Eugenics is any choice that influences the genetic makeup of your descendants in a way that you believe to be desirable. Choosing a tall partner because you want your kids to be tall is eugenics. Eugenics happens every day, in every country. The bad rap comes from historical attempts to apply it coercively. Parents choosing to eliminate their genetic diseases is not the same.
For all their failings, there is nothing catastrophic about democracies at the moment. Not compared to the actual catastrophes that autocracies commit. Lumping the two together as equally failed is ridiculous.
On the other hand, I’ve worked in places where the total destruction of IT (so as to start again from a clean slate) was within the Overton window of options for how to transform the business.
I fear this altimeter idea may be scuppered by local variations in the Earth’s density (it’s not an exactly uniform sphere of rock). Or maybe that just means the clocks could be great density-mappers!
On second thought, you need a base station on the ground to tell you its time for comparison anyway, so if that base station is nearby the density thing should mostly work itself out
I don’t have a problem with chess.com existing, but if someone starts shouting loudly about how chess.com is going to be the future of everything, and that I’ll need to buy a bunch of expensive-but-still-kinda-crappy hardware to participate in the inevitable chess.com-based society, and that we need to ground-up rearchitect computing to treat chess as fundamental component of UI… well, it just gets a little tiresome.
Like plastics recycling the basic problem is that it competes with plastic monomers and other bottom-of-pyramid substances that cost about 50 cents a pound. For instance you can make ethanol fuel using either strong chemicals under harsh conditions and mild conditions or with enzymes under mild conditions. Either way it doesn't work economically, you can use $30 of enzyme to make $1 of fuel, but hey, sometimes you get a radical cost reduction.
I think an argument can be made that relations, schemas and constraints encode a kind of business logic that is intrinsic to the definition and integrity of the data, while other types of business logic represent processes that may hinge on data but aren’t as tightly coupled to it. Similar to the difference between a primitive type and a function.
I guess some will argue that their business logic is special and really is so tightly coupled to the data definition that it belongs in the database, and I’m not going to claim those use cases don’t exist, but I’ve seen over-coupling far more often than under-coupling.
This is why I say: Applications come and go, but data is forever.
A useful use of AI might be to simulate thousands/millions of user sessions (via generating mouse and keyboard inputs), with instrumentation/logging switched on. Run them in various shapes of VMs until you hit the problem. Fuzz testing, basically.
>"Han Wavel is a world which consists
largely of fabulous ultraluxury hotels
and casinos, all of which have been
formed by the natural erosion of wind
and rain. The chances of this
happening are more or less one to infinity against. Little is known of how
this came about because none of the
geophysicists, probability statisticians,
meteoranalysts or bizzarrologists who
are so keen to research it can afford to
stay there."
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