https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... is a good explanation. The diagram of the "MacLeod Cycle" utterly convinced me, having been around that loop a few times.

Is AWS an environment where attempts to discover improvements are commonly mocked?

I don't think the disdain was for seeking improvements. It was for the techbros thinking they can solve any problem, even in domains they have never worked in, better than anyone actually working in said domain.

The disdain on my part was very much towards the egotistical tech bros who were convinced they could do better in fields they had no background in.

It used to get really tiring seeing the rhetoric about every single field of expertise. So many tech bros that were simultaneously experts in law, geopolitics, elevators, building codes, architecture, sports, transportation, finance, global logistics, and beyond. Literally from one second to the next. Any time anything wasn't 100% perfect, it was because the people working in the field were idiots and they could have done it so much better.

Sounds reminiscent of the CDC 6600, a big fast compute processor with a simple peripheral processor whose barreled threads ran lots of the O/S and took care of I/O and other necessary support functions.

Today, there are at least 9 production-level surviving Fortran compilers (GNU Fortran, IFX, nagfor, nvfortran, XLF, Cray/HPE's ftn, Fujitsu's frt, old Flang-based Arm/AMD, and flang-new). This situation has advantages and disadvantages for our users. Their Venn diagram of equivalently implemented features is very much not a circle, and portability across compilers is really tough. The ISO standard is hardly clear and doesn't have a test suite or reference implementation, so it's been a very challenging task to make flang-new as easy to port existing codes to as possible.

I started writing the new "f18" Fortran front-end at NVIDIA in the summer of '17, and it was added to LLVM as "flang" in June 2020. There were already at least three other "flang"s at the time, one of which was our open-sourced llvm-targeting pgifortran compiler.

I still call this latest one "flang-new" myself just because that's the only unambiguous name for it. The name confusion is not my fault, I promise.

If "AI" were doing anything more than repeating content from the web without attribution, I might agree with you.

What's FORTRAN 83?

If one really wants to take a stand against this crazy administration, they shouldn’t start it by referring to Hegseth with his assumed title.

I thought that too, but then wondered if they thought better of deliberately antagonizing a very powerful bully.

Democracy rewards mass appeal, and that in turn encourages demagoguery and gives a platform for stupidity. It's been an unavoidable problem with the system since Athens.

Having lived (or maybe more accurately "resided") in the Springs for a few years, this story didn't surprise me at all.