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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Someone shared this on Mastodon so I’ll just repost my thoughts from there. (Bonus for Lemmy, I was forced to squeeze all my thoughts into 500 characters, so this is the most succinct I’ve been on this site!)


    Pretty incredible how little people seem to understand these. For one thing, every method other than waterfall is a subtype of agile methodology. The major distinction is that waterfall has a series of phases from design through building, testing, and delivery that attempts to plan the whole project up front. Agile methods focus on smaller iteration cycles with frequent, partial deliverables.

    Something like kanban is designed for continuous delivery: we want to go to mars weekly.

    LEAN development is a scam though, that one is accurate.






  • People in this thread apparently aren’t paranoid enough or have some ridiculously optimistic beliefs about the US and surveillance policing.

    Here’s an article about how the police in my city (New Orleans) worked a secret deal with spy company Palantir to consolidate data from numerous sources to create a crime-prediction system that we’ve been the unwitting beta testers of. https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predictive-policing-tool-new-orleans-nopd

    And here’s a page from my own city government bragging about the same: https://nola.gov/next/homeland-security/topics/real-time-crime-center-en/

    I can’t find the story now, but at one time (less than 10 years ago), Palantir and NOPD were working a deal that would require the CCTV feeds from every bar and restaurant in the city to be fed into the “crime control center” which would have instantly made NOLA the most surveilled city on earth. The citizens voted down the bill that would have made it happen, but there was no technical limitation. I’m not convinced they don’t have secret access to them anyway.

    Police can also subpoena camera operators for footage. This happens with Ring doorbells, Amazon is only too happy to hand over footage from the camera on your front door to the police.

    If you are buying cameras for yourself, any video that goes “to the cloud” is now government property. Very few companies have the desire or power to deny their host government’s or their police’s access to the video. If the cloud is in the USA then our spys already have it. Keep your video local or sync it through your own networks.

    If the camera is attached to a business though, you should just assume that government can look through it.







  • Codex@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzEvidence
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    7 days ago

    There are a ton of competing models for how the early universe formed. In order to explain why the universe is so smooth and flat though, they all invoke the idea of a short (10e-37 seconds) period of time immediately following “the singularity” that is presumed to have been literally the first point. During inflation the universe blows up 100000 times in size (and correspondingly drops in temperature by the same factor) then immediately slows down to roughly the rate of expansion we see today.

    There are a lot of simulations and theories about this could have worked. And I’m sure they all have lots of grounding and math and believers. But none of thr explanations I’ve ever heard amount to more than “when I do this funny thing, the math works and none of of us know why” and that has been the state of quantum physics for 70 years: a series of “we don’t know but the math works.”

    In software, we call that tech debt and I feel like our current model of profit-driven science isn’t capable of actually finding or reporting the answers that underly the debt-riddled results out of modern labs.



  • Codex@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzEvidence
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    7 days ago

    The hot big bang is basically just “let there be light” wrapped up in science words and don’t get me started on the period of rapid inflation. It’s incredible to me that the bedrock of modern physics is hand-waved away to get grad students focused back on either bigger nuclear plants and bombs or more qubits.