Yes, I recently read the book The Master Builder by Alfonso Arias which gets into some of the detailed pre-requisites provided by existing cells. (it’s also why restoring extinct species may be harder than expected even knowing their full genetic sequence)
Oh, lots. We are slowly but steadily making more advances with learning how to reprogram cells and get those cells to grow and divide and turn into things are sort of like different body parts. It's not really like sci-fi yet but it is honestly starting to get a bit weird. See the new book The Master Builder by Alfonso Arias for some recent info.
It's true that if life exists on other planets, it may not look exactly like life here. But it's also true that there are a small number of elements in the periodic table, and only so many of those are even relatively common in the universe, and only so many of those are useful for reactions, etc, etc. The things that life on our planet use seem to be some of the most obvious candidates to use, if not the most obvious, so if life exists on other planets, it would be surprising if the things that we use are unique or even uncommon across the universe.
Oh interesting! I just started reading The Monkey's Voyage: How Improbable Journeys Shaped the History of Life by Alan de Queiroz and I think I'm going to enjoy it as much as The Song of the Dodo many years prior. Historical biogeography is very fascinating!
In the book Super Volcanoes, I read about how complex the moon is geologically and how little of it we've examined and how poor our understanding of the geological history is. Apparently we can't yet explain how it was geologically active so recently. Imagine if the only rock samples we had from Earth were from a couple random spots on the surface, from wildly different time periods, and trying to develop together a theory of how its geology changed over time from that.
> - don't do what you want but what society/religion tells you to do (Simba is happy with Timon and Pumba, but then they send other animals including the monkey shaman to tell him he has to fight his uncle)
Interesting interpretation. I always saw it as being more about justice (i.e. don't live a blissfully ignorant life while your own kin are suffering when you can do something about it) Although maybe that's actually what you're saying too - the message is "don't do what you want" - but we disagree about whether that's insane or correct :)
Not exactly, but that's why we have different certificates, endorsements, and type ratings that show demonstrated competence with each type of airplane.
A popular aircraft type is likely to be built for 20+ years and be flying for 40 or more. The 737 was rolled out in 1967, and the fourth generation is still being built. This is rather like a major chunk of the world's computing infrastructure running on Fortran (F77, F90... 2008, 2023).
Maybe it’s time to start thinking about doing to software what has been done with other professional fields: licensing and checking out of various levels. If I have to spend 30 hours or so learning, practicing and demonstrating my knowledge about aircraft instrument procedures before I can attempt that as a pilot in real airspace, maybe it’s not that big of a jump that we’d license different software features, and going outside of those bounds would be subject to loss of license.
Then we’d know this set of language features you’re familiar enough with to hold that cert. It might cut down on the waste and proliferation of useless tech that seems to be strangling the industry because people just want it on their resume.
It would do enough to dissuade companies from hiring non-licensed engineers (hey you could actually call yourself and engineer and not feel like an imposter), and would put a hard liability on things that definitely need it: financial and health data, which seems to be ripe for exploit and disclosure.
One way or another the insanity of the current system needs to stop.
I think the hard thing is that there’s just a lot of mediocre programmers out there writing mediocre software. Should they be accredited or not?
I think a lot of average programmers will end up accredited if they see it as a path to a job, just like we see with Microsoft certificate programs. And if that happens, I wouldn’t want the accreditation test to be my company’s hiring bar. I’ll still run my own interview to make sure candidates are actually good. And so will most companies. So the time consuming interviews won’t actually go away.
The one big problem licensing would solve is that we could insist some baseline amount of security knowledge is in the tests. Right now, plenty of people get jobs handling sensitive personal data without knowing the first thing about how to keep data secure. That just can’t continue. It’s insane.
I have interviewed people who have attested to having a Java certification from Oracle that while they were able to pass that test, they were unable to use their knowledge to develop solutions or solve problems.
I could ask about how the class loader worked or the syntax associated with a particular construct (that that language level - not anything later) and get the correct answer.
They could pass tests and follow instructions.
Licensure for problem solving is difficult. Extend that to different domains and it is an even harder problem to solve.
> The Software Engineering PE exam, which has struggled to reach an audience, will be discontinued by the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying after the April 2019 administration. The exam has been administered five times, with a total of 81 candidates.
> NCEES’s Committee on Examination Policy and Procedures reviews the history of any exam with fewer than 50 total first-time examinees in two consecutive administrations and makes recommendations to the NCEES Board of Directors about the feasibility of continuing the exam.
> In 2013, the software exam became the latest addition to the family of PE exams. The exam was developed by NSPE, IEEE-USA, the IEEE Computer Society, and the Texas Board of Professional Engineers—a group known as the Software Engineering Consortium. Partnering with NCEES, the consortium began working in 2007 to spread the word about the importance of software engineering licensure for the public health, safety, and welfare.
> This collaboration was preceded by Texas becoming the first state to license software engineers in 1998. The Texas Board of Professional Engineers ended the experience-only path to software engineering licensure in 2006; before the 2013 introduction of the software engineering PE exam, licensure candidates had to take an exam in another discipline.
Not a pilot but it sounds like 250 hours minimum to become one commercially [1]. My guess is that unless you can buy your own airplanes it'll take more than that for somebody that owns a plan to trust you being in charge on them to get to your 250 hours.
It varies on your state but to become a Master X it often requires >5 years. (ex 5 for CO Master Plumber [2], 4 for TX Master Plumber [3], 7 or 5 + Bachelors in NY [4]). Imagine needing to pair program with somebody for 5 years before you could be considered Senior. That'd probably cause a lot more professional development than the current copy from stack overflow meta but also really irritate a lot of young professionals. You can't even quit and start your own business because you can't write software as a journeyman without senior supervision!
It would destroy coding boot camps and outsourcing but many people already pursue B.S. degrees in Computer Science or Computer Engineering. If the laws changed to require a 5 year paid apprenticeship that allowed you to skip the college degree I don't think too many people entering the field would be upset so long as we planned and accounted for the transition (like a path towards accreditation for currently employed software developers since no accredited "masters" exist to pair under right now).
I think another issue is that there's no feasible inspection process or liability management. We have crap like SOC2 and PCI compliance but they're so dependent on self reporting that they mean little practice. Mountains of spaghetti code accumulated over decades are not inspectable like a building is. Software salary costs are already very high and this would push it even further up. It would eliminate offshoring/outsourcing as an option from businesses and they would lobby hard against it. Uncertified software products from other countries would need import controls, and all other sorts of issues that don't exist in our unregulated environment right now
It's also hard to imagine what sort of massive software failure would be required to spur regulatory change that we haven't already experienced and collectively shrugged and did nothing about.
