The real problem isn't the "addiction" (which is so mild as to be laughable); its the sudden influx of time you have, and the fact that smoking, favors a sedentary lifestyle (typically associated with high stress jobs).

Typical spreads are; 1-3 days discomfort, 7-day relapse, 14-21 day relapse, 6 week relapse. after that, unless you hang out with smokers...

They strike anyone with a brain or domain-level knowledge (until they run out of strikes).

You never see the totality of the evidence; just what the judge "allows in" (that isn't prejudicial to the prosecutors case).

You don't know what the punishments are; half the time you aren't instructed on lesser offences; and most of the time you never even get to see the actual laws, or more importantly, case law.

if you think sitting on a jury (as it stands today) qualifies you to render any sort of judgement on the "evidence", you are woefully mistaken.

You are a puppet. A fop. Anything but "the last bulwark against state tyranny".

The appearance of justice, is the only thing Courts give a shit about. You are part of that appearance. A show, for the uneducated to think they still have a functioning legal system.

--

I had someone contact me for a "consulting" position, to replace their rule-based insurance claim denial system, with "ML". Contract-work, nobody in-house to review its performance, no insight to the problems of the domain and they wanted to throw ML at it to "solve their problem".

When I refused, and pointed out that it would be highly irresponsible, to "contract-out" this type of work, particularly given its life-or-death implications; the CEO got angry. Told me; its "post-claims processing" and it isn't life or death. To which I told him bullshit; your denial of claims is going to directly influence how doctors practice their treatment. There is a direct feedback cycle. The fact that you don't see it, makes it even more dangerous.

They simply, didn't understand, how HIGHLY inappropriate it was to just throw random ML at a problem, particularly as a one-off consulting project (and no in-house expertise).

^ thats real-world.

Personally I don't think you should be allowed anywhere near ML, UNLESS you have that PHD in computer science. I don't even think you should be allowed to HIRE people for ML until you fully understand the hazards with letting a computer control critical decisions.

So yeah, with respect to your distinction of "ML research" and "applied ML".

"NO."

If no-one is going to look at the actual evidence/agreements/law....

You don't need AI.

You just need collusion between law firms i.e. to write a program, and then agree, that whatever it interprets, is the way it will be semantically enforced in court.

To be clear: the study of law is bullshit; so why not take advantage of it, and simply agree, that computer generated bullshit, is what determines it...

... of course while still retaining high rates and billable hours for "attorney review" (for billable hours/padding).

might. I skipped it, use soft-links, and hard outputs (variable files) to get around it. cuts down on the graph, I can set explicit boundaries (on whats getting eval'd) without having to go through the terraform DSL. equivalent to running separate terraform scripts, on separate portions of the infrastructure.

data source providers (understandably) are not static; there is no way to cache the output of data providers between runs; which means any query retriggers dependencies eval which rebuilds perfectly fine infrastructure. hence why I just output static files. Now there is no chance for terraform to think this variable might change, and ergo, no chance for rebuild of infrastructure that doesn't need it.

> It has been my experience with tens of providers that the time loss occurs when the requests have been handed off to a providers API but not so much in Terraform.

Agree. So this is sort of the point. I don't need to actually bring up machines in a typical DAG fashion - so some of the work is parallelizable. But other parts aren't. If I need 20 machines, I know I need 20 machines. If the AMI's are loaded on the cloud provider, there is absolutely no reason to have them loaded sequentially (such as a "post-config" might require) i.e. incurring large wait times. Once you start using "terraform" variables (off of resources), that is what you get. So I prefer a different variable resolution mechanism (i.e. lazy/evented).

Particularly now that you can ghetto-leverage the cloud providers tag systems, in order to do "proto" service discovery (tag machines for eventual service discovery/config i.e. similar to ansible roles).

I'm twisting the hell out of terraform (for things it is not intended to do). but that is because I want to avoid adding yet another tool to the toolchain. More declarative DSL's = more issues to diagnose.

> As for Terraform itself, my biggest issue is that it has turned around the view of resources and providers.

not so much a problem for me (not multi-cloud). I like knowing (at a glance) what provider-specific features I can expect to be supported. The problem with trying to abstract out cloud provider, is you go with the lowest common denominator (in terms of declarative syntax).

> It should have been going in the direction of https://github.com/google/go-cloud

Never used it.

Also I've never written a terraform module. So its entirely plausible, this is where my issues would be resolved (custom provider) and an "enhanced" dsl.

> In a very real way, its all ad-hoc expertise.

> A series of one-off's you try, to get a compromise your client can accept.

^^^ substantive comments. Not "ranty". Points. Made in logical order.

You may not like them. But they are there.

which is why I don't stress that "agree to disagree over similar premises". can be both a hindrance, and a benefit.

wink.

> One formerly quite religious friend who lost faith in his mid or late 40s seemed quite apathetic for a while after.

runs deeper than that. people who are religious, usually are religious because it made sense. but the corruption in organized religion in the west, is difficult to reconcile with the actual tenets of a faith. so when they abandon their church; they still have the same needs that drew them - but now their is no path forward for fulfillment. Religion (in the purest sense), does have a purpose.

> Thankfully atheist evangelists and militancy aren't a thing here outside of Dawkins. :)

Indeed, you are somewhat blessed in this respect. I've always preferred a good conversation.

> Passport applications insist on it (I think. It's been 8 years or so since my last)

that would seem to be the thing to rectify. Unless your legal system is based on religious code; mandatory religious disclosure would seem to be a bit "impolitic".

> This seems to nail it.

He's a good person. So am I. Good people, prefer the company, of good people. Thus, has it always been.

> Religion, belief, spirituality and atheism has become a personal thing separate and unrelated to organised religions in the UK.

You guys have had a rough time of it. Speaking from a historical/religious perspective.

I'm not surprised by Western Christians jettisoning their "faiths". But it would be nice if they didn't impute the Western failures, say on Eastern or Middle-Eastern Christianity (which are vastly different creatures).

It distorts the mind, to project local problems, on all of humanity. Each culture is different; each takes a different path.

I'm not a big fan of this (as you've mentioned it) for multiple reasons. First, use is not necessarily linked with failure rates. Second, predictive analytics that cull the actual failure rates, distort the underlying processes. Third, not every (insert part) is the same. Forth, replacing parts on a predictive schedule (particularly absent a rational policy) is wasteful/inefficient.

Sort of why statistical inference in medicine, is also a failure. This is the same type of faulty reasoning, applied to cars.

Having said that; what does work is: * Maintaining and monitoring for detection of NON-use failure rates (abnormal production/design/environment issues). * Maintaining and detection for imminent failure (via live signal extraction via failure mode matching). * Improving design and production, using high-resolution detection of onset of problems on part post-mortems.

> Now the company not only sells vehicle telemetry but also predictive maintenance notifications.

Intro the vehicle equivalent of "you have to replace your toner, drum, etc". I need to make more money? Send out more PM notices. Who doesn't like more PM notices? :)

> However; I believe there may be an indirect metric

called a proxy metric. Doesn't work in the long-term as their is always drift. But good for eyeballing a dataset and trying to work out a rough estimate of the bounds.

> Maybe that particular solution isn't great but the idea of a "'universally' applicable indirect metric for tech debt for business monitoring" seems tractible.

Naw. The real problem is that "technical debt" is an actual "fiscal" thing; its just not being tracked i.e. you need to link the metric, to the ledger. And then, you have to handle the strategic aspect (when do you actually pay the price, to "pay down" the technical debt). Lastly, couple it with product lifecycle (in the software industry, months). It may be, for example, cheaper to simply retire the product than pay down the debt. Which effectively converts your technical debt to "zero" by strategic decision.

Its not an accident that microservices are very popular (for example); nevermind all the bullshit spouted about it, there is a simple, direct line of reasoning to the entire practice.

> P.S. Personally, I've toyed with the idea of a 90/10 technology business where 90% of all work done is invested in production monitoring, building metrics, improving any performance bottlenecks, simplifying the codebase (literally reducing LOC where possible), information sharing (recorded tech talks about parts of the system with quizzes at the end), building testings, investing in deploying the system quickly and painlessly, and getting people set up to work ASAP (Vagrant, documentation, w/e). Only 10% would be spent on new feature development. Tech debt is always being paid down in this setup.

Wink ;) you cannot automate, brilliance. particularly, in coding. either you have the right mindset to the problem domain, or you don't. frameworks cannot substitute, for understanding. you can fake it with structure (and throwing more machines at it), but at the end of the day, you need, to understand your problem domain, your customer and your orgs fin. structure. You should take a step out from the technical side, and look at it from the business side. Particularly, when you introduce uncertainty, and constraints (business).

I built something similar to what you are talking about; but the purpose was targeted to slightly (sufficiently) different purposes, using similar techs. I prefer to architect the solutions rather than rely on (insert methodology); that is, to take into account the system dynamics and test proposed codebases using different types of methods, rather than rely on the current methods of remediation. But this necessarily, increases tech debt. But it does so, for the right reasons. And that, makes ALL the difference.

It is not an accident that the GINI coefficient, is so drastically out of whack in the US.

The mortgage system, was meant to break the original land grants (which had to be honored under British-American common law).

The corporation both a shield for the rich; and a sword against the middle-classes as it disenfranchises citizens from the bill of rights.

Intellectual property is just a more extreme form of corporations. The notion that idea can be owned for decades, with the cost of enforcement out-sourced to the public, and private profits insourced.

Same with the public schooling system (ready workers). Etc.

Just about every Western institution ("improvement") you'ld care to name, has an ulterior motive moving us one step further along to what amounts to perpetual slavery.

I think if you sent back a person from this era, 120+ years ago, to try and "improve" the American system, they'ld have burned him alive. Such is the level of degradation inherent in todays "modern" governance.

Yup. Your idea of good, is not my idea of good. That we can reach an agreement (compromise), the consensual portion.

That good, is often a matter of perspective, and subject to change in hindsight (i.e. a value judgement distorted heavily by the sensorium/ego) is where it is a hallucination.

> Again, your entire argument here is hinged on the assumption that all morality originates from religion

no, it doesn't. in point of fact, religion arises as a consequence, of the argument. So do gangs/police/armies/nations. Welcome to the morass, of humanity. :)

;)

or if you prefer "the road to hell, is paved with "good" intentions".

or more succinctly, "hell is other people".

> Give me a break with this "mathematical format" nonsense

Not a fan of logic?

> and condescending smiley faces.

condescending? not really. simply commenting on an alternate pathway to arrive at the conclusion, as a consequence rather than a posit. as I am not privy to your actual conversation with said "religious" person, I chose to demonstrate the line of reasoning.

But by all means, continue to stick your head up your ass and think its "religion is the only source of goodness" statement, rather than a logical argument, predicated on human psychology and its biases.

> Just the odd individual going off on one on some Facebook post or other net forum from time to time.

I discuss theology on a fairly regular basis ;) and philosophy. ;) lets just say there's a fair amount of "ex-Christians" who are looking for something new to latch on. Same old shit (hate/misanthropy), just wrapped in new cloth.

> "no belief in god" as an equally valid box to tick as CofE

Just leave it blank. What to your mind, is the purpose of having an explicit box? I'm curious.

> Humanism, some sort of earth centred belief, or Buddhism thanks to its philosophy and lack of creator have all risen as religion has become increasingly irrelevant for most.

Eh. I know Buddhist philosophy well. Few people get it. My friend who is an atheist (in the truest sense) is a humanist. So am I. Thats why we're friends. :) But he respects my choice to follow a religion; same as I respect his choice, to follow none.

Case law, is the only thing that matters.

You think hanging them up from yardarms would deter them?

You want to ensure proper behavior; you have to take away the tools that let them aggregate power in the first place; and prevent it from re-occurring.

There is no "higher" standard. There is only one standard; functional, competent, accountable, just.

If you don't have a legal system that can accomplish those. Then you need to scrap your legal system. Not "hold them to a higher standard", which often is just an escape clause for preferential treatment ("Chevron deference").

LOL. This is so wrong, its not even funny.

Lawyers, are incompetent. If you haven't come to that realization yet; its because you haven't dealt with enough of them. It is -extremely- rare, even at the higher levels of pay, to get a lawyer, who actually knows the specifics of your case.

In a very real way, its all ad-hoc expertise. A series of one-off's you try, to get a compromise your client can accept.

> Lawyers know the ins and outs of this stuff.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Yeah right.

in reality, its just another religion.

true atheists, are like true feminists; god/gender, simply doesn't enter into the mix.

I enjoy the company of both; but not, their intellectual progeny. And neither, do they.

its interesting to note, that the concept of morality, is in fact, moored as a consensual hallucination as to what is good.

therefore, as an atheist, you might mimic a "cultural" sense of goodness; but since the intent is not from the same source -- you may not pretend to share it. Logically, you are immoral simply because you do not share the same inspiration. This is a direct consequence of "assuredness".

if you want it in mathematical format ;)

you have to look deeper than the act. Which is what, you are missing. It is not enough to be 'good' (as if some objective standard can be said to exist!); it is also important to be able to enunciate the impulse to 'goodness'; and further to assure the reliability of that impulse.

This is why atheism, is and always will be, a minority religion. You lack the one characteristic, that all other religions share. A framework.

That is not to say, btw, that organized religion is "better". As with everything, the intent and education/erudition of the practitioner, makes the difference in real effect.

> so his acts are based on an inner sense of morality.

... or self-interest/greed.

:)

same thing you do when you listen and try to guess where the conversation is headed. ;)

also with the same flaws when you guess wrong.

its a failure of all modern business management methods.