I think it's extremely hard to argue that kids tend to be emotionally immature and especially vicious in this regard. But considering the GP has admitted that in retrospect they find this action to be a dick move I think it's important not to try and generalize immature behavior to all of humanity.
The question of whether humans are more biased towards social or antisocial behavior[1] is a complex one that philosophy has struggled with for a long time without a clear consensus.
1. Often historically framed as whether humans are inherently good or evil.
There's never going to be philosophical consensus on the "good/evil/social/antisocial" debate because the human impulse to self-justify and believe that you're the "good guy" is extremely powerful. Those of us who seek to understand human nature have to proceed without consensus as a goal.
Mao Zedong was able to convince kids and teenagers to have their parents and teachers killed during the Cultural Revolution by convincing them that it was prosocial behavior, and indeed their duty. So the question is fraught with conundrums of the form "humans tend to prosocial/antisocial according to which standard?"
There are plenty of business' products that I use where I'm unaware of if I share or don't share the owner's political views and I'm totally fine using them. Elon Musk has made it impossible to not be aware of his political views by constantly shoving it down our throats.
OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, Google, MSFT, Spotify, Duolingo and NVidia - those are the ones that come immediately to mind. They're either selling the AI (or the tools to make the AI) or hoping against all hope that they're on the right side of bubble history.
If we soften the claim to "increase engineer productivity" I think something like 70% of engineers would also agree. If you tack on "if applied wisely" then you'll probably be up to 95% of engineers
I think it opens them up to a huge customer base of less technically apt people who just downloaded some random "S3asYourFS.exe" program but also opens them up to needing to support that functionality and field support calls from less technically apt people. I don't know if that business decision makes sense (since AWS already lacks the CS infrastructure to even deal with professional clients) but the idea that you could get everyone and their brother paying monthly fees to AWS is likely too tempting of a fruit to pass up.
No - it's actually local variance in materials coupled with the difficulty in moving materials between markets economically. Some areas just have better suited limestone or gravel or sand and can afford to build resilient structures for a fraction of the price that it'd cost in other areas.
This issue here is mainly that it's very expensive to ship all the components of a Concrete in the volume necessary in an economical manner. Some areas of the world just lost the lottery when it comes to having resilient building materials.
Corruption absolutely is an issue as well - I don't mean to downplay it - but even if we remove it as a factor there are just a lot of variables involved in making a reliable Concrete... finding a good mix is an artform and if, for instance, your limestone quary suddenly hits a more clay-laden amalgamation then your Concrete that was reliably lasting for three decades under certain conditions might suddenly lose a decade off the expected lifetime. That change in material quality can also be difficult to detect so there are real quality assurance issues in Concrete mixtures outside of just corruption and cutting corners.
I wanted to mention that Concrete is far more complex and regional than folks might imagine. The quality of gravel and sand, local impurities - these all contribute massively. It's probably best to think of it like a wine's terroir - except, unlike a bottle of wine, it's prohibitively expensive to ship both the components and the finalized mixture to different areas. If a region's limestone has a massive clay impurity then it may simply be unsuitable for large structures or require extensive filtering to the point of being uneconomical.
It's important to be aware of just how much the local geological mix can impact the viability of building with concrete because while theoretically we could use perfect concrete for every project - at that point most projects would simply be too expensive to consider undertaking. There is a very large field of engineering around establishing the realism required in settling for what you've got for the price you can afford in. It can absolutely mean that the materials required to build a high rise in Philly might be priced starkly differently from the same structure planned in Milan even with adjustments for the labor impact on pricing.
And it's not just the gravel/sand that's important. The water itself also differs in its chemical composition (e.g. salts, minerals, basic/acidic pH), which can catch you really dirty when making concrete. Or when dealing with water at all, shout-out to Flint and its infamous water crisis that took eleven years to resolve - every single lead service pipe had to be physically dug up and replaced.
> it's prohibitively expensive to ship both the components and the finalized mixture to different areas.
We could do this if it is important. There are mines in Wisconsin the export sand to the middle east because that is known to work well for fracking and they don't want to risk a local sand not working well. (AFAIK they have never tested local sand properties, but it is possible they have and it doesn't work). In this case the value of the "perfect" is well worth the high shipping costs.
We certainly could - it's absolutely possible. The question is if it's economical and so far the market has ruled in most cases that it isn't. Either the project doesn't need such a perfect amalgamation of materials (maybe there is an expected deprecation that doesn't justify such an outlay - possibly earthquake risk would minimize any expected lifespan gain - possibly the materials contractor just can't internally justify the added material cost while remaining attractive to local contractors).
It's all a balance. Imagine a scenario where you can ship in specialized materials to build a bridge with an expected lifespan of 100 years and it'll cost 50M - or you could use local concrete that has an expected lifespan of 15 years and materials would cost 5M. This is a vast simplification of the math but, assuming those expected costs it'd be cheaper to build using local materials and just schedule replacement every 15 years. And, of course, there'll be egg on your face if you build the 50M bridge and then suffer a massive tsunami in two years that destroys the foundations anyways.
To paraphrase a Grady quote: "Engineering isn't a study of building the best thing - it's optimizing the quality we can get for the cost outlay."
for fracking, what they want is a perfectly uniform sized quartz grain thats rounded. You find this sand where multiple processes occur, notably glacial geology. You want uniform grains because frackings goal is to open, then support an porous structure when you can then pull the fluids/gas out without clogging.
It's not really hard to test for this property, but the cost efficiency is notable when you find a massive amount of it in one place. It still may be washed to remove further silt/clay, but they absolutely know the product works and they generally know the geology in other places don't tend to produce the same material.
There's a fair amount of materials size thats mostly "we found this geologic material and this is some magic shit" rather than some wholly manufactured human endevour.
>It remains the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, a staggering achievement for an structure completed around 126 AD during the reign of Emperor Hadrian.
IRR is so trivial to manipulate - it'd be wonderful if more investors began demanding actual metrics on capital performance. If you're parking cash with an investment firm you want to know about how much of a return you can expect when it is withdrawn, and while history is a guide and not a guarantee, there are much better ways to inform that expected return than IRR. "My million got a return of 2% during a year when your reported IRR was 10% - where's the other 8%!" is a common cry from those who haven't just rolled over their investment, unaware of how little it has functionally appreciated.
Also, the valuation for such a debt laden company should be viewed with great skepticism. I'm afraid a lot of mutual funds will end up holding the bags.
I'm sure had you omitted it - instead of that reply there would have been a series of comments talking about how Microsoft actually has a track record of doing things like this. It's impossible to please everyone on the internet but I very much appreciate when people lean towards making their communication clearer.
The question of whether humans are more biased towards social or antisocial behavior[1] is a complex one that philosophy has struggled with for a long time without a clear consensus.
1. Often historically framed as whether humans are inherently good or evil.
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