> A feature like WebBiDi has nothing to do with the CSS engine team.
This example is almost true, but not entirely. For example the getBoxQuads API was something that testing tools wanted, which led to it being standardised [1]
More generally there can be surprising dependencies between features when it comes to implementation (e.g. both DOM and layout features might depend on accessibility work).
So from an implementer point of view, trying to encode the team that would do the work into the ranking tool is harder than it might sound.
One can imagine providing categories of features to help people find things that they're interested in. The counter argument is that people might just filter down to the kind of proposals they think they want, and end up missing things that were more important but got put in a different category.
In the end this simple approach proved helpful to us (Mozilla) last year, so we decided to do more or less the same again.
I don't really know anyone serious who thinks that ecological systems have a single stable equilibrium state.
Indeed, even the trivial systems you learn about at school, like predator-prey relationships are dynamic equilibria rather than static ones. Experiments clearly demonstrate trophic cascades can shift ecological systems from one meta-stable state to another (e.g. remove crabs from a rockpool, and the herbivore population explodes until it runs out of seaweed, at which point it crashes).
Evolution is obviously a progression between many quasi-stable states.
I think a stronger claim is that _economics_ doesn't recognise this; local incentives and the price feedback structure aren't enough to avoid pushing natural systems out of their current quasi-equilibria state into degraded states that are long-term also poorer for humans (e.g. collapsing fish populations). This is also pretty broadly understood, and why market interventions like fishing quotas exist. But in the conflict between "extract more more now" and "long term health of the ecosystem", "extract more now" is the economic default and "long term health" requires special pleading, so unsurprisingly the former tends to win.
I tried asking this before on here, and didn't really get many useful replies (and I guess I won't again now the algorithm has decided this post has too many comments and not enough upvotes, or whatever it is that's caused it to sink off the front page), but I'm honestly interested in what people here with (school age) children are telling their kids about the future, and what that looks like in terms of decisions around education, careers etc.
This isn't because I think that having children gives people any extra insights, but because it's pretty hard to think of other situations in which people have to plan for the happiness of others they care about over a timescale of decades and where there's significantly more ability to change course than for many adults (kids tend not to have short-term financial commitments that lock them into existing career decisions, for example).
Historically I think a lot of people in tech would have recommended it as a good career (whilst at the same time, reputedly, the people who made generational wealth out of tech were arranging their children's lives to minimise exposure to the products that made them rich). Is that still what people are saying?
This is something I've been thinking about for a while, as I have two high schoolers, both with a knack for programming, and at least one of them wants to get into software.
A lot of my comments get responses that assume I'm an "AI booster" but what I really am is someone highly motivated to understand the capabilities and limits of this technology, because it is already very directly impacting the future of my kids.
What I tell my kids is a function of what I believe the future holds: nobody will be doing low-level cognitive work anymore, it will all be done by AI, so our job is to be better than AI. Unfortunately:
a) Low-level cognitive work is like (SWAG) 80% of all knowledge work, and so more than 80% of jobs are effectively gone, they just don't know it yet.
b) AI is getting really good really fast so that 80% is also growing quickly.
That means that the days of doing a junior-to-mid level job, kind of just coasting along -- often until retirement -- are gone. Everybody has to be good enough to be doing the top 20% of cognitive work, which involves fuzzy things we call innovation, expertise, domain knowledge, intuition, taste, handling uncertainty, and the like.
So my advice to my kids is:
1. Whatever you do, be the BEST at it, regardless of grades. Grades already meant little, now they mean even less. Being the best likely also necessitates strategic avoidance of AI, but I'm willing to be proven wrong on that.
2. Be "high agency". Annoying buzzword but perfectly captures the trait everybody will be hiring for. The 80% of the jobs were those doing the drudgework for the 20% "high agency" people calling the shots. And those are the exact jobs that are gone. Just do things, because now you can.
3. Critical thinking may soon be the only job requirement remaining. Get bullet-proof at that and learn relevant skills (maybe data literacy?)
I'm also encouraging trade school, but that seems less attractive to the kids.
I'm not saying skip college just yet, but we do intend to aggressively "value-maxx" college education (e.g. community college) and focus on building something, anything, practical -- since showing what you've built is better than degrees from most colleges.
I thought of that too and looked into it. (Or rather had an AI look into it! ;-)) Fortunately, there are extreme physical constraints on how quickly manual labor could be replaced, especially anything requiring dexterous work. Mainly, supply chain constraints on rare earth elements, which are required to make these motors feasible.
By some estimates, today's global supply is like 2% (or was it 0.2%?) of the total amount required to enable such widespread deployment of robots. Until we can scale that up (or figure out how to bypass that dependency) there is a very hard constraint on how fast they can be deployed.
I have a hard time believing that won't be overcome or surpassed when you compare it to the cost of producing an adult human capable of skilled trades.
I have three children aged 15-17. My youngest one has shown an interest in becoming an electrician, and I encourage that as I think it is pretty AI safe and in high demand.
My two older and more theoretically oriented children I am not sure what to recommend so I let them find something they are interested in mostly on their own.
* Keep calm and carry on, because we don't have any better ideas
* Sometimes it's OK to eat the damn marshmallow (i.e. in the face of future uncertainty, remember to do things that make your kids happy today)
I kind of suspect that the first one in particular is more or less people's default response. But I also wonder about what changes people _have_ made, if any.
My kids are too young for that, but my nephew is applying to college now. I told him that anyone who says they have any great insight into how he should be thinking about his future education/career is either wrong or lying.
Server side image maps predate javascript. They were in early versions of Mosaic.
Client side image maps and the script element were (AFAICT) both introduced in Netscape 2.
Even when scripting was introduced, you didn't necessarily have the ability to move elements around freely on the page. I think (but I'm not certain) that it wasn't until Netscape 4 era that you had enough layout primitives to implement the multi-layer positioning approach to custom clickable areas.
But only square hit targets then (until clip paths much later). Image maps supported polygons and circles. And position absolute is still a few years after image maps.
This seems like a much more interesting question to me.
Telling other people's children what to do is easy and basically doesn't have any downside to being wrong. With your own children things are a bit different.
So: what are people here with school age children telling their own kids about the future? If their kids ask, what kind of careers would they encourage them to pursue, assuming they have the skills and interest?
When I was last in the Bay Area, maybe about a decade ago the bookshops were full of titles like "Python for Preschoolers" (I exaggerate, but only slightly). Clearly at the time a lot of people working in tech thought that cultivating an interest in programming was going to be the path to being a successful (by some metric) adult. Is that still the case?
"learn to code because it will get you a good career" perhaps, but "learn to code at at least a high school level, because it will give you a very good mental model for how computers do things" is still very useful.
Or maybe generalized to "get good at problem solving." I've found building software systems has a lot of parallels to working on physical things such as carpentry/DIY and working on small engines. The concepts of breaking down a problem into a bunch of smaller problems, and identifying what can be independently tested/built remain the same.
the problem solving aspect is great too, but I mean specifically "this is what it means for a computer to know something, and this is what it means for it to do something" expressed in terms of data stored in memory, and algorithms that read to and write from that memory, and "this is how computers think" in terms of control flow and if tests, is a form of literacy that everyone should at least be exposed to.
I also went to a couple of his (fantastic) undergraduate courses, and have a huge amount of respect for him.
That said, I think it's worth mentioning that Climate Change Without the Hot Air has aged pretty badly, and I'd be reluctant to recommend it to people who don't already have the background to understand what's aged well and what hasn't.
The high level approach of making high level numerical estimates makes sense, but it dismisses solar energy in about a page due to assumed high costs. It turns out that even if you're David Mackay you can still be caught out by exponentials :) I notice now that the version you link has some inline updates pointing out how off the assumptions in this section were, but it seems to me that's not enough; you probably need to redo the entire analysis based on what we know today rather than trying to make purely local adjustments.
On the other hand the point at biofuels are even more inefficient, and therefore a dead end even before you consider broader environmental impacts, are well made and something that is sadly not yet widely reflected in policy.
> biofuels are even more inefficient, and therefore a dead end
Only if energy density doesn't matter. But it really does, though. Battery powered electric trucking? Dead end. Battery powered aviation? Dead end. Battery powered shipping? Dead end.
[edit] Maybe there's some sustainable way to convert solar energy into sufficiently energy dense fuels that isn't biological, but so far it seems like seed oils or algae are probably the least bad?
> However natural ice cream can be, it's still a buttload of fats and sugars
My default base for homemade ice cream is a custard with 50g sugar for 6 egg yolks and 500g of milk/cream.
I'm not claiming it's a health food, but in terms of pure sugar content homemade ice cream is pretty low compared to most other things you might make as dessert.
Sorbet is very different; that is usually something close to a 1:1 ratio of sugar and water.
This example is almost true, but not entirely. For example the getBoxQuads API was something that testing tools wanted, which led to it being standardised [1]
More generally there can be surprising dependencies between features when it comes to implementation (e.g. both DOM and layout features might depend on accessibility work).
So from an implementer point of view, trying to encode the team that would do the work into the ranking tool is harder than it might sound.
One can imagine providing categories of features to help people find things that they're interested in. The counter argument is that people might just filter down to the kind of proposals they think they want, and end up missing things that were more important but got put in a different category.
In the end this simple approach proved helpful to us (Mozilla) last year, so we decided to do more or less the same again.
[1] https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/10537