random4369

> Also that whole "Android" thing happened.

Yeah, and Google made their opinion of Java quite clear by adding first-party support for Kotlin.

As for Java being popular because it has mindshare, you are agreeing with my original point. It doesn't continue to exist because it's a good language. It continues to exist because of inertia.

C# ticks all the same boxes and is much better from a language point of view.

The only reason Java still exists is because it created a generation of professionals who only know Java, only do Java, and won't learn anything else. That group is still large enough to maintain critical mass and create new greenfield Java projects despite the fact that Java is a shit-poor choice of language for those projects today.

There's nothing impossible about it. It's merely a question of resources. Pervasive surveillance+ML coupled with an implanted device which incapacitates an individual would get you there. Fast forward to an Elon Musk future where everyone has a neural lace, feeding their every thought and intent to pervasive surveillance. Futuristic? Sure. But not far off and certainly not impossible.

You can stop 100% of crimes with a 100% effective law enforcement mechanism. The term for that is authoritarian dystopia.

Our ancestors recognised this a long time ago, and recognised that there's an intrinsic balance between individual freedoms and the degree to which laws are enforced. We are shifting hard and fast to the extreme authoritarian end of that scale.

[Citation needed]

Again, the jury was never out about vaccines, there's no scientific research claiming they are harmful. This scenario is not analogous to the grandparent post where scientific consensus is being actively manipulated by vested interests to delay regulatory action

Doctors don't make vaccines. Pharmaceutical researchers do. And pharmaceutical manufacturers wouldn't blink twice before selling you drugs that they know are harmful, there's plenty of well covered precedent for that. It's not that the medical field is more or less moral, it's just that in the case of vaccines, they actually perform well with no significant side effects so there's no reason to engage in morally questionable business practices to sell them

On what planet is the jury out about vaccines and autism? There's not a single research paper suggesting a link between those.

You are falsely conflating scientific consensus with public opinion.

Every time the jury is out on a topic where one side has a vested interest and a billion dollar budget to protect it, you can be reasonably sure what the outcome will be.

See: pesticides and bees, fossil fuels and climate change, food packaging plastics and cancer, pain treatment meds and addiction.

The answer in all those cases is the harmful effects eventually became known, but the jury was out long enough for the vested interests to make a ton of profit and cause a ton of damage which they'll never pay for repairing. All made possible with a series of comparatively small investments to buy scientific research to keep the jury out. The Wikipedia section that the parent post links to straight up says that the only research that found no links was sponsored by Monsanto.

Edit: to be really clear, 'jury being out' refers to scientific consensus. We are not talking about issues where public opinion is uncertain despite scientific consensus, such as vaccines+autism. We are talking about issues where scientific evaluation of some phenomenon is actively prolonged or hindered by vested interests to delay regulatory action.

I'm a bit confused about this. What if the target is HDFS? Why this dependency on SQL databases for ETL?

> We can still have electric trucks for the last mile

I think you're grossly underestimating how spread out truck destinations are. You would have to have a very extensive rail network to get cargo anywhere near all the destinations where it's currently trucked. And if the rail network doesn't fall within X average distance of every destination, the value proposition of this idea rapidly becomes negative.

There's a few reasons, but they're all becoming irrelevant. I'm going to focus on Sony as the exemplar mirrorless player because I'm most familiar with them.

Mostly, it's because mirrorless lenses were garbage compared to Canon/Nikon until recently. This is the biggest reason. Sony in in particular has been very aggressive in addressing this issue by releasing native lenses which compete with Canon/Nikon in terms of price and performance at the high end. This wasn't an innovation problem, this was just a matter of Sony catching up to the leading players. When they did this, 3rd party players like Tamron and Sigma responded by producing more mirrorless lenses as the market size grew.

Next was brand value and inertia. Despite those, Sony has gone from a prosumer toy to a serious consideration in the pro space over just a few years. I don't think this shift could have happened much sooner.

Finally, and this only applies to Canon, it's the firmware. Through a series of happy accidents, Cannon cameras ended up with a completely open sourced firmware package called Magic Lantern which unlocks functionality not found in any other cameras - functionality that enables some types of photography that simply weren't accessible without 6 figure budgets before. This hasn't happened in the mirrorless space, so there's a segment of Canon users who are ready to make the jump to Sony but are held back by its comparatively limited stock firmware.

Also, there is one limiting factor on mirrorless cameras that takes away their main advantage at the high end. Professional grade lenses are big and heavy, and mirrorless cameras do nothing to remedy that. It's just a physical limitation of optical systems, the performance of the lens is ultimately dictated by the diameter of the elements. So if you're a pro photographer with his 85mm/f1.4 or 70-200/f2.8 lens, the size of that lens isn't going to change, and it completely dominates the size of the camera body. This takes away one of the main advantages of mirrorless technology in the pro space.

There's a huge bandwidth bottleneck on both input and output sides. Your imagination of what a neural lace would do is too limited. It wouldn't be 3d, it wouldn't be auditory.

It would be having a perfect recollection of every single moment of your life.

It would be knowing the entire contents of wikipedia off by heart.

It would be understanding and speaking every language on the planet.

It would be looking out the window and seeing exactly where a friend living 1000km is in your field of view.

It would be sharing thoughts and feelings with other people in the literal sense.

It would be the ability to suppress short term urges by being constantly aware of your long term goals and your progress towards them.

It would be the ability to open an enterprise project you're working on, and instantly know the layout of their codebase.

If you're imagining the neural lace interface to be sensory, you're way off the mark. Sensory interconnect is just the beginning. The real revolution is giving your brain a low level IO bus that allows a computer to transparently extend it beyond the physical limits of whatever number of neurons are in your head.

> SV as a whole is substantially a creation of military spending.

This is a national budget problem. If you're in the tech world long enough, it becomes pretty clear that the only way to get Big funding is through military affiliation.

This puts a huge selective bias on what kind of technology projects actually get big funding, and further it prevents the benefits of those projects from reaching the community for years, because the military overlords demand secrecy sole use of the technology until it gets superceded.

We need to cut a huge chunk out of the military budget and give it directly to the tech sector, so that big innovative projects are actually possible without having to be military.