Re: Computers say Yes,..... Resistance is Futile and Puerile and Self-Destructive
First question: who architected this very expensive, licence-heavy FOIA IT infrastructure when flat files are almost free to host?
2223 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Aug 2006
> however you believe we can do 4 things, it's just the 5th one that is a problem
It might be a problem - anything can be a problem to someone - but it seems not on the same scale of things as the others. I don't think 5 is a problem if anyone does it. I think it's particularly distracting when large, unnatural steps forward can be made in multiple areas.
This is all entirely unsurprising, and why no one should want the government to handle any more things than the bare minimum...
But...
I will say this: the less time businesses have to spend on fake activity like tax affairs, and the more time they can spend on doing useful things for their customers, the better off we'll all be. So the estimates on the benefits might be under-egging it.
> the same people who want things free also want to have very nice vacations.
This is a good way to put it. "Things should be zero cost, but also everyone should be well paid" is definitely an idea validated by years of low interest rates. I hope they find a way, as it would be nice if it were zero cost for as many people as possible, but the transition between paid and free can become very tricky.
The problem is it's all concentrated in one place. It's fine to have people arriving in a location with money - they will slightly push up house prices, but not disastrously so, and they will spend their money locally as well. The issue is the concentration of many companies all bidding for the same pool of developers, who get wealthy off the competition, and are all wanting to buy houses in the same place.
> Unless the CEO is personally computerising or other automating the work, it doesn't matter what the nature of the work is.
No, quite the opposite. The CEO is overall in charge of the success of the company, which, as I said, includes funding, specification and operation of the automation.
As to why compensation exists the way it does: it's because it can do. Why does a Silicon Valley engineer get compensated $500k when they couldn't work in the office without someone cleaning the toilets for $15k/year? The same forces that drive a compensation level of $500k drive the CEO's salary as well.
Yep. Anything graph-related, e.g. a social network, or a large-scale representation of things that relate somehow (e.g. if you're Amazon and want to query across all your networked devices, or an IoT provider wanting to query all your devices in the field and how they relate in a mesh) it works.
I will say at least Neo4J is also quite good for exploratory work, but that's more because it doesn't enforce schemas and has a nice visualisation technology, than anything to do with it using graphs.
It depends on what "the same use cases" is.
Graph databases are an optimisation: they're amazing at queries like "count all my friends of friends of friends" but they are bad at queries like "give me the mean of all the ages of people in this database". Unsurprisingly, they're good at graph-like traversal but bad at relational operations.
Relational databases are pretty good at everything, but not the best at many things. Choosing them is not the premature optimisation choice, which is good.
They've been villified a lot, despite in my mind being the most engineering-friendly cloud platform, and doing loads of good stuff like open sourcing VP8, starting Kubernetes, making AlphaFold, making Go, running Android, etc. They're obviously not perfect, but I think this is to be expected based on the commentary they get in the media.