I have worked on DO-178C (aerospace) and IEC 62304 (medical device) software design documents and they are much narrower in scope.
OP's design document is comprehensive enough to cover much of ground of the full documentation package for regulated software submissions. Basically all that's left is tracing requirements to design to verification method to verification result.
I agree. Sensationalizing "is correlated with increased risk of cancer" to "could cause cancer" undermines the legitimacy of the inquiry and findings and just generally makes everyone dumb.
I'm annoyed I had to go googling around for the baseline rate. At 5 per 100,000 cases of this cancer, does even a 10X increase in risk matter versus having your beverage the way you like? Maybe cut the cream and sugar first.
Lately I've been making a conscious effort to flip my coordinate system around on inflation.
Instead of tracking cost increases of fuel, I try to conceptualize prices for all things in equivalent fuel or metered energy.
The fed can overlook energy and food in their "preferred metric of inflation", but that's 90% of what I care about as an individual. Very interesting to track your purchasing power in MWh
I’ve been doing something similar, tracking the price of technology purchase in terms of AAPL shares for 20+ years. It’s amazing how much cheaper computers have gotten!
My observation is simply that tech leaders misinterpret rewards from the market in conquering some abstract representation of a facet of a domain with conquering the domain itself. Then they become egomaniacal.
Did you conquer commercial real-estate ushering in the future of work and society, or did you build a handy scheduling app?
Did you have a neat idea for an online community or did you revolutionize human connection?
I think it takes a certain type of mental or emotional deficit to forfeit all of your free time and the majority stake in your company for funding for a tiny shot at hitting a grand-lam.
"Not everything needs to be a platform". I remember a 10 person company that did translation dispatch for medical needs in California. And the CEO was insisting we needed to someday "become a platform."
Similar to "needs to be a platform" [0], another variant is "be a data company" where somehow the underpants gnomes will transform your moat of stored information into profit.
[0] Read: "Needs to be pitch-able to investors as a magical 1000x growth unicorn."
Google already had the machine, this was just feeding the machine. 99% of companies do not have this machinery in place and probably wouldn't know where to start.
Do you go home and talk to your spouse? Do you go to church and talk with your pastor? Do you go to your therapist or to the local bar?
> Comfort with mental health care has become another facet of political sorting in the U.S.
I'm skeptical. Bars and churches and friends are way cheaper and more accessible in red states. It's hard enough to get poorer, less educated men comfortable going to the doctor, let alone a therapist.
Community, in whatever form that is. And community has broken down in the US, and has been for decades. It is a social system, lumbering towards failure (as many systems are).
> Differences by religion also emerge. Religiously unaffiliated Americans are much less likely than those who are religiously affiliated to feel connected to others in their local community (43% vs. 60%). This pattern aligns with previous research on interpersonal connectedness and philanthropy among religious people. Religious people tend to be more likely than nonreligious people to volunteer and give to charity – though they prefer these activities benefit others within their own religious groups. [My note: Religion->Shared belief tribalism, observation, not intended to be derogatory]
> Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community is a 2000 nonfiction book by Robert D. Putnam. It was developed from his 1995 essay entitled "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital" in the Journal of Democracy. Putnam surveys the decline of social capital in the United States since 1950. He has described the reduction in all the forms of in-person social intercourse upon which Americans used to found, educate, and enrich the fabric of their social lives. He argues that this undermines the active civic engagement which a strong democracy requires from its citizens.
> Bars and churches and friends are way cheaper and more accessible in red states.
Just as a curiosity, as I don't have any experience of red states myself, how easy would it be for a closet homosexual to come out and get support from their bar, churches and friends in a red state, typically?
Much lower odds of default support on average, but not zero, and the odds are not uniform throughout all the red states or any given one.
For example, my small town in a red state was not accepting of homosexuality in general, but my church was tolerant, and my church youth group was affirming and supportive.
I empathize with the straight white Christian as a fellow human, and wish them support (I donate to organizations that provide crisis support, but this does not scale, we need more scale [community building via robust government support imho]), but also recognize that religious belief is rapidly declining in the US [1], ~100k churches are anticipated to close over the next 5-10 years [2], and so while this support should be provided to the religious folks who need it, it is not a growing or long term support need [3] (imho, specifically in the context of a religious leader providing said support) from a systems thinking perspective. Citations below for this area of the knowledge graph.
TLDR This is a human support capacity and capability issue. We should fix it, to the best of our ability, imho.
> The means are denoted in red, and you can see that most of the numbers are at least 55 years old. For instance, the average adult member of an Episcopal church is 61 years old. For Southern Baptists, it’s 58. The Assemblies of God are doing a bit better on this metric at 54. But look at the modal age for a lot of these groups—this is probably the most important metric when it comes to understanding the future of American Protestant Christianity. For many, the modal age is significantly higher than the mean. In a bunch of mainline Protestant denominations, it’s between 67 and 69 years old. For the Assemblies of God, the modal age is 69, which is 15 years older than the mean. What does this mean? Well, the mean can be pulled down by a decent chunk of younger folks. If you have a good core of 30-year-olds, they can counterbalance those 60-year-olds in that calculation. That’s not true for the mode. It gives you a much better sense of when “the tipping point” is going to come.
[4] The Generational Collapse of American Religion - https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-generational-colla... - January 19th, 2026 ("So why do overall levels of attendance decline? Well, because each successive birth cohort is less religiously active than the previous one. That’s the main driver of religious decline—it’s a decay function across cohorts.")
As an atheist, this topic is one of many that stays on my mind and keeps me awake sometimes.
I would argue that the change isn't really about the church as an institution. It is about a 'thing' to belong to and a place to go to every week/month. I've been reading Victor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning and it he talks a lot about having a purpose. That is the thing that we have lost. This is why so many feel so lost. We have always been a tribal species. This is what makes "othering" so powerful in today's political climate. Anyone who looks/thinks/behaves different is bad even if we would otherwise be best friends. Instead we go through each day covering up our loneliness and lost feeling with anything that will distract us.
This isn't even new but it is rapidly accelerating. Roll back to the 40s where all houses had a front porch and people sat around talking to each other. Everyone knew their neighbors and kids played freely and everyone felt more safe and actually connected. Then television came along and people rushed to the living room after dinner instead of to the front porch. Now almost no one knows their neighbors beyond superficial "How are you?"s let alone knowing and hanging out with several. It is so bad now that people in the same family sit on the same couch with the television on but all they are doing is scrolling their phone. And this isn't the last chapter, it is going to get worse when all AI and VR merge into custom hamster wheel content that fills but doesn't satisfy. The solution is for us to re-find our purpose, find a hobby, go outside for a walk, volunteer with a cause, visit people, make phone calls and write letters.
Strongly agree. Intentional community and defending what is needed to support it is the only path forward, imho. What that looks like will be based on the participants of that cultivated community.
I don't think this is an unreasonable view, but it does seem to me that the declining Christianity rates aren't super useful on their own for determining actions from a systems thinking perspective.
Maybe rates are declining because the religion is legitimately not appealing, in which case your action is right. An opponent would say that it's declining because it's culturally discouraged (since even religious pockets are exposed to the national zeitgeist), in which case ignoring it would be the exact opposite of what we'd want to do.
I have thoughts on why religion is declining, and I don't believe it's because it's culturally discouraged. Young people want community, but they do not want to be told what to do by a hierarchy and spiritual leaders simply because "they say so" and related historical texts. The power and control through belief systems and hierarchy inherent to religion are breaking down. Is it because of social media [think increased velocity of cultural Overton Window and societal norm transition]? Younger people are more empowered and can support themselves while avoiding these institutions? Brain structure changing as it relates to social needs, fear, and tribalism? Hard to say yet, but I am excited to understand over time as a scholar.
For comparison, Japan legislated that religious indoctrination and withholding education or healthcare from your children due to religious beliefs should be classified as child abuse.
How's that? I don't know that much about the guy, but it looks like he was raised in the faith, never gave it up, and talks about how his faith influences and guides him in public life. Seems pretty Christian to me.
We could debate about appearance versus true belief, but in the context of "try coming out as a straight white Christian in California" only the appearance actually matters.
What are your struggles? (single item or a long list)
Talk to one of these:
Close Friends
Spouse/Partner
Immediate Family Member
Mental Health Therapist
A Co-Worker
Neighbor
Religious/Spiritual Leader
"I can't pay my mortgage because I lost my job"
That's a real problem. Solution: Who will pay that mortgage? For how long?
My church, friends, possibly in-laws would pay my mortgage for about 3-6 months but after that the help runs out because the REAL problem is those 3-6 months of not looking hard enough, not taking any job, not down sizing, not moving into someone's garage, not spending beyond the budget.
Friend, priest, acquittance at the bar and mental health professional are 4 different roles. Your therapist is not your friend, will refuse to play that role. Your therapist is also not your religious leader and wont speak into those considerations.
And conversely, neither priest nor friend will be able to deal with actual mental health issue you have.
It depends heavily on the therapeutic relationship/bond.
As a therapist, I focus more on building rapport and establishing connection before diving into the mental health aspects. Without trust/rapport, nothing will move forward in treatment. To generalize is not the best way to put things forward.
Price increases are tolerated if the value increases. Even rent-seeking is tolerated if the value is relatively stable. But what we have here is value proposition decreasing from fragmentation and shallow content and increasingly intrusive targeted ads while the prices keep going up.
Both parent and child are now mediating their experience through technology with the parent blaring recognizable intellectual property at the child to psychologically manipulate them into a better photo.
I mean, I remember having a guy squeak a rubber ducky at me when we took family photos... that part isn't new. What difference does it make that it's recognizable IP? It's Snoopy. Kids like Snoopy.
The whole idea that AI will usher in this utopia where workers in healthcare are able to realign their primary job functions with obvious value creation by sweeping all the paperwork under the rug is just silly.
It will just fester out of sight and out of mind: audit bots and compliance bots and malpractice bots and insurance bots will arms race creating such a mess it will become unfixable.
There's an optimistic future where Medicare becomes so much more efficient it becomes politically obvious to expand it because it's outperforming the mess that is private sector healthcare.
With AI I could actually see this being a possibility since it doesn't depend on a huge army of competent employees in a government office.
I was waiting for a comment like this. It's not like there aren't any projects that should be thinking about "scale", but it's almost a meme at this point. There is even the section there near the beginning about how small web apps without many users 'may have to think about horizontal scaling as well' - no, no they don't. To take part in the meme as well, a single server with Postgres will suffice for what? 99% of companies?
its substantially worse than that. anytime anyone uses the word 'scale' without even saying what kind of scaling they mean is guilty of eroding the discourse. at this point I don't think we should even be talking about scaling without meaning 'the Amdahl residual'
It depends a bit on context... and scale of scale.
At my first software engineering role the system I 'inherited' (The guy who wrote it quit after it launched, I was hired on after) was only used by 5-10 users at a time. On the flipside, one or two of those users would do things that the system was advertised as being able to do, but would really stress out the system and slow certain operations down for everyone, including exposing our company to financial penalty risks. We actually for a time slowed down trying to get large customers signed up, because even the business folks had to manage enough complaints that they didn't want to risk damage to our reputation. [0]
At my second job, well, I remember the debate I had with the manager about a change I suggested to improve memory allocation on a new email templating process he wrote. He then gave me a lecture about 'premature optimization'. Then when the thing kept crashing with OOM errors he cribbed the parts of my changes that solved the memory leak but left out the pooled buffer to save face. [1]
[0] - The thing was written such that we could only process 2 messages concurrently from a given integration partner at a time, we eventually fixed it by moving the processing to actors behind a consistent hash router.
[1] - The pooled buffer changes were 5-10 extra lines total, lol.
Yeah, I just always say 'it sure does!' ; not like people who make remarks like that will try / know how to try anyway. And if they do, even the largest prototypey crap we make can do 10-100x what sales/marketing expects (and they overshoot estimates always).
OP's design document is comprehensive enough to cover much of ground of the full documentation package for regulated software submissions. Basically all that's left is tracing requirements to design to verification method to verification result.
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