On the one hand, I empathize with the desire to keep as many books as we can, but on the other, librarians have to practice collection management, and they have to do it in the context of dropping budgets and greater demands for student meeting and study space. What do you expect to happen? Faculty often don’t have any idea how the systems that support them actually function, but things have to actually be made to work.
Many mid size to large companies are hilariously inefficient and the executives have no idea how work actually gets done. This means you can (in theory) fire a decent percentage of your workforce without affecting your output. You can then claim they’ve been replaced by AI without anyone ever challenging that assertion. I’m not making a pro or anti AI claim here, just saying that you won’t know whether you were wrong about it until/unless things start to go really badly.
If it can’t be copyrighted, then no. Licenses rely on the copyright holder’s right to grant the license. But that would also mean it’d be essentially public domain. I’m not sure there’s really settled legal opinion on this yet. Iirc it can’t be patented.
You might enjoy Sophocles' Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction by Fred Ahl (https://a.co/d/ditCwg5). It explores this idea, concluding that Oedipus’ investigation is flawed, but the audience is primed to believe it because they know the myth.
I was at a large public university in the 90s / early 2000s that used Oracle. The database product itself was absolutely rock solid if well-administered. They also kept trying to sell us enterprise services built on top of the database that were pure trash. "Oracle Forms" was one of those things iirc. We never bought that stuff, but it did get us a nice free lunch or two.
I remember a sysadmin at the company I worked at in 2006(?) remarking that this would be the third time he had migrated to and then away from Lotus Notes.
Of course not. What does that have to do with anything? People with different lives and experiences will have different perspectives that are likely to be helpful. We all care deeply about the things that directly affect us and our loved ones and less about the things that do not. You can cover more bases with a diverse workforce and avoid making dumb mistakes. I don’t get why this is controversial.
Binaries are cool and all, but maybe it's better for your organizational health to have (for example) your company look something like the population they're selling to? Maybe not everyone gets the same level of boost in their education? Maybe they've overcome some adversity and that will make them a better, more resilient colleague, but it also meant their grades weren't as high? Like I said, this isn't easy stuff, and binary thinking doesn't really help.
It’s astonishing to me how obviously intelligent people can just be put into the mental equivalent of an unrecoverable flat spin by ideology. The essay is interesting, but then just flips into silly mode. DEI is not the Spanish Inquisition. The idea that we should try to hire, retain, and promote people besides white men seems straightforwardly good to me. Obviously it’s hard to execute on, particularly without making some people uncomfortable. Such groups will make mistakes or be ineffective at times, but they’re not some sort of thought police. It’s quite hard to understand the opposition to them without hypothesizing that it’s simply racism.
My favorite thing about Hibernate is that it’s sophisticated enough that it has its own query language, which is very, very similar but not identical to SQL. Makes me want to take a drink just thinking about it.
This is the thing I find really puzzling. Being able to read between the lines of virtually any kind of communication (but especially business communications) is kind of a superpower. I can only come up with cynical reasons why it’s deprecated.
I had an interesting experience as a child. I grew up in Barbados, where circumcision is not a common practice. In Biology class on day, the teacher talked about the practice, and basically everyone in the class went “Eww”. I moved to the US the next year, and when the same topic came up in Biology, the teacher mentioned that in other countries, most men are uncircumcised. And the class went “Eww”.
I was you until a couple of years ago. Could have rolled naked in the stuff. Then it got me. And Lord, it was horrible. Weeks of agony. I’m super careful with it now.
Yes, but: a programmer who has made it to age 25 without learning how to ssh into a server where their code will end up running is to me demonstrating that they are remarkably incurious about the larger ecosystem within which they’re working. One sign of a better developer is that their horizons are broader.