Technology

It wasn’t a very long initial question (only a few sentences), but you somehow missed the only qualifier to the whole thing, “…Besides AI,” within that short intro.

Agreed. Future carbon capture capabilities are used to justify current emissions.

Oh yeah, definitely this. The economics will probably never allow it to be deployed at a scale where it will make any sort of difference.

Instead, it is used as an excuse to not take any action on climate change which is actually realistic, albeit hard.

Yep.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-false-promise-of-carbon-capture-as-a-climate-solution/

I'd rather grown more Hemp

The two nuclear developmemts I'm watching closest are the test molten salt reactor in Oak Ridge, TN and just recently heard about a new permit to build one for Abilene Christian University in Texas.

I was at my company's booth at a career fair earlier this week and it felt like every other student was looking for an internship in "machine learning". When I asked follow up questions about what sort of experience they'd had or projects done or what they wanted to do with it in their career, crickets.

To be fair, 2nd most popular was "CAD" which is also not a job.

What sort of automation specifically are you referring to? I work in commercial building automation, which is basically tying various systems like fire/burg alarms, access control, energy/lighting management, intercoms, and everything else together using TCP/IP networking, RS-232/485, and dry-contact relay triggers everywhere. For instance, unlocking all doors and stopping elevator access when the fire alarm goes off. Or automatically disarming a burglar alarm and turning on the lights when the first person in the morning scans their badge. In that sense, it works great and has been working for decades.

If you mean robots taking all our jobs, yeah that's about 100 years out.

No worries. Still interesting!

I feel like it's hyped just enough. It does have the potential to revolutionize computing but we have no practical applications for it at the current point in its development. There's only so much you can hype something that can't even act as a simple calculator better than a handheld calculator can.

Disagree. People are terrible using the cloud, and often are doing lift and shift instead of modernizing.

Incompetent users are the problem, not the cloud.

Are militaries businesses in a wide sense?

Thinking of those "permissions for Ukraine to strike" being discussed and the reasons Armenia couldn't use Iskander missiles against Azerbaijan in 2020, and Azerbaijan apparently hasn't used Lora missiles after 2020.

1000% this. Without giving away too much information, I work(ed) for a cloud provider (not one of the big ones, there are a surprising number of smaller ones in the field you've probably never heard of before). I quit this week to take a position in local government with some quaint, on-prem setup.

1. We were always understaffed for what we promised. Two guys per shift and if one of us took vacation; oops, lol. No extra coverage, just deal.
2. Everyone was super smart but we didn't have time to work the tickets. Between crashes, outages, maintenance, and horrendous tickets that took way too much work to dig into, there was just never enough time. If you had a serious problem that took lengthy troubleshooting, good luck!
3. We over-promised on support we could provide, often taking tickets that were outside of infrastructure scope (guest OS shit, you broke your own server, what do you want me to do about it?) and working them anyway to please the customer or forwarding them directly to one of our vendors and chaining their support until they caught wise and often pushed back.
4. AI is going to ruin Support. To be clear, there will always be support and escalation engineers who have to work real problems outside the scope of AI. However without naming names, there's a big push (it'll be everyone before too long, mark it) for FREE tier support to only chat with AI bots. If you need to talk to a real human being, you gotta start dishing out that enterprise cash.

Mix all that together and then put the remaining pressure on the human aspect still holding things up and there's a collapse coming. Once businesses get so big they're no longer "obligated" to provide support, they'll start charging you for it. This has always been a thing of course, anyone who's worked enterprise agreements knows that. But in classic corpo values, they're closing the gap. Pay more for support, get less in return. They'll keep turning that dial until something breaks catastrophically, that's capitalism baby.

It’s totally possible to make cool mobile apps, but most of the ones you see are just a big company porting their website.

I am mostly concerned about potentially needing specific Big Tech implementations for them in some way... I don't mind using, say, KeepassXC for it, because it is independent from any account or hardware, as well as easily backupable. But NOT anything tied to a Google or MS account.

Maybe I am misunderstanding something, but Paypal says it restricts what passkeys can be used, so it is apparently possible:

Passkeys are currently available for eligible personal accounts. An eligible Apple or Android device is required to create a passkey.