Okay, so when you, BobbyJo, become too old or unwell to work; other people should just shoot you in the head and take your stuff, right? It would only be efficient. Or does this 'harsh reality" only apply to other people?

Modern society has the luxury of surplus resources at the moment, and we are able to take care of the old and weak, which we indeed choose to do. If/when that ceases to be the case, the harsh reality will apply to everyone, me included, yes.

Another thing humans are arguably good at is making a longer term plan and investment: if we see that old people simply get shot, we won't be investing surplus value into our retirement funds — at least not of the same sort. Perhaps we'll be building fortresses when younger, accumulating wealth to be able to pay soldiers to protect us etc...

Wait, that's exactly what has happened, except it has evolved into a more systemic solution (our taxes and social contributions pay for police, courts; bigger accumulated wealth allows for more options...).

Politicians in democracies need a fallback career for when they lose office. Before capital controls were lifted in the 80's, economies were a lot more local: UK politicians would take positions in UK companies or institutions, French in french ones, etc. This did mean a certain amount of corruption, but it did mean politicians were highly interested in the success of national companies and institutions.

Now, most of our senior politicians go to the US after leaving office; so for consistency they adopt the belief that there is no downside to making the UK beholden to foreign companies, or becoming a nation where all the innovative professions end up building capital for foreign owners, instead of building strong UK companies. As a consequence of this, they almost compete to sell out the public. It's impossible for them to believe that what they were doing is a betrayal of their country, because that would go directly against their personal interest.

This is presumably why vertical freezers have drawers. Theoretically if all the space is taken by drawers, there is no cold air that can immediately fall out. I guess the movement of the drawer would at least disrupt the air in that drawer though, unless it has an individual lid. It does seem like drawers could be used on fridges as well, and gain some of the benefit of this and still be practical. Although not so convenient for the top one.

Well, but do you never have to open the fridge to get an ingredient, half way through cooking?

It inherently takes more usable space, there's no design that won't lose space, which makes them impractical in smaller homes. To visualise it, for those living in more spacious areas, imagine a "galley" kitchen: 8 spaces one standard unit size, arranged in 4 on each of two opposite walls, with an aisle in between. One unit may be lost to a door. One must be a hob, another the sink. The hob must not have storage above within 60-70cm vertically, due to fire risk; and limits what may be adjacent as well. A window may prevent the use of some spaces above waist height.

A door that opens outwards uses space that has to be clear anyway because that's where you walk. A door that opens upwards takes space that could have been used for another appliance or storage, or the upper half of a fridge twice the size.

The only way round that would be for it to be able to slide outwards, but that's also inconvenient.

Having said all that, they are a great idea if you have the space.

You may not need to read it, but you still need to test it.

Code that has not been thoroughly tested is a greater liability, not a lesser one.l, the faster you can write it.

The choice is not between "individuals are on their own against scammers" and "users are locked into Google vetting their phone". Users should be able to choose another organisation to do the vetting. They bought a phone, they didn't sell their life to Google.

There's a question about the right units here. Your CPU performs more operations in its first millisecond* than most mechanical devices do in their entire lifetime. So in per operation units, they are staggeringly reliable.

Actual operating life is often determined by the economic feedback loop which causes manufacturers to cut costs until basically all consumer products have roughly the same expected lifetime, regardless of the potential of the underlying technology.

* Or at least, the first millisecond after it starts using its normal operating clock, which might not be the very first millisecond

> Actual operating life is often determined by the economic feedback loop which causes manufacturers to cut costs until basically all consumer products have roughly the same expected lifetime, regardless of the potential of the underlying technology.

Which is why, despite being a huge BEV proponent, laugh when I hear people say things as "BEV are inherently more reliable due to having no transmission and less moving parts that could break". It might have been true in the early stage, that we're currently at the end of, but we already know that the reliability of a second-hand mid-range ICE car is what market has been bearing for decades, so we can be certain BEVs will be "value-optimized" until they are just as unreliable.

But that also just means that BEVs will become way cheaper as companies rush to optimize value and capture users at more attractive prices.

Yes. Cars have fixed cost ranges for people so the end result is pretty much predetermined - electric cars settling at the same price and quality points as ICE cars are today.

Agents are new, but dumb coding practices are not. Despite what it may seem, the knowledge of how to manage development has increased. One practice I haven't seen for a while is managing by limiting the number of lines changed. (This was a dumb idea because rewriting a function or module is sometimes the only way to keep it comprehensible - I'm not talking about wholesale rewriting, I'm talking about code becoming encrusted with conditions because the devs are worried that changing the structure would change too many lines)

Buffer size is the product of bandwidth and delay, so if communicating with something close, it can still go fast.

Had an illustration of this once when my then-employers IT dept set up the desktop IP phones to update from a TFTP server on the other continental land mass. Since TFTP only allows one outstanding packet, everyone outside head office had to wait a long time for their phone to update, while head office didn't see any issue.