Bit of a rambly story, but I swear it is relevant.

So previously I worked as a consultant for a company that manufactured a relatively small number of high value (tens of thousands of dollars each) Gizmos in a lightly regulated industry - the requirements weren’t too crazy, basically that everything has a serial number and they can prove that any given serial passed the full range of tests before it left the factory. Pretty much the sort of thing you’d want to have if you gave a crap about quality products anyway.

Initially they were using Excel to keep track of this - they manufactured 10 units a week, it worked well enough. Eventually, they got more successful and needed to scale up to 50 units a week, and it was decided that they needed A System to keep track of testing and manufacturing. Their head of manufacturing “looked around and couldn’t find anything off the shelf that was suitable” (ie, cost $0, and perfectly matched his aesthetic tastes; mistake #1), so they decided to build their own system.

They had a few in house developers, but they were focused on building new features (things that drive sales, unlike maintaining their reputation for delivering reliable products), so head of manufacturing decided to get one of the production line techs (who was “good with computers” by virtue of having built the Excel system, but was not a software developer mistake #2) to do it.

Eventually, they decided to use Microsoft PowerApps to build the new system - for those with the good fortune never to have seen PowerApps, it’s essentially a “no code required” drag and drop UI tool that you script using Excel formulas. Think Visual BASIC or Scratch, but Cloudy.

On the surface this made sense - the developer was proficient in Excel, so use what you know. Unfortunately, PowerApps is designed to rapidly build throwaway UIs over simple data models and lacks some of the things that actual software developers would have thought to ask about:

• It lacks real version control - you can “undo” a deploy, but there is no way to discover what changed between versions, or do branches, or code review
• Because you can’t effectively manage changes to the system, you can’t do pre-production releases
• Its native database system doesn’t do referential integrity
• There is no straightforward way to do any kind of locking - and because there is no referential integrity, it’s really easy for concurrent users to really mess up the data
• There is no way to do automated testing
• The development group could have actually documented how stuff worked, requirements, specs etc but didn’t, so any time there was any issue you had to play the game of “is this a bug or bad design?”

Eventually, these chickens came home to roost in the form of a defect that slipped through testing that they then couldn’t isolate to a particular batch because none of their testing data could be trusted. I was brought in to try and unpick this mess and advise on a replacement system, but between the cost to fix the issue and the lost sales from it they ended up in a pretty bad spot financially and ended up being acquired by an investment group.

Anyway, the takeaway from this is that you disregard experience and judgement at your own peril, up front savings generally don’t manifest in the long term and I expect there is going to be a thriving market of consultants brought in to point and laugh at companies that decided that a bunch of cheap, inexperienced developers and a magic talking parrot would build better software than cheap, inexperienced developers being guided and upskilled by an experienced senior developer

The thing people don’t really get about “bullet proof armour” is that it’s job is to stop the bullet going into you and messing up your fragile internals - but Newton still wins. The force still has to go somewhere.

Imagine someone held a stake to your chest then someone else smacked it with a sledgehammer - this would be a Very Bad Time for you, what with all the bleeding and internal trauma. If instead someone held you down with a steel plate and that was sledgehammered with the same force - it would hurt like hell, but probably not do the same amount of internal damage because the force is distributed over a wider area. There is of course a limit - at some point the force is still going to be too high and cause fatal damage.

Helmets work the same way - the internals of your head are very fragile, so keeping the bullet out is pretty important, but the same problem exists. The force has to go somewhere, and while getting whacked in the face with a sledgehammer is better than having a stake driven into your forehead it not that much better

Are there people left who will lend him money after seeing what happened to twitter?

… no?

if I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Yikes. I feel sorry for the 3rd party vendors who are going to be getting awkward questions from their clients about why they think that WordPress is going to be a viable platform in the future

Maybe I’m out of the loop, but isn’t this the primary corporate entity - the one that owns the trademark, sets the development direction, and ultimately owns the product - essentially announcing that they are abandoning their own product?

Jellyfin has explicitly asked that people find other places to donate to: https://opencollective.com/jellyfin/updates/were-good-seriously

Most likely outcome (assuming you make it to Iran) is they make a big show of congratulating you and setting you up with a super lavish lifestyle that is totally not a compound that you are definitely allowed to leave if you want but why would you want to with all the people trying to kill you

data retention

It’s the opposite - most regulatory frameworks require that you only retain data if you have a “legitimate purpose” for holding on to it; providing app features absolutely is a legitimate purpose, so by having a “wrapped” you can justify holding on to everything a user does - after all, you need it to provide features.

I’m surprised it’s not already in place for rail freight. Pre-defined, well known routes, automatic right-of-way. You’d need some exception detection - spot things on the line or if any part of the train is behaving abnormally, but like cars you can “fail safe” - do an emergency stop if the computer or a remote operator decides that something has gone sufficiently wrong which you can’t do in a plane

Technology wise, aircraft are already 90+% automated - autopilot does basically the whole cruise phase, pilots are there to do the communication with ATC, manage the autopilot, and be hands on for taxi, takeoff and landing.

From a legal/policy perspective, the aviation industry is held to a much higher standard of reliability and safety than the automotive industry - the AI driven YOLO that companies like Waymo get away with. It’s not just that autopilot systems have to always work, it’s that they have to always behave in a predictable way.

If they did it deliberately and I could prove it, I’d rent a billboard across the street from where they worked

What’s stopping you from learning to mod BF1 today? Why do you need some magic AI to make this happen?

I’d say the only ethical way to be a residential landlord is if you are renting out the only house you own because you aren’t in a position to use it as a house - say you’ve brought a house, but had to move somewhere for a few years for work and intend to move back at some point.

The moment you own 2 houses, you are profiting from a system that only works because of inelastic demand - you could have put your money into the stock market and made it do something productive, but instead you are collecting rent, making it harder for others to meet their own basic needs, and profiting from a speculative bubble

… Wasn’t there a story a few months ago about a family that had done exactly that and turns out living in Russia kinda sucks?

Town where I grew up had an awesome laser tag - you started off with a basic blaster but could unlock a shotgun (more damage, but fired slower and had limited ammo) and a rocket launcher (single shot insta kill) by doing different things in game

I don’t know, but there probably should be a line somewhere. More wealth than 99.9% of the rest of the planet sounds like a good place to start

Because in countries with functioning democracies, political power is narrowly scoped (your electors give you a mandate to do certain things, and if you act contrary to those interests you loose your power) and fleeting (you only have power as long as your electors continue to entrust that power to you, and can remove that power if they decide you are no longer fit to wield it).

Money, by contrast, is permanent (capital breeds capital) and unaccountable (you can choose to use the power your wealth grants without any regard for what others think - even if people disapprove, they can’t stop you spending it)

Simply by having a billion dollars means they have decided to hoard that wealth. They could give away 90% of it, leaving them with $100 million, it wouldn’t impact their quality of life in any way, and still leave them with more wealth than 99.9% of the planet. Imagine the good that $900 million could do if it was put to good use rather than sitting in a bank account as a status symbol - having the capability to do that good with no impact on yourself or your family and choosing not to makes you an immoral person.

Billionaires shouldn’t exist. At all.

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