No - it's actually local variance in materials coupled with the difficulty in moving materials between markets economically. Some areas just have better suited limestone or gravel or sand and can afford to build resilient structures for a fraction of the price that it'd cost in other areas.
This issue here is mainly that it's very expensive to ship all the components of a Concrete in the volume necessary in an economical manner. Some areas of the world just lost the lottery when it comes to having resilient building materials.
Corruption absolutely is an issue as well - I don't mean to downplay it - but even if we remove it as a factor there are just a lot of variables involved in making a reliable Concrete... finding a good mix is an artform and if, for instance, your limestone quary suddenly hits a more clay-laden amalgamation then your Concrete that was reliably lasting for three decades under certain conditions might suddenly lose a decade off the expected lifetime. That change in material quality can also be difficult to detect so there are real quality assurance issues in Concrete mixtures outside of just corruption and cutting corners.
I wanted to mention that Concrete is far more complex and regional than folks might imagine. The quality of gravel and sand, local impurities - these all contribute massively. It's probably best to think of it like a wine's terroir - except, unlike a bottle of wine, it's prohibitively expensive to ship both the components and the finalized mixture to different areas. If a region's limestone has a massive clay impurity then it may simply be unsuitable for large structures or require extensive filtering to the point of being uneconomical.
It's important to be aware of just how much the local geological mix can impact the viability of building with concrete because while theoretically we could use perfect concrete for every project - at that point most projects would simply be too expensive to consider undertaking. There is a very large field of engineering around establishing the realism required in settling for what you've got for the price you can afford in. It can absolutely mean that the materials required to build a high rise in Philly might be priced starkly differently from the same structure planned in Milan even with adjustments for the labor impact on pricing.
And it's not just the gravel/sand that's important. The water itself also differs in its chemical composition (e.g. salts, minerals, basic/acidic pH), which can catch you really dirty when making concrete. Or when dealing with water at all, shout-out to Flint and its infamous water crisis that took eleven years to resolve - every single lead service pipe had to be physically dug up and replaced.
> it's prohibitively expensive to ship both the components and the finalized mixture to different areas.
We could do this if it is important. There are mines in Wisconsin the export sand to the middle east because that is known to work well for fracking and they don't want to risk a local sand not working well. (AFAIK they have never tested local sand properties, but it is possible they have and it doesn't work). In this case the value of the "perfect" is well worth the high shipping costs.
We certainly could - it's absolutely possible. The question is if it's economical and so far the market has ruled in most cases that it isn't. Either the project doesn't need such a perfect amalgamation of materials (maybe there is an expected deprecation that doesn't justify such an outlay - possibly earthquake risk would minimize any expected lifespan gain - possibly the materials contractor just can't internally justify the added material cost while remaining attractive to local contractors).
It's all a balance. Imagine a scenario where you can ship in specialized materials to build a bridge with an expected lifespan of 100 years and it'll cost 50M - or you could use local concrete that has an expected lifespan of 15 years and materials would cost 5M. This is a vast simplification of the math but, assuming those expected costs it'd be cheaper to build using local materials and just schedule replacement every 15 years. And, of course, there'll be egg on your face if you build the 50M bridge and then suffer a massive tsunami in two years that destroys the foundations anyways.
To paraphrase a Grady quote: "Engineering isn't a study of building the best thing - it's optimizing the quality we can get for the cost outlay."
for fracking, what they want is a perfectly uniform sized quartz grain thats rounded. You find this sand where multiple processes occur, notably glacial geology. You want uniform grains because frackings goal is to open, then support an porous structure when you can then pull the fluids/gas out without clogging.
It's not really hard to test for this property, but the cost efficiency is notable when you find a massive amount of it in one place. It still may be washed to remove further silt/clay, but they absolutely know the product works and they generally know the geology in other places don't tend to produce the same material.
There's a fair amount of materials size thats mostly "we found this geologic material and this is some magic shit" rather than some wholly manufactured human endevour.
>It remains the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, a staggering achievement for an structure completed around 126 AD during the reign of Emperor Hadrian.
IRR is so trivial to manipulate - it'd be wonderful if more investors began demanding actual metrics on capital performance. If you're parking cash with an investment firm you want to know about how much of a return you can expect when it is withdrawn, and while history is a guide and not a guarantee, there are much better ways to inform that expected return than IRR. "My million got a return of 2% during a year when your reported IRR was 10% - where's the other 8%!" is a common cry from those who haven't just rolled over their investment, unaware of how little it has functionally appreciated.
Also, the valuation for such a debt laden company should be viewed with great skepticism. I'm afraid a lot of mutual funds will end up holding the bags.
I'm sure had you omitted it - instead of that reply there would have been a series of comments talking about how Microsoft actually has a track record of doing things like this. It's impossible to please everyone on the internet but I very much appreciate when people lean towards making their communication clearer.
I'd rather the symbol be there and occasionally see this discussion happen then the symbol be omitted and occasionally have the discussion where we try and figure out if the person was serious. When talking in person there are all sorts of visual and vocal cues and the speaker has cues in response to confirm the sarcasm was received. There are two parties that can correct that misunderstanding and have well established tools to do so.
/s is basically the internet-enabled equivalent of a sarcasm tone or a wink - it is much more difficult to detect genuine subtle sarcasm on the internet because of the absence of common communication tools. /s is also a valuable accessibility tool for those that might have difficulty with social cues and subtlety so, for all my autistic friends, I'm happy to defend it.
The only setting I'm seeing is on a per-user basis. Does anyone know how to blanket disable training on an organizational basis?
Is there any information about how much information from an organization managed repo may be trained on if an individual user has this flag enabled? Will one leaky account cause all of our source code to be considered fair game?
The initial title and your reply are both too broad to be fully accurate. By April 24th Github will train on private repos (assuming a flag isn't set) but this change is limited to just non-Business/Pro users. So a number of private repos will be effected but it won't automatically affect all private repos (so my panic check on our corporate account wasn't necessary yet).
I am not certain if you're a spokesperson for github - but it's good to be careful in your language. Instead of "No we won't" a lead like "That isn't entirely accurate" would be more suitable. In the end both the original post title and your reply have ended up being misleading.
> By April 24th Github will train on private repos
This statement itself is misleading. Also, GitHub probably should have seen this coming.
They are not doing what I initially thought, which is slurping up your private repo, wholesale, into its training set. You don't have to opt out of anything to prevent that.
They are slurping any context and input containing code from your private repo which is provided to them as part of using Copilot.
So, in addition to the opt-out setting, there is an even easier way to avoid providing them your private repository data to train AI models, and that's by continuing to not use Copilot.
Probably extremely ineffective, it's an issue of scale and unless you really automate the terrible code generation and somehow manage to make it distinct enough in style that it isn't easy to detect and eliminate wholesale then you just won't have the volume to significantly impact the result set.
I'm absolutely sure that there are state actors with gigantic budgets that are putting a lot of effort into similar attacks, though.
It's absolutely bonkers and wrong but it's unlikely to raise to the level of actual misrepresentation.
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