What is the technical hill you are willing to die on in your industry?
Every industry is full of technical hills that people plant their flag on. What is yours?
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Every industry is full of technical hills that people plant their flag on. What is yours?
For any non-trivial software project, spending time on code quality and a good architecture is worth the effort. Every hour I spend on that saves me two hours when I have to fix bugs or implement new features.
Years ago I had to review code from a different team and it was an absolute mess. They (and our boss) defended it with "That way they can get it done faster. We can clean up after the initial release". Guess what, that initial release took over three years instead of the planned six months.
The joys of agile programming....
What they did was far beyond "agile". They didn't care for naming conventions, documentation, not committing commented-out code, using existing solutions (both in-house and third-party) instead of reinventing the wheel...
In that first review I had literally hundreds of comments that each on their own would be a reason to reject the pull request.
When agile works, it actually works pretty well.
99% of the agile projects i've been in were waterfall in disguise (fragile for short).
Sounds like you had a bad experience with the failed attempt at establishing agile development methods - sorry to hear that.
I just want to encourage you to give it another go with other developers that are more experienced with the methodology - in my company we're working successfully that way for over a decade.
[edited because the initial comment was unkind]
In my team we manage 2 software components. 1 of them (A) has 2 devs, the other (B) approximately 5.
Every time a feature needs to be added, B complains that it's going to take forever, while A is done in a fraction of the time.
The difference? B is a clusterfuck of a codebase that they have no time to refactor because they run low on time to implement the features.
I work in A, but I'm not going to steal the credit, when I entered the company, A already had a much cleaner codebase. It's not that me and my partner are 10x better than the ones working in B, they just have uglier code to deal with.
I can't comprehend why management doesn't see the reason A needs half the devs to do the job faster.
Management cannot see beyond the next quarter, it's a genetic precondition of the species.
I 100% agree with you but I have a hard time convincing my team of that. And so we have a mess of a codebase... It's not directly important to business, so it is secondary. And obviously nobody notices when fixing bugs take way longer or implementing new features introduces more new bugs than necessary, as it always has been like that. 🤷♂️
I work in disability support. People in my industry fail to understand the distinction between duty of care and dignity of risk. When I go home after work I can choose to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. My clients who are disabled are able to make decisions including smoking and drinking, not to mention smoking pot or watching porn. It is disgusting to intrude on someone else's life and shit your own values all over them.
I don't drink or smoke but that is me. My clients can drink or smoke or whatever based on their own choices and my job is not to force them to do things I want them to do so they meet my moral standards.
My job is to support them in deciding what matters to them and then help them figure out how to achieve those goals and to support them in enacting that plan.
The moment I start deciding what is best for them is the moment I have dehumanised them and made them lesser. I see it all the time but my responsibility is to treat my clients as human beings first and foremost. If a support worker treated me the way some of my clients have been treated there would have been a stabbing.
Disabled people are so often treated like children and it just sucks.
Like you, I tend to feel that in general, people need to stop trying to force people to live the way they think is best. Unless there is a very real, very serious impact on others ("I enjoy driving through town while firing a machine gun randomly out my car windows"), people should be permitted to choose how to live as far as possible. Flip side is that they gotta accept potential negative consequences of doing so. Obviously, there's gonna be some line to draw on what consitutes "seriously affecting others", and there's going to be different people who have different positions on where that line should be. Does maybe spreading disease because you're not wearing a facemask during a pandemic count? What about others breathing sidestream smoke from a cigarette smoker in a restaurant? But I tend towards a position that society should generally be less-restrictive on what people do as long as the harm is to themselves.
However.
I would also point out that in some areas, this comes up because someone is receiving some form of aid. Take food stamps. Those are designed to make it easy to obtain food, but hard to obtain alcohol. In that case, the aid is being provided by someone else. I think that it's reasonable for those other people to say "I am willing to buy you food, but I don't want to fund your alcohol habit. I should have the ability to make that decision." That is, they chose to provide food aid because food is a necessity, but alcohol isn't.
I think that there's a qualitative difference between saying "I don't want to pay to buy someone else alcohol" and "I want to pass a law prohibiting someone from consuming alcohol that they've bought themselves."
Nope. Don't start putting caveats on aid.
You can't buy comforts. You will live the life i think you should be accustomed to. It's infantilising and controlling
It’s more like - I’ll help with the necessities to keep you alive. Anything extra is on you. We all have our vices but why should I pay for yours
And who decides what is or is not a necessity? Is entertainment necessary? How much? Are certain shows OK but others not? Should they be restricted to the shows that you like? What about choice? Dignity? Autonomy?
When we lessen others we inherently lessen ourselves. We have a moral duty to consider the harm from both our actions and our inactions. If you choose to not restrict someone else self determine and live their own life it is no less morally wrong than if you took that person and imprisoned them. From a position of power it is tempting to think "I don't like this thing therefore others should not have it" but follow it through to the logical conclusion. You are binding your neighbour with the very same chains that will land upon you given time.
**It is better to be an enemy of chains than judicious in their use. **
The person donating decides what they wish to donate.
Sure, for donation, but the original context we are talking about disability services which are government funded through taxation. You don't get to object to the military budget because you are a pacifist, you have to pay regardless. In that context the person receiving the service is entitled to that service by law. They access the service and the service providers are supposed to do their jobs without personal judgement getting in the way. My issue is with providers not doing their jobs because of this type of judgement. I am not donating my time when working with a client, they (or their allocation) are paying me to work.
How much of your income do you want to give to buy alcohol for strangers? Would you donate a large amount of your money to an aid fund that spent 10%? 50%? 80%? on booze? What about meth? Guns? Nazi memorabilia? What it's only 5% on Nazi stuff, 95% on food?
I'm being a dick but they have a fair point in why people put caveats on aid. I'm a fan of UBI to some degree personally, because I think people as a rule should be trusted with making their own decisions, but I do like choosing where the value of labor goes too.
You might personally think it sucks, but it's how it rolls. I live in a country where social system payments are straight up monetary amounts. If you are eligible to receive aid, you receive it. How you manage your affairs is none of the government's business .
There are caveats, such as the income management system, but for the most part that's actually opt-in and they're reviewing junking the entire concept as it was originally introduced very very badly by an administration that attempted to leverage vulnerable groups
My taxpayer dollars go to support people doing their peopley things as they choose, as adults. And I'm actually ok with that. It's a safety net, not a leash. Poverty isn't a moral position
I disagree with restricting alcohol for food stamps. In fact, it shouldn't be food stamps, it should be cash. When you attach all these requirements and drug testing and restrictions you are destroying the autonomy of the person you are claiming to help.
It is like with housing. Many of the housing programs available require drug tests, job seeking documentation, separating men and women, and so on. In some cases this can make a little sense, given that men are much more likely than women to be domestic abusers, but other cases make less sense. If someone uses drugs to cope with their life and then you offer housing only if they stop the thing that is helping them cope they will not be helped, they will be harmed. They will not be able to take the housing and end up off the street in a secure place building a life, they will be still on the street and still on the drugs.
If I go and work a job and get paid should my employer be able to say "I'm fine with paying you so you can have housing and food, but alcohol? No, I don't want to pay for alcohol"? This would be insane. Your employer choosing what you can do with your money outside of work hours is authoritarian nonsense and yet when it comes to welfare or charity people think it is fine. I disagree vehemently.
If I give you money to alleviate your suffering who am I to decide how you employ that? I want you to have more money because it is fungible, you can do almost anything with money, so you can make choices. I want you to have more power to effect your life, not less.
I assume you are an American given your reference to food stamps. Where is the American spirit of independence? Of self determination? Of rugged individualism? It seems quite dead in the modern era of state capture and authoritarian oligarchy. It is a loss and a tragedy.
How are you distinguishing:
From
Statistically speaking the rate of abuse from men to their partners is extremely high. I don't know how to manage this best but it seems likely that at least some of the situations of abuse would be helped by having spaces without men in them. Does that mean we should force men and women apart? No. But how to manage that I will concede is a difficult problem.
In many cases of abuse the abuser keeps the victim close and prevents any outside contact as much as possible. Having the moment without the abuser nearby can provide an opportunity to escape which seems to provide some significant utility. On the other hand someone who is supported by their partner and actually does derive benefit from that would suffer from the separation, not to mention the suffering of the men who would theoretically be separated from their partners and kids.
I don't have the answer, but I do see it as fundamentally different from the self destructive behaviour situation. Someone who is disabled is no less able to make bad choices. If I could be a tradie, say an electrician, and I can go to the pub after work and smoke a pack of cigarettes then the same should apply to a disabled person. Is it the best decision? No. But it is theirs.
In the same way an abused partner should be able to make the decision to stay in the abusive relationship, whether that be a good or had choice. That said, paths out from abusive relationships and from smoking should both be made available as much as is reasonably possible.
No. Higher than the other direction but hardly extreme
Statistically speaking the harm from drug adficts and alcohol is is much higher
In Australia, the country I live in, roughly 1 in 4 women have experienced intimate partner violence since age 15. For men this is 1 in 14. 23% compared to 7.3% to be clear. That means that about 3 times as many women have experienced IPV than men. This includes LGBT relationships, so abusive men who abuse other men would show up as part of the men being abused statistic, as with women abusing women.
As for the harm from drug addicts and alcohol use/abuse, where does the harm come from? Surely if I am in my own home and I take a drug and while high I stay at home I am not harming anyone? If I were to hurt my partner or other people in my house that would be a possible route for harm to occur. But if I don't drive drunk or high and I don't hurt those immediately around me how does harm happen?
I would suggest that much of the harm around drugs comes from the criminal enterprises involved with production and supply, crime committed to fund addictive drug use, and over policing coming from having already had one interaction with police leading to petty things becoming criminal due to that interaction. Surely there are other harms, but think about how much of this would be alleviated by legalising the less harmful drugs and decriminalising the rest. The legalised ones can be produced under regulation and made safer to consume as well as being made affordable. This would kill the criminal systems around drug production and supply. For the decriminalised ones it would shift the lower towards the user, allowing users to have power over dealers and have a way out of those fairly toxic relationships.
But again, we can always talk about some other harm out there and ignore the case at hand. I would rather close the conversation with a simple statement. We do have a problem with men abusing women which is larger than all other forms of abuse. We would all benefit from this being reduced. And lastly when managing something like a shelter it is reasonable to take a few extra steps to provide a way out for women who are particularly vulnerable at that time. Should we offer that for men? Of course. But is it going to be used far more by women? Yes.
You’re confusing “way too women experience partner violence sometime in their lives” with “all men are violent criminals and need to be separated”.
While yes, a lot of drug related violence is caused by the drug war, the harm for drugs is easy to see from with a significant portion of the homeless, theft and ciolence as the worst addicts fall out of society, and ruined wasted lives. Harm for alcoholism is much more obvious and easy to see, but I’d also add all the victims of drunk driving to it’s harm
I mean, sure. But we were talking about disabled people, and disabled people possibly can't buy anything for themselves for reasons out of their control. You're essentially imposing a different standard of life on them just based on that.
And maybe that's not wrong - you're not the only one that takes this stance - but it does deserve pointing out.
(And with, like, porn it doesn't even apply. That's mostly for free)
Patient autonomy!
RIP those disabled people who's carers won't even let them nut, and who definitely don't have anywhere else to go.
Not strictly technical, although organizational science might be seen as a technical field on it's own.
Regularly rotating people between teams is desirable.
Many companies just assign you in a team and that's where you're stuck forever unti you quit. In slightly better places they will try to find a "perfect match" for you.
What I'm saying is that moving people around is even better:
You spread institutional knowledge around.
You keep everyone engaged. Typically on a new job you learn for the first few months, then you have a peak of productivity when you have all the new ideas. After some 2 years you either reach a plateau or complacency.
I'm in health sciences and I wish we would do more education days/conferences. I'm a med lab tech and I feel like no one knows what the lab actually does, they just send samples off and the magic lab gremlins Divine these numbers/results. I feel the same way when another discipline discusses what they do, its always interesting!
I'll allow it, institutional knowledge while sounding good does cause business continuity problems.
It’s even better for software, since now everyone regularly needs to learn a new code base. It’s a huge incentive to make code better quality and more maintainable
Not everything needs to be deployed to a cluster of georedundant K8s nodes, not everything needs to be a container, Docker is not always necessary. Just run the damn binary. Just build a .deb package.
(Disclaimer: yes, all those things can have merit and reasons. Doesn't mean you have to shove them into everything.)
But then how will I ship my machine seeing as it works for me?
Damn, I haven't thought of that! Looks like I have to use a subdirectory of your Homedir from now on.
Just symlink my home folder to your PC and we are good to go.
Genius!
I see you are well-versed in the ways of Citrix.
Docker is the source of my secret nerd shame lol. I feel like I'm reasonably competent with computers - I'm no pro but I can install and setup Arch (BTW) without using Archinstall and stuff like that. But I just don't understand Docker. I've read so many ELI5 guides and I understand in a really general way what it's meant to do, but I just... cannot picture in my head what it's doing. I don't even know where it is on my machine! But I still have two apps that I run in Docker. They just... exist somewhere and if they ever break I'm lost.
That makes two of us. I’m in IT rather than development but I deploy VMs and containers semi regularly at work and at home. Docker seems to be designed to be an ephemeral isolated environment for repeatable testing, but oh so many server applications are distributed primarily as docker images.
You might find LXD more straightforward. I think docker was first and foremost a development platform, not meant for deploying production appliances. That's why there's this nonsense about persistent volumes. If it were designed from the ground up to be a turnkey appliance platform you wouldn't need to mess around with that stuff because of course you want your filesystem to be persistent between reboots in a production environment.
Cleaning, organizing, and documentation are high priorities.
Every job I've worked at has had mountains of "The last guy didn't..." that you walk into and it's always a huge pain in the ass. They didn't throw out useless things, they didn't bother consolidating storage rooms, and they never wrote down any of their processes, procedures, or rationals. I've spent many hours at each job just detangling messes because the other person was to busy or thought it unimportant and didn't bother to spend the time.
Make it a priority, allocate the time, and think long-term.
Starting a new job soon, and I’m paying for some holes in documentation as I prep my offboarding documentation for my current team. Definitely making it a priority to do better going forward! Being lazy in the moment is nice but the “stitch in time” adage is definitely true
In many jobs, someone with the power to fire you makes the priorities, allocates your time and does not think long-term.
I'm so hot for you right now.
This is a non technical hill but it is applicable to my technical career. The hill is that REMOTE WORK WORKS. I am so frustrated that so many businesses are going back to hybrid or full RTO.
RTO is about control and management/owners thinking that everyone else is lazy and would not do anything if not constantly pushed. I believe that is because they are the kind of people who would need that kind of supervision.
The financial side is that making people go to work maintains value. The money you spend on lunch, travel, dry cleaning, maintenance of cars, and the increased value of property near places of business add to the ownership class's wealth. All that money you spend traveling to/from and while you are at work goes to them. If you save that money by working from home, the wealth stays with you.
Hear hear. My job's about to force RTO starting January. Precious few other engineering jobs offer WFH to non-SW engineers.
Bastards, all if them.
I think it's way more sinister. If people don't waste time on stupid shit like commutes, pressing and starching business attire, wasting social energy on superficial coworker interractions, and needlessly spending money on lunchflation and work clothes, then everyone has more time/money to be a healthy human being with more time for self-actualization and community-building. Such people tend to attempt to facilitate a healthy society, and that misaligned with the goals of the exploitative wealthy class.
RTO mandates are employees reduction schemes, nothing more.
Except they're actively hiring more people still. (My company that is doing RTO I mean.)
React sucks. I'm sorry, I know it's popular, but for the love of glob, can we not use a technology that results in just as much goddamn spaghetti code as its closest ancestor, jQuery? (That last bit is inflammatory. I don't care. React components have no opinionated structure imposed on them, just like jQuery.)
I much prefer VueJS, much more intuitive and clean.
And you favorite poison is?
I like that you called it poison because all options are bad, but I prefer the one I consider the least bad: Angular.
AI is a fad and when it collapses, it's going to do more damage than any percieved good it's had to date.
I can believe that LLMs might wind up being a technical dead end (or not; I could also imagine them being a component of a larger system). My own guess is that language, while important to thinking, won't be the base unit of how thought is processed the way it is on current LLMs.
Ditto for diffusion models used to generate images today.
I can also believe that there might be surges and declines in funding. We've seen that in the past.
But I am very confident that AI is not, over the long term, going to go away. I will confidently state that we will see systems that will use machine learning to increasingly perform human-like tasks over time.
And I'll say with lower, though still pretty high confidence, that the computation done by future AI will very probably be done on hardware oriented towards parallel processing. It might not look like the parallel hardware today. Maybe we find that we can deal with a lot more sparseness and dedicated subsystems that individually require less storage. Yes, neural nets approximate something that happens in the human brain, and our current systems use neural nets. But the human brain runs at something like a 90 Hz clock and definitely has specialized subsystems, so it's a substantially-different system from something like Nvidia's parallel compute hardware today (1,590,000,000 Hz and homogenous hardware).
I think that the only real scenario where we have something that puts the kibosh on AI is if we reach a consensus that superintelligent AI is an unsolveable existential threat (and I think that we're likely to still go as far as we can on limited forms of AI while still trying to maintain enough of a buffer to not fall into the abyss).
EDIT: That being said, it may very well be that future AI won't be called AI, and that we think of it differently, not as some kind of special category based around a set of specific technologies. For example, OCR (optical character recognition) software or speech recognition software today both typically make use of machine learning --- those are established, general-use product categories that get used every day --- but we typically don't call them "AI" in popular use in 2025. When I call my credit card company, say, and navigate a menu system that uses a computer using speech recognition, I don't say that I'm "using AI". Same sort of way that we don't call semi trucks or sports cars "horseless carriages" in 2025, though they derive from devices that were once called that. We don't use the term "labor-saving device" any more --- I think of a dishwasher or a vacuum cleaner as distinct devices and don't really think of them as associated devices. But back when they were being invented, the idea of machines in the household that could automate human work using electricity did fall into a sort of bin like that.
I'm a bit more pessimistic. I fear that that LLM-pushers calling their bullshit-generators "AI" is going to drag other applications with it. Because I'm pretty sure that when LLM's all collapse in a heap of unprofitable e-waste and takes most of the stockmarket with it, the funding and capital for the rest of AI is going to die right along with LLMs.
And there are lots of useful AI applications in every scientific field, data interpretation with AI is extremely useful, and I'm very afraid it's going to suffer from OpenAI's death.
The issue that I take with AI is that it's having a similar effect on ignorance that the Internet created but worse. It's information without understanding. Imagine a highschool drop out that is a self proclaimed genius and a Google wizard, that is AI, at least at the moment.
Since people imagine AI as the super intelligence from movies they believe that it's some kind of supreme being. It's really not. It's good at a few things and you should still take it's answers with skepticism and proof read it before copy/paste it's results into something.
Weird i haven't seen this one yet: the cloud is just someone else's computers.
If you're selfhosting, the cloud is your someone else's computer ;)
It is, but I’m ready to officially throw in the towel and embrace the fact that running your own hardware is not much more than a hobby these days. I’ve preached and preached the value of multi or hybrid cloud, only for the people with money to pour it down the same hole time and time again.
I’ve always said IT is essentially an entirely CYA driven industry. Having someone to blame is more valuable for them than uptime, and if they can show their outages, even if the numbers suck, was not their fault (easy to do when all your competitors are down at the same time), it’s all good…
Update- lol, YouTube is currently down.
Geopolitics is kind of coming to the rescue, since it's bad if your server is subject to a hostile power's laws. Although it remains to be seen if there's fundamental change, or just what we call in Canada "maplewashing".
Hardly a hot take really...
OP didn't really ask for a hot take...
It was kind of implied, though.
How do you die on a hill if nobody's fighting you? Is it just a hill suicide? That wasn't in any war I've read about. I guess Life of Brian had something a bit like that.
Dying on the hill doesn't mean it has to be controversial or a "hot take" IMO, but whatever.
...which are much more secure than yours ?
Riiight... downtime in the big clouds is totally not a thing and databreaches unheard of.
They have tighter security because they are bigger targets.
Is there anybody on Lemmy that isn't a software engineer of some description? No? Anyone?
I'm a geologist!
Carpenter
Yes, me. I am a network engineer with an expired CCNA
Fellow network engineer here. The expired cert is implied.
I'm a machinist.
Just because I'm not in a technical job doesn't mean I'm not a technology user.
Low voltage electrical engineer!
Yes, there are dozens of us.
Shoe Cobbler
I do (workplace) safety, compliance and hazardous waste handling.
I'm not, although I do write some code.
My field is HR.
As for technical hills, I'm not sure.
Musician and Audio Engineer (so my 9-5 is in IT)
I do gynecology as a hobby.
I'm an Illustrator. And I even contributed something non software engineery.
I was thinking the same thing.
otoh, the post does say 'technical'
Lots of trades are starting to use more modern equipment, to the slow embracement of older more “established” tradespeople.
An example from a couple decades ago, when auto leveling tiling systems were coming out, more “prestigious” companies refused to use them since they think it’s cheating. It’s like a calculator, a tool to make your life easier though.
Anyways, now you won’t catch tilesetters NOT using them.
This was my introduction to the 'wonders of tech.'
With great fanfare and joyous noises, we were promised a wonderful, fully modern system that would solve a problem no one knew we had. I was a new supervisor and had to learn a system that seemed to be designed to frustrate and annoy everyone who used it.
the tl, dr is the city wasted lots of money on a project the Mayor's daughter was pushing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityTime_payroll_scandal
the only code I would ever write is some hacky scripting.
I do data engineering, so to software engineers, the answer is no. To non-software engineers, they'd probably say yes
Paper pusher!
Manufacturing design automation specialist
I fucking hate AI in HR/hiring. I try so hard not to spread my personal data to LLMs/AI ghuls and the moment I apply for a job I need to survive I have to accept that the HR department's AI sorting hat now knows a shit ton about me. I just hope these are closed systems. if anyone from a HR department knows more, please let me know
I'm lucky in that I've been in the same job for ages (since before AI) and so I haven't had to deal with this yet, but a friend of mine was using AI to write his resume recently and I had the thought that the resume is probably being written by an AI, then sent to another AI to read it and that you could conceivably get a job with a resume that no human has ever entirely read. Probably not an original thought but it had never occurred to me before lol.
You could also starve in the street after your résumé is rejected by several levels of LLMs, never having had human eyes land on it once.
Yeah probably the more likely outcome.
One thing, we both know why.
It doesn't even matter how hard you try.
Keep that in mind, the design has right to exploit your time.
All I know privacy is a valuable thing.
Watch it fly by as the disks spin.
Watch it collect down to the end of the day,
the applications piling away
It's so unfair, didn't look out below
Watch the ram go right out the windows.
Tryna get job, d-didn't even know
I wasted it all just to watch spies go
I kept everything disabled.
And even though I tried, it traced apart
What was personal to me will eventually be a tracked thing in a time when
I tried so hard, not spread it all.
But in the end, it doesn't even matter.
I had to apply to not lose it all.
But in the end, it doesn't even matter.
Hardly a hot take really...
They should stop teaching the OSI model and stick to the DOD TCP/IP model
In the world of computer networking you are constantly hammered about the OSI model and how computer communication fits into that model. But outside of specific legacy uses, nothing runs the OSI suite, everything runs TCP/IP.
Understanding that other protocols are possible is important. Sure, reality doesn't fit neatly into the OSI model, but it gives you a conceptual idea of everything that goes into a networking stack.
So does the TCP/IP model and that is what systems actually use.
Plenty of things don't fit into the TCP/IP model at all. Infiniband, for starters.
Thank you. Didn't know of any non-IP network stack. Got something new to research while commuting.
Another one is fibre channel (not to be confused with just running ethernet over fiber).
Does infiniband run IP?
No
It doest run CLNS either.
Doesn't matter. The OSI model does not stipulate an OSI protocol
This is going to blow your mind but there are other systems out there that do not implement TCP/IP at all.
And they all have their own models to learn.
Don't you mean the OSI model? ISO means International Standards Organisation lol
I'm sticking that to autocorrect.
WELCOME TO THE OFFICE OF SECRET INTELIGENCE SAMPSON!
[Co. Gathers jumps out of the plane without a parachute]
I don't discount your point but coming from the support side, it'll cause confusion to call it a layer 6 issue than a layer 8 issue. Layer 0 issues won't change at least, especially as long as sales gets in the middle of project planning.
the hill i am willing to die on is: FUCK AI. I'll be dead before I let it write a single line of code.
I don't let it wrote code per se but I've found it useful for writing regex for me to paste into notepad++ find/replace commands.
Holy shit, that's a thing you can do? Like a sed type function works in Notepad++?
I bet someone smart could, but i just have Gemini or Claude open on the side where I tell it what I want to do with a regex in NP++ (or Geany now in Linux). Then I paste it into the regex box of the Find/Replace and test it then run it.
Transparency + blur + drop shadow is peak UI design and should remain so for the foreseeable future. It provides depth, which adds visual context. Elements onscreen should not appear flat; our human predator brains are hardwired and physiologically evolved to parse depth information.
Can you give an example?
Im not him, but theres a tiny shadow underneath the cursor on most windows, probably most everything else. Buttons are slightly 3D looking to appear like they pop out.
What of, more specifically?
An image of the 3 concepts together as you deavribe.
Windows 7 is a great example.
Cognitive behavioral therapy/dialectical behavioral therapy are not the universal cure for everything and they need to stop being treated as such
I'll join you on this hill, soldier.
CBT is the only one they've tested, and they tested themselves, and of course they look great. It offloads all success and failure 100% to the victim, and so many failures don't reflect on the process; ever. It resembles a massive sham.
My counsellor friend calls it "sigma-6 for mental health" and notes how it's often not covered by insurance (even outside America's mercenary system) so it's a nice cash cow for the indu$try.
So what are the alternatives? When I think about non-CBT therapy I think of like, Freud asking about problems with papa und penis, which just from a common sense angle seems more questionable.
Somatic focused therapy has been much more helpful and less gaslighty for me, but it's also not right for everyone.
Say you have anxiety that's more top down. You usually aren't feeling anxious, but then you start thinking anxious thoughts and that spirals out of control and now you're an anxious mess on the verge of a panic attack. CBT could make sense for some people in this situation because you're reminding yourself there's nothing to really be anxious about in the moment and redirecting your thoughts to less anxious things.
If your anxiety is more bottom up, you might not even have to think about anything that makes you anxious. Your nervous system is just in a chronic state of activation/hyperdrive, and warning you there's danger even if there's not. You can think calming thoughts all you want but that doesn't usually change the fact that your body is kicked into survival mode.
Instead of trying to redirect your thoughts, you can focus your thoughts on noticing physical sensations and putting a label on the way your body is feeling.
So you wouldn't say "I am safe." You would stop and acknowledge how you're feeling, and acknowledge it's your body's way of trying to communicate danger to keep you alive. You don't want to necessarily act based on that warning (unless you are truly in danger, which is the case sometimes), but instead of just dismissing it, recognize what you're physically feeling. Ok, my heart is beating really fast, my chest is kind of tight and I feel physically unsafe. What are some other physical sensations I feel right now that I know are safe?
A popular one is focusing on your "sit bones" or the way a surface you're sitting on feels beneath you. Or focusing on your posture, if how the floor feels beneath your feet when they're planted flat on the ground. It works surprisingly well to reset/calm your nervous system.
This guy offers a free course of several short videos that are really helpful. I started them last year but let it drop off. Reminds me I need to pick up where I left off and finish them
https://traumaresearchfoundation.org/coming-home-to-the-body-a-short-course-on-trauma-and-mind-body-re-connection-with-matthew-sanford-collection/
Sounds a bit like the mindfulness thing, as well. Thanks!
I can't remember what the original comment said about mindfulness, but it's definitely a part of somatic therapy.
The idea behind it though is to "reset" the nervous system once it's in an activated state. If it's activated because of an anxious thought, then just redirecting your thoughts (CBT) might be enough of a solution.
If your body holds on to something like a traumatic memory or near death experience, sometimes you can be activated by something you're not even consciously aware of (for example, there are certain contexts or feelings your nervous system recognizes even when your mind doesn't). This is where CBT might not be as helpful because the issue never had to do with your conscious thoughts to begin with. Somatic therapy focusing on mindfulness of the sensation though is still mindfulness, just not in the same way as CBT.
Example of bottom up processing: I had a friend who had been on a ventilator in the ICU and eventually recovered, but even a year later she was dealing with all kinds of anxiety that seemed to just pop up out of nowhere. One of the first triggers or activators she recognized was the sensation of thirst triggering her body's memory of the ventilator, which then would then lead to anxious thoughts that could spiral into panic.
An example of the same situation but top down processing: thinking about the ventilator, which would then trigger the memory of how her throat physically felt when she couldn't drink water for several months then triggering the sensation of thirst due to anxiety caused by the conscious thought.
It depends on what it is that's putting you in the activated state. Is it a conscious thought or a "body memory?"
It's popular because it does work for a lot of things, from fear of spiders to eating disorders. Of course they would try it on as many different problems as possible.
Beats the currently popular "that's just the way you are and if it affects other people that's their problem. In fact, you're actually better than other people."-therapy
CBT is just a rip off of psychoanalysis with different words.
Okay, I'm pretty late to the party, but here we go. My field is illustration and art, and especially color theory is something that a lot too often is teached plainly wrong. I think it was in the 1950s when Johannes Itten introduced his book on colortheory. In this book, he states that there are three "Grundfarben" (base colors) that will mix into every color. He explained this model with a color ring that you will still find almost anywhere. This model and the fact that there are three Grundfarben is wrong.
There are different angles from where you can approach color mixing in art, and it always depends on what you want to do. When we speak about colors, we actually mean the experience that we humans have, when light rays fall into our eyes. So, it's actually a perceptual phenomenon, which means it is actually something that has small statistical differences from individual to individual. For example, a greenish blue might be a little bit more green for one person or a little more blue for the other.
Every color, however, has its opposite color. Everybody can test this. Look into a red (not too bright) light for some time and then onto a white wall. The color you will see is the opposite. They will cancel each other out and become white / neutral.
Ittens colormodel, however, is not based in perception. In this model yellow is opposed to violet, which might mix to a neutral color with pigments but not with lightrays. But even that doesn't work a lot of times. I mean, even his book is printed in six colors, even though his three basecolors are supposedly enough to print every color..
In history lot of colormodels have been less correct course. What is so infuriating is that in Ittens case, he just plainly ignored the correct colortheory that already existed (by Albert Henry Munsell) and created his own with whatever rules that he believes are correct.
Even today, this model and rules are teached at art schools and you can see his color circle plastered all over the internet.
Tldr: Johannes Ittens colormodel is wrong, even though it's almost everywhere.
(Added tldr)
Fun fact:
OKLab which was created recently by Björn Ottosson as a hobby project, is a pretty accurate perceptual colorspace. It is open Source and has been adapted by Photoshop for Black and White conversion.
I kinda hope painting apps will also impliment it as a standard model for colopickers.
Can you post examples of what correct and incorrect models look like?
Itten
Munsell
The colormodel of munsell, for example, takes into account that some light waves have the same energy, they are experienced in a different brightness. >Helmholz-Kohlrausch effect
The Color model is dependent on what you want to do with it but in Ittens case, it doesn't even help with pigment mixing nor as a perceptual representation.
I'm sorry I've really tried to understand what your position is but I can't wrap my head around it. I find this really interesting but I don't understand it, are you willing to help?
Itten is "normal" RYB color wheel, yes?
Can you ELI5 how Munsell is different? The graphic you linked pretty much looks like it showed the same RYB archetype, with some layers and different levels of brightness... Isn't that just RYB with extra steps?
Here's some things that might help us meet in the middle:
-I understand radio/light/EM spectrum/frequencies/amplitudes
-i struggle with concepts of hue, contrast, brightness, luminosity, flux
-i am not an artist at all. I have pretty strong aphantasia - I'm not sure if that's relevant but it seems like it might be in this case so I'll mention it here
Sure. Colors are a huge topic and I'm not a physicist. There are a lot of colorsystems, and I probably don't know half of it, but I try to break it down.
There is no real "normal" colormodel. We just sort colors on a chart that fits our needs the best.
The color model you will see most often is, for instance, in Photoshop the HSV model. (Hue, saturation, value). It's good but has its own flaws with the color brightness.
In Ittens and Munsells case, you can see a small difference in the colors that are opposite of each other, in both colorwheels. In munsels case, yellow is opposed to indigo. In ittens case yellow is opposed to violet.
itten
Munsell
That's a small but significant difference. Opposing colors should combine into grey and not into other colors. In ittens case they don't.
(Upper is correct, lower is Itten)
Munsell is closer to a perceptive color space that takes into consideration that colors have different value and chroma levels, and vivid yellow is brighter than a vivid indigo.
Itten only used the flat ring model and lost the value and brightness of colors.
Now I compare those two because they are from the same time period, and Ittens model even came a little later.
Munsells color model even holds today.
Thanks for entertaining my struggle. I get it now.
When I referred to itten as "normal" I was making reference to its prevalence (which seems to be something that peeves you, given its inaccuracy), but I think it's so prevalent because it's so damn simple. I had to read and re-read your posts and look at your graphics in order to understand what the various layers were signifying, but the flat itten wheel is easy as pie to comprehend to the point that it's taught to children in preschool. I've never really needed any more depth of understanding in my day to day life since then.
Like many models, the simplest are often very inaccurate on a technical level. As a layman the difference between indigo and violet and purple and blue green or whatever are unremarkable in most cases, so the slight yet important difference of which is across from yellow on the wheel doesn't seem significant, until you showed an example of how they mix.
I can see why it bugs you if you have experience in a field that uses color theory as part of its toolkit. For me I've always just needed to know the bare minimum of RGB vs CMYK or whatever.
What would you prefer to see, that there's just better education about colors once people are old enough to get some more nuance?
Glad I could help.
That is true, and I get that it should be simple for children. But that doesn't mean that the foundation has to be incorrect.
Just using the simplified version of a correct layout like I showed you should be the way to go in this case.
Of course, most people won't need to know what's colorsystems there are. Itten is none of the less still teached by artschools even though it is this incorrect simplified version of a color space. At that advanced stage, there is no need to stick to a simplified version, let alone a one that doesn't lead to correct results.
Ittens model is just a remnant of its time. And it keeps being shared because of that simplification. But hey, that how history sometimes goes.
I think that's pretty crazy that itten is taught in art schools of all places, except maybe as an example of how models have different strengths and weaknesses, to spark a deeper acknowledgement of the color space in general (as this conversation did for me).
The good news is that now there's two of us. Cheers!
A plain text physical password notebook is actually more secure than most people think. It's also boomer-compatible. My folks understand that things like their social security cards need to be kept secure and out of public view. The same can be applied to a physical password notebook. I also think a notebook can be superior to the other ways of generating and storing passwords, at least in some cases.
But will you be diligent enough to make a new password for every single website using this method?
I understand, somewhat, this being discouraged at work but I agree that doing it for personal passwords with the notebook at home is fine. I've met people opposed to ever writing down passwords and I think it's just a rote reaction based on work training.
If you have a notebook at home with all your passwords then somebody needs to break into your house to get them, which is pretty good security.
Workplace safety is quickly turning from a factual and risk-based field into a vibes-based field, and that's a bad thing for 95% of real-world risks.
To elaborate a bit: the current trend in safety is "Safety Culture", meaning "Getting Betty to tell Alex that they should actually wear that helmet and not just carry it around". And at that level, that's a great thing. On-the-ground compliance is one of the hardest things to actually implement.
But that training is taking the place of actual, risk-based training. It's all well and good that you feel comfortable talking about safety, but if you don't know what you're talking about, you're not actually making things more safe. This is also a form of training that's completely useless at any level above the worksite. You can't make management-level choices based on feeling comfortable, you need to actually know some stuff.
I've run into numerous issues where people feel safe when they're not, and feel at risk when they're safe. Safety Culture is absolutely important, and feeling safe to talk about your problems is a good thing. But that should come AFTER being actually able to spot problems.
I'm always in favour of actually testing safety stuff.
Does that fall arrest line actually work? Go walk over to that way until you can't.
Can this harness hold you without cutting circulation off to your legs? Go sit in it for an hour and see.
The mining industry emphasizes safely culture, just like what you said, and a lot of it is focused on wearing PPE.
There are still too many preventable deaths and accidents.
I think safety is talked about and vibe-based to please investors.
Dynamic typing sucks.
Type corrosion is fine, structural typing is fine, but the compiler should be able to tell if types are compatible at compile time.
This is one of those things like a trick picture where you can't see it until you do, and then you can't unsee it.
I started with C/C++ so typing was static, and I never thought about it too much. Then when I started with Python I loved the dynamic typing, until it started to cause problems and typing hints weren't a thing back then. Now it's one of my largest annoyances with Python.
A similar one is None type, seems like a great idea, until it's not, Rust solution is much, much better. Similar for error handling, although I feel less strongly about this one.
I usually take these holiday weeks off to learn a new language or framework, and started to take a peek into Python, I had it on the back burner way too long. Got to the dynamic variable types and my heart sunk... I couldn't continue.
Maybe I should take a third attempt at Rust.
Honestly modern python is not that bad because of the typing hints and checks you can run on them nowadays. Also it's worth noting that python has very strong types, so it's not illy willy magical types, and while it is possible to use it like that it's normally not encouraged (unlike other languages).
That being said, if you haven't learnt Rust I strongly encourage you to read the book and go through the rustling exercises. Honestly while still a new and relatively nieche language, it fixes so many of the issues that exist in other languages that I think it will slowly take over everything. Sure. It's slower to write, but you avoid so much hassle on maintenance afterwards.
i hadn't heard of the rustlings before. looks neat, might be what i need to finally learn rust properly
Coming from a background where all the datatypes are fixed and static (C, PLCs) it took me so very long to get used to python's willy nilly variables where everything just kinda goes, until it doesn't. Then it breaks, but would've been fine if we just damn knew what these variables where
Now my brain just goes "it's all just strings"
Dynamic typing does kinda smell like primitive obsession, now that you've brought it to my attention lol
Do you mean type coercion?
From my perspective, dynamic typing IS type corrosion!
Type coercion = Allow types to be converted to other types automatically to perform some operations like comparison.
Type corrosion = some non-standard condescending term to say that dynamic typing has no proper rigid types?
It was obviously a typo
It was a typo, but I also wanted to add that type coercion is not dynamic typing, the coercion can be done statically during compile time, so it could not be the 2nd one, even if it wasn't a typo
No it's not, they're completely different concepts. In C/C++ lingo Dynamic typing is having every variable be a
void *whereas type coercion is implementing conversion functions for your types to allow casting between types, e.g. having a temperature class that can be casted to a double (or from it).This is a function with dynamic typing and no type coercion in C/C++:
This is the same function with type coercion and no dynamic typing in C/C++:
I'm making a Star Wars joke based on a typo. I know what type coercion is. The joke is that dynamic typing is corroded and disgusting to me. The Star Wars reference being Anakin saying from his perspective the Jedi were evil.
Dyac
YESSSSSSSSSSSSS. You are so valid for this. Static typing is so so so so so useful.
Its not possible to have objects that are statically typed.
Wut
What are you talking about? What do you think C/C++/Rust/Java do?
Any tolerance on a part less than +/- 0.001 isn't real. If I can change the size of the part enough to blow it out of tolerance by putting my hand on it and putting some of my body temperature into it then it's just not real.
I used to work with those kinds of tolerances. Sensors for supersonic vehicles definitely need them and the tools to make them as well. Our tolerances were as tight as 0.01 arcseconds in rotations of motors smaller then my hand.
That's the tolerance on paper, but the dude was doubting that you actually achieve that tolerance in the field. How can you when (using your supersonic aircraft example) you need to deal with temperature fluctuations more than 100c, not to mention pressure changes and sheer forces, which all deform the part?
Were they temperature controlled deep in the craft? On the leading edge, things can get up to foundry temperatures and so thermal expansion can reach the percents.
I guess you could design something to self-compensate for that, like the old gridiron pendulums, but that's a big ask on top of a task that already sounds daunting.
Everything was temp and humidity controlled in the factory and delivery. After that I don't know. I know when we branched out and did control sticks we did thermal cycles where someone held it with 2 hands running on a treadmill to simulate the exhertion of a pilot.
It's a rule, every high-tech workplace does something low-tech and stupid looking. Last time it came up it was somebody handling radioactive samples with tape on a stick. (It was long enough and they yelled for everyone to stay away, you see)
0.001 what? Meters?
Inches I reckon. .001= one thou
Yes, most likely. Although that's a cursed industry-specific unit, right up there with carats and hands.
apples
I suppose if it's something that's going to sit in a temperature controlled compartment or room you'll know it, although those applications exist.
You usually hear finish considered separate of tolerance in machining, but if your making an optical component they're actually not, as well.
IT restrictions should be much more conservatively applied (at least in comparison to what's happening in my neck of the woods). Hear me out.
Of course, if you restrict something in IT, you have a theoretical increase in security. You're reducing the attack surface in some way, shape or form. Usually at the cost of productivity. But also at the cost of the the employees' good will towards the IT department and IT security. Which is an important aspect, since you will never be able to eliminate your attack surface, and employees with good will can be your eyes and ears on the ground.
At my company I've watched restrictions getting tighter and tighter. And yes, it's reduced the attack surface in theory, but holy shit has it ruined my colleagues' attitude towards IT security. "They're constantly finding things to make our job harder." "Honestly, I'm so sick of this shit, let's not bother reporting this, it's not my job anyway." "It will be fine, IT security is taking care of it anyway." "What can go wrong when are computers are so nailed shut?" It didn't used to be this way.
I'm not saying all restrictions are wrong, some definitely do make sense. But many of them have just pissed off my colleagues so much that I worry about their cooperation when shit ends up hitting the fan. "WTF were all these restrictions for that castrated our work then? Fix your shit yourself!"
You pay me to admin 400 servers on a couple million dollars worth of hardware. Let me install a fucking app on my own machine without 4 levels of bullshit.
Me and the IT admin in my previous job had this understanding, as I dealt with field hardware, and he dealt with the "normal" IT stuff.
Once a merger caused the corporate requirement of only allowing whitelisted apps to run, my laptop was simply disappeared from the requirement list. It made it easier for the both of us. I could be on the other side of the world in sudden need of running some proprietary BS software that had to be whitelisted, and nobody wanted me to have to wake someone up to whitelist stuff.
When you deal with network hardware that cost more than most PCs, and the server clusters cost more than a house, some leeway should be allowed.
Until you install solarwinds between 2015 and 2020......
All the good will in the world won't make up for ignorance. Most people know basically next to nothing about IT security, and will just randomly click shit to make the annoying box go away and/or get to where they think they want to go. And if that involves installing a random virus they'll happily do it, and be annoyed that it requires their password.
A major part of that is, I think, that desktop OSes are, "by default, insecure" against local software. Like, you install a program on the system, it immediately has access to all of your data.
That wasn't an unreasonable model in the era when computers weren't all persistently connected to a network, but now, all it takes is someone getting one piece of malware on the computer, and it's trivial to exfiltrate all your data. Yes, there are technologies that let you stick software in a sandbox, on desktop OSes, but it's hard and requires technology knowledge. It's not a general solution for everyone.
Mobile OSes are better about this in that they have a concept of limiting access that an app has to only some data, but it's still got a lot of problems; I think that a lot of software shouldn't have network access at all, some information shouldn't be readily available, and there should be defense-in-depth, so that a single failure doesn't compromise everything. I really don't think that we've "solved" this yet, even on mobile OSes.
This one definitely drives me nuts, but these days I don't see how else to keep systems safe. It would be nice and probably be pretty effective if you could just prove to your IT team that you're not a moron to get reduced restrictions though. Most people I imagine would fail or not even make the effort, so you could be reasonably sure the risk was minimized this way.
Sure, but the reason isn’t always just security.
We have government contracts and want more. But to get those, they insist on us doing a bunch of security things.
So it sucks for the users, but if we don’t implement the restrictions, we lose the contracts and thus the income.
And as a side benefit, holy shit we are pretty secure. Next annual pentest soon and I’m expecting good things from it!
There are a load of things in IT where using a processor is the wrong choice, and using an FPGA instead would have made a lot of problems a non-issue.
Is that controversial? I've always assumed people avoid FPGAs just because they're unfamiliar with them.
Tell that to the people who think they will soon replace this expensive and complicated FPGA stuff with something running on a cheap MPU programmed by an intern. For thirty years now...
Yikes.
Welcome to my world.
I think it’s because FPGAs are an intermediate to just making your own ASIC.
If you're at a scale where making a new ASIC is your go-to, congratulations on your job at Google or Apple. I don't even know if FaceMeta would do that. Designing and founding a new chip is a whole thing.
Agreed. If you're not moving hundreds of thousands if units, there probably is no return in investment. Those things have expensive up front costs.
I wish FPGAs and other more purpose built and purpose suited options were available in my IT equipment. They can do amazing shit, better and more efficiently. Just wasn't ever available to use for me at least.
One problem is that programming an FPGA is a rare skill. A lot of even good programmers simply don't get their heads around how they tick.
Coming from a digital hardware background, an FPGA was amazingly straightforward, so I'm one of the rare breeds who does both FPGAs and microprocessors.
That's awesome! I bet that gives you some really good insights to the two platforms.
Ebikes are motorbikes, not bycicles.
Not saying they aren't fun or useful at times, but they shouldn't be treated as a bicycles.
I don't care if the motor engages using a button, twist grip, your feet or twitching your nose, it is a motor and exceeds your natural body power.
There is no goddamn reason to continue to use magneto ignition in aircraft engines. I've been a Rotax authorized service technician for 13 years, I have never seen the digital CDI installed on a Rotax 900 series engine fail in any way, and you've still got two. Honestly I believe a CDI module is more reliable and less prone to failure than a mechanical magneto. The only reason why we're still using pre-WWII technology in modern production aircraft engines is societal rot.
Professionally: Waterfall release cycle kills innovation, and whoever advocates it should be fired on the spot. MVP releases and small, incremental changes and improvements are the way to go.
Personally: Don't use CSS if tables do what you need. Don't use Javascript for static Web pages. Don't overcomplicate things when building Web sites.
As a web dev, please don't. Use a table if you have data that should be (re)presented. Don't use tables for layout. Please use semantic HTML elements, for the love of accessibility.
Use tables for presenting tabular data, not for layout of non-tabular data.
If you'd put it in a relational db or spreadsheet, then tables is fine.
THE AMOUNT OF TIMES I SEE PEOPLE USE A TABLE WHEN BULLET POINTS WOULD WORK IS TOO DAMN HIGH. Tables SUCK is you're putting long paragraphs randomly in specific places and not others.
It’s also bad for accessibility.
Maybe not technical, but teaching is weird.
If people aren't having fun/engaged they're not learning much. People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. It's so frustrating to come across someone who writes the standards you're supposed to follow and they are the most boring and fake teacher you've experienced.
If you don't understand that development, security, and operations are all one job you will constantly make crap and probably point at some other team to make excuses about it, but it will be actually be your fault.
Programs have to run. They have to be able to change to meet needs. Implementing working security measures is one of those needs.
The amount of times I've had to slap devs hands that wanted to just disable security or remind security that just shutting it down is denial of service is crazy. If it can't deploy or is constantly down or uses stupid amount of resources it's also worthless no matter what it looked like for split second you ran on on the dev machine.
The next patch isn't going to fucking fix it if no one that writes patches knows about the damn issue. Work arounds are hidden technical debt and you have to assume that they will fucking break on some update later. If you are not updating because it breaks your unreported workarounds you will get ignored by the devs at some point, and they are right in doing so.
If you depend on something communicate with the team that works on it. We can send a fucking petabyte of info around the world and to the moon and back before some people write a fucking Ticket, email, or even a IM. Look dumb and asking the stupid question rather than being an actual idiot and leaving something broken for the next decade. We're all dumb, it's why we built computers, get over it and just talk to people. If you really struggle with, don't just communicate, try to over communicate, say an obvious thing now and again just to keep the dialogue open and test that you really on the same page.
That's my rant/hill borne from ulcers supporting crappy IT orgs and having to overcome my own shortcomings to actually say something in channels where things can actually change and not just griping in private about it.
I love that.
I don't know if the basic idea that it's okay to look dumb will ever catch on, though. There's a lot of self interest and direct ego motive going against it.
And it's a balance too that self interest and ego gets alot done too. It's just getting over protective of ego or too self interested (very hard in an economy where a lot employers are straight up conmen) that leads to these pain points.
I do find in the rooms I've had the pleasure of being with the smartest people in a field were always full of reasonably humble people.
Technisation and standardisation are good for the EMS sector.
The whole "it was better when we could do what we want and back then we had only real calls with sicker people and everything was good" is fucking aweful and hurting the profession.
Look, you fucking volunteer dick, I know you do this for 10 years longer than me (and I do it for 25 now),but unlike you I did it full-time and probably had more shifte in one year than you had in your life. Now my back is fucked because back then there was no "electrohydraulic stretcher", no stair chair, the ventilator was twice as heavy (and could basically nothing), the defibrillator weighted so much we often had to switch carrying it after two floors up.
And we had just as many shit calls,but got actually attacked worse because the shit 2kg radios were shit and had next to zero coverage indoors, and so had cellphones which led to you being unable to even call for backup.
And of course we had longer shifts,needed to work more hours and the whole job market was even more fucked.
"But we didn't need this and that,we looked at the patient". Yeah,go fuck yourself. MUCH more people died or took damage from that. So many things were not seen. And it was all accepted as "yeah, that's how life is".
So fuck everyone in this field and their nostalgia.
In the medical system here, there is a trend toward imaging and other tests but no actual examination of the patient.
I have a friend whose injury didn't look too bad on MRI. But a lesser scan (CT?) they don't value as much showed the actual problem and confirmed the complaint. Our greater trust for the new hotness, and discounting tools we needed to use before the new exam tools even when the patient begs, is not a perfect solution.
It seems we could be doing both and getting a better understanding.
I totally agree with everything you say about the heavy tools and bad radios - family was in rural EMS, and the bodily wear and tear seems to be prevalent among all the old peers.
People are idiots and it's the designers' duty to remove opportunities for an idiot to hurt themselves up and just short of impacting function.
if you're using modern fabrication techniques, a couple 10uf mlcc capacitors in small packages are just as good as traditional decade capacitors (10uf,1uf,0.1uf) for decoupling in pretty much every situation, and you need to worry about less varieties on your bill of materials
Usually it was a tradeoff with the voltage, but just checked and MLCC caps have quite high V limit! Long time I haven't done any analog design but got a chuckle seeing that micro is still typed as lowercase "u" :)
mlccs can also be run right up to their voltage limits without needing a huge derating
for high frequency response the main determining factor is actually the package size!
I still call pf 'puffs'
If people used a language that actually leverages the strengths of dynamic typing, they wouldn't dislike it so much.
I encourage every programmer to build a Smalltalk program from the ground up while it's running the entire time. It really is a joy
Should also try programming in Rockstar so you can actually say you are a rockstar developer.
https://codewithrockstar.com/
Lisp works this way too. An editor can provide completions, documentation, and the like by introspection of the running program. Experimental code can be tested immediately against live state.
I'm puzzled that this approach isn't more common.
The problem with dynamic typing is not one that can be solved, even with a live running program you might not be hitting the edge case where you're passing a wrong type.
It's fine for small stuff, but when you're developing a piece of software with hundreds or thousands of classes, functions, and APIs it's impossible to mentally keep track of everything. And adding a type checker is tangential to overriding all of the benefits of a dynamic typing system.
I use, say, bash quite happily. But I will also come down pretty firmly on the side of static typing for large software packages. It lets software handle a bunch of rigorous checking that otherwise eats up human time.
give me a job or im dead how about that hill
un(der)employed solidarity :(
Take the time to do it right the first time but also don't waste time if it doesn't add value.
Having a process is great but if the process exceeds the value then the process not only harms profit margins but also erodes morale. If the reason a process exists is to counter bad behavior then it's an employee problem not a process problem.
Open office floorplans are a terrible idea!
Work from home shouldn't be considered a given based on the job tasks but a privilege and benefit extended to those employees that have shown the discipline and reliability to work from home. But the in office requirement shouldn't be forced on everyone just to satisfy a "butts in seat policy" or a managers insecurity.
Modern PLCs are indistinguishable from IPCs with an RTOS and there's no reason I shouldn't be able to use a proper language for them - with a stdlib and external library support. But manufacturers defined the term and have the industry hostage so you have to buy semi functional libraries and can't use git, unit testing or other automation.
But they're not Real Time
Well they're more stable and predictable than software running on a regular OS, at least, however you want to call it.
Don't cost-optimize people's homes. Just don't.
The amount of times I've gone to a maintenance job with a description "people are cold", only to see a plaque on the wall stating that this building has been optimized by Company X is actually infuriating.
And the worst thing is that they inject their proprietary, remote control system on top of the original automation. This means that I can't change anything without literally reprogramming the entire site.
So I'm standing there, trying to figure out how to tell an 80yo lady "you're cold because the building managers want to save some money" without going on an anti-capitalist rant. This has had a success rate of around 30%.
Do not power law fit your process data for predictive models. No. Stop. Put the keyboard down. Your model will almost certainly fail to extrapolate beyond the training range. Instead, think for at least two seconds about the chemistry and the process, maybe review your kinetics textbook, and only then may you fit to a physics-based model for which you will determine proper statistical significance. Poor fit? Too bad, revise your assumptions or reconsider whether your "data" are really just noise.
Always run qNMR with an internal standard if you are using it to determine purity. And, as a corollary, do not ignore unidentified peaks. Yes, even if it "has always been that way".
DOE models almost certainly tell you less than you think they do, especially when cross-terms are involved, or when the effects are categorical, or when running a fractional factorial design...
Snapshot tests suck. That's a test that stores the dom (or I guess any json serializable thing) and when you run the test again, compares what you have now to what it has saved.
No one is going to carefully examine a 300 line json diff. They're just going to say "well I updated the file so it makes sense it changed" and slap the update button.
Theoretically you could only feed it very small things, but if that's the case you could also just assert on what's important yourself.
Snapshots don't encode intent. They make everything look just as important as everything else. And then hotshot developers think they have 100% coverage
Your favorite AI enabled LLM does a very, very good job of simulating language tests based on previous tests and there's no reason at all not to use it to study and prepare.
It can write you a poem, it can't write you a play.
It can't write you anything that hasn't been written a million times before, but it can give you a paragraph and tell you to find the verbs, and then mark the exercise to a shocking level of accuracy. It can explain what you did wrong and give accurate examples and details. Then you can say "I don't get it...I still don't get it" a hundred times and it will try and try to explain it to you, endlessly, and it will never get frustrated or impatient.
More like it can write you a poem but it won't make you a poet.
Abilify is a beautiful long term maintenance med but wholly inappropriate for an acutely agitated and combative patient.
Do it via an actual text editor like Notepad++ to clear out all the bullshit.
I think you can do ctrl shift v in some programs to strip down to text only
I hate Rust's syntax.
I don't think an aesthetics opinion counts as a technical hill to die on.
Look, It's a silly post. Let them die on any hill they want.
Ooh, a meta hill. I like it.
I do ameuter music production, one hill I will die on is there is no right way to mix a track of music it is entirely subjective and mixing a track of music is way more creative of a practice then some faceious salesman make it out online
Efficient code beats easy code, regardless of resources.
Isn't it like saying "a fast car is faster than a cheap car"
By efficient I mean, well, efficient, non-bloated.
By resources I mean CPU, RAM, storage, network, etc.
A dirty hack that exists now is infinitely better than a properly developed tool that has gone through all stages of approval and quality control at some theoretical point in the future.
My shitty report.pl script was heavily frowned upon when I put it on the production servers. Not only was it an undocumented script, but there was going to be a "proper" tool for that soon. Well, the proper tool never arrived and now three years later everyone is using my script because we are all too lazy to compile a list of warnings manually.
I always tell people "There is nothing more permanent that a temporary hack that works". It also means that sometimes I will refuse the hack because I know ut will become permanent.
I think it depends on how dirty it is and how easy it is to replace. A decent solution now is better than waiting for the perfect solution that may never come.
Jack it together now but then a Italy run the proper fix. Don't leave dirty hacks in production or test.
Your Polish real estate maintenance script? 😆
A perl script which collects some basic stuff from a few servers in a cluster to get some statistics and compile a quick overview of things to keep an eye on.
I got it, I was making a joke about your script name showing as a clickable link to a website of a Polish property maintenance company
I think too much safety is annoying and stupid. To me safety is often about mindset. I think companies like to force a bunch of stupid safety rules on people so they can try to get out of being sued for doing really dumb shit like hiring drug addicts or people with zero experience to do dangerous jobs. I think it's really insulting that as an adult, you have to be uncomfortable all day and deal with stupid stuff to work at a job you are being massively underpaid for anyways.
Safety is important sometimes. You should definitely be careful around machines and wear safety glasses sometimes, but for some reason the people who do most of the work at companies often end up being abused by shitty companies who want to lobby the government for tax breaks, but never on behalf of their workers.
It's quite sad how people spend decades wearing uncomfortable clothing working long hours, and have to subject themselves to humiliation by wearing stupid and ugly clothes simply to get a bit of sympathy from our extremely materially obsessed society and our toxic capitalist system.
Commercial providers for space programs cost more money than if NASA just hired civil servants to do a lot of the work. Big corps just take longer, then don't want to share development info that taxpayers funded, making integration into other elements a huge safety problem that can't be fully resolved due to the protection of the provider's intellectual property.
Then they get shit workers that put up with job instability caused by a fickle Congress. This has gotten progressively worse for decades, and now NASA is reduced to a corporate subsidy program for parasitic billionaires and huge companies that don't deliver well. Nothing like someone asking me if a design will function properly with another, and me basically saying I have no fucking clue because everything is a goddamn secret.
NASA's commercial provider obsession was bought by lobbyists, and it's a fucking terrible idea. I'll die on that hill.
"installing a library" should not exist as a concept. A library is either so essential that the OS needs it (and therefore it is already installed), or is not essential enough that each program can have its own copy of the library.
"But I want all my 3 programs that use this random library to be updated at the same time in case a security flaw is found in it!" Is no excuse for the millions of hours wasted looking for missing dependencies or dependencies not available for your system. If that library does have a security vulnerability your package manager should just find your 3 programs that use it and update their copy of the library.
Efficiency out the window...
I don't care about 10KB or even 100KB of disk space per installed program if it saves humanity the collective millions of hours wasted on .dll/.so issues.
If your program needs libcirnfucb to run, it should be in the same directory as your program, and you are responsible for putting it there for me. No other program in my computer needs libcirnfucb, there's no efficiency gains and now I have to go to some random website from the 90s and find where they put the damn download link and now I have to learn all about how libcirnfucb manages their versions and if I am in the correct webpage, because the project is abandonware that was formed 10 years ago and now it is in another 90s looking website that has a name completely unrelated to libcirnfucb.
Some care and there are, hence that approach. You might like snap, appimage or that works-on-my-computer-in-a-box thing called docker.
Or GoboLinux.
But what if we realize that a library is so essential it should be included in the OS, but the OS is old and already running, so now we need to install it, so everyone can make use of it.
Then just install it? I don't see what's the issue here.
Only issue is that you said installing a library should not exist as a concept.
Not by the user. By the OS.
Software engineering: Don't script stuff! Seriously, just stop, it's a huge waste of everybody's time. I don't fucking care if you think mygitwrapper.sh is the bomb. I want you to know your git commands by heart or just learn to use the damn history on your terminal.
Scripting is only allowed if it's part of the project's infrastructure. Stop faffing about.
Are you a fan of curl?
https://justuse.org/curl/
Best lib on the planets.
The problem isn't mygitwrapper.sh. You need to know those git commands to write that wrapper. The problem is people taking someone else's mygitwrapper.sh and using that instead of learning git.
I had this fight at work once. Someone wanted to write a makefile to invoke pytest. I didn't want to do that because I wanted people to know how pytest works, so when something goes wrong they know they can do
-vvor--pdbor whatever.Scripts that cover trivial steps and obscure stuff people should know, I'm not a fan of.
Agree but I’d add “unnecessarily” or something, because yeah many common aliases and smaller convenience functions offer meager cumulative time savings in trade for the skill atrophy, but script files can also contain seriously lengthy and/or complex logic that would simply be counterproductive to attempt typing line-by-line into a terminal without any mistakes, especially for scripts that are run often.
Every day I have to open a VM as I turn on the computer. I could go find and open Virtual box, then select the VM and open it. Why would I do that when I can open the terminal and run a script that does that in a single action. Then I have to SSH into that machine that always has the same IP. Why should I have to type the IP every time?
Scripts are good when used correctly. I don't need to know what vboxmanage to run to do whatever I want, I just needed to search it once and remove it from my brain.
Kinda unrelated but:
I don't think you should know how to do everything from the git CLI. For 99% of use cases, the IDE already knows how to do what you want to do, with a simple button. For the rest, just search for the git command when you need it.
Electric vehicles are not a solution for environmental problems, not now at least, they pollute when building the batteries and, unless nuclear energy is widespread, they will be powered by coal/gas making them pretty polluting. They will be a solution only when we have cleaner energy available.
Bonus: people should stop being lazy and learn to setup a server infrastructure instead of using "the cloud". Your data are safer, you save money and give less power to gargantuan cloud companies.
Weren't there multiple researches concluding that even an EV powered by a coal plant is better for the environment than an ICE vehicle?
If you tell me gasoline yeah probably (diesel generator to power electric motors is done in big ships), caol I highly doubt it.
But apart from pollution per se, an electric car used everyday would require at least 50% of a household power budget to charge (2-3 kW). If every single ICE vehicle would be immediately swapped to electric, I doubt many countries would be able to cope with the increased power consumption. That's why we need more energy infrastructure before a full switch. Or you know, less cars and more public transport.
I do like the idea of less cars, more public transport, and better power infrastructure. Can we have all 3?
If I remember correctly, 1/4 if microplastics (or was it plastics in the ocean) are from car tires... Tires that EVs also have.
And brakes as well. EV are, for the most part, greenqashing designed to sell you more cars you wouldn't need in a better designed world.
EV's are harder on tires (generally due to increased weight), but much easier on brakes.( Regenerative braking mean the pads/drums are rarely engaged under normal usage)
If change happens here, I'm pretty sure that it's going to be in the form of some sort of zero-administration standardized server module that a company sells that has no phone-home capability and that you stick on your local network.
Society probably isn't going to make everyone a system and network administrator, in much the same way that it's not going to make everyone a medical doctor or an arborist. Would be expensive to provide everyone with that skillset.
My "everyone" was a bit too wide I think. I'm not talking about everyday people of course. I'm talking about 50+ employees companies, that would save money by hiring a sysadmin and running their own servers. I know of companies with thousands of employees that pay millions on Azure and AWS and have no in-house infrastructure. That's how you get to Amazon running half of the internet
Fossil fuel also pollutes when being extracted and refined, and probably more than batteries being produced, and batteries are only produced once.
Changing your car for an EV is not good for the environment, but considering getting an EV for your next car is.
Plus, we should also migrate the power generation to renewable sources, claiming EV cars aren't worth it because power generation is still fossil in your country is similar to saying we shouldn't recycle because companies don't.