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Yeah true. Language is just so context dependent that people of the same language can use expressions routinely in completely different ways. (Although I have no doubts that with enough training data/complex enough models even this can be solved)

The biggest problem seems to be the slow disk performance when working with volumes. At least in personal projects I could make this fast by making use of Docker's caching in creative ways. E.g. first copying the package deps, installing them and afterwards copying the (often changing) source. Also sometimes when a volume is needed it can be enough to make it a single file volume.

I agree with the sensationalism but it's a for-profit company after all. They definitely do more than the average email provider but it's certainly not the Tor equivalent of E-Mail.

What people say must still be legal and harassment is basically not legal. I have big problems to a) see where people see their free speech limited, i.e. examples and b) there are plenty of platforms with much more laissez-faire to no moderation. But the latter has its price, those communities tend to be quite repelling to most people.

To me it seems a theoretical discussion about the definition of free speech that is mixed up with a business discussion which makes no sense.

Ask anyone throwing in solutions (A, B, perhaps even other people) to add pros and cons for each solution. Make a short meeting and then discuss within the whole team and make a vote. At my last job this worked really well.

Do you maybe have an example? I'm always astounded how well the IMDB score matches how likeable a film is (minus personal preferences of course). 5 is basically always really bad unless I'm a fan of a specific actor/director/genre. The comments are mixed, the comments below the YouTube trailers tend to be quite on point though to see if a film is worth watching

I'm also wondering about this myself. I also used to check Tom's Hardware, had a subscription to Technology Review and was amazed by almost everything in there.

In fact I had also been working for some time on actually cool tech and was looking forward to go into the office as early as possible and stay late. But as I "progressed" I worked on more and more boring problems and products. The by far most exciting tech is what I use in my free time.

Also it seems that only a small fraction of tech products nowadays are driven by tech geeks.

Although IMHO things like Non-violent communication and how stucture a discussion e.g. by comparing different options with pros and cons should be placed into hard-skills. Luckily I've seen such concepts getting more widely recognized/adopted at some workplaces but there's still a long way to go.

I think Bitcoin also lives from the fact that there is complex Mathematics and Financial reasoning behind that usually nobody thinks about because it just works. (Great cult material) So any time someone explains Bitcoin to an outsider, the outsider will be overwhelmed by unverifiable facts and astonished by people who made a lot of money with it.

Also I don't buy anymore that Bitcoin is resilient to inflation. Inflation is a financial symptom but caused by a failing real economy. Dividing out the inflation just leads to other malfunctions...

No, PFAS is not like Nuclear. The biggest problem with Nuclear are explosions with extreme risks. PFAS had lead in the past to birth defects - even during "normal" plant operation

That said, until shit had been hitting the fan a lot of facts about PFAS had been kept in secrecy with active manipulation going on. Even today there isn't much authorative and practical information available.

Also the practical benefit of Teflon pans over say Emaille or iron pans is more than questionable. Are professional cooks really using Teflon pans?

I realize this will get you along but if everyone does this, nothing changes.

Also the cost of these lies are immense for companies, managers, employees and customers. Assigning employee A for one task and B for the other although it should be reverse. IMHO that's also the reason why companies ship products that are profoundly bad for their customers and only "realize" this after many years.

I know of a few people for who that is the reason why they prefer working in startups.

For me pop sci documentaries were quite a motivation to study Physics though. But yeah, after having studied it I have zero interest in pop sci anymore. It's unfortunately not really explaining things but more show casing things. But what I also learned while reading text books, listening and reading lectures: often the most concise explanations are very close to every day language. (In the lines of https://www.motionmountain.net/9lines.html which was recently also posted on HN) Would be great if such things could be included more into pop sci. Maybe in a way that at least the common notations are put in. That doesn't enable you to do meaningful calculations but at least it would be way closer to relevant literature. Unfortunately there's also quite a barrier to university literature in terms of pricing and some stuff is just not published on the Internet. E.g. lecture notes are only sporadically available but tend to be more readable than most books. FWIW Feynman's lectures on Physics really stand out here

For travelling it would be nice. I really don't like carrying any fragile/expensive hardware with me longer than workplace distance. (Used to have a subnotebook for that but it fell apart)

I don't think so, Russia has (or at least had) quite a vibrant tech scene with startups, tech agencies and all that with customers worldwide. Like in every other metropole. And of course the people are leaving, what should they do there now... Things like this make me really wonder if Putin ever went outside of the Kremlin, going for such a destructive action

I like how they had all this software with a lot of entertainment value. Probably the list could be made much longer, e.g. there used to be Microsoft Dangerous Creatures and 3D Pinball

Worked at a startup that built a 3D modelling tool in the browser. They did a major refactoring that was still ongoing. At this point in the core team of 5 they churned through 10 engineers in 1 year. So when I started my job I learned that you could neither create a working build nor would any of the tests run. (Not to speak about the CI pipeline) Eventually the build could be fixed as well as the few tests. But as it turned out every basic user functionality had to be rewritten and the structural refactoring was still in progress.

IMHO the refactoring sounded very reasonable since the old code base was unmanageable. But there was a culture of extreme pressure from the CTO, making everyone haste through tasks preventing everyone to do "proper engineering". At the time the CTO was in some sort of permanent absence already. Afterwards the team lead left because of burnout, I also left and later on I heard they closed down the company.

Actually I've seen similar destructive refactorings at other places. At one they also had a lot of subtle problems leading to many user complaints. It could be fixed but by then it was already too late.

IMHO refactorings are great but it's always necessary to keep regressions in check all the time and really understand the design decisions of existing code.

That's true on the other hand the state of Java desktop UI frameworks is at best confusing. I guess it's possible to write well performing Java desktop apps and yet I have a Java app that slows down my whole system and usually crashes on macOS

I think industrialists are one of the few who are more or less inflation safe. But the part about the whining seems to be true

I can see how this is almost offensive to the whole subject of Experimental Physics since it ignores all of it - and for that matter Solid State Physics as well. But for Theoretical Physics (minus Mathematical Physics) it seemed to me almost like a sport where professors tried to boil the theory down to a minimal set of assumptions while taking symmetry arguments to the extreme. Obviously this doesn't contain any QM postulates but OTOH for practical purposes QFT is what many people use to compare theory with predictions. IMHO Theoretical Physics without Experimental Physics is useless and vice-versa. And there isn't much research going on with QM (despite plenty of open questions)

I mean you have the groups (6. and 7.) from there you get all the variables. E.g. from U(1) you get the generator and the group item. Then add all combinations of the polynomes to L (1.) but skip those that violate invariances like Lorentz (2.), U(1), SU(2), SU(3). You end up with something like L=-1/2 d phi^2 - m phi^2. (Oversimplified) Do the same for SU(2) and SU(3) and you end up with http://nuclear.ucdavis.edu/~tgutierr/files/sml2.pdf For convenience usually some of the variables are then called e (Electron), W+ (W+ Boson) etc.

I would take this with a huge grain of salt. But generally it's quite astonishing with how few assumptions such complex theories can be derived. Also the mathematical apparatus has really all batteries included speaking of Lagrange formalism and its Action (point 1)

Open Source was always political, ultimately this is where some moonshot projects like GNU got their momentum from. IMHO the red line is where it gets destructive or actually discriminates individuals. In the past PGP couldn't be exported to certain countries so sanctions apply also for OSS. Speaking of the immense popularity of web3 and decentralized of course not all measures will be realizations of government directives. That said I don't think OSI (opensource.org) represents the whole OSS movement.

Also the title is a bit click-baity. The protestware example is clearly weaponization of OSS but the other examples are not.

Yeah yeah, I also wanted to say... So far I repaired 1 charger, bought 3 or 4 new and eventually even found out that an iPhone charger I have is likely to have an electrical problem. That said, with the USB-C craze I think things got a little better

Just to give one example, CI pipelines seem to fail all the time. For closed source and open source project. Just like this, it worked in the last commit and in the new commit it fails despite the test suite passing. The ultimate reason is routine tasks pulling in a ton of complexity of which only a tiny fraction is being used.

At workplaces this creates a lot of absurd situations that eat up insane amounts of productivity.

Or another example, it's pretty common that water pipes don't work as expected. (Congestion, low pressure, undesired backflow, tricky to get water at body temperature...) Nobody really complains, everybody lives with it and learns to completely ignore it. I'm not saying these problems occur everywhere 100% of the time but often enough to show there's something structurally not working

It depends, I mean in times of remote work it's good when the routine doesn't degrade to a purely mechanical exchange. Also it can be actually useful if people chit-chat about what they are doing which can lead to discussions and save time by cutting useless work. It's not ideal when people repeatedly ask me about a certain class of problems - terse or not - it's a disruption to my work.

(With dropping a bomb I also mean something like a larger/tedious amount of work)

True words for 1:n communication. For 1:1 communication it's a different thing though. I really prefer people to warn me before dropping a bomb

Install only software that you use and prefer minimal installations. (Debian has good defaults) Then you can install the unattended-upgrades package and when using ssh don't setup a password but use ssh keys. Also ufw needs to be enabled and then you can use nmap to scan for open tcp and udp ports. (Of course it's also possible to filter outgoing connections, by default only the package servers need to be accessed)

If you install services like email or http prefer software with a small footprint and with few CVEs in the past. Since http services are quite common, it's advisable to put a reverse proxy in front. Separate users for separate services is also a good idea.

Never had any issues with that kind of setup. Of course it's possible to add additional hardening like using an ssh jump host or a VPN to access ssh. (Probably advisable if you plan to put private data on it) Also using SELinux is an option, Fedora has it by default.

I love how they still have the categories for software from Planning/Pre-Alpha to Mature. At some point I got almost all Desktop apps from there

I once used it for mathematical code in my thesis. Basically I had everything written with C++ code but it just didn't work. Also tried Matlab but I'm just not made to use it efficiently, so I tried Haskell for interfacing with the GNU GSL library. In the end I changed back to C++ but it helped me a great deal to understand what I was doing and to clean things up. Some nice features include obviously dealing only with constant expressions and being forced to write only mathematical transformations. A bit unexpected was that you can actually swap variable declarations, declaration order doesn't seem to matter much. Quite a big pain relieve when dealing with a lot of variables.

Actually ImplicitCAD is written in Haskell which implements CSG (very tricky to efficiently implement)

I don't get why companies that large would bother considering not using HSMs. Basically it's about public-key encryption, even if https is not ideal, it's quite a widespread implementation that can be sufficiently secure for many use cases