While that's a fair question.

I'm thinking that you would get same answer if website/company that offered this was Google/Amazon/etc

In fact it might even be worse with those since they keep launching and then few years later "sunsetting" various things.

Can you give some examples for "repeatedly tried to kill SQL"?

For me it's only KeyValue/NoSQL (which trades/focuses on some ACID traits over others) and various incarnations of ORMs (which try to normalize different SQLs and map it to your familiar OOP programming language) that come to mind.

However they are either orthogonal or complementary to SQL.

Funny that for you Java and JavaScript are classic.

After initial big corporate SOAP/servlets buzz in 1990s, Java itself was trending down for a while. Stuff we have now (mostly due to borrowing a lot of good things from C# and other even more "dynamic" languages) gave it second life.

Well also strong PR and push for it in academia (because there were many big corporate jobs for it). But without improvements it had (and continues to have) - it would've ended like Visual Basic.

And I'll leave JavaScript mini history lesson (or rant) to someone else

Those ...?

Would those be stuff like carpentry/construction, animal husbandry, distilling alcohol, making "green" petrol/diesel (from vegetables), cooking gas (from food scraps and manure) ...

And anything and everything else that might be considered long term and post fall of civilization prepping?

At that point you might as well also add knowledge of some Germanic (that includes English), Slavic and CJK/Asian language... Though French, Spanish, Portugese and such could also come in handy.

While I'm only 40 y/o - I started with computers really early (Amstrad CPC 6128, later Amiga before PCs).

And both of you seem correct.

Looking at short enough time window, and especially if you don't know those lower/deeper levels (concepts) - even more so if you focus on buzzword/trends - it does seem to change a lot.

With deeper and longer term context, and focus on concepts - IT is seemingly doing circles. From mainframes and thin clients to fat clients to big servers, to "serverless".

Last time I checked "serverless" it went from it's initial "So it's basically like CGI scripts - each request executes a program from scratch" to "And now it's faster with persistence" (so like FastCGI/Plack/etc).

Of course with orders of magnitudes improvements in memory size, execution & computation speed and bandwith/latency...

Every now and then, some things which were impractical/gimmicky and maybe even not possible (e.g. text to speech, sound/image to text, 3D/VR/raytracing, ML/AI ...) finally become possible.

And on occasion the sum of those "new but theoretically/conceptually old" things unlock something that's really kind of new - like video deepfakes.

To me personally - ChatGPT and similar still seem like just much less (but still a bit) gimmicky variant of those end of 1990s IRC and early 2000s phpBB chat bots.

As mentioned video I saw was newer than the news article. In the video I think doctor was talking about events like https://www.lowcarbusa.org/pioneering-ketogenic-management-f...

In another comment I mentioned UK doctors (so folks closer to couch potato than ultra long distance runners) basically saying let's do this.

Photo resembles guy I saw talking in a video about it (video was newer though) - otherwise it's first Google hit for "UK doctors diabetes keto running" and I'm yet to read through the article https://www.diabetes.co.uk/blog/2018/08/gp-type-1-diabetes-r...

Years ago I saw some YouTube videos featuring sports folks - from marathon runners, to someone row/paddling across the ocean - all of them being long term (basically permanent) on keto.

And also recently some UK doctors (some of them with diabetes - I mix the types so not sure which one) decided to prove a point by going low carb/keto, while doing long runs daily (about half marathon a day), to be sure they've definitely used up all the potentially stored glycogen.

It's pretty fascinating stuff, and totally doable. I stand corrected on the "any athletic event"- what I said doesn't apply to ultra long duration lower intensity events. Endurance will be higher but peak power outputs lower. For endurance focused events like the ones you described, I could see it being an advantage- everyone will run out of glycogen, but those already keto-adapted won't need to suddenly start trying to adapt during the event.

It's basically same everywhere in the world - except some places don't mind nuclear, coal, or natural gas.

Few places have enough elevation and water for hydro (and don't mind submerging loads of land to make it happen).

For almost all countries - experts (engineers and scientists) have been warning grid and production will not be enough, and politicians kept focusing on shorter term wins of votes.

I think (collectively) the voters in many places didn't want green energy enough to actually pay for the large investments required.

What I find interesting is that in the US the cost of developing small solar PV systems is within reach of many homeowners.

The economics are still a little shaky for home solar installations, particularly when you factor in batteries. Larger "water batteries" instead of hot water heaters would make a dent but we need more passive storage.

I started looking at the cost of solar installations vs. future energy costs and this has worked out well.

The long view is critical so I looked at the solar install costs against the retirement cash flow needed to pay for energy.

My first install has got to be over 10 years old by now and has been completely trouble free. I have sold SRECs in that time that have almost paid for the system. I only receive an electric bill in the winter(heat pumps). I also received text incentives at the time. I feel like now I'm in a position where my only costs will be replacing failed components. These components replacement costs will be a fraction of the original install and will perform better.

I recently moved from a house without solar to one with a small ~7kW rooftop installation. Most important variables are similar: House size, electric usage patterns, location, and so on. I'm seeing a very small cost savings compared to my old house, maybe 10-15% at most. And I went from a consistently high monthly bill to a variable (but never zero) one, with an annoyingly giant "true up" cost mid-year. Given the economics, I would have never have chosen to install it if I didn't already have it. It would take decades for the investment to pay back.

The installation is unfortunately also grid-dependent, so it's useless when the power goes out.

It's highly dependant on location. Labor costs, tariffs, net metering arrangements, solar irradiance, solar seasonality and local cost of electricity vary a lot.

If you heat water I'd say solar thermal collectors are more efficient?

The energy can be used more directly. The real bonus of solar thermal for me is that there is no regulation compared to solar pv which is grid tied and regulated for me.

How is this different than many other "western democracies"?

For one specific example - The Netherlands with its various tax breaks/benefits - such as buying hybrid or fully electric car, installing solar panels, turning off natural gas (widely used for heating houses/apartments and domestic water) and switch to air based heat pumps and induction cooktop ...

All combined brought the country to a point where it's struggling with electrical grid capacity and availability.

While existing homes tend to have reliable supply of electricity. New homes and companies wait for electrical connection or they still go through with using natural gas despite hybrid heat pumps already being placed, during peak sun electrical grid operators turn off receiving electricity from private solar panels ...etc

The Netherlands is struggling with a lack of grid capacity due to political decisions to ignore the power network management companies that pleaded for at least a decade for expansion.

It is changing now though. TenneT now has some huge projects coordinated with the Ministry for Economic Affairs. All the doom and gloom is unhelpful, the Netherlands has come a long way in the last 10 years and we should celebrate the victories. People only want to see the bad news about a supermarket that couldn’t get a grid connection and declare that it’s all a mess.

There are definitely many places on the grid with big backlogs but the rate of upgrades to accommodate them has accelerated immensely.

The same happened in both my home countries: US and Sweden.

Hybrid cars is a good bet... They almost always use less fuel than the same model ICE, have a better emissions profile, and if they're plugin offer a lot of flexibility.

Adding solar panels when peak production is already too much can still make some sense, depending on circumstance. If it reduces long distance transmission by balancing use closer to generation, that's valuable. If it increases the length of time in a day where solar is dominant, that's valuable. If there's enough capacity that it makes sense to build export facilities, that's valuable, because it also brings import facilities and greater stability. If there's enough excess capacity to inspire storage facilities, that's good too.

Otoh, it could just be that the solar subsidies need to be turned off as they've done their job.