ajford

I'm assuming OP here was referencing Google's cloud services vs AWS. As in Google's abysmal behavior in regards to AdWords has spoiled them against using any other Google services.

Oh yeah, I totally get that. I'm lucky enough that my team really averages less than an hour of meetings daily. Usually under 30min, most of that being a daily standup.

Our larger scoping/planning/brainstorming meetings are spread out enough that an hour-long planning call isn't that much of a burden, rarely more than once a sprint if even that frequent. We instead try to pre-plan or hash out things in threads and emails ahead of time, then use those as notes/outlines for a condensed call.

Far more common for us is an impromptu 15-20min discussion after standup to help unblock someone on the team, or a huddle when someone is stuck in the middle of the day. That fluidity feels more like the kind of casual interaction you'd get asking for help in-office.

I've found having camera on full-time during meetings and making use of a $50 usb drawing pad has been a very acceptable substitute for in-person meetings and whiteboarding.

Being able to see the faces and body-language of your colleagues by being on-camera during the meetings solves most of that higher-bandwidth comms that in-person brings, and using either a simple drawing app or even something like MS Teams' Whiteboard app lets you get that whiteboard like experience.

So can you explain how a number of escaped pet-trade ferrets can grow into a force that can threaten an ecosystem when they are unable to increase their population size?

It's highly unlikely, given that released/escaped pet ferrets can't breed. Ferrets purchased for the pet trade are all sterilized as a ferret in heat doesn't end well.

Females can die if they go into heat and don't have a mate to breed with, and male ferrets can get very hostile around a female in heat.

It's really rare for an escaped "pet ferret" population to boom on it's own, since most ferrets purchased in the pet trade (i.e. not specifically purchased for breeding) are already spayed/neutered. This isn't the case for most other pet species.

IIRC, this is done because female ferrets who go into heat can/do die if they don't mate and male ferrets will become quite hostile when near a female in heat.

And development, which you seem to skip over. Most people draw the line at third trimester, which is generally when a fetus is viable outside the body.

A fetus in the first or second trimester isn't capable of life outside the mother's womb. A vanishingly small percentage of people are even considering late-term abortions, but that's what you seem to be fixated on in all these threads.

Entry level EVs exist that are under $30k USD new. Used EVs and Plug-in Hybrids exist that are under $20k USD.

I spend less on electricity for my Chevy Volt than I would for any combustion vehicle.

Sure, your example "low income people" won't be driving around in a brand new Tesla, but anyone who's buying power includes a $15k-30k vehicle can just as easily buy a plug-in hybrid or entry level EV.

Or maybe if politicians had put together a bill to improve roads and bridges and highways. Some kind of bill to improve the Infrastructure of the country everywhere...

Now why don't politicians do something like that...

So it's not exactly what you're talking about, but the Parkes radio telescope used to have it's control system wired up with speakers and the control software used Australian animal sounds for various statuses and errors. So when things went well it would sound like a peaceful wilderness.

Supposedly after a while, you could tell how things were going by the shift in the animal sounds, even for minor shifts from normal operation. And of course the various alerts used loud noises like panicked Kookaburra (if I'm recalling correctly), so those definitely got the attention of even novice operators.

In the three years my spouse has had an Apple device, I've had two first-party cables fray and wear out at the connector, the lightning port get fouled up with lint and require cleaning, and I think three third-party cables stop working at all with no obvious damage.

In the same time, I've only had two usb-c cables fail on me, both third-party.

I did have three other usb-c cables destroyed by careless children breaking the usb-a side off at the charger (all three plugged into a knee-height automotive charger in the back seat area), but that's less of a failure of the cable and more a testament to that plucky Anker auto charger that's still going fine.

Yours doesn't hold for hardware either. MacBooks are comparable and competitive to PC laptops, but it's only your opinion that they are superior.

Having used a few different models of MacBook over the last decade for work, and owning a few different models of Thinkpads over the same timeframe, I'd take the Thinkpad any day of the week. From the annoyingly either hot or cold all-metal case to the floating ground problem triggering shocks when using the fold-out wall connector, MacBooks are inferior in my book. But that is also only my opinion.

Generally with much reduced functionality compared to a full app. Can't mobile deposit from the web, and couldn't use a one-time access method to use my bank's ATM without my card (which did only occur once, but it was damn convenient).

Also, one of my banking institutions is a small credit union whose website does not work well on mobile, but has a well functioning android and iOS app.

Are you able to use any banking apps? I stopped rooting some time back when that became normal for financial apps, and the ability to monitor/manage account balance from anywhere was hard to give up.

I've always wanted something like license points for law enforcement officers. Every time they have a valid complaint/incident, the LEO looses a point of their national LEO "licence". Pair that with their dept. liability insurance bond, and once they drop below some threshold their insurance cost goes up or has to be self-funded. If it drops below another threshold they're uninsurable by any department and/or loose their national level credentials.

If this licensing entity is external to the force it would hopefully be more likely to remain unbiased, and this kind of national level of oversight would prevent bad apples from just moving to some other area to dodge a bad reputation/incident.

Smarter than your average proxy, but apparently dumb enough it doesn't actually cache at all, according to the reports.

Just about every CDN out there manages to cache at a global scale from a single hit, so I don't understand what's so vastly different about the go mirror system that it can't do the same under the hood.

The Thinkpad chiclets suck compared to the scissor switches of the earlier models, but compared to the soft putty that is Mac keyboards, they're still a winner.

When I had to use a Macbook for work a few years back, I was unable to use the keyboard for more than 15-20 minutes without it flaring my RSI. That's compared to about an hour or so I can get on my Thinkpad.

Exactly. There's so many stories from earlier generations about working their way through college and a family home. My partner and I make three what my parents did, and while we're comfortable, we're nowhere near what my parents were at 20-30 years ago because of inflation.

There's no chance I'm able to buy a home within an hour of the Metro I'm living in within Texas. I'm really hoping working from home sticks around as most major cities are quickly becoming so costly to live in.

It's so bad I've been talking to some family about going in together on some rural land to split and create a family commune type thing to share infrastructure while living rural. A number of us can work fully remote as long as we have solid online connectivity.

A friend of mine from some time back chatted about this once. His take was that as you get older, your "mental models" grow and are able to cover larger parts of your day/week/month and your mind simply keeps the important parts but lets the rest fade.

When you're younger, those models are less complete and larger parts of your waking moments are needed to build the foundations of these models, so you feel like time is slower since so much more of your time is kept "fresh".

I'm probably butchering his take on it, but I blame my own mental models for compressing away the finer details!

Unfortunately, imperial measurements are a pretty common thing in the EE field when it comes to boards. A lot of parts are standardized on the 0.1 inch grid that was relatively common for a good 40yrs or so. I think the commonly understood root is the Dual Inline Package (or DIP) that most early ICs used, which was on a 0.1in pitch for a fair time.

Many of the more common packages under JEDEC [0] are all defined on imperial measurements.

Some package footprints can be approximated or closely matched with round metric measurements, but when the part itself is designed to an imperial measurement you "go with the flow".

The "mil" is one one-thousandth of an inch (0.001) and is thought to have originated from it being a "milli"-inch. I think it's an artifact of decimalizing the inch, from what I've read in the past anyways.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JEDEC

erm... a hostel [0] is NOT a brothel [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostel

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothel

Worked for a state agency (nothing enforcement, just dealing with state level stuffs), and we did have mandated lock-down drills once a year. Mostly I assume because we shared a state building with other depts. that might have been targeted, but I assume it was likely a state gov't thing.

Yep. It's common in the US. I wouldn't call it normal by any stretch (at risk of normalizing this bullshit), but it's definitely common. My kids have gone through it every year. Heck, I think they've had more shooter drills than fire drills.

When my oldest kid went through one for the first time in 1st grade, they came home and broke down about it. Said they didn't want to die at school and was afraid the bad men would attack. We ended up going through therapy with a child play-therapist which helped my kiddo a lot (in case anyone might be running into this issue and is unsure of what to do).

Somehow this is considered OK, but the "trauma" of wearing a mask to prevent an airborne illness was too much to bear.

While I don't doubt other manufacturers have taken steps to charge better at cold temperatures, since theoretically you can do this if you have the charger warm the pack up to temperatures above freezing, this isn't just an issue with my Chevy.

All battery chemistry suffers from degraded performance in cold temperatures, because they all rely on chemical processes that are hampered by cold. Lithium batteries are in some ways more susceptible because they are just a more finicky battery chemistry overall, being far more sensitive to charging currents, temperatures, and voltages.

There's tons of articles and references out there about the cares that must be taken with batteries of various chemistries, and they all talk about the low temperature issues.

- https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2021-08-24-how-extreme-c...

- https://www.fluxpower.com/blog/the-importance-of-industrial-...

- https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-410-charging-at-hig....

- https://relionbattery.com/blog/the-best-battery-for-cold-wea....

Definitely something to consider. I wonder if there's some value to a secondary/supplemental seasonal battery that can be added for part of the year to handle the extra load.

Would come down to whether the installation/removal (to lower the "dry" weight for the warm seasons) would be worth the energy savings of not hauling around the supplemental battery weight.

Other options might be to use some kind of thermal mass for heating, perhaps a large heated mass or fluid tank? Not sure if there's any benefit there though beyond being able to swap out the fluid tank between runs faster than charging a battery.

There's far less going on in a normal EV drivetrain, which kinda supports the lower maintenance cost.

Fewer fluids required, just your differential and some coolant for the motors really.

Given the specialization of parts, it's far more likely that any performed maintenance is going to be more of a swap for known-good parts and sending them off to the home-office for reconditioning.

Cold air impacting heath & capacity on the Li batteries, perhaps? Lithium batts tend to be finicky about their temperatures. Even my PHEV chevy volt de-rates the capacity if the ambient air temps hit less than 36*F.

This is where programable keyboards win out when using alternative layouts.

When the layout is at the hardware level, the OS only ever sees the actual keycode for the N key, instead of an "L" which is later transcribed into "N" by the OS's layout map.

Same. Pinky/ring finger RSI lead me to split ergos for this same reason, landing on the Moonlander by ZSA.

I've got Space, Bk Space, Shift/(, and Alt on left thumb cluster; Enter, Tab, Shift/), and Esc/Ctrl on the right thumb cluster. Pinkies have far less to do now.