> Regulators ultimately approved the plane to return to the air nearly two years after the 2019 crash, but Pierson still doesn’t trust the MAX line — the modernized, *more fuel-efficient version* of Boeing’s predecessor planes.
I think we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the fossil age - and its end will take more than a few companies down with it, which are way too attached to the massive use of fossil fuels.
> Not to mention multiple orders of magnitude safer than driving to the airport.
I guess that's counting accidents per distance. Which is a weird metric if you compare a vehicle that is going some 560 miles per hour with one that is going not even 55 mph on average.
By that metric, using a space shuttle is safer than commuting by bicycle in Europe (which is not only extremely safe if you wear a helmet, cycling will statistically make your life longer instead of shorter, in spite of the accident risk, so large are the health advantages..)
If I need to go to a place 1600 km away and can choose between a car or a plane then fatal accident per km is a metric I would use to see what would be a probability of a fatal accident in either case.
Why does this reminds me in this big, extremely profitable company that made something every American needs in a while, which seems to have abandoned all sanity in their processes? Looks like Intel and Boeing are on a similar path....
I know some people browse the web while gaming, but I don't. For the gaming use case, I legit want a toggle that says "yes, all the code I'm running is trusted, now please prioritize maximum performance at all costs." For all I care this mode can cut the network connection since I don't do multiplayer.
I imagine people doing e.g. heavy number crunching might want something similar.
I think that a lot of the heat in the debate between different error handling strategies, and whether Exceptions, functional return types, or whatever are the best way, boils down to that there are very, very different requirements.
In some sectors and domains, it is not a problem if a program fails and crashes. And it is also not a problem if a change in error handling makes an internal library backwards-incompatible (*). In such environments, errors are not costly, and it is more important to quickly write code, than that it is always correct. This is even more valid in distributed computing environments which have redundancy.
In other domains, a crash could be deadly (like in an autonomous car) or could cost millions of dollars (like with the Ariane rocket) - and backwards-incompatible changes in libraries might be not tolerable neither (for example, in industrial automation, where core libraries are used for 20+ years).
(*) One point to consider which might not be obvious to most people: When extending a function, which has, say, an enumeration as one argument, it is always possible to extend it by adding new enumeration values to its input parameters, just like one can add keyword arguments with a default value. This modification is always backwards compatible.
But backwards compatibility breaks if one adds enumeration values, or new kinds of errors, or new Exception types to the *output parameters* of a function - because the code of its clients must now be modified to handle all possible cases. If one takes semantic versioning seriously, this is a breaking change. And one can argue that in a statically-typed language used for safety-critical systems, the compiler should always catch that.
> This is the major problem with most comparisons of config file formats: the actual semantic domain of a config file format is extremely limited [ ... ]
Scheme lacks most syntactic affordances that imply semantics. Even if some of those implications are dead wrong, they're still useful.
Personally I think the right answer for configuration files is to define them in terms of a generic object model. A program could even support multiple formats (TOML+JSON+YAML). If a user dislikes all the supported formats or the file is generated with something like NixOS, it can be handled with straightforward conversion.
Point taken, but it would seem the problem there is probably due to the arbitrary placed mixins? My proposal was more for a single configuration object, just in whatever actual syntax you (or your team) prefers. If someome runs away with that and writes json that includes yaml that includes python that generates configuration from what it found on the filesystem, responsibility for that needless complexity rests squarely on the shoulders of the new programmer.
Having syntactic affordances for every nuance of semantics is what led to the current state of zoo. What is wrong with having trivial syntax and distinguishing semantics by labeling parts of the syntax tree with symbols?
Specifically with scheme, I believe the main problem is the symbols lack any distinction to know the difference between a function call and a syntactic form.
(Don't shoot the messenger, I've done my fair share of scheme. I've also done a lot of thinking about why some people are so turned off from the syntax, and it's certainly not that the opening parenthesis is in a slightly different place on the prefix function calls)
From a New York Times article yesterday about a different natural disaster (the wildfire in Maui):
> Natural disasters have often been the focus of disinformation campaigns, allowing bad actors to exploit emotions to accuse governments of shortcomings, either in preparation or in response. The goal can be to undermine trust in specific policies, like U.S. support for Ukraine, or more generally to sow internal discord. By suggesting the United States was testing or using secret weapons against its own citizens, China’s effort also seemed intended to depict the country as a reckless, militaristic power.
Kate Starbird, disinformation researcher at the University of Washington, got her start investigating crisis communications and disinformation which would emerge during crises, at the University of Colorado Boulder.
She discusses this in some of her online presentations on YouTube. If you're interested in those, I'd suggest looking prior to ~2020 and ~2016 specifically as later discussion gets more caught up in COVID-19 related and Trump-related topics. Which are interesting in their own right but not the sources I had in mind.
(I'll see if I can locate a representative video, there's a lot to comb through.)
Does Kate or any of her peers ever discuss the particulars of how language is used by those on both sides of various disagreements to imply certain facts without asserting them outright (as in the GP comment)?
I'm not sure if she discusses that specific element of disinformation, though her research covers a number of dimensions, from disinfo-at-scale in social networks to types of disinformation.
You don't need bad actors for a disinfo campaign. There's a certain type of person in a natural disaster that just loses their head and starts making shit up on social media, and they're fairly common. I've seen it a few times now and it's crazy. They'll make things up that could jepordize people's lives for the likes, I guess.
Also, having seen FEMA at work first hand, they are approximately useless. I could see a lot of anger happening organically.
> certain type of person in a natural disaster that just loses their head and starts making shit up on social media
They're the "everything happens for a reason" types. Their belief system doesn't properly integrate chance events, so when confronted with one, they create a bogeyman. Because somebody being in control, even a bad somebody, is more comprehensible than nobody being at the wheel.
Sometimes, but not always. There are PLENTY of "highly" rational people who do similarly as they utilize reasoning at the "close enough" level as is the cultural (and culturally enforced) norm in their country/era. And if you protest based on a more strict approach, expect to be dismissed ("debunked") via culturally ingrained, rhetorically persuasive memes.
Avoiding all errors in cognition is often extremely difficult, ain't nobody got time for that sort of "pedantry".
There are also just those who actually always had kooky beliefs, but normally they weren't relevant so even their acquaintances didn't know, but after a disaster they feel they're obligated to help, which manifests in them espousing their kooky beliefs on social media.
> FEMA giving victims in Maui a measly $700 while other parts of the US federal government spend billions upon billions to fund not only the war in Ukraine
You’re comparing cash handouts to military aid. (Also, the $700 figure is incomplete [1].)
>WASHINGTON -- One week since President Biden declared a major disaster declaration for the state of Hawaii in the wake of the devastating wildfires, the Biden-Harris Administration and voluntary agencies provided survivors with immediate needs such as food, water and shelter and approved millions of dollars in disaster relief. To date, FEMA has approved more than $3.8 million in assistance to 1,640 households including more than $1.57 million in initial rental assistance.
I think we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the fossil age - and its end will take more than a few companies down with it, which are way too attached to the massive use of fossil fuels.