Check out Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" for an interesting take on this dynamic for nation-states and political economies. His core thesis is that dominant powers rise as new players leverage new technologies (especially energy technologies), build complex interdependent economies centered around those technologies, but then wither and fall as they spend increasingly more on military power to monopolize and defend the chokepoints of those technologies. When a new more efficient technology comes along, they are doomed to irrelevance as they fail to capitalize on those technologies, and new players swoop in for dominance.
He gives examples of the Dutch and wind power (sailing); Great Britain and coal; and America and petroleum. He also predicted China's ascendency as the next player willing to leverage new technologies.
I was fascinated by "At Home In The Universe" back in the 90s. But this seems like a rehashing of the same ideas, without new evidence or theory. Anything new here?
Does anyone have a similar compendium specifically for software engineering disasters?
Not of nasty bugs like the F-22 -- those are fun stories, but they don't really illustrate the systemic failures that led to the bug being deployed in the first place. Much more interested in systemic cultural/practice/process factors that led to a disaster.
One of the safety training stories at the lab I used to work at was about a chemist who set his lunchtime hamburger on the shelf in the fume hood while running reactions with a potent methylating agent. Slow painful death over the course of a week. Definitely put the fear of god in me.
Pop-culture tangent: Does anyone know if Slotin's story was the inspiration for Dr. Manhattan's orgin story in _The Watchmen_? Many resonances between the two.
LOL. Copernicus & Galileo didn't "doubt" the geocentric model, they provided scientific evidence that it was incorrect. You see how that's different, right?
"I'm not trying to question climate change, I'm just wondering if this overwhelming scientific evidence might somehow be wrong, despite any evidence to the contrary ... and I'm just as brave as Galileo for questioning established orthodoxy, too!".
There's plenty of easy-to-find evidence out there that shows that the speed and magnitude of these changes are not only unprecedented in human history, but geologic time scales as well. It's also crystal clear that these changes are caused by the massive increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations caused by humans burning fossil fuels. This is sorted by both theory and massive amounts of evidence. Good primers exist all across the web, http://climate.gov/ is a good starting point.
"But wait, maybe this is all just natural cycles" is borderline willful denial at this point, especially on a well-informed site like HN.
Might as well ask if maybe the earth is flat after all.
The post goes into this in some detail. In human languages, the embeddings for specific concepts seem to follow very similar geometric relationships no matter what language. If that holds across species, then you could use geometric similarity to map animal embeddings to human concepts.
Also, since chatbots just output "meaningful" strings of tokens based on a string of input tokens, you can build a chatbot that can "talk" to animals without us necessarily being able to understand it. But sure how useful that would be, but interesting nonetheless.
Sorry if it came across that way, wasn't my intent.
I live in the city, and travel through all parts -- including the less desirable parts. I ride down Market every day. I go to the central library at Civic Center. I do bike loops through Candlestick. I frequent bars in the Tenderloin.
So no, it's not just because I can avoid "crime-ridden areas". It's because I don't find those areas fundamentally unsafe.
I think that says more about Hacker News than SF. There's a level of hate for the city here that I don't understand. Feels a bit like a vendetta sometimes.
I've lived in SF for almost 30 years. I agree 100%. Sure, there's a lot more sad/ugly homelessness in the post-covid era. The shantytowns out by Candlestick are depressing. The Tenderloin continues to be a mess.
But do I feel less safe? Absolutely not! The neighborhoods (where most people live) are just fine. I regularly walk home from the bars at midnight without a care. It's simply not a problem.
Compare back to the mid-90's, when there was active gun/gang violence in the Mission corridor ... quite frankly, I feel far safer today than I used to.
I would definitely ask ChatGPT what the best keyboards are, summarizing their strengths/weaknesses, and then use that as the starting point of my search.
Comparison shopping is a major PITA with current sites, clicking back-and-forth between various product pages and review sites, and trying to distill it down to a few relevant choices -- things that ChatGPT's excellent abilities at summarization could really help with.
He gives examples of the Dutch and wind power (sailing); Great Britain and coal; and America and petroleum. He also predicted China's ascendency as the next player willing to leverage new technologies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great...