I was a professional, and I didn’t have a backup of my personal system for about 2 decades. I just didn’t have another 4TiB of storage to copy my media library onto. I’m now on backblaze, but there was a long time there when I did not have a backup even tho I knew better.

Also, even in a professional setting, I’ve seen plenty of “production support” systems that didn’t have a backup because they grew ad-hoc, weren’t the “core business”, and no one both recognized and spoke up about how important they were until after some outage. There’s virtually never a test-restore schedule with such systems, so the backups are always somewhat suspect anyway.

It’s very easy to find you (or your organization) without a backup, even if you “know better”.

/s ?

Your feelings are valid. The “rise” of “AI” has been a net negative for my subjective experience, too.

On my good days, I still enjoy programming, but I just ignore AI, and if it is too forcefully suggested, I just blacklist the purveyor.

On my bad days, I don’t have enthusiasm for anything, but I still program because this project isn’t going to get done any other way. I’ve tried throwing AI at other things, and it screws things up so badly it takes me more time to fix it. And, sometimes it “lies” and I don’t catch it immediately.

I have a good selection of subscriptions on YT (and Nebula), communities on Lemmy, and Follows on Mastodon, and I start there when I just want to enjoy the web. I intentionally avoid following algorithmic suggestions of unknown quality (and defintiely turn off any sort of auto-play); I find I will spend time on that stuff nearly without bound, but it’s less enjoyable than what I (or other humans) have curated.

I started programming in '85 as a child. I used to be a professional Haskell programmer. I’m open for work. (All I need is vim and some API docs and I can write anything from C to JavaScript to Lean.)

Fidelity, Banks, Coinbase (before I got out of cryptocurrency entirely).

But, basically, only when government regulation does (or SHOULD) impose KYC requirements.

Age and ID verification might be good in a very few cases, but it should definitely be a deviation from the norm.

I’m confused, why would “Accurate Noon” be important?

Why is any particular time important? It serves me to be able to tell time without a clock and synchronize my internal clock with solar activity.

And for countries that sit far enough from the equator, wouldn’t it be inaccurate regardless?

No. Distance from the equator doesn’t significantly affect when the sun it at it’s peak. It does affect how high in the sky the peak is.

Time adjustments (like “daylight saving”) drags the Sun E/W (which is why we “need” timezones). Increasing latitude dags the Sun N/S.

I’d rather have accurate noon / celestial time for the few months it is still allowed and still have to switch twice a year than let the government make wrong-noon (“daylight saving”) time permanent. So, many of the “end time switching” movements I actively resist rather than support.

I imagine things like this aren’t “done and over” because there is no majority opinion.

RCV / a Condorcet Method might help.

Investment as a form of collaboration and results distribution is probably fine. Tho, I would not be opposed to limits on size/scale for companies, individual wealth, pay ratios, etc.

Shorts, options, and other “exotic financial instruments” are worse than gambling because they compel corrupting (withering) behavior.

I think an active, forceful SEC based by a similarly aggressive DOJ, both focused on benefit-to-working-class primarily and market-health (e.g. lack of rent seeking, monopolistic, or monosoponistic behavior) secondarily, would lead toward a better (for global society) market. I think that could be true even if we continued to allow fairly arbitrary contracts that are those “exotic financial instruments”, options, and shorts.

I agree that gene editing to reduce suffering is good. I’m not sure “designer babies” is a label that includes those gene edits. Or, if it does, it groups the with too many other gene edits so the good ones are no longer exemplary of the label.

billionaires who froze themselves hoping for immortality

Most Alcor members that the state considers deceased were never billionaires. Freezing appears to be better than chemical fixation for preserving the brain: https://www.brainpreservation.org/large-mammal-announcement/

Making Mortality Optional does seem like a good goal. You don’t have to want to live forever, just one more day.

I think the knock-on effect of making some innate, human characteristics undesirable is probably a net bad. That’s very close to labeling persons with those characteristics as sub-human–specifically due fewer “human” rights.

That said, if I were choosing between gametes or embryos and had genetic information on them available, I do not think it is a moral stance to ignore/discard that information when making the choice. We should be careful to understand our genetic knowledge is still quite limited and, even if our knowledge was perfect, (most) genotypes are not destiny.

Capital-class behavior. Nearly as bad as rent-seeking.

ESG in shambles.

Also, my preference shouldn’t matter to anyone else. If you want to increase your proof assistant skill (even from nothing), I suggest lean. Probably the same if you want to increase programming skill in a dependently typed language.

Honestly, I should get more comfortable with it.

Right now, I’m spending more time in Idris. It’s not a great proof assistant, but I think it’s a lot easier to write programs in. Rocq is the real proof assistant I’ve used, but I don’t have a strong opinion on them because all the proofs I’ve wanted/needed to write where small enough to need minimal assistance. (The bare bones features that are in Agda or Idris were enough.)

Yes, I’ve written some Lean. It’s not my favorite programming language or proof assistant, but it seems to have “captured the zeitgeist” and has an actively growing ecosystem.

Yeah, software is already not as deterministic as I’d like. I’ve encountered several bugs in my career where erroneous behavior would only show up if uninitialized memory happened to have “the wrong” values – not zero values, and not the fences that the debugger might try to use. And, mocking or stubbing remote API calls is another way replicable behavior evades realization.

Having “AI” make a control flow decision is just insane. Especially even the most sophisticated LLMs are just not fit to task.

What we need is more proved-correct programs via some marriage of proof assistants and CompCert (or another verified compiler pipeline), not more vague specifications and ad-hoc implementations that happen to escape into production.

But, I’m very biased (I’m sure “AI” has “stolen” my IP, and “AI” is coming for my (programming) job(s).), and quite unimpressed with the “AI” models I’ve interacted with especially in areas I’m an expert in, but also in areas where I’m not an expert for am very interested and capable of doing any sort of critical verification.

Oracle is not the worse DB in existence. They are a worse company than MS, but I’d much rather be talking to Oracle than MSSQL.

(My go-to is PostgreSQL, tho.)

Unfortuntely, nothing fine-grained enough for me. But, you can block communities and users (or even whole instances).

I prefer the keyword filters on Mastodon, but I don’t mind the political stuff, so my needs are clearly different from yours.

Definitely burning. It is possible to make reusable plastics out of oil, e.g.

Of course, plastics might have their own problems, but they aren’t always CO2 emissions.

It seems unlikely we’ll be able to completely eliminate plastics (current medical practices is the sticking point I see), tho we can certainly make a more “circular economy” around them, to reduce the need for oil extraction.

I have problems to this day with a single monitor setup. When I switch the monitor to another input (e.g. to play with my Switch), KDE Plasma, X, or something else freaks out, about half the time (I’m guessing it has something to do with locking or DPMS timers). When I switch back, it is running that the “safe” 640x480 which can’t display enough of the display settings panel under system settings for me to restore the 1920x1200 monitor native resolution!

Things are better than 2007, and they might be better than MS Windows, but “no trouble” is inconsistent with my experience.