beryilma

> I’m not planning on doing articles or videos on my ventilation setup. Mainly because well… it is just an on/off switch?

The irony of the author responding to another request on his site with the sentence "well… it is just an on/off switch".

I dont understand all the details, but Veritasium and others on YouTube have videos on how the current/electron flow is also an illusion.

Since electricity and magnetism are really fields per Maxwell equations, the current flow and other electrical things that we attribute to the inside of the wire are really happening outside of the wires as electric fields.

They have a much better explanation than mine certainly...

Reminds me of "modern control systems" courses and books I had in graduate school that contained material developed in the 60's. I think a lot of engineering research developed in the Apollo program era has been called "modern" for some reason.

The article seems insightful on the surface but falls apart very quickly when you take time to analyze what the author is actually saying in each sentence. Pretty much every statement is a logically false or bad argument or, at least, requires a lot of supporting material to be convincing.

Take the following sentences for example.

> If people have enough autonomy to make locally smart decisions, then they can recover from friction more easily.

Having autonomy has no relationship to recovering from friction more easily. Any why would autonomy cause one to make locally smart decision? The person having the autonomy might be the one causing the friction in the first place and might also be the one making bad decisions.

> Friction compounds with itself: two setbacks are more than twice as bad as one setback. This is because most systems are at least somewhat resilient and can adjust itself around some problem, but that makes the next issue harder to deal with.

Why would being resilient to one type of problem cause not being resilient to another type of problem? And why would this cause the friction to compound itself?

Incidentally, ChatGPT does produce an equally (if not more) plausible article when I ask it to produce an article on software friction.

Yes, but the same companies in the US have no problem asking for professional references when they are the ones hiring you.

Upwork is a disgusting place along with Fiverr, etc. The company itself, the contractors, as well as the freelancers. Everybody is lying, cheating, and scamming.

I know some people make some money there and it might be lucrative if you are located in a developing country. But I wouldn't touch Upwork if you have a tiny bit of self-respect. It is just a race to the bottom there...

Absolutely not. Please don't do this. Treat your audience as smart people and just tell them. All that pseudo-psychology just doesn't work with presentations.

> Yes, I know it’s good to be a generalist, and I am, but employers seem to prefer to hire “experts” in particular domains.

Who says so? Being a generalist is the worst thing to do. The world is full generalist software engineers who are ready to take your job. Being a framework monkey doesn't work either in the long term; it is so exhausting.

Being just a software engineer is not sufficient. I think without having a unique specialty, which is hard to replace, you would be just another cog in the machine.

Understanding a domain (finance, healthcare, embedded devices, etc.) in addition to being a developer is one way to make yourself indispensable, which is something a lot of developers lack.

The same thing happened to "data scientists", but faster. Throwing a data scientist to a big data problem without them knowing nothing about the field resulted in bunch of stupid "solutions". The focus on AI is an outcome of that, because very few people actually understand their domain, so we throw AI to everything in the hope that something will work. This might work for employment opportunities in the short term until something shinier comes along.

Government presentations are the worst, including the likes of NASA, NIH, etc. Extremely overcrowded slides, the logo of the institution on EVERY slide, equations all over the place, no care for providing value to the audience. This gave rise to the assertion-evidence style of presentions, which sound right on the surface but it has also been taken to another extreme where every slide tries to use the approach. My single concern for my presentations is to provide value to the audience; this usually fixes a lot of stupid presentation content...

In the real world, cities like Boston go for what's called Land Value Capture instead of LVT. Basically asking developers for bunch of benefits such as bike lanes, affordable units, etc. at the time of permitting process.

My thoughts are mixed about this approach. On one hand, it feels like extortion since it is tied to permitting. On the other hand, benefiting the community in general around the development site seems also right.

I think there is a whole group of vim + tmux people out there and their primary use case may not be session persistence, but to construct an IDE like environment, which is also my use case.

How could this be a tmux alternative if it only provides session persistence? I use tmux mostly for layout (tiles, multiple windows, etc.) and not for session persistence necessarily. I don't know if this is why other people also use tmux, but I am not sure if "alternative" is the right word here.

> _my_ React app is hard and challenging for me

I love the idea of "essential vs artificial complexity". React claiming to solve the essential complexity of state management, among others, creates bunch of artificial complexities. And software engineers are no better as a result and become masters of frameworks, but not masters of their arts. That is why the comparison to assembly line is apt. Doing assembly line work is still hard, but it is not software "engineering" in a certain definition of the word.

Mathematics or more generally academics is no panacea either. At least in engineering and applied math, there is a different assembly line of "research" and publications going on. We live in the area of enshitification of everything.

In both software and math, there are still very good people. But too far and between. And it is hard to separate the good from the bad.

I am not a web developer. But, in general, I don't understand why state management is considered to be a big difficulty needing a framework.

We have been writing complex standalone apps for decades without needing frameworks and they manage state just fine. At least for medium size GUIs, state management can be done with a few simple architectural conventions, MVC pattern, etc. May be I am missing something special to web applications...

I still love his debate with Foucault from ages ago. Chomsky speaking English, Foucault speaking French! The subject didn't matter much to me, but the ease they were debating each other is something else.

You should see what ISO and ANSI do when you try to get a PDF of one of their standards. PDF with DRM, installing a DRM application on your computer that some claim cannot be uninstalled from your machine. You are also allowed to keep only a SINGLE copy of the PDF and only a single printout. It's just crazy.

Isn't it possible to force these devices only call a fixed IP address? Same thing for phones: why are these devices allowed to call back arbitrary IP addresses without the owner's control?

As an extension, I have three good examples of DIY medicine that makes a huge difference.

1. Urinary tract infection testing: 4 tests at home for $10, or same test at the hospital for $300 (nominally as reported to insurance).

2. Night dental guards: $100 for good quality custom mold versus $800 at the dentist.

3. Eyeglasses: $36 at Zenni versus $400 at the eye doctor.

I wish there is more of this available... Some kind of home cholesterol test would be awesome.

I often come here for the comments as I often learn more from the comments than the actual article. I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing.

Call me old fashioned, but I wouldn't waste 100s, if not 1000s of bytes of program space to program them in python when literally 5-10 bytes of register programming would suffice. But, of course, this requires a bigger commitment of time to study and understand the reference manual.

I regularly use both atmega328p (Arduino Uno) and stm32g0 (st-nucleo boards) microcontrollers for hobby projects. The linux toolchain for both are equally good. But the Nucleo boards are a lot cheaper than Arduino Uno/Mega boards, have a lot more capabilities, any are 32-bit microcontrollers.

I am actually fascinated with the things you can do with stm32 chips. If I ever do a commercial project, I would definitely use stm32 chips. Bare metal programming them has been a lot of fun.

Insults you can produce in Turkish involving your mother and genital parts are at a different level. Insults involving f*ck do not even come close.

Also freetaxusa.com; a legit and almost free tax filing service, which is much less evil than TurboTax and Intuit.

I hate the Work Number with a passion. What's more disgusting though is people's own employers giving them all your salary and other private information for their own convenience and without your consent and sometimes without your knowledge.

The prize for the ugliest building in Cambridge, MA should go to the Stata building at MIT. An eyesore masquerading as "architecture".

> I only recently learned how to correctly raise and lower window blinds

So, how do you do it correctly?

Pot calling the kettle black. I haven't seen many useful PMs either, other than being glorified note takers and document pushers. It is not the middle managers transforming these processes to shit show; the processes themselves are shit shows in the first place. Even their names Agile/Scrum are cringe-worthy.

A standard CS master student's understanding of algorithms is very very bad. I wasn't necessarily any better at the time either; so I think ability to learn is more important than knowing algorithms fresh out of school.

The level of algorithm skills I deal with in code reviews is to correct and explain the redundance of statements like

bool variable = true...

if (variable == true) ...

So I don't dare expect a deep understanding of O notation and algorithm efficiency.

Turkish used to be written using Arabic characters before the Turkish Republic. Now, the Latin alphabet is used. So, it was fairly easy (probably not) to switch alphabets for the same underlying language.

And 29 characters are sufficient to represent the sounds of the language with a couple of controversial accents like '^'.

The sounds in Chinese are probably very different and nuanced, but for Turkish, I am always surprised that sounds were very similar to European languages so switching alphabets was possible.