(And yes, the Alchemy thing was a bit silly, but back in the day it was capital-S Science. Newton for all his brilliant contributions to math and physics, spent his waning years searching for the philosophers stone and trying to transmute lead to gold. Ironically at least half of the alchemists quest has been solved by physics. We CAN transmute lead to gold in the LHC. Although probably not enough of the stuff to do anything useful, or enough to actually turn the LHC into profit)

Theres kind of a principle thing as well though. If you look at the history of universities, philosophy, math and physics (and once upon a time alchemy, which eventually got tossed and replaced with chemistry) where kind of the big things a university did.

I'd argue that if an institution doesnt at least pay lip service to philosophy, math and physics, its not REALLY a unviersity, but an adult education college,.

Honestly, its probably time for a full rewrite. This site is waaaaaaay behind the times, and finding competent Perl coders who are also up to date with modern web tech, and young enough they can be hired for anything resembling a feasibly outlay is probably harder than just a rewrite with modern tech.

Aspergers was never really considered a separate condition in the biological sense, rather it was just a classification intended to separate profound and non profound cases (Ie people with significant disability vs the "awkward and likes trains" people). But no thats not whats being suggested here, rather that there might be whole separate conditions with the same or similar symptoms but different underlying biology.

I strongly suspect theres something similar going on with ADHD, and its almost certain its the case with schizophrenia.

Small, 6 servers, about 30 vms between them. But it certainly handles much larger clusters, you have entire datacenters running it.

Apple had the trifecta of three visionary types. Steve Wozniac (pretty much single handedly invented the 80s portable TV computer), Steve Jobs (Didnt invent shit, but had a god-like sense of predicting what consumers would want.) and Jonny Ives (Masterful industrial designer. Love or hate Apples, but the devices that came out under his watch where beautiful).

Jobs should have left the company to Ives. Tim Cook is a fine enough businessman, and he seems a decent person (I've yet to hear of him throwing tables at staff members like Jobs did) but the only real innovations to come out under him where watches (which where kind of predicted by everyone, so more just getting in early) and the ARM thing, again less innovation more just smart use of resources. But nothing that completely blows the market apart. macs look more or less the same as they did a decade ago. IPhones have stagnated because the updates are so incremental. IPads are still IPads. Wheres the new product lines?

All we've gotten is the bloody VR headset thats too expensive and nobody wants since VR is an intractably flawed technology that causes eye strain and headaches in *most* people. Good fun to toy with occasionally, but not at $3K+

It is an unfortunate part of the Authoritarian playbook to go after science and academia in general.

The Nazis went after "Jewish Science", notably Relativity , as well as trying to assert the reality of "social darwinism" , amongst their attacks on sociology, sexual health, queer theory and other things they put under their coined term "cultural marxism".

Meanwhile over in the USSR Stalins boys went after evolution prefering lysenkoism (which let them imagine marxism would be passed down by genes.). Maos people apparently went after relativity too (according to the three body problem book, fiction so take that with a grain of salt). And most violently, Pol Pots people just killed anyone who went to school.

Seems regardless of underlying ideological leaning, Authoritarians really dont like Academia. Book burners, Censors, and those that seek to be King don't want you to think for yourself.

You can absolutely be sued, and be subject to criminal prosecution. Just because you have an inside accomplice it's still an unauthorized intrusion

Ruby is still used fairly exensively out there in enterprise and web dev world, thanks to rails, but its certainly not the behemoth it once was.. Which is a shame actually, because I rather like Ruby. I like python more (and have been advocating python since the 1990s. And yes, to any younger coder out there, Python is that old. Its *older* than JS,. Java, C#, Ruby, and so on. Y'all just didn't notice it till the scientists started advocating it cos of Pandas) but in many respects Ruby may well be the superior language due to its excellent implementation of anonymous functions and its metaprogramming capabilities. (Although its not superior in all ways)

Anyway, unfocused rant aside, I think it'd be a shame for Ruby to die like this. A lot of mistakes where made with Ruby (putting Rails as the center of its ecosystem, was a mistake. Rails was pretty flawed tbh, its ORM sucked but more to the point when you make something the only show in town, you lead people to think its all its good for) but the core language is actually really nice. Its eminantly readable, even more so than python, and thus maintainable and you can get a lot done with a minimum of lines of code.

The most miserable work life? The fewest workplace protections? The most money made by billionaires? The highest rate of workplace burnout and suicide? A future where they know they'll never be able to afford a home?

Third. Most money by billionares. 1, 2 & 4 & 5 are merely the expenses to be paid on it. Of course those downsides are paid by us, not the billionares.

Personally I couldn;'t give a fuck if China out competes us. If I have a home , well fed kids, and enough time to give those kids a happy childhood, I'm gonna be pretty happy. Maybe they can go and visit china on a holiday. Or not. Ehhh....

This is just CEO-Brain bullshit. These people keep thinking we live to work, instead of work to live. What they forget is that yes many CEOs and "Founders" do work insane hours. But thats because they expect that at the end of the rainbow they will look in their bank account and behold a stupid number of zeros in their bank balance.

But the rest of us have our labour effectively stolen from us. We make the boss a million dollars off our labour and in return we get maybe $100K. For most americans, a lot less. Its almost as if 3/4 of the week we are working for free. And they want us to do more? Fuck no. I want to spend time with my girl and the kids. I want to spend time playing in punk bands, or shooting scrubs in videogames.. I want a fucking holiday.

If they want me to spend MORE time in the office, and especially if they want 72 hours a week, then I want to see at least six zeros hitting my bank account every goddamn year. And then in a year or so I'll say "Bite me", and take those years, find a nice house in the south west forests and live out my years fishing or growing murder-chillis or doing sick leadbreaks.

These billionares, they aren't like us, and they arent on our side.

The arm stuff isnt whats making supporting the silicon macs hard, its the fact that all the other stuff just isnt documented at the level needed to write device drivers. Apple doesnt benefit from sharing that info, the market for apple lapops for running ARM is very very small. People buy macs because they like OSX. Quallcom on the other hand have a vested interest in making the SOC and supporting chipset datasheets available and accessible, because they need linux to come on board. If I wanted to write arm linux stuff, I'm going to buy one of these rather than a mac, simply because the macs a lot more expensive.

Virtualbox is a pretty excellent replacement for VMWares desktop personal VM platform, but its not really suitable for datacenter VM stuff.

Proxmox however definately is up to the task, and works well enough for running both individual VM servers and clusters of VM servers, as well as having all the useful doodads for distributed storage (Ceph), etc. We moved to it at work, and it couldnt have been smoother. A bit of fucking around reconfiguring the VMs but once we got those detailed worked out, the rest was pretty painless.

Yeah , for the most part Academics see them as nonsensical and even harmful. Most Universities will have *something* that makes them desirable. They might be a lower ranked uni in general, but have a world class Nursing program, or perhaps they are more research than student focused (which doesnt make it a bad choice for students, in fact it makes it a great choice for students who want to become researchers) and so on. Where I live, the lowest rated university also has the best Teaching and Music programs Despite its reputation as the "last chance university", if your want to study music, it'll be your ivy league choice. Thats the sort of detail these things dont capture, instead demeaning perfectly good degrees and unduly elevating degrees from institutions that get their reputation from their status as Ivy Leagues. This in turn tends to reinforce other , often harmful, heirachies in society. Rich kids get to go to harvard, and walks out with a harvard degree despite being a useless seat warmer who did the bare minimum to pass.

Thats not to say the elites are bad universities either. The extra funding from daddys endowment means that rich kids got access to some of the finest academics to tutor them. But the working class kid sent to the local working-class university might just be enrolled in that one topic run by an academic whos ideas will change the world. And that kid might be the one of the greatest students that academic has ever tutored, but said kid isnt going to get the job over the lazy ass harvard grad.

The thing is, most of the other western powers arent having these problems. Hell, Australias constitution just has a bit of stuff about separation of powers between the states and the feds, some immensely dull nonsense about the political organization of taxes and yeah its all dull procedures. No bill of rights or whatever. THAT part the judges kinda had to fudge by declaring that since it says we are a democracy theres some implied rights to free speech and yeah. But the thing is, it all runs just fine because those boring details in the constitution actually put a bunch of checks and balances in to limit the prime-minister to someone whos answerable to the parliment , the judiciary as being fully impartial, and so on. Even the relationship to the british crown has a check and balance (The prime minister can fire the govenor general, and the govenor general can fire the prime minister [and, as the joke goes, the CIA can fire them both]).

Basically, the US was one of the first modern democracies, so its got a pretty good excuse that theres a lot of flaws in the system. But maybe its time to look around at how other countries do things and plan up a version 2.0 update to the operating system. Because version 1.0 is starting to crash.