berniedurfee

Oof, yep. Look at a stop sign. And think about all the lives of all the people through all the decades that sign has been standing there.

Each person connected to everyone else in a web of history.

Every single living being having a unique experience, every second of every day. Every inanimate object having a history that might span back through to the beginning of time. Lonely rocks floating through space for longer than we can even fathom.

Sonder is a wonderful feeling.

100% yes. So many things seem like magic.

Big things, like big mechanical things or carpentry, I get.

But the incredible precision that we’ve achieved at the microscopic scale with CPUs and such always confound me. So many things happening perfectly in sync at mind boggling scale and speed.

And yeah, even the mundane products that we can produce at incredible scale. CAT-6 cable by the mile, seemingly effortless. Glasses and contact lenses curved to a perfect shape by the millions, no problem.

The corpus of thought and work that’s built up over the span of human endeavors is really pretty impressive.

How To Make Everything was a great series on YouTube. It really did a good job of capturing how incredibly difficult it is to go from nothing to even a primitive existence.

Thanks for your post!

Why is it monthly? What happens if you don’t renew?

I’m guessing that’s a solved problem by now.

There was no way big enterprises were going to allow those ‘toy’ iPhones on their network.

That was the attitude for a minute until the CEO got a cool iPhone.

Same with Macs. And jeans.

Correct.

Capitalism, by definition, has no conscience.

Regulation provides the layer (sometimes facade) of moral and ethical control.

The two forces are generally opposed, but, hopefully, balance out to keep our society and environment tenable.

Right, I think the questions are going to be along the lines of “Do you feel the proper controls are in place for you to ensure the safety of the aircraft you service?”

The NTSB is after Boeing.

How did you find out that Orange had actually modified the code?

I was thinking the same thing. I had to double check that was an article on a .gov website.

I think it’s refreshingly well written and accessible. Not an 800 page blob of legalese.

Nice job to the authors.

Or more generally, “Everyone is spying on users, that’s how the internet works.”

Have quotas ever been tried or considered? Like users being allocated a few upvotes per day or week?

I wonder if that would give enough pause for users to consider if a comment is worth their upvote.

I was thinking the same thing. The article didn’t go into what percent is actually recycled vs landfilled.

I’d hate for this movement to push people to simply skip the recycling step.

The narrative that recycling plastics is never effective isn’t accurate and drives demand for more plastic manufacturing as stocks of recyclable plastics diminish.

Huh, wonder who started this rumor anyway?

"That's what you try and do. You try and make as much profit as you can. That's how free enterprise works. You think Chevrolet sits back and says, 'Gosh, how can we get the price of this Chevrolet down?' No, it's like, 'How high a price can I get and maximize the profit for my shareholder?'"

Martin Shkreli got shredded for this attitude, no? Now it’s generally acceptable? Because capitalism?

That any compromise to raw capitalism is derided as socialism is a problem.

It’s sad that even in the context of healthcare we need regulation to control greed. Alas, here we are.

I can barely handwrite a complete sentence anymore. I’ve never had good penmanship, but decades of keyboard use has rendered my writing skills almost useless… and I’m too old to care! :)

It is indeed tragic that virtue is a childish trait among adults.

100% agree.

Pretty sure the original idea of patents was to protect the inventor while they brought a product to market or licensed the patent to others to improve their products.

Holding a patent without even attempting to bring the idea to market should invalidate the patent after some reasonable amount of time.

The whole system as it is today needs a hard sanity check.

I’d prefer, “Hey, I heard it’s your birthday today, why don’t you knock off a couple hours early and go relax. Happy birthday!”

And thank you! Many companies follow CA regulations by default if they do significant business in the state or have even a small footprint there.

You’re being way too reasonable! A stable, self-sustaining business is for mom and pop corner pizza shops.

Tech companies want to disrupt and destroy everything in their market segment or die trying.

I wish there were more companies that would focus on stability, sustainability and longevity. But in my experience lack of rapid growth is a mark of failure for most companies.

Yep, I was on a team that tried to do OKRs only to waste months debating about how to correctly define OKRs.

The fad wore off before we agreed on how to write OKRs and we never spoke of it again.

There’s something to be said about doing the right thing simply for the sake of doing the right thing.

Beyond that personal choice, setting an example for others is a powerful tool to promote change.

I’m with you. For twenty bucks it covers my home network and the app covers me when I’m out of the house.

Turning it off occasionally reveals the horror of the un-ad-blocked internet. I never forget to turn it back on.

I was waiting for the Rick roll.

100%

If the number isn’t in my contacts, it goes to voicemail.

I used to answer calls from local numbers, but I’ve started getting spam calls with my local area code now.

One possible explanation is that companies try to avoid discrimination lawsuits by laying off employees in a way that provides plausible deniability of discrimination.

That tends to mean broad sweeping layoffs that select whole orgs, functions, lines of business or locations.

Often that means rehiring (sometimes the same people) to rebuild what was lost by some broad sweeping blind decision.

There’s also some gaming that goes on beforehand to protect key people by shifting them around to get them out of the selection group.

So yes, opaque and senseless may have been a purposeful strategy.

I did that in a low basement once. I had to replace the crumbled concrete floor anyway, so I figured I’d dig it down a foot or two while I was at it… then I found out the house was sitting on a shale ledge.

Turns out excavating shale by hand or with a jack hammer is incredibly difficult! It breaks into tiny pieces, bit by bit. Then you have to shovel said pieces into buckets and haul them out. Really heavy buckets because rocks.

One of the few jobs I threw in the towel and hired out. It still took 3 people 2 days to dig out about 18 inches. Never again!

I was at a big company where this happened. I also knew of a person behind the scenes with admin access making sure softball questions were voted to the top.

Then they dropped voting when the questions got too real.

Then they lit up the staff by saying, “If you don’t like being here, then leave!”

Then they stopped taking questions and went back to fireside chat monologs that offered no real information.

One of the many Dilbertian experiences in my career.

I once accused a VP of creating an environment of “opaque transparency” in a large staff meeting… nobody laughed, though I got lots of private kudos after the meeting.

Much of the corporate world is smoke and mirrors. That’s the nature of the game unfortunately.

Corruption can lead to money and fame.

Mentour Pilot on YouTube, fabulous channel BTW, talks about the Swiss Cheese Model.

I’ve started to use this model when talking about software testing.

Unit tests, integration tests, functional tests, UAT, etc are all layers that help prevent defects from reaching production.

Those testing layers are deliberately redundant.

When we do a postmortem on a defect, it often turns out there was only one layer of testing between the defect and production and the incident would have been less likely to occur with multiple layers in place.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

Reminds me of the never ending MP3 vs FLAC argument.

The difference can be measured empirically, but is it noticeable in real world usage.