This is the famous “Loo With A View” taken from a high end restaurant in Paris, incidentally.

Peak Shitpost. A++. Would expect to see it reposted again.

You will never own an EV for under $80k

Putting on my D.A.R.E. T-shirt and clutching my state issued copy of the Ten Commandments and snapping an Amazon Ring Camera on my front door, so I help the state identify any of those nasty, America hating Antifa I’ve been hearing so much about.

I’m helping!

“You’ll never own another computer cheaper than $500”

Chinese tech firms produce high end computers for less than $500

“SANCTION! TARIFF! EMBARGO!”

Apologies if I’ve touched a nerve.

Again, not clear how the US plans to neutralize long range missile capability of Iran.

Target the depots and destroy them with artillery.

You quite literally have no clue regarding the subject you’re opining on here.

This was established decades ago in excersises the US has been running since the Cold War Era.

The goal isn’t to defeat Iran in a quick war, but to neutralize the nation’s long range artillery and turn it into a free fire zone for American and Israel armies.

Ukraine isn’t Iran. It has a firm rear guard of support from the NATO block, supply lines that can re-arm and re-staff depleted arsenals and positions along the eastern front, and allied agencies ready to pick at Russia’s flanks - by seizing cargo shipping, assassinating ranking political leadership, and blowing up critical domestic infrastructure.

What the Iranians lack, at the end of the day, is friends. Nobody in the Russian, Pakistani, or Chinese government is going to send saboteurs into Israel on their behalf. Nobody is going to help them keep the Straight of Hormuz shuttered. Nobody is going to blow up Saudi desalination plants or bomb peripheral American military bases.

Once Iran military can no longer produce and deploy new ballistic missiles, the country just becomes target practice for its enemies. We (probably) won’t see a Rumsfeld-style blitz into Tehran, like they managed in Baghdad. But we will see Iranian airspace closed, critical infrastructure destroyed, and population centers targeted to effectively break up the political face of Iran into its component parts.

What becomes of a nation without a central bureaucracy, an intercity municipal system, or a functional electrical grid? This was a country already in a water crisis months ago. It is a nation functionally under siege by the most sadistic and savage militaries in history. People are going to die by the millions before this is over, simply due to disease, drought, and famine. It’s going to be a country the size of Germany experiencing what Israel has done to Gaza.

Quite literally bombed into the Stone Age.

I can explain in basic terms what is happening there. Does that help anybody?

Really depends on where the bug lives.

I would argue that it doesn’t because almost everyone writes code in higher level languages.

Most people write mediocre code. A lot of people right shit code. One reason why a particular application or function runs faster than another is due to the compilation of the high level language into assembly. Understanding how higher level languages translate down into lower level logic helps to reveal points in the code that are inefficient.

Just from a Big-O notation level, knowing when you’ve moved yourself from an O(n log n) to a O(n²) complexity is critical to writing efficiently. Knowing when you’re running into caching issues and butting up against processing limits informs how you delegate system resources. This doesn’t even have to go all the way to programming, either. A classic problem in old Excel and Notepad was excess text impacting whether you could even open the files properly. Understanding the underlying limits of your system is fundamental to using it properly.

Similarly, I could explain to you how long division works but the next time you need to divide two numbers you’re still going to reach for a calculator instead of a pencil and paper.

Knowing how to do long division is useful in validating the results of a calculator. People mistype values all the time. And whether they take the result at face value or double-check their work hinges on their ability to intuit whether the result matches their expectations. When I thought I typed 4/5 into a calculator and get back 1.2, I know I made a mistake without having to know the true correct answer.

One of the cruelest tricks in the math exam playbook is to include mistyped solutions into the multiple choice options.

What then is the point of lamenting the loss of knowledge that no one uses directly?

It’s not lamenting the loss of knowledge, but the inability to independently validate truth.

Without an underlying understanding of a system, what you have isn’t a technology but a religion.

I think the plan is to have Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles demolished before then.

You’re better for it.

The majority of posters are indistinguishable from bots

You’re not missing anything. Reddit is the embodiment of Empty Internet Theory. If you’re a human posting on that site, you’re a statistical anomaly. And not for long, because everyone’s getting booted.

Well, like with the Netflix question, you can keep going deeper until you hit the unknown. At some point, the person asking the question doesn’t know the questions to ask to get to that next level, though.

Stupid cephalopods. Learn to breed without dying, idiots!

LintCoin’s value is through the roof, though. You’d be a fool not to hand them all your boring old American dollars.

And don’t even get me started on TulipCoin.

Idk if I’d call it a “strength”. Feels more like a weakness.

But sure. This is the reason bureaucracies exist. Knowledge accrual, organization of specialties, long term investment planning, and distribution of surplus… as critical today as it was 8,000 years ago.

Those telephone systems still work because someone knows how each part works.

I’m more than confident that - if you actually went down to AT&T HQ and really dug into the weeds - you’d find blind spots in the network created by people leaving the company and failing to back-fill their expertise. Or people who incorrectly documented this or that, forcing their coworkers to rediscover the error the hard way.

I think we do underestimate how many systems are patched over, lost in the weeds, or fully reinvented (by accident or as a necessary replacement) because somebody in the chain of knowledge was never retained or properly replaced.

I would be very dubious of the theory that anyone at AT&T could recreate their system network from the 1980s, without relying on all the modernizations and digitized efficiencies, for instance. No way in hell they could reproduce the system from the 1940s, because all that old hardware (nevermind the personal) has been rendered obsolete ages ago. But I’m sure there are still lines in the ground that were laid decades ago that are still in use. Possibly lines that they’ve totally lost track of and simply know exist because the system hasn’t failed yet.

I remember talking to Brendan Gregg about how he conducted technical interviews, back when we both worked at Netflix. He told me that he was interested in identifying the limits of a candidate’s knowledge, and how they reacted when they reached that limit. So, he’d keep asking deeper questions about their area of knowledge until they reached a point where they didn’t know anymore. And then he’d see whether they would actually admit “I don’t know the answer to that”, or whether they would bluff. He knew that nobody understood the system all of the way down.

I think this is the nut of building out a skilled development team. You need different people at different levels who know their area of expertise well and who are willing to admit where it ends, such that they can reach out to the next guy to step in and assist.

But also, you need the Full Code Stack as it were. Or, at least, you need a way to know where your blind spots are and understand the limit of your capacity. Otherwise, you run the risk of an “innovator” asking why they can’t just dump canola oil into their gas tank or how come you can’t just use hydrogen instead of helium for your balloon. And worse - plowing ahead because nobody outside of their cubicle stepped in to stop them.

You run the risk of destroying a lot of your own hard work - and possibly a lot of other people’s hard work - because you didn’t realize your own limits or know where to go to exceed them.

I think some people look at this arrangement and say “This is unsustainable, the cards have to come down at some point”, because it is a fucking stupid way to run an economy.

But, like… the money keeps flowing. And it keeps flowing because the Fed and the Treasury are implicitly backstopping the malinvestment. And their pockets are functionally endless.

I wish you could just roll your eyes and make these abhorrent economic decisions stop. But I’m afraid these people might legit die trillionaires without a regret in the world (other than failing to solve Immortality Science with an LLM), because we’ve stacked the economic deck so high up in their favor.

Which means now our tax dollars won’t just be used for data centers, they’ll be used for power plants too.

Sure… maybe…

Part of the problem with power plant construction is that our production capacity is largely maxed out. If you want a new gas power plant, you go on a waiting list that’s two years long (conservatively). Wind and Solar production are also at their domestic limit. Nuclear continues to be a pipe dream.

And, again, it cannot be overstressed that turning on a data center means a net-negative cash flow. These facilities cost more to operate than they earn, even under a ludicrously generous state contract. Why would you want to power them on these terms?