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The premise of this program is reasonable. If a cadaver is unclaimed, then letting the next generation of doctors use it for training is not a bad solution to the problem. I'll grant its sad when loved ones find out too late to do anything about it, but thats the nature of the beast.

The real question is, are we sure that institutions using their "best effort" to find next-of-kin has been corrupted enough as a process that we should switch our default from medical training and science to rotting in an unmarked grave?

I really struggle to say that it has. At least from the information provided by this article.


There is a pervasive bias in "social issue" journalism to only assign responsibility to institutions and never even an iota on complainants. If closest relatives don't check in for the many months/years (as stated in the article) it usually takes a dying and then dead individual to reach this limbo status, and the deceased hasn't named them in a will, then they should own of the consequences of their ignorant estrangement (however cosmically unfair its reasons) and not seek frivolous lawsuits.

And what of the person who hired a detective to look for the person? Or the hospitals that refused to return the bodies until they were done with them, after the family contacted them?

Pass. This article could have been published as "Why Internet Message Boards Are Making Programmers Worse at Programming" 30 years ago, "Why Google Is Making Programmers Worse at Programming" 20 years ago or "Why StackOverflow Is Making Programmers Worse at Programming" 10 years ago. Its the same-old-same-old. Has it been true in the past? Maybe, if your criteria for "good programmer" is "someone who went through the same struggle I did". But the industry grows and adapts. The next generation of programmers is going to be good at different things than we are. As long as they can get the same job done, who are we to say that they are wrong?


Agreed.

If you're getting paid to ship features, no one cares whether you're learning, or learning the "correct" way. You simply have to get the job done. If tools like copilot help you meet your goals and budget, then they are a good thing.

I heard the same thing in the 90s when Java (and even C++) came on the scene. The C programmers bristled at the idea that you no longer had to deal with memory management. They thought it would make the programmers sloppy, generating poorly performing code bases.

They were right, and it didn't matter.


A generation later, most C programmers are bad at performance anyway. And they get segfaults.


> The C programmers bristled at the idea that you no longer had to deal with memory management

The funny thing is that is the same example I was thinking of.


You’re right on with the parallel with stack overflow, google, and message boards. I take a different conclusion though, which is that lazy irresponsible copy pasting has always been with us, but that doesn’t make it good. Remember the “full StackOverflow engineer?” Competence and diligence will continue to produce different results than faking it.


I was going to ask something along the same lines. Is the article analogous to saying python is making programmers less familiar with the underlying hardware. Perhaps something’s we don’t want to think about (boilerplate) and other things that really drive performance or business


The worse programmers are winning!


Absolutely not. Compensation should reflect value received. This idea effectively forces a business to subsidize their employees, because you damn sure can't pass all that to the customer (because then we are just back where we started, just with an extra 0 on every transaction). Small businesses and business with low profit margins will be forced out of business. And this would consolidate capital into the hands of the big businesses and billionaires who can afford to pay everyone tens of thousands of dollars more than they can bring into the company.

A McDonald's cashier is not worth $55,000 just because they are >18 years old. That position is not supposed to be a career. That position is supposed to be a first job for a dumb 16 year old who needs gas money and $500 for a PS5. When their needs outgrow their paycheck, they are supposed to move to a job that pays more. Can McDonalds afford to pay the extra? Sure. But Jimmy's Hotdog Stand down the street can't, so he goes out of business and the money he would have made goes to McDonald's instead and the rich get richer.


> Small businesses and business with low profit margins will be forced out of business.

Bad businesses that don't create enough value to justify their existence will be forced out of business.

That's a good thing.


I agree with you about the latter half of the sentence. But no business should be punished simply for being small.

I'd go so far as to say we should create laws that err on the side of "slightly favor the little guy" because, as I think we all know, big businesses have armies of lawyers, PR firms, and PACs that bend reality to their whims, whereas little ones mostly do not (though in theory they could band together for the same goal it's unlikely to happen if only for administrative issues).


Same. I was so sad when my old chromecast broke. And casting was basically the only thing that kept me on the chrome browser all these years. So perhaps its a good thing and this change will finally allow me to move to a more private browser.


Does anyone know of a way to implement this at the network level? Maybe with a pihole or something?


Probably by modifying the source code of https://tinyproxy.github.io (it's a lightweight proxy, but modifying the source would be not a 5-minute thing...)


That's what I'd love to see. Have the ability to set a desired latency for specific domains and have it apply to all traffic on the network.


Sure, but at least then your options are limited to existence or destruction, and you still have to have physical proximity to experience either. Digital represents a third form-factor, "malformed", and physical proximity is no longer needed either to corrupt data, destroy it, or steal it (two of these three not necessarily being obvious to the owner).


Frankly I'm looking forward to not being harrassed endlessly to update my computer. I'm happy to live on an EOLed Windows 10 if it means that I don't have to keep playing goalie against whatever random crap Microsoft thinks they should be allowed to put on my machine.


I'm sure they'll continue to play games with updates that make the big warnings even bigger and scarier.

In the meantime, they told me in 2015 that Windows 10 is the last version of Windows,

"Right now we're releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we're all still working on Windows 10" [1]. That came from a Microsoft employee, was widely reported, and not corrected; so it may not have been an official statement, but it's not like it came from nowhere. My plan is still to move to FreeBSD on the desktop once Windows 10 is dead; but we'll see what happens to my plan when it comes time to actually do it.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8568473/windows-10-last-ve...


I upgraded my Windows 7 to 10 (due to Chrome-based browsers weren't being updated anymore for Windows 7, and there was the WebP exploit) using DISM, and I learn that you can also upgrade Windows 10 to Enterprise, which is a little less car-salesman-ly than Pro (no web stuff on the Start Menu/search for example):

https://woshub.com/upgrade-windows-10-edition-without-reinst...

On this Windows edition I haven't seen any nudges to upgrade to 11.

There's even a "curl $URL | sh"-esque command to get Windows activated, hosted on Microsoft's own Github: https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts


Super cool. I've been thinking about building something like this for years. I have a background in debate, and the inability to "flow" complex discussion in any sort of digital format has always bothered me. I'm excited to try this out.


As someone else who is currently into debate, I'll probably use this for flowing in the near-future. It's interesting that most people view debate as "who can make flashier speeches?" when the skills are more so about tracking and participating in very lengthy discussions.

I never fully grasped just how hard it is to understand and respond to what other people say until I got smoked by people who do it competitively.


Curious to know what you two think about Kialo. It's built for debates. CQ2 can be used for debates but it's really for complex discussions.


If you are offering free samples of your product, you shouldn't get mad at the people who don't need your product for more.


But likewise, a hungry person isn't entitled to every sample on the tray - just one. They're samples.


What kind of question is this? Of course it has. The 3-letter-agencies are effectively a black box that command unlimited resources, all the power that can be wrung from a blank check cashed by the US economy, and no oversight except what they allow. What is there to trust?


The question is not about public perception but mostly about policymaker perception. That's not obviously true that policymakers have lost trust.


I get the impression that policymakers are more afraid of them than trusting, thinking of the "don't cross them or they have 6 ways from sunday to get back at you" sentiment


New Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities.

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/312605-schumer-t...


Just Devil's Advocate, but isn't this good?

I want the intel community, the politicians, the journalists, the judges, etc to all be mutually antagonistic. Sorry, but that's just how I see it.

In fact, if I can get the factions inside of the different silos to be sniping at each other as well, then score one for me! The idea of checks and balances is smart. If they want to be underhanded in kneecapping each other's power, more's the better for us.

Do you really want people like DeSantis or Nikki Haley to have unchecked power over you? Of course not. These people are essentially criminals. The fact that they want to be president, is all you need to know to be confident that they shouldn't be president. If the intel community or the journalists take them down, that's nothing but good news for all of us out here in flyover country.

You want Biden and Harris off the leash and running around the neighborhood? You want Trump doing whatever he wants with the levers of power? No. That's madness. This is why we have CNN and FOX, to snipe at sheriffs, mayors, police chiefs, DA's, governors, congresspeople and Presidents. Bonus points if the intel community gets in on the action. That'll guarantee no one will ever get control of your republic.

And vice versa as well by the way. You want homeland security to be doing whatever they want? Or do you want senators and presidents to agitate against them? You want cops to be doing whatever they want? Or do you want the news media and judges to be breathing down their necks?

The adversarial nature of our system's power allotments works for us. Maybe it causes gridlock? But so what? That's preferable to the alternative.


This is an inherently naive take. I understand why you have it and where it comes from.

It is however, disconnected from reality. Basic fundamentals of human existence since the dawn of time remit one thing above all else in a large civilaztion:

Money and power dictate the actions of those wielding it and use it to continue a very closed cycle of power enticing money and vice versa. Period.

Put any government up against that, any mega-corporation, and nearly all individuals whom are not named that have more money and control over assets (including populations) than you are keen to continue to remain in this cycle.


Given how little they spend compared to the unlimited spending power you claim they have, the TLAs might be the only people who could balance the budget.


because majority of the spending and revenue generated is off the books.

they're not only getting financed by the US gvt through the budget. But they have their own ventures that generate profits to feed the monster. their ventures could be public such as the CIA venture firm or dark money as usual.


For FY 2023, the IC was appropriated $99.1b. By your suggestion, the majority of their budget is off the books, which means that more than $99.1b is off the books. That's a pretty extraordinary claim.


Have you never heard of Iran-Contra?

The CIA was caught selling weapons to Iran to illegally fund contras and death squads in Latin America.

There's also BCCI, their own international bank to fund who knows what. By going through shell companies and subsidiaries they escape congressional oversight and FOIA requests.


You think it’s extraordinary to suggest that the majority of a secret agency’s budget is… secret?


I don't find it unreasonable.


I don't find it demonstrated, though. Certain people have biases which lead them to find the claim reasonable. Certain others have different biases.

It's really hard to have a meaningful conversation based on that...


Well, given that these companies have unlimited profit making ability to fund their unlimited budget if they were to list these companies on the stock market the share price would be infinite.

Truly whatever they have figured out is a massive boon to humanity. And they probably should be in charge of everything as no one else has figured out how to make unlimited profit. Their workers must be exceptionally productive.

The TLAs could thus balance the budget simply by paying the taxes owed on these unlimited profit companies.


Your comment is deep into tinfoil hat territory.


how so ?

Does IranContra ring a bell ? the CIA pushing drugs in the minority community in the 80s ? Now the CIA is supposed to be handling foreign issues - but they're doing this in their homeground. Now imagine what they're doing in other foreign countries.

Then take the DOD which has failed multiple audits - you know how dysfunctional you've to be as an org to fail audits ? and the amounts are in the trillions. Even though the CIA is not part of DOD - just to throw that there.


Given the recent news, tinfoil hats can actually be quite useful


Nice try CIA ;)


Great, now I have to issue a burn notice for this account. It's got over 5000 points, goddammit.


What a great show


Actually, its not tinfoil if its already been proven they have a history of this.


Do share the proof, then.


How little they spend? What's that about the trillions in defence that go missing each year?


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