This is the American version of Kremlinology: just like then all manner of non-political actions of members of the Soviet elites were studied to try to predict the direction of the Soviet Union, now all manner of non-political actions of members of the American elites are studied to try to predict the direction of the United States.

The reason for that kind of thing is that in systems were almost all of the real thinking, motivations and even politically revelevant actions of the elites controlling those nations are hidden or disguised, the only way to try and deduce what’s going on is to look at those things which by need or because they’re deemed to unimportant aren’t hidden or disguised.

Peter Tiel’s bulk stock sales and purchases are one of such non-political data points that might be important in predicting the short- and mid-term future of the US, at least Economically, which in turn has Political implications and more broadly for the future of American and Americans.

Sadly what American elites do in the Stockmarkets tells us a lot more about were they see the country going to than what they say, which itself already tells us way more than what Politicians say.

Well, what’s already happening is circular self-contained greed “economies” were money (not actual wealth just value-tokens such as money but also assets which have valuations expressed in said value-tokens, from crypto coins to realestate and stocks) is made from merely money being passed around whilst no actual value is created (in fact, value is mainly destroyed as those things are consuming actual resources to produce no real value at all, only boost the count of value-tokens)

This is destroying the capability of currently accepted value-tokens to actual represent an underlying utility value.

In other words, thing like stocks but also things like currency are decoupling from the underlying value they used to represent:

• Stocks were a share of ownership in a structure - the company - that created things, either directly - manufacturing, extraction - or indirectly by increasing the efficiency of direct value creation - i.e. services that indirectly made manufacturing or extraction more efficient or helped in distributing the products of those - whilst nowadays the most “valuable” by market capitalization of stocks have almost purely speculative valuations or are for companies in rent-seeking activities which don’t create value but merely take a share of the value created by others.
• Currency used to be (and still is to a large extent) value tokens which were a claim on the value produced by the Economy. What we’re seeing is that as more of those value tokens are created in those circular “economies” each token can claim less and less quyantities of the traditional underlying value things - just notice food inflation. Also rent-seeking activities (such as realestate investment) have even faster devalued how much each value-token can claim. Whilst official Inflation numbers don’t tell us this story (there is a strong motivation for politicians to have Officially recognized Inflation be lower than reality, because Mathematically that makes GDP seem larger), most people are actually feeling the real Inflation, especially in the most ancient and required concrete assets: Food and Housing.

I expect that something is going to break, though I don’t know when and exactly how it’s going to materialized (though the way the ultra-wealthy are trying to transform the powers they captured from Democratic to Autocratic, leads me to believe that they’re preparing for a break in the functioning of the current value-tokens by having a more direct control over just about everything than indirectly by merelly holding lots of value-tokens).

The societal consequences of the value-representation structures we have (literally, of thing like money, stocks and even certificates of ownership) unwinding would be huge.

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Maybe the really unusual thing which made it worth mentioning the “man named Kim” in that group is that out of 200 Koreans there was only one man named Kim?

I personally know a person who was charged and convicted of the Crime of Libel (in what for my country was an incredibly speedy legal process) for accusing a local politician of Corruption.

Curiously, about a decade later said politician was convicted for Corruption. Lets just say it only happened because that Libel conviction really pissed of that person who had time, brains and no fear of their professional life being affected, so they worked tirelessly behind the curtains to push an earlier report into “irregularities” in his City Hall all the way into and as a case against him, including digging evidence even from abroad and having to threaten with exposure in the Press at least 3 public prosecutors who on different occasions were quietly holding the case so that it didn’t get to court before the deadlines for prosecution expired (and even then that politician actually got away with a number of crimes because the deadlines for prosecution did expired for those). In fact that was the first politician ever in my country convicted of Corruption.

Libel having been made a Crime in my country (which is quite unusual in the World) was done exactly so that people can be punished for openly accusing the powerful of malfeasance without the powerful having to bare the costs for a civil court case and actually prove damages (so it mainly helps politicians in the big parties who have the connections to get the local Public Prosecutions Office to take the case to court) and that’s exactly how it has been used.

By an amazing coincidence my country is one of the most corrupt countries in Europe and last I checked was the one most behind in implementing the EU advised anti-Corruption measures.

Well, for merely commissioners that moved from the commission to those positions, the first example that comes to my mind is the head of the EU Commission during the 2008 Crash and it’s aftermath, who went to Goldman Sachs afterwards and is still there today as a non-executive president.

During his time in the Commission they were very pro-Finance in the way they handled the aftermath of the Crash with him personally pushing frequently for measures were EU money was used to unconditionally helped the interests of large Financial Industry companies, and Goldman Sachs is one of the largest companies and massively benefited from, amongst other things, near-defaulting Greek Treasuries being bought from the private sector by the EU, which subsequently forced the Greeks into Austerity to as much as possible pay those Treasuries.

There’s even a scandal with him were, whilst working at Goldman Sachs, he broke the EU rules on lobbying by using his access card to EU buildings - which he was entitled to have as an ex-Head of the Commission - to simply enter into those buildings and waltz over to the offices of sitting EU officials to lobby for Goldman Sachs. The EU ended up revoking his access privileges, the first and only time that has happened for an ex-EU Commissioner.

Legally there are no Corrupt EU Commissioners. To be deemed Corrupt there would have to be actual evidence of Corruption (such as recordings of meetings were they explicitly promised to use their power in a certain way, in exchange for some form of payment, which normally only the Police has powers to obtain), them being subsequently charged and a Court Of Law convicting them for the crime of Corruption.

None of them was ever just investigated for Corruption, much less convicted so pointing fingers at any one of the them explicitly and saying that they’re Corrupt would be Libel, which in my country (which by the way, is pretty Corrupt, with actual ex-government members convicted of Corruption) is an actual Crime prosecuted by the local Prosecution Office, not merely a civil lawsuit for damages.

So if I was to name names, I would be putting my head of the block for the Crime of Libel. Obviously I’m not going to do that.

What there is are various coincidences of EU Commissioners which acted in very positive ways towards certain industries and then after leaving the Commission went to work for those Industries making a lot of money, even thought they had no background in them (never before had worked in said Industries, no Educational training for said Industries).

Since the police never investigates it, all there are are such coincidences of commissioners ending up in gold plated gigs in the industries they helped whilst they were commissioners.

I’m not going to put my head of the nose for you by naming names (I’m not a Legal expert so don’t want to risk committing the Crime of Libel by doing so). I suggest you start by looking into were the EU commissioners during the 2008 Crash (during which the commission was very pro-Finance) ended up working afterwards.

That’s because Fascism is the natural end state of unfettered Capitalism as monopolies and cartels form naturally under it over time for most things and capital (which in Capitalism is Power) increasingly concentration, thus Corruption in Politics explodes which in turn accelerates monopoly and cartel formation and thus capital concentration in a vicious cycle.

However homophobia is not an inherent problem of Capitalism, it’s an inherent problem of what Capitalism innevitably leads to if it’s not stopped.

(All of this IMHO).

I’m sure he’s happy to fuck all Apple customers for money if he thinks he can get away with it, which strictly speaking would make him Pansexual.

True.

That is however a pretty hard and time consuming change, so to me it makes sense that in the meanwhile we take steps to reduce the harm caused by the system still in place, not least by cracking down hard on Corruption and Conflicts Of Interest and closing the legal loopholes that allow certain politicians to stay within the Law whilst purposefully using today the power they have been delegated to do favors for others who have promised them monetary payback for it tomorrow.

If you’re drowning now you don’t put all your hopes on the ship that might be coming but isn’t even visible yet.

Sounds like the problem is lack of enforcement of the existing laws rather than the existing laws being bad.

To provide an extreme example, just because there’s a wave of murders doesn’t mean murder should be made legal.

I believe the EU Parliament has to approve this so they can block it, and that’s elected by Proportional Vote and we all have MEPs there who, unlike national parliamentarians in countries without Proportional Vote (which are most of them) have to worry more about the public opinion in their nation turning against them.

So if this shit ever makes its way to the EU Parliament (were the EU Commission will try to make it pass quietly), contact your country’s MEPs and show you’re well aware of it.

Whilst I do not agree with the spirit of the message of the previous poster, I must point out that specifically the EU Comission - from were this came - is not elected but nominated, and the nomination is one big horse trading shit show several levels removed from voters, were everybody but the head of it is chosen by the Council Of Ministers (which only represents EU National Governments , not National Parliaments) so the whole thing is maybe slightly more “democratic” than nominations for the Chinese Politburo.

(If there is one thing that needs changing in the EU political structures, it’s the crooked, rotten shit show that’s the EU Commission).

That said, the EU Parliament which can stop most of this shit, is elected and it’s even via Proportional Vote so there is no mathematical rigging at all to make some votes count more than others (unlike in First Past The Post Power Duopoly countries like the US or Britain) and hence voting in the EU Election does matter.

Looks like somebody has been promised by one or more large Tech firms a very highly paid non-executive board membership, millionaire speech circuit engagement or gold plated “consulting” gig when their time in the Commission is over…

Mind you, by now that kind of exchange of “favours” is tradition for the members of the EU Commission.

TL;DR

QLC drives have fewer write-cycles than TLC and if their data is not refreshed periodically (which their controllers will automatically do when powered) the data in them gets corrupted faster.

In other words, under heavy write usage they will last less time and at the other end when used for long term storage of data, they need to be powered much more frequently merelly to refresh the stored states (by reading and writting back the data).

So moving to QLC in cloud application comes with mid and long terms costs in terms of power usage and, more importantly, drive end-of-life and replacement.

–

Quad Level Cell SSD technology stores 4 bits per cell - hence 16 levels - whilst TLC (Triple Level Cell) stores 3 bits - hence 8 levels - so the voltage difference between levels is half as much, and so is the margin between levels.

Everything deep down is analog, so the digital circuitry actually stores analog values on the cells at then reads them back and converts them to digital. When reading that analog value, the digital circuit has to decide to which digital value that analog value actual maps to, which it does by basically accepting any analog value within a certain range aroun the mathematically perfect value for that digital state.

(A simple example: in a 3.3V data line, when the I/O pin of a microcontroller reads the voltage it will decide for example that anything below 1.2V is a digital LOW (i.e. a zero), anything above 2.1V is a HIGH (a one) and anything in between is an erroneous value - i.e. no signal or a corrupted signal - this by the way is why if you make the line between a sender and a receiver digital chip too long, many meters, or change the signals in them too fast, hundreds of MHz+, without any special techniques to preserve signal integrity, the receiver will mainly read garbage)

So the more digital levels in a single cell the narrower the margin, the more likely that due to the natural decay over time of the stored signal or due cell damage from repeat writes, the analog value the digital circuitry reads from it be too far away from the stored digital level and be at best marked as erroneous or at worse be at a different level and thus yield a different digital value.

All this to say that QLC has less endurance (i.e. after fewer writes the damage to the cells from use causes that what is read is not the same value as what was written) and it also has less retention (i.e. if the cell is not powered, the signal decay will more quickly cause stored values to end up at a different level than when written).

Now, whilst for powered systems the retention problem is not much of an issue for cloud storage (when powered, the system automatically goes through each cell, reading its value and writting it back to refresh what’s stored there back to the mathematically perfect analog value) with just a slightly higher consumption over time for data that’s mainly read only (for flash memory, writting uses way more power than reading), the endurance problem is much worse for QLC because the cells will age twice as fast over TLC for data that is frequently written (wear-leveling exists to spreads this effect over all cells thus giving higher overall endurance, but wear-leveling is also in there for TLC so it does not improve the endurance of QLC).

Cambridge Analitica was mainly funded by wealthy Americans.

Not state sponsored, but the elites of that nation are certainly an enemy of Britain, Brits and even the rest of Europe and Europeans.

PS: As a side note, who could forget Steve Bannon coming to Europe with money from amongst others the Koch brothers, stating very openly it was to “fund the Far-Right in Europe”. Notice how the Far-Right did in fact grow in the following years.

Most people don’t actually know what they need until the see it, and the only ones who might are those who already have a process in place (hence know it in detail) and just want it or parts of it automated.

People often do think they know what they want, but it’s a very general and fuzzy view, with little in the way of details and which seldom considers what should happen outside the most thread path of their process (i.e. things like error situations such as “what if somebody enters the wrong data in this form” or after the fact responsibility tracing in the form of usage logs and reports).

It is actually a bit of an art to tease the details of the requirement from the stakeholders in a consistent and thorough way and also spot and get requirements for those “outside the main process path” elements and, frankly, in my career I’ve met very few people - even amongst business analysts - who are actually good at it.

That said, what maybe the main advantage of Agile when done properly (with proper use cases and the actual end users trying the implementation of those requirements out) is exactly that it’s an interactive process to refine the requirements by cycling back and forth between requirements gathering, feature development and result evaluation to fill in missing details and tease out further requirements. IMHO, this is actually were Agile shines the most when compared to Waterfall, but as I said you need to do the requirements gathering and results evaluation parts of Agile (so the parts involving interacting with actual users bot upfront in making use cases and at the end of the cycle in evaluating the fitness for what they need of what was implemented) to get those gains, and most “Agile” teams out there seem to only do the fashionable parts of Agile like the “standup meeting” which aren’t what makes it most valuable as a process.

Well, seniority helps on the deadlines front: you can spot managers trying to force too short deadlines on you a mile away and throw it back at them (“I’m am the specialist, so I’m the one who knows best how long it will take”) and if they just try and impose deadlines you can bluntly state “that isn’t possible” and if they somehow have the authority to push them you make sure everybody (especially other managers, ideally the managers above them) knows that you’ve informed them upfront that such deadlines were impossible so when it inevitably fails, said manager can’t shove the blame your way.

As for obtaining things from other teams, that’s a two part thing:

• First make it painfully obvious in your estimates that a dependency on something from an outside teams exists. When inquired about progress, constantly point out that it will only happen “if that team provides us what we need to progress”. Keep reminding people that those deliverables are a conditional for yours - “they’re late our project is late”.
• Second, start pushing them for delivering to you what you need well before you need it. It’s there, in your planning, so you know you need it and have some idea of when. The bigger the project the earlier you start pestering them. Persist on asking them for it, escalate to upper management if no movement is visible on their side. Make sure the groundwork is set so that if they’re late they get the blame on project deadlines being missed. It depends on the country culture but generally most people aren’t really impeccable professionals at time and priority management (and yeah, that includes managers) and tend to prioritize addressing “what’s burning harder” in their pile, hence why you need to start pestering them early, do it often and with more urgency the closer it gets to the point you need it (to make sure it’s perceive as an urgent need and rises to the top of their priority pile) and make sure the groundwork is set for them to be blame if your own deadline is missed because they were late and, more importantly, that THEY know they will get the blame (this generally at mid/upper manager level), so that from their point of view it’s “burning” (i.e. they’ll suffer if that doesn’t get picked up on time)

Of course, all this requires competent management since they’re the ones supposed to do it and if your managers are trying to impose deadlines on you or using slimy trickery to get people to commit to shorter deadlines, they’re NOT competent managers - that kind of shit invariably yields death marches and bug-riddled results that in the mid and long term end up wasting far more time that it was shave by those shorter deadlines.

Kinda sad that one has to play such games. Welcome to Mankind.

I would describe it as “insufficiently thinking about and researching the problems space”.

From what I’ve seen that’s very common because developers have a tendency to want to be hands-on rather than merely researching, myself include.

Even for the sake of figuring out inconsistent requirements or even just big gaps in the requirements, it’s a good idea to really think about it and cross check things.

Personally, the more I advanced in my career and the more complex and larger problems I had to tackle, the bigger the fraction of preparation time vs the fraction of coding time and I believe most very senior devs have the same experience.

I think you’re confusing doing analysis before coding with doing all analysis before coding.

If you do Agile properly (so including Use Cases with user prioritization and User feedback - so the whole system, not just doing the fashionable bits like stand up meetings and then claiming “we do Agile development”) you do analysis before development as part of evaluating how long it will take to implement the requirements contained in each Use Case. In fact this part of Agile actually pushes people to properly think through the problem - i.e. do the fucking analysis - before they start coding, just in bit-sized easy to endure blocks.

Further, in determining which Use Cases depend on which Use Cases you’re doing a form of overall, system-level analysis.

Also you definitelly need some level of overall upfront analysis no matter what: have a go at developing a mission critical high performance system on top of a gigantic dataset by taking a purist “we only look at uses cases individually and ignore the system-level overview” approach (thus, ignoring the general project technical needs that are derived from the size of the data, data integrity and performance requirements) and let me know how well it goes when half way down the project you figure out your system architecture of a single application instance with a database that can’t handle distributed transactions can’t actually deliver on those requirements.

You can refactor code and low level design in a reasonable amount of time, but refactoring system level design is a whole different story.

Of course, in my experience only a handful of shops out there do proper Agile for large projects: most just do the kiddie version - follow the herd by doing famous “agile practices” without actually understanding the process, how it all fits in it and which business and development environments is it appropriate to use in and which it is not.

I could write a fucking treatise about people thinking they’re “doing Agile” whilst in fact they’re just doing a Theatre Of Agile were all they do is play at it by acting the most famous bits.