notabot

As per the article:

What plastic

polyethylene terephthalate (PET)

How scalable is it

They're working on increasing to industrial scale.

The description of their process sounds fairly exciting, in that it doesn't need a solvent, uses a cheap, non-toxic catalyst and produces PET precursors. If they manage to get it to industrial scale they'll go some way to solving the plastic problem.

This may just be a terminology mismatch. I would consider the tasks you've mentioned to just be part of your day-to-day work, and yes, if you're not doing those you can expect to be pulled up by your line manager/pm/whoever's running the show. I usually see accountability talked about in terms of the quality and timeliness of the deliverable. If your team's deliverable isn't on time, it's not because developer 'A' failed to deliver their ticket on time, it's because the team as a whole didn't manage their resources appropriately, didn't spot the slippage and didn't adjust or escalate the issue in time. If there's a bug in the code, it's not because developer 'B' forgot a bounds check, it was down to the whole team to ensure the quality of the deliverable, probably via code review.

Holding the individual solely responsible for this sort of thing is counterproductive, as it tends to lead to people trying to cover up mistakes, which rarely goes well, and means others don't get a chance to learn from it.

None of which is to say that the indivuduals shouldn't be held to the quality of their work. If the work they're delivering consistently isn't up to scratch, whether that's found through code review or a bug report, they first need help to improve, and only if that doesn't work should they face the inevitable consequences.

You've unleashed chaos and destruction on a planetary scale with a single wish, wiped out all known life and you say "worthitifitlookscooltho"??!?

You may have a point...

When it's a grouping that we lack the definition for, then the group doesn't really exist, even if it's members do and we all gave a good idea of what are, for instance, fish. Basically the group 'fish' contains all the things you think are fish, which is problematic as someone else may have a different idea of which things belong in the group, and while that's fine when talking coloquially, you can't really use it when trying to discuss things in a rigerous fashion.

That's interesting. I've often wondered what it must be like programing or using the CLI if you aren't familiar with the English language, but I hadn't considered the dyslexia/graphia type issues.

The rules also ban the use of facial recognition equipment in public places such as hotel rooms, public bathrooms, public dressing rooms, and public toilets.

Why was there facial recognition, or any other sort of camera, in those places in the first place? Has something been mangled in the translation, is it a fuss about nothing, or were organisations genuinely going "hmm, we need to check your face before you can use the restrooms"?

According to the book, there's no need for them to eat it, you just have to give it to them, although I think they may have mixed up 'fascinate' and 'confuse'.

Thank you for the summary. I don't have time to go down a rabbit hole at the moment, so this was just enough to sate my curiosity until I do have time.

Now that's a better reason for looking for a GUI solution than the OP had. I hadn't really considered how dyslexia would affect CLI usage.

Granted. A moon pops into existance, orbiting Luna, and is tidally locked to it, causing Luna to start rotating. Your admiration of the new celestial setup is short lived as you notice that, over the course of a couple of orbits, Earth's gravity peturbs this new moon's orbit, causing the apogee to get closer to Earth. Shortly the orbit reaches a chaotic tipping point, and it is ripped out of the gravity well of Luna and into the clutches of Earth's attraction.

The gravitational effects of a body thus large approaching Earth are catastrophic, monsterous tides obliterate costal regions and flow deep inland. Earthquakes and volcanoes errupt worldwide as the crust is sundered at every weak point. Hurricane force winds, unlike any before, scour the surface of the planet.

The new orbit is wildly unstable, and the new moon, now christened Armageddon by those who have survived so far, starts to graze the upper atmosphere at it's perigree. The compression heating caused by such a large bidy rapidly raises the air temperature and wildfires break out everwhere that isn't saturated by flooding. Those areas that are soon dry out and join the conflagration. The polar ragions are the last surface areas to succumb, the ice holding the air temperature just within survivable levels until it too flashes to steam, and the last of the surface dwelling creatures of planet Earth perish.

The oceans start to boil under the intense heating of Armageddon's atmospheric entry. The last to die there are the extremophiles that make their homes around hydrothermal vents, but even they cannot survuve the waters boiling away.

Atmospheric drag hastens the decay of Armageddon's orbit, and it plows into the surface of what was, until quite recently, the green and blue marble we called home. The inital blow is a glancing one, barely gouging the surface, but shattering the crust of both the Earth and Armageddon itself. The bulk of the sundered rocks, now molten, make a fraction of an orbit before crashing back down, obliterating what is left of the surface.

The planet is now a shattered ball of molten rock, lifeless and featureless. However, not all life has perished. By some quirk of fortune and orbital mechanics the International Space Station was on the opposite side of the planet when Armegeddon plunged into the crust, and was not obliterated by the ensuing explosion of rick and debris. The inhabitants of that little outpost watch in horrified fascination as the planet they orbit is scoured of all life, it's very face now a molten hellscape. The extea mass of Armageddon has disrupted their orbit too, and they now face the prospect of being thrown clear of Earth's orbit, to freeze in the blackness of space.

It sounds like you've had more than one traumatic trip to the beach. I've never really seen the point of listening to a shell to hear the sea, you're at the beach, it's right there, being noisy at you!

When you're coding as part of a team blaming individuals isn't helpful. For starters, any code should have gone through at least one level of code review, so there's been multiple sets of eyes on it before it causes trouble. Better to learn from mistakes as a team so everyone gets the benefit of hindsight.