I appreciate the fact that IMB is trying to present a optimistic view of the future. Not all sci-fi needs to be negative or dystopian, and his remains plausible despite its optimism.
I think if you’d rather read about the downfall of the Culture, then you’ve somewhat profoundly missed the point of Ian’s writing.
I have an ongoing argument with my wife where I proclaim Brave New World to be a utopia, not a dystopia.
It's a society where the VAST majority of people are happy. Really truly happy. A society that is in ecological balance with nature.
If Brave New World is a dystopia, what does that make the world we live in now? It has to be some kind of super-dystopia, because it's worse in every way you can possibly imagine.
I'm pretty sure that if the Culture discovered a world like that of Brave New World they'd work to shut that society down pretty quickly as they'd be appalled at the idea of creating underclasses by intentionally exposing embryos to poisons (alcohol?).
The the society of Brave New World would fail as a utopia because of the "What would the Culture think?" test ;-)
I don't think it's that complicated: because not everyone thinks "being happy" is the utmost peak of meaning or purpose. Many people desire challenges, difficulty, a grand narrative that comes with ups and downs.
And those people exist and are handled specifically in Brave New World. It's just that the system fucked up a bit and took a long time to find the protagonist of the book. But consider the world you and I live in where a vast majority of people who want challenges like this can never have them as they are stuck being dirt poor, or in criminality or something. It's gotten a lot better in the last 100 years, but it's no where close to BNW.
that's not the point of Brave New World? We like to interpret it like a dystopian book (and I still think it is), but the book challenges you into explaining WHY.
It certainly plays the "moral" card, and more back when it was released. It FEELS dystopian because it plays at a different moral than ours. Oh, a world totally devoted to hedonism, with no families, everyone drugged all the time, where eugenics creates a cast system where people are clearly not equal.
Right now some of those things are less shocking than in 1932 (sexual promiscuity, for example), but Huxley makes a great work into presenting a good case on how the society presented WORKS and it is, at least, superficially a paradise. The book, after all, was written as a response to other "utopian" books that were describing "ideal societies".
I think that a lot of people, even today, gets a gut feeling that's a dystopia, and feel more identified with John the Savage, which is totally out of place and hates it. But I think that the genius of the book is that it presents a world that we can interpret as bad while their inhabitants live in bliss.
It's not just the food. It's the social interactions are good, you get to go to great plays and other entertainment, and you have a work that is exactly matched to your cognitive level so you feel challenged by it but not frustrated.
Are they really truly happy? I got the impression they were superficially kept content by drugs, sex and social engineering. I recall strongly disliking their society.
Not much of a dystopia if you can leave at any point - and in fact be actively supported in leaving if that's your thing. The fact that the Culture seems to be inherently comfortable with people, ships and even chunks of society leaving or joining gives an indicator of how it really is "self consciously rational" as Banks put it.
Maybe I'm lost here because I haven't read the books, but how does this not lead to a fundamental contradiction?
The article says that the Culture intervenes in places that don't quite live up to their values or are otherwise problematic in some way. So if people leave the Culture and develop in ways that become unacceptable to the Culture and thus get interfered with again, how free are they to actually leave?
> The article says that the Culture intervenes in places that don't quite live up to their values or are otherwise problematic in some way.
In practice, they mostly intervene against people with, like, slavery and death camps, not minor philosophical differences (or even pretty major ones; many civilisations run artificial afterlives of eternal torment for their people, and the Culture doesn't openly intervene against _that_). A number of breakaway ex-Culture cultures show up in the books, along with various Culture dissidents.
The galaxy in the Culture novels is a big place full of many societies - a few at the same level of technological development as the Culture. So it wouldn't be that difficult to wander off somewhere and get lost and do your own thing.
However, if you do go off and set up your own fascist dictatorship outside of the Culture there is also no protection should the Grey Area come hunting for you.
1. Exercise good judgment about what projects are “away team-able”. Be okay saying “this needs to be done by our team” even when that’s hard. Otherwise you’ll end up with tricky features implemented by people who don’t understand the full context (this sucks very badly)
2. Make sure the amount of process matches the amount of complexity. If the change is very simple or only a few lines, make it trivial to submit code changes that will pass review. (So have really good automated style checks/test suites.) If the change is complex, make sure you’re doing design reviews before implementation, to ensure the away team doesn’t waste time with bad implementation strategies
How does that work when the thing you want to change is a complex micro-service with a public API? Do you want to spin up your own version of that service and own it forever? Even if you’re okay with that, you’ll not have the clients the older version has
Open-source model works for libraries, or small changes in service code (where the maintenance burden is trivial). But it doesn’t work for complex services with high maintenance burdens
Spin up your own and own it forever would be my thought, yes. This is definitely a high cost to pay - my thought is that the bias should be much more towards modifying the existing service, but leaving the engineers that own the code to be empowered to figure out how to do this. Rather than having management say you have to review this away teams code, deal with it
This would work if the service is stateless (ie owns no data) or the state that it carries can be duplicated without ill effect. A lot of services won't be like that though.
That's a good point. You'd need to figure out what to do about persisted data the service depends on as part of the forking process. In the cases that aren't such that you described, I'd guess most of the time you'd be stuck trying to get your changes merged by the home team - something I think is much more desirable for long term code quality (in theory)
This should never happen on Prime Video. Major breach of customer trust.
If it’s happened to you please call customer service and complain. If they can’t fix it or refund you, please get in touch with me and I will try and get it fixed for you
What angers me the most is that they never bother to get subtitles (closed captions) on a lot of films I'd like to watch. Being deaf, it's a major pain when a decent film doesn't come with subtitles !
I feel like this is easier if you’re a non-lever-puller. If you think it’s wrong to pull the lever if it causes anyone’s death who wasn’t dying anyway, then most of these are easy.
Except the “you can’t see the track” one I suppose :P
I think it's never right to pull the lever, unless there aren't any humans on the other track. I'd sacrifice an animal or objects, but people should never be sacrificed for other people, unless they actively choose to.
“The court also found that the act [shooting down hijacked plane] is incompatible with the constitutional right to life and the human dignity. The act would turn passengers and crew of a hijacked plane, victims themselves, into "objects" - not only to the terrorists, but also to the state, which does not have the authority to kill innocents. If their deaths would be used to save others they would be reduced to mere "things" at the pleasure of the state. Further, the court believes that the arguments of the federal government, saying that passengers in such a situation would die anyway, are invalid, as human lives deserve protection regardless of the expected duration of their existence and that it is impossible to fully assess the situation leading to an eventual invocation of the act.”
Extreme situation that could be a counterexample to your claim:
Dr. Evil is 90 years old, his consciousness is slowly fading away, and he is going to die in a week. He is almost ready to release a bomb that will torture kill half of the world population. If you pull the lever Dr. Evil will die today and you will save all those people. You are the only one who can pull the lever. Do you pull the lever, or do you stick to your principle of not sacrificing other people who don't want to be sacrificed?
I think (3b) isn’t true, since the sanctions are effecting every part of Russia’s economy. And while the petroleum industry is like 40% of their exports by revenue, the other 60% is obviously significant. Also from a Russian point of view, the difficulty importing and lack of access to the international banking system may be more painful.
In fact if the west could target everything except oil, they probably would (since that’s the most critical export that Europe needs).
Your overall point still stands though. Your argument is strong. It’s not practical for Russia to simply redirect their flow to maintain “business as usual”.
China is supporting Russia. At the end of day, you want buy "stuff". China makes worldwide "stuff". Yes, they can't but Channel or enjoy netflix, but they are world food producers and near unlimited oil (if you factor in the frozen methane supply will dwarf entire Saudi). For money, China will be the middleman. So you still supporting Putin everytime you purchased an app from iPhone store. It is just a more complicated steps to assist Putin to take down Ukraine. The real question is can you sanction China? Look around you. China ensures decades of low inflation. Take China out of equations, you gonna see BLM rioting on steroid in America.
There is one school of software engineering which upgrades all warnings to be errors and thus fatal because "warning culture" leads complacency. Thus emitting a new warning as part of default behavior will break builds.
Yes. But if you do that, then you need to be willing to fix new warnings (or ignore them) when you update dependencies. After all, if an update adds a new warning about something dangerous you are doing in your code, but shouldn't be, wouldn't you like to know about it?
You have it backward. This is installing a red light in the middle of a road where there is no intersection because 10 years from now there is a plan to build a crossroad and then wondering why people are angry about a traffic jam in the middle of nowhere. People who ignore warnings are the people who run new red lights and will eventually kill someone when the intersection goes in. The people who upgrade them to errors stop at red lights, don't kill anyone, and get rightfully pissed that someone put a red light up 10 years too early.
The people who upgrade warnings to errors are those who wire the check engine light to the brake. This is fine for a test environment where you want to highlight problems, but it does not mean you get to yell at whoever improved the check engine logic to detect more potential problems if you car now stops in the middle of the highway.
Breaking over new warnings seems crazy, but that can be one of the prices of stability. C, Perl, JavaScript and others have similar problems and come to their own solutions.
(For instance, C has warnings under the -W flags and you could enable them all at compile time with -Wall, but then people depended on the specific flags under that option so there's also -Wextra now.)
Stability means sometimes you stay still when there are good reasons to move, though there's always a balance. Perhaps a larger solution is needed (more prevalent version pinning, or an ASDF 4.0), but this may be a tempest in a teapot. We'll see how this particular issue shakes out.
1. The parent comment is referring to waste in the environmental sense. Nature does not care how expensive the trash was--just the volume/composition
2. It's a big stretch to call AirPods "disposable" I (and many others) keep them for years. In the long run everything is rubbish; an expensive electronic device that lasts for years and years is not "disposable"
> Nature does not care how expensive the trash was
No, but the price is often a stand-in for how much energy/carbon it took to make the product, which is what I always assumed was the case here. I'd love to be wrong...
I suspect that the airpods are expensive because of how difficult it is to manufacture them rather than material use. They probably require the latest factories with time consuming manual labor to pack them all in the case and glue it up. As well as a thick markup that you $1 battery doesn't have.
I think if you’d rather read about the downfall of the Culture, then you’ve somewhat profoundly missed the point of Ian’s writing.