Scubabear68

Wherever Robert Heinlein is right now, he is shaking his head sadly. Told ya so......

I moved largely away from Microsoft products in 2010 personally, and 2015 or so professionally. Just came back to them last year for a client.

What I am seeing are two really disturbing patterns: 1) really, really bad stuff that has been there for decades is still there, weighing everything down, for "backwards compatibility", and 2) a lot of horrible fluff and nonsense everywhere.

#1 is pretty self-explanatory, as I am editing docs in Word I am finding my muscle memory circa 1999 or so still works with it due to all of the formatting bugs that still exist.

#2 I saw with Windows 11 and the crazy adverts everywhere, seemingly random UI choices, half-broken or implemented tools and applications, and now random UI buttons thrown everywhere.

The 1-2 punch is devastating and makes using Microsoft products 10x more depressing than it was 10-15 years ago, and it wasn't a happy fest then either for me.

So to me, AI is just "more of the same" with Microsoft. It is more random shit thrown on the wall to see what will stick.

If they are not actually trading, they are almost certainly getting a lot wrong and I would not trust this one bit.

This article resonates strongly. I am consulting right now to a group that has enormous struggles technically, but they are all self-inflicted wounds that come down to people and process.

Management claims to want to understand and fix the problem, and their "fixes" reveal the real problems. Fix 1 - schedule a lot of group meetings for twice a week. After week 1, management drops off and fails to show up anymore for most of them. The meetings go off track. The answer? More meetings!

We now have that meeting daily. And have even less attendance.

Fix 2 - we don't know what people are doing, let's create dashboards. A slapdash, highly incorrect and problematic dashboard is created. It doesn't matter, because none of the managers ever checks the dashboard. The big boss hears we are still behind, and commandeers a random product person to be his admin assistant and has her maintain several spreadsheets in semi-secret tracking everyone's progress.

This semi-secret spreadsheet becomes non-secret and people find a million and one problems with it (not surprising as the commandeered admin assistant nee product person was pulling the data from all sorts of random areas with little direction with little coordination with others). We then have the spreadsheet war of various managers having their own spreadsheets.

Fix 3 - we are going to have The Source of Truth for product intake and ongoing development, with a number of characteristics (and these are generally not terrible characteristics). These are handed off to a couple of junior people with no experience to implemented with zero feedback. The net result is we still don't have a Source of Truth, but more of an xkcd situation that now we have 4 or 5 sources of truth strung together with scripts, duct tape, bandaids and prayer.

This continues on and on over years. Ideas are put forth, some good, some bad, some indifferent, but none of them matter because the leaders lack the ability to followup or demonstrate even basic understanding of what our group actually does.

It is truly soul crushing, but in this jobs environment, what are you going to do?

Agree. Those parameters are incredibly artificial bullshit.

This will probably get me voted into oblivion, but reading your posts here, I wonder how you would do if accommodations were taken away from you entirely in your elite university.

Maybe I am completely wrong, but I suspect rather strongly you would do just fine based on what I am reading here.

And before people flame me into oblivion, in addition to my own kids I know lots of others with significant learning disabilities. They have one thing in common: they don't write like this.

I am aware, my daughter has Dyslexia.

But this is not a thread about elementary school accommodations, it is about university level accommodations.

The question is why the author implies he needs the same or similar accommodations at 20ish that he did at 5ish.

Or does he?

So you are a long way from Kindergarten to an elite university. I mention this because it is odd to me that you picked your 4 to 5 year old self to validate why you are getting accommodations in your teens/twenties at a self-described elite university.

My own kids have some issues and varying levels of accommodations, but those have evolved and lessened over time. As you would hope they would! You seem to imply your conditions have not really improved and you need same/similar accommodations now as you did 15 years ago?

Sorry, I am trying not to be offensive here but I am genuinely confused.

Digging around, OK that makes sense. But even in the context of C and C++, there are often more ways the compiler can't help you than ways it can.

The most common are on function calls involving array operations and pointers, but a lot of it has to do with the C/C++ header and linker setup as well. C and C++ authors should not blithely assume the compiler is doing an awesome job, and in my experience, they don't.

I liked the idea behind this post, but really the author fairly widely missed the mark in my opinion.

The extent to which you can "fool the optimizer" is highly dependent on the language and the code you're talking about. Python is a great example of a language that is devilishly hard to optimize for precisely because of the language semantics. C and C++ are entirely different examples with entirely different optimization issues, usually which have to do with pointers and references and what the compiler is allowed to infer.

The point? Don't just assume your compiler will magically make all your performance issues go away and produce optimal code. Maybe it will, maybe it won't.

As always, the main performance lessons should always be "1) Don't prematurely optimize", and "2) If you see perf issues, run profilers to try to definitively nail where the perf issue is".

Here in NJ, I live in a small town of around 7,000 or so. We have a Township Committee form of government, five committee people with one nominally as Mayor (but really the same as everyone else). They get a yearly stipend of around $5,000 a year or a little less.

It sounds crazy but our whole muni budget is under $5 million. We have almost no infrastructure other than roads (98% of housing is on well water and septic systems, there are no street lights or sewers or the like).

A lot of municipal government in the US is like this. Very small with near-volunteers running everything.

You are right that this rules out a lot of people who can't afford to effectively volunteer for local government. I think mostly this is a good thing.

I agree that blind trusts don't fix everything, but it is a start.

The situation right now isn't just corrupting, congress-critters are labeled as idiots by their own if they don't actively take advantage of "perks" like free stock tips that would be illegal in any other context.

The "everyone does it" excuse is what keeps this house of cards up. And it is not partisan, both D's and R's inevitably become rich if they stay in the house for more than a couple of terms.

Oh please.

Anyone looking to actually do something interesting with a piece of land is going to have to a much higher resolution map of the site, not use the extreme zoom and on a map covering a huge area.

Or they may even go rogue and visit the place! Heavens to Murgatroyd!

As a child of the 70s and 80s, Snoopy was a very big deal, but Peanuts was kind of secondary.

I remember around 2nd grade or so Snoopy Joe Cool was a big deal and I had the t shirts and thermos and lunchbox.

There are of course the Peanuts TV specials, they didn’t have much impact on me personally other than to solidify a like of both Snoopy and his side kick, Woodstock.

For me as a kid, Snoopy and Stocky were the only interesting ones.

Thanks to the author, I needed this today.

Yes, it’s weird and eclectic and not at all mainstream, but those of us like that got to stick together!

In the United States, males are known to be as stupid as a box of rocks when it comes to any sort of moving vehicle.

Male cyclists are much more prone to be doing 40mph wheelies down a blind hill in the middle of the road than woman.

Don't get me started on motorcycles, PA is just next store (we are over the border in NJ). PA doesn't require helmets for motorcycle riders, and many male riders happily throw helmets to the wind. The level of stupidity there is astronomical.

They hide it because you won't choose them if you were aware that it's Yet Another Wrapper around someone else's service.

You setup a payment flow and it took you less than a day, and you are upset? I don't understand.

“Well your payments platform doesn’t actually do payments, but the developer experience of doing nothing was flawless!”

Sorry for the snark, but been in payments a long time, and seen too much of this nonsense.

This was exactly my thought. Poverty reporting has gotten very weird.

While housing, food, etc costs are rising, I still also see teenagers and their parents who I know are very poorly off with $400 sneakers, wearing AirPod Pros and getting $6 lattes from Starbucks.

This isn’t even pseudo science.

What was described in the article sounded more like answers to questions on the game show Jeopardy.

Obama and the Democrats were surprisingly heavy on surveillance and curtailing rights during Obama’s Presidency.

So you can include them in the “reupped it over and over”.

To be fair, the current Republican Party bears almost no resemblance to the "classic" Republican Party of....10 years ago.

The Newt and the Tea Party started the slide, normalizing hatred and bombast and FU-politics, and MAGA perfected it.

Whether you love it, hate it, or are indifferent, what you are dealing with now are not really Republicans. They are MAGA-folks. They should really rename themselves the Solipism Party. Nothing matters but the current state of your own head.

And yes, I know parties change and evolve with the times, but I would argue this time is very different.

I got into Perl in the early 90s in the Perl4 days, watched the very weird but necessary Perl5 come into focus, then I saw Larry and the community in the 2000s get stars in their eyes and just throw it all away for the dream of Perl6.

The real issue is not just that Perl6 wasn’t backwards compatible, it was that Perl6 basically did not exist for real for many, many years. People got tired of waiting, and the lack of backwards compatibility did not help.

Also Perl6 was just more weird on top of weird from a mainstream perspective. Making it even harder to justify.

It is still worthwhile to try to troubleshoot something like a washing machine these days before calling someone to service it, or buying new.

We just had a ~8 year old washer start dying with an error code, with digging it turned out it was the hall effect sensor on the drum motor that needed replacing. Cost $12 and change and was over nighted from Amazon.

What would have been nice if we got a detailed diagnostic code and not just "FE" on the front panel.

This. Exactly this.

The answer isn’t some fancy security software or screening, it is much simpler: no software, period. The bulk of school should be learning in a classroom, computers are not required.

They can and should be allowed in limited doses early on, and can build over time, particularly as courses either obviously require it or the computers truly facilitate the learning.

We had her public school teachers trying to tell us the answer to our daughter’s reading issues was more screen time. We ended up sending her to a private religious school with very limited screen time, and she is now an A and B student.

This is a huge problem in public schools because state and federal governments are complicit in burying kids (and parents!) in unnecessary technology. During Covid, the feds flooded schools with literal billions of dollars that did not go to better teachers, it went to smart boards and MacBook pros and iPads and dozens of “School as a Service” providers who existed only to extract money from clueless superintendents who have a seemingly endless supply of tax money to draw from.

There is a reason C++ devs and only C++ devs have nightmares of diamond inheritance.

Oh the damage that language has done to a generation, but at least it is largely passed us now.

I'm really confused by your response.

Divulging where you've lived for the past 10+ years, having agents contacting your references, etc for "Secret" is not very onerous or difficult.

Given that, your subsequent statement that "Top Secret was notoriously more difficult in terms of paperwork" seems to be pointless.

Getting locked up in jail will do wonders to cure people of this and many other things.

However, the side effects are very severe.

For me, the big miss with Postgres Aurora RDS was costs. We had some queries that did a fair amount of I/O in a way that would not normally be a problem, but in the Aurora Postgres RDS world that I/O was crazy expensive. A couple of fuzzy queries blew costs up to over $3,000/month for a database that should have cost maybe $50-$100/month. And this was for a dataset of only about 15 million rows without anything crazy in them.