mdip

Are welcomes a positive for some people? Or is this like starting Slack conversations with "Hey, how's it going?"

They can be positive for me -- if they provide helpful information, explain -- briefly and courteously -- the expected etiquette of the group and set the tone.

That's the key: the tone. Is this group aiming for broad appeal and trying to be welcoming or is it a clique? Forget, for a second, how the users of the forum/group behave -- are the moderators, the sysadmin messaging and the like conveying the tone that is desired for the group? If a "welcoming newbies" is desired, then a welcoming tone should be used throughout messaging.

Unfortunately, being "welcoming" doesn't usually push away the less friendly/welcoming users. Being unwelcoming will certainly attract them and almost every forum site falls victim to it. It usually presents itself the first time you attempt to post something with a full page list of "WE KILL USERS WHO DO ANY OF THE FOLLOWING:", many items in red, often with words that "outsiders" don't recognize so they can't be certain they're violating them. Most posts, then, are from insiders with many "pissing matches" (we get bored, I guess?). Outsiders get trampled on and people complain that "we need better forum software that solves trolls/jerks" :)

I find myself agreeing with you in the respect that "welcome messages" are at least pointless. Fix everything else that isn't user generated, replace moderators with people who have empathy for new users, if "noise" becomes an issue (as it would on larger sites), machine learning coupled with requiring moderation for "first posts"[0] goes a long way. Generally speaking, though, you can't fix dicks. Most of the dicks on the niche forum sites are also the most knowledgeable users and the reason the forum site is so popular ... smaller forums, they're the ones running things. :)

[0] I'm thinking of the bigger problems QA sites get into where new users post the same question, causing hundreds of identical answers because new users often don't figure out how to craft the perfect search query (depending on the kludgy-ness of the forum software) before they figure out the reply/post button and they're usually making that first post because they have a headache already.

Food is all over the place these days as long as that place is "up".

We just stopped going to Taco Bell all together. It's kind of crazy. I can't find a reason to go there any longer. As a kid, they were so cheap[0], the running joke was that $20 worth of food there would kill a person. It was about properly priced -- despite being a fan of Taco Bell, their consistency between restaurants (better, today) was terrible in the 90s -- you'd get anywhere from 1/4-3/4 filled shells with random mixes of cheese-lettuce-GroundMeat ratio.

I took my kids there last weekend ... it was over $30.00 and I didn't eat. Fast food -- across the board -- has gone up. In my area, and I suspect most places, it's because they need to pay upwards of $18.00/hr to employ enough people to keep the store (and now restaurant) open. I expect a lot of automation is coming (and I hope like hell McDonald's fixes their terrible in-store ordering kiosk ... and that's one place where it's becoming increasingly expensive to avoid their app).

My grocery bill went from ~$100/trip to $250/trip if I don't do the majority of my shopping at ALDI. So I basically stopped grocery shopping anywhere other than ALDI[1] for anything ALDI carries. I only avoided it, before, because I have 4 options within 2 miles and ALDI is 6 miles away (I love ALDI).

I've started buying a lot of "the maintenance things[2]" at the dollar store (now $1.25, and the independent ones are now $1.00 - $5.00). You have to be careful with those because some items are a terrible deal there and some of the products are fscked up[3] but we've gotten lucky with a few trips -- consider that a 32oz bottle of the same shampoo was almost $8 at the other places and after purchasing a "test bottle" we bought out the rest and two other local stores in the chain. We do that when we find a good one and end up with enough to not have to think about it for a decade.

The saving grace, I guess, is that I haven't had a commute in two years and won't be getting having, again. I also replaced much of the rest of my driving with a OneWheel. I'm filling up my gas tank less than once a month when I was filling up more than once a week, before.

[0] At one point they were running $0.49 tacos -- mid-90s.

[1] While everything went up there, too, it went up less ... although the frozen pizzas that are a guilty pleasure of mine still land around $2.39 (they never go on sale for $1.99 any longer, though).

[2] Shampoo/Conditioner/Soap/etc, things like Band-Aids/Toothbrushes (they carry fancy manual toothbrushes which my kids use)

[3] I've gotten Shampoo from a well known brand that I've purchased at a grocery store which was "separated". I guess I could have called the 800 number; guessing it was counterfeit/meant for destruction and ended up back in the gray-market.

   > Honest question: wouldn't tipping be a major problem for half-width cars? And the amount of space needed between cars wouldn't go down much, so if you need at least 4 feet of clearance on either side, and your lane is 5 feet wide, your cars can only be 1 foot wide. This explains why most vehicles thinner than a car are motorcycles or electric scooters. 

Probably would be a problem. I don't know that the author was thinking "a car that is half the width of a normal car" as "a vehicle that takes up substantially less space". Perhaps we'll all be riding around in Go-Karts, who knows? :)

> we need 30% more grid capacity, an insanely higher number of chargers (1 out of 4 are duds) / service companies / land, China still controls most of the resources for production (of raw resources, manufacturing, & assembly) and now they want the chips too.

> Basically there are so many thing sthat can go wrong in the next 18 years ...

There has to be a name for this particular kind of response to change (usually positive change[0]). Please don't read this as crapping on your points -- they're all valid.

The problem is that it's identifying problems that "may occur in the future" using what technology we have, today, to solve them. It also presents those in a vacuum and ignores the unknown of what the world could look like after new vehicles sales gradually transition to 80% electric. We can speculate more easily on the negative, but it's a lot harder to predict the positive -- at least, the "societal changing positive effects".

Consider that newer EVs can power your home during a power loss, or integrating EVs into the grid, itself. Reliance on traditional automobiles and how we rely on them is changing, as well. My driving habits, due to the vast availability of fully-remote work and the purchase of a OneWheel have been drastically reduced[1]. I went from ~20 gallons/week to ~10 gallons/month of gas. I've done the math a few times and it's stupid for me to own an ICE vehicle. I own it out of a desire of convenience that could probably be eliminated with Uber and when my kids are out of the house, I probably will no longer own a car. Until then, however, my car could basically be filling in that 30% gap (or whatever the gap happens to be at this very moment).

Articles that recently hit the front page of HN related to Geothermal conversion of Coal Plants[2], the myriad of posts related to companies attempting the modern-day alchemy called "Nuclear Fusion", there's a lot of energy/money being spent in the space, much of it having nothing to do with reducing climate change but providing for an increasingly electricity dependent future.

Even the incredibly slow-moving electric companies have made some pretty serious progress. I think back on my short life; I happen to currently live in the city I grew up in -- losing the power for a few days in the summer was a "normal thing", as was losing it during every miserable thunderstorm. The price of whole-home generators and the hardware to integrate it were so cost-prohibitive that few people owned one. I still do not, however, I've lost power maybe four times this year for under ten seconds. I've lost power once in three years for over an hour (still restored in under four hours).

[0] I'm thinking something succinct like Hanlon's Razor.

[1] 2,800 miles and going since I bought it. I grocery shop with it ... it's a good upper body workout carrying 6 bags back 1-3 miles.

[2] Filed under "I'll believe it when I see it" but still.

Personally, I hadn't thought of it this way (mostly dismissed the idea). I'm sure it's a much different experience and one would have to experience it to properly judge it. I think the difficulty with the other, more generic, platforms was that the question of "what is the point" came up, a lot. And when users got to define "the point", sometimes "the point" was pretty disturbing ... most of the time it was just boring.

My biggest concern is that I've yet to find a VR headset that I can use for more than about ten minutes before feeling nauseated from motion sickness. I'm told this is somewhat/mostly solved and I've used higher end gear but it's been the same result for me every time.

The "Hotel Tonight" example hit home with me, recently.

I used to use that app all the time, then kids happened and spontaneous hotel reservation became rare. Fast forward a few years and a circumstance came up that made me think "Hotel Tonight". I discovered it wasn't installed on my new phone so I grabbed it. It was unrecognizable. Maybe the prices were as good, maybe it could still be used the way I used it previously, but it looked like it turned into a hotel booking app when what I wanted to see was a small selection of good hotels nearby with unusually low prices. One of the features was the lack of choice.

I think the issue I see people running into here is the "all or nothing" approach to handling these problems.

To start, classifying the restaurant by its customers expectations is important. The experience of dining at Panera Bread[0], for instance would be radically improved by ripping out all of the touch screens at the front-end and moving them to the tables.

For dine-in customers in that kind of restaurant, I'd rather sit down knowing "I have a table" before ordering my food. Too often it's packed and by the time I have my food there's no place to sit. I also have extra time to fool around with their inadequate software without feeling like I'm holding up the line/getting ripped off because I'm not ordering "correctly"[1].

For take-out customers, I'm not competing with all of those dine-in people either in the food line or the check-out line, they're sitting at their tables waiting for their tablet to notify them to come up and grab their stuff from the window.

At more full-service "chain restaurants" where the customers might revolt at giving up the server, a tablet can be used to allow the customer to signal for drink refills, pay the bill and handle parts of the job the server usually handles allowing servers to cover more tables and customers to not play the look for our guy/gal and try to get their attention for my coffee game. I hate ordering on tablets ... hate it ... but the tablet is a useful way to advertise add-ons. I never plan on it but I'm often pulled in when I see something chocolate-brownie-with-ice-cream-like pass by. I rarely order it, though, because it never coincides with when the server is there and by the time they're back, I'm over it. However, if a tablet were available for me to spontaneously add an item, I'd be more likely to do so. I'm not saying that's a good thing for my health, but I'd be a happier customer. I usually leave the restaurant wishing the server had come back sooner to "double-check" that I really didn't want desert. It's not their fault.

Take the server away, entirely, at those restaurants and I'll stop going. I'd rather just have it delivered. But put the tech in the right places and staff, the business and the customer can benefit.

No, I don't sell these things or do anything in relation to that kind of business ... realized this kind of sounded really in favor of the tech and while I am in favor of what it can do and I have seen a handful of solid implementations, I've seen it done wrong and worsening the customer experience far more than I've seen it done right. Maybe my tastes are off?

[0] It is a cross between fast food and a cafe. You order at either a digital device or a person, standing in line for both in the morning, then you stand in line for your food, grab it and (possibly) find a table.

[1] I always appreciate when I go into a new fast-ish-food place, order a few things and the person behind the counter says "I can save you a buck if we use this combo, instead". Most of the software for these restaurants are terrible at such basic things.

You would certainly think so ... I did. But I'm sorry to say that you are strongly overestimating the general population here.

My friends know I'm the local crypto-geek[0] so Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and tokens are brought up to me all the time by people who's knowledge of what any of it is begins and ends with "Last year X coin was $7.00 and this year it's $100.00, and all of the other ones have had gains like nothing else I can invest in."

I can think of at least 6 members of my extended family who are presently invested in cryptocurrency trading (many just say "Bitcoin" and don't actually have any) who are -- in every way -- technologically obliviously ignorant[1]. Half of them, however, are not otherwise uneducated people (one guy is a very well paid VP at a company everyone in my state has heard of and has an MBA from a major university ... he's just not in finance or tech). They're not thinking "well, 15% APY is insane/impossible to provide over the short term/impossible to ever guarantee unless they've invented a time machine or are breaking the law." They're looking at the percentage gains on Bitcoin or Ethereum (depending on when you acquired it, of course -- Lord knows it's taken a hit lately) and thinking "15% sounds easy for a company to pull off in this space."

Everyone in my family who invested in some crypto used some company to hold their crypto. Almost all of them used services/companies that had enough of a strong scent of "scam" that I would have dismissed them without further research. Some used more mainstream crypto-sort-of-banks. Sort-of-banks because none of the companies that my family members chose for crypto trading were FDIC or otherwise insured in a manner that made sure the numbers they see on their page could be turned into dollars in a bank account somewhere else. The surprising thing is that none of them had any idea this was the case! A few family members thought they were buying Bitcoin because they were investing in "cryptocurrency" and it turned out they were buying some strange token running on the Ethereum network.

I'll grant it's a small sample size, but in every way it's consistent ... it's a "gold rush" kind of frenzy filled, unfortunately, with a lot of fraudsters riding the wave of news around the crazy gains of crypto.

The thing that scares me the most is that a few of my family members[2] have done very well trading crypto (4x/5x/10x their yearly salary). Some lost a little, the others gained a little. The ones that did well aren't treating it like a short-term gamble, even watching the prices drop ... it's like they're holding on to the stock of a company that they deeply believe in except ... there's no company.

[0] I don't invest, I did mine Ethereum a while back/spent most of it and made a small profit but did it mostly to learn how the miner worked and how to write CUDA software. I worked SecDev for a couple of years at a global telecom and I enjoy the technology behind it all.

[1] One of them -- not elderly -- called for help reconnecting to his 4G modem (their only internet service). The instruction "reboot your computer" was not understood. I fell back to "turn it off, count to ten, turn it on again." Nope, right back where he left it. I had not seen his computer setup so I could provide no more instruction. When I arrived I discovered he was "rebooting" ... the monitor.

[2] Four, precisely, two who are distantly related through a great aunt and are working together, but are among the most irresponsible people with money I've ever known, and two who are quite good with most things financial.

Edit: Realized my tone was harsh in a few places and there was one inaccuracy.

I am not in these markets and certainly don't understand the finer details, or major ones like "Xperi needs X license purchases to survive as a company", so I'm putting this out there at that level -- please correct me where I'm being naive, if you feel the need[0]. :)

There's always been a pretty solid few "categories" of products in this space. There's my Mom and Dad, who purchased a sound bar for the place up north because the TV speakers were terrible and the room acoustics were so bad you couldn't understand anything said[1] and it does rain up there, sometimes. There's "I want reasonable surround sound" guys who buy higher-end sound bars/lower end all-in-one 5.1 set ups. There's the guys like me who went through the trouble of setting up the room, perfectly, and purchased a mid-range AVR, solid TV, and higher-end speakers[2], and the "Reference Folks" -- all premium, high-end, obsess about aspects beyond the speakers/devices/cables to "wall coatings, double dry-wall, sound insulation, etc, etc."

There's several categories in-between those, but everyone above me absolutely cares about having that track and will pay extra for it. Depending on the set up, it wasn't (probably still isn't at some level) uncommon for folks like this to have a separate component for decoding specific audio tracks sending the decoded result of each channel separately to the amp, which did nothing but what it's name suggests. There's a world where DTS can continue to exist for these folks. They're still consumers of Blu-Ray discs, or have Plex servers with uncompressed versions of things, for the same reasons -- streaming service audio and video isn't as good. It sounds like they were already trying to position themselves as "the higher-end", which was a far better value proposition before streaming platforms took over, now that market is much more niche.

I, similarly, didn't know about streaming platforms not supporting DTS. Frankly, since having kids, I pay a lot less attention to that space. I'm surprised the benefits of delivering the DTS (reasonably compressed, but DVD quality) track don't outweigh the extra size. These aren't small files and video is most of it, but I'd take a small hit there for some movies in my collection to hear the DTS audio. Adding to the file size a bit is certainly something I'd like to see; I'd probably pay a buck more a month for it if a "Premium Streaming" option were available -- well, I would have in the past. I guess the issue they face is that there's nothing particularly special about the DTS sound track these days[3]. Is there no technical benefit between DTS:X and Dolby Atmos? I sounds like DTS supports more speakers.

Outside of streaming video, does it matter for gaming? It seems like if my console could output a DTS:X signal to my AVR, assuming my AVR supported it, I could setup 32 speakers (and pretend I could tell the difference between that and, say, 9), but I'm know there's people who would care if that exists. I know my Xbox S can output some compressed formats to my AVR, I'm not sure if DTS:X is among them, but there are those who would pay for that ability, delivered by software (if MS isn't doing that already).

So, not taking into account whether or not Xperi could survive the smaller -- high-end only -- market or not (it's a pretty big space), having support for a better audio codec for just the uses of "discs/Plex" and non-video is going to rank higher than most of the trivialities I've seen hundreds dropped on by people in the high-end home theater/audio space[4]. Maybe that means cranking up the licensing fees, and my category of owner no longer has the next generation's DTS creation available to it. It also probably matters a lot less to me in that category because the sound quality of the DD:Atmos tracks that I've heard have all been on the great side. Once it passes a certain threshold, people in my category don't care about it -- our other equipment probably doesn't support some of the things DTS:X provides that DD:Atmos doesn't (my AVR handles 9.1 speakers in various configurations, max).

[0] Kindly, preferably, I won't hold you to it.

[1] It amplified deep all the way through mid-range, but just below an average woman's voice, so if soundtrack sounds, noise/effects, or a man's voice would be 10-20% louder than a woman's. We needed some dampening panels but it's a lake house, main floor -- all windows except for the one spot it makes sense to put a TV.

[2] Or even "purchased speakers they had to buy one by one, separately", since most of the companies requiring you to do that at least partly because it's hard to sell integrated 7.1/5.1 sets in the $3,000+ range.

[3] Maybe there never was, but the DTS tracks on some movies have bullets that fly through me whereas the DD tracks they wouldn't leave the center speaker. I've heard many, perfect DD tracks, but among my collection I have several examples where the DTS track sounds perfect and the DD track sounds like up-mixed stereo, and a small handful where the DD track is great ... provided you don't listen to the DTS track, where everything is just a little wider, particularly in the back, and it makes everything kind of "line up" better -- a guy runs past the camera and the footsteps come from behind just to the right, whereas the character goes through you on the DD side. It also seemed as though the DTS tracks engage the LFE parts. I have an old-school piston ButtKicker under my couch, we feel that, and when that part is off, it wrecks the experience of some movies for us (my favorite being sending some of the notes from a sound-track's bass guitar into LFE where it over-powers everything else going on). I have only anecdata, I'll admit, though.

[4] I'm just jealous -- very happy with the sound of my own system, but I know a few people who obsess and spend a lot of money, constantly tweaking/upgrading their Home Theater space and when you hear the same movie played on their perfect system, you come home and it briefly makes your system sound like the speakers are empty soup cans connected by rope to the receiver.

It depends on if their target audience was small companies or enterprises. It may have made a difference, but it wouldn't have changed much for Enterprise customers. At BigCo (a global telecom[0]), it was much easier to add business from a vendor that we already had a relationship with than it was to purchase anything from anyone we didn't. It was also, of course, much easier to buy software/SaaS from one of the existing, boring, established vendors than lesser known/smaller ones. There was a mess of "Purchasing" involvement, legal, and everything else just to set things up so we could make the purchase. I don't know what Friday was for (had never heard of it until, today), but it sounded like it was something that would be company-wide, probably, so sneaking it in with an "expense card" isn't likely going to be defensible.

Then there's the "easy to integrate" side. Expect it to have to pass security reviews if it's SaaS of any kind and will touch any of our IP[1], and particularly detailed ones if it's very easy to "integrate with."

Azure AD Login was easy for us at "BigCo", but tied up several days of more than one grumpy security architecture team member's time with a variety of pen-tests that are required before they'll grant approval for it in our domain. That goes up exponentially to the impossible pretty quickly if it wants permissions to access things on our end via OAuth grants; even things that are typical (profile photo).

IT Architecture might get involved if there would be a need to make sure it worked with our systems, minimally to set up monitoring for it if we're making it available to a large amount of staff because if it goes down, we'll get a million calls into our 4-6 person (state-side by contractual/security requirements) Help Desk over something we can't do anything about and we're going to make sure we have a way to react to it when that happens. Someone's going to have to learn how to do any administrative/integration requirements, because configuration changes, we merge with companies somewhat frequently, and someone's going to have to make sure they know how to set it all back up, correctly, later -- just in case -- even when it doesn't make sense. Likely, BigCo want it to be used, so someone's going to have to write copy for an article for the company landing page explaining what it is, how it works and what problem it solves. There'll be other activities related to this when adoption doesn't take off. IT will have to dedicate some time to tracking usage to make sure we're getting ROI on it when the quarterlies come around and they have to justify every recurring expense, including the ones outside of the sticker price, all over again, and it's easy to trim off the add-on. Plus, they're often the ones who take the budget hit in the first place.

Legal/HR/The Business(tm) might get involved if employees can communicate, uninhibited, through it -- just like they do with E-Mail while they apply a flobbidy-jillion set of restrictions/disclaimers bits of nonsense around. We were not a Defense Contractor, we were just big, spread out and had a lot of employees. At scale, you end up with increasingly many who lack common sense, and a small fraction who still need to be warned about Nigerian Prince scams when one slips through. In a strange alteration of Rule 34, someone will upload porn to it or store porn on it if it is possible to store things on it. For the person who wants the product, it's going to be requiring phone calls, follow-ups, and general "going to bat for the vendor's product" against a hurricane-force headwind.

In fact, an add-on might be less likely to be purchased -- by BigCo, anyway -- because it doesn't do enough to pass the "Why do we need to tie up all of these people to bring this easy-to-integrate product into our environment when they can just use (some terrible excuse for a thing by comparison)?" The "we don't need that bad enough" answer is usually the case for Add Ons, and having a number of ancillary capabilities to distract with sometimes makes it more attractive to "the business" side of the above groups, which has the ability, often, to over-ride all of the rest of the "No"s going around.

At BigCo, an add-on requiring anything that the "good enough to somewhat OK" solution/solutions we already have kind-of sort-of covers doesn't stand much of a chance of being purchased. The one thing that can get in the door is the simple solution that solves a big problem, especially if there's nothing else out there that much of any part of it from any of the big vendors. I spear-headed a small handful of those. It has to be amazing and some reasonable combination of inexpensive, simple to maintain, highly available, non-critical if down (many, many things are unexpectedly critical).

[0] I worked there about a decade for 17 years, incidentally, most of it remote at an organization that was notoriously against remote work ... basically against a major service we enabled and often provided for other businesses. I worked as a software developer in the architecture organization working primarily on security-focused projects (figure that out) and had to go through this process enough to make my soul die a little.

[1] Basically, everything. At least, anything that would have a reason for the company to purchase it.

I've had a pretty basic and successful approach to getting both of my kids to do chores:

(1) I'm honest, nobody likes doing chores, including me. We're part of a family. There are things that have to get done. Dad does chores in the form of work that the kids can't help with. The kids pull up some of the slack so Dad has time to do fun things with them.

(2) Your age does not dictate your privileges, your maturity does. A big part of maturity is doing things you have to do with the quality you would if you actually wanted to do them. Demonstrating that you are completing your chores without being asked and at or above the level I am expecting them to be completed always earns you more privileges. I won't give you crap about playing video games too long, you won't get interrupted while playing to finish something that didn't get done, you'll get more of an opportunity to control your free time without my interference.

(3) I spell it all out to them, regularly. It's one thing to say "this is what will happen", but it's another thing for me to walk into a room and recognize "Hey bud, thanks for taking care of the kitchen so well and without being asked, you're really demonstrating maturity of a kid a lot older than you. You can have an extra hour of (privilege) or 'you no longer have to ask me permission to have (privilege) because you've demonstrated your maturity'". I thank them, constantly, when they decide to handle something early, when they handle things correctly, or when their handling of things is more thorough than usual.

(4) When things aren't right, but effort was made, I praise the work that was done and the parts I was happy with, first. If it's pretty close to correct, but part of it was missed, I'll let them finish whatever entertainment they're in the middle of instead of making them stop and fix it with a simple "You got pretty close, so I'm going to give you a break. When you're done with that, just wipe off the table. Make sure it gets done in the next 30 minutes".

(5) When the chore is unusually large (big dinner/etc)[0], I get right in there with them and intentionally take the hardest part of the job -- cleaning the pots/pans/knives by hand. They hate it, they know I hate it, and when they see me step in, everyone suddenly works harder and without complaining[1].

(6) If it's a total failure or they completely forgot, they are required to stop what they're doing and address it immediately.

That last one doesn't come up much any longer. When it does, it rarely comes with grief because they know that grousing is simply going to result in me repeating the exact expectations they already know they live under. When I do get grief, I re-explain the rules and end up at "So we have a bunch of things that need to get done and a family who needs them to get done. I can't think of a more reasonable way to make sure both of those needs are met. If you have better ideas, I'll listen." ... and the chore gets done.

Since taking this approach, I've never had to resort to discipline. I don't even make it about that. To them, I'm not having them do chores in order to "teach them about work", I'm having them do chores because "there's work to be done and it's right that we share it."

I will say, it took me a while to get there. It was tempting once my kids started showing that they could handle chores to give them far more than they should be expected to handle. It was also tempting to hold them to an unreasonable standard. I've learned that until they're around 14-years old, the chore will get done to my expectations 1 out of 5 times. They'll actually remember to do the chore without being asked about 3 out of 5 times. There is no yelling, no grounding, etc when they're not meeting my expectations. Chores suck. That just makes them dread them, more, and it'll "only make them work as hard as they need to in order to not get [grief]"

I set my expectations accordingly. It'd be nice if my 12-year-old didn't skip cleaning the shower almost every time the bathroom chore comes up, but she's young and forgets -- we have a list, she forgets to look at it. Both of my oldest kids, once they hit 14, just "get it done" and do things they're not expected to nor asked (which I encourage by making a big deal about it in front of the rest of the family). That's a big deal for me. I learned early in my career that the person who volunteers for the work nobody wants to do often gets to chosen to do the work everyone wants to do.

It's tempting when they're doing things right to treat that as "normal" and ignore it. I try my hardest to avoid this -- I don't want my kids to feel like their efforts are taken for granted. I certainly appreciate walking into a clean kitchen to cook and I will find the kid who handled that job, last, give them a hug and tell them how thankful I am that they made my job easier by doing what they had to do. My oldest acts as though I'm over-doing it, but I don't let that bit of humility stop me.

I remember telling my 16-year old that I was terrified about the idea of handing over the keys to my car when he was 13. While teaching him how to drive, I realized I had no fear that he'd choose to be irresponsible with such a dangerous privilege. I still have fear, but driving is dangerous no matter how responsible you are. This child, however, got his first job this year (he's a lifeguard) and is loved by his manager, the same kid who couldn't keep $10 from burning a hole in his pocket and couldn't come up with an answer to "what do you think you'd want to do when you move out?" has $1,000 saved up in the bank[2] in a couple of months because he wants to be a pilot and knows he needs a lot of money available for flight school and a degree. He drives himself to the gym after school or after work three days a week. He knows he's responsible for paying for college and from 9th grade on he's scored all "A"'s with an occasional "B+" which landed him in a program to take college classes during High School at no cost. He is a much harder working kid than I was at his age and he's a hell of a lot happier than I was back then.

Seems like a stretch to connect chores and that, but it all comes back to it. Nothing is free, nothing gets done without someone doing it, and as far as your own life is concerned, you're never going to achieve the things you want to do if you aren't willing to do the things you have to do. He fully grasps this and my 14-year-old is almost there, too. The others are well on their way.

[0] A rule in my home has long been "The kids handle meal clean-up". The adults cook, the kids clean. It's entirely selfish on my part, I hate doing dishes, and it was probably the first thing I taught all of the kids to handle. They know I hate doing it.

[1] Something that I picked up on early in my first job was that managers who lead this way win the trust of their staff. I had a retail job and was "a grunt"; for a brief period we had a GM that everyone loved. The reason was simple: He worked 8-5, but every morning when the store opened, he was right out there with us tidying up the aisles, aligning products, pulling depleted products down from overstock ... the crappy parts. It barely affected the amount of work we had to do having one extra guy out there, but it made everyone want to work harder seeing the "big important guy" doing the menial labour work.

[2] My dad's rule was "you save 60% of what you make while you live here". My Dad started a business for me -- selling custom PCs to businesses -- so I was making quite a bit of money. I hated the rule. I didn't even look at my savings account until a few days after my 17th birthday when my Dad sat me down and said "you have $14,000 saved up -- it's time to buy a good used car; what kind do you think you want to own?" I was the kid driving a bright red convertible to school, without a car payment or a dime of Mom/Dad's money. That thing was cleaned every weekend/waxed once a month and never got a ding or a scratch on it. My 16-year old didn't need help saving, he wants to.

   > From my personal experience doing homework with my son I think a big issue that is not addressed is that kids/people are different, some don't instantly get it and most f the time the kids will not have the courage to tell the teacher that they do not understand. 

You are absolutely right. I have a unique experience with my children. Two of them are homeschooled, two attend public school. The two who are homeschooled learned to read around age five, are excellent readers and are about two years ahead in math/algebra[0]. My public school kids were a little above average students, as well. That all changed over the last two years -- partly due to pandemic/remote learning, but not because we became more actively involved in their education. My two homeschooled kids get three hours of formal education, per day, on a busy day. When you're one-on-one with two students, and the teacher understands the student better than any other human being on the planet, it's really efficient[1].

Having worked remotely for a while, I told them that they have to get to know their teachers. They attended a "remote first" school which we transferred them to -- this was not a normally in-class school that had been forced to go "online only" in an unprepared manner, but one had existed for years prior and taught classes completely differently than the in-person schools. We forced them to schedule time every time it was offered to meet with their teachers. The result was an increased comfort with speaking up when they got lost. Returning to in-person schooling this year, they have kept that pattern; all of their teachers know them well -- when we pop up on video for parent-teacher conferences, we hear "Oh, you're (name omitted)'s parents!" Both are honor-roll students, now, two years in a row.

[0] That's an unscientific assessment; I use it because I regularly caught my son helping his two-years-older stepson with math homework; they were either working on the exact same concepts or they my son had done it the prior year.

[1] This works in the exact opposite direction, as well. My daughter, for a solid year and a half, would break down crying over her inability to understand her math work and would become very defiant about learning -- giving up before trying, etc -- because "it's Mom, and I can get away with these things with Mom". It's manageable, though, when you recognize that the "giving up before trying because she feels she can" is the way she expresses how she's struggling. The advantage of home schooling is that we don't have to move on to the next thing until they understand the previous enough to restore their confidence. We don't have to start summer time-off or even have it at all (it really doesn't feel any different, anyway!) if they need it.

I have a lot of thoughts on this from my own personal experience and was honestly surprised to find that it was "Linear Algebra" that was the class being discussed -- I thought I was the only one who suffered through that!

This was 20 years ago, for me, and my experience was nearly identical. I was not a great student in High School but ... now having to pay for my own classes ... did well in every class in college except for this one. I attended sessions with tutors offered through my class, I attended office hours, I failed ... hard. The pattern I kept running into was one of learning the material after the exams for each unit were returned to me. In fact, it was so ridiculous, I stopped going to class, resigned to the fact that I was going to fail and simply showed up for the exams. I re-took the class and managed a near-4.0 on the same material. The school I attended had a bad reputation among its math department as being ridiculously difficult staffed with professors who had a basic understanding of English. Of course, this came from students who had recently failed, and they'll have the loudest and often most defensive voices on the subject.

None-the-less, out of the three professors, two were in the "avoid" category pretty quickly due to feedback I received about how difficult it was to understand the words they were speaking[0]. The third was a recent hire -- the rumor being that they picked someone from the US because of the frequent complaints about understanding the set of maths professors they currently employed. But I suspect a lot of people played the game of "pick the guy with the American sounding name" and found out the same thing that I did -- a deep south Alabama accent is much farther from English as it is spoken where I live than any ESL professor's native accent. I picked up about every fifth word coming out of this gentleman's mouth with his very thick drawl and unusual word choices and lousy grammar. In the north, we'd be surprised to find out that he's a maths professor, stereotyping him as a farmer

I suspect, after reading this, that there was more to it than just my struggling to understand what was being said. My pattern was that despite all of the extra energy put into attending tutoring sessions and scheduling office hours, I found myself understanding the material just after we'd taken an exam on the portion we were studying. As this was too long ago, I don't remember if we were given solutions or not, but it fits with that pattern -- the tests were reviewed pretty thoroughly after they were taken and I could see what I did wrong -- it clicked. It clicked so much that despite getting a hard fail in the class, I ended up sailing through with -- I think -- a 4.0 or somewhere near the second time around, attending only on exam days -- with the same professor.

The tutoring/office hours which are brought up as "the way you teach without the solution" were totally inadequate. The staff provided for assistance were not professors, or even particularly skilled tutors. They were advanced maths students who found the work being done to be easy and didn't know how to teach things that were very basic to them. Open office hours were difficult for me to get because I had a full-time job in the field I was seeking my degree in; they were always booked and by the time I knew I needed them, the earliest I could meet with the professor was after the exam. I ended up just scheduling them as soon as I was allowed and cancelling if I didn't need it. Many, many others did this -- it resulted in a group forming by the smallish meeting space that he reserved for these[1] in hopes that he'd finish early and grab the first student waiting. I never did this, but on days that I had a formal appointment, I'd noticed the waiting students would sit on the floor with their materials trying to help one another -- it was a blind-leading-the-blind scenario.

And here's the worst of it: I'm not bad at math! This class made me fear every future maths course I had to take. I got through two Calculus classes many years later due to a desire to fill in the gaps I had learned from books -- they were easy by comparison. I think the way it was taught was specifically because it's a class that many fear; we were gently introduced to the concepts and they covered much less by comparison than linear algebra covered. They were also taught from a more practical standard -- while we were working with odd terms, functions, formulas and theory, they were often brought back to "and here's where it applies in engineering/life" which made it a lot more interesting. The problems we faced in linear algebra, despite having many interesting practical applications, were rushed through and were taught as though "this is just something that Maths majors learn so that they can fill whiteboards for use as props in movies and The Big Bang Theory to make the characters look smart".

My experience in higher education was, in general, not a good one. I left this school a semester later and went elsewhere mostly because of this class, though the final nail in the coffin was an experience in my first programming class[2] where a test -- with very few answers -- responsible for half of the grade had a bug in it -- a failure to dereference a pointer ... a missing star, caused more than half of the answers to be "F - None of the above" or didn't have an answer. I chose to treat the unanswerable as "undefined behavior" (it was C, after all). Luckily, in an attempt to provide answers that might "look right", I found that if I pretended the function call didn't exist, I'd find an answer among the choices and explained to the professor that my fictional compiler optimized away the call since there wasn't an answer among the list that worked without it. I spent an hour arguing with the guy but he ended up re-scoring it to perfect.

[0] One was Indian, the other was Pakistani and I know I would have done better with either of them given that I worked with folks from those regions regularly who had pretty thick accents; like anything, you learn to understand the phrasing and tempo and you stop hearing the accent pretty quickly. I suspect many of the younger students coming from American high schools struggled having encountered it for the first time. It's nothing on the professors or their country of origin, though.

[1] I have never visited a professor for "Office Hours" outside of this class; I don't know if it was because this professor was on his first semester at my school or if this is common but no part of it had the scent of "open office hours" -- it was done in a conference room about the size of my kid's bedroom with a single round table and four chairs cramped under it, one of which couldn't be pulled out due to its proximity to the wall. The professor tended to explain things while searching for materials to help me ... that he didn't have on him that day, so he'd scribble on a piece of paper.

[2] I agonized over this during the 45 minutes we had to finish the exam. Worse, it was proctored by a TA or assistant -- someone I'd never seen, before, and not someone who would know if it was a mistake on the professor's part or not. I'm also pretty sure the guy was playing Descent on the laptop he sat in front of while the test was being taken. It was pure luck that I found a way to answer the questions accurately which also could be defended when an accurate answer wasn't a choice. My concern was that by ignoring the bug, had the professor intended it, I'd have no defense that wouldn't sound like "I didn't notice it and now that I know I got it wrong, I'm trying to weasel my way to a better grade". It was still a tough hill to climb.

You're not alone, I did the exact same thing. I clicked the link trying to figure out what IR was being used for, exactly, at a (public) library. :)

I think a better way to word it would be "Library for sending ..." but none-the-less, I wasn't disappointed on clicking it. I've been thinking about a few things I wanted to do with my home theater setup to be able to hide the components[0] which also allows me to control it via WiFi, as well as its existing remote which I'd further like to alter the commands of -- map one of the 300 buttons so that it triggers something different/sends a different command to the devices than what it received from the remote.

I had something setup that basically did each of these things, in the past, when I had a whole HTPC in the living room. That's gone in favor of Roku/Plex/Xbox (for less noise than my HTPC was putting out, or no noise in the case of Roku) and I've

[0] That's trivial to do on the cheap with off-the-shelf things.

I agree with you on the title, but when reading what was actually happening, I was disappointed.

   > who would want to buy an appartment [sic] in a mall

I wouldn't want to rent an apartment from a mall, but I'd buy one if it allowed me to build out my space any way I wanted, if the mall were indoors, and if there were at least a small amount of services available from within the mall that I would use (such as a good food court/restaurants).

Where I live, about five months out of the year are so cold it's miserable to get motivated to go out. It's too cold and snow makes getting places painful. Having a space, like a traditional "flat" which is wide open and would allow me to construct a living space (which would usually mean buying a place rather than renting it) would be awesome, especially in such a "crappy environment" that an old 80s/90s-era mall has to offer. I'd love the retro aesthetic and I could make some interesting use of it.

I can't see this sort of approach actually happening, though. If it could, and the price was reasonable, I'd buy in.

As a parent with a child who's learning to drive, I love this idea and I'm teaching it to him.

It's funny how many other things like this exist in the driving world. I remember when my parents were teaching me about "backing up", I was told to put my right arm over the back of the passenger seat. This has a similar effect to the "Dutch Reach" in that it forces your body to look completely behind you, covering blind spots in both back corners so that you can see oncoming pedestrians and bike traffic (as well as cross car traffic) on a sidewalk as you cross it.

I've thought about this a lot while debating a new purchase that I have a few months to sit on. The author hit the nail on the head with this:

  > But what this rationalization ignores is the extent to which tools and possessions enable new experiences.

The opening paragraph mentions a Lambghini as being a poor buying choice because "it'll fade into the background" after a few weeks. I think back to my first car, a LeBaron Convertable that I bought with cash at seventeen. Considering where I live, owning a car for the first time was something that enabled experiences that I couldn't have had without it. The car, itself, faded into the background, but the experiences it enabled me to have did not.

But there are some "things" that are new experiences on their own and don't fade into background if using them is something that brings you joy. About a decade ago, I purchased my first motorcycle. I fall into a little bit of depression when the weather turns to winter, stressing over the fact that it'll be months before I'll be back on it.

Back to the purchase I'm thinking about, now. I own a Future Motion OneWheel Pint. I purchased it more than two years ago. Over the last two years, if it's not snowing, I'm riding it every day. I ride almost the exact same route on this thing every time I'm on it. I'm using it for the experience of riding it and because the device offers so much to me as a rider, as I get better at mastering it, I experience new things. It is so much fun to use, in fact, that I'm looking at getting an upgraded version of the same board. I'd like to have longer range and slightly higher speed, but more importantly, I'd like to be able to ride with other members of my family at the same time on the same devices rather than fight with them over "who's taking the bike".

For me, I'm using this approach from now on: "prioritize purchasing things that are experiences on their own to use (my OneWheel), followed by things that enable new experiences (my car), followed by things that free up time to do the things I want to do, instead (my lawn care services)"

I agree with the author, mostly, though I don't have as much of a problem with the deeply technical questions he's suggesting one shy away from -- my problem is with how the responses are handled by the interviewer. And as far as the whole "give them the actual work" approach, I love it -- I do it, and I stand by it, but don't abuse the candidates time in the process.

For the most part, I avoid the data structures-style questions. We have a limited time as interviewers and while these show off a candidates knowledge in areas we may need very rarely, I'd rather have someone who is productive at using what the framework we write code in provides. I stick with "when is it appropriate to use 'X' vs 'Y'" style questions but usually don't have to ask them; the candidate reveals that knowledge (or lack thereof) through other questions and I hate whiteboard interviews. I don't penalize the candidate for lacking knowledge they're never going to use on the job, but I like to know what areas they have deep understanding of. Before I ask these questions, I'm careful to point out "I don't care if you know the answer to this or not -- you might encounter that once in 10 years, here -- but if we do encounter it, it's helpful to know if you have a deeper understanding than others on the team." For the most part, though, it's a waste of time and I'd rather spend that time on the next two points.

My preference is to ask the candidate (very carefully) to provide a link to anything they've written that they can legally[0] share openly. My explanation includes all of the following: I am not interested in judging them on the code they send me -- in fact, I want their worst. I want the code that they don't care about, that they wrote in a hurry to solve some random problem that they had and that "just needed to work and do that one thing". I'll use that code as a starting point to discuss refactoring -- i.e. "What if you wanted to take this code and make it worthy of a product you'd sell". If there's absolutely nothing that they are comfortable[1] sharing, I ask them to take a few minutes and find a project in the framework we're interviewing for on GitHub that we can use for that purpose.

As for the "give them the actual work", we have a single-sheet project we give to every candidate, Junior, Mid or Senior. It's a "to do" app with basic requirements: Must use a database of some kind for storing/retrieving data (Sqlite is called out as an option, but anything relational is allowed), it must allow adding, marking complete, unmarking complete and deleting. We additional coach Senior/Mid developers to include things that would be important for a completely released application with examples (none of which are required), such as documentation, instructions for starting/setting it up, installers (with advice not to take this too far as that's one hell of a rabbit hole). Depending on the outcome of the "actual work", we might follow-up in a similar manner to ask them questions about their choices.

I've seen everything from a To Do app that used SignalR to perform its operations, allowing multiple users to watch the check-list get updated in real-time (complete with a WiX installer, OWIN hosted web service running as a Windows Service with everything wired up and a doc generation project[2]) to a simple HTML-template based solution that is done in four files. Of course, we check the usual sources for obvious evidence of whole-sale copying, but we're not terribly strict here, either (this point is made on the spec sheet -- it's such a simple app, it shouldn't require a lot of research/copy-pasta to build).

[0] The first time I did this, I left off that "legally" part and the candidate shared code that -- while not representing anything their employer would care about (basic library code that probably every programmer as written from time to time) and certainly not representing anything the company I worked for was interested in "stealing", it carried a copyright that they did not own. Unfortunately, it disqualified the candidate (not my choice in this case, but the company I was working for at the time had concerns that the employee might introduce liability we didn't want). And I don't want any candidate to think I'm asking them to break their contractual obligations in order to get a job -- we operate ethically and don't want to imply otherwise.

[1] I'm always careful to say "comfortable" so as to allow them to not have to feel bad about not having any code written "outside of work". I have met many software developers (albiet often in the Junior/mid-level skill levels) who simply don't care to write software outside of work. At the senior level, I've met several software developers who haven't written anything publicly shared in a while -- they're working too much at their current job, have families, and might not have the time to devote to things outside of that. Interviewing sucks and anything I can do to disarm the person and get them talking/excited will help me to evaluate them better.

[2] The dude really wanted the job. OK, I lied, the dude was me, but it was rare that I wouldn't include these things in an app I was writing for my current employer, so those parts were automatic (and easy at that point) for me -- it felt wrong not to include them. I used the documentation to explain my choices, mostly, which avoided a second technical interview.

The Amish are really misunderstood by people on the outside (myself included). This article does a great job of addressing those misconceptions and I enjoyed reading it after a long afternoon spent talking about the subject with a friend who was a midwife to the Amish community in northern Indiana[0]. My knowledge up to that point was "Those are the folks that I get my turkeys from who ride around in buggies."

The conversation started with an odd statement -- she had 7 children under 18 all home-schooled at least until High School (they were given the choice to attend public school at that point) and is a devout Christian. I was asking her why she allowed them to attend public school in High School given her rigidity on the merits of Home Schooling and her involvement in the Home Schooling movement.

She said "They know enough to graduate by the time I'm done with them, so it's an opportunity for them to evangelize to the other kids and enjoy themselves. I even let them attend an occasional party provided it's not an Amish party"

I chuckled ... wouldn't want to be negatively influenced by The Amish! I had no idea what 'rumspringa' was at that point. She explained and I don't think I blinked the entire time. Her son pointed out "The Amish have the best cars and every hard drug around". Rumspringa[0] is a period of time after age 16 where Amish children are basically allowed to live conventionally in order to make the decision, on their own, if they want to join the community as adults. Many buy (really nice) cars, many -- having experienced freedom for the first time in their lives -- make every mistake a late teenager can make and seem to make it at a level that pales in comparison to my experience as a teenager. The cynical -- and she was one -- believe it is used to encourage children to make every mistake the modern world has to offer so that they are trapped into making the choice to join the Amish community.

Because of my experience buying Amish turkeys, which are sold as cage free, hormone free, and otherwise considered superior from a health-standpoint to conventional turkeys[1]. I was surprised to find out that my midwife friend didn't buy Amish turkeys despite being extremely into the "all natural" way of thinking[2].

The article mentions that the technology choices which are allowed are limited by the parish and are inconsistent among parishes. Gas engines are usually allowed. Electricity is allowed with some restrictions, though AFAIK, being off-grid is required -- if you can generate it from solar/gas generator, it's OK and gas refrigerators or gas generators powering refrigerators were allowed.

While Amish Turkeys may not use conventional methods -- hormone-free/pesticide-free feed -- such is not the case with pretty much anything else. Velveeta, apparently, can be found in large quantities in every Amish kitchen in the community she served and is used in so many meals that she turns down Amish meals. Gelatin (non-desert Jello) is another staple of the diets of the people she served. Her take was "Amish food is unhealthy and disgusting".

Outside of that, she explained to me that literally everything is grown conventionally. The parish she serves has no rules against pesticide use/GMO/conventional fertilizers and the like are common -- basically anything that will keep a plant from dying is common. On the surface, this was a strange thing for me to wrap my brain around given my Amish Turkey experience, however, the explanation she gave was "Velveeta notwithstanding, they rely on their own farming for the majority of their food and use the most effective/least expensive options available in order to make sure there's enough". I still can't get over the Velveeta. Nasty. Her opinion was that among the conventional farms, Amish farms were the worst and she wouldn't consume anything grown on an Amish farm.

As a midwife, though, she had a bit of experience with some of the darker side of Amish life (a lot is explained in The Devil's Playground). Bed Courtship is among the oddest practices for a community that believes per-marital sex is evil. More than a few of her baby-delivery roles were for late teenage girls who became pregnant before they were married. The practice involves, basically, bringing a girl home to lay in the same bed with as part of a date. Sex is forbidden, and it sometimes includes a barrier that is supposed to separate the two participants, but that practice is rare (as is Bed Courtship, in general). Her opinion was that Bed Courtship, much like 'rumspringa', is designed to cause children to make mistakes that result in them feeling forced to stay Amish for life.

A small anecdote I share with people choosing to make a switch to a programming/IT career was that her husband -- an IT systems analyst -- worked with a gentleman who was Amish up until his late 20s[3]. He was a former-Amish software developer. "If that guy can do it, anyone can."

[0] I strongly recommend the documentary The Devil's Playground if you want to learn about 'rumspringa'. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0293088/

[1] I don't challenge those labels, but I also can't validate them.

[2] She refused to buy pasteurized milk, opting for milk from a neighbors farm. Her husband refused to drink it without passing it through their own pasteurizer.

[3] Yes, they do shun family members who leave the community.

I did something similar years ago but for different reasons: I suffered from Migraine headaches since age 17, am intolerant to the most effective medications for alleviating the pain and found that caffeine was one of the few things that could reduce the pain I experienced.

At age 17, I had a trip to the ER thinking I was dying -- worst headache of my life up to that point. It subsided during my stay and several tests later, any major problems were ruled out. I was not a regular caffeine drinker at that time, and caffeine has never caused Migraine headaches[0] for me. Over a few years of early mornings/jobs, I started drinking coffee regularly to be sharp/awake and experienced many of the same problems as the author. The biggest problem, though, was that I had become tolerant to the most effective medication (for me) to eliminate my headaches.

I would not advise quitting cold turkey. It sucks. The headaches are intense, but not Migraine[0]. After doing that for a few days, I took a different approach -- to replace my coffee consumption with decaffeinated coffee. At the time (I'm not sure if this is still true), decaffeinated did not mean caffeine free. It had just enough to ween me off of caffeine, while keeping my routine the same for a month. The dull headaches were manageable with a single Ibuprofen when they were the worst, but often required nothing at all. At the end of a month, the beans sat unused.

I treated caffeine as a medication from that point forward. I kept a container of beans in the freezer and would brew up a cup of coffee any time Migraine reared its ugly head. It took about a cup and my symptoms would be reduced -- sometimes remaining there until the headache passed. I've since found a prescription which prevents Migraine entirely, for me and have resumed coffee drinking, but limit it to a single cup a day and not daily -- just when I'm feeling "dull", mentally. But I have to be careful -- the jitters are very strong after the second cup and end up turning that sharpness into anxiety at times.

[0] I think people misstate a "bad headache" as a Migraine headache. I get different kinds of headaches, Migraine is very distinct to me, including auras and other symptoms that otherwise awful headaches do not. They also barely respond to common OTC medications, so I don't bother with them when I know it's a migraine.

I was doing exactly the same thing for the last several years (Firefox, not Vivaldi, but "g" is configured for Google). Sometimes I'd slip on the space and it'd go to DDG.

This happened a few months ago after I'd spent hours trying to find the right incantation to get Google to give me something other than a bunch of troubleshooting that I'd already done. The DDG page had much of the same, but the top link was bizarre in its irrelevance to my query. I don't know if it was the two hours of frustration that led me to click it[0] or that the title also included a service that my application used, but one I had (in error) ruled out as the culprit.

It turned out to be the exact solution I needed.

Here's my assessment:

  - DDG falls down for queries that are seemingly simple but require context beyond the term to get the result I'm specifically looking for.  Google knows too much about me, so if I search for a technology company by name, and it shares a name with seven other businesses, DDG won't put it on top unless that tech company ranks higher than the others using their privacy respecting search.  Google will have it as the first link, with a sidebar explaining things that might keep me from needing to click it.

  - DDG performs as well or better (in a lot of cases *better*) than both Bing (I think the major source of its search data) and Google for queries seeking programming/troubleshooting/other technical help.  It surfaces results that don't show at all on Google for me.  Its results for these queries contain fewer spammy responses, as well, for reasons unknown.

That last point was surprising to me mainly because ... Google has all of my context and a massive team of people who are supposed to be ensuring my results are excellent. DDG is working with so much less, yet they're providing me better results often enough that it seems they've got some things implemented that exceed Google's capabilities. I'm not sure if that's the case or if it's just coincidence, but it's happening enough (now that I'm giving them a chance and looking) that I'm happy with the outcome.

Give it a shot, next time. You may find, like I did, that it works really well for a lot more than it has in the past.

[0] Details at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29725919

That's funny ... I haven't noticed this problem. I don't run pi-hole, I use uBlock with some customizations so I'm guessing I'm just not seeing the sponsored links at all.

I killed all text/image ads after an accidental click on a non-intrusive ad a decade ago infected my work laptop and haven't looked back. I'm going to turn it back on for DDG and just "be careful". Hopefully this is less of a problem in 2021, and hopefully it's not a problem at all on DDG, but the ad I clicked by accident was on a mainstream, non-porn/traditionally risky site ... it was a flash exploit, though, so at least that's gone given my configuration.

A few thoughts here:

- That's a pretty small number compared against Google, but that's not the point. I'm a little impressed and a little skeptical. More on that later.

- OT: The whole "every sentence is a paragraph thing" increases that skepticism, but I realize it just feels like I'm reading something my tweenage son wrote and I need to get over it.

On the skepticism, the number I'm more interested in is how many searches resulted in a link being clicked. If it were possible to get, how many of those searches were not repeated on Google.

The reason I ask is that I have the DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials extension installed[0]. I don't like Google being my default search engine, I prefer search suggestions coming from a search engine that is more respectful of my privacy and have long ago set a shortcut so that starting an address with "g " will perform a Google search.

I often forget the "g " and end up sending that search to DuckDuckGo. For a while, the results returned were nowhere near as helpful as Google and I'd simply repeat the process, inserting the "g "[1].

Lately, however, I think there's combination of "Google's results seem to be getting worse" and "DDG results are getting better" at play -- more recently, I had a horrible problem with Azure AD B2C, performed a search on Google, got pages of relevant-seeming results but all obvious things I had checked/ruled out. DDG had several of those, too, but the top result was a curious article that mentioned another Azure service we used -- KeyStore -- and otherwise seemed totally irrelevant. Mostly due to 2 hours already wasted, I clicked it just to see... well, it turned out that my solution was under Link #1 on DDG.

Since then, I've actually started looking at the results, and most of the time I don't need to redo the search. So I do believe the product is improving, a lot, and they deserve credit for knocking any whole integer percent off of Google.

[0] Like many of you, I am "IT Support" for my extended family. So everyone has Firefox as default and a few extensions, DDG is among them.

[1] I do not use any of the "slash" or special features of DDG. I don't care to learn search syntax and the little bit that I played with that wasn't as helpful as just putting the query into Google. I'm sure it's great and that's on me, but these are 1:1 searches between the engines.

I should have clarified -- the modem was really obsolete for the purposes it was being used.

The carrier involved was one that everyone has heard of. All of our other carrier billing was handled using a variety of authenticated links/services to the carrier. And this particular carrier had other, better, ways of doing it, too. For whatever reason, we had never altered that process. It was permanently fixed a few months after we got that host working again.

Completely agree!

And I had to pipe in to say I've had similar problems with mechanics -- though not as brazen as spray painting old parts, but frequent cases of being over-charged for things that weren't fixed, not honoring warranties for things that weren't fixed, and generally having a car that ... wasn't fixed.

Like my psychotherapist, I found an amazing car mechanic. He's made a mistake or two over the years, but every single time it happened, he resolved it beyond my satisfaction. Honestly, kind of worried about how old the guy is getting who owns the shop and hoping he leaves it to someone with the same high ethical standards.

Most of my bad experiences with therapists were simply people that couldn't relate to my circumstances in a manner that they could provide advice/actions that I could use rather than people doing actual harm, but I could see that as a possibility if I had stayed for too long.

I'll second this advice: I can't walk alone when I'm depressed. The quieting effect of being alone just causes my mind to go crazy with all of my problems.

An audio book at that time, however, is a great solution. Audio books, for me, can't occupy my entire mind. I can't sit and listen to an audio book. At the same time, they occupy enough of my mind that I can't do other mentally intense things and pay attention to the book at the same time. I had used them for driving, yard work, and other boring tasks to quiet the noise in my head and the feeling of boredom[0] that the task occupies.

When walking with a good audio book, I can observe the world without the noise of my circumstances and it really is a peaceful exercise.

[0] For me, boredom drives depression.

You are not alone; at least,... your struggles are shared. I haven't lost the job, but lost an 8-year relationship at the beginning of the month (about 7 days before my birthday). I'm guessing your mental health issues might originate from those events, or maybe not; I can't speak to those, personally -- I'm experiencing my share of depression, but I know it's because of my circumstances.

You're still alive, but you probably don't feel like you're living. Maybe life is becoming a bit like getting from one difficult thing to the next. And those "things" aren't anything that is normally difficult, but feels overwhelming. I've both been there recently and have been there, in the past. It's tough and my heart goes out to you.

Most advice is bad so here comes mine: get from one thing to the next for a little while. Take the time. You need it. And understand one thing: you're not special[0]. Whatever mistakes you're beating yourself up over many, many others have made and experienced the same or worse circumstances. The very vast majority overcome those mistakes, and many do it without medication, doctors or other treatment[1].

And then there's "later" -- whatever that is: During a divorce group meeting a gentleman said something that greatly affected my life: Whether its winning the lottery or becoming a quadriplegic, the happiness of both individuals looks pretty similar a year later. Neither have ever happened to me, but in my own life, that 1-year rule was something that time-and-again proved to be true. And my timeline is typically 3-4 months, not one year. As they say, "this too shall pass".

I've lost a great job in the past. I found a better one. I lost a pretty rough relationship, not by choice, to the point that I'm not interested in doing that again. I hate being alone[2], but I know that the sting will fade and I'll start dating, again. And I know there's someone who will want to share life with me in a way that is more fulfilling than my former relationship was.

Easily the biggest factor, for me, was re-discovering my Christian faith. I realize there aren't a lot of us in this place and I'm not interested in being preachy -- to each his own -- but its really the only thing I can credit with getting me through a really rough tragedy about a decade ago. It wasn't "being surrounded by other caring people at church" which caused me to be less lonely or made my life better because of that. I don't put myself out there very easily. I didn't know anyone at my church and didn't meet anyone until well after those circumstances passed. It was prayers, all of which were answered, several of which were answered in ways that I refer to them as miracles. Yeah, yeah, I can explain them as coincidences, too. They're not but I'm not going to attempt to defend that.

The only other bit of advice I'd offer is stay as far away from alcohol or other mind altering substances as much as you can. One of the ways out is finding a purpose for your life to replace the ones you've lost. This will be impossible if you add another layer of resistance on top of the problems you already have. You lost. You're not a loser. You had a 7-year relationship. You had a job. Those came from something you did and you probably had far more success in those places than you had failure, but you won't be able to see that clearly right now.

I'm praying for you and your circumstances. This time of year really amplifies loneliness. I'm right here with you.

Merry Christmas!

[0] I chose that word intentionally, not insultingly. When I'm depressed it's easy to feel like I'm the only one who's going through what I'm going through and that I'm uniquely cursed. Somehow using the word "special" to describe that situation makes it seem a little less difficult.

[1] I'm not saying don't do this -- I see a psychologist, regularly, now and have been doing that for a few years. Finding a good psychologist changed my life and it might help you, too. I only mention this because it helps to get past the whole "I'm too depressed to call a doctor/doctors, so I'm going to be stuck here forever".

[2] To clarify: I like alone time, I don't like "being alone". My family all lives pretty far away, I have few friends close by, I have a 3-bedroom house with "just me", I have my children part-time. I spend a lot of time stuck with my thoughts these days, but comparing today to 3 weeks ago, I'm happy a lot of the time now -- maybe most of the time.

  > No psychotherapy please.  I won't go near their arrogance.

I felt this way a while back. I realize, now, that it was my arrogance that was the problem with that situation -- coupled with a small number of bad experiences with psychologists[0]. Finding one that works for you is difficult, and it took me quite some time, but the value of having a professional "disinterested third-party" decode the workings of your mind is impossible to replicate alone.

Consider that the thing responsible for diagnosing your problems is the exact thing with the problem. Your brain has a way of lying to you, making things seem smaller/less impactful than they are. Talking to a professional about it can reveal things to you which you can't see with the blinders that your brain puts up. It doesn't have to mean "turning your brain off and blindly listening to everything you're told" -- it means listening for something this third-party is telling you that you may not agree with, but perhaps -- they're seeing something you're not and you should evaluate whether or not they might be on to something.

If you are unwilling to see a psychotherapist, find a friend that you trust deeply enough with this problem and ask them, directly, "What do you think I'm doing wrong, here?" or "What do I need to start doing differently?"

[0] Maybe it's just where I live but it seems every psychologist in the field got there because they had years of psychotherapy of their own. It's almost similar to how many who work in drug rehabilitation are former drug addicts, themselves. I'm not sure that it's bad, always, but I found myself speaking with people that seemed a lot less put together than myself.

This model (and every other that I've seen, though, admittedly it's been a while since I've looked at a typical rack mount server) had an easily removed battery.

I'm not sure what that engineer's reason specifically was, but I'll chock it up to laziness.

The CMOS batteries, themselves, have a shelf life and for whatever reason, we probably had none of the specific size required on hand. Being that the device was on battery backup in a rack, it probably led to the engineer thinking "it'll never be rebooted, a label will do"