I’m sure that there are examples of actually wasted money, but just putting it out there that planning is fucking important. There have been several high profile projects, like Texas high speed rail, where planning was the hard part and the project got canceled as they were ready to break ground because “there was no progress”. Cue* Republicans “the government does nothing” after they stopped anything from happening. Infrastructure cannot operate on election cycle timelines.

Digging in the ground and integrating with existing infrastructure isn’t just a plug and play operation. Leases and liens need to be sorted out. Estimates of current and future demand needs to be sorted out so you don’t install useless networks. Fiber isn’t that heavy, but “can the existing conduits under bridges/roads/etc support it and/or do they have room to without a complete replacement” isn’t a trivial question for backbone lines.

Winging it just causes more problems as you find things you didn’t anticipate and cause delays while having to continue paying contracts so work can resume once the delay is cleared. If you don’t, the contractor is on to their next job and unavailable for an effectively random amount of time. While everyone is mad at you that “no work is being done”.

It could be done faster, but it would cost more. Because planning is really important to keep multi-million/billion dollar projects accountable and on track.

Wyoming thinks it’s cool to for armed citizens to oversee state senate votes.

It can be both.

I feel like using that statistic is misleading in terms of efficiency just from the factor of “gallons of gas per pound of food transported”.

Sure there’s spoilage from product going bad, but marginal efficiency gains there are so far down the list of things to worry about that they’re not really worth going into. The reason people don’t have food isn’t because enough isn’t produced, it’s because they’re not allowed to have it because they don’t have enough money. Less food spoiling doesn’t fix that problem.

heralded by the Biden administration, tribes and conservationists as historic

This is the reason. It’s an absolutely terrible reason. But we’re at the point where the 2nd Amendment folks are cheering the deployment of National Guard and Marines against protesters.

Like with Florida Man a lot of that is simply due to Florida’s more lax reporting standards. It’s less that Florida law enforcement are exceptionally worse and more that they’re the sample that is most transparently on display.

Which is worrisome.

Dick Van Dyke is also still around and doing projects heading towards 100.

If keeping busy is keeping them around I look forward to each of their 150th birthday parties.

If the message is “that circle of people in the back of the crowd are mumbling something”, it doesn’t matter.

More people checking out instead of getting involved means the more easily influenced are all that remain to campaign for.

And what I mean is that prior to the mid 1900s the etymology didn’t exist to cause that confusion of terms. Neither Babbage’s machines nor prior adding engines were called computers or calculators. They were ‘machines’ or ‘engines’.

Babbage’s machines were novel in that they could do multiple types of operations, but ‘mechanical calculators’ and counting machines were ~200 years old. Other mathematical tools like the abacus are obviously far older. They were not novel enough to cause confusion in anyone with even passing interest.

But there will always be people who just assume ‘magic’, and/or “it works like I want it to”.

“Computer” meaning a mechanical/electro-mechanical/electrical machine wasn’t used until around after WWII.

Babbag’s difference/analytical engines weren’t confusing because people called them a computer, they didn’t.

“On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”

• Charles Babbage

If you give any computer, human or machine, random numbers, it will not give you “correct answers”.

It’s possible Babbage lacked the social skills to detect sarcasm. We also have several high profile cases of people just trusting LLMs to file legal briefs and official government ‘studies’ because the LLM “said it was real”.

I think because it’s language.

There’s a famous quote from Charles Babbage when he presented his difference engine (gear based calculator) and someone asking “if you put in the wrong figures, will the correct ones be output” and Babbage not understanding how someone can so thoroughly misunderstand that the machine is, just a machine.

People are people, the main thing that’s changed since the Cuneiform copper customer complaint is our materials science and networking ability. Most things that people interact with every day, most people just assume work like it appears to on the surface.

And nothing other than a person can do math problems or talk back to you. So people assume that means intelligence.

Pantone doesn’t mean much when the lighting conditions change throughout the day.

Maybe maybe not. Camo is just about playing the odds, nothing works from every angle or circumstance. If tires on wings means 5% more planes survive it’s probably worth it.

That’s what config files are for. It would be a nightmare to hardcode weight and balance and have to recompile the HUD every time you change the loadout or refuel the plane.

Most code, algorithms, etc are not any more sensitive than the concept of desks and file cabinets. No, guidance programs for missiles probably shouldn’t be put on GitHub, but there’s a reason RSA and other encryption algorithms were open sourced. It’s better to have more eyes looking for inefficiencies, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities than to just assume it’s good because no-one on the team responsible is smart/engaged enough to find them.

A lot of functionality can be decoupled from anything that needs to be classified. A HUD is a HUD and no one should be hard coding in performance characteristics of the F-35 into it. I’ve also worked on government projects and holy crap does the code quality vary wildly, even before you get into “it’s still working so deal with the problems, it doesn’t have the budget for updates”.

Using ‘off the shelf’ parts/code can save significant time and money. There’s a reason subs use xbox controllers. Government websites and data interfaces at the very least should have the audit-ability that open source provides.

Also it’s Hard Rock Cafe, they have a burger with shrimp on it, what’s so weird about mix n’ matching patties?

In theory yes, but not a lot of people are uploading their family photo albums AFAIK.

I think it would be interesting to have some kind of global archive. Even if descendants don’t care “now” has the potential to be the beginning of the best documented era in history. Historians would kill for photographs by random average people from any other time.

A lot of people thought that that’s what the Internet would be, but that’s obviously not the case. And I know the “right to be forgotten” is a thing, and deservedly so, but at some point you’re throwing out the wine with the amphora.

It helps when you don’t care if the answers are true, just that you have “answers”.

Hackers is a movie without lies and nothing can convince me otherwise.

Why?

Every vehicle doesn’t need to do everything. Otherwise we’d all buy turbocharged Hummers with a trailer for extra fuel. It’d be nice to have some middle ground between a smartcar that confined to surface streets and something you’d take a roadtrip in. A worst-case ~150-200 mile range is enough for a boatload of people to commute 50 miles and not have to worry. If you can plug it in overnight, even on just 120v, charging speed is a negligible concern.

I think a lot of range anxiety is weird. A lot of gas cars from the 80s/90s/00s have ~300/400 mile range per tank, but that’s because you don’t want to go to a gas station every day. If you could just trickle in gas overnight they could’ve had much smaller tanks too.