At the University of Michigan many moons ago CTA stood for Central Tripping Authority, a largely imaginary collective devoted to taking hallucinogens. (Regularly.) There was CTA graffiti all over East Quadrangle dormitory when I lived there. The meaning was well-understood.
> In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic lights being out.
My purely anectodotal experience is that the response is variable and culturally dependent. Americans tend to treat any intersections with a downed stoplight as a multi-way stop. It's slow but people get through. I've experienced other countries where drivers just proceed into the intersection and honk at each other. (Names withheld to protect the innocent.)
It seems a bit like the Marshmallow test but measures collaboration. [0]
One could argue that it's "cultural", but California state law says this about the situation:
> Traffic Light Not Working
When a traffic light is not working, stop as if the intersection is controlled by STOP signs in all directions. Then proceed cautiously when it is safe to do so.
Where I'm from (a relatively rural country) they just get treated like give way signs you'd have on a country road, the larger road generlly has priority but as it's not clear they'd be more cautious too.
My company hires remote staff worldwide. We use Deel and Remote and normally include time zone rather than location if it's relevant. There are countries where we don't hire for geopolitical reasons like China. Having staff in those locations can make it complicated if you seek funding (including loans).
Having said this most companies I encounter that have overseas workforces set up local corporations where staff work in proper offices. We have a lot of customers so I see this a lot.
> It seems like they are building a complex distributed system to solve a problem that is better solved by tar -cvf
That doesn't work on Parquet or anything compressed. In real-time analytics you want to load small files quickly into a central location where they can be both queried and compacted (different workloads) at the same time. This is hard to do in existing table formats like Iceberg. Granted not everyone shares this requirement but it's increasingly important for a wide range of use cases like log management.
Or understand what it's doing internally. I used to dislike Oracle User Group presentations because it seemed as if most people were just guessing what the database was doing under the covers. MySQL presentations on the other hand (a) showed code and (b) were often given by the authors.
> I was visiting Jane Austen's House Museum last year and it always gives me pleasure to see how wildly popular her work remains.
I have believed for a long time that Austen is broadly popular because her works deal with issues of human relations and economic prosperity at the heart of modern, bourgeois existence. The draw is summed up in this excellent quote from the article:
> They also both, mostly, focus on characters who have enough privilege to have choices, but not enough power to escape circumstances.
That's a perceptive description of middle class life. The movie "Clueless" is an illustration of how easily Austen's insights translate to a society that is superficially very different from hers. [0]
She is although simply a joy to read. Witty remarks and well written.
"Elinor agreed with it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition". - from S&S
Who wasn't in a situtation where they felt arguing would do nothing? John Green asked: "Who doesn't want a friend as witty as Jane Austin to comment on life?
Austen's command of language and empathy for her characters is second to none. I love the hook at the end of this passage from Pride and Prejudice.
``And of this place,'' thought she, ``I might have been mistress! With these rooms I might now have been familiarly acquainted! Instead of viewing them as a stranger, I might have rejoiced in them as my own, and welcomed to them as visitors my uncle and aunt. -- But no,'' -- recollecting herself, -- ``that could never be: my uncle and aunt would have been lost to me: I should not have been allowed to invite them.'' This was a lucky recollection -- it saved her from something like regret.
IBM is turning into a real player for enterprise data. They have a very long history of data related products and their portfolio is starting to look interesting again, especially if it includes Kafka and the Confluent cloud service.
I just hope this is not another Data+AI play. There's real value in doing data properly that does not go away. AI return on investment is much more speculative.
> For your own personal sake, you may be selfishly wishing it’s as few people as possible. Eventually they’ll outlaw VPNs too and by then you’ll have little recourse. You can’t hide behind them forever, deeper change is needed.
It does not work that way in functioning democracies. This is like blithely raising people's electric bills in the name of preventing global warming. Noble aspirations but brain dead implementation that completely undermines the original goal. And fuels, one might add, the rise of political parties that just want to burn everything down.
Personally I went from more or less ignorant of these laws to completely outraged in the time it took to eat a couple of sausages.
Why don't we humans think this stuff through? Surely we can do better.
Moral: A good TLA can be surprisingly memorable.
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