If you are interested, I highly recommend the youtube channel Kings and Generals. It has very good history content on the last centuries of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Ottomans, among others.
By what metric is Vietnamese the largest immigrant group? The largest is easily Mexico, and I don't see that Vietnam cracks the top 5, and maybe not the top 10.
The largest minority group in the US is Hispanics. White Americans have a median household income 36% higher than the median household income of Hispanics. The median income of Germans is almost double the median income of Turkish Germans.
Your run of the mill computer program also "operates in enormous parameter spaces that are impossible to meaningfully test for all possible adversarial inputs and degraded outputs".
This is hardly similar as the state of a typical computer program can be meaningfully inspected, allowing both useful insights for adversarial test setups and designing comprehensive formal tests.
Right, if you consider the internal state, it is hardly similar. You talked about black box and QA though. Black box by definition holds the internal state as irrelevant, and QA mostly treats the software it tests as a black box, or in other words the tests are "superficial" as you call it.
Black box testing in typical software is, however, less superficial, because the tester can make inferences and predictions about what inputs will affect the results. When you're testing a drawing program, for example, you may not know how the rectangle tool actually works internally, but you can make some pretty educated guesses about what types of inputs and program state affect its behavior. If the whole thing is controlled by a neural network with a staggering amount of internal state, the connections you can draw are much, much more tenuous, and consequently the confidence in your test methodology is significantly harder to come by.
> Game of Thrones completely disregards the real world, and because this is on purpose, I think criticisms from "realism" are unwarranted
This is not true, any work of fiction needs to be believable within the bounds it sets for its world. Those bounds are extended to include dragons and magic, but no more. The rest of it should be as close to the real world as possible. There's a term for this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisimilitude_(fiction)
Yes, I'm aware of this term, back from when I read Tim O'Brien masterful Vietnam War novel, "The Things They Carried" (which I recommend if you haven't read it).
A Game of Thrones has plenty of verosimilitude. The thing about it is that's about feelings, the emotions in the reader. If you read it and something takes you out of the moment -- "wait, this makes no sense! this character would never do this!", "dragons!? nobody ever mentioned dragons before!", "what, one man defeated an army of hundreds single-handedly!?" -- that breaks verosimilitude. But within AGoT, very few things do this. It's self-contained and, within the span of your reading it, self-consistent. It won't resist a medieval history scholarly review, but then again, it's not meant to, and neither is it "shallow".
Would you say that a database is a "black box full of binary garbage, chewing gum and rubber bands that tightly couples everything in Windows.and it's like spaghetti and can't possibly be unwound"?
I don't think you would, that's not the conventional wisdom. Databases are considered to be the epitomy of clean, reliable, and efficient representations of data. It is text files that lack these capabilities and are considered a non-standard mess when it comes to data.
The registry is just a database. It may have not seen the best usage it could have from windows and applications, does that make it a bad architectural decision? Would we think different on the registry if it was just SQLite (or would we in this case think differently of SQLite)? Personally I firmly believe that the registry approach is a great architectural decision, for all the reasons outlined here: https://sqlite.org/appfileformat.html
My unpopular opinion is that there are a lot of times a database should not be used, and the rest of the time, a standalone database is still a bad idea if you don't need it.
Text can be versioned.
And databases invariably need either manual admin or a docker container or something. Many apps could totally be easy, instant app store type things, but they depend on some extra daemon. More things to misconfigure.
DBs are usually secured by passwords. Now I need a strong password... on a completely local system, instead of just some file permissions?
SQlite is absolutely wonderful. Possibly one if the best libraries ever made. But text is perfect for configuration.
Apps don't need to do queries against config. They don't frequently make small updates of the type one usually wants a DB for(Unless they are horribly written and rewrite megabytes files every minute even with no changes like browsers do or used to do).
Config isn't high performance, storage space isn't critical, but you do often want to version.
I share the sentiment, but not for Roblox. Hashicorp, with a recent IPO, 200 mil operating revenue, and supposedly a good engineering reputation has one of its flagship products critically depend on a "toy project".
You are basing the statement "fear of wolves is completely irrational" on your experience as an outdoorsperson and 25 years of yellowstone. This is not a good basis. Wolves had lived in huge populations and had been in conflict with humans for thousands of years, with human casualties. Humans were very much afraid of wolves, and rightly so. Physically weak and isolated humans such as children and elderly are prime targets of wolf attacks.
Are you arguing for or against? A mythology is not a good argument. A wikipedia entry of about 184 attacks within a decade (apologies if I miscounted) argues for wolves being a non-existant threat. I'm more afraid of riding in a car thank you.
Significant dog bites affect tens of millions of people globally each year. It is estimated that 2% of the U.S. population, 4.5–4.7 million people, are bitten by dogs each year. Most bites occur in children. Between 2005 and 2018 approximately 471 people were killed by dog bites in the United States, averaging 37 deaths per year.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/net-and-typescript-at-...