Mixed feelings. On one hand I can imagine situations where longetivity and its development might really be useful, for example when (if ever) we enter the human space travel era, where the human lifespan will eventually start to factor in. On the other, its hard to not consider the deeper meaning of such pursuits. After all, death is what gives life meaning and pushing it further raises lots of possible negatives e.g. 1) less sense of urgency 2) traumatic death will be even more traumautic, especially in the early years of life… I do wish I can live healthily to the end of my days, but its really a sort of miracle in todays world if the reaper doesn’t collect you before aging runs it course.
The real problem is that it will even further empower the gerontocracy. Imagine older people accumulating more and more wealth and being an ever larger voting bloc. Now you could imagine a world in which lifespan is extended and these issues are also resolved and we don't get stasis where nothing can be built and huge inequality, but it's unlikely to happen in a democracy.
For me this statement is a logical conclusion to the thought experiment ”imagine if everyone lived forever”. But I realize maybe for some it isn’t, so lets categorize this as an opinion.
Well there's probably no version of everyone living forever. Societies will still fail. Natural disasters will still happen, not to mention wars and terrorism.
Functionally there'll still be an end-date for most "human" lives.
But there's plenty of meaning to be found in 10,000 or 100,000 years of life, without disease and death lurking around the corner every day.
It will still be lurking around the corner and it will change your risk calculus completely. Today, if you go out and get hit by a bus, at worst, you lost 70 years of your life. In the future, you're risking 10-100k years of your life. What's worse is having to accept this risk for your loved ones.
A better question to consider would be, what would people do if they had only 1/5/10 years to live.
Sure. I’m not saying death is the sole provider of meaning, but still a major one, no matter how far we push it. As long as an inevitable end exists, we will adjust our life and actions with it.
I have yet to make the final push towards leaving, but have thought about it many, many times. Still, there were some new things here that I didn’t realize as a ’con’. Thanks and consider me still considering, but harder…
”Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”
-Kurt Vonnegut
So were it not for this era of cloud platforms and the other technical ”advancements” you mention, would we somehow be in a different place when it comes to maintaining and operating software?
As someone in a devops team, I could argue that ops teams are rarely the ones deciding what technologies to use. If we follow the basic sales->development->maintenance -pipeline, as ops your task is simply to keep the service running and secure with the tools you are given. Sure there can be added complexity, but I doubt it is as systemic/general as you make it seem to be.
Anyway, if this is seen as a problem the devs could simply take on the responsibility of learning those quirks themselves or produce the level of quality software that requires no maintanance whatsoever. But for some reason that hasn’t happened, eventhough the original idea behind devops was to blur this line. So until that day comes, I’ll sure enjoy whatever security one can really have in todays job market.
No, we would simply still use incomprehensible websphere setups. Now we got kubernetes as the application server of the current decade that's application language/framework agnostic.
But it shouldn't be like this. Devops shouldn't have to exist. Everything should work like heroku, where even mediocre devs can quickly setup proper pipelines.
Indeed, the logical conclusion for a man who has the misfortune to end up on the complaining side of one of these conversations is simply: just shut up! Thankfully you had the courage and security to remind us of this, before we further breach the code of conduct and embarrass the male gender! /s
This is really puzzling. For once we actually have not one, but two ’hi-tech’ companies in Europe, that can be considered significant competitors in a global market, yet instead of embracing this opportunity, Germany thinks its better to further segment the market to smaller players? A market that to be honest, is not as lucrative as many might think and has huge upfront R&D costs everytime the next G is coming up, especially on the RAN side.
I guess if its not airplanes or cars, we can leave it to Silicon Valley to handle. Or is it only airplanes now?
The reasons the network equipment suppliers consolidated was that the network service providers had consolidated and were starting to buy in bulk. That forced the prices down and gave advantages to the larger players who stayed larger players by gobbling up the other players before a competitor could.
The key problem is differentiation for network access providers. The business is highly infrastructure intensive and at the end of the day you take an IP packet, ship it to an interconnect and collect monthly payments. It is hard to see how such an industry where innovation is centered around bundling of tariffs for different access technologies is able to run more fragmented network technologies in cost effective ways.
So this is imho. all support PR to justify funding general EU tech investments. The US has venture funds the EU has research grants.
> two ’hi-tech’ companies in Europe, that can be considered significant competitors in a global market
And they still will be, this just lowers the barrier for entry on smaller companies who might have some beneficial R&D but dont have to sell/lease their intelectual property to the big two.
I have worked at Ericsson and they're extremely patent hungry. Thats not a bad thing in and of itself, but it reduces significant competition when you can buy smaller companies IP or block them out of the market.
> 3. The commuting routine, even if it's a nightmare, offers a sense of normalcy that most people have gotten used to and in a weird way rely on for grounding.
While working from home, I’ve found it much harder to switch between work/free modes. It seems the daily commute has been an effective way to for me to either prepare for the coming day or settle my mind for non-work related activities.
I've found some success in replacing that with similar routines, for example walking the dog before and after work. It's a pseudo-commute that allows similar mental preparation/release.
This worked well pre-covid. Since covid hit ...overall I'm struggling with bleeding boundaries. The pandemic anxiety makes it hard for me to settle in my basement office, so I use other spaces around the house.
Good read, thank you. I always welcome these articles where the notion of "how things came to be" is introduced. Makes it easier to manage the latest and greatest, when you have an understanding of how things have evolved.
Me too! And only recently I setup purchased a software-controlled radio, specifically so that I could watch aircraft flying over Helsinki in real-time.
