jwestbury
It can, given sufficient inputs in terms of desired outcomes.
Of course, desired outcomes are where subjectivity enters into things. :)
As a result, GDPR is pretty well followed. As an American living in Europe, I have to use a VPN to access many of my American financial institutions, because they don't think the GDPR risk is worth it and have chosen to simply block access from Europe.
(That said, three months is better than any longer period. The shorter the rotation, the lower the risk -- but, more importantly, the stronger the impetus to build strong automation around the process.)
In a similar vein, you should never generate resources which will expire unless some undocumented action is taken. A common one I've seen is self-signed certs which last for n days, and are re-generated whenever an application is deployed or restarted, under the assumption that the application will never run untouched longer than that. (Spoiler: It probably will, at some point, whether due to unexpected change freezes, going into maintenance mode, or -- in my personal favourite -- being deployed to an environment that just isn't updated as regularly.)
I've worked at -- including Microsoft -- three major tech companies and a quant hedge fund, and Microsoft's engineering practices -- at least within the Office org, where I worked -- are appalling by almost any measure, in comparison with their competitors. Their success is largely down to three things, IMO:
1. First-/early-mover advantage in many spaces.
2. Excellent business management.
3. Some very, very strong engineers at the principal level and higher.
"Marketing" gets kind of murky at the edges, really. Consider Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle, who are famous for their fish-throwing, but have never actually spent anything on advertising -- are they marketing or not?
And, of course, King of the Hill skewered the idea by having Bobby get addicted to cigarettes when Hank used this punishment.
This is actually something which is borne out by research, though in a slightly different context. Niro Sivanathan at the LBS has studied how arguments are presented, and essentially, recipients of arguments engage in an averaging function instead of an additive function, when evaluating strength -- adding one weaker point to a pair of very strong points actually detracts from the perceived strength of an argument.
It would not be at all surprising if we did the same sort of thing in different contexts, such as the example you gave here.
By definition, every new source has never sent spam -- but it's reasonable to assume that an unknown source is likely spam, however unfortunate that may be.
I assume this has an implicit "in the USA"? Trying this in Europe would be an awfully bad idea -- GDPR has teeth, unlike most American consumer protection regulations.
Having originally gotten my license in the US -- in what is apparently the hardest state to get a license in (WA) -- and now in the UK, I can say emphatically that US driver education is severely lacking.
Ruby is heavily influenced by Perl, with a focus on being enjoyable to write. And let me be clear: I loved writing Perl, back in the day. If I still used Perl, I'd still love writing it. But part of why Perl is so fun -- and why Ruby is fun! -- is that it's expressive and flexible, and you can do a lot of things you really shouldn't. This leads to people writing code that was fun to write, but will be difficult to maintain -- and the language's foundation rests on this concept, so the culture is (subtly?) encouraged to embrace it.
The problem with maintaining Ruby is that Ruby is heavily influenced by Perl.
And, in fact, I'd say that most students in the humanities -- i.e., those who generally study and care about history -- tend to view the past through the lens of the present, which often leads to negative perceptions even of reformers and progressives of their time. I recall several instances in my own classes -- now nearly 20 years ago, sigh -- when students criticised medieval writers for their racist/sexist/etc. views, even when the writers were notably forward-thinking. Chaucer, in particular, skewed the institutions of the time, and portrayed female characters of remarkable agency, but is often criticised by those who don't consider the context in which he lived. You can see this today with the founding fathers of the US, too -- wholesale castigation of slave owners, even those who were more modern in their thinking than the average politician of the time.
What I think the author of the linked article really misunderstands is that our own mores and inclinations are not those of the past, nor are they those of the future. The people of early modern Europe looked down on the middle ages and viewed ancient Greece and Rome as Platonic ideals (pun somewhat intended), which is a view the author would probably disagree with, given the fact that most of Rome's history was, in fact, anti-democratic, and that Greece's "democracy" was far less egalitarian than even early America's.
Perhaps future generations will see us as enlightened. You never know.
Further, while the US is seeing major shortages of mental health care providers, most European countries are even worse off, in large part because there's no class of master's-degree-holding therapists -- you either get a doctoral-level degree, or you just attend some basic courses and call yourself a therapist with no licensing or regulatory bodies governing your practice.
I'd actually argue that the US's system is better than most other western nations' mental health care systems -- which is not a statement in favour of the US, but an indictment of other nations' approaches.
(Source for my data and opinions here: I'm an American immigrant to the UK, and my wife has a master's degree in clinical mental health counselling - she only practised for about a year before she quit because the system is so broken in the US.)
It's an endless loop, I think. I've observed a very different behaviour in other parts of the world, where companies which either migrated away from the cloud already, or companies which never moved to the cloud to begin with, are now moving things into the cloud and other managed services in order to better focus on their core competencies.
Dropbox, for instance, shifted everything out of AWS in 2014 -- but are now moving a lot of their corporate infra back into AWS in order to focus on effective and efficient storage, which is what they're good at, without having to build everything else themselves. Likewise hedge funds - if you look at job postings for a lot of systematic trading firms (e.g. Jane Street, HRT, 2Sigma, etc.), you'll find loads of them are hiring extensively for people with cloud experience, because there's been a sort of wake-up moment where companies are breaking free of the idea that everyone can be Google, and realising that you can't build everything in-house if you only have 1000 employees.
So, interesting to hear of a move in the opposite direction in Denmark. I'm sure that ten years down the line, a new generation of engineers will be coming in and asking, "Why in the world are we managing all of this infrastructure on our own?"
Why not? This is such a cynical take, and I don't think it goes without saying that it's true. Unless you believe that organisations are organisms with an express evolutionary goal to seek profit at all cost, at least. But I think many non-profits and other companies which act in the interest of something other than profit-maximisation make it quite clear that this isn't the case.
(And, no, companies are not obligated to maximise profits. It's quite well-established that this is a myth.)
Anyway, point is, I was probably in the top ~1000 Counter-Strike players in North America in the early to mid aughts. But the gap between CAL-M and CAL-I was just ridiculous -- we're talking about the gap between a college sports team and a pro team. The average CAL-M team wouldn't win a single match in a CAL-I season.
So, yeah - the gap is increasingly large the closer you get to the top of a given pursuit.
0. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2023/02/16/microsoft-...
(Caveat that the following is US-centric.) I'd love to see the data showing actual price gouging, because the data I've seen has generally suggested that per-student spending hasn't even increased at a pace equivalent to inflation; rather, funding didn't increase with enrolment, leading to students paying for an ever-higher share of their education.
(As for private universities... fine, I'm okay calling it price gouging.)
But I'd like to talk for a moment about why I think the humanities are important, especially in the context of my own career, because I think the reason I've been successful is often a result -- direct or indirect is perhaps unclear -- of the particular education I received. I was, in fact, a math nerd growing up. I did math competitions. I was two years advanced in school, and by seventh grade I had to go to a different school every morning to go get my math education at high school.
After I was a math nerd -- because, to be honest, I finally had to think about it sometime around calculus, and I didn't really enjoy it once it stopped being pure intuition -- I was just a normal nerd. I played a lot of computer games and went to LAN parties, and I learned about building computers, maintaining a network, and troubleshooting. And I decided pure math wasn't for me, but maybe computer science was. So, I started studying that. I was in a dual-enrollment program with a local college when I was in high school, and I did the first-year sequence of CS when I was 16.
I got bored, though. I didn't want to do my homework. So I decided to go find another major, and did the classic thing where I wandered through various majors trying to find a fit. Eventually, having considered history, oceanography, journalism, and philosophy, I landed on English lit. I liked the critical theory aspects -- it felt like applied philosophy, I suppose.
There's some useful context here: I was an absolute dick. I was always right. I felt like I was better than everyone else. I had done well in math competitions; even though I'd quit studying it, my computer science professors were using the work I'd turned in weeks ahead as examples in class; I felt like I was better than my peers.
My humanities education brought a lot of nuance to what was, before then, a very black-and-white reality for me. I learned a lot about the importance of communication, about how our backgrounds can lead to different interpretations of the same material, and about how to deal with challenging, uncomfortable subjects -- not just intellectually challenging topics, but emotionally challenging topics.
The funny thing is that, in the end, I landed in tech, where I've now been for over a decade. I made my way up to senior engineer, and it was largely on the strength of my communication skills, not my technical skills; the latter were necessary but not sufficient. And I think I have a lot of potential growth left -- growth which will be enabled by soft skills, not hard skills, because the more senior you become, the more the balance shifts toward soft skills.
My point here is that studying in the humanities made me a productive member of society.