dan_quixote

Consider that some of Amazon's more recent ventures into automation (namely PrimeAir) are driven by the long-standing knowledge that they would exhaust the labor pool in many markets. They knew their growth and labor practices would hurtle us toward dystopia years ago.

Primary care in the US is heavily reliant on the most basic heuristics to meet patient throughput requirements. Many clinics are operating at 15 min/patient. And no one wants to spend their free time charting the visit and making necessary orders (pharmacy, radiology, other providers, etc) if it can be avoided - so they try to cram it into that 15 min if possible. So they simply don't have time to ask the necessary questions and perform research.

> Not every business has the money to waste converting their old apps to cool-tech like Elixir or a React frontend with microservices.

I always ask myself (and the team at large) "how much time/effort will it take to reach parity using the new tool-set?". The answer usually settles the debate immediately.

Anecdata: Everyone I know with kids in elementary school is reporting major outbreaks at school for the first time in the era of Covid. This includes my family. The transmissibility (specifically among kids) appears to be significantly higher than before. And the symptoms fortunately appear to be light for everyone I know who's caught it recently.

A.k.a series hybrid. Chevy attempted this with the Volt - it made perfect sense to me but never really caught on.

Fraud paranoia seems to keep constant downward pressure on our social safety net. We'd rather scrap a life-saving system than accept a minimal level of fraud. Just imagine if retail businesses operated this way and shut down at the first sign of shoplifting. Instead, they mitigate where possible and treat the result as a cost-of-doing-business.

>If I was a parent in the US I'd be looking for an underground formula railroad

Yep - we found a company in Florida that was importing formula from Germany at a reasonable premium. Keep in mind that this was 4 years ago, so I don't know the state of that pipeline today.

It actually wouldn't surprise me if they optimized for bar/qr code readability. I wrote something years ago that used industrial cameras to read QR codes as well as very precise metrology features. I had to optimize the optical/lighting setup for the feature measurement and then wrote some finely-tuned operations to identify the QR code, window down to the code only, clean up edges/features with expensive convolutions (mostly median filter) and then finally read the code. None of this was visible to the operator, but if you saw the final image of the QR code it was essentially binary color space and looked a bit cartoon-like.

His videos are a delightfully interesting AND relaxing. Always a joy to watch and very little patreon/shill filler.

> Insurance is the only industry where they agree to pay for something (in this case, "medical care"), but then after service has been rendered can decide to pay less, or not pay at all, or stop paying that provider altogether

This is precisely why I think we will never be able to effectively treat healthcare as a "free market" with tools like HSAs, posted price sheet, etc. The end user can never know the true cost of their procedure until it's long over (sometimes years later) and often don't get to choose at all.

Sounds ideal in principle (principal?), but low interest/risk on student loans is what allowed tuition to inflate well beyond general inflation in the last several decades.

It's still very common outside of the cores of highly urbanized neighborhoods. I generally like it, but sometimes the visibility isn't as well-maintained as it should be.

> I try not to exceed 75MPH on 65MPH roads, or 80MPH on 70MPH roads. Where I drive, often traffic exceeds the posted speed limit.

Here I was thinking you were in the Seattle area until I read the last bit.

Teams has good features. Lots of good features. Too many good features, really. And they're assembled in the most confusing/annoying/exhausting way.

I've given it a fair shake (probably in the hundreds of hours of video conferencing) and I still feel like I don't understand how I'm supposed to use it for anything but pure video conferencing.

Nostalgia I guess. If you're old enough to remember the world before ubiquitous internet, you likely have some fond memories of arcades. We didn't always have everything available at arms length instantly. Many of us saved up money for the one-per-week (or month) trip to the arcade. The delayed gratification and shared experience made it a phenomenon that has few parallels any more.

I can't speak for Wealthfront, but managed "funds" are typically balanced across high and low risk securities. Thus they will obviously lag behind even index funds like SPY/QQQ. Where managed funds tend to show benefits is in times of high volatility or downturns. Ask yourself how many downturns you've seen in the age of Wealthfront. Because I count 0. And 10-15% yearly returns aren't exactly impressive in the last 12 years. SPY stomped those numbers: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPY/performance/

I made the leap from physical to software engineering several years back and the quality-of-life difference is night-and-day. Certainly there are software devs that would find a better fit in the physical engineering world, but I think most will be suprised by the drop in quality-of-life that they've been accustomed to. The poster above mentioned several items (that my experience fully concurs with) and I have a few more:

- Many jobs require travel; often with little to no advance notice. And you sometimes don't get to go home until the job is done. You know how devs joke about how hard it is to accurately plan a project? The same applies here too, but except the cost could be you stuck on the other side of the world, unable to visit family, until you reconcile the gap.

- Even lower upward mobility. There are still manager and project manager tracks most places, but VERY few have technical tracks that match. Oh, and if you choose the manager/project-manager path, expect to do zero technical work AND travel significantly more!

- Lower flexibility in expertise/duties. Most disciplines under "physical engineering" are highly regulated/mature and thus do not change much these days. One not-entirely-contrived example could involve industrial-scale boilers - any engineer working in this world has almost zero room for creativity/innovation, you are entirely bound to 50+ year old industry codes that are insurmountable. And if this is what you do for 10 years, you're going to have a terribly difficult time convincing another company to hire you to design gears or PCBs, etc.

I've come full circle on this and actually like HCL now. It's so limiting that there's often only one (or a few at most) way to feasibly do something. This is kinda painful when your team is small, but becomes a net-positive in a larger team.

I’ve even seen vegetable oil used as cutting fluid on CNC mills. So it makes sense on a chain saw.

> In my opinion as a 20 year software veteran, the skillset many software engineers lack is having a bigger world-view of company operations and why they are doing what they are doing. Some of that is obviously on the company structures they've been exposed to, but decent engineers with really good business sense go far, fast.

As a former mechanical engineer, I came to say exactly this. Engineers in the traditional realms (mechanical, electrical, chemical, etc.) operate in the business domain all the time, even the junior engineers. Conversely, software engineers are usually isolated from the business domain until they reach the most senior positions. This creates a serious skills gap when the time comes for software engineers to make business decisions.

I say this as someone who has gained significant wealth from personal real estate - Tax it more. It's crazy to incentivize personal real estate as an investment.

I was forced back into it after years of using GSuite and....it's just as clunky as I remember. You get a different feature-set depending on whether you're using the native app or browser version (but it's not obvious at first). There is some locking and checking-out required to modify shared files with the native apps - also not always obvious when this is required.

Is it not just a case of survivorship bias? I'd expect that the historical stuff in museums is carefully (not randomly) selected. There were probably all kinds of crap art from the same era that simply got trashed.

So, lack of SELinux and the like?

> Letting employees work from home: -$0

Are we sure this is true? It's easy to put $0 on a balance sheet under the real estate column. But there are certainly other costs (including opportunity costs).

I _think_ the reason that the comparison with OpenAPI feels weird is because OpenAPI uses one (and only one) communication interface in REST. AsyncAPI is trying to accomplish the same thing without a consensus in communication interface. This requires that any specs are far more abstract to encompass the possible options.

But consider what OpenAPI/Swagger actually changed - it made for a singular page to tell a user (or machine) all the possible ways to interact with the service and what the shape of the requests and responses would look like. AsyncAPI is meant to do the same, but it's much harder to grok with all the various protocols generalized into unnatural-looking fields/URIs/etc.

Yup, used quite a lot for things like loadbalancer configuration (for instance): https://kubernetes-sigs.github.io/aws-load-balancer-controll...

This is a huge hurdle. There is actually some chip/silicon fab sites that never left (only scaled down considerably from their peak). A family member has worked at one for many years as an engineer/manager. When he tells me stories about the insane complexity of their process engineering it really hits home. Impurities at the nanometer scale can ruin 10 million dollar batches of silicon. Nasty chemicals are piped everywhere at the plant - the kind that explode if touching oxygen in the atmosphere or acids that dissolve bone before they noticeably affect your skin.

Running such a production is difficult.

Anecdotally, I have at least 7 family/friends that were RNs at some point and moved on to other professions or dropped to part time. Zero of my family and friends are still full-time RNs. They cite a combination of reasons: risks from patients (moving overweight people, assault from patients, verbal abuse from patients/families, etc), increased workloads that threaten their licenses, and cost of childcare. And this all occurred before COVID.

OPB is excellent. Oregon Field Guide is just so good. As a Seattle resident, I'm a bit jealous that Oregon has us beat with the outdoor programming. But a lot of their stories cross the state border. https://watch.opb.org/show/oregon-field-guide/