SpaceX can probably accelerate their flight schedule to accommodate Russian crew needs. There's the question of if Russia is able/willing to pay nearly $100m per seat. Their flights on Crew Dragon are currently paid through NASA in a seat exchange program where they provide flights from this site on Soyuz for US astronauts. They don't actually pony up the cash.

This launch site is also essential to attitude control of ISS. To refuel the ISS stabilizer thrusters and hold it steady while the gyroscopes are relieved periodically requires Progress modules launched from there. There isn't currently a backup plan for those services.

Ok, it's only because I assume people skim rather than bother reading whole paragraphs. I can paragraphs, honest.

I think one of the greatest advances of the Western Enlightenment was a kind of realization that it's really, really difficult to know something.

It's not just about personal biases, and it's not just about cultural biases. It goes way beyond that -- it's the systems we live in and depend upon.

When we were living in tribal times, you could probably find out through direct experience most of everything you needed to know. And anything beyond that was just magic. How to find food, how to make relationships, and the consequences of various strategies. The tribe was local and could learn and retain that direct tribal experience.

Today we live in an incredibly complex global system which is not only 8 billion people, but they are all agents who are part of systems, of systems, of systems.

We're all dependent on and using systems which we have no idea how they're actually made or how they're connected or what they even do.

We have this problem when you listen to what your doctor thinks is wrong with you, what legal advice you might be given, which foods are being promoted as healthy, which morals and ethical views are being enforced, which laws are being made, which things are taught in education, as well as the wider opinions around which side are the good guys in any particular conflict.

And so on and so on.

We seem to be living in a system that is far more complex than we can understand.

If the internet and now AI are to save us from this bizarre place of being both incredibly interdependent and nobody really understanding what the heck is going on, that tech has to give us exquisitely transparent and clear feedback loops.

When someone in some position of authority or influence, like a politician or a company manager, makes a decision, we have no idea what's really going on and why they really made that decision. Yet it can affect many and in unanticipated ways.

And that's even before we get into the fact that 99% of the brain is unconscious.

We are in the kinda Forbidden Planet scenario where we built an incredibly powerful system yet none of us understand the implications, and by the time the feedback loop completes, it'll be too late.

New math isn't the problem -- new math was never the problem. Standards are the problem.

You do realize the young people aren't choosing their own education, right? Its the previous generations making those changes.

You're likely falling into the logical thinking word problem portion of those students.

Generally agree, I mean, companies don't need to make their own steel beams, cars, and teacups, Cloud gives the lower parts of the stack over to the specialists, who can industrialise their skill with a massive production line.

But what's kinda interesting is that there's still industries where lots of small players are needed, like housing construction and maintenance. We don't all live in an IKEA like mass produced kit house. There's huge variety of small custom house designs and arrangements, ad-hoc pieces, as every house is different.

I guess the question is whether an org's IT is going to fit and benefit more from the mass production line model or the custom local one.

Holy cow!

Was there no agency you could have tipped off about it?

But does it have a Yoda mode?

Are you sure about that? I heard MBS through a Canadian wealth management firm.

Cool :) I must try to reread that again one day.

I was hoping for other proxies, but yes I too see that's a good method. I wouldn't rate my own coding skills, but when I've had chance to speak to people, and ask questions like, so the pentest revealed this bug two years ago, which you fixed back then, but now the latest test this year, reveals the same class of bug again, so what happened, did this code not exist back then? And they say, oh yes it existed. And I'm like, so didn't it occur to you back then to search your code for the same class of bug in other parts of your code where it might be likely to be present, not just where the pentest found it, given you know what your app does? No, we didn't. And then they start complaining about their managers not giving them enough time.

The kinds of common errors which the article suggests shouldn't be happening. Like the 2023 MOVEit snafu.

So the simple version of quality, not the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance version.

We have a massive demand for software, but very few programmers are actually competent.

Interesting. Do you have advice on how to judge the quality of a piece of software, without seeing the source code, but being able to ask other questions?

Sigh, true, I guess the future needs to become decentralised?