bbojan

You're saying we've been calling it "Software Development" in error, and it should really be called "Software Production"?

> Imagine having toddlers, having to do heavy groceries, and living in a place with difficult landscape or challenging weather.

Here in Switzerland I see people biking with toddlers AND heavy groceries all the time. And the landscape and weather are definitely challenging.

I have a neighbor who drives her 3 small kids around on a bicycle (one in the rear child seat, two in a trailer). In her defence it's an e-bike.

Any organism we bred is genetically modified by definition. That's why "transgenic" is a much more accurate term that we should be using.

So facing your accuser is not a thing anymore?

Product categorization on Galaxus is the best I've seen so far. Light years ahead compared to e.g. Amazon.

Or as my former colleague put it: I didn't know I liked tomatoes until the first time I traveled to Europe.

I remember stopping at this gas station a few years ago and using the restroom.

I walk an and it's completely dark. I start looking for the switch and the light turns on automatically after a few seconds. I guess it's motion based.

I start to pee (this is a toilet, not a pissoir) and I guess I'm very still or what, the light turns off and it's of course pitch dark because I've closed and locked the door. So now I'm trying to jiggle left and right to turn on the light, but still keep my aim fixed in the bowl. Try doing that and you'll see how hard it is.

The light turns back on eventually. Complete disaster if you ask me.

If not, there's a business idea!

If you have excess electricity, I always thought it would make sense to use the Birkeland–Eyde process [1].

From what I understand it is very energy inefficient, but scales down well.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkeland%E2%80%93Eyde_proce...

Both critical bugs are integer overflows. It's unclear to me why our languages still default to modulo arithmetic semantics. I feel Rust had a chance to fix this, but also dropped the ball.

> What matters to the business is that the code works.

Yes, but there is a time dimension to "code works". It should work tomorrow when a new OS comes out, and it should work when a library is updated because of a vulnerability, and it should still work when a new feature is added, and it should still work with a 100x more users.

The only way to make sure code still "works" in these situations is to continuously keep modifying it. And here the technical debt comes into play.

> Also 6: tech debt being another term for "code I personally do not understand," or "software written in a way different than I would write it."

Sometimes it's quicker for me to implement a desired change on a code that was written long ago by someone who is no longer with us by re-writing that part of the code in the way I understand it, and then implementing the change, as opposed to trying to understand the code and implement the change in a way that aligns with it.

I've always hated YAML, and now I'm glad there's a very nicely written article to back me up.

I also notice that I have a preference to procedural as opposed to declarative specifications. E.g. I find conditionals and loops in declarative specifications quite bad.

Ironically, in Toronto, not every bedroom is required to have a window [1].

[1] BCC Ruling No. 14-03-1366: https://web.archive.org/web/20210422142050/http://www.mah.go...

Yeah, I understand why you would need licenses for fishing. It's a limited resource and you want to prevent overfishing.

But why would you need s license for a fish processing plant? Why shouldn't anyone (whose facility fullfils hygiene criteria) be able to open one?

Yes. I was replying to parent's comment that concrete produces CO2 when setting, which is clearly not the case for hydraulic cement.

Hydraulic cement does not produce CO2 during setting. Non-hydraulic cement actually consumes CO2 while setting.

Swiss type deal isn't working for the Swiss anymore. EU was putting pressure on the Swiss to accept a comprehensive deal to replace the dozens of agreements that they have. When the Swiss refused, the EU simple lets one by one pass without renewing them.

This has e.g. happened with the Horizon Europe research program which Switzerland is no longer part of.

You must have very high standards if you consider reducing costs by an order of magnitude "incremental".

Why not use a bicycle or a regular (non-electric) scooter? Honest question, I'm not being snark.

Mars is smaller and cooled down before Earth. That means it had liquid water while the Earth was still too hot. Therefore, it's possible that life first appeared on Mars, and was later transferred to Earth on a meteorite.

The airplane is dense and very aerodynamic. We would say it has a high ballistic coefficient [1].

The pilot is light would leave the cockpit flat or even bent over, which is a very non-aerodynamic shape. His ballistic coefficient would be low. He would decelerate quickly, and the tail would catch up with him and slam him from behind.

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

I see what you did there.

Haha, did the same thing also on a CPC464.

I did know about the concept of "assembler", I just wasn't able to obtain one.

I wasn't aware of that. This is my first time assembling a PC after probably 10 years, and I remember TT when they were making (good) coolers.

I just recently had a problem where writes to M.2 SSD wouldn't work due to a faulty PSU. Everything else was fine.

Took me 3 SSDs, 2 motherboards and 2 PSUs to figure out what the cause of the problem was.

It was a ThermalTake TR2 500W PSU. No graphics card (integrated graphics) so 500W should have been fine.

I just recently had a case where writes to an M2 SSD on a newly built computer would frequently fail. Reads were OK.

After replacing the SSD twice and then rebuilding everything using a different motherboard, it turned out it was the PSU.

Really hard to diagnose problems like this.

I always envisioned a CTO should be something like a Chief Pilot in the airline world. In an airline, Chief Pilot is the highest-ranking member of management that can (and does) still fly passengers around. This gives them unique insight into flight operations.

So a CTO should be someone that can still (and from time to time does) write code. Doesn't mean they do it every day, but still enough to give them insight into the development process.

I'm not sure if this is feasible in really large companies, but I think definitely should be the case in small and medium ones.

I'm not privy to what Boom is doing, but variable intake geometry easily takes care of this.