Can you explain where this comes from? I mean, that's not even close to what the norm is in Europe. Though, to be fair, we don't normally count fuel into TCO and the reasoning is: if you want to go distances then you are always paying for them. Whether it's public transport or taxis or whatever. Is fuel the major contributor in the number?
If you want to go some distance you're always paying something to do it - you can't therefore assume all means of going a distance cost the same and that factor can be ignored, though. A plane, train, bus, car, and taxi are all going to have different cost efficiencies (some more different than others) of going on a given type of trip. From a different perspective, they all require purchase, maintenance, licensing, and registration as well - but those are still part of TCO because it's part of the total cost. If you remove them for being the same type of cost rather than the same actual cost then you wouldn't really end up with much going into TCO even though the total cost of each is wildly different.
In general, you're almost certainly no longer on the path to calculating anything that should be called TCO once you've started removing costs associated with using the item. Apart from that, you're probably not on your way to a very meaningful cost comparison either.
As an American I would also like to know... My actual expenses for my low end luxury car are nowhere near that high, and I live in CA which has massively inflated car expenses in practically all fronts.
Registration: $600/year
Insurance: $1,500/year
Gas: ~$2,700/year (15,000 miles @ 30mpg @ $5.50/gal)
Loan: ~$3,500/year if I had borrowed the entire price of the car on a 60 month loan and then kept the car for 15 years as the GP stated
Maintenance: Certainly less than $1,000/year, much less in most years.
And in some states registration and insurance could literally be a third of what I pay. Gas could easily be half. I can't imagine anyone is paying $12,000/year for any non-luxury vehicle.
I think it now has a slightly different lens. The DropBox argument was that anyone can build this in five minutes, so why use this? Now, with LLMs, the argument is that anyone can build its own.
I remember reading an article in National Geographic of how crow's brains are much more interconnected than is the norm in mammals, i.e. IIRC they have a higher density of synapses between neurons. From that article, it seems that the usual brain weight vs. body weight to determine intelligence, which seems can be used to approximate intelligence in different species of mammals, cannot be used for birds (or at least crows, which the article was focusing on).
In other words, they seem to achieve better results with smaller brains than we thought. And yes, crows (in EU) do exhibit some pretty intelligent behavior.
The brains of corvids are not closely related to mammalian brains. All the mammals have roughly the same brain, but corvids have a different architecture.[1]
Intelligence seems to have evolved three times on this planet - mammals, corvids, and octopuses. Octopuses have a distributed system rather than one central brain.
They all have neurons, but the higher level architecture differs drastically.
Knowing that several different architectures can work is important for AI.
There's apparently more than one way to do it.
I appreciate the linked article. I wonder if the the list should be expanded to 'at least three times', and I start to think about intelligence in plants.
My point here is that if intelligence developed more than once, it didn't come from some one-time random event or divine intervention. It looks like once there are connected neurons, it evolves via continuous improvement.
In some environments, that evolution hits limits. Flying birds are limited in brain mass or they can't get airborne. Which may be why corvids don't rule the world.
Oh yes absolutely. Intelligence certainly developed more than once. Bird brain is no slur.
Before your comment I would have said it emerged twice, but then I had not considered octopuses, they are wicked smart and so unlike other intelligent animals we know.
I've read there's also a social aspect - crows are extremely social creatures, as are humans, and other highly intelligent animals like whales. That does seem to be a common denominator.
Regarding that, I'm reminded of another story - on my daily walk near work, there was a dead crow on the pavement. 5 or so crows were standing all around it, doing nothing really. Even me passing close by did not trigger them to fly away or anything, it seemed like they were standing watch on the body. The next day, it was still there, same thing. The 3rd day, it was gone, but the crows were still standing watch in the same manner. I didn't know what to make of it other than it appeared they were mourning or taking part in some type of ingroup ritual. I didn't see it again after that, but it struck me.
> [Social creatures] does seem to be a common denominator.
One theory is that it drives the creatures to internally model or simulate others intents and reactions, in a way which is a far more regular, consistent, and nuanced than any modeling of various prey or predators.
Further along that path is modeling future-me in plans, and layers of "I know they will know I know they know, so..."
Thanks for the link. I observed a flock of "mourning" crows around a dead one in the field behind my yard. I was flabbergasted at what I was seeing.
So they are mourning and investigating the cause of death for the sake of the flock. Wow!
Thanks for linking this, I had been wondering what the heck I had observed. It was really interesting. I love watching them. I almost always see something new (for me)
I'm not an expert in the area but have read a bunch on this topic to try and understand it better. Bird brains and human brains are structured very differently. Birds are much more like GPUs with independent distributed processing happening in parallel. Mammals have these big bidirectional layers where signals are constantly propagating up and down in a big connected computation.
It could simply be an evolutionary "discovery", with no particular advantage over our "brain model". Evolution doesn't seek out optima; it simply encourages genetic structures that improve odds of reproductive success.
Or, to put it another way: if corvid genetics happened upon a brain type that promoted their survival, it doesn't matter if it was "better" or "worse" than the path the monkey/hominid brains took. Genetics took the first bus going in that direction.
In terms of why bird brains would be exceptionally efficient for their volume (and I assume by extension, mass), would be that weight is at a premium for them.
Another case of brain efficiency : jumping spiders. They have less than half of ant's neurons, but instead of bruteforcing computing power they have a different specialized wirings.
tl;dr, the higher cognitive abilities of birds are centered in a different region of the brain compared to mammals, the pallium vs the cortex. Neuron density in the bird pallium is also higher than the comparable density in the mammalian cortex.
You mean the middle management? I have been in environments where they were almost literally made up of pencil pushers. Wouldn't be too sad to see them go. Only half joking, but it is written in jest.
Nope, just people who basically swivel chair information from one place to another. Useful in some way, should have been automated a long time ago, and yet persist.
But yes, middle management would qualify ;-). My manager seems spooked by LLMs. Loves to use them to write his emails, but seems to internalize that since they're doing his job for him at this point, his boss may figure it out.
Indeed, there were plenty of people doing just that. I imagine they get the most out of vibe coding. However, when it became a problem, an engineer was still required to fix it.
It might have been you, a couple of months later, or someone else. I have dealt with slop produced by unknowing programmers most of my career. With this vibe coding I think my job is still safe. The amount, though, is increasing exponentially.
Indeed. I have to say, I hate this. Suppose you are in a meeting, you update something and you see the result, but the rest of the team does not. Ok, a couple of hundred ms does not play into this but if the update does not make it through? And yes, it happens.
Changes go through and synced to everyone on your team in almost realtime. If there's a conflict on the server and your change cannot be applied (almost never happens), your change is rolled back on your client, again, almost in realtime. If servers cannot be reached, we will show you a syncing badge within 4 seconds to tell you that you have made changes that haven't been sent to others yet.
Strange that we can be so be polar opposites on this. You hate it, I would never write an app in any other way, ever again.
(curious) What if a user closes it before 4 seconds? Ctrl+enter, it optimistically locally updates within 1 second. I close ctrl+w. But my wifi goofed and it didn't reach the server.
I have mysteriously lost comments/descriptions I wrote on issues. I figured it was related to a failed and lost opportunistic update like this, although I suppose it could have been caused by a fixable bug.
The HTTP request is fired off instantly, so chances are that the request is already written to the socket and closing the page won't cancel the request. Should your wifi-router drop it, your client will retain the transaction on disk and retry it the next time you come online.
Yeah that's the issue isn't it?
I see in the UI it's sent. But actually it's sent only the next morning.
To be fair. It's fine for an issue tracker. Anything actually important i'd spend a few seconds going over what I just sent. In which case I'd see it's not synced. And what's not that important it's really fine if in some random wifi edge case it's phantom sent. So makes sense.
That's really gross behaviour; users like it because they don't understand it and don't know to blame it for their issues when weird things happen to them, and weird things to them all the time.
‹giant argument breaks out before people realize a bunch of messages went missing and were posted out of order› “Oh, it's just ‹app› being weird again. I really hate that.”
As a user, I like when things appear to sync instantly and perfectly, such as in Google Docs.
As a developer, I hated the article and many of the comments I read thus far because:
- Having clients and a server properly sync and not lose data in the event of a network failure amounts to having a consistent distributed system which is not easy to do, and the commenters don't seem to have understood that
- I hate having written a long document and then losing it because the sync code is buggy, so the previous point becomes even more important.
So reading many of the things here has been mildly infuriating.
That being said, none of these people are likely affiliated with Linear, and given the overall quality of the product I'm pretty sure it works properly.
In the case of a partition the client nodes get temporarily out of sync but the system will then synchronise to one state again once the partition is resolved if it’s written correctly.
So no violation of CAP theorem it just prioritises liveness over consistency
But... software engineering was never about the boiler plate. Or adding the extra parameter.
It was about knowing how to fit the new use case into an existing code base, respecting the architecture, and sometimes rearchiteting the solution. How easy the latter was is really dependent on whether the code/arcitecture respected the low coupling, high cohesion principle.
Now, some of this can be coerced into LLMs but it takes work and careful study of the changes. Sometimes they get it right, many times they do not. So, you have to go back and forth with them. If you know what they should have produced.
SWE is far from dead. We just let too much slop into the codebase because we're overwhelmed by it and not incentivized by leadership to care. Code quality will likely drop to the point where even the leadership will notice and it will normalize again. There's nothing like a high profile customer calling out a problem that was vibe coded. It has started already and will be happening more and more.
In a poly I would guess people need to feel attached to a group not a single individual, in a sense loving all people in the group almost equally. Mostly, we are not raised that way and culturally it would be unconventional, to say the least.
Loving people equally is impossible. Even poly people have a 'primary' introducing hierarchy and preference.
A group of people sleeping together is not a stable community. It's filled with people who are trying to sleep with other people inside and outside of the group who are vocal about being able to spend time, money, and effort on others for sex. There's nothing binding a group like this together besides sex.
Even normal community activities like volunteering or sports clubs have drama and people who end up hating each other. Add sex in the mix and you've created an explosive dynamic.
I tend to agree. I was describing how I think it could work and how I suppose it worked before. Nowadays, when contact with many people outside of the group is ubiquitous, I think it's next to impossible, but maybe there's people out there that make it work. Good for them, if they found a way.
Other posters have said something similar, but I wanted to be more direct: nobody should ever seek validation from outside of themselves (not that I don't have problems with this, I am just saying how it should be).
It's inevitable in childhood, but the parents' role is to create an independent individual. This often not the case, so we see ourselves in need of validation from our spouses, bosses, etc. and it can cause people to stay in bad working or personal relationships.
The trick is to be proud of yourself in an all-encompassing form, admit where you are not good at and improve, if you want to. Advice is welcome but critique should not lessen how you feel about yourself.
Just my 2c and what my experience in life taught me.
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