Trades seem to have high barriers to entry and have stringent unproductive working rules. I’m not really sure, but does to make sense that construction prices have risen so much so fast without even considering the cost of materials? The public sector is much worse, of course, where a short jaunt tram at LAX costs more than a 75 mile HSR run in China. We obviously aren’t competitive in building things anymore.
Somewhat related, but I know construction is the one of the only industries that has gotten less productive in the past 100 years. You'd think more machinery and such would make it more productive, but no.
I think part of that is safety and labor cost, but I think another part is that construction is contracted almost always.
Go to Miami, Florida, and see how virtually all public projects magically go to Cuban-American-owned companies — even huge multinationals with far greater skill, capacity, and efficiencies can't seem to land the good work.
> I get that developers want to be compensated for their time.
Depends. If you build software for others then of course you should be paid. But if you build sth for youself, to scratch you own itch, isn't that already compensation? Why try to milk that cow to for such a mini tool that just took a few weekends to build? (The author said that.) If everybody had followed that philosophy then the whole OSS ecosystem wouldn't exist. Time to pay back to the community and open source such a project.
The author wrote explicitly that they want to be compensated because they spent weekends writing the thing.
Any customer support that has to do with payments and license checks doesn't count.
Once you have a community of interested folks then fixing security issues and keeping things up to date is much easier. If there isn't enough interest then there isn't much of a monetizeable customer base anyway. It's self-regulating.
The Mac way is much better. Users get high quality software for a fair price, and talented indie developers get compensated for their work and skills.
Meanwhile I guess FOSS communists can continue to enjoy working for free programming crucial net infrastructure for companies like Google, Meta and Microsoft.
Pick any FOSS project and you will be right at home.
But you won't have time for much merry-making with your friends: An important manager at Meta just submitted a bug report to your open source project which needs to get taken care of urgently and for free by you. Quarterly reports are quickly approaching, so get on it comrade! Don't make him wait!
C'mon, why not just open source it? Do you really expect to gain a sizeable following to get substantial cash flow? Most shareware went the way of oblivion.
If you'd open source it then there is at least the chance of gaining a community. And you'd be giving back to the community that you have benefitted from for decades.
Exactly. Feels like R K N would be a more suitable initial position in which castling would swap the king into safety, provided it has not moved and is not in check...
Though maybe in that case the best first move for both is to castle and we are non the wiser (back to the original starting position)
> Everybody is talking about ai. Everybody is using it.
Please take a moment to step outside the tech bubble. Neither my neighbor (a hair stylist) nor the carpenter fixing up her kitching cabinets are "using" AI. They might get Gemini text when googling something, though they often scroll past it because they often don't trust it. And they get lots of fake videos when scrolling their youtube which increasingly annoys them. The only times they are in touch with AI is when it's forced upon them, and otherwise they are living a pretty good life without any of this.
But how do they learn to do their respective task? How is the information disseminated?
The capability is there for robotics to handle these kinds of repetitive tasks from a long term view. They're just statistical processes on a fundamental level.
In general, a lot of this shit that we do can be represented this way. It's just a question of where the incentives are to apply it first and how many economic cycles it'll take to get there.
Also, who controls the training data will matter a lot more. I.e. the sort of "ancestral knowledge" within different enterprises and how they deliver on respective business goals.
It was less the low wages and more the general unavailability of things (shortages). Lots of things you couldn't just buy but you had to know somebody who knew somebody.
I wouldn't call it "funny" though. It ws quite sad and I'm glad it's over.
As I mentioned in another commebt, I don't even consider anything related to that to be a viable government system.
That said, the general unavailability of everything was caused by an incompetent government rather the the system itself but the system itself caused the government.
My point is that it was a succession of demagogueries hiding personal interests that caused the recurring and unrecoverable tragedies of that state. Being controlled and misguided is not exclusive to any particular government or political system.
> If you're ok with the looming threat of total annihilation.
Don't you have that problem with any energy-dense fuel? It's just that it doesn get more dense than that, so you can be very space and weight efficient.
It's like everybody saying that a hydrogen car is a rolling bomb because of the energy stored in the hydrogen. Well, sure, but gasonline has just as much energy stored. Which is the whole point of fuel. To store energy. It's not like you are bringing 100x as much energy with you just because it's hydrogen. So that doesn't make an ICE car any less of a bomb...
The difference is that antimatter annihilates with any normal matter that it comes into contact with. This means you can't just put it in a tank, the way you can with hydrogen. You can't e.g. combine it with some metal to make a metal hydride to make it safer to store, the way you can with hydrogen.
At an absolute minimum, you need extremely strong magnetic confinement and an extremely hard vacuum. And even then, you're going to get collisions with stray atoms and annihilation events which release gamma rays and other radiation products - although shielding is probably the least of your worries in this scenario.
A typical research lab at a university or large corporation can't make a vacuum strong enough to store even tiny quantities of antimatter for more than a few minutes, and they can't produce the magnetic confinement strength required to store macro quantities of it, either.
So the question with an antimatter-powered car is not if it's going to destroy the surrounding region and bathe it in hard radiation, but how many milliseconds (or less) it will take before that inevitably happens.
But probably luckily for us, this is all moot, because we have no way of producing enough antimatter for this to be an issue. If all the antimatter that's ever been created by humans annihilated simultaneously, only scientists monitoring their instruments closely enough would notice, because it's such a microscopic amount.
Edit: for perspective, you'd need about 7 billion times the 92 antiprotons transported in the truck in the story to produce the energy produced by a single grain of gunpowder.
How is it possible to make as hard of vacuum as they did? I assume it's not perfect, so what's the trick? Does the magnet setup create a volume that's simultaneously high probability for antimatter and low for everything else?
For this antimatter transport experiment, they only transported 92 antiprotons. To store and transport that, the requirements for the magnetic field and vacuum are many orders of magnitude lower than what would be needed for macro-scale quantities.
Also, if there was an accident and all those protons annihilated, the consequences would be unnoticeable except to sensitive instruments. The energy involved is about one seven billionth of the energy in a single grain of gunpowder.
Liquid gasoline does not spontaneously explode like an action movie. You can put a match in the fuel tank and (presuming infinite oxygen availability) it'd just start a small fire. Heck, may even just give a little puff and then put out the match.
Antimatter in any sufficient fuel quantity, the moment it breaks confinement, will completely annihilate and release ALL it's energy in a single moment, setting off a chain reaction to the remaining antimatter. It's like sitting on an armed nuclear bomb, where you rely on electrified, highly sophisticated containment equipment never failing a single time for months to years... In a radiation-heavy environment known for causing sophisticated electronics to have errors.
And, yes, hydrogen cars were looked at critically because of the perception they can Hindenburg (I'm unsure if it's true or not). Which is a good example because you don't particularly see any hydrogen blimps anymore - we made them illegal because they're dangerous.
Any compressed gas fuel is inherently dangerous. There's a video of a CNG-fueled bus falling off a lift and sending a fireball through the maintenance facility.
Batteries have some of these same risks: they store a lot of energy and it can be released very quickly under the wrong circumstances.
This provides a great cover for intelligence agencies to avoid disclosing their actual data source. Just point to Strava and hand-wave a little. Nobody will suspect that you actually had an in via a close associate of the target.
It’s called parallel construction in many related circles and is used on a daily basis even in communities like yours.
For example, do you have information obtained from illegal surveillance technology to know of an illegal activity happening in a house? Well, why not just ask very forcefully of someone facing inflated jail time, whether they happen to remember… after thinking really hard about it… having seen that illegal activity in that particular house they definitely have been in, to get the warrant approved by a judge.
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