Airships could potentially be electric and solar powered. That would insulate it from fuel cost fluctuations. It would also resolve the issue with refueling.
The problem is that ultimately, all those efforts are building software - whether open source or platforms. And few of them are building it very well. The user experience of the vast majority of these efforts is abysmal and it undermines whatever other credibility the organization might have.
User experience matters. And for that, you need people who have experience building software with a high bar for user experience.
It seems like HN has gotten one of these posts every month or two for as long as I've been reading it (about 15 years now). They always make me some combination of sad and angry, because they almost always misdiagnose the issue.
Process isn't the enemy. The various named and defined processes are just tools. It's all in how the tool is applied. And while this post wrongly blames a process, it does get one thing right:
> If a development team were to sit down and decide to deliver code every two weeks, based on a process of their own design—one that made sense to them and suited their circumstances—that would be one thing. [...] Autonomy—the ability to direct one’s own work—plays a significant role in how work is experienced.
The development team (which ideally includes design and product as equal members) should be deciding its own process collectively and with a high degree of autonomy. Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, Waterfall, "no process", these are just the defined and tested tools we select from in deciding our processes. We can mix and match them, draw from them as needed, or throw them out and try something new.
But we as a development team should be deciding, together, what process to adopt in order to achieve the businesses goals with the resources and time as best we can without burning ourselves out.
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I was a full stack IC for 10 years and an engineering manager for 5 years.
I've done more or less all the processes. I'm currently back to being an IC in an org where Product dictates exactly the sprintless "no-process" this post is advocating and it is every bit as stressful and bad as he's claiming sprints are.
The best team I've been on was one where we had full control of our process. We started with scrum-like month long sprints, of which the first week was planning week where we did deep dives on our stories, wrote them up and ended the week with the scrum planning ceremony and agile pointing. We used an "ideal day" as a point to give our estimates some level of concreteness, but largely stuck to our recorded velocity. And you know what? It worked! We got surprisingly good at estimating and, while we were never perfect, if we overran our sprints it often wasn't by much.
Planning week was definitely rough, and we eventually chose to ditch it in favor of two week sprints with planning stories worked into the sprint as needed. That worked really well too (and I think that's my preferred process).
But the point was, we choose these processes. We ran these processes. Our retros were vibrant and highly critical discussions where we asked ourselves every sprint what was and wasn't working and made changes.
When I became a manager, I carried this forward on my teams. We iterated through the two week sprints with planning SPIKES, to continuous flow kanban, and back to two week sprints with planning SPIKES. When I became a manager of managers each of the teams in my org choose its own process. One stuck with the scrum-link, one adopted kanban, and one (the smallest) decided to throw it all out and go with "no process". Each made their respective process work. Each had different challenges, because no process is perfect. Each continued to iterate on their respective processes. And I worked with the leads - the manager and staff engineer of each team - to form the cross team processes and communication to ensure that each of these autonomous teams could still collaborate.
Process is not the enemy. Process is just the structure of our collaboration.
It becomes bureaucracy only when someone else is dictating that structure and preventing us from structuring our collaborations in the ways that best work for us.
That is flatly false. Worker cooperatives are every bit as innovative as any other form of private corporation. These are owned by workers not a centralized government. There are quite a few of them and you may well have purchased their products with it even realizing it. Two additional examples you may have encountered are Equal Exchange and King Arthur Flour.
There aren't more of them because they have a hell of a time securing financing when most businesses are financed through equity sales which they can't do.
Example of innovation please. I’ve seen first hand that no collective farm is able to produce nor SpaceX nor even EV nor even plant in time and harvest in time.
I'm not close enough to manufacturing to evaluate how innovative their approaches to factory automation are, but it's not like they're based solely on turnips:
The collective farm that produced SpaceX is the United States Government. It carried out all the research and development necessary to create and further the North American space program. And it is existential in furthering it to this day. Without this source of contracts, research projects and income SpaceX would not be able to produce its commercial spin-off products.
It looks like this system was created out of necessity; there was no viable product for what they needed. Necessity is the mother of innovation after all, and we find this sorts of innovation frequently in non-collectivized entrepreneurships as well. Still, very cool!
By this logic capitalism is the thing holding back capitalist farms from being rocket makers too? Or do you only apply it when you get to use the word "collective"?
Of course it is the logic of collective. In capitalism you decide how you'd want to spend your resources, on a farm or on a rocket. In collective it is collective who decides.
There are multiple Kibbutz in Israel that plant and harvest on time and are the major source of innovation for Israel's AgTech sector (which is only behind the US in terms successful startups).
The fact that we do more horrifying things to other species is not a justification.
We shouldn't be doing those things. The fact our legal structures haven't banned them yet does not invalidate the ethical concerns about using human brain tissue in this manner.
It's not just a cell cluster, it's a cluster of brain cells, the organ that is most likely linked to consciousness. We don't understand how that organ is linked to consciousness, so we don't know at what point and structure a cluster of neurons would develop it. Given that, this is an extremely dangerous path to start walking down.
This is going to come across as inflammatory, but I promise I’m not intending it to be:
Can someone give me the argument for and against for why this different than the ethics of abortion?
It occurs to me that if anyone concerned about the possibility of consciousness and therefore suffering in bio-organic computing, is the consistent position to be against abortion after 2 weeks, which is when the brain begins its development in the fetus?
Euthanasia is not murder. There are many situations in which death is the desired choice.
In the case of abortion, you have one being (the fetus) that isn't yet fully formed and capable of living on its own and another being (the mother) who is potentially harmed by the first being's life. Yes, it is a morally complex situation.
We don't know when the first being becomes conscious. But we know the second being is conscious. And we know the consequence of treating the fetus as a being with full rights is to deprive the mother of her rights, frequently her right to life.
Frankly, I have first hand experience with this I strongly doubt many abortion opponents have. If not for abortion, my wife would probably be dead after our wanted pregnancy turned out to be non-viable. We aborted our son while he was still alive, because if we hadn't she could have gotten sepsis as he slowly died and rotted in her belly.
People who treat abortion as a black and white moral issue the way you appear to be doing have now banned it where I live, which means my wife and I cannot risk having more children, given our history of loss. (Of which the one I described above is only a small piece.)
Abortion is morally grey. There are few other ethics cases where there is such a direct conflict between the rights of an existing being and the rights of a potential being. The only reasonable way to handle that is to allow each individual to make their own moral judgement and choice.
Death is only a relevant concept to the living. Someone who understands nothing about their existence, who has no desires, no memories, can't possibly understand death.
If I cut my arm off, I'm "murdering" trillions of organisms. Is that immoral?
I think suffering is only possible to much more complex organisms. You can't mourn if you don't remember for example.
Dangerous for the potential consequences we cant predict, and the violation of ethical considerations for a sentient organism.
We dont fully understand consciousness or how it works, and by experimenting with these, we could inadvertently create something capable of suffering or even self awareness. Without a clear understanding of these processes and how they work, it's downright reckless and unethical to assume theres no risk. Dbingham rightly points out that we're treading into unknown and potentially unethical territory.
We couldn’t predict consequences of most things, from wheel to eletricity to internet. People predicted mailmen on flying bicycles delibering mail to cloud houses. Best predictions were rare and still shallow. Still worked more or less. I don’t get this part at all.
I believe the most important part for ethics-concerned commenters here are ethics. But I have a hard time reasoning about it while living on a whole planet with (roughly) 90% of humans living under poverty line, 9.9% of humans living as modern-era slaves, and 100% of organisms that ever lived suffering in an incountable amount of ways. To me it’s more dangerous to leave this as is than experimenting on yet another 0.001% of biotissue.
Even when I try hard to take an ethical position, it seems moot to me. I still can’t be sure that my spinal cord isn’t suffering all these tears without me knowing. I mean yes, less suffering would be great, not even by ethics, just from empathy. But neural tissue that has no mouth and probably must scream is too effing everywhere to single some cell collections out. Nature doesn’t care. Scream if you can, and if you can not, too bad. I just can’t find this balanced view that you guys have, it feels pretty self patting on the back to me.
This falls squarely into the "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to consider whether they should" category.
There are so many unknowns with potentially horrifying answers.
We don't know what generates human consciousness. But we know the brain is a key part of it. At what point does a bunch of lab grown human neurons become conscious? Can it become conscious outside of a body? What would that experience be like if a lab grown brain used as a computer developed consciousness? And what would happen to that consciousness?
The potential energy savings aren't worth risking the potential horror.
> What would that experience be like if a lab grown brain used as a computer developed consciousness? And what would happen to that consciousness?
That's my concern as well, because I think it would go insane almost instantly. This would also render the whole project useless, you can't reasonably expect an insane brain to yield correct results. Or would it be a double trapped brain existing as chip, unable to move or communicate, witnessing it's neurons being used as a computing resource, but without being able to do anything about it.
It's very very scary, and there needs to be a process for testing for any type of consciousness and a plan for what to do if it's detected, I recommend just killing it instantly to prevent any suffering.
> witnessing it's neurons being used as a computing resource
What exactly is doing the witnessing here, if the neurons are being used for computation? A lot of these comments seem to tacitly assume there is a little person inside our brains who is at the controls, and that organoid computing means that these controls are forcibly taken away, causing the magic little person to suffer horribly. It's strangely childish.
> We don't know what generates human consciousness. But we know the brain is a key part of it. At what point does a bunch of lab grown human neurons become conscious?
Why just human neurons for a human consciousness?
We know very little of what sparkle consciousness but the consensus seems to be that most living things experience it with varying degree. Even though most of us, conscious humans, are absolutely fine with millions of mammals being slaughtered without much care for their feelings.
It'd be really awesome to have a link to the channel and video that is playing in case I want to find it later. This is a wonderful discovery tool, but I'd really love to be able to save the content I discover!
This sounds very similar to my experience as well. Memory and mental visualization are very fuzzy. Like a camera with a dirty lens and very narrow focus. I can't even imagine my wife or children's faces clearly. I can picture an environment, but it's like a low res image or impressionistic painting.
I can think very clearly in text however, so I can imagine vivid descriptions of a physical environment and with descriptions of fine detail. But it's stored as text, and only blurrily rendered to images.
Recently, I've gradually realized that I struggle to recognize faces and some significant chunk of my social anxiety comes from this. If I see a face often enough or in large enough doses I can recognize it, but if I see it only occasionally and for brief encounters, I really struggle. I think it may be related to my inability visualize.
Maybe because there is no universal solution? Different teams work in different ways and I don't believe one tool can solve for all of them effectively without being mediocre at best for all or most use cases. (Jira comes to mind.) You're better off using simple, opinionated software that fits the way your team works.
I tend to think that the underlying issue is that collaborative/group planning software usually isn't starting from first principles but is just a list of attributes people think they need or that are memetic/familiar.
Based on my experience I think a universal solution will have a starting point in the individual and will evolve from something like obsidian or emacs (but it will probably never evolve from a consumer hostile community/platform like emacs)... and will eventually be akin to a full OS replacement.
For any given universal interface you have to make it extensible, interoperable and personal (for some given definition of personal) and no software organized around a group can get there without a fundemental rework.
Honestly, I think for large commercial players (products like MacOs) it's more likely for us to get there after AI conversational interfaces are fully synthesized and OS' are fundementally reevaluated for production after they lose their relevance in other general computing ways.
The best highly-opinionated product management (not project management) alternative to Jira is Linear.app - it is sooo good I can’t begin to do it justice.
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