, might have occurred to the US decision makers as beneficial. However, the question is, how much reduction for how long, and how critical this would be for China.
And the point remains that this operation has been started in a way that leaves the US in a weaker strategic position, not just in the Gulf, but also, crucially, in the far east. It has now become harder to contain China, both in the medium term by the reduction of US military capabilities both globally and in-theater by pulling out strategic defensive assets from South Korea and Japan; but also long-term, by putting themselves into a situation where they have to do that, retroactively, after painting themselves into a corner elsewhere, therefore undermining their posture as a credible, rational actor that can be relied on to oppose China's ambition in the region.
You can easily get compressed episodes of a TV show that are 250MB, so it's like watching a TV series at the rate of 2 episodes every 5 minutes. Obviously better quality is in the range 500MB-1.5GB for a 45-minute episode, so even being generous it's 20 minutes of compressed TV or 70 minutes of uncompressed music every 5 minutes.
Yes, as I understand it, the ~700 MiB "standard" was derived from the capacity of a CD. A rip is definitionally a copy that lacks some of the original data of the source media.
I see a fun metaphor for doing the tedious work of arranging a meeting, getting people to join, and getting a solution. Reading it put this way made my day a little brighter. I needed that, too.
Btw, border collies are awesome dogs, and sheep are also awesome. I find no automatic disrespect in using them as stand-ins for our human foibles; intent matters.
One of my first real experiences with Border Collies was at a family reunion. There were a bunch of kids running around playing in the park. At one point someone showed up with a border collie and I watched with delight and amazement as the dog did the herding thing and slowly and carefully pushed the group of children closer together. The kids didn't even realize it until they were way too close to each other to comfortably play tag. The owner called the dog back and the games continued.
Later on I ended up with a sheltie with a very strong herding instinct. She mostly just acted like the Fun Police though with the other dog and cats. Lovely creatures!
Herding sheep is such an interesting experience too. The best way I can describe it is that each sheep has a really large soap bubble around them. You need to push gently on the bubble to get them to go where you want them too. If you push too hard and the bubble pops, they'll scatter and you have to step back and let the bubble reform.
For some reason, you're reading things into the original statement that are not there. "An etiquette exists in a culture" does not mean everyone has to follow or even be aware of it.
If mentally adding an "s" to the original comment enables you move past this issue and actually consider the comment as it was intended, then I would say that is well done and worth the effort to get to this point. :) Have a great Sunday!
Usually, you don't want your developers to be coding monkeys, for good results. You need the human developer in the loop to even define the spec, maybe contributing ideas, but at the very least asking questions about "what happens when..." and "have you thought about...".
In fact, this is a huge chunk of the value a developer brings to the table.
And this is usually one of the defining traits of a senior engineer. They understand the tech and its limitations, and thus are able to look around corners, ask good questions, and, overall, provide quality product input.
Programs are a socially constructed artifact that help communicate and express a model (which is perpetually locked in people's heads with variance across engineers; divergence is addressed as the program develops). Determining what should or should not be done is a matter of not just domain knowledge, but practical reason, which is to say prudence, which is a virtue that can only be acquired by experience. It is an ability to apply universal principles to particular situations.
This is why young devs, even when clever in some local sense, are worse at understanding the right moves to make in context. Code does not stand alone. It exists entirely in the service of something and is bound by constraints that are external to it.
This is very much my experience from working with outsourced development. Almost by design, they tend to lack domain expertise or an intimate understanding of the cultures and engineering values of the company they're contracted out to.
This means that they will very quickly help you discover all the little details that seemed so obvious to you that you didn't even think to mention them, but were nonetheless critical to a successful implementation. The corollary to that is, the potential ROI of outsourcing is inversely proportional to how many of these little details your project has, and how important they are.
So far I've found LLM coding to be kind of the same. For projects where those details are relatively unimportant, they can save me a bunch of effort. But I would not want to let an LLM build and maintain something like an API or database schema. Doing a good job of those requires too much knowledge of expected usage patterns working through design tradeoffs. And they tend to be incredibly expensive to change after deployment so it pays to take your time and get your hands dirty.
I also kind of hate them for writing tests, for similar reasons. I know many people love them for it because writing tests isn't super happy fun times, but for my part I'm tired of dealing with LLM-generated test suites being so brittle that they actively hinder future development.
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that taboos should not be examined from within the space where they hold effect, because doing so calls into question the whole concept of a taboo and robs all taboos of their usefulness, and that would summon evidence for, or even cause cultural decline?
That sounds suspiciously like something a taboo would say that has something to fear from being looked at. ;)
I think this chain of reasoning is made of links that do not self-evidently follow. From my lay perspective, taboos seem more complex, resilient and variable to require a perfectly dogmatic approach to hold up. If they were this easy to bring down, they'd all be gone.
I'm also not sure what a "culture without taboos" is, or one has ever existed. Also, what is meant by "peak"? Is there an optimal amount or set of taboos? How do cultures with taboo-ical differences (and their peaks) compare to each other across space and time?
I think it is good and healthy to approach taboos with curiosity, whether it is to interrogate them or to appreciate them more.
Not should, can't. The assertion I'm referring to is that once something can be rationally discussed it's no longer a taboo, and once a culture has no taboos it has no real vitality or potential for growth left.
Nothing there about causing cultural decline, just evidence of it, and thereby limits on the kind of culture that can host the attitude you describe.
> once something can be rationally discussed it's no longer a taboo
This appears to be an entirely impractical definition, to the point that it would not allow a taboo to ever exist in a group of people capable of any sort of rational discussion. Any two moderately curious and independently-minded people could simply destroy any taboo by talking about it. They could even do it on purpose, using this fatal weakness.
Taboos, as in: the actual attitudes and behaviors of people, do not simply disappear the moment they are named or even questioned. I think we have to allow for taboos to be more nuanced, or we will struggle to describe the actual, interesting phenomenon, let alone do anything useful with it.
> once a culture has no taboos it has no real vitality or potential for growth left
That's an extraordinary claim on multiple levels, even when allowing for different ideas of what taboos are and how they work. I already mentioned some questions this raises, which makes it surprising to find the naked claim simply restated, in an even stronger form.
It's the kind of sentence that can sound really deep and powerful in passing, but when you look at it, is really only a huge, gaping question mark in a fancy dress.
I would not. But I don't see how that's relevant here.
I'm also not going to guess what point you're trying to make. I'd ask you to explain how exactly you think Overton windows relate to our argument about taboos, because, despite a superficial similarity, taboos and Overton windows deal with different things and are very much not the same; but I'm not interested in this style of discussion, sorry. Have a nice day!
People really say this ("I could care less") to express that they do not care at all. I've seen it happen here on this site. Calling out the sheer absurdity of it, even in a respectful way, is not universally well-received. Unfortunately, I could care less about this, as it sounds very grating to me.
I try to remember that I ain't got no problem with other "illogical" uses of negation and could this one in a similar light, but it's more easily said than done.
This reads like you think that "major" version bumps should ony happen when things make a big difference to you personally. At least that's where you land when you follow the logic of your statement. I think you may overrate the importance of your particular use case, and misunderstand what GP meant by "major".
The gist of what GP meant is that Python does not exactly follow SemVer in their numbering scheme, and they treat the middle number more like what would warrant a major (left-most) number increase in SemVer. For example, things will get deprecated and dropped from the standard library, which is a backwards-incompatible change. Middle number changes is also when new features are released, and they get their own "what's new" pages. So on the whole, these middle-number changes feel like "major" releases.
That being said, the Python docs themselves [0] call the left-most number the "major" one, so GP is not technically correct, while I'd say they're right for practical, but easier to misunderstand, purposes.
> A is the major version number – it is only incremented for really major changes in the language.
> B is the minor version number – it is incremented for less earth-shattering changes.
> C is the micro version number – it is incremented for each bugfix release.
> That being said, the Python docs themselves [0] call the left-most number the "major" one, so GP is not technically correct, while I'd say they're right for practical, but easier to misunderstand, purposes.
That's ultimately the point I was trying to make; my inner pedant can't help but feel the need to push back on people using versioning terminology inconsistently, but in practice I don't think it really made much of a difference in this case.
Oh, you are right, I forgot that "major version" is a technical term and incorrectly read it as "For Python, 0.1 increases make a big difference". My bad!
And the point remains that this operation has been started in a way that leaves the US in a weaker strategic position, not just in the Gulf, but also, crucially, in the far east. It has now become harder to contain China, both in the medium term by the reduction of US military capabilities both globally and in-theater by pulling out strategic defensive assets from South Korea and Japan; but also long-term, by putting themselves into a situation where they have to do that, retroactively, after painting themselves into a corner elsewhere, therefore undermining their posture as a credible, rational actor that can be relied on to oppose China's ambition in the region.
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