Admittedly, after slogging through Jodie Whitaker'a seasons, I gave up after the first couple episodes of the new doctor. On your recommendation, I'll try the latest season.

The reason the show sucks now isn't Ncuti Gatwa, his acting or any indelible characteristics. It's Disney and their infinite capacity for ruining anything creative by playing it safe, coloring inside the lines.

This is the kind of thing that the US government would pay reporters to make up, using circular and non-existent citations. Late they revise or redact figures and reports to maintain a shred of credibility. The problem, is that someone's reputation was on the line, but now they can just defer blame to an AI hallucination. The damage is done, you've formed an opinion and a general sense of unease, but you forget what facts and sources you based that opinion or feeling on.

This might seem like a good comparison, but there's a key difference in that salaried intellectual work doesn't have strictly quantifiable output metrics. You can find yourself in a position where a feature, once explored in depth is really a rats nest of features. Developers can poop or pee, but they may find themselves under immense pressure to deliver something where a project manager has underestimated the effort required to complete it. The developer then finds themselves virtually shackled to a chair for long hours to meet management's expectations. Meanwhile, warehouse workers go home at the end of shifts.

Nuclear Lake refers to a lake used for nuclear waste storage. The Taiga Test site, or Atomic Lake, is a different lake and the radiation levels are fairly low.

You might not realize it, but we also have a one-party system in the US and a horrific history of human rights. For example, slave labor didn't end in the US, we just call it prison labor. This isn't what-about-ism, but pointing out that the US should worry about their own problems before pointing out China's problems. Much of your information is also just flat out propaganda and a distortion of reality.

I'm sure the average Slashdotter doesn't remember, but in 2020 I was saying the sanctions would backfire by clearing out competition in domestic Chinese markets. Well, here we are. While the US was busy staring in the rearview mirror, China was closer than they appeared and sped past. Clearly, the only solution is more sanctions, tariffs and cutting research funding!

While I love Rust, the "we wrote it in Rust so it's fast" or "Rust performance" conversation is getting really tired. Languages aren't "fast" or "slow", the software and algorithms written in the language are "fast" or "slow."

This is just gaslighting

Right, compilers are pretty damn good these days and we've learned a lot of tricks from people who write assembly. However, compilers are not AI and will invariably do things that are less than optimal in some cases. It's not really feasible to write large codebases in assembly, nor are the gains generally worth the effort. My point is simply that when I was first learning to code in the 90s the guys writing assembly were mocking the kids writing C and C++ for writing bloated software with tons of unnecessary dependencies.

Fast forward to today, and a simple CRUD app on your phone is 3Gb just to fill in a form with a button, not counting the backend. I do a lot of data pipeline development where much of the base infrastructure was designed by guys currently in their 20s before I got to the company, and even 10 relatively simple unit tests take 5-10 minutes to run on a modern CPU with plenty of ram(they spin up postgresql/fastapi/moto docker containers). I can't exactly argue that the approach is wrong, but the bloat is EASILY 1000X what I would have created in a clean room just for unit tests. The actual services themselves(that are mocked for the unit tests) handle bursty loads of a few hundred thousand requests per minute, but require a cluster to run. The waste is absurd, but the cost is acceptable to the company. The developers at my company are relatively competent and cost conscious, probably because they're in their late 20s and early 30s and learned to code in a pre-cloud-dominance era.

The more CPU and memory the more bloat. Younger software engineers don't feel the need to optimize... I was once one of them and I thought it was impressive, but absurd to write code in assembly(I still do and I'm not wrong). However, at this point we're be vibe coding our way down the slippery slope of irreversible climate change.

Whether he actually existed or not, depictions of Jesus as white reinforce the standard racial biases of Euro-centric people. A brown, hook nosed Jesus might have invoked some sympathy over the millennia as Europeans(including white Americans) went on murder sprees in the Middle East.

I think there's some value in working together in person, but it's not a cure-all. There's no simple way to return to halcyon days, except through deep analysis and planning. Management (eg MBAs) doesn't really understand the things they're managing. They're just really good at making you think they do. When they're failing all they know is how to do is "go harder." Employee misery is a sign of going harder, so they do more of that. Intel needs to identify, acquire, incentivize and retain innovative engineers and scientists. They should be paid like C-suites. However, the current guard of C-suites is more focused on squeezing more juice out of existing products and processes, especially in terms of cutting wages and intensifying labor, when there's no more fucking juice to squeeze.

I was also critical of the best that the Democrats could put forward. I've worked closely with many of what people call the "wealthy elites." All of them are brutish low vision narcissists. When they're lost they double down on their worst impulses, which for them is what they think is their recipe for success. It works in a system that coddles billionaires, but fails in adversity.

So much winning! D=