mdip

I'm not sure what he made, but it was his first job so I'd imagine it was pretty terrible.

Actually, I think he would have moved on from that job a lot earlier except that the owners paid for him to get his pilots license and then paid him to fly -- something I know he really loved.

He eventually created his own startup outfitting (mostly automotive) manufacturing plants with ... just about anything. His company (being that it was actually his) also paid him to fly to various far flung (often rural) automotive plants -- it was often a business advantage that my Dad could drive 30m to the airport where his plane was stored and fly to a plant in any of the bordering states in as little as 30 minutes.

I recall a story where one of the plants was 2-3 hours from any airport you could get a commercial flight into, and you always had to connect at Chicago O'Hare[0]. The only way to get there for day shift was to take the earliest flight out, but that flight was always cancelled and everyone was tossed on the next flight that left 2 hours later. Some days took 10 hours flying commercial ... it's like a 12 hour drive from here. When the plane was available[1], there was a small landing strip 10 minutes from the plant. I'm guessing it was 3-4 hours in the air (and a lot of time over Lake Michigan) in the Piper Cherokee but I have no idea ... it no more than 40 minutes of driving, though!

[0] Which, apparently, was folly at every turn.

[1] He shared it with a few other men but his company was the one using it the vast majority of the time.

I had a few questions if you don't mind answering as I'm doing something similar for a vacation home (and my own, but this is more relevant to the remote one).

    How many IoT devices are you working with?  

I don't have the best router up north and some of my lousier routers can't handle more than about 25 devices before they start crapping the bed.

    Do they disconnect often from your router (and do the successfully reconnect)?

Similar router problem, though I've found some of the more finickier devices I own can have problems in my home where I have a number of options for connections.

    If you haven't had these problems, what router are you using?

    What about "the internet is down"?

This was less of an issue when everything was Z-Wave/ZigBee, but all of the cheap stuff is WiFi. This mostly only concerns "the lights" and "the plugs". I don't want a switch to stop being able to control devices it's not directly attached to if home assistant or the target device can't reach the internet. All of the ones that I own broadcast state and can accept commands via UDP over the local network so I was thinking of writing something that HA could call, locally, which would issue those commands and receive the statuses (so they'd always be local-only).

   > cloudflared: effortless external access for all my stuff + all other Cloudflare goodies (WAF/Zero-Trust). Good piece of mind to not have to ever open ports on my local network and let CF just take the brunt of the Internet. Also used as a local PlaintextDNS=>DoH proxy that is hooked up to NextDNS (https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/).

I was a beta tester for Warp pre-launch and set my home server up to use it. I'll agree with you -- it was awesome. I stopped using it after the beta since it became metered (which was expected and I'm not sore about[0])

   > [disclaimer: I work for the big orange cloud company, so sorry if the previous sounds like an ad, I do really like the software we make]

I don't work for the big orange cloud company and I really like the software you make, I really enjoy reading your technical blogs and have routinely shared them with co-workers at past jobs[1]. I had a coworker solve a long-running issue on a pool of Linux front-end hosts by tweaking some kernel/network configuration settings -- he mentioned he got the idea from a blog post from the big orange cloud company that "he read over the weekend". I use your services for my home server and end up recommending (and ultimately using) it with every one of my customers. I'm sure you guys have pissed someone off by now, but everyone I encounter heaps praise on your products and company.

[0] Okay, maybe a little. It was a really neat service that I got to use for free for almost a year. A gentleman from Cloudflare (I think he said he worked in Romania) even sent me a gray T-Shirt with the big orange cloud company's logo on it in "Apple-style" minimalism.

[1] Programmers have gaps -- I'm surprised how many web developers' gaps are "everything between the various hosted files and The Browser".

That's really cool. I had assumed they always sacrificed the bird and I can't imagine everyone being OK with that over time. Regardless of the cost, most people don't relish the idea of killing an animal even if it means their own survival so it doesn't surprise me that an invention like this exists.

As the article states, I can imagine the miners responsible for this duty became attached to the birds (especially after they had a way to keep it alive).

There's a detail that got lost in the shuffle there, though. While it had been possible to detect CO presence since -- I think -- the 20s or 30s, they didn't become common until the 80s. My Dad used to fly a private plane across the country selling CO detection solutions provided by his company to factories and businesses until the late 80s (from a little company in Ann Arbor, MI). Of course, come the mid-90s, most of us had devices that could detect presence and (to a lesser degree) levels in our homes.

I share some of the concerns of the author, but I think she's failing to "never ascribe to malice ..." -- in this case "when there are a myriad of other, less malicious reasons that are probably the cause."

I suspect the biggest reason companies are choosing "plant-based" (and including "vegan" somewhere less prominent, or maybe not at all) is because they want their products to appeal to both vegans and non-vegans. In fact, they may be making products that don't appeal at all to vegans despite being vegan, but would appeal to non-vegans.

First -- non-vegans -- if I see "Vegan" on something, I won't buy it unless it would only ever come that way (or would typically come that way, like a salad). If it's a "Vegan Burger", I'm assuming it's a piece of minced paper mixed with soy/plant oils and packed with enough herbs "used for grilling" to make it taste like "burnt grilled something" attempting to hide the fact that it tastes nothing like beef. If it's cheese, I assume it won't melt. It'll kind-of melt, then it'll start to harden, brown, and catch fire. If it's chicken, it's probably not vegan, but vegetarian (which are actually very good), but if it's vegan, it'll be ... wrong ... I don't know how to describe it.

I was Lacto Ovo Vegetarian for a year (for health, not puppies). I tried every single vegetarian pretend-to-be-meat product that Whole Foods and Kroger sold (in 2005). Amazingly, I found a brand of sausage that almost passed if you squinted at it just so. The vegetarian (non-vegan, I think) Morningstar Farms "plant-based" chicken was better than the frozen "real" chicken equivalents a few doors over. Everything else was inedible if it was trying to be meat. I like Black Bean burgers and Portabello Mushroom burgers, but you have to season/prepare them as that kind of product. When they tried to turn it into "something beef like", it was a disaster.

Fast forward to today where we have burgers that are "plant-based" that have the right texture, taste and even bleed. I don't know if my set is skewed or if this is normal but every Vegan I know (out of about 6) is vegan for their own moral, not health, reasons. Not one of them liked the meat-substitute products that I liked. They think eating animals is disgusting and it makes the flavor/texture gross to them. I'd imagine a plant-based burger that bleeds would have a similar impact.

So marketing to vegans with "Vegan" prominently on the label (and any required certification/testing/other necessities to ensure you don't get a class-action by accident) and there's a good chance your actual market avoids the product right along with the vegans who don't want it (unless it stops you from eating meat, you can have that crutch. :P).

    > I used to hate the phrase “plant-based” because I thought it was a cute way of avoiding saying vegetarian or vegan, as well as all the cultural baggage that comes with those identifiers (and I do believe some cultural baggage here can be a mark of honor).

And there's the last little nugget. To those that "Vegan" doesn't mean "Soy Pretending to be Meat and So Not Pulling it Off", it elicits images of judgemental people being vocal (in passive-aggressive ways) about the smell of the rare, juicy, Ribeye on the plate in front of me.

"Plant-based" might be "Vegan except LARD" or might be "Vegan except some ingredient with an unpronounceable name that is an animal byproduct" (gelatin/glue). It probably means the latter in most cases and that's fine for the people they're marketing to.

I'm going to put myself in the "partly agree" category, here.

First, to get it out of the way, I hate where things stand, today. Location privacy basically doesn't exist. A permanent license plate reader was just installed at an intersection bordering my neighborhood[0]. They're installed in every police cruiser, they're automatic and they flag problems/trigger being pulled over.

On three occasions, over 20 years (evenly spaced), I was pulled over for vehicle registration problems. The first, someone had scraped the tag off of my car and I was driving without tags. I showed the cop my registration/insurance and 10-60 minutes later I was on my way. The second (about 7-10 years ago) was my new motorcycle who's registration expired six months later than my cars, I rode for almost the entire summer with the wrong tabs on my car, passing several police (sometimes driving directly behind me) until I was finally pulled over. I was written the ticket because "it was six months past-due" (he waived the charge when I showed up renewed to the hearing).

The last was this year: my car was in my ex-wife's name and the registration expired in July. I still had insurance and I was aware that it was past due but couldn't resolve the problem, myself. I drive with Waze and in my area "if the cop isn't on the road driving with you" they're lit up on Waze. I avoided driving. When I had no choice, I avoided routes that showed cops and altered my route when they showed up unexpectedly[2].

This worked for two weeks after the expiration date and two days into the following month. The first time a cop ends up behind me I got pulled over[3]. The wording he chose was "Your vehicle was flagged as having expired plates" or something like that[3].

The unintentional follow-up to this, though, is that when I received my tabs it was unusually cold outside, I was running late for a date and my plate was too dirty to just "spit shine/affix" the sticker, so I put it in my winter jacket pocket and went on my way (figuring if I got pulled over, I'd show them the tab and explain my situation). I had no less than three police cars happen into range of being able to read my plate electronically or visually and not one budged. Maybe a coincidence, I thought? Perhaps they had something better to do/get to? The route to my girlfriend's house passes a police station; it's rare for me to take that route without encountering a cop on the road or in a speed trap. It's been 6 months since I put those tabs in my pocket. They're still there.

[0] Full disclosure: My information is from a neighbor mentioning it and my noticing it afterward as I drove past; I have not inspected/researched but it's not relevant as these installations are being rolled out at an increasing pace.

[1] The first was my new motorcycle which renewed on a different day than my cars and I missed it, the second was a car that was in my ex-wife's name which she failed to renew.

[2] It was a very weird place for me ... I've never had that "avoid the cops" feeling in my life. It's unnerving.

[3] The guy saw the car was in my wife's name, I said "divorce", he said he "totally understands" (and was incredibly sympathetic). He did write the ticket, but told me to ask for a hearing, show up with current registration and he'd request the ticket be invalidated. It was. I wasn't even given court fees.

I found it interesting that one of the things he did differently was to empower the local Barnes & Noble stores to make placement/marketing/merchandising decisions themselves.

The way typical retail stores are run these days is a lot like the Fast Food model -- consistency above all else -- where the food has the same (lousy) taste no matter where it's made. Having spent a lot of time buying last minute gifts, retail, this year ... short of some stores being a mirror of others, each brand has the same products in the same places.

This works well at Walmart, Target, and other general retailers (the kind of commodity "super-store" arrangement I stopped visiting a long time ago). Those retailers have recognized I don't even want to walk into the store -- even my grocery store will bag my things and pop them in my car for me.

Barnes & Noble seems to have figured out that it's really easy to buy a book. The previous management[0] thought they employed only cashiers, re-stockers and "where can I find"ers (the latter of which were impossible to find). When financial struggles hit, the few employees who were there "because they loved books" left because their jobs were slowly turning into "warehouse fulfillment for internet orders." Our local location shut down shortly thereafter. Further proof that this new strategy works is that the huge location was replaced by a combination book, record and other media store which is run "like a record shop" and feels like a mom-and-pop despite the square footage.

This strategy works everywhere. Because I have a Microcenter location within 30 minutes of me, I buy 80% of my computer equipment retail. I wanted to physically touch the laptop I was buying so I stopped in on a Saturday. I don't ask for or want help, usually, because ... I'm a developer and I come in pretty ridiculously researched ... but that didn't stop no less than four people from asking to assist -- all while I stayed in the same section of the store. Overhearing them serve other clients, I was impressed at how well they knew their products. And if you haven't been into one of these places ... the one over here took over a six screen cinemaplex. It's massive. They have multiple models of 3D printers/filaments/accessories, multiple models of soldering irons and bench power supplies, IC components (loose LEDs/resistors/capacitors/basic motor drivers/timers), Ardinos/Pis (well...sometimes) and piles of accessories for it. Some of these things are really hard to buy confidently online or are really convenient if they can be returned/replaced with the correct part in an hour. They carry high-end, low-end and everything in-between[1]. I used to say that "I shop there first because I don't want to support their business" but that's granting myself credit I don't deserve. Frankly, the one gripe I've ever had about that place -- slow checkout[2] was remedied by common feeder and online pickup.

People tend to complain everywhere about lack of floor staff, but waiting behind three people for the "one person in the whole computer department" at Best Buy was typical of all electronics retailers 15 years ago. I worked at CompUSA (I left a couple of years after the Windows 95 launch -- before they became a general electronics retailer) for 5 years -- we were half the size. Average floor staffing was two in hardware (three, sometimes, since there'd always be a guy or two who only sold Macs), two in software/accessories, one handling both depending on customers. Microcenter had at least 4 people just in the laptop/desktop section, three in the upgrades/parts, one in mac, one in the Maker area and several in the 10-or-so-floor-to-ceiling aisles (that most electronics retailers ditched to control shrink).

Contrast that with my trip to Best Buy where three kids stood around talking to one another while I drooled over a Lenovo laptop. Had any one of them walked up to me I would have been easy to persuade into buying that day. I ended up picking it up from Microcenter (and it ended up being the best deal, too).

The takeaway, I think, is that the one thing Amazon can't give me is the intelligence/personal interaction with another human being who knows what they are selling[3] and can give me confidence that the choice I'm making is the right one. This has to be done carefully, of course. One of the advantages of buying online is the lack of pressure applied by a sales-person. The places I seek out for retail shopping are ones where the staff is knowledgeable, consultative, friendly and not pushing me to buy something right now.

[0] I've never worked for them or a competitor and it's been decades since I've touched retail, but a friend's adult child worked there just before our location shut down.

[1] My children act like we're going to the dentist when I tell them I need to make a quick stop there. There's no such thing.

[2] They still need work here. A little while back I ended up there with only one of my credit cards. The chip failed. I handed them my ID, figuring they'd run it via magnetic strip having positive proof that I'm the cardholder. A manager was brought up, and I even discovered I had my passport in my jacket pocket. It was a hard no for a sub-$100 purchase ... that kind of pissed me off ... if I hadn't had so many great past experiences, I probably would have sworn them off for good (as it was, I didn't return for several months).

[3] Hell, Amazon can't seem to give me results for what I specifically ask for. Can we please stop filling search results with answers "just because they are sort of like the thing you searched for"? It doesn't work when "OLED Laptop" returns 400 results and the first page has two which have anything OLED related in them, let alone an OLED screen. Even when you're given a filter for AMOLED or OLED, most of the OLED results are then missing. It happens with nearly every thing I search for using just Amazon's search. I find Google Image Search with `site:amazon.com` is the only way I can find things sometimes.

I'm going to guess the previous comment was in reference to the GM EV1 program[0]. I didn't read the whole article but I think GM lost around USD$800 million.

It's a "fun topic" because you can find an incredible amount of "fanboi-ism" about whether or not GM was on the side of good or evil. I live in SE Michigan, my Dad owned a business that was a supplier to GM and my long-term girlfriend works there[1]. And here's me ... I don't care about cars. I intentionally avoided "the big three" and any company that most of its business was "work for the big three[2]".

They either created it prematurely in order to destroy the market entirely, entered it prematurely in order to scare off smaller competition (akin to buying up the little guys and dismantling them in the manner of the electric rail cars), used it without any serious desire to create a legitimate product but only to harm their competitors through CARB regulations (them being the only EV manufacturer) ... frankly, I find all of that to be a bit tin-foil hat[3]. I've heard a million other arguments for and against but at the end of the day they poured a lot of money into it. I think they rightly recognized that "the issue was battery technology" and made a dangerous bet on it[3].

I suspect they expected the battery tech would improve, the cost would go down and they could control the losses by limiting production, refitting leased vehicles with newer tech and re-leasing them, eventually getting to a profitable state well before their competitors figured any of it out. Meanwhile, they'd take every advantage they could from government regulators/grants/programs (why wouldn't they?!). Unfortunately, 1999 tech wasn't up to producing a car that could be used to get to and from work in sub-freezing temperatures and there was no charging infrastructure at all.

Fast-forward to today ... I'm seriously considering a Bolt[4]. They have a lot of "regular old consumer" electric vehicles on the road for quite a while now and have had a few bumps in the road[4].

I think some of the GM hate originates from people being sore about the bailout. Hell, even living here and knowing how awful the impact would have been without it, I don't know how I felt about it at the time. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, it's kind of pointless to be sore about it any longer ...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1

[1] Doing a job who's responsibilities are sufficiently complex enough that I can't explain them because I don't entirely understand them.

[2] Somehow I had a 17-year career at a global multinational telecom that nobody locally would be able to identify, then went on to conferencing software and a company that was mostly IoT but also did quite a bit with the autos, so I did end up doing a few (rather cool) things in the automotive space despite my efforts to avoid.

[3] An argument often made is that GM wouldn't sell these cars, they would only lease them. I'm not sure if that's true or not but I know the initial reason for the lease-only choice was that replacing the battery in the vehicle was $40,000 and was expected to be necessary after two years.

[4] I fully expected fires and the like ... and expect more of it as manufacturers figure out that "Li-Ion is hard" and municipalities discover that they need to refit their fire departments. I mean, I'm presently driving around with an incredibly flammable liquid in a device that operates by making it explode in a controlled manner. I don't believe for a second that the problems presented by these batteries can't similarly be solved.

    > In just ten years we’ve gone from the first Model S leaving the assembly line to electric F-150 and Mustang. That’s as mainstream as it gets. 

I agree with you and I think you make a more important point than the CEO of Toyota is trying to "Silent Majority" his way out of.

Let's just get out of the way and say if you have to use the term "silent majority" you better make sure you're not falling victim to confirmation bias (aka, "other automotive CEOs who are similarly viewed as 'behind' in the EV space feel the same").

But the bigger point is "the point at which the benefits of an EV exceed the trade-offs for most people in developed countries." I think we're there, or we're getting there once the initial cost of the vehicle comes down[0].

There's no question it's "mainstream" and I'm having a really hard time these days seeing any downside -- for my specific vehicle needs -- to owning an EV and several upsides without taking the cost of fuel into account[1]. Being that Volkswagen had let slip they were designing an electric version of the classic VW Bus, I figured I'd wait for that to be out a couple of years and purchased a used Dodge Caravan for the time being.

Family circumstances led to me no longer needing a van and because of how little I drive, I'm beginning to wonder if it makes sense for me to own a car at all. That was unthinkable where I live about 15 years ago but I'm driving so infrequently that I'm often finding I'm failing to do maintenance on time (well under miles, but past the date -- sometimes it matters). The car is paid off but I need to sit down and factor in the cost of maintaining insurance, registration, oil/transmission changes, tire rotations (which required new tires due to my failure to realize how past due I was), alignment, brakes (similar to tires, I'm often replacing rotors), fuel, cleaning and repair and just see what that is costing me per month. I own a motorcycle which I drive in the warm months in most weather -- total maintenance/insurance is $250/yr, tires/repairs, it's probably added $20/yr to the cost and I paid cash for it -- new -- in 2012. I'm easily past the point where "Uber/Lyft" would be much less costly than owning a car.

The loss of having a (safer) vehicle "on demand" and the way that might appear to someone I'm dating is a huge factor, though. I don't know what kind of regular maintenance is required for an electric vehicle, but I've read that some manufacturers are considering using drum brakes throughout[2]. There's no equivalent to oil changes, I'd expect there is (or will be at some point) a way to tell the vehicle to keep the charge at an "storage/idle state[3]" Stored in a garage between 40-80 (sorry, Fahrenheit) year round, what kind of other maintenance am I looking at? Could I sock some money away each month to replace the battery and how much would I need to plan to have/when?

I'm not what a lot of people would consider the mainstream EV buyer. External effects excluded, the cost of fuel would start affecting me, probably, at $10/gallon with my driving habits. I don't care abut the impact of my driving on climate change and generally do not make large purchasing decisions based on environmental concerns (character flaw as it is). I don't care how fast it accelerates, or how sexy it looks. For my driving needs (and wants), though, it's looking like an EV is by far the best choice.

Of course, astute observers will notice that this is a pretty non-optimal solution to my problem. The "Uber/Lyft" solution is cheapest, but involves someone driving me around. Because my driving tends to schedule well (mostly Friday-Monday, presently, though that will change), renting a car on the weekend would be a suitable option if it weren't an awful experience. I don't see a way for a company to swoop in and fill this space (without going bankrupt) with current technology/culture. For example, if the "Uber/Lyft" solution were self-driving vehicles, I'd be more apt to drop car ownership. I think a lot of people would. At what point does "getting places" become so generic that you simply "subscribe to transportation" and an array of options is available to you based on where you're headed/the purpose of your trip. At a certain point, that sort of thing changes "why we travel", as well.

[0] People are kind of terrible at factoring in total cost of ownership.

[1] The last time I was in the market for a new car, my driving needs were under 10,000 miles a year but most of those miles involved six passengers.

[2] Not a car guy but my understanding: Drum brakes are not exposed to the elements and otherwise last much longer but are more expensive to repair (they may also not stop the wheel as well but I don't know). With regenerative braking, drum brakes will last substantially longer than disc.

[3] Other EV devices I own recommend 40-60% to keep the battery from premature death.

Ah, yes. I actually remember the first time I learned what each of those options meant. My Dad had purchased an 8088 earlier that year and it was still a mystery to us (though Dad and I were the most proficient). One late evening while my Mom was finishing up something for work using "Word Star", she tried to print something but the printer was not turned on[0].

The issue was quickly solved but the prompt remained on screen. The funny thing about the prompt was that, at the time (I was 8?), I didn't understand that it was asking a question and provided for more than one answer. Every time my Dad had seen the prompt, he hit "A" and redid whatever trivial thing he was doing. I had learned to do the same.

Confidently, and very unhelpfully, I hit "A", watching the past hours work vanish. It was the first time DOS made my mom cry.

[0] Forgive me, it was a while ago; it may have been unplugged or some other trivial issue.

    > Very disappointed by the discourse in this HN thread. The same old quips over and over. "NIF is just a nuclear stewardship program", "it's not actually generating power", "fusion still 30 years away".

The interesting thing here is that every part of what you said I completely agree with. My behavior, however, indicates otherwise. I didn't read the article[0]. I went directly to the HN comments mostly because I wanted to cut through the hype.

Basically, I came to the comments to hear from the skeptics. Of course, most of the skeptics fall victim to a mental trap.

I think there is one key difference between "what I was looking to read from skeptics" and "what most skeptics used as arguments". The information I was seeking: to understand the difference between what the "breakthrough" was being reported as and what the breakthrough actually was. The information I received was: "this is impossible for (reasons)"

An equally important thing I was seeking was to understand was how this work might affect other industries (before it results in "fusion power").

The thing I'm least interested in is hearing "why it will never happen." I think most of us know many of the reasons this is a "Marsshot" problem[1]. I think most of us get annoyed when the media presents news in a manner that provides the general public with extremely unrealistic expectations and are sensitive to the dangers of that, but we get frustrated by those kinds of comments because, likely, none of us need to be told that! :)

It's impossible to make a useful argument to a skeptic that "this technology will exist in (insert timeframe)." The point at which (timeframe) is a trustworthy estimate usually coincides with the technology maturing to the point that the skeptics fall off (or turn out to be right if "timeframe" is never). And there's a long way to go (I think I saw a list of 10 or so "extremely hard problems") but this certainly appears to be something that is chipping away at one of the "impossible problems." Over-simplifying as this is, the rate at which technology advances is not linear; it accelerates. The next problem may not be as difficult or knowledge we attain from solving this one may be able to be used to solve related problems[2].

[0] There were several others on the topic and being ft.com, I assumed it would require a subscription that I do not have.

[1] Maybe far more difficult, but I never liked "moonshot" when describing something that hasn't been done, yet.

[2] Again, not a physicist, but reading through various "fusion is doomed" lists, many of the problems center around "the word 'hot' is a woefully inadequate description".

As I was reading this article, that itch in the back of my head kept being triggered. I didn't encounter anything obvious, but I felt like something was missing. Then I remembered a project I inherited at a past job.

tl;dr Good idea, but it can be easy to end up with very complex code flow if best practices/language-specific patterns aren't followed.

I'm not sure if my experience is an example of Negative Engineering success or failure (a bit of both, perhaps). I had inherited a tool that monitored a conferencing environment looking for specific conferences that also were not started and had non-moderators waiting to be admitted[0]. It was a code base written by someone who was not familiar with the language it was written in, resulting in code that was very non-ideal.

I had joked that the fact that the system worked was "an accident". It was a perfect example of "failing it's way to success". Every time a targeted conference was discovered, an exception was thrown. When the exception was thrown, the catch block would retry the request slightly differently. It would then add an invisible (which started the conference), monitor for the conference state to indicate it was started and remove the invisible user from the conference. The add/remove had to be done because the "invisible users" could not join two conferences, so we had a pool that would grow/shrink as needed. Nearly every step of the way, of course, there were many circumstances that were appropriate to retry, to catch and recover and (ultimately) to crash[1].

Now, my approach to this kind of a problem is "if you can check that a request will fail and fix it before making it, do that", so I have the "invisible user pool" ensure it adds users before the pool is empty (and if it is empty, creates/returns a fresh user instead of throwing). Nearly every command that could throw had an invariant that could be confirmed before the call yet the developer opted to let things crash and handle the problems as they surfaced.

You can imagine the kind of Rube Goldberg device each part of this solution was. Part of that was the language and the developer's inexperience with it. Abusing Try/Catch, as this developer did, made the code feel like it was just a bunch of GOTO statements. The fixed solution had nearly as many Try/Catch blocks -- it's a distributed network application, after all, nearly every call had something external that could go awry. The difference was that there was an obvious "happy path" and the "catch" logic had been limited to either "sleep/retry", "abandon" or "fix; returning to the happy path".

On the balance, my experience would suggest that Negative Engineering, when applied exclusively ... works[2]. You just might not be able to explain why it works very easily if it's designed carelessly and (at least in some languages) the patterns you're required to use lend themselves to code that can be challenging to follow.

[0] Not a terribly difficult thing to do but not something that the API provided a way to solve so it involved listening for conferences with the API and reading data from the reverse-engineered database the service used... not a difficult task.

[1] The service had its own supervisor which handled recovery so for application failures (database unreachable/conferencing environment down), the right thing to do was exit.

[2] It logged critical errors left and right, but I wasn't put on the project to fix bugs, I was put on it to add a feature ... something that could no longer realistically be done due to the tech debt/complexity the solution had reached being designed the way it was.

Wow, yeah. I'd love to know what the source of that is all about, personally. I mean, my initial thought was "oh, it's a younger crowd here, they haven't shot themselves in the foot enough to be able to empathize with the situation", but age doesn't matter ... experience does. It's a simple fact that if you're writing software, it doesn't matter how good you are, over time "the house always wins." And this is a crowd that has plenty of experience.

Thousands of comments from other stories and stories themselves are rife with "how I deleted our entire production database with this one cool trick" stories -- things that are orders of magnitude worse on the "blunder scale". And it's not that these are "stories of humility", i.e. the author is writing because they want to tell you how dumb they are. They're, minimally, warning tales (because you will make a mistake this bad at some point). Sometimes they're stories meant to make the author feel better for having made the ridiculous blunder (I can relate to that). :)

Usually those stories are not filled with a bunch of comments along the lines of "You really should have known better given the work you do". No kidding?!

    > Just bc someone has a Github account doesn't mean they're some sort of super hacker

Well stated. I'd add "just because they're some sort of super hacker doesn't mean they're any less likely to to make the same mistake/be tricked into doing something like this" ... including if the permissions were more clear. It's the old "Mechanic's Car" (which hasn't had its oil changed in 15,000 miles).

The party deserving of harsh penalties is the product implementing Github's API, alone, in my opinion. Here's my thinking: change the scenario, slightly. Imagine I use "login with Github" in a tool that's distributed by a trusted third-party, that spells out exactly how they use those permissions in a clear manner at login and then uses them exactly as they state. Several years down the road, the company is sucked up by someone "not as trustworthy". It's possible they dropped an e-mail about an update to their application Terms & Conditions and buried deep within there is something about consenting to allow them to "star their repositories". Even if they sent a one-sentence e-mail in bright red letters saying they were going to do it, in all likelihood, GMail didn't put it in my Priority Inbox, so I missed it. :)

The "typical exposure a user (including a super hacker) has to 'consent dialogs'" on a PC are the kind that ask for permission "to sign me in and see minimal profile information". On a phone, the things they're asking for are things that "if I give them permission to, I'm not usually allowing them to harm an internet community in a general sense" like "star farming" would. I think seeing these dialogs as frequently as we do might work against paying more attention to them ... regardless of the fact that we know the kind of damage and we'd probably assign more blame to ourselves than is warranted.

All of that said, there's probably more to the story. Unless something stated is fabricated, I can't think of a detail that could be added to the story that would make me feel a permanent ban is justified. I can think of reasons I would be sympathetic to Github initially banning the account (due to AI/automation) and then unbanning the account after "a human being saw that this was something close enough to phishing" that the account should be restored.

That's it for me, too. And damn it's effective.

About two years ago I had an opportunity to run a "for fun" experiment. My family and another family went on vacation together but I had to come home a couple of days early due to business travel. Because of vehicle sizes, I ended up taking the other car home -- which was a small luxury SUV with a high-end radar detector ... somewhere inside the damn thing[1]. I had Waze up. For whatever reason, between two different states, the roads were teaming with traffic enforcement. When I stopped to fill up, I grabbed a small notebook and a pen and kept score: Radar/Waze with ticks under "Cop Missed", "Cop Found", "False Positive". The radar was worthless. It had lower false-positives than I'd expected (I remember those things going off all the time for nothing) but when it went off, it went off too late. It missed more than half of them.

Waze, on the other hand, had very few false positives. I suspect some that I marked "false positive" were really me failing to see the police officer[2]. This was "8-hours of highway (non-turnpike/toll)" and there was a police officer every 5 miles (I went 2, maybe 3 pages in tick marks on a hand-sized spiral-bound $0.99 gas station notepad). I don't even know that I bothered calculating everything out completely. For one, Waze did not miss a single speed trap that entire drive. Where I live (metro to a major mid-west city), it's rare that I'm the first reporter or that I see a cop that Waze isn't alerting me about already.

Beyond police, the reports for disabled vehicles (by law you must move one lane over where I live) is very helpful for both "ticket avoidance" and safety (if you care enough to follow the rules).

I prefer the Google Maps interface -- and generally everything else about it over Waze, but I use Waze 99.9% of the time and for every drive. I have it setup to not speak the directions because much of the time I'm traveling to places that I am very familiar with the routes (I might follow a suggestion over my own preference, though, because "Waze tends to be more right"). I use it, entirely, for the social reporting features. Though Maps, at one point, added this (is it still there?) it wasn't even close to the quality of that provided by Waze. I'm really hoping they "put the social features into Maps" and I'll switch to maps or "move the UI more toward Maps in Waze" and I'll continue using Waze.

[0] For context, I'm not an aggressive driver ... I don't drive that much any longer as it is so I tend to be a lot more cautious these days. But it's way too easy to not notice a 10-15 MPH speed limit change accidentally and driving laws are among the small set of laws that are more often broken unintentionally, than intentionally.

[1] I would have had no idea what the insane beeping was all about but it was a brand that a friend of mine owned growing up and I recognized the tone ... but he had it installed in a manner that it you'd never know there was one in the car except for the sound (they're illegal in Canada which they traveled to frequently). It was a very expensive model outfitted with the latest Radar Detector Detector Detector Detector Detector (odd or even number, I can't remember). I had no idea how to silence it so I was afraid I'd get pulled over and guarantee myself a ticket for having it.

[2] Where I live, on-ramps make great speed traps. If positioned just so, you can't see them until they're behind you, and you can't see them in your passenger mirror at all if it's a typical mirror/aimed the way most drivers aim them -- requiring you to turn your head to locate them (something you're probably not in the habit of doing while chilling at highway speeds).

So I feel exactly the opposite, yet having nothing to do with climate denial. I should state that my experience with government lies exclusively with the US, so that should be taken into account to understand much of why I feel this is an approach that would result in an outcome that's the opposite of what is desired.

Let's ditch "the thing" -- "Carbon Tax", because "the thing" has certain assumptions behind it -- like political party X or Y believes or is skeptical of climate change/carbon taxes/etc. So I'm going to just call it a Concrete Tax. You can make the connection that it's a carbon offset, is way more sophisticated than a tax ... For most citizens, "Concrete Tax" is how it's going to be experienced/understood, anyway (and for a lot of them, that might be a good thing if you support the tax).

So we start at "Government applies or increases the tax levied per (unit) of (concrete) sold (at specific supply chain point)." Your problems begin with the things in parenthesis, but let's say you've gotten them right. The arms race begins.

It isn't this simple, but as it relates to this topic, it's good enough to think of "a cement business" as a for-profit publicly traded company who -- like every for-profit publicly traded company -- has a responsibility not to keep the customer happy, not to make good products, not to help the environment, not to make the C-level executives or the employees wealthy or really do anything other than "to make money for its shareholders (owners)".

The goal of the government by levying a "Concrete Tax" is to coerce the corporation into altering its behavior -- either replacing "concrete" with "green concrete" or using something "more green", entirely -- by increasing the cost.

First, you have to look at the market. Advances have been made and are being made in to make concrete more green, more durable, and superior to other products for more purposes (both in durability and environmental impact). Really, you're seeing a diversity of products that trade-off different strengths and fit better for narrower purposes. The article didn't conclude that "things are A-OK" but reading where things are and understanding that "the pace of technology is always accelerating", we can expect that "left alone we'll have better products, anyway". Apply the tax and "the current producers" start to consolidate. It's likely the next product isn't "I Can't Believe It's Not Concrete", but rather "Concrete 2.0 -- twice as strong with 10% of the Carbon!" It's possible you make it hard to enter the market to "provide a solution" because of the closer association of the hypothetical "Concrete 2.0" and the cursed/taxed Concrete.

Once the "arms race" begins, the taxed business is rarely left with "do what the government wanted me to do". Frankly, they didn't just come out and ban it, they went the subversive route by applying a fine (sorry, tax) to the product so it's hard to judge them for not playing by the same rules. They'll start poking at "the definition of concrete"; the exclusive goal being to find "something that is taxed less" with "how well it appears environmentally" being one of many (and only as high as it must be) variables ranked according to cost/need. The common approach is to move the problem somewhere else in the supply chain where people aren't paying as much attention (kick the can down the road).

The "avoid the tax by importing it" approach is a favorite. This usually falls into the pattern of "this or that trade agreement forbids the US from taxing the imports, so we'll just stop making it over here and import it from there" or "it's taxed regardless, but they'll make it over there for half the price because they just get to pour the byproducts onto the neighbor's land", either way -- add "moving the stuff" to the environmental impact. Maybe while the bill was being written, the Concrete Lobby had "their guy" get some language in there to make sure only a component that makes up a 10% of the final product is what's actually being taxed. The regulators liked it because it's easier to track, the industry liked it because if they just import that part, that'll lower how much has to be moved. There's a loophole somewhere that'll require further adjustments to the regulation/law. In the meantime, R&D budgets are increasingly being spent on working around the tax.

In an ideal world, that "tax money" would go to a magical entity who's sole purpose would be "to create solutions to the problems concrete solves which have less environmental impact." In the US, it would be worse than "vaporized", it would go to organizations which would spend that money adding oversight/administrative burden and creating jobs that will make it a lot harder to solve the problem (once it's solved, what do we do with all of the regulators...?). Even if that organization existed and worked, the cost to transfer the money from "the business" to "that research organization" will see pennies on the dollar make it to "actually solving the problem."

I'm sorry if this sounds combative or hostile -- it's difficult to express a different opinion and avoid "sounding like a bit of a dick." I wouldn't have wasted the time, though, if I wasn't open to hearing where I'm getting it wrong. It's a difficult thing to argue, as well, because I can't say "OK, give me an example of something that was taxed which accelerated advancement/adoption of a preferred technology that worked better than just letting the preferred technology stand on its own" because once you tax it, you lose the ability to measure the result untaxed. I think the EV tax credit might be a good example of a tax that will turn out to have not been worth the cost. I think once Li-Ion technology reached the point that it was realistic to use in replacement of an ICE, the many, many other benefits beyond "the price of gas" and "smog/pollution." I decided 4 years ago my next car would be an EV, I had no idea what the tax credit was then -- gas/pollution/the tax credit were not factors for me. My factors were convenience of filling up at-home, maintenance, overall simplicity, electronic features, and performance. Any two of those being radically better than ICE and I'm buying electric at a 25% premium. Add to it that my driving patterns have evolved that even the lowest-range EV available in the US would ideally fit my needs, and owning an ICE vehicle stops being a "baseline" and you start seeing all of the inconveniences pile on. Now, in 1999 when GM produced the EV-1 using a $40,000 battery that was in (most ways) worse than an ICE-based vehicle, there wouldn't have been any amount of green points" that would have gotten all but the wealthiest among us to buy one. The tech was so far* from being ready that even were it offered at competitive prices it would have been dismissed.

For those clicking in, seeing the length and thinking something like "Pages and pages; sounds really alarmist" and are ready to click off, he ends up doing a really thorough job also explaining what advances have been made, what's being looked at for each of the various identified problems and it ends up being an interesting and informative piece on the subject ... if you find Concrete interesting. (That's a pretty good tl;dr if you want one, but it makes me sound (at best) underwhelmed or (at worst) grumpy, so ...)

I'm kind of reading this thinking "that sounds like a bunch of crappy things to say" and I can't find a way to accurately explain where my head was at without kind of sounding like "a dick" -- it's really not intended. I get extremely annoyed with alarmist articles, especially those with the words "Carbon Footprint" and "Climate Change" in the title[0]. I am not a "Climate Denier"-whatever-boogie-man, I've just noticed that articles with those words in the title are (a) almost certainly going to tell me nothing I don't already know -- they're very low-information, (b) they're low-information because their audience is the general public usually for the purpose of getting them behind some government action that will "move money around and help nothing" or (c) no-information because the goal was to scare you into clicking.

I feel really badly for getting annoyed at this article given that it was none of these things, but turned out to explain history, current state-of-the-art, the various problems, various approaches being looked at by industry/in use (or near/in research). Failing to include those components causes readers to fall into a "mental trap" that I'm sure has a name, but which I don't know. It's the "5% of cars are electric vehicles, we expect that to grow to 10% but if ((really unpalatable/expensive solution)) isn't done, we won't have the charging/grid/etc capacity to support it!", ignoring the fact that ten years ago we didn't have the infrastructure to support the 5% that we have, today and assuming that we'll suddenly stop building out new infrastructure.

"Humanity"[1] advances at an accelerating pace. It's easy to get lost in that word. A way that helps me grasp it better was told to me in fifth grade: as time goes on, we double the amount of things we know in less and less time. Yes, we lose things, too, and even regress in places, but we're getting better at that, too and overall we're ahead. By including past advances, current state of the art and where things are heading, the author reminded the reader that "the world is moving around all of these problems, too."

It also presents the trade-offs correctly. I find it interesting that -- in my lifetime -- I've watched 12 miles of a 6 or 8-lane cement road get blown away and rebuilt twice (along with years of roving maintenance). Grumbling about "it seems like they work on that same road every other year despite replacing it every 25 or so" aside, the differences in how they are built and the final product are astounding. Gone are the rusting painted iron road bridges, replaced with cement. In two cases, a 2.5-year (and I mean, in-between snowfalls on both ends of the year) job took under a year to do the second time. I think the biggest difference was how the road bed was put down. Before, it was methodical, a few squares at a time at various stages in the "pouring from the cement truck" to "cleaning everything up and smoothing the top out". In all cases the last several years, it's some combination of "prepare the foundation the surface of the road will sit" then over two weekends this machine the width of the entire road rolls down the bed while about the same number of workers manage the machine. They finish it off with curbs/the like and Bob's your Uncle. If this similarly reduces the cost (I have to believe it does but I have no data), an interesting equilibrium has to be reached between price, the time it takes to build[2], maintain and destroy[3]. Unfortunately, the raw "price" of the most expensive part and "how long the voters will be furious" will win out provided everything else is "barely passable".

[0] Calm down... just read on.

[1] I know, what's "Humanity" -- a subset of humanity, of course, but enough of us to matter.

[2] And similar balancing of civilian annoyance: I'm OK with an important highway being taken out for a year every 25 or so if maintenance is "knocking a lane out for a few months every 5 years" instead of "knocking most of the highway out for most weekends every other summer" for a material that goes down in a few months (or lasts for 50 years, etc).

[3] Extremely durable/robust concrete is great until it's time to build a bypass through town and some roads need to ripped up before their useful lifetime. Concrete that survives being beaten up by God, semis and all of us for hundreds of years is going to be resistant to ... a lot of stuff.

I haven't read the whole thing but I really enjoyed the introduction and agree completely. The RDBMS I've spent the most time with over the years is Microsoft SQL (immediately when 2000 was released) and over the years I've been surprised by two things: (a) How many developers that work with databases every day yet haven't the foggiest idea how to do anything the GUI tooling doesn't handle "easily" and (b) How quickly a developer can go from zero to "able to keep things performing well for all but the ugliest scenarios" knowledge-wise.

I've watched that last part unfold on many occasions. Usually I'd be brought in because the developers have done everything down to "copying the data to denormalized tables[0]" to try to sort out slowness. Most of the time, just "blindly investigating the schema" will turn up something frightening that the ORM did, or a mess of inappropriate indexes. Two indexes on a table used by nearly every query in the database caused 30 second requests to yield sub-second results in one case[1]. I'm never willing to walk in and promise that, but I can't think of a time it hasn't happened when similar circumstances were presented to me.

So if you're dragging your feet about learning SQL, take this as my encouragement: it's one of those things where the rewards come quick and the effort is far less than you probably expect.

[0] ... with a broken sync process that has to be run carefully b/c it hammers the already over-sized database every time it fires.

[1] If memory serves, it was an account table ... used a GUID between the app and the database, but primary key was an integer auto-incrementing field which was used as the FK to other tables. All I remember was adding a unique index to the GUID field and including the e-mail address/name columns which were included in every query. Ran the fix in production and it felt like "the dam broke".

It looks like there was minimal to no lockdown in Sweden: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sweden-covid-and-lockdow...

Seems LoRa is coming up a lot the last few months. I almost picked up a project to do a number of sample implementations/documentation for LoRa-based IoT solutions but I'm not with the company any longer[0].

Permits aren't necessary for operation[1], it works in unlicensed spectrum. The use cases are limited to low-bandwidth/power needs and it uses an AP<->Client communication.

I am in the very initial stages of investigating whether or not it can be used in a peer-to-peer fashion[2] as a way to network the devices worn for playing Laser Tag[3] so that the game could be played on several acres of land and keep the scores/hits in sync.

The backstory is we play an "made-up game of tag" throughout our large neighborhood that involves the person who's "it" riding a OneWheel while being chased on bikes. It's "no contact" for obvious reasons, but it makes it tricky to define what being "tagged" is ... so, being an engineer, I'm trying to find the most complicated and interesting way to solve the problem.

[0] I don't know that they ever got the contract, either, but it looked like a dream project as far as I'm concerned.

[1] I'd imagine that comes with the disclaimer of "provided the devices are operated unmodified" and I'd expect the usual FCC-related things to be required for a product being brought to market.

[2] The thing I want to build would be easier to do -- software-wise -- with a "gateway"/"client" model, but it'd be way more interesting in a mesh-setup.

[3] I have two children who are breaking the bank at the local arena while embarrassing every other casual player. :)

I'm guessing there's a fancy name for this phenomenon that I'm not aware of, but a lot of these kinds of advocacy-news pieces fall victim to it: The assumption that a problem that will occur in X number of years, where X is anything greater than, say, 20 will be met only with the exact technology available to us, today.

If tomorrow, most of the non-elderly population died off leaving only the less-capable-of-working-and-therefore-feeding-the-world-elderly to fend for themselves, we'd have a crisis on our hands. This will happen gradually, over time. Over time, nearly every thing we produce -- food included -- is done more efficiently when the market requires it.

I should temper this a little -- I'm not saying "let's just start pouring sewage into the rivers because robots will come by and clean it up some day"[0], ignore climate change (or deny it or anything else). I am suggesting those who believe this is a problem that requires awareness (and not dismissal) might be better served by being less sensational. And it would be intelligent of us to remember that when we try to make predictions about the future that the future happens all around the thing you're predicting, too ... and might even make it irrelevant.

[0] If anything it's over-reacting pieces like this that cause people to think that way ... especially when they end up being the opposite of previous hauntingly similar sounding over-reactions (see The Population Bomb)

It looks quite impressive; guessing the server is getting more traffic than it's designed for (and it doesn't seem to cache tiles, at least not partially loaded ones, maybe?).

Is it normally significantly slower in Firefox than Edge/Chrome or is that just my b0rked up daily browser?

Rather insightful on (2) with regard to:

    > ... we need to start protecting against the person in front of the device

My first thought was, "Oh, God, please don't". I'm a parent, if I put that software on the computer it comes with rules not to touch it; if it's touched, they know I'll probably find out, ban them from it for a bit and return it to them locked down in a manner that when I return it to its original state, they won't touch it again. :o).

But then I thought of the other common reason this kind of capability is added to software -- are you preparing for the eventual future where you will have to do this, not to protect from a child removing the software, but to protect from another app surreptitiously removing Portmaster in order to bypass its protections?

   > ... So while Matter makes it possible for Eve, a sensor and device company that historically only worked with Apple’s HomeKit ecosystem, to finally work on Android devices, it also means that Eve’s competitors can work with the same ecosystems ... 

I'm struggling why this is a problem that we don't already mostly have, today. My smart speakers are Alexa devices[0]. I used to have a ridiculously complicated HomeAssistant setup that died when the server that the virtual was running on cratered. And yes, I'm missing some functionality that I had setup, but really -- I can program my thermostat, I can setup complicated routines for lights that are all different brands. When a person is detected on my front porch using my Wyze, my phone alerts me (wyze app), My echo dot notifies me that someone is on my porch, and I'm supposed to be able to make the Show display the feed (haven't bothered). I get that Matter brings to the table "they can talk to one another offline" -- that is a big deal -- my only issue is the idea that Matter introduces new market risks that don't already exist, today.

I buy the smart home product based on the specific need I'm trying to fill and whether or not it works with Alexa, which nearly everything does, so the only part of the ecosystem that I'm locked into is the Alexa side. I can, however, control my devices (a subset of features depending on what the vendor decided to expose) from my Echo Show, Alexa app and "talking to the lady". I say "Ziggy, Goodnight", my Belkin smart plug fires up, my two LIFX lights shut off, my Cree bulb shuts off. At 1:00 AM, my LG and Roku TVs shut off. I set this all up through Alexa routines, not the apps (which were needed to join the device to WiFi and pair with Alexa).

This post seemed more negative than it should be -- I'm not unhappy with Matter -- yes, it's got problems, but it's a good starting point toward "let me use the device from the manufacturer that makes the best one, not the one I'm stuck with because I use Amazon's ecosystem." Only time will tell if we see a myriad of devices that are Matter licensed which "interoperate with one another offline" but I'm hopeful.

[0] It's by accident ... I had a job that involved developing Alexa skills so it was helpful to work with one regularly; the kids liked them, so we bought more.

OH how I can relate to the sentiment expressed in "Rise of the Rotation".

On the surface it sounds perfectly reasonable. As the author explains, it's falls apart quickly. There's still going to be people that will make the argument that, given the author's specific example, that "it gives everyone a more complete understanding of the product to work that way". It's wrong (I'll elaborate if required). But I can hear it.

This affected me in a way, though, that is even more unreasonable -- "The Wire" rotation example, it'd be like ... I don't know ... having the person who designed the guns the department uses participate in the "murder investigation rotation".

Due to a company acquisition, I found myself kludged into an Architecture Engineering team ... I was/am a developer. This happened because Infrastructure[0] didn't want to lose their developer (me[1]) and my role at this place over 17 years had expanded to the point that I fit on any team and no team. I gathered I was put in Arch due to my elevated title (and a misplaced concern of insulting me) and because that specific team because it had "unix guys"[2], they often know how to write shell scripts, which are kind of ... oh, and this other guy is a developer in Ops, too -- completely different language/framework/tech -- but ... it quacks like a duck?

They had a two-week on-call rotation between 5 (now 7) men. I managed to hold off being worked into it for half a year using the same argument: "I support write software in .NET for Windows, your legacy team supports software on Unix/Linux. I expect to be woke up at 3:00 AM if anything of mine fails, all the time and nobody on your team is qualified to log into the box let alone troubleshoot it ... and vice versa".

The first few days of my first on-call rotation consisted of being woken up at 2:00 AM for some server-or-another, me finding someone capable of resolving it, then finding their off-hours contact info, and about 20 minutes later apologizing to them, repeating what I was just told and going back to sleep. My toddler (at the time) could have done that part of my job. I repeated my difficulties in "actually being useful on-call" to my manager during that week at our 1:1 (to which I was brushed off, again), but included my difficulties in "finding people to call" ... he must have thought he found an easy win, there, because he nearly cut me off half-way through with a "Just call my cell if you run into trouble with that." So my new on-call work flow became: (1) Wake up at 2:00 AM to a ringing phone, (2) Write down the ticket number, (3) wake up my boss to find out who to call, (4) thank him, finishing the call off with "He's more likely to answer if you call, would you mind relaying the ticket number to him for me?" It reduced my TTRTB (Time-to-return-to-bed) from 10-15 minutes to far less than 5.

That insanity was the biggest factor in why I left but not because of the apologizing/dislike of it all. My boss knew he was operating in a tricky spot. If his boss knew I was even slightly unhappy with being on-call, I'd be taken out and he'd have taken grief. His options were (a) explain to the rest of the team that "this guy and this other guy don't do anything resembling your work so rather than add them as one more delay to waking you up (or worse, breaking something), they're going to manage on-call for their own apps amongst themselves and not be part of our on-call" or (b) continue to accept calls from me at 2:00 AM reminding him of how dumb it was to put me on call. He chose the latter. And as I evaluated their (much larger than the company I had come from in the merger) IT operation, I saw a pattern of "because that's how we have always done it" and similarly ridiculous -- astronomically expensive at times -- operational choices. That culture was pervasive throughout IT because the merged company had far more people (2:1?) that made up the new organization because -- despite the companies having similar IT services/quality -- we operated better ... with far fewer people.

[0] We basically had Infrastructure/Architecture and Development. Technically Infra/Arch were two distinct VPs reporting to whatever the title was of the interim person considered "the C-Level over IT" during those months of the integration.

[1] And I wanted nothing to do with "Enterprise Development" at this place.

[2] I wrote nothing that ran directly on Linux/Unix at that time.

Completely, especially if it has the words "Digital", "Online" or "Data". I haven't read the bill or read about the bill but I'd wager a coffee there's also some form of entertainment/copyright industry hostility in there.

I'm really trying not to be cynical here, but I started so I might as well finish. Step #2 is if it does happen to pass, the parts of the bill that are actually consumer protections will be unenforceable, be ruled unconstitutional or have unintended negative consequences. The bad parts of the law will have no issues in the courts or with enforcement. They, too, will have unintended added negative consequences.

I'm reading the title and I'm like ... they can't be referring to Liquid Tension Experiment, can they[0]? Apparently, yes and no :)

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Tension_Experiment

First, thanks for the info -- you answered my question, too. :)

  > VR is in my opinion absolutely groundbreaking in flight simulation.

I completely agree. I'm not a pilot nor interested in becoming one. My Dad owned his company and flew a plane for work[0]. He used the 1980s version of Flight Simulator to get licensed for IFR flying. I was impressed with the latest, but if there ever was a use for VR, it's this. You've got a panel full of instruments in front of you and an array of windows to look out of. At least half of the "controlling" in that game involves looking at specific places/in specific directions. Everything would be much more natural if I could control what I was looking at by ... moving my head.

So far I've held off on buying any VR-related non-sense because I have yet to find something that it would improve the experience of enough to warrant spending money on. It sounds like this might be getting me closer?

[0] I've written at length about this in the past, but he owned his company and sold to manufacturing plants. Many were out-of-state, so the plane allowed him to get to a few appointments and back home without a hotel stay -- or ... "gave him an excuse to own a plane". You pick :)

I understand where you're coming from but ...

   > There's virtually no competitive advantage to having unique business processes.

I'm not intending to take this sentence out of the context of the rest of your post (on its own, I don't think you agree with that[0]), but I think even in context of "specific to resource planning" there are many competitive advantages that companies pursue.

Take "Time Accounting" for example. I'm not referring to tracking hourly employee hours for payroll, I'm referring to tracking salary employee "project time." Every past salaried position I've had at a company with more than 90 employees had its own custom time tracking software[1]. The first company to do this was a multi-national telecom that I worked for. It was done so that each project could be broken out into its stages and the portion of the employees' salary could be itemized among "Capital Expenses" and "Operational Expenses". This was so important to the company that it warranted a massive development effort along with a corporate initiative to get 100% of time reporting in "on time." They did this as you'd expect a huge company would -- fail to hand in a time sheet on time a few weeks in a row and you'd get dinged more for that mistake than anything else.

The second and third companies ended up "accidentally developing time tracking software" specifically because there was competitive advantages to improving "Resource Planning". It was most helpful to my last employer. Their businesses was creating new products (often hardware/software combinations) for companies. This involved hiring a large number of people specialized in things that had limited cross-over. Resource Planning was predicting when what skills at what level would be available. This, necessarily, involved tracking what time was spent on projects in the past to improve those predictions and ultimately ballooned into a full time management and accounting application for the business (they sold "our time" to customers at the end of the day so it helped them to plan what to charge).

I'm curious -- from your perspective, is it that the competitive advantage is lost "because the tools that everyone is stuck with won't work" if you stray too far from "standardized" or is there another advantage to this standardization?

[0] Unique business processes and marketing are frequently the difference between the #1 and #2 company in a given space.

[1] In one case (about 250 employee global company), the company wrote it as a concept for a future product but once it was available, the existing solution was tossed primarily because the business side really liked the flexibility. In another it grew out of a pet project and became entrenched. At the remaining two, a decision was made to develop something from the ground up.

After participating in the hiring of an SAP developer I realized -- financially speaking, anyway -- that I picked the wrong thing to specialize in.

The first time we brought in someone truly experienced in SAP development, we paid him more than any other developer on staff[0]. I appreciate the different take on SAP. Can I ask -- is it still as lucrative to be an SAP developer?

[0] This was a global multi-national telecom who ran an in-house developed audio conferencing service (written entirely in C++, interacting with a lot of hardware) ... the skillset of some of our devs was incredible, which made this all the more surprising.

Just looking through the comments made me almost avoid adding to the hatred of SAP but I don't know ... SAP is special to those of us who have had to deal with it.

I worked at a global multi-national telecom that used an ancient version of the software. You suffered with it. I'm convinced -- because we were always cash strapped (having been through bankruptcy and back) that part of the motivation for keeping it was that it made doing expense reports so difficult that many abandoned them.

SAP looked cool at the time[0]. The web UI had an appearance of a web app and attempted to behave like one. It had many flaws, but they all went unnoticed because of one massive flaw -- it failed to handle the Back button in the browser ... and the UI often put you in a state that "instinct" made you want to click it. When you did click the back button, the web app would see two of you. As this was not an allowed state for a user, the new "you" couldn't access the system until the old "you" timed out ... an hour later. This meant a sufficiently complex expense report could take two days to complete since, on average, hitting the back button (by accident) twice per line wasn't unusual. So if it resulted in less than $40 coming back, it often wasn't worth the effort to do the expense report.

My entire experience with SAP was limited to integration with downstream (simple) internal applications and expense reports. Others spent all day within it. It was bad enough to warrant a special launch page that popped the thing up in a window that lacked the back button[1] but that was a pretty inadequate solution.

The worst part was hiring SAP developers. Having not looked at the product since the mid-00s (and being far from huge-company-land), I don't know if it's still the case, but I suspect so -- SAP was basically a custom setup everywhere it existed. It had the same graphics, similar UI, but requires substantial development to tie everything into it and tie it into everything else. I ended up participating in the interview when the company "got serious" and decided to put some money toward hiring a solid SAP developer/lead to get everything upgraded and solve some of the worst problems we had. We brought on a guy and paid him 25K more than the highest paid developer on staff[2]. He, like the previous four (under-paid) employees, lasted about three months before he left for substantially more money. We tried "paying some third party", too. The problem there was similar -- whomever was contracted to us was either incapable of doing the work or didn't last long enough to get past initial planning.

The end result was SAP existed in our organization at the same version it was when it was setup, initially, until we got rid of it ten years later when we merged with a competitor. The competitor ran Oracle for ERP and had a team of people to manage/develop/maintain it. Personally, I'm not an Oracle fan, but I wanted to buy Larry Ellison a beer.

[0] This was the mid 00s.

[1] This idea, I think, was tried -- IIRC, the more frequent case was accidentally running into the Backspace key on a non-text field and having the browser hot-key back which isn't solved by taking the buttons away.

[2] This was saying a lot considering we had software actively developed in C++ that managed a pretty massive audio-conferencing service (and set of related bridges/hardware). I met with several on that team -- they were geniuses. The "SAP Guy" had to know Java and SAP. I interviewed him. I wasn't impressed.