Or, y’know, there’s a war on and you can’t stop to recharge, or you need to cross a desert, or you just want to do an express route with one vehicle…

Combustion is just a superior vehicle technology vs. lead-acid electric, assuming you don’t worry about emissions, and that will show up in plenty of contexts. Eventually, lead-acid would go the way of the other workable-but-not-as-nice technologies like crystal radios or black-and-white film.

“Thanks bro/comrade!” would be a great way to play this off diplomatically with someone you still want to be allies with, so that could be the origin of that bit.

Because it lead directly to feudalism and other forms of autocracy?

Batteries could have been standard for a bit longer, but it seems to me that eventually the need to go faster for longer would have forced combustion engines to be a thing. All they had were lead-acid batteries (or primary cells, but that would be dumb) and new more energy-dense chemistries didn’t show up for a long time after. Maybe they could have found one if they really needed, but it’s a tricky science even today, so I’m skeptical.

It’s possible, I suppose, that infrastructure could have been rolled out for both en mass, but I don’t see an even mix lasting through the whole 20th century. Probably not even past WWII.

In addition to mixing up the man and the place, I got that wrong. Fixed.

Human history, as a whole, is so depressing and meandering it’s a weird question to try and answer. Were the great empires a success, or a failure? It depends on if you’re measuring monuments built or social justice enacted, and if you’re comparing against modern polities or whatever shitty local warlord they replaced. History doesn’t really have an end goal, as much as we’d like it to.

Maybe you just meant a personal failure:

Thomas Midgley is one of my favourites, because he’s famous for three things: Inventing leaded gasoline, inventing ozone-destroying PCBs, and inventing an accessibility contraption that strangled Thomas Midgley. He did nothing else of note; he’s like the real life Bloody Stupid Johnson.

Pheidippides of Battle of Marathon fame is famous for running a long way just to deliver some news first, and then dying from exhaustion. People regularly make the same trip and are fine. He was regarded as a hero, and the races were originally in his honour, but I wouldn’t want to be him. Edit: Maybe not a great example, actually. The story names a much longer distance than a marathon, although it’s kinda mythical.

Muhammad II of Khwarazm received an envoy from Ghengis Khan, who wasn’t bent on invading at all but wanted trade, and decided to steal their shit and kick them out instead. Then he killed the people sent next to ask for a nice apology. You can guess where that went.

The Soviets once tried to sextort Indonesian quasi-communist leader Sukarno with a tape. It did not work, because he was shamelessly proud of his “virility”. In at least some tellings he misinterprets the KGB’s presentation as a gift, although I doubt he could have been that dumb.

If only I could believe a word it says. Evidence either way would have to be indirect somehow.

Producers are rich, and don’t find poor people problems sexy, but rather inconveniently guilt-inducing. When they do show poverty it has a way of being pretty theme-park, too.

I’m not a big rom-com consumer, but of course there’s probably exceptions to the rule.

I can see you’re frustrated by the downvotes and pushback you’ve received. It’s understandable to feel defensive when your viewpoint isn’t well-received. I appreciate you sharing your perspective, even if it goes against the majority opinion here.

Thanks for the kind words. FWIW I’m doing fine, this feels like a worthy fight. I know a bad appeal to authority when I see one.

Interestingly, one could argue that NASA may have used agile-like practices in the space shuttle program, even if they weren’t labeled as such at the time. However, I did a quick search and couldn’t find much concrete evidence to support this idea. It’s an intriguing area that might merit further research.

There’s somebody else in the thread talking about the Apollo missions and Agile. Uhh, here, because I don’t know if federated comment links are supported yet. There’s no source for that already provided, though.

What do you see as the pros and cons of different methodologies? Your insights could add a lot to this discussion.

Honestly no. Sorry to undercut you a bit, but I’m not going to be the Dunning-Kruger guy. I know that I don’t know project management.

Honestly, I worry that it’s conscious enough that it’s cruel to train it. How would we know? That’s a lot of parameters and they’re almost all mysterious.

I often feel like that too, but there were things like haggis and sausage before them. It’s good to remember that turning inedible mush into something appealing actually has a long and noble history.

Scientists revealed that Neanderthals cared for their disabled children out of compassion

I mean it’s the obvious guess, but compassion doesn’t leave a direct fossil record. In the paper the thing they emphasise is that it was an obviously permanent disability, so there couldn’t have been a practical survival motivation.

Also, yeah, not good writing.

If so, it’s still probably deliberate, because corporate knows full well a bigger box would work too. Eshittification is coming for our nuggies.

I was using the term pretty loosely there. It’s not psychopathic in the medical sense because it’s not human.

As I see it it’s an alien semi-intelligence with no interest in pretty much any human construct, except as it can help it predict the next token. So, no empathy or guilt, but that’s not unusual or surprising.

Campbell’s law goes brrrrr.

I mean, the Luddites were right, mechanical looms were bad for them personally.

Treat it like a psychopathic boiler plate.

That’s a perfect description, actually. People debate how smart it is - and I’m in the “plenty” camp - but it is psychopathic. It doesn’t care about truth, morality or basic sanity; it craves only to generate standard, human-looking text. Because that’s all it was trained for.

Nobody really knows how to train it to care about the things we do, even approximately. If somebody makes GAI soon, it will be by solving that problem.

Still, you get there in two-thirds of the time. I’ll leave it to people with the budget for CoPilot to say if it feels like less work.

Yep. They’re probably better than anyone at making a complex system with literal moving parts that works 100% of the time, the first time. On a nearly unlimited budget, with a decades-long schedule. In an institution and culture that’s now a been around a lifetime, staffed with top-notch people.

That’s all perfect for what NASA does, but I wouldn’t recommend a management system that NASA uses to just anyone, just 'cause “da astronauts” use it. Not any more than I’d recommend drinking your own distilled piss to anyone.

I don’t really have an opinion on Agile, even, I just have a problem with selling it this way.

See, the thing with that is it’s just really aspirational. Anything could be Agile if you do it in the right spirit, if the manifesto is the whole thing.

Edit: I suppose what I should have asked is: “Is Agile really a system, or just a philosophy?”