L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen

Congratulations!

I recommend this report from the Royal Society in 2020.
royalsociety.org/news-resourc...

Important question! The electrolysis of water to gain hydrogen is an option, but the cost range is higher because electrolysis energy costs to get hydrogen from water, which the Royal Academy of Sciences estimates to be 85% of total costs.

my bloomberg terminal is just showing the scene where wile e. coyote runs off past the edge of a cliff, is this good?

Name of the hospital that saved my life (Lucile Packard Children's Hospital) and famous historical figure (Eleanor Rykener) got me Lucille Eleanor.

Run from it, hide from it, the Haber-Bosch Process comes for you all the same.

The industrial revolution and the demographic transition In the 19th century, the United Kingdom began a period of economic transformation known as the Industrial Revolution. It?s commonly believed that this era opened as new inventions improved the technol

The interrelationship between the demographic transitional and industrial revolution is also interesting scholarly literature, about which preceded which. See Khan (2008) in Business Review.
ideas.repec.org/a/fip/fedpbr...

Sure! I mean, adoption of innovations in yield-increasing technologies is also itself interesting. Zvi Griliches on hybrid corn is a classic.
www.econometricsociety.org/publications...

Routledge version by Ester Boserup's book The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure.

I mean my quip was Boserupian, that societies across the globe have adapted to population pressure with agricultural intensification, and this is a long-run trend across societies.

I'm gonna out myself as being hashtag woke, but personally I prefer to listen to indigenous forms of knowledge, like the choices of the Haudenosaunee to focus production on optimizing caloric yields with the Three Sisters and having early forms of specialization of labor.

Why are average weekly hours worked declining? : Beyond the Numbers : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Shawn Sprague wrote an interesting piece back in 2024 for the BLS Beyond the Numbers publication on this.

www.bls.gov/opub/btn/vol...

Average weekly hours worked have been decreasing for private nonfarm weekly average hours worked since Q4 1981, punctuated by recessions. There's some interesting recent research on this issue.

Active debates on this question, as far as I can tell! Social policy, automation, and broader macroeconomics does not exist in a vacuum. A summary of some of the notable work up to 2001 on this question can be found in the E-H Encyclopedia.

eh.net/encyclopedia...

Pretty sure the Rubio doctrine is don't tell Trump about things, wait for him to get bored, tell him ~outcome~ is success on the old thing, let him take credit for victory on the old thing while he's distracted on the new thing.

Congrats 🎉!

Who needs Grand Strategy when you can have "fuck it, let's just see where the vibe takes us" Strategy?

The owners of farms who lament the costs of automation overwhelmingly rely on low-wage, high precarity workers who are often undocumented, disadvantaged, and desperate for employment of any sort.

Farm wages are overwhelmingly less than nonfarm wages, especially non-supervisory wages.

Throughout industrialized nations, there's been a long-run decline in hours worked annually. This time is, in fact, used on leisure and other non-work activities.

This has been concurrent with mechanization, automated manufacturing, and the decline in agricultural share of total employment.

Every year we are doomed to recreate Lockhart, and every year we try again try to fit society into cogs that fit our mechanisms, over and ever again, and we face the debate between subsuming all to it or allowing ourselves to be outside of it.

I feel like we're always reinventing a Lockhart's A Mathematician's Lament.

Mathematics for most people is rote application of hand and increasingly digital computation. Which remains a disservice to the creative, exploratory, and playful nature of exploring problems outside of plug and chug.

Not just taking Pragmatic Programmer, Uncle Bob, Kent Beck, Phoenix Project at their word, but the underlying why of all of it. Conway's Law and its inverse for designing software teams.

Understanding the business and social context to develop code, and then building your code to that context.

Betraying myself as a data engineer here:

Security. Least access principles. The importance of abstractions, encapsulation, and the tradeoffs of code interpretability.

The pen and paper stuff of computer science. What data structure and why. Not memorizing syntax but the craftsmanship of code.

The underlying theory I have is the Microsoft/Adobe-ification of it all. Glossy, functional machines that churn out unremarkable but useful content for a job, built by companies paranoid about pushing past corporate platitudes, competed by enterprise providers.
bsky.app/profile/moos...

Well, to use the quip from aviation safety, standards are written in blood. Whether or not that's a good thing is left for brighter minds than I.

I'm no Uncle Bob Clean Code Evangelist, not an eXtreme programmer by the standards of Kent Beck, by any means. I, too, have rated against trello boards and story points and kanban like everyone else. But there was a there, there, that I think might get lost in the generation.

Capacity is always matched with constraint, power matched by fragility. The business analyst empowered by code generation, building insecure systems that are easy to attack because there's no least-access principles and solid data pipelines. The loss of DRY, Agile, and clean code principles overall.

My guess is that it becomes like "lean production", as Womack et al wrote, The System That Changed the World. A good many little tweaks here and there that streamline systems but also add fragilities as well, which empowers but also changes, and a trickle that changes the stream, ever so slightly.

I would like to note that I am not a defender of LLMs, or Microsoft and Adobe.

I'm a former government statistical researcher who did data work and now I've decided to spend my life taking vitals and drawing lab samples. Sun Microsystems is dead and so is tech, long live tech.

My more prognostication take is that a good many LLM providers focus products on serving enterprise customers and creating inoffensive, slick graphics and text that don't raise copyright and trademark issues.

Or, the inexorable arc of technological history bends towards Microsoft Office and Adobe.

We shall plumb the depths of cooperative game theory, from proximal policy optimization to the Shapley value, to train models that ensure that the Opus-Chat-Grok-Gemibi-Seek is 10% better at making a good excel formula.