Surprising to see how many commenters are in favour and supportive towards policy of prioritising short term profits vs. Long-term research.
I understand Meta's not academia nor charity, but come on, how much profit do they need to make so we can expect them to allocate part of their resources towards some long term goals beneficial for society,.not only for shareholders?
Hasn't that narrow focus and chasing the profits get us in trouble already?
Many people believe a company exists only to make profit for its shareholders, and that no matter the amount it should continue to maximise profits at the expense of all else.
Interesting, it seems that extremely rich americans are discovering what scandinavian countries solve through taxation and effective government.
They used to have it in some form with 'new deal' and 'great society' until ~1970, but now they can't because of the very same reasons that are making them extremely rich.
Plus there's some fetisishation of efficiency of the private sector vs public one and distrust in public institutions, while in some areas I don't think it's warranted, it's just that public insititutions are more transparent than the private sector imo.
"Like, the same font, right? And she points this out to the HR manager, and they’re like, Yeah, that means that this person’s the most qualified, because it’s the exact same language. And she’s like, This person is clearly unqualified because they didn’t even know to reformat. And this is not an outlier. Like, this happens a lot.
So first they’re looking for these exact matches. And then they take everybody who was really close in language—and also, by the way, who has something called a government resume, which is different from a private-sector resume, and you have to know that somehow, magically, before you apply. Then from that pool, they send everyone a self-assessment questionnaire, and everybody who marks themselves as master, and I literally mean master—I think that’s the top rating in a lot of these—they make the next down select, so they move on to the next pool."
This is not necessarily what I would consider transparent or fair. FWIW I do think government can provide value, but I think folks who don't live in America don't understand how dramatically different and worse the implementation of government is in America from many other countries who sometimes do get value from some aspects of government even if the goals are similar.
I’m at a private company and the process of resume screening done by clueless HR people is the exact same. I referred a friend for a job position, he got turned away because he didn’t have Java Version X with Springboot on his resume, I told him to re-submit with that on there and voila he got an interview. (For reference, he was a Java backend dev for 10 years and already had that on his resume)
Same exact thing (or worse) happens in private orgs. But we don't even have access to it.
I mean, we don't have to go far to see this. Nepotism is illegal in many countries for public institutions, and rampant on private ones.
This narrative that private corporations are better "just because" is so silly. We simply see the inefficiencies of the government and can't see the same ones on private entities. Especially the big ones.
I've never worked at a company that didn't have many absurd processes, incompetent people, useless bureaucracy and so on.
I don't know your background, so I won't say I don't think you understand - but in my experience, government is multiple times worse than any private organization. Yes, the same problems exist - but without any of the pressures that force private business to adapt or fail, so the problems are worse by far.
Policymaking is never discovered. It’s forced. Like class struggle forced the hand of actors like FDR during his presidency.
Then that was forced away by the reaction (class struggle) of the most right-wing capitalists and ideologues which ultimately lead to neoliberalism.
So sure, there are some set of relatively enlightened capitalists that want more of a social democratic status quo for the stability it brings. But the material conditions are not there.[1] So people like Jeff Atwood will write opinion pieces and give what is the grand of scheme of things token material support. But it can’t realistically happen right now in the US.
Of course the same principles apply to Scandinavian countries. They’re (our) false ideology is called the Nordic Model.
[1] Look at Bernie Sanders. The Independent senator who ran for the ostensibly left-wing Democratic Party as a mere social democrat and was shot down by the Establishment. Now that he is too old to run again and the presidential election is done for you see people in the Establishment say things like, huh I think that guy had a point!
America has a lot of taxation. Fortunately for the Scandinavian countries it spends it on "protecting Scandinavian shipping lanes" and "medical research grants that benefit Scandinavia", rather than solely on local welfare spending. The America First lot are learning a lot from Scandinavia there, though. I'm not sure we're all going to like where that could lead.
I can't immediately think of a major US naval deployment in the North Sea outside the big NATO exercises every 1-2 years. Were you thinking of a specific shipping lane?
US keeps the 6th fleet in Europe / Mediterranean sea. It costs a pretty penny to defend Europe's seas - about 40 ships,175 aircraft and 21 thousands people.
Scandinavia (like most countries; it's not specific to them) benefits from a relatively piracy-free world, and a constrained Russia. This takes a giant amount of money to achieve, and it's mostly funded by the US taxpayer.
It is very difficult to compare or extrapolate US with Scandinavian countries. US is socially super-heterogeneus, huge, and big population while Scandinavian countries are socially homogeneus, small size and population. And this is just the beginning.
I though America spends its taxation on destabilizing Middle East and flooding Europe and Scandinavia with migrants.
If Europe tried to do what America does for Europe it should dump military equipment onto various central and South American countries so they can fight among themselves and create droves of refugees traveling North.
This is a common misunderstanding. The US doesn’t send its military around the world because they want to protect freedom and democracy. The US does this to protect open markets that it then gets first right to exploit.
The US has benefited from this situation since WW2. It’s one reason why the US economy has been so successful.
It’s also only now that the US has exploited these markets that they can question the purpose to continue their military imperialism.
TLDR: the US military across the globe wasn’t done out of altruism. It was to expand US economic power.
Arguing intentions seems foolish. The result is the world gets free trade defended basically at zero cost, which was my point. If Scandinavia had to pay for that, it would have far less money available to spend its money on Scandinavia First policies.
>the world gets free trade defended basically at zero cost
At zero cost? Ask the families of those who have been killed by american millitary.
>If Scandinavia had to pay for that
Other than the Scandinavian soldiers killed, and millitary gear lost in the different wars? Other than the thousanda of refugees scandinavia and europe have taken in from the destabilized middle East?
>it would have far less money available to spend its money on Scandinavia First policies.
There are no Scandinavian first policies.
Again, why should Scandinavian countries pay for Americas geopolitical activities more than is already done?
You're being too general, in my opinion. Piracy is almost completed stopped just by presence, not by combat. American also engages in and their taxpayers fund foreign wars, which perhaps it should stop doing, but that is very separate to economically bouying up a global economy via and global R&D via global grant awards and open sharing of American research findings. Trump is right now pausing NIH funding and detaching from the WHO. All the funding that paid for benefited other countries is now gone, partly because people globally laughed at America for not spending enough on its citizens, and eventually enough of its citizens didn't think it was worth keeping on doing that any more.
This is just wrong, on many levels. If you look where tax revenues go, it's mostly defense (military industrial complex) and middle-class entitlements.
I prefer my higher wages and lower taxes, thanks. We need to get a handle (moratorium) on mass immigration into US before we care about handing out more of our money for welfare. Why would I want my hard earned wages to be given to an endless influx of poor foreigners? The problem with higher taxes is the money is not spent well. Solve that and people are more willing to contribute.
Look at how badly run are the high tax cities and states in the US. Talk of taxing more without discussion of bad governance is a non starter.
As a counterpoint I moved to Massachusetts where the roads are among the worst in the country. My taxes apparently do not buy infrastructure maintenance.
I don't really get Mass in general. On paper it seems like it should be quite a bit nicer than it is in reality. I live in the Hudson Valley and feel like it would be a downgrade in a few ways. And for being a deep blue state they are pretty far behind Cali/NY/Wash/Ill on things like food safety and health guidelines.
>pretty far behind Cali/NY/Wash/Ill on things like food safety and health guidelines.
I know that state and local governments are responsible for inspecting restaurants. Also I know that NYC banned transfats in restaurant food. Is that what you mean by "food safety and health guidelines"?
Is it better for the people who live in the rural areas of whatever state you live in? Are the better areas affordable?
I’m far from a “disaffected rural White American Trump supporter” (yes I’m purposefully using a cliche). None of those adjectives describe me besides “American”. But a lot of people on the left (which I am when it comes to social issues) are very self unaware.
No, I have no problem paying taxes or government requiring business to pay taxes.
I don’t agree with the over and mostly dumb regulation of tech from the left and I think they over index on the wrong issues and the reason we are where we are now is because old folks on the left wouldn’t exit the stage when they should have - Supreme Court justices and Biden specifically.
I’m pro Vax and have been shot up with every vaccine imaginable including multiple Covid boosters. But the anti-vax movement was exasperated by Democrats trying to force the Covid vaccine on people
Although there is probably support for immigrants besides welfare, I believe that welfare itself is reserved for citizens.
And this is not a statement for or against immigration, but in response to what some people have said (not PKop, to whom I am replying): non-citizen immigrants do pay at least some taxes, in the form of sales tax. And, depending on how they are paid (cash or paycheck) they will also be paying taxes on their own pay. If they are getting cash it is easier to avoid taxes. It is harder if they're receiving a salary.
Immigrants from certain locations, which the vast majority of the waves of immigration we are getting in recent years, are net negatives in terms of budget impact, takers vs contributors to tax revenue. And yes, I agree with you on the perfectly logical and common sense position that welfare should be reserved for citizens.
Housing migrants in Hotels in US cities, paid for by citizen tax revenue, or guaranteed emergency health care, paid for by citizen tax revenue, among other examples are bad policy and unfair to Americans.
With at least one major exception: I want to non-citizens, whether here legally or not, to get healthcare. In the spirit of enlightened self interest, if someone has smallpox or tuberculosis or COVID or anything else deadly and communicable, IDGAF where they're from, I want them to get treatment.
What are you talking about? Non-citizen immigrants pay the exact same taxes as citizens. Not just "some" taxes.
Taxation is based on where you live, not your citizenships. (Well except US citizens who have to pay federal taxes even if they live abroad but that's an exception).
I was mostly thinking that poorly paid agricultural workers or other people doing periodic manual labor may be getting paid in cash, and perhaps they are not paying taxes on the money, even if they are legally required to. The wait staff and bartenders I used to know did not pay tax on their cash tips.
So what I am talking about is not what the legal requirement is, but to what degree it is followed. But to the degree these people pay taxes while here they are not getting a completely free ride when they take advantage of our tax-supported services.
On a related note, I would be happy for illegal immigrants to get at least some medical support, such as vaccinations and treatment for communicable diseases, as that benefits everybody.
It's a non starter to raise my taxes, fix your reading comprehension. Certainly, you wouldn't be surprised to know I think there's enough money to do this, and that I oppose the government doing other things but support the government doing this yes? It's just common sense.
I'm not sure I understand why they're using java if they avoid GC? Doesn't sound like the best fit, especially the foreign memory in java isn't too pleasant to work with.
"Hard to write but easy for customers to deploy" is my guess. There are a bunch of very high-performance computing use-cases in finance (quant, HFT) that Java gets used for pretty routinely. That's a very attractive market to build primitives like databases for, they have very deep pockets, but you need to play in their ecosystem.
I've seen this "GC-less" Java in those use-cases quite a bit. From a conceptual design POV it's likely not the best approach, but there's a lot of sunk cost in that eco-system and a lot of trust and expertise where "Choosing a better language" is often several orders of magnitude more expensive.
They're not the only ones to have done this in this space. VoltDB (Michael Stonebreaker of Postgres [among other things] fame) did this -- low or no-GC style Java, effectively non-idiomatic Java, but taking advantage of the Java runtime in other ways.
Others have done the same. And as others have pointed out, there's things outside the DB domain in high frequency trading and the like that have done this as well.
There are advantages to Java: mature runtime, large talent pool out there, good tooling (still haven't seen anything as good as JMX for any other runtime). And if there's any language whose GC could be tuned to be "responsible", it'd be the JVM; there's been more GC R&D in the JVM than in any other runtime.
I worked at RelationalAI (another DB vendor) for a bit, and their DB is all written in Julia, another garbage collected language... and the GC in Julia is what I'd characterize as ... immature... for that kind of application. I would have loved to have access to the JVM's GC there.
Also this looks to be more of an analytical, column oriented, database. So I can imagine they're optimizing more for throughput than transactional latency. (I could be wrong, correct me, Quest folks...)
And choice of Java likely has to do with when they began working on the project and what was out there at the time. It's the real world of software eng. We work with the tools and people we have because shipping a product on time and bringing in $$ is more important than anything else. I don't know when they got started, but Rust has only matured to "mainstream" stability/acceptance in the last 2-3 years.
Finally, DBs often have a very layered architecture and theyt could easily compartmentalize pieces such that latency sensitive bits could be done in native Rust. They're not apparently doing this, but I could see them doing things like moving the page buffer or column indices or storage engine over to Rust over time for performance benefits.
All power to them, it's great to see them working with Rust. (aside: my email history looks like I spoke to a recruiter there at some point, maybe, but didn't interview? I think if I'd known they were playing with Rust I would have given that more attention...)
Also this looks to be more of an analytical, column oriented, database. So I can imagine they're optimizing more for throughput than transactional latency.
Seamless integration with parts that don't need to be GC-free comes to mind: they are not building an application, they are building a building block. And that building block can be used both in applications that do require the latency guarantees of GC-free as well as in applications that don't. Another class of applications would be ones that alternate between phases of unpredictable latency (like bootup or reconfiguration) and low-latency operation.
Folks with a background in electronic trading (FX, hedge funds, trading firms etc) are familiar with zero-gc Java. London / NY / HK are a good pool of talent in that respect
Yep, I ended up checking their code base. I know a little bit of Java but didn't realise that sun.misc.Unsafe existed, so it does actually look fairly straightforward to create code outside of GC (for anyone reading questdb/std/Unsafe.java seems to be where some allocations are handled). A pain I am sure, but way more manageable than I thought.
It's not necessarily outside of GC, it's that they make great efforts to avoid GC. Such as instantiating all objects at startup and holding references to avoid GC, never using new keyword, avoiding objects in favor of primitives, avoid exceptions, etc.
These systems often restart or do a full "stop the world" GC once per day.
The system is quite different than what most are used to, especially during a trend towards increasingly Functional styles with immutability as a default, etc.
Peter Lawrey[1] has some great posts/talks about his experiences in HFT.
Having worked on writing DB internals in both Rust and in other languages, I can say that there's huge time-saving advantages to having something higher-level & garbage collected at the layer of the query parser/analyzer/compiler. The borrowing/ownership semantics can get really snaky when dealing with complicated expression trees, iteration patterns, etc.
It's fairly hard to write ergonomic interfaces for more complicated iteration patterns in Rust while still respecting safety. That's actually fine and by design, and it's possible with a lot of effort and thought but this is not as much of a concern in e.g. Java. E.g. skim the discussion on this proposed "cursor" API for Rust's stdlib BTree: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/107540
(And while Rust's enum-based algebraic types & pattern matching are nice, they're actually fairly limited when compared to what you can find in e.g. Scala or F#, Haskell, etc.)
But I think there's also huge win in doing something like the pager/buffer pool/storage/data structure/indexes layer in Rust. For safety and efficiency reasons.
QuestDB engineer here: We use jlink to create images for selected platforms. This means not even JRE is a dependency: You unpack a tarball and you are good to go. See: https://questdb.io/docs/get-started/binaries/
Keep in mind the JNI libs are platform specific. That means available platforms are a function of what the JRE runs on AND they have built the shared lib for (and bundled in to the jar)
The Spanish flu largely overlapped with the WW1, and since its 2nd wave had a high toll among people with strong immune system (ex. young male) the perception was to a large degree mixed with the perception of war and its casualties, at least in Europe.
The name 'spanish flu' itself also stems from the fact that most countries involved in the war didn't want to talk too much about the Flu, while Spain retained neutrality and didn't have incentives to keep it in the dark - this could also be a reason that people were putting the aftermath of the pandemic in the same bucket as the outcome of the Great War imo.
Sun isn't shining at night and it's not always windy, hence other sources, mainly natural gas is used to balance the grid, but it's deepening our dependance on fossil fuels. Nuclear is the only power source at the moment that is clean and stable.
Sun and wind aren't the only renewable energy sources. There is also geothermal and hydroelectric power for example. Countries like Iceland and Norway already do or are close to meeting all their energy needs with 100% renewable energy sources.
Studies like [1] seem to suggest that the problem of grid stability can be solved through decentralizing and interconnecting power grids and energy storage. I'm not saying such a transition isn't a challenge, but I have yet to find a source claiming a stable grid would be impossible without nuclear energy of fossil fuels.
Iceland is basically a city-state of ~350,000 people that live next to volcanoes. Norway is 99% hydropower, likewise owing to its unique geography of rivers and mountains. Are we really trying to extrapolate energy generation policies to continent-spanning nations (US, China, Russia, India, Brazil) from such outliers?
I don't see "the sun isn't shining at night" as a good argument, yet it always comes up in these discussions.
We have a lot of ways to store energy. Molten salt, pumped storage, hydrogen gas from water just to name some. All of these are possible in some places and impossible in other places, but there is no place where nothing is possible.
Since the "fuel" for wind and solar is "free" it doesn't matter that you spend more energy saving energy than you get back later. Anything you can save is a plus. And then you get to use it whenever you want.
In short - when the sun isn't shining you spend the energy that you saved when it WAS shining.
Massive amount of concrete, fossil fuels used to rapidly cool the concrete, methane released in the areas that get drowned during the process. Not to mention all of the best dam sites in the US were tapped in the 30s and 40s. That well is dry in terms of net new power.
One more question, by fuels used to cool the concrete, I'm thinking you are referring to powering the pumps that circulate the cool water in the tubes inside the concrete slabs, right? Or is it cooled differently?
Any particular reason why you couldn't adapt energy consumption to match disponibility? 99.999% availability is a nice perk to have, but you have to overprovision to get to it or otherwise have big costs and complicated problems. OTOH making factories more lowtech, simple/robust/small-scale surely they're gonna have lower peak efficiency, but they'll cost less and be start/stoppable far easier. Scaling has limits.
Changing the structure of our distribution network and the pattern of our energy consumption will cost much, much more (in both time and money) than building additional production into our current system.
A couple nitpicks before contradicting your claim:
Time and money are both cheap in the face of climate crisis ;)
> than building additional production into our current system
Not sure how this is can lower energy consumption and emissions.
You say "our" distribution network. I'm quite positive the level of electricity availability most people in the world have access to is not the kind of thing we're seeing here (france). Even in us/eu/"highly-developped" countries, there is lots of variance between city and countryside. So there's a big part of us not making them build things like us that make them depend on us. Which would be quite revolutionary on it's own.
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This is not something i'm making up, some detailed projections of such low-tech scenari have been done (eg "the age of lowtech" by bihouix, part 2). Most infrastructures are readily overprovided (network infrastructures generally like roads, electricity distribution, telco) and could be left as-is for long time if we lower the requirements. Ponctual plants can be either selectively shut down and working intermitently (stuff where scale is really enabling like some chemistry plants, primary industry or semiconductors) or scaled down and relocated (everything household, everything clothing, everything construction, everything food).
I fully agree that there is a very big inertia, as in infrastructures aren't fluid. But that not a fatality. Globalisation has benefits for some stuff (again semiconductors, petro chemistry), but for most of the volume (consumption goods) there's no material benefit (i'm not talking financial things, i mean from an engineering perspective) to globalize food, textile, consumer good manufacturing. For these stuff there are marginal process efficiency benefits at the (externalized) cost of maintaining very highly available network infrastructure (and obv making parts of the world less gifted by history dependent on the other).
In particular for consumer goods, not only does it not make any sense outside of wealth-extraction to globalize, but we're building too much and too cheap. There's no economic incentive to do it, but we know since long how to build stuff that last. They cost more to produce (bulkier/more material, less (more crude) plastic and more wood/metal), are less efficient on a small scale (thus require shared ownership) and have several order of magnitude longer lifetimes, etc. But we could literally flick a switch, stop production, repurpose/scrape the newly available high-tech plants and no one will be any wiser. And not only plants: we'd free up maritime transport, manpower, etc. We'd pay with reduced capitalistic output and trend-based lifestyle, but materialistic well-being would actually be better: we could all get access to what we call "professional" gear.
edit: your claim also seem to get contradicted by proponents of the smart-{city,grid}, right? All there needs to be is some more coordination. Which would also be easier to do with less and bigger things which live longer.
edit2: let's dream for a moment and imagine what could happen if we just took control of some big industrial infra with capital, domain knowledge and all and gave it 5 years to come up with public and durable goods for concrete tasks, sharing all the details and teaming up with the f/loss engineering world.
> Sun isn't shining at night and it's not always windy,
The sun is always shining somewhere and the wind is always blowing somewhere.
We should be investing in better transmission systems and grid interconnects. Doing this will enable places that momentarily have more solar and wind than they need to sell that energy to their neighbours. Add vehicle to grid and a lot of the intermittency problems are eminently soluble.
Even if there was, you need to be aware that the DNA has much more personal information than your name and surname, there can be multiple Joe Does, but probably just you with your DNA. Also Joe Doe doesn't tell anything about your race, sex, appearance, nor conditions while DNA can. Using the DNA you can be traced even if you submit it anonymously e.g. one of your relatives may upload their DNA which will point to you.
Wind and solar do not work on demand. It's a huge difference. It's not always sunny nor windy. Only coal, natural gas or hydro in some cases can be a viable baseline energy sources.
I believe we have reached the point where solar/wind plus storage is cheaper than nuclear, and without the massive capital outlay, political problems, or risk. Even solar or wind plus a gas turbine is cheaper.
That's a pity because nuclear could be competitive if economies of scale and innovation occur in that space.
Edit: I'm getting down voted, maybe because I didn't provide a source. But neither do the people who disagree. I stand by it.
I honestly don't care if it's cheaper. I just don't want to keep running gas and coal plants, and continuing to let the planet warm up. The cost when we've burned this planet up will be much higher.
We have a solution to end coal, oil and gas fired power plants, and end a tremendous amount of pollution. But it's somewhat more expensive to run a nuke plant... Is money the only thing we are looking at here?
We keep fiddling around with solar and wind, and while it's great, we're still running goddamn fossil-fuel based plants for a huge percentage of our power. If solar and wind are cheaper, and price is what dictates this market, then we should have much more transitioned away by now. Solar and wind will get better and better, but we need to dump all this carbon-based power right now. We should be building nukes right now to replace the fossil-fuel based plants and then phase them out once wind and solar, and other, better tech gets developed.
We have a huge problem solved right now. It's nothing but politics and bullshit getting in the way.
Yes, the money matters when it's private industry putting it up.
If the government could do the smart thing and enact a carbon tax so the true cost of carbon based fuels could be accounted for, this problem would naturally go away with no need to convince anybody of anything else. Nuclear would maybe be viable, but at the very least building new solar and wind would become cheaper than just operating existing coal plants.
Maybe it's not politically popular? I don't know. Taxes automatically reduce the thing being taxed, but we tax good things like income, rather than bad things like illegal drugs, gambling, pollution, garbage, etc. It makes no sense, but that's why I'm a programmer and not a politician.
You can ask what CO2 tax would be needed to make a particular non-fossil source feasible.
For nuclear in the US, CO2 taxes would have to be $300-400/ton for nuclear to compete with natural gas combined cycle. This number is from the president of Exelon, which operates 20 or so power reactors in the US. Exelon has given up even planning for new nuclear power plants; they are too far out of the running.
>We have a solution to end coal, oil and gas fired power plants, and end a tremendous amount of pollution. But it's somewhat more expensive to run a nuke plant... Is money the only thing we are looking at here?
I see these types of comments over and over and over.
Wind doesn't always blow. Sun doesn't always shine. We don't have economical grid-scale electrical energy storage technology. Therefore, we can't actually shut down the fossil generation plants, and we end up paying for both.
People are working on it; no doubt. But look up the total capacity of these systems and compare to the size of the grid and you'll see that were at the beginning of a very long road.
Nuclear can be on demand, but if you are turning nuclear on/off, you have huge capex but less and less electricity.
Nuclear is so expensive to build, that it doesn't make sense to 'turn off' a nuclear plant. We can do it with control rods, but the economic fallout of leaving nuclear off is bad. (Nuclear will need to be retired after 50 years. Every minute it is turned off is a minute wasted of it's limited lifespan)
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Natural gas is the opposite. High ongoing costs but very low capex. So it makes economic sense to cycle natural gas on and off.
Also note that there is 'turning off/down' thermally and electrically.
Once the steam is created, all of it is usually sent to the turbines. But if a nuclear plant need to dial back output, it is possible to route the steam to some place else where it's dissipated and not used to spin a turbine.
You can see this in some of the generator numbers for the Ontario grid, specifically for today (2021-04-24), DARLINGTON-G1 had reduced output:
I understand Meta's not academia nor charity, but come on, how much profit do they need to make so we can expect them to allocate part of their resources towards some long term goals beneficial for society,.not only for shareholders?
Hasn't that narrow focus and chasing the profits get us in trouble already?