seletskiy

Master Git and a novice were walking to the market to collect alms.

The novice asked: "Master, what is the advantage of unstructured text over structured? Is it not mere adoption?"

Master Git said nothing and pointed to the first shop, kept by the old scrooge Postgre.

As they entered, Master Git said quietly, shaping his mouth funnily:

  SELECT weight/2 FROM shelf WHERE name = ''

Postgre, long weary of Master's wisdoms, took a weight of three from the nameless shelf and cut it unevenly. The whole piece he pressed into the novice's bowl; the larger part, he kept for himself.

Next stood a shop kept by a bright newcomer, Duck D'Bee.

Master Git repeated:

  SELECT weight/2 FROM shelf WHERE name = ''

Duck D'Bee smiled, carefully took an unnamed jar from a vertical stack and handed over one piece and half of another.

Their journey ended at a giant abandoned building beneath a dead neon sign: ORCL. The door stood open. Inside, putrid odour and dust lay upon deflated balloons and faded banners saying A.I. The shelves were still full of unmarked boxes.

Master Git shouted into the dark:

  SELECT weight/2 FROM shelf WHERE name = ''

Silence was the reply. At this point the novice became enlightened.

  Now that my storehouse
  has burned down, nothing
  conceals the moon.

This piece instantly reminded me of Ashes and Snow movie, where one of the poems has very similar opening (followed, in my opinion, by even more beautiful piece, which you can easily find if interested):

  Ever since my house burnt down,
  I see the moon more clearly

I wonder whether or not this is just a coincidence.

Dataviz suggestions from top of the page to the bottom:

- Location search & display: no English version, only localized names, which is hard to reason if you don't know native language.

- Summary: a) what does precip. in % mean and how it correlates with cm? b) pressure is only displayed in hPa, while some countries prefer mmHg; c) what does ozone index mean and why is it important?

- Next 24 hours: visual indication for temp variation through the day would be easier to reason than just by looking at numbers (as discussed in TFA).

- Next 7 days: a) unnecessary precision for y-axis (e.g. 10.9°C vs. 11°C); b) band overshoot actual values (e.g. if I see 10..−10°C, I assume that would be max/min temp, but in fact it is 8..−9°C, which is impossible to tell without hovering mouse over); c) no horiz. line through 0°C; d) no horiz. lines through y-axis ticks, which makes it harder to reason about values closer to the end of the graph; e) precip. in cm tells little, especially when band is alike (0.00..0.80 cm) - peaks on graphs look like a lot, in fact they are not? g) seeing blue precip. graph subconsciously means 'rain' to me, while in fact it would be snow; f) labels for y-axis are at the same time very small, rotated 90° and also take too much horizontal space from the graph.

- Map: moving mouse over next 7 days graph causes time shown on map to change that would make sense if map's timeline would cover all 7 days, but it only covers small part of today.

- Week: a) fog icons look like they have solid white square background, which seems to be off compared to other icons; b) low/high values are hard to reason about, especially when it says 'Low … at 11am' and there is no tick labeled '11am' (10am .. 12pm) - displaying a line through coldest/warmest hours with °C value next to it would be much easier to understand.

Also: displaying air quality prediction based on last year's AQ would be helpful.

Drop me a line if you would like to talk. Email is in the profile.

You are not alone in this. Though I would say it is absolute horror, not just suboptimal one.

Practically speaking, I have no idea what I _personally_ can do except of accepting the inevitable.

Unfortunately, ear plugs would not help against low frequency bass noise, which this noise typically is.

I kind of see your point, but only in the context of working on time-sensitive task which others rely upon. But if it is hobby/educational project, what is wrong doing things by yourself? And resort to decomposing existing solution if you can't figure out why yours is not working?

There's nothing better for understanding something rather than trying to do that "something" from scratch yourself.

I would say that AI is not to blame here. It just accelerated existing process, but didn't initiate it. We (as a society) started to value quantity over quality some time ago, and, apparently, no-one care enough to change it.

Why tighten the bolts on the airplane's door yourself if you can just outsource it somewhere cheaper (see Boeing crisis)?

Why design and test hundreds of physical and easy-to-use knobs in the car if you can just plug a touchscreen (see Tesla)?

Why write a couple of lines of code if you can just include an `is-odd` library (see bloated npm ecosystem)?

Why figure out how to solve a problem on your own if you can just copy-paste answer from somewhere else (see StackOverflow)?

Why invest time and effort into making a good TV if you can just strap Android OS on a questionable hardware (look in your own house)?

Why run and manage your project on a baremetal server if you can just rent Amazon DynamoDB (see your company)?

Why spend months to find and hire one good engineer if you can just hire ten mediocre ones (see any other company)?

Why spend years educating to identify a tumor on a MRI scans if you can just feed it to a machine learning algorithm (see your hospital)?

What more could I name?

In my take, which you can say is pessimistic, we already passed the peak of civilization as we know it. If we continue business as usual, things will continue to detiorate, more software will fail, more planes will crash, more people will be unemployed, more wars would be started. Yes, decent engineers (or any other decent specialists) will be likely a winners in a short term, but how the future would unfold when there will be less and less of them is a question I leave for the reader.

Don't blame me.

  setInterval(() => { [...document.querySelectorAll(".upgrade,.loot-box-target,button")].map((e) => e.click()); }, 50)

Drop me a line if you ever decide to start. Be glad to help.