Science fiction has thought of this decades ago. Possibly the most drastic environmental effects that any human activity has wrought so far.
Consider - sunlight duration is a critical trigger in the lifecycle of many, many species, most very tiny. Insects and smaller. They can time dormancy to day length. Not the average, since weather is so fickle: even a flicker of sunlight means daylight because, only the sun can do that so it must be up there.
Bring a species out of dormancy at the wrong time of year, and it'll probably die. Do it over a broad area and it becomes an extinction event.
What micro-biomes can we do without? Who knows. These guys aren't even talking about it, I imagine. Just a gee-whiz thing - We can make it as bright as day, during the night! Wouldn't that be cool?
I haven't gone deep on enough things to know whether science fiction is worse than anything else in that regard. But science fiction is largely trope-ridden young adult male power fantasy emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually bereft pulp. It's also my favorite genre.
Digression: a file system is a terrible abstraction. The ceremonial file tree, where branches are directories and you have to hang your file on a particular branch like a Christmas ornament.
Relational is better. Hell, and kind of unique identifier would be nice. So many better ways to organize data stores.
Filesystems have a property that changes preserve locality. A change made to one branch of the tree doesn't affect other branches (except for links). Databases lack this property: any UPDATE or DELETE can potentially affect any row depending on the condition. This makes them powerful but also scary. I don't want that every time I delete a file it potentially does a rm -rf / if I mistype the query.
The best compromise is what modern OSs have: a tree-like structure to store files but a database index on top for queries.
You can create the tree structure from a relation. Not a primitive data store operation at all. Just add the attribute: parent directory and voila.
So often we want to look up 'the last file I printed' or 'that message I got from Bob'. Instead of just creating that lookup, we have to go spelunking.
Hell, every major app creates it's own abstractions because the OS/Filesystem doesn't have anything useful. Email systems organize messages and tags; document editors have collections of document aspects they store in a structured blob. Instead of asking the OS to do that.
NTFS has a database, the MFT. It can index attributes, such as file names, which are a b+tree. A file's $DATA is also placed into the MFT, unless it doesn't fit, then NTFS allocates virtual cluster numbers (more MFT attributes) which point to the on-disk data structure of the file.
All files are represented in a table with rows and columns. "Directories" simply have a special "directory = true" attribute in a row (simplified).
The hierarchy is for you, the human.
Like many file systems, NTFS also contains a log for recoverability/rollback purposes.
It's not quite relational but it doesn't make sense to be relational. Why would you need more than one 'table' to contain everything you need to know about a file? Microsoft experimented with WinFS, which wasn't a traditional file system (it was an MSSQL database with BLOB storage which sat ontop of a regular NTFS volume). Performance was bad and Skydrive replaced the need for it (in the view of MSFT).
A dataset can persist across multiple file systems. A UUID is a way to know that one dataset is equivalent (identical) to another.
Now you can cache, store-and-forward, archive and retrieve and know what you have.
UUIDs aren't very good for this use case, a sufficiently large CRC or cryptographic hash is better because it's intrinsically tied to the data's value while UUIDs are not
UUIDs are necessary. It's possible for file contents to be identical (e.g. short configuration files may coincidentally coincide over time and space). Would the hash then be unique?
Consider: you want a certain data object, with a given UUID. You can find it anywhere, even from a malicious server. Then look up the hash in a trusted database, verify it. Impossible then for the MITM to fool you. No more virus scanning executables.
I've been wondering this too: for us, UUIDs are super opaque. But for an agent, two UUIDs are distinct as day and night. Is the best filesystem just blob storage S3 style with good indexes, and a bit of context on where everything lives?
One thing directories solve: they're great grouping mechanisms. "All the Q3 stuff lives in this directory"
I bet we move towards a world where files are just UUIDs, then directory structures get created on demand, like tags.
Filepath is just unique name that model can identify easily and understand grouping.
Uuid solves nothing but requires another mapping from file to short description.
You can have several versions of the same set of data object at once - an entire source set for a build, all the names duplicate but tagged with 'revision' so they can be distinguished.
Hard to do that without a UUID at root, to use for unique identification of the particular 'particle' of the particular data set.
I'm not going to ride a bike to save CO2 when AI is allowed to build a whole datacenter. And yes the misinformation and dogma is used by both parties. And I am not a Trump supporter, I think he's an abhorrent human. But I think the environmental argument is propaganda. Trying to get us to sign away our rights but not doing anything that affects the rich (e.g. ban gas stoves but not private jets).
You've gone from hating the far left for trying to push their agenda via global warming to hating the Democrats for not targeting the rich to solve climate change within the span of two comments.
Perhaps you have cognitive dissonance because you've fallen for some very low quality propaganda.
I haven't "gone from" anything. I pointed out it's "regulations for thee but not for me". If the party cared about climate change, their actions would look much different. But instead they claim disasters (that have occurred for millennia) are caused by CC, then make it right by banning and regulating things as if it will prevent, say, a hurricane. That's akin to self pleasure, or religious dogma (you are "saved" if you give your life to Christ/drive an EV and recycle).
You know I agree with you, but I might be more hard line than you can stomach.
Policies are not perfect, and they will be created with input from all parties. What you highlight feels like an artifact of these policies not being hard line enough. You are of course right that it is effective to show natural disasters and explain that these will be more frequent if we do nothing, when you do that people will make the wrong conclusions how that effects their daily lives. We know that we use too much resources, and this is going to have catastrophic consequences in the future if we do not change how we use them.
It is not obvious who you are arguing against, it feels to me that you are against the people who make climate policies weak, and the very same policies.
Lets talk specific, we had a plastic bag ban here in Sweden. It was vilified as not efficient. In the end it was effective according to research after the ban was lifted and an even extreme approach would have been even better.
Such folk (medical degrees; phd's) are notoriously hard to pin down and finish a product. Been part of more than one; after years of unfocussed effort they failed to deliver.
They seemed agile and capable. But not a lot of interaction with humans. Not sure they perceived their environment beyond simple gymnastics. So what use?
Agreed. While marvelous to watch, there's a big difference between "look at what I can do" and "let's move through the world together". I think it's just a matter of trust. I have no problem watching these perform in a public park or whatever, and admiring the awesome feat of engineering before me... I just don't want the damn things in my house, around my kids.
Maybe it's more complicated than that? With allocate/delete discipline, C can be fairly safe memory-wise (written a million lines of code in C). But automated package managers etc can bring in code under the covers, and you end up with something you didn't ask for. By that point of view, we reverse the conclusion.
>can be fairly safe memory-wise (written a million lines of code in C)
We are currently in a thread, where a major application has a heap corruption error in its CSS parser, and it's not even rare for such errors to occur. This doesn't seem true.
>But automated package managers etc can bring in code under the covers, and you end up with something you didn't ask for.
Last year there was a backdoor inserted into xz that was only caught because someone thought their CPU usage a little too high. I don't think the whole "C is safer because people don't use dependencies" is actually sound.
Yet so many language features that 'help' with this issue, end up not helping. Null pointers are endemic in Java, as well as leaks. Heap fragmentation becomes difficult to address when the language hides it under layers of helpful abstraction.
In the end, discipline of some kind is needed. C is no different.
In Iowa, most farmland is owned by folks 55+. A third in their eighties. Half women (widows by and large).
The land, if it's farmed at all, is by a younger tenant farmer who pays cash rent.
A huge intergenerational transfer is imminent. What the grandkids will do with eighty acres in Iowa is anybody's guess.
Sell for cheap to big corporate farming conglomerates. At least until the market is so saturated that even the conglomerates have no use for more.
Meanwhile, a few here and there will be snatched up by people from coastal cities who have made enough to FIRE and have romanticized farming. They won’t grow significant crops but will raise a few chickens and goats and a garden full of cabbages and peppers.
If you had the right background and resources, you could probably make a killing buying up 80 acres for a pittance, carving it up into 5- or 10-acre plots with modern amenities (upgraded plumbing; solar; excellent internet) and pre-built facilities for small numbers of farm animals, and selling them off to that market with the value-add of instant community.
Carving up farmland into home plots is easier said than done. Most fields have zero infrastructure, so you need to drill wells, run power lines, streets and/or ROW for driveways. Internet access is pretty easy as you get get a fiber line run. You'll need to work with the local town and county for permits and be sure that they can handle the additional services such as road maintenance, plowing, trash pickup, etc.
It could be done, but it is not just re-drawing some parcel lines and calling a realtor. Even once you get it done, you now need to build somewhat expensive homes to recover your costs, and the FIRE folks will then probably buy that century farmhouse down the street and re-parcel the connected field to keep a few acres for themselves and sell the rest to the neighbor, as they can almost get a house in the country for free if they do so.
Also you often cant build without owning a minimum of land, like 40 acres. A rule to stop the urbanization of farms. That could change, but for now you'd have to get the zoning board to make an exemption.
Where I live, it's not the conglomerates buying up farmland but developers. This put a huge strain on infrastructure and also exploded the price of land, so much so the county finally outright banned it.
Not sure the dynamics of Iowa of course, so it could be different...but I do not live in a particular big or interesting area, either.
80 acres sounds big to people who don't live in the country, but is fairly small potatoes when it come to agricultural land. Such parcels will get consolidated into nearby large operations/corporations. Sometimes that is a corporate farmer, sometimes a local family or two just hoovers up land as it becomes available. But there is no guessing needed - land ownership will consolidate.
Yeah, even 30 years ago I had farmers around me closing down because their about 400 acres wasn't enough to make any useful amount of money on. Under 100 isnt enough for any sort of row crops to even pay for tractor and impliment maintence.
You would need super specialize production of lower volume products. Flowers, maybe rarer berries, otherwise you just have a large garden that lets you sell some corn and pumpkins on a road stand to offset some fertilizer costs.
Twenty grandchildren are splitting whatever the grandparents had left. But that didn't occur to lots of people, who are unfamiliar with such events as land-inheritance.
Around me, cranberries are another crop where large farms will own thousands of acres. And there are some large dairies that grow the food for their herds as well as give them grazing space. There are no lack of commodity farmers in my state, but you are right that I appreciate those who grow food more.
Everyone in my mom's family agreed the farms should be inherited by one cousin so that he could make a go of keeping family farming going. Mom and hardly any of the cousins even lived in state anymore. They didn't get an inheritance but their parents wanted to keep the family farms in the family and this was what they came up with.
My male ancestors died of cancer in their 70's and 80's but my great grandmothers lived to 93, 103, 99, and died in childbirth. I actually remember meeting my great great grandmother when I was 8 or 9 and she was 102.
Consider - sunlight duration is a critical trigger in the lifecycle of many, many species, most very tiny. Insects and smaller. They can time dormancy to day length. Not the average, since weather is so fickle: even a flicker of sunlight means daylight because, only the sun can do that so it must be up there.
Bring a species out of dormancy at the wrong time of year, and it'll probably die. Do it over a broad area and it becomes an extinction event.
What micro-biomes can we do without? Who knows. These guys aren't even talking about it, I imagine. Just a gee-whiz thing - We can make it as bright as day, during the night! Wouldn't that be cool?
Not cool.
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