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   > The video mentions an exception for educational content. Fine, but who decides what is educational? What about some of the truly horrific WW2 content. Is that educational? Hard to blame YouTube for being very cautious here.

Educational? Absolutely.

I'm a parent of teenagers and to be clear, when they were younger, I was careful about "truly horrific WW2 content." The goal is to educate, not present a child who is incapable of understanding/rationalizing those atrocities with the graphic reality of what took place in a manner that they're not going to understand but -- instead -- will likely cause psychological issues and irrational fear at a time when they're not capable of integrating that into their view of the world.

That said, I can't find a word strong enough for how I feel about censoring "the true nature of the evil that took place" or restricting access to this information in any way. I remember when Schindler's List was played -- completely uncensored -- on broadcast network television in the US (I believe it was NBC at the time). I can't think of another drama or content of any kind that received an MPAA "R" rating ever being aired to the general public without editing and little more than a regular warning about the sensitivity of the content. It's a tough movie to watch and certainly not meant for all ages but I think the broadcaster and the regulatory bodies rightly recognized that there were two choices: don't do it at all - or - do it completely.

My experience in this area is not one of "a child of Jewish parents who survived/were victims of the holocaust" but as "the kid who saw some truly horrific WW2 content" in middle school. My eighth-grade English teacher was Jewish. There is a Holocaust Memorial Center/Museum about an hour from our school. Our teacher set up transportation and granted students a few extra credit points for joining in on an after-school trip.

That experience changed my life and looking back on it, today, I'm so glad I had this teacher. She did this every year. It was not without controversy among the parents of students.

For the men[0] who attended public middle school in America, think back to 8th grade. Outside of a serious injury, an 8th grade boy does not cry ... EVER ... in front of classmates as doing so would basically destroy your life[1]. Now, imagine any experience that could cause every boy to not just "openly cry" but outright sob in a parking lot and then on and off for an hours-long drive home in a yellow school bus[2]. And then the stories throughout the school the next day none of us could help talking about the holocaust, the experience we had, and not one of us left out the bus-ride home.

By the way ... the kids who took advantage of the extra credit? A few good students and all of the bullies (some needed the points to avoid the dreaded "summer school"); including the one white redneck who called the only black kid in our school the "N-Word." Sobbing. I had a history class with the redneck in 11th grade. He talked about his experience, about how is parents are racist and about how that experience changed him.

It breaks you.

It's necessary.

[0] Maybe things are different, now, but where I attended middle school ... the girls were basically all crying at one point or another during any given week. It wasn't a pleasant place most of the time.

[1] We had a kid in school who cried in class. This poor kid was then beaten up weekly -- it would have been more frequently if both parties to any fight weren't "suspended for a week" regardless of who started the fight. He attended a private school the following year.

[2] The drive there was the typical 8th grade "herding cats", random "F-Bombs" and general misbehavior.

I'm with you on this ...

What seems to be happening is a whole lot of anec-data that has various problems which do not allow someone to draw useful conclusions.

The problem a lot of folks have is "We've been planting things in the ground using centuries of study on the subject, something so novel couldn't possibly work!"

Putting together some experiments with a little rigor to try to identify (a) if plants are growing better in this environment and (b) what, specifically, is causing that growth and (c) altering the experiment to focus on that "what" ruling out other possible side-effects[0] would be helpful.

It seems like something that could be done by an amateur as the equipment involved for a lot of this is inexpensive while the upside is huge if it turns out there's something to it.

[0] Specifically the mention of lighting strikes affecting Shitake mushroom growth -- which could be any number of crazy things that happen when lightning strikes something -- would be necessary.

I had one of those "blessings in disguise" circumstances around 2017. I had just purchased a shiny new "phone of my dreams"[0] to have it land face down on the concrete two days later resulting in a few large cracks.

I paid full price for the phone; it wasn't top of the line, I could afford to replace it but it wouldn't be "fun" -- and you can guess that I purchased no insurance. Owing to stubbornness and a general desire to punish myself a little so that I didn't make that mistake, again, I decided I'd continue to use it as long as the touch-screen accepted input and was basically usable (without injury).

I expected to put up with it for a few months. A few things happened: Doom scrolling basically stopped, entirely. When I visited social media, I'd prefer my laptop so the time I spent there was "maybe once in the evening" rather than any time "I had to wait". I became the obnoxious guy who replied to texts with phone calls[1], and wrote e-mail replies that were longer than the "Sent from my ..." notice (which none of my e-mails contained because all were sent from my well worn keyboard).

The phone didn't come out during dinners/meetings. To be clear: I don't feel the need to engage people in conversation simply because we're "both waiting for a meeting to start" and "we work together." But be the one guy in the room who doesn't have his phone out and just ... sit there. It's at least a little awkward; you sort of feel like a voyeur as everyone buries their nose in their screen as if the act of doing so makes them invisible to the outside world.

It takes a second, but someone will almost always look up and notice you're ... just ... sitting there. You can watch the expression change on their face as they question this odd social behavior but it eventually lands on: Someone seems to think we shouldn't have our phones out!. A "guilty look" and a sly "sneak it into the pocket/chair" action later and ... now there are two people, sitting quietly, watching a room of people staring down at screens. By the time the third person follows, someone feels the need to start small-talking and wow some folks are out of practice!

There were a few occasions where I thought I may have been giving off a look, unknown to myself. I really don't care about other's phone habits if I am not their parent or romantic partner. I write software and work with others who write software. Most of us our phone habits were excessive before "it was normal"; a few of you, somehow manage to handle conversation and Doom Scrolling simultaneously with minimal effort. So I occasionally found myself in the odd position of having to grant some sort of not-directly-requested-but-clearly-desired permission ... like I'd be doing exactly that if I could; don't mind me at all. It wasn't that I had a completely busted phone, it was just really inconvenient to read anything reasonable on; and I'd rather look at the dots in the ceiling tiles than remind myself of my $600 "dammit".

Outside of those weird situations, in smaller group/1:1 settings I've found if my phone isn't out, their phone will stay in their purse/pocket and we'll actually engage in whatever activity brought us away from our home/homes and into the world.

Going on a year, I had no interest in replacing the phone. I kept the broken screen phone for longer than I'd ever used a mobile device. As if to test my resolve, this phone refused to die. Eventually, on year 4.5, it stopped taking a charge. My new phone gets a little more use, but I'm much more aware of it, now. I'm the last person to take the thing out of my pocket; my notifications are customized to very quiet tones except for a small number of contacts so I know when it's worth "responding to the bell."

I'm not recommending anyone go out and take a hammer to their phone, or anything. That first few months took a lot of resolve to not just plunk down the MasterCard and fix my mistake, but I'm glad I didn't.

[0] It was a Samsung, but I can't remember which one.

[1] Having the additionally side-effect of eliminating text messages for things that a few seconds thought, or at worst -- Google -- could handle with fewer social obligations attached.

About 15 years ago I made quite a bit of money recovering data from damaged HDDs using various low-tech means.

It started when I threw a very expensive (at the time) 1.5TB HDD. It had various things going on with it but I recall it wouldn't spin up and once I was able to get it to spin up, it wouldn't function for more than a few minutes before it would error out and the drive would become unrecognized by the PC.

I remember I made it spin up again entirely by accident. Figuring the drive was toast, I'd removed it and while fumbling with the cables it slipped out of my hand and landed on the hardwood floor. I hadn't noticed when I was holding the drive, but it felt like something was "stuck"[0] and after picking it up off the floor, it felt like the components were moving again. On a whim I plugged it back in and it worked.

The second problem, I knew, was thermal. The drive got incredibly hot very quickly. Being that it was a 1.5TB drive at a time when "that was big", I'd need the drive to be functional for hours to complete copying the data.

I had a dorm fridge in my office and debated putting it in one of my external cases and running a cable from there but knew that the moisture wouldn't play well. Because I kept very little in this fridge, it was filled with a few cans of soda, coffee creamer and about ten of those blue gel bags that people freeze/put in coolers in lieu of ice. I did this mainly because the fridge was really loud and keeping it stocked with anything made it run a lot less.

The upshot was that the size of these "bags" was just a little larger than a 3.5" HDD, if left out they maintained their temperature for hours[1]. I grabbed two, placed the drive on top, put two more on top of the drive and managed to image the whole thing.

It was so simple, I popped an ad on Craigslist and $200 "I'll get your data back or you don't pay." Out of 30-40 drives, there were less than 5 that were beyond help. About half were software issues, many of which were simple to resolve. Very few required a tool like photorec, but it did the job when needed[2]. The rest were handled with an extremely stable power supply, four gel bags and patience. Except for one of my own drives, I never popped screws and generally didn't resort to "applying physics and gravity" in hopes that if I couldn't recover anything, I'd at least give them a drive that was "no more damaged than when I received it" (they still signed a document covering me for any liability).

The whole experience made me realize how critical keeping "components other than the CPU" cool is. Every drive I've experienced hardware failures on[3] has had something heat-related coinciding. I remember one time I couldn't figure out which of the 8 drives was indicating failure; I saw one of the three fans in the drive cage wasn't spinning. I shut the server down, pulled out the fan and its 3-drive set, figured has to be the middle drive, swapped it and it started rebuilding the array on reboot. I guessed right. :)

[0] If you take a drive, lay it flat on a desk and spin it, you'll hear things move ... this one didn't.

[1] Provided it's just sitting on a wooden desk.

[2] There was one customer that I'll never forget and he was a reason I stopped doing this entirely. I told him I could recover photos/videos/specific file types from his drive but it will recovery everything it sees including files that may have been intentionally deleted. He said "Oh, no! Don't do that. I'll pick up my drive." I still wonder, to this day, what kinds of horrors I would have been in for (I rarely did more than a spot check on the data, anyway).

[3] I still have a pretty massive custom built storage server with an older LSI MegaRAID controller and a mess of SAS HDDs. For what it's used for, the speed is more than adequate the individual drive costs are substantially less (even taking into account SAS over SATA) and they outlive my SSDs.

Gotta say -- that looks ... kinda awesome.

I'm sorry the relationship didn't work out. I can completely relate, though. I think just about every "coolest physical thing" I've made ended up going to an ex-wife or ex-girlfriend.

I guess I'm just not motivated to make cool physical things for myself.

Maybe.

OK, I grasp what the author is getting at -- there are certainly times when I've gone needlessly complex expecting a set of problems that not only never materialized, but the ones that actually materialized were poorly handled by my design. It sucks. Lesson learned.

I only have first-person anec-data based on a diverse career in software development (big/small/solo/small/big team/process-heavy/haphazard) but it's the opposite circumstance that usually burns me far worse.

I describe this as "they asked for this really small thing and now it runs half the company" problem. It's an exaggeration, but the story from my past was the temporary system that was set up for an (unnamed) major long-distance carrier to "pay the bill via an EDI setup"[1]. Ten years later, shortly after we moved a huge data-center to another time zone the panic alarm bells rang over a few million dollars missing from said carrier.

The temporary-turned-permanent setup was an IBM NetVista machine hooked up to a 1200 baud modem with a dedicated phone line running a DOS program at boot off of a hard drive that had to have its disk parameters manually provided via BIOS every reboot because the little battery inside had sent its last electron down the line and -- rather than replace the battery with an abundance of spares -- the technician decided printing a label with the values would suffice.

A more apt example would be a dashboard that I created a simple service for which produced a list of "the top 20 endpoint threats by vulnerability patching level" ... oh did the execs love this[2], which led to creating a mess of other dashboards and a set of small services that produced just the hostnames. They were all variations like "Just locations with desktop support staff on-site by location", "Servers", "Domain Controllers" ... I want to say I had something like 30 variations at the end ... and thousands of lines of code. I wasn't clever. This "stupid service" took me away from things I needed to finish and several others that I enjoyed working on much more, so this was a model of spaghetti-code-copy-pasta(-marinara). And then they wanted something added to the output of everything. I finished it a few days before leaving the department ... along the way I figured out that more than half of the reports produced results that were anywhere from "kind of close" to what they said they did to several which produced results for the wrong building for each endpoint type (and -- as a result -- was completely ignored). I bit the bullet and took this 5,000 multi-file ASP (vbscript!) monster down to 6-ish classes, less than 500 lines, easy to extend/expand and re-use what's there[3].

Unfortunately, this leads to the totally useless advice of "Be Clever When It Will Help." When will it help? Beats the hell out of me. I didn't imagine a world where a VP calling my desk asking for "a quick web page that shows the worst machines on the network for a slide I'm working on" would become an integral reporting component of an in-house massive networking auditing tool, so I can't help much, there...

[0] Admittedly, I only discovered I encountered the opposite circumstance after that circumstance presented itself, so the whole thing benefited from hindsight bias.

[1] I was not directly involved in the software involved, only in the resurrection of the dead service.

[2] I had the dubious distinction of accidentally creating "a new operations process" whereby every week it was expected that the top 20 machines on Monday (...which became "from each list"...) would be fully resolved by Friday. Desktop had to have dolls in my shape with knives sticking out of them.

[3] Demonstrated on the final revision by adding a single class that altered the retrieval process to WeakReference cache all views (there were reasons an output cache wasn't useful due to it now being part of a bigger system that often required previously materialized values on other threads but never touched an HTTP endpoint).

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, I guess. I'm not at all surprised there's this much drama around this. It sounds like it's a matter of a little time and we'll know what's going on.

   > Einstein's Relativity was called "fake Jew science".

Thankfully, along the way, we discovered that "Jew Science" is quite good. I imagine an alien civilization visiting the Earth at that time trying to make sense of the arguments being given as to why one particular race/nationality's science is better than another's ... I think we'd find our answer to the Fermi paradox, maybe.

   > As alluded to those same pop science magazines promised a fusion future too.

I get it ...

But how many of them predicted their use in ~36,000 advanced medical imagery devices world-wide?

I'd love fusion power (and flying cars), too, but there's a whole lot of interesting technology between "check out my shiny new super-conductor" and "let's use it to contain plasma that's hotter-than-the-core-of-the-sun-kind-of-hot[0]" that we do benefit from[1], today, to not be too disappointed that we haven't quite reached the greatest potentials.

I don't know enough to speak intelligently on any of this -- who knows -- maybe fusion won't be a possibility until even higher-temperature super-conductors are created ... or maybe there's some other "not possible" in the way (until another discovery is made).

[0] And (if I understand things correctly) it's probably really unfortunate that they traditionally require extreme cooling, likely made more complex given the heat involved and almost certainly requiring far more power than would be required if said super-conductors worked at much higher temperatures.

[1] Myself, personally -- and I have a pretty cool 3D file of my brain backed up to my server as a result.

/// apologies: reading this over it sounded a little hostile; that wasn't intended -- I was merely offering a competing perspective, albeit poorly :)

   > I don't think it's given that all superconductor breakthroughs will require 40 years to get to that point

Absolutely right. People generally understand that "collective human knowledge[0]" grows but they think of it as a linear system. The speed at which knowledge grows accelerates -- not at an even pace -- but I'd wager somewhere near exponentially in a lot of places.

And each discovery can change our understanding of other things/accelerate discovery in other areas.

[0] So much as such a thing can exist

The biggest problem was being taken seriously. Everyone gets an eye-twitch from time-to-time. I made a special appointment with my PCP and was told "get more sleep", reduce stress and eat more things containing potassium... I have since found a new doctor. :)

This was the early 00's but considering your project 20 years ago, that lands in at about the right time-frame.

You're right -- I mix the two up because I've rarely seen someone get injections that hasn't done the Botox thing. I assume it's the Botox that makes their lips move ... strangely?

That's a pretty fantastic idea!

Of course, I'm far from an expert in anything related to medicine and I'm sure there's some reason this is dangerous/wouldn't work but I'd love to know why...

I saw the title and that was the first thing I thought of.

I was sincerely hoping that "magic drug" wasn't referring to its use in cosmetic surgery[0].

As I'm not a member of anything medical-field related I was unaware that it had been used to treat "blepharospasm"[1]. Having gone through that to the point of actually seeking treatment, I'm disappointed my doctor wasn't aware of that option. At the point -- two days with no sleep -- I would have raided the drawers and given myself a shot.

But, really, Botox is what most people think of when thinking "magic drug." I'm not sure that's the word I'd use.

I'm a guy in my 40s with a pretty typical subset of people categorized as "I used to know them in High School". Literally in the period of 4 years about 25% of the women in my friends list were very clearly talked into getting Botox. One woman must be involved in some multi-level marketing scam related to Botox because she's frequently posting pictures of her face "post treatment" (and, I'm sorry, it's grizzly)

I have to believe that some people have good results. But, no joke, I can pick out at least 10 women who have what I call "Botox Face". You notice it first in the lips -- "permanent semi-duck-face". Then they start talking -- large portions of their face don't move as expected. I had a co-worker who had it done, missed a few days of work, and when she returned I had assumed she suffered a stroke (thank God I didn't say anything). I had known she had Botox before (she had the lips already) so this was a second course of treatment.

Despite how this sounds, this wasn't intended as an attack on folks who use Botox. I'm truly curious -- it seems like a lot of people have this done and the results are much worse than before for many of them. How many is anyone's guess ... in theory, it would be impossible to tell the difference between good Botox and "natural" but I can't think of another form of cosmetic surgery that has worse results. But considering how many people have bad results, why do so many people continue to get it done (including folks who previously had bad results!)

[0] Ok, maybe just a little, because it's an "easy target".

[1] Such a fun word -- one that people know if they've ever had their eye twitch consistently for a month (try sleeping that way).

While this may be correct when all possible types of deliveries (weight/distance/geography) are taken into account there are definitely cases where drone delivery is going to be substantially cheaper than similar delivery by vehicle.

Maybe it's my proximity to large bodies of water, but there are many island communities where I live that have limited (or no) road access requiring either a very out-of-the-way route to reach a destination or -- worse -- a ferry. A trip out to some communities could be the difference between a mile travel by air vs 10 miles travel by vehicle.

That's an extreme outlier, obviously, but if you dial that back a bit and use, say, "a trip from my home to my girlfriend's" which involves working around two rivers that roads only cross at certain points, the difference is 5 miles "as the crow flies" vs almost 14 miles of windy roads.

When all of the other problems are worked out, a drone delivery service could augment regular delivery to reduce costs/improve delivery time for products.

I think products that greatly benefit from improved delivery time, though, is the place where drone delivery can be successful. It's currently being used in some countries for blood/medical deliveries and that was the first thing that came to mind when I thought of places where drone delivery would be able to be compete/displace existing providers.

I had a friend who flew a helicopter for a company that moved people/organs/other emergency-releated activities for hospitals. Organ transplants, as I understand them, are extremely time-sensitive. One day he was called on to deliver a liver from a hospital nearby to a hospital mid-state for a waiting patient. Weather, wind, clouds and other variables were excellent; he was on-call and a ways out but made it. Shortly after take-off the helicopter suffered a failure (memory escapes me), it crashed resulting in the death of my friend, (I think) a passenger and ultimately the patient waiting for the organ.

This was 20-ish years ago and in the time since then it was discovered that part of the pre-flight check was skipped and IIRC[0] the crash was determined to be related to condensation in the fuel tank or something along those lines -- basically, he was on-call with a tight delivery schedule and cut a corner to account for the time it took him to get to the hospital for the delivery.

Drone delivery would improve several things in this model. The most obvious one being "no dead pilot or passenger" when something goes awry. If we're "flying things around" especially using small aircraft and GA pilots, there's going to be crashes -- drones or people involved -- it's a guarantee. Using drones would enable deliveries to take place without delays involved in "waking up a pilot on-call/waiting for their arrival" -- allowing hospital staff to prepare the delivery vehicle, make a call, and hand off to a remote drone pilot to get it to its destination. Assuming software/user interfaces can make piloting a drone remotely as safe as flying a helicopter "in person", the benefits would be enough to offset the higher delivery costs.

[0] I tried to find a reference online to refresh my memory but was unable so forgive my memory if I've got some details wrong here.

Many thanks for the reply; you make some excellent points.

I agree completely on the "theory" side of things. One of the reasons CS degrees have value is in these foundational aspects. While they can be learned outside of that environment, it's challenging and most people don't take the time to do it.

I think there's a "happy medium" between pure apprenticeship and what we (mostly) have, today. You brought up the model used in medicine -- I feel this model is more like the mixed apprenticeship/university model with a lot of hands-on work in the field under apprentice-ship like conditions with increasing responsibilities/exposure to actual patients. Of course, my exposure to how all of that works begins and ends with medical dramas on TV so I may be imagining that "ideal scenario".

My own situation was quite unique and I feel it was pretty ideal for myself and the company that I spent my college years working for.

I'd started building small business networks for folks in my teens and at 19 interviewed for a job supporting network rollout at a regional-LEC-turned-national telecom. I'd just started college full-time in hopes of completing my degree in 4 years -- I'd have to push this to 6-8, instead, but for accepting a longer time in school, I'd get experience working in an IT department[0] and they paid for my tuition/books.

The tuition reimbursement policy was generous -- it covered at least two classes a semester with books, four semesters a year at 100% if you scored at least a 3.2 (or pass in pass/fail scenarios). If the degree was in your field of work you required no approval; if outside of it, you could still receive reimbursement with approval from HR (which was always granted if the degree was useful to any job in the company, so it was nearly always approved). Some of work time could even be logged as "working on my degree".

You had to pay back a percentage of any class you took two years prior to quitting[0], but IIRC even that was never more than half.

On the company's side, the program encouraged loyalty. Once you're in it, it becomes a big factor in "am I going to take this new job?" -- I turned down two excellent offers because they lacked a similar program and I wasn't encouraged that I would be otherwise supported in completing my education[2] Myself and two other coworkers stayed there 17 years -- at least nine of those were "while I was getting my degree" or waiting for the pay-back period to end. I turned down two excellent job offers during that time because they lacked a similar program and I really appreciated the fact that I was earning a respectable salary while completing my degree and accumulating exactly zero student loan debt.

[0] My hope at the time was to transition to the software development team but I started supporting migrations from mainframe terminals to networked PCs -- some of which were allowed to connect to the internet. Within a year I was writing software full time but (thankfully) not on any of the actual development teams at the company.

[1] If you were laid off you were not required to pay them back.

[2] That sounds a little entitled -- and it is. But I had support at my current job so it was a "real thing" I would be giving up. Beyond that, though, it spoke to the overall organizations' feelings about professional development.

   > the economic model of teaching *this* is bad.

I tend to agree with this statement over "the economic model for teaching everything is terrible". Bear with me as I'm trying not to be petty by taking issue with the word "everything"[0] and I agree that this statement would be true about the majority of how traditional in-person education is done in the United States, especially at the (public) school and college/university level, however, I believe that issue lies more with the system, itself, than the idea that it's impossible to optimize an economic model involving education.

Looking at it "from a step back" -- from the perspective of any other product -- the cost is the teacher/facility/equipment and environment to support a touchy activity (learning) and multiple human beings attempting to do so at the same time. It's probably the most expensive way to transfer knowledge available to us and it's the default way most of us are taught.

In-person hands-on teaching falls victim to the basic problems of scale. Profits increase as the number of students per teacher increases but -- in most cases -- this negatively impacts the quality of the delivered education.

I don't think it's a "wild guess" to say that a lot of us meandering in the comments are self-taught. Sure, we went to college. Some of us even have advanced degrees[1]. But if you write software -- daily -- you've largely learned the details from somewhere other than a classroom. Most of the time it's been "for free" by reading others' code, online tutorials, actual documentation, etc. These are extremely efficient ways of both teaching and learning -- the single effort put into teaching is able to be consumed by limitless numbers of people.

There are many modalities to teaching/learning that are more efficient/provide for a better "economic model for teaching" than "traditional in-person education". One that we seem to have stepped further away from is apprenticeships. Puppetry -- though I have no experience in it -- is probably something that deeply benefits from in-person knowledge transfer and it seems like the kind of work that has probably only been taught via apprenticeship in the past.

[0] Love it when my kids do that ... "oh yeah, but what if ...?"

[1] That's not meant to imply anything negative about such degrees.

It's funny you mention that ... I have both discovered and forgotten the novelty of a headlamp at least 5 times in the last decade.

At the time (1980s), I'm not sure there were very many good headlamp options but either way, I wasn't in control of the portable light purchasing decisions.

However, the man who's job it was didn't skimp much. He was a small plane pilot, so I recall being warned not "to look into this flashlight[0]." It looked not much different than you're typical consumer flashlight, but if you picked it up, it was much thicker plastic, used 4 C batteries and no joke, it hurt your eyes to look into.

[0] The flashlight has a switch and a button on it, the button lets you flicker the light for emergency visual signalling (the kind that a pilot might need for the very specific situation of "need to flash morse-code through the windscreen at the ATC tower to get landing clearance because I was struck by lightning and my radios are all fried" -- so ... bright.

I've had much the same experience in my life (though less with game development and more with other forms of hobby development).

Gotta say, though, like the name :)

That would a pretty accurate depiction of future years, though who was holding the work-light changed hands when I was about 13 :)

Second for this -- I worked on a product that used their back-end API several years ago (just before they were acquired). Great group of developers over there.

  > Autodesk is the oracle/adobe of the CAD world

So many things come to mind with that one sentence, it's mesmerizing. I don't have a lot of direct exposure to Oracle, but I remember grief with Adobe and Autodesk products dating back to the 80s.

My dad's company was light manufacturing. They used AutoCAD for various things and my dad became proficient enough that he started wanting to use it for various projects at home. They used Aldus (eventually Adobe) PageMaker to design their catalogues. Both were ridiculously expensive large applications with a pretty solid lock on their respective industries. For the kind of catalogues they printed, they were required to provide the files in some format only PageMaker could produce and for their plays -- .DWG files.

I'm not sure how AutoCAD was actually licensed[0]. But much like Adobe's products, AutoCAD was somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000-$1,500 and because a price tag like that means "a lot of people will pirate it", they required attaching a special device to the parallel port (a "License Dongle") in order to start the application. Before I was old enough to "step in and solve the problem", my Dad would just take the dongle home with him on the weekends.

Generally speaking I don't think a single piece of software generated more profanity in my home than AutoCAD did. It started when he brought it home the first time. He'd dropped $4,000 on an 8088 clone (built by a local shop) with a 10MB hard drive. We lacked the free space and he'd come home with a full height 20MB drive. I remember my Dad with a screwdriver trying to get the old drive out / new drive into this tight, steel case[1] about every 2-4 minutes -- yelling some brief 4-letter word-combo. I don't remember what it was that I needed in the office at that moment but my mom intercepted me on my way and said "you'll want to stay out of there for a little bit."[2]

I remember he had to install/remove the drive twice because he had forgotten to install the 8087 co-processor before he put the drive back in.

The dongle was a source of constant grief. In this era, the parallel port was almost always used for printing. The dongle had a pass-through. It sometimes let you print when the pass-through was used but for whatever reason, it failed enough that it was often removed to print. The license dongle remained unplugged most of the time because the computer was used to print things more than it was used to draft things. Worse, I think this was one of two license dongles that was required by software my Dad used. These dongles appeared to be designed to fail -- kind of makes sense if their license model really is "per seat/per user" -- maybe they wanted it to fail if it's traded between machines too frequently? But suffice it to say, it broke. Around this time, thankfully, I'd discovered BBSes and software cracking. I fixed the problem and we lost the dongle.

[0] I'm going to guess that it was actually "per install/per user" and forgive the remainder of the details ... I'm going from poorly Google-enhanced memory from when I was under age ten. Anecdotally, my Dad and all of the businesses that he worked with -- outside of "taking home a dongle" -- were all properly licensed despite the common wisdom at the time being "small shops are mostly pirates."

[1] Google image search 8088 clone and look for the ones with the two 5.12" floppies, beige plastic front, all metal otherwise. We had two 5.12" floppies in the right full height drive slot and one MFM full-height HDD in the left.

[2] I'm making my Dad sound like an angry hot-head -- in reality, he was never like this except for the handful of times he had to fight with this box. Had I walked into the office, my Dad probably would have been embarrassed ... my mom was simply trying to keep me out of his hair while he was stressed out.

Mostly agree with the author but hadn't thought terribly deeply about it in the past.

The N/`CHAR` data type has served as somewhat of a code smell. I use the following approach when deciding (against) selecting fixed-width char types:

((1)) Is it ALWAYS a single character? Yes: use N/CHAR(1) No ... ((2)) Is it ALWAYS fixed width? No, use VARCHAR. ((3)) Is there a more appropriate type to use for the fixed-width data.

The third item tends to be the killer of CHAR(x>1). Too often the underlying data was converted to a fixed width string and stored that way when it should have been stored using a different type. I've seen everything from GUIDs-as-text which could be UNIQUEIDENTIFIERs to CSS hex codes that could be stored as integer values.*

Thank you for the thoughtful, honest, introspective essay[0]. I have a 15-year old son who -- like a lot of kids -- is interested in making games for a living. I've shared other pieces with him about "what it's really like to write software in the computer gaming world" and after clicking the link, quickly sent him this one. I just assumed it'd be something along those lines so I sent it before I read it.

These "real life in the world of game development" pieces are usually the kind that serve only to discourage a kid from wanting to write games (and really any other software for that matter) which is not really what I'm aiming for. I simply want him to have a more realistic view of what game development really is and I suspect he'd be interested in a lot of other corners of software development.

You basically nailed it, here[1]. In fact, as I read it, I imagined my son writing something like this in the future -- albiet with some details changed. He's an incredibly intelligent 15-year old kid who has pretty serious ADHD and struggles due to family circumstances. He had similar issues with friends -- mostly related to being homeschooled until last year[2].

[0] Looks like submitter is the author assuming the HN profile is accurate.

[1] As a fellow Christian who was praying about his son this morning, I suspect this was something He sent my way ;).

[2] He's got friends and makes friends easily but the school he was put in was a small (unfortunately awful) Christian school with kids who had attended since Kindergarten ... it was hard to break into.

It's an interesting read but I kept finding myself questioning the conclusions that were drawn. I always assumed it was that phenomenon where we're seeing a false pattern in randomness. If I'm reading things right, here, the article cites a study that basically involved calling people and asking them if they wake up before their alarm clock regularly -- I'm hoping they've accounted for this.

The thing I'm talking about (it has a name that escapes me and Google was no help) was something that affected my ex-wife a lot. She felt like she saw her birthday (US format) on the clock all the time. Upon further examination, her birthday lands near a mealtime (when she's more likely to look at the clock) and being that one arbitrary combination of numbers has significant meaning, every time she looks at the clock around meal-time, daily, she has about a 1 in 20 shot of really noticing the time, but were it -- say -- 12:05, she wouldn't make a mental note of it (or may not even remember looking at the clock).

Similarly with time "just before the alarm goes off", you wake up several times throughout the night and sleep lighter in the morning. You're really going to notice the time if the alarm is going to go off in 5 minutes vs. say 45 minutes. You're also far more likely to look at the time if it's starting to get light outside, if the birds are chirping, or there's other subtle signs of morning approaching whereas when you awake and it's obviously night you are less likely to bother checking the time.

Assuming it's possible for a given function/role/company's product, which is quite common in world of software development, I find the whole trend of moving people back into the office at least a little perplexing and, frankly, short-sighted much of the time.

In 2001, I began switching my schedule to full-time remote[0]. I was working for a bankrupt telecom doing about three times the work a person could reasonably be asked to do (while what was being asked for was equally unreasonable given my salary). I had a great boss who -- while recognizing he couldn't do much about my salary -- was willing to do everything else and being at a bankrupt company, there was little in the way of "Corporate Handbook" policy that could get in the way any longer[1].

Over 17 years, about half or more of the company began working from home regularly, many full-time. This happened shortly after we deployed OCS 2008 R2 (what is now "MS Teams") which we did partly because "Cisco license renewal is expensive" and partly because most teams had members in more than one state -- in IT, we had members is several countries. We had these wonderful meeting rooms in every office, and people would take every meeting from their cubicles because "there's only 2 people from my 10-person team here, anyway".

If we had a role that could be done from anywhere, we'd routinely hire from a far-flung office. Literally no staff was available to research "what we should pay for this person if they live in Nowhere, Wisconsin." We don't even trust what what we pay current staff in the area because we just assume we underpay all existing staff. And the ones that set those rates often live in expensive places. So we'd make an offer at 30% above the going rate, get these amazing hires that -- maybe they really want to do the work, but they really want to do it if they can drive in to the office in the new car they can now afford. Meanwhile, they're among the lowest paid for the role, so HR thinks we got a deal!

Having "distributed teams", necessarily, adds friction to collaboration. Learning to address/be proactive with that friction is something that can bring it back to "the right level of collaboration." I love this assumption that "well, for certain highly collaborative roles", being face-to-face is necessary. Later you'll find that one of these roles involves software developers ... probably deploying to servers they don't have physical access to. I am deeply skeptical of this. What I suspect is happening is that there are a small number of people on the team who are highly-collaborative, a lot who benefit from it, but for whom "a little less talk and a little more heads-down writing code" would be helpful. I've been on highly-collaborative projects, totally remotely -- I literally sat on camera all day/into the evening a few nights in a row on one occasion (with five other people) -- it was equivalent to "coding in a conference room re-labeled 'WAR ROOM'" and taking sleep-breaks under your desk in the early 00s -- except I could cover the camera/nap in my own bed.

The list of "difficulties with remote teams" is filled with "reasons" that all have countless examples of "companies that are remote but aren't struggling with that problem." It sounds like a lot of it comes down to combinations of "organizational inertia" -- unwillingness to find/utilize tools which help reduce the friction of being fully remote[4]. Invest in researching the myriad of pros/cons -- the quality-of-life on the employee side means attracting a lot of talent that is missing their COVID-temporary remote status. Being able to hire outside of the difficult urban marketplaces, alone, should be enough of a savings -- even if you stayed "in-state" -- to make it worth the costs of providing high-end laptops/improving VPN gateways/subscribing to a few SaaS tools/cost of more frequent team-building and intentional team "remote shoot-the-sh_t" meetings.

Prior to COVID, I worked at a place that was a "no offices/no phones on desks" kind of "in-person" (ironically listing "remote friendly" on their job posting). There were a small number of remote employees, but they were due to extreme circumstances (and the fact that the owners were, honestly, great people), and they were relatively impossible to collaborate with if you were in the office, so they were "on project X or Y" always. We had offices in Seattle, Germany, NY, and India and most of us never talked to any of them. Their projects were almost all geographically near their office. We wrote software! (and, a lot of it, more than once for more than one person, without realizing it).

Somehow fates collided and we'd deployed Teams a month before COVID shut-down -- replacing Slack. Two weeks into COVID, all of us remote, and a few things happened. Work, basically, continued about as fervently as it did before. Development started having "informal" weekly meetings and we discovered all of the developers at other offices! Over two months, most projects consisted of teams across time zones (shock of all shocks -- "need" matches up more evenly with "developer availability" when the latter is widely spread out -- we had 4 people knowledgeable in Voice in Seattle doing one small project while we had 4 waiting for "the one voice guy" at our office).

It would be impossible for that company to justify to me, today, why I'd have to return to the office. By the time I left, we were doing more business, completing more work, and filling long-open positions more easily. As far as I know, they left the extremely expensive, but incredible office (that attracted me to accept returning to a daily commute in 2016). The company went from "minimally remote" to the point of not even integrating between offices well to "fully remote because the government said so" ... we had an "all employee" call, HR made some rapid adjustments and a lot of good choices and business improved. As an employee, we all just went to IM/Teams and adjusted ... it just meant having more time due to the loss of the commute.

Sure, it won't work for every kind of work to be done, but companies who's product is software that is deployed on hardware they no longer maintain -- the vast majority of roles, if not all of them, can be done remotely as effectively as in-person. We all watched it happen in real-time for a year -- some struggled ... we sure didn't -- among my friends, I can't think of one developer/IT/other who's company has requested them back into the office (either flex or full time). Among them, "getting new-hires up to speed" is the biggest stress point, but "it's been a couple of years, now" ... most have figured that out[5].

[0] By 2005, I still had a cubicle, but I came in, at most once a month.

[1] By the time I left, I hadn't seen my desk in over a year. At the time, working remotely at my company "officially" required written approval from a C-Level executive, keeping a daily work journal sent to HR and a number of other "we really don't trust you/want you to do this but there will be that one reason some day..."

[2] It didn't rank nearly as high with attracting customers -- it was the thing you didn't know you needed until you had it and we didn't know how to market it, apparently.

[3] I can't remember the history, but I know the application was designed there -- I think we acquired the company that developed it, originally, and integrated it into everything, but the original reason for hiring in WI was "that's where the team was". Over years, much of that staff was working on projects that had no presence in WI.

[4] Actually, it sounds more like companies are interested in tools that allow them to spy on remote workers. My attitude is "these are problems shared by every distributed team, whether those people are in an office or not" so if you wouldn't install that on a desktop in the office, it doesn't go on my work laptop in my home.

[5] Usually the "brute force" method is used: get a few people to the same place/derelict office for a two-week boot camp "here's the code, here's how things work, here's the obnoxious process, the time tracking tool, the 5 things we do once a year and can't remember how (and how to get to the page where they're all documented), and what's expected in what meetings" Fully remote doesn't mean you forbid face-to-face; I'd argue it's always optional -- I've done these things fully remote and seen it done well.

Thanks for sharing that -- on its own it was a great read.

At first, I was not surprised that they saw 1% of GuildWars players had these issues. My reasoning was given the time of the article (2012) and pointing to a more distant hazy point somewhere between StarCraft and Diablo[0] their user-base probably included a lot of "custom builds", a not-small portion of which would be "built intended for overclocking", in an era when the firmware/motherboard/processors would let you apply settings that would become extremely unstable under load[1]

... and I got about that far before I thought, only 1% of users managed to make their "let's see what happens if we alter the voltages/frequencies such that we run the DDR2-333 memory at DDR2-2048 (it's been a while), change the various "latency" settings throwing caution to the wind. Meanwhile all of this hardware is sitting in a case with a fan configuration that slightly lowers the air pressure in the case[2] ...

Back in the day (less common, today) you could often put any value from a range of "Way Too Low" to "Way Too High" and steps in-between. If it could reach the boot sector,... "Weeeeeeeeee!!" I recall a case of a customer who completely trashed an Intel Pentium (2? 3?) chip via firmware settings "my. kid. was. F---in'. with![3]"

Maybe I'm wrong and it's just a matter that the game involved attracts people who rarely OC/build and the 1% is "just those people", but anecdotally "in my life", everyone I knew back then who was a PC gamer either started with a build of their own or went that route the instant they had a job which allowed them buy their own computer (rather than sharing Dad's or getting his hand-me-downs if you were really lucky/have fewer years on you than I do).

My experience, especially back in the 08-09 era, was that things were ridiculously forgiving. Depending on the use, overclocking would either "do nothing at all" or maybe let you get away with slightly better graphics settings while maintaining a playable game. Generally, I purchased the cheapest memory rated slightly better than what I intended to configure them for (DDR2-xxx slightly higher than where I will clock it) with whatever I decided were the right latency values[4], placebo-overclocked day-to-day, but would push it from time to time. There's been times the system simply doesn't boot but one "tiny notch south" and it'll pass a 72-hour memory stress-test.

I've had crashes, locally, that I can't explain beyond "memory corruption" but I can't say if it's an OS failure, hardware failure or "something that's not memory corruption but malfunctioning other hardware" ... it passes a stress test, I usually find the "other hardware" a little while later (surprisingly often the PSU, for me).

[0] Unclear if editions implied are "I" in both cases, and it's not important enough to matter since reasonably earlier than 2012 puts you in the category of "the firmware/motherboards will let you do incredibly stupid things".

[1] Sometimes subtle "some character's armor texture is transparent" (making your enemies see-through, not naked, much to my teenage chagrin). Sometimes crazy like "Everything is shades of green with partial geometries".

[2] Say, if you had to have the most sleek case where every available air-flow "vent" can take a fan facing inward or outward (where it can sometimes be a bad idea to not leave one empty) has all of the fans blowing out... I've seen "The Vacuum Computer".

[3] So, this really happened to me (CompUSA, filling in at the Parts Department), and that's exactly the way I hear it, but you need to understand that it wasn't some form of "Jersey Shore" accent -- this guy was absolutely Korean with an accent so thickand not a day younger than...60? Aside from the shock of a person very much struggling with the English language dragging out the "F" word, you just don't see a plain-looking-harmless-old-man speak with such vigor and gusto!

[4] This being "unimportant" information for me day-to-day, requires hours of "refreshing via Google" and learning every miserable thing that's changed, coming to a complete understanding, finding that the memory I want either doesn't exist, doesn't work with my mother board, or costs a fortune and settling somewhere pretty close to what is "typical" if not ... exactly typical.

   > The city has a dedicated hazardous waste disposal site in each borough — but the hours of operation for these sites are limited.

Where I live, the waste hauler offers a single day per year where consumers can take hazardous waste for disposal.

And AFAIK, that's been the case everywhere I've lived since I was a child.

A related problem just hit me this weekend. I had removed a failed/bulged Lithium Ion battery from a week ago and placed it with my others to be taken during the one time a year that garbage collection allows us to bring the toxic stuff to them for recycling (later this year...).

Fast forward to this week and the battery is nearly twice its size. A while back I decided to repair a bunch of failed Ryobi Li-Ion packs (taking them apart, testing the 18650 cells independently and rebuilding each with all new cells of the same specifications)[0]. I'd done this several times over the years with various battery packs made up of 18650 cells[1].

While basically ignoring all of the intelligent warnings for handling/dealing with these cells[0], I managed to short one of the visibly bad cells for long enough to turn the battery into what might be a very respectable, completely out of control, blow torch.

The heat from the flame caused me to immediately drop it and everything I was holding but despite being in my hand for all of maybe 10 milliseconds, it managed to leave a permanent scar (which serves as a reminder for me every time I decide I'm going to risk my limbs to save a few bucks to ... at least ... be a whole hell of a lot more careful).

My question is: what in the hell do I do with this expanding pouch battery? I can't take it to the "toxic waste day" event until the fall. I know these pouch batteries are as prone to torching as much as the 18650 cells and this one is growing so fast that it was noticeable.

Are there any options beyond: (a) Toss it in one of the "Electronics Recycling" boxes at a big box store (are those still a thing?) -- I am concerned for the safety of the staff/store. (b) Same but get one of those "mail away" bags -- I would never do this; trading a garbage truck fire for a mail truck fire isn't an improvement and I'm sure it's as illegal as: (c) Hide it in the garbage and hope for the best -- see the article and "b" for why I won't do this, either. And finally, the only option my garbage carrier gives me: (d) Find some magical way to store this thing until the fall when my garbage carrier will let me drive it to their facility for Toxic Stuff Day. By then it'll be in a box of melted goo.

For the moment, I went with (d) and placed it inside of a container from a kiln I hacked together a few years ago ... which sits in the center of the cement floor of my shed[2].

I don't like any of these options -- anyone else been in a similar spot and found a good solution?

[0] I am not a battery guy or an electrical engineer, just a typical hacker with the driving force being: "What could possibly go wrong?"

[1] Pretty much every notebook from that era (gifted to me as "I'm just going to throw this out, do you want it?) had detachable packs made up of combinations of 18650 cells wired together.

[2] I learned I built this pretty well after it took a real world test with some mixed molten metals and other materials that left the entire interior covered in a layer of black "something" but did no damage otherwise.

  > Yes, *technically* it is illegal.

Oh how many phrases start "Yes, technically" in my life.

The law is an interesting beast. I know nothing about the law in India as it relates to FM band transmitters but I suspect that the law predates the common availability of adapters that one might use in ones car to add an input to a stereo that lacks such a highly technical circular hole for such purposes[0]. Once these devices gained wide adoption due to both their utility and -- more generally -- the fact that operating one is usually so benign that they can be difficult to discover let alone actually cause enough interference to warrant them to be seized.

The intention of the law was to prevent someone from operating a pirate radio station/give exclusivity to a single license-holder for that frequency. Since these devices don't violate the spirit of the law, the governing body finds it easier to carve out an informal exemption rather than explicitly write one in. It can also be tricky to correct a law that has a very valid reason for existing but may have cases where total enforcement isn't realistic[1].

The law may not have caught up to the reality on the ground and the legislatures answer to it is "enforce it when the interference is enough that someone notices." One might imagine a world where something akin to TV Detector-like Vans[2] drape the country-side in a dragnet to catch all of those pirate FM-input-devices but that usually only happens if there's a substantial amount of tax revenue to be gained ... to pay for the vans.

[0] I had one of these in the 90s (in the US, where it's not illegal if designed correctly) that connected my Discman to my ridiculously sad factory radio which lacked both external input and even a cassette deck.

[1] I do very little with regard to radio communication (if that isn't obvious) but I'd imagine most lawmakers do even less, so now you have to bring in experts to figure out "what's an acceptable amount of interference in this specific use case" and "how should a device like this be restricted." Not that government isn't famous for wildly wasting money or anything but I'd imagine the thinking is that it's not worth the effort to correct.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van

... I've always been amazed how often "Was that wrong?" works.

I guess I shouldn't be. Even letting them know you were fully aware you were breaking the law, most people would see its intended purpose -- to bring a little peace and comfort to a very old woman -- and have their own compassion kick in.

YMMV but I'm guessing you'd hear something along the lines of "Oh,... well,... (shuffles feet) ... just turn it off, then". Many of us have elderly people in our lives we wish we could provide some comfort to and most of us know we're headed there (if we're lucky to live that long). You know, assuming your 20m radius FM transmitter didn't, say, cause some cataclysmic event/knock emergency services offline for several city blocks, etc.

Put another way, while some police actually will pull you over and write you a ticket for going a couple of miles (km) per hour over the speed limit, most won't waste the brain power/physical energy/thermal paper to bother enforcing it.