Idk about this, I have gotten almost every job I have ever had on cold-apply, including internships. The only one that wasn't that way was talking to a (internal) recruiter in college.

Don't discount that path. I did not have the best grades or anything, but (IMO) a mix of skills that was a good fit for the job at hand and confidence I could apply them.

Most of the people you will interact with in the (corporate) world have no understanding of their own understanding, and are operating in unknown unknown territory. Being confident, demonstrating competence in something jointly known/unknown or known/known helps a ton.

I don't even work with it that much and have a laundry list of complaints about the weird little edge cases or funky pieces of documentation required to make things work.

There are a lot of alternative cements to portland, interested to see if that is in-scope. The list of admixtures is also very long and also fairly secretive. UHPC is a pretty cool development, and I am especially bullish about removing rebar and replacing it with FRP bar to limit the eventual rust cracking that comes with the gradual march of carbonation.

Anyways, very cool and looking forward to the mix developments that come out of this framework.

At least in the US, you have 70+ year old lawmakers proposing (not even writing) laws they do not understand, passed to them by opaque groups with a obscured, albeit clear, interest.

See the latest age verification bills passed by Meta through a convoluted web of influence. Bring back the technocrats.

To answer the point, there is no technical limitation keeping people in the UK from building, creating and shooting homemade or otherwise improvised guns that I am aware of.

What the UK does have is universal healthcare, a 3-4x lower incarceration rate and dramatically improved social safety services.

I think you can group the majority of shooters into three buckets -- ideologically driven (think white supremacists, Islamic terrorists, anarchists, etc), the mentally ill, and the criminally motivated (gang shootings mostly). The US has only amplifying factors for all three groups.

For idealgoues, there is no wider span of acceptable discourse than in the US. Commonly espoused views in the US legislative and executive branches are criminal offenses in a number of peer countries, e.g hate speech is still constitutionally protected speech in the US. The rhetoric is insane, accusations of nazism, faciscm from the left and similar accusations from the right, and generally a very high degree of polarization.

For the mentally ill, the support system in the US is abysmal, with cracks big enough to drive a truck through. There are multiple books written about the failures of America's mental health system, I will not belabor the point.

For the criminally motivated, gun crime is concentrated in young, mostly black men in decaying post-industrial cities in the midwest and (south)east. They have almost zero political capital, low social mobility and very little pubic support. Other countries certainly have their ghettos, but take a trip to Gary, IN or Jackson, MS. You would be hard pressed think you are in the richest, most powerful country in the world.

Fundamentally, the point still stands. There is not a feasible technical path to keep firearm technology out of a massive number of hands. The skills needed to produce a functional firearm have never been lower, and they will keep declining until almost zero. The only technical (preventative) measures run squarely into the bill of rights -- think a lowered bar for a warrant or infringements on the 1st amendment limiting the sharing of technical knowledge. Changing the culture -- around mental health, around poverty, and around power is very difficult, so we will see an attempted erosion of civil liberties, just like 9/11 was used to erode civil liberties with the introduction of the Patriot Act and similar legislation.

I am arguing there will still be a significant number mass shootings/casualty events, political assassinations using a firearm, etc, and that the only way to effectively prevent them is to roll back most of the bill of rights.

The gun is a very old piece of technology and you do not need a sophisticated one to kill people effectively. Shinzo Abe was assassinated with a gun that could be described as primitive at best. Mangione used a 3dp firearm to kill the United Health CEO. Rebels in Myanmar are fighting the military junta with 3d printed small arms.

I am fundamentally arguing that the capacity of any one person has dramatically (100,000x) increased since the bill of rights was written, for better and for worse.

To be clear, I fully support the bill of rights and want to see it expanded. However, I reject the idea that simply eliminating the 2nd amendment and removing guns from civilian ownership can fix the underlying issues. I think you will see "casual" shootings and hopefully even mass shootings go down, but they will not go away and I expect they will still be higher than anywhere else in the world.

I am arguing that the new laws being proposed (e.g serializing other firearms components, ammo serialization, assault weapons bans, higher gun-owner standards) have absolutely no bearing on an entirely new source of firearms. Many Dem-controlled states have passed "ghost gun" regulation, but there is no real enforcement mechanism and it's mostly an additional charge to tack on after an actual crime has been committed.

You can see states like CA trying to go after 3D printers, but I suspect this will fail. There is no software out there that can realistically determine whether a part is a firearm component, other than dumb hashes of known parts. 3DP is a general tool, it is like trying to ban milling machines, files, or basic handtools.

Small firearms are hundreds of years old. Drones have been commercially available for many years and are easily modifiable into something that is 80% as good as what is currently being fielded in Ukraine.

It is not technically feasible to restrict someone from assembling basic, non-firearm-specific components to build a firearm. In the US, there is an increasing effort at the state level to serialize, restrict, and document individual firearm parts. However, an 80% good barrel can be fabricated at home, a 100% as good receiver can be printed on any recent 3D printer, and the rest of the parts (bolt, trigger assembly, etc) can be designed around easy home fabrication (see FGC-9). There is no practical way to trace, regulate, or stop behavior.

It isn't possible to restrict someone from building a capable drone either. The firmware is opensource, the parts can be ordered from almost any marketplace, and an energetic payload can easily be made by any amateur chemist from chemicals in any hardware or camping store. EW is often touted as a solution, but is frequently beaten by tethered drones. Cheap COTS IMUs are getting good enough to provide surprisingly accurate short-term INS, to say nothing of autonomous systems that need no external input past initial targeting.

I personally think this is a far bigger risk than most countries realize, largely because they are 10-15 years behind the technology. I believe this will force most governments into spending an order of magnitude more to defend their institutions at every level, not just core government security.

At least in the US, these threat vectors will absolutely be used to justify intrusions into civil liberties, but no amount of infringement will be able to even partially mitigate these threats. I think this should start to play out over the next 5-10 years.

It is very easy politically to target those over the top 2-5% of income, but you better believe those tranches will be expanded in the future.

This is not a huge disadvantage in my opinion. Let the rest of big tech fight each other to death over cloud, while controlling a very profitable differentiated offering (devices+services). Apple keeps the M series HW out of data centers, even though it presents some very attractive performance/w and per-core numbers.

Also a symptom of how inelastic hardware demands are. You would expect the purest k8s people to just shove workers on older machines and completely dodge this crisis, but we don't see that at all. Despite being an almost-commodity, many of the hw vendors still have a decent hand.

meh, I understand the point, but it is about your risk tolerance being different than whoever writes the code. I have a long list of complaints about the NEC, (including AFCI requirements), but IMO, these kinds of requirements do save some amount of lives -- the issues comes down to how much do you value your own life, and/or the lives of others. The tradeoff, as always, is cost -- inspections, permits, impact studies etc push up the cost of new and remodel jobs substantially.

Where I really take issue with different code is when we hammer down on a specific issue of small significance while neglecting a more significant problem. For example, I have never in my life seen an inspector check the torque of a main lugs, polaris connectors, etc. Might just be my inspectors, but I have seen way more failures due to loose or over tightened connections than anything else.

I am all for gradually raising the bar for safety, but it has to rise faster than the increased cost, along with a level raising of the bar across all facets.

I am not a civil engineer, but I did spend a bunch of time looking into building an underground range. Way more relaxed life safety reqs, smaller bore, etc. However, when you start reading, it is clear that much of the work is empirical, heavily localized and based on a great deal on the experience of the builder. I found very little in the way of solid theoretical modeling, but lots of measure, adjust, etc.

I think Grady does a reasonable job highlighting the dangers and risks.

There are good business and technical reasons to choose a public cloud.

There are good business and technical reasons to choose a private cloud.

There are good business and technical reasons to do something in-between or hybrid.

The endless "public cloud is a ripoff" or "private clouds are impossible" is just a circular discussion past each other. Saying to only use one or another is textbook cargo-culting.

This is a nicer way to say to say layoffs/outsourcing while being rewarded by the market for "adopting AI".