Copies in Seconds: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine by David Owen
"A history of the photocopier offers a portrait of reserved physics graduate Chester Carlson, who invented the copier to ease his job as a patent clerk and who saw his marketing efforts daunted by numerous rejections, before the head of Xerox research recognized the machine's potential. "
The bad grammar was a tell for me - did not even come close to being plausibly from a native English speaker. That said, I can understand how someone who very much needs/wants a job could could fall prey. I hope things work out for this guy.
They were after data for other carriers and/or more enriched data than they could easily collect. They could use this data for their own marketing and/or network planning. e.g. “We have the least share in market M where some significant proportion of all cellular users , based on twitter data, love NASCAR and spend relatively a lot of time on their phones at racetracks and Walmart. Lets increase capex around race tracks, do a promo with NASCAR and Walmart, and buy some appropriate ads.”
"even not particularly addictive when not delivered via burning leaves"
My personal experience is that it is even more addictive. First, with NRT (gum, lozenge) you can use nicotine much more frequently - e.g. even going to bed with lozenge in your mouth. Second, you can easily increase your dosage. 2mg piece of gum not doing it for you? Pop in a few more or move up to 4mg. Switch to mini-lozenge and you can suck on say 5 * 4mg lozenges at one time.
In 30+ years of programming, vast majority of bugs I've fixed were diagnosed with a few strategically placed print statements.
"I just print values. When I’m developing a program I do tremendous amount of printing. And by the time I take out, or comment out the prints it really is pretty solid. I rarely have to go back." — Ken Thompson in the book Coders at Work by Peter Seibel
I too have suffered from depression. The work of Dr. David Burns have proven to be most helpful to me! I'd suggest checking out his website feelinggood.com or his new book "Feeling Great" - he also has a podcast. FWIW, Dr. Burns is not some kind of "self-help charlatan" He is a Stanford MD/Psychiatrist with decades of experience treating depression. Best wishes!
A few years ago I fell and broke my elbow. It was a mess and had to have emergency surgery to put it all back together. After surgery I'm sent home with a "ball" around my neck that is a reservoir for some pain meds that are being fed into my body via a catheter that was threaded into a vein in my neck. So I am sitting on my recliner a few hours after the surgery , awake but groggy. Anesthesiologist calls me on my cell phone to check in on me. So the pain med ball has a valve on it calibrated from 1 to 10. It's on like 9. He asks me how the pain level is. I say "no pain". He say's "great, what's the setting our your valve" I say 9. He says "whoa! you need to turn that down! At that level it will be used up in about 10 hours and you need it last for at least 48 hours" I say "okay." He then hangs up. So being a groggy engineer, I think "okay, I will dial it down to like 2 and then as pain arrives adjust up to needed level" So I turn it down to 2. About 45 minutes later I am in the most excruciating pain I have ever experienced. Think teeth clenching. Sweating. Tears. I immediately turn the dial up to 10. The pain lasted for 2 hours. I'm an atheist, but let me tell you I was coming to Jesus in those two hours. Once the pain subsided, I call him back. He says "Oh yeah, you should have slowly backed down on the dial." Upside is that I have a lot of empathy for folks who say they are in pain. Seriously, if that pain had continued I would have taken anything, Heroin, whatever!!!
I'd talk to a doctor or two. I posted above about a friend diagnosed with stage 3 at 45 who passed on at 49. She too had a family history (aunt, uncle, grandmother)
Prepping for the colonoscopy is worse than the procedure itself. Get a good doctor, the risks are low but not 0 and, of course, you can google up the worst outcomes. A dear neighbor was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer at 45 years old and departed us at 49.
Thank you sir for your generosity! My wife teaches second grade in a lower income bay area school district, she's rocking a 2012 macbook pro :-( Let's put it this way, the fan is always on what with Zoom, multiple chrome tabs with google classroom and other apps, and an old ipad mini feeding quicktime to serve as a poor man's document camera.
My wife is a 2d grade teacher. She brought home her lumens ladybug that she used with her Promethean board in the classroom. However, the lag was terrible, her 2012 macbook pro just couldn't handle it. Our solution was to re-purpose an old ipad along with reflector teacher https://www.airsquirrels.com/reflector/teacher ($17.99). Yeah, just in case you're curious - my wife teaches for a SF Bay Area school district where I suppose they can afford lots of stuff except a refresh of eight year old laptops.
I think this has to be some attempt to "test" the guy to see how he would respond to a company policy that is not only wrong but could have serious legal consequences.
Countries with nukes and 2M+ man armies? Besides, too much is at stake by our corporate overlords to put military action or sanctions on the table. Sadly, Hong Kongers need to steel themselves for some tough struggle sessions.
re: "free lawyer" - many times you get what you paid for. Hence people with incompetent representation (purposefully or otherwise) ending up with bad plea deals and/or lengthy sentences.
I've coded/supported a number of admin tools for a number of large companies (banks, telcos, etc) so I'll take a stab at "why" First, god mode can be implemented cheap and fast. God mode also makes day to day support easy as admins/support staff can do just about everything fast and easy - so they typically love it and will often fight to keep it. More than once I have had managers turn down proposals to tighten up security because of the cost and false beliefs that because the tool is behind a firewall, better security is not needed. Taking a schedule and/or budget hit to implement tighter security is not going to get them a promotion or bonus. Sad but true. In the vast majority of cases I've seen, paying for security improvements becomes incentivized for managers after their company gets burned by a breach.
Also, admin tools are often "afterthoughts", there is usually a motley collection of them, and often considered as an expense/cost to be minimized and not a revenue generating asset that gets more budget and attention.
I lost my software engineering job a year ago. In my late 50s I sunk into a depression. A resource that helped me get back on my feet was the works of Dr. David Burns. His website is https://feelinggood.com. He also has a book "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy" and a podcast. In my case the feelings of hopelessness and depression that stemmed from my job loss were due to distorted thinking. For example my thinking was along the lines of "I've lost my job, I'm old, I haven't interviewed in decades so no company will hire me, I'm doomed". In reality that was distorted thinking. Sure some companies might practice age discrimination, but not ALL of them. I may be older, but I also have years of experience. It turned out that after about 4 months I found a job with a better company with a pay increase. There is hope and I hope this comment can help you in some way.
Was in job search late last year so not much to worry about. But abuse me and you lose me, goodbye triplebyte, we hardly knew each other and never will.
Reminds me of circa 1998 when people said "don't use Javascript" because mixing logic with presentation is the root of all kinds of evil. I have used threads for decades now and am still alive to talk about it.
Have to say the "We're all in this together" rings hollow for me, even irks me - especially when it's some wealthy celebrity saying it. That said, I feel blessed that (so far) I still have my paycheck working remotely and my wife has her's as a teacher. We decided to keep paying for a number of services (local small gym, house cleaner, gardener) we aren't using - I guess partly motivated by a sense of "we're all in this together" and "it's the right thing to do", etc. But there is a still a lot of risk that I could eventually lose my job depending where all this ends up and with two kids heading to college, a mortgage, retirement coming sooner than later - It's not stress free by any means.
I’d second this. Check you sleep. #hours. Get a sleep study, make sure you don’t have sleep apnea. Also review your diet and any substances you consume. In my case it was sleep apnea in my 40s that took me from “coding like a m’fing riot” to barely able to concentrate long enough to code a for loop. good luck.