I think China does not need cutting edge of everything to be successful. If they build a nuclear power plant that has turbines from 5 years ago they are still going to be ok. The question what kind of power plant to build is much more important.
Isn’t solar energy a SPOF? It goes to zero MW roughly every 12 hours at any given location on Earth where most people live due to the availability of the Sun’s light.
Maybe, but at what cost? There is no such thing as "solar fallout". Doesn't the SPOF come with the trade-off of incredibly low risk of causing long term high-mortality rates of all life in the surrounding area?
Solars go first in any disasters and there's cleanup cost of destroyed panels, so there is such thing as solar fallout. They also don't decay unlike radioactive fallout.
that... is not even close to comparable. A hurricane smashes a bunch of your local panels, you go and pick them up, and if they're too damaged throw them in landfill. Fukushima is going to cost between $470 billion and $660 billion to clean up. A solar "cleanup" would not even be a 10000th of that cost. Why even mention this?
It is. They just don't take a lot of weather, so they're not more than disposable subsidy capture device if you live in places that storms and flying debris are normal. Solar panels are glasses painted with heavy metal stained glasses, so you can't leave the panels around, they have to be recovered.
All moot points if they last indefinitely where you are, serious points if they don't.
- against random black hats, most of chat software is ok, maybe even WeChat
- against gov agencies, nothing is going to protect you
When I am in China, i happily use WeChat including the gazillion of services available through it. Buying metro pass, ordering food, getting a battery pack and so on.
Btw no country could replicate this outside of China, which is an interesting phenomenon. We have endless ads including actual scams and malware distributed by Google Ads yet I cannot buy train tickets in the EU through a single app and order food as well, let alone getting a cab. It would be great though.
Very partially. The first book of the Old Testament is mostly retellings of existing myths.
I agree clay tablets tell us about the origins of civilisation - but TBF she is writing about the "enlightenment". However, it clearly had multiple causes, including political and economic ones as well as new discoveries.
Absolutely. I was just referring to the invention of writing which is based on current understanding was done by Sumerians. It raises many questions in me, how did we end up with such a sophisticated language (and many other things like the sexagesimal number system for example).
The Bible is hardly based on the clay tables. Genesis, the first book of Moses, tells the story of the flood, which the Sumerian refer to as Gilgamesh.
Sorry but you can't blame the medium for this. If you do please also blame everybody else: keyboard producers, monitor manufacturers etc. Do not just cherry pick one vendor.
Scaling a non-scalabe by default framework that should have been few services written in a performance first language at a billion+ USD company.
I am not sure why are we boliling the oceans for the sake of a language like Ruby and a framework like Rails. I love those to death but Amazons approach is much better (or it used to be): you can't make a service for 10.000+ users in anything else than: C++, Java (probably Rust as well nowadays).
For millions of users the CPU cost difference probably justifies the rewrite cost.
You are connecting the dots backwards, but a project is usually trying to connect the dots forward.
So if you have a lot of money then you can start implementing from scratch your own web framework in C. It will be the perfect framework for your own product and you can put 50 dev/sec/ops/* on the team to make sure both the framework and product code are written.
But some (probably most) products are started with 1-2 people trying to find product market fit or whatever name is for solving a real problem for paying users as fast as they can. And then delegate scaling for when money are going in.
This is similar because this is about a startup/product bought by Microsoft and not built inhouse.
For fast delivery of stable secure code for web apps Rails is a perfect fit. I am not saying the only one but there are not that many offering the stability and batteries included to deliver with a small team a web app that can scale to product market fit while keeping the team small.
"For millions of users the CPU cost difference probably justifies the rewrite cost." This is only true if you have expensive computations done in Ruby or Python or similar, which is very rarely the case.
Not true, Ruby and Python are absurdly slow at even trivial tasks. Moving stuff around in memory, which is most of what a webapp is, is expensive. Lots of branches is gonna be really expensive too.
I've got more than 15 years of Rails production experience, including a lot of performance optimisation, and in my experience the Ruby code is very rarely the bottleneck. And in those cases, you can almost always find some solution.
You really do not know what you are talking about, it is not about the language, like it was repeated in this forum many many times already. We serve an application in PHP to thousands of users per second in less than 100ms constantly.
Sometimes it is the language. Or at least the ecosystem and libraries available.
My go-to example is graphql-ruby, which really chokes serializing complex object graphs (or did, it's been a while now since I've had to use it). It is pretty easy to consume 100s of ms purely on compute to serialize a complex graphql response.
I have mixed feelings about this. It's saying that python is too slow for data science ignoring that python can outsource that work to Pandas or NumPy.
For GraphQL on Rails you can avoid graphql-ruby and use Agoo[1] instead so that that work is outsourced to C. So in practice it's not a problem.
