pbourke

This text sits at the wellspring of Western culture, such as it is. You don't need to accept any metaphysical claims that it makes in order to appreciate its wisdom.

Real humans who are unable to resolve your issue are quite accessible indeed.

In the loop for the NFC part. One's bank is, rather obviously, involved in the transaction.

I don’t know what you’re referring to. Trust is a fundamental part of security. Without trust you need to be ever vigilant in an ever expanding set of domains and technologies, or you have to shrink your vulnerability surface area down to something that you can at all times personally comprehend and manage. This will not work for 99.99% of the population.

> But no one would force you or anyone else to leave that Apple ecosystem you hold in high regard. There would simply be more opportunity for alternatives

“Opportunity for alternatives” is not free. There will be a trade off to enabling it, and my perception is that it’ll negatively affect those who are happy with the status quo.

I don't have an example, but I believe your question supports my point. From everything I've observed, Apple is generally better at providing a secure ecosystem than the variety of major parties that comprise the Android ecosystem. So if I remain in the Apple ecosystem I'll need to devote less energy to answering questions like the one you've asked than otherwise.

Security. I'm quite happy as an iPhone user to have Apple be the only ones in the loop for NFC payments. I'm generally happy with all other restrictions mentioned in the suit (no 3rd party app stores, no super apps, etc). It seems that this suit is brought on behalf of other companies (device and app makers, etc) and has a tenuous benefit to the public. There is a fair alternative available in Android for those who don't want to be in the iOS ecosystem.

FWIW I use Linux on my desktop computer, believe in open source, etc. Since mobile phones have become much more than phones and are now a sort of master key to your entire life, I am happy to have that key reside in as high a trust environment as I can find.

> The personal computer & the internet clicked for me because I saw them as personal enables, as endlessly flexible systems that we could gain mastery over & shape as we might.

I feel the same way. Developments in computing have evolved and improved incrementally until now. Networks and processors have gotten faster, languages more expressive and safer, etc but it’s all been built on what preceded it. Gen AI is new-new in general purpose computing - the first truly novel concept to arrive in my nearly 30 years in the field.

When I’m working in Python, I can “peer down the well” past the runtime, OS and machine code down to the transistors. I may not understand everything about each layer but I know that each is understandable. I have stable and useful abstractions for each layer that I use to benefit my work at the top level.

With Gen AI you can’t peer down the well. Just a couple of feet down there’s nothing but pitch black.

> A privately owned company is just as likely to consider input from employees as an employee-owned company is.

> Both employee owned companies I worked for the board made those sorts of decisions without any say from employees.

If there was 100% (or majority) employee ownership, would the employees not have the ability to use the general meeting process to eject board members they didn’t like? Aren’t employees voting for nominees to the board, allowing them to use a write-in process to bypass a hostile board?

> also, what actual publicly available product has he ever produced?

JUnit

I think the pipfile should specify only the ‘readability-lxml’ package and not ‘readibility’, which does unrelated things.

Nortel had a similar trajectory. Just prior to the crash it represented 1/3 of the Toronto Stock Exchange by market cap. It essentially went to null and took 10’s of thousands of jobs, the wealth of hundreds of thousands of small investors and Ottawa’s tech sector with it.

> Which is maybe better than a tightly integrated system when it comes to farming implements.

He mentions swapping out components from last season a couple of times, so lack of integration is probably a feature.

Dry graphite powder is messy. I would recommend a teflon-based product like “DuPont Easy Entry Lock Lubricant”

> It annoys me to get and send pdfs in text messages, but that seems to be how the world works now.

Do you mean PDFs for correspondence such as bills or invoices? That is not common for me.

> For-profit, private sector health insurance is not a healthy market.

Anyone over 65 would be on Medicare. It’s not exactly free, but it’s also not private.

My team at Microsoft works on DiskANN, which was designed for this kind of use case.

https://github.com/microsoft/DiskANN

I think it depends on the industry. In a specialized niche (B2B), sure.

In something like new auto sales, all of the information is available online and is usually more comprehensive and accurate than that offered by a car salesman. YouTube probably sells more cars than car salesmen these days (in terms of locating a product that meets your needs and convincing you to buy it)

> You can pay people to churn out bad self-help all day, but none of those are going to be worth a damn without allowing the human element to flourish. But you still need a factory which can print the things, and as clinical as a mass bookbinding operations sounds, I really believe that you're only going to get a beautiful binding when that factory is run by people who have the connection to the work necessary to exercise taste.

Operation, innovation and maintenance. Pick any 3.

Better if done by the same team or teams that are very close to each other.

Ideally, all done to varying degrees by each person on the team because that’s where inspiration for improvement comes from.

We can split the 3 functions up into 3 groups, with 3 sets of management hierarchy. Often the result is mediocre and the people are unhappy (especially those stuck on the maintenance team - thankless but crucial work, that).

We can try to make teams responsible for all 3 functions, but often hire managers who overfit on one of them (coincidentally the one that leads to better rewards next quarter). It’s hard to champion operational excellence, diligent maintenance and hammock time in a single culture.

No wonder it’s hard.

Sounds like we need an AI complement to the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

I recall that it’s depicted as a kind of bloodless coup / occupation.

The Mars rover landings, Pluto flyby and SpaceX successful returns have been pretty exciting. Feels like we’re building to more exciting times with the beginning of return to human space flight past LEO now.

You might do well to add contact info to your profile

My Leatherman Wingman multi tool has a “package opener” which is perfect for opening plastic clamshell packaging.

> The problem is there are engineers who will take your paycheck and build crappier software more quickly

You’ll usually pay them better than the engineer who delivers a better quality product in more time.

I quite like context managers and try-with-resources style constructs. They make lifetimes explicit in the code in a fairly intuitive way. You can get yourself turned around if you deeply nest them, etc but there are usually ways to avoid those traps.

> to dress like a teenager even as one nears retirement

For some of us this is a KPI of our life/job satisfaction.

I can tell you that if I was in some job that did not allow me to schlep around in hoodies and cargo pants I would be much, much less happy than I am today.

If you have a system with a fast sort/order by operation but a slow (or missing) shuffle, one trick that I sometimes use is to generate a new random number for each record, then sort by that random number.

Uniform sampling is also quite easy (and principled) - you can just take the first n records.

You will likely have issues if you ever try to sell property with an unpermitted well. FHA loans have restrictions on the well as do many local jurisdictions that may refuse to convey the property if the well isn’t up to code. My local jurisdiction won’t block the sale but will write an alarming letter to the seller. In the case of a new build or major remodel, you will not be able to get a certificate of occupancy without a state and county verified well here.

> Hell most of the licensed contractors I hire (electric, plumbing, etc) don’t bother to pull permits, even for new work.

Yeah, it’s your responsibility as a homeowner to get the permit (either get it yourself or see that the contractor does). Even if you don’t think the permit inspectors are doing anything in terms of quality control, the permit helps you to pass inspections as part of the sale process and will limit your insurance exposure if there’s ever an issue. There’s probably fine print in your insurance contract saying that all work shall be permitted as required.

1. Not all cellphones are smartphones, and not all smartphones are capable of running a given app

2. Presumably a debit card on the same network would work just as well. What’s the credit + debit card penetration rate?