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Programming in the Apocalypse

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Re: Programming in the Apocalypse

#261

Post by kaba0 »

coryrc wrote: post #151
madrox wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a fallacy here in that "because covid's impact wasn't great, covid wasn't that bad." Any time we have to mobilize a lot of effort to head off the worst outcome, there's a tendency to say "well nothing really bad happened, so why did we go through all that effort?" Let's not trivialize the global effort necessary to bring us to 1/10th the death toll. It absolutely could've been worse. It's our response…

> there's a tendency to say "well nothing really bad happened, so why did we go through all that effort? Basically a third of our country didn't go through that effort and the country is mostly still chugging along. Were it much deadlier, things would not have turned out okay.

The more deadlier a virus, the rest likely it is to spread. Let’s take ebola as an example which was very feared due to it being quite deadly, yet a flu-like virus managed to infect many orders of magnitude more people.

Re: Programming in the Apocalypse

#262

Post by flaghacker »

capableweb wrote: post #92
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could not imagine running rustc on a Rust program, let alone building a 200-crate dependency graph or all of rustc, on a 2000s car entertainment system microcontroller.

What you are programming would change, just like what you're programming with would change. The projects who use 200-something crates are building desktop applications or something like that. What we'd program if we only have microcontrollers available, would be much smaller in scope, maybe a lot of focus on controlling physical infrastructure for agriculture and such.

They're talking about the fact that recompiling the rustc compiler itself is very complex and resource intentisive.

That may not actually be a problem though, since the current compiler executable is already good enough for almost any project.

Re: Programming in the Apocalypse

#263

Post by ClumsyPilot »

astrange wrote: post #260
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment section is full of clueless numpties that do not understand what 4 degrees REALLY means, and think it won't lead to collapse. When the world was 4 degrees COLDER Chicago was under 900 meters of ice. Toronto was under two Kilometers of ice. Do you think that would cause collapse of civilisation? How are you going to adapt to a glacier covering all the farmland? No technolgy, not even nuclear bombs, can rem…

We are not headed for 4C, the median prediction is between 1.5 and 2C.

We have missed every single target that we'd need to hit to limit the warming to 2C.

We have 28 years left and emissins are still increasing. We have to reduce emissions by like 40% per decade, which is not happenning at present.

We have to replace every car on the road, which takes 20 years. That means in 8 years every new car has to be electric, and that's not happening either.

Re: Programming in the Apocalypse

#264

Post by cellis »

jrumbut wrote: post #246
madrox wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I'm low confidence on pay is because I think there will be even more disparity among programmer salaries and the median will be far lower. Will it be possible to make a million a year as an engineer in 30 years (forget inflation for a moment)? Sure. However, I think there will be a lot more engineers making five figures. We're lowering the bar to do simple work all the time. Much like the other professions…

I would agree though for a different reason. If society has to rebuild/replace infrastructure destroyed by more hurricanes, raise ports above new sea levels or build new ports, upgrade the power grid, food takes more resources to grow, etc, all using materials that are being desperately sought by every other nation on earth that's going to take every penny we can find anywhere and that means most salaries will be squ…

Software is going to be needed to control many many more automated systems especially as we age and don’t have replacement birthrates. So the demand, and therefore the pay, for highly skilled technical professions will only increase.

Re: Programming in the Apocalypse

#265

Post by TomSwirly »

kaba0 wrote: post #261
coryrc wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's a tendency to say "well nothing really bad happened, so why did we go through all that effort? Basically a third of our country didn't go through that effort and the country is mostly still chugging along. Were it much deadlier, things would not have turned out okay.

The more deadlier a virus, the rest likely it is to spread. Let’s take ebola as an example which was very feared due to it being quite deadly, yet a flu-like virus managed to infect many orders of magnitude more people.

> The more deadlier a virus, the rest likely it is to spread.

Not really. The two primary factors controlling how fast a disease spreads is the infectiousness (R0 or other similar measures), and how long victims are infectious before they display symptoms.

The deadliness, the victim living or dying, happens significantly after they've finished their role as spreader of disease and thus does not significantly affect the spread.

Ebola fails to spread, not because it's deadly, but because the symptoms are almost immediate and dramatic.

(I took graduate level course in the mathematics of epidemiology and got an A, which makes me no expert at all, but this is fairly fundamental.)

Re: Programming in the Apocalypse

#266

Post by kaba0 »

lelanthran wrote: post #174
wiredearp wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This guy Mark Lynas studied the models and wrote a book about it, but then he wrote it again based on newer models, so make sure to find the latest one called "Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency" for a grizzly drilldown into the centigrades towards extinction. Few models deal with warming beyond three degress, in itself a point of some consideration, but the references are all there and here's the sy…

Actually I was kinda hoping for just a model or some peer reviewed conclusions. I'm just not in the mood to devote a lot of time to what sounds (to me) like hyperbole: If the earth stabilised at +8 degrees celcius I find it hard to understand why the entire earth becomes literally uninhabitable.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/cloud-loss-could-add-8-degree...

Here is a well-written article (shared by another HNer here) on one plausible run-away event. But the same way as upon exerting more and more force to a branch it will first have linear changes going on, there will come a point where it will break.

Some possible runaway events include the aforementioned loss of clouds which in turn won’t reflect back that much sunlight (which currently can account for 30-70% of sun light not hitting the ocean water), melting ice will free lots of trapped CO2, changing climates may alter currents and winds causing very large-scale changes to certain areas (and might also affect cloud formation), etc. We are in a big, closed jar and that 8C change may not be a problem locally, it is that much more heat trapped globally.

But one should add that life is unlikely to die out in even the worst predictions (life, finds a way), but you still don’t want to find yourself in the situation where you will have to literally hunt down other humans because they may have food, or try to migrate with 100s of millions of other agitated, hungry people to nations which won’t be friendly to you because they themselves have enough problems to begin with.

Re: Programming in the Apocalypse

#267

Post by belter »

madrox wrote: post #124
coldtea wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Covid looked nothing like a pandemic film, thank god. That's probably because it was not that great impact wise. If it was more like the Spanish Flu, with a huge death toll across all ages (as opposed to 1/10th the death toll, and mostly focused on older people and co-morbidities) it would have absolutely have looked like "a pandemic film".

I think there's a fallacy here in that "because covid's impact wasn't great, covid wasn't that bad." Any time we have to mobilize a lot of effort to head off the worst outcome, there's a tendency to say "well nothing really bad happened, so why did we go through all that effort?" Let's not trivialize the global effort necessary to bring us to 1/10th the death toll. It absolutely could've been worse. It's our response…

Let's also not take too much of a Western perspective, as only 16.2% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose.

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

Re: Programming in the Apocalypse

#268

Post by actually_a_dog »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #204
actually_a_dog wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we lost all the insects in a ~100 year period, the result would be close enough to losing "all life on earth" for anyone who doesn't have a microscope (or, more likely, a telescope). This is not an exaggeration in any sense of the word.

You are not wrong, but isn't the insect-apocalypse distrinct from climate change? Insects aren't dying from CO2 emissions, different policies are needed to address them.

It’s a combination of climate change and loss of habitat from expanding agriculture.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/insects-are-dying...

Re: Programming in the Apocalypse

#269

Post by soco »

Vecr wrote: post #242
imwillofficial wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it shows they don’t believe it. Obama’s recently purchased beachfront property is a testament to this.

Massive sea level rise is a meme, no way it's going over a few feet until Obama is long dead.

A few feet meme rise is gonna drown a lot of things, many Pacific island states, New Orleans or half the Netherlands, to name a few.

Re: Programming in the Apocalypse

#270

Post by fractallyte »

astrange wrote: post #258
erddfre3423 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defeating aging sounds like a horrible idea as long as we aren't able to conquer space. The planet is badly overpopulated already as it is.

The world is nowhere near overpopulated, most countries are going to see population crashes if anything. “Overpopulation” is a meme from the 60s coming from a book (Population Bomb) that was disproved the instant it was published. It is, however, a big reason for single family zoning in California - they literally thought it would encourage people to stop moving there and having kids.

Overpopulation - a number - is the wrong metric. Instead, we should be looking at the mix of factors (which include overpopulation) that cause the destruction of ecosystems, all the way up to climate change. So that would include: mono-agriculture ('monoculture'), technology powered by fossil fuels (such as logging machines, strip mining machines, etc.), and global transport networks (which hugely enable demand to outstrip supply).

More complicated, but more accurate - and humanity is way past that threshold, even with population crashes.

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