fivea

> Spreadsheets are better because as you say the owner is their job to maintain it. If you replace with an IT process the new "owner" is likely a below-average developer that probably is uninterested in the business.

I disagree. Spreadsheets are incomparably worse because what you charitably described as "the owner is their job to maintain it" in real life it's reflected as having a single employee who abused a first-move advantage to monopolize and excerpt unduly control over, and even hijack, key operation areas.

We all heard horror stories of how employees screwed over their former bosses because only they had control over things like key spreadsheets. Advocating for spreadsheets is advocating for these vulnerabilities.

> But what happened in Spain and Italy was a catastrophic disruption to normal life by any reasonable standard.

I lived in Spain through the pandemic. I saw from my apartment the army trucks racing across Madrid, the police cars with loudspeakers advising everyone to stay indoors, and army patrols going through the city to enforce the lockdown.

Do you actually know what was a catastrophic disruption to normal life by any reasonable standard? Having to commandeer the local ice rink to have a place to store all the excess dead bodies, and setting up a huge makeshift hospital in the city's expo hall to accommodate the patients.

Knowing that, do you have any idea what finally managed to reign in the outbreaks under control? Lockdowns. Two weeks since their onset, infection rates dropped to residual.

Don't talk about things you know nothing about.

> The candidates that are interesting to me have diverse and interesting lives, their resumes should reflect that.

Doesn't your resume reflect that if it has that written down somewhere?

Why would a CV be picked over any other if a candidate, say, paid a service to pimp out it's styling?

> A boring looking resume thats like all the others might be good enough for SAP but would get filtered out my me immediately.

I could see the point of that approach for a creativity-driven position such as designers, advertisement, marketing, or even front-end development.

For hard technical roles, where substante over style is a mandatory and very basic competence, seems to be a sure way for you to filter out all the candidates you'd be looking for.

> You can tell by not entering any PII into the site in the first place.

That's not the definition of PII. At best, that covers a small subset of PII.

PII means any information that can be used to identify you, either directly or indirectly.

When you access a website combined with which link you opened or which search keywords you used can be used to infer who you are.

How do you tell if a script is not shipping that info to an undisclosed third-party?

> The article provides no direct evidence of people starving, only that 'We cannot freely choose our recipes'.

What? The article clearly describes how people in Shanghai are barred from accessing the supplies they ordered because their buildings have been literally locked up and there is no way to get their orders past the outside gate.

From the article:

> Sometimes one of the people in the locked building yells to the dabai or anyone who passes, to hand over the vegetables she has ordered and who are now perishing at the locked gate of their building. But people don’t have the key and the ones who do may not necessarily care.

> How you can tell if the data you're collecting is PII?

No. How can you tell, as a user of any random website, that the script your browser is running as part of that page you've opened isn't shipping PII collected from your usage.

> Keeping everything locked down has a huge human cost too.

That really depends on what's your personal definition of "keeping everything locked down".

European countries like Spain and Italy showed that lockdowns work quite well in quickly halving infection rates with negligible externalities, but their lockdown focused on non-essential work and everyone was allowed to do basic provisioning things such as going to the supermarket.

Also, if I recall correctly Spain also had in place a kind of stimulus program where people could apply for a guaranteed minimum income scheme.

It boggles the mind how some people conflate a quarantine with solitary confinement under house arrest where people are left to starve to death.

> They already know english for the job (...)

You're somehow presuming that there is no functional difference between being a native speaker and knowing a language as second or third language.

> If it contains PII (...)

How can you tell?

> I have used swarm optimization methods that have consistently provided better solutions than alternatives for optimizations of solution spaces in alterst 3 different domains.

Benchmark your PSO implementation against a) a naive Monte Carlo implementation with an uniform distribution, b) low-discrepancy sequence, c) a global optimization algorithm such as DIRECT, and compare convergence rates.

I'd be surprised if your PSO implementation did not competed for the last place in terms of function evaluations.

> AWS lambda has a bunch of python specific optimisations that make python the best candidate for lambdas (...)

I don't believe there is any truth to this statement.

The general guidelines for AWS lambda is that a) if you seek performance then Go is the way to go, b) for everything else nodejs (i.e., JavaScript/typescript) is by far the best runtime, specially given lambda's single-threaded nature and nodejs's support for concurrency.

All other options are only relevant if you have very specific non-technical constraints, such as wanting to reuse code (JDK) or just leveraging whatever language your team already uses somewhere else.

>>I fully anticipate they will come back in fashion.

It's not possible to predict fashions, but I seriously doubt that the whole evolutionary algorithms field will see a resurgence based on anything other than buzzword-driven fads.

In general evolutionary algorithms perform terribly poorly in any optimization problem, and at best are effective (but not efficient) in exploring problems involving the arbitrary addition/removal of dimensions/parameters, including high-dimensional discrete optimization problems.

Given there are already techniques to convert discrete optimization problems to non-discrete ones and to add/remove arbitrary parameters, and there are already global optimization techniques which are far more efficient and, more importantly, deterministic, genetic algorithms don't really offer any relevant advantage over even brute-force techniques.

Oh I know a few. Evolution strategies, particle swarm optimization, ant colony optimization, etc, etc.

They are a treasure trove of easily publishable papers, but frankly the whole field feels like a fraud. Each paper is formulaic and consists of coming up with a metaphor to add minor twists to established heuristics, and in the end they all fare slightly better than Monte Carlo.

The gravy train is provided by the No Free Lunch theorem, which is just a convenient copout to justify why an heuristics isn't good except on a single convenient realization.