Their model of scripts and mindlessness is only one of many possible explanations of the behavior they're seeing. And I don't even know where to start with the sending letters to random doctors thing.
Is this actually a thing that was/is taken seriously?
If someone on my team or in my company proposed to break most of our python code for no substantial reason, unless they were pretty junior I would count that as a real red flag against their judgement.
How do people land on the python steering council exactly?
I'm very ready to believe your description of the state of python is true but I've been out of the loop on python for a while. I'm interested in more details. Can you expand or point to any articles that give more details?
> I think blaming DEI hires for problems is mostly people who don't like the idea of hiring based on race/gender/etc. and who also realize that if you do that hard enough, you're bound to get inferior people because you're limiting your hiring pool.
Isn't that exactly the problem though: hiring is currently based on race/gender in favor of white/male hard enough that you get interior people from that hiring pool?
no, not in tech companies and certainly not at crowdstrike. lookup people who work there and you'll see. In cybersecurity, the talent pool is so small you can't even pick and choose like that even if you wanted to.
There seemed to me to be a clear shift in focus from CrowdStrike to Microsoft somewhere along the way, maybe a little while after George Kurz' message. I was wondering if it was either spin or the media collectively deciding that people understand what MS is better than CS.
How much of a politician's time is taken up by making public statements of the type this kind of legislation covers? At least for someone in power, surely only a small part.
If we can't trust politicians to tell the truth in public statements then that's the smaller problem. The bigger problem is: what are they doing the rest of the time when not in public? What kinds of decisions are they making and how are they exercising power? Being a liar and being a terrible leader goes hand in hand. This gives the impression of doing something useful when the best case scenario is that awful people can continue to exercise power, they just have to be a bit more careful what they say in public.
The real question is, how do you prevent terrible people from ending up in positions of power. But avoiding that requires changing how people come to power which nobody in power wants to do. So we get red herrings like this instead.
It makes a lot of sense to not care about a slight amount of drift. But that already exists: that's what TAI is. Why make UTC into another TAI just slightly offset? Why not just switch to TAI? Or, if the 37 second difference between UTC and TAI is the problem they can make a new TAI-minus-37.
What makes no sense is taking something useful, UTC, and redefining it out of existence. Then what time do you use if you really do care about drift? Do we invent a new UTC?
> Then what time do you use if you really do care about drift?
Nobody uses UTC because they want to know where the Sun is to the nearest second. People who actually need to care about variations in the Earth's rotation speed (e.g. astronomers) already need far fancier stuff than just UTC. People use UTC because someone else made a mistake and decided they should use UTC, like a government standard, or an operating system vendor, or whatever. Unfortunately the best way to correct all those millions of mistakes is to redefine UTC rather than convince everyone in the world to simultaneously switch to TAI.
> taking something useful, UTC, and redefining it out of existence
I question that UTC is useful. What utility does it have over TAI, outside of interoperability with other people who are using UTC? Again, anyone who actually needs to care about Earth rotation speed changes already needs to use something better than plain UTC, and my argument in my original comment is that drift that is small on a scale of a human lifetime is not an actual problem for anyone alive today or in the future.
Getting the world to switch timescales is orders of magnitude more difficult that redefining currently used timescale. The latter can be done in the BIPM backrooms by small committee, the former needs action and agreement from pretty much everyone.
I implemented a slight variation of this a while back which worked as described up to 11110xxx but then a prefix byte of 11111xxx meant a payload of 64*2^xxx bits. So 11111000 is followed by a 64-bit value, 11111001 by a 128-bit, up to 11111111 which is 8192 bits.
