nul
You’d be surprised. Especially if the testing environment is not readily available or if automated tests are not functional and comprehensive, large code changes can be the norm. A developer may habitually hang onto their code until a big chunk is complete, at which point it will take heaps of debugging to uncover where the errors are. This is why we need IaC to quickly create testing environments that closely mirror prod, and trunk-based development to ensure code changes are small and issues are caught as early as possible.
As I understand, when you’re working with an object-relational mapper (ORM), the default is to refer to persistent objects which cannot have their types changed at runtime. If an object goes through some kind of transformation, introducing new attributes, the best practice in OOP is to create a new object with those attributes so you don’t leave nullable attributes in the original object’s class definition. But this would cause the ORM to be unaware of your new object unless you create custom code to swap the references out, which is messy. In functional programming, you create a new object and DB reference by default, so no custom code is needed.
Alternately, in OOP, you could create smaller objects to contain the attributes which are expected to change through the lifetime of the controlling object, and give the outer object an attribute which refers to the smaller object. This way, the contained object may change entirely, but the owner object’s type remains static in the ORM and always has a non-nullable attribute pointing to the mutable attributes (contained in objects which are swapped out functionally). It still means you have to tell the ORM when the smaller objects are swapped out, which is still messy, but at least it standardizes the process. That’s my understanding of this issue, in any case.
If you’ve been working as a SRE since 2011, I’d say now is a good time to refresh your knowledge on Ops. A lot has changed since then in terms of best practices.
I would recommend reading the DevOps Handbook. The audiobook version is quite easy to digest. There are many case studies about DevOps transformations in this book as well, including Etsy’s—the development techniques they used are quite interesting.
DevOps has introduced a swath of methodologies for increasing the stability and maneuverability of large technology companies. Ignoring or remaining ignorant of these standards puts companies at a steep disadvantage. CI/CD and IaC techniques allow technology companies to develop stable code efficiently without accruing technical debt.
I’ve worked in places where these principles were not followed and had to take on somewhat of a SRE role myself because of how many failures we were having. DevOps practices would have saved us, had we only had the knowledge and foresight to use them throughout the organization. I highly recommend increasing your awareness of these standards, regardless of what direction you want to take with your career.
I think you’re exactly right. Social media is just the first thing we should be federating. Next should be farming, manufacturing, timber, construction, shipping, sales, and energy. If we crowdsource our solutions while using logic and algorithms to enforce quality control, we can exceed efficiency of the greedy ruling class and share profits among everyone who contributes so contributor ever faces starvation or living on the streets.
The billionaires can hoarde all the resources they want. If the masses stop contributing to their system, they will find that endless consumption is not as competitive as true justice and fairness.
I think this is a valid point, and there may indeed be a line in terms of what kind of graphic AI-gen image can or cannot be freely distributed. This should be based on evidence-supported research with the goal of reducing harmful behavior, even if our gut instinct is that banning these things outright is the best way to reduce harm. We need to follow the science.
My personal opinion is stronger when it comes to AI-generated nude images of minors in non-sexual situations. Again, any decisions we make should be evidence-based, but I suspect we will find that the prohibition of nude imagery of children makes the risks of pedophilia and sexual assault against children greater, not reduced.
Imagery of nude bodies in non-sexual situations tends to be considered as sexual because of its irregularity. In societies where nudity is normalized, nude bodies are not considered sexual in non-sexual contexts and indeed, countries with this kind of culture tend to exhibit lower levels of sexual deviancy. In America in particular, nudity is very taboo and child nudity even more so. This Puritanical belief that hiding bodies protects people from sexual urges is, I believe, misplaced. To the contrary, it tends to fetishize the nude form, especially that of minors developing secondary sexual characteristics.
This ratcheting effect of hiding child nudity more and more has led to a reality where our society as a whole cannot break free of the prohibition without putting our most vulnerable populace at severe risk. In other words, anyone attempting to photograph nude children and distribute those photographs is both committing an abusive act against those children and likely causing harmful fetishes to emerge in themselves as well as those who are on the other end of the distribution chain. Simply put, none of the adults in that situation are likely to be taking part in an effort to decrease the sexualization of minors.
Now we have AI, where as others have mentioned, images can be generated basically through guesswork, combining known information about what humans look like at various ages, using drawn images to fill in the gaps. Nude imagery of underage people can be made without anyone being harmed and without any sexualization of the image itself. People who grow up in oversexualized cultures will inevitably project their sexuality onto those images, but by having access to sufficiently realistic simulated nudity, the idea is that over time they would become desensitized. The playing field between adults and children would be leveled, hopefully making underage nude imagery no longer a thing that any significant portion of society covets.
And in an ideal situation, the next generation would grow up already having access to this kind of imagery, never developing a fetish around pubescent or prepubescent nudity in the first place. And hopefully this added comfort around nudity would serve to curb some of their overstimulation when they, as adults, fantasize about seeing the naked form. It would be more about finding a partner that suits them, not about fulfilling a desire to see the rarest most prohibited sights. And we can finally start to move beyond base objectification of women. Even if that seems virtually impossible from where we currently stand.
So, even if it touches a nerve for most of us, to be talking about this, I think we have to discuss this for our own good. We may finally have a silver bullet for a problem that’s been plaguing society for uncountable generations. And a puritanical knee-jerk reaction may be about to cause us to throw it away. Before we do so, we need to think really carefully to make sure we’re not doing it for all the wrong reasons.
Yeah, I think Buggy said it best with, “Where’s the dancing lion?” I think the show creators were very aware of what they could or could not accomplish with their budget, and Arlong seems to be the limit. Interested to see how they tackle Chopper. If they can get the requisite amount of CG to do that well without landing in the uncanny valley, the sky may very well be the limit (next stop Skypiea).
It would seem they finally got a live action adaptation right. Given Oda’s involvement, maybe that had something to do with it. The spirit of his work was definitely captured. And they covered a whole lot of ground in just 8 episodes.
Makes me wonder how many seasons we’re going to get and how they might break it up. I’m hoping for something like this:
S2: Loguetown Arc, Arabasta Saga
S3: Sky Island Saga, Water 7 Saga
S4: Thriller Bark Saga, Summit War Saga
S5: Fish-Man Island Saga, Dressrosa Saga
S6: Whole Cake Island Saga
S7: Wano Country Saga
S8: ???
It’s a pretty tight schedule and we’re unlikely to get that far, but I’m just happy it sounds like we’re getting a season two.
Agreed that it’s possible, just very very expensive to make it look good. For Chopper, I think they’ll pay up, but I’ll bet there will be a lot of devil fruit users who get cut purely because showing them on screen costs too much money for too little payoff. Which is unfortunate, but understandable.