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Yes. This might be unfamiliar to software engineers, but there's a reason mechanical engineering and architecture (there might be more, but these are the ones I'm familiar with) schools put students through at least a semester of ethics classes.

We are literally the last line of defense in a lot of industries. From the first line of the ASME code of ethics:

> Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public in the performance of their professional duties.

If you can't do that, you should be in another field. Maybe software engineering at Meta would be a better fit.

My alma matter (which is directly on a lake) has been gradually banning all unsupervised swimming for students because someone gets blackout drunk and drowns themself in the lake every year.

I think it's a tragedy; I spent a lot of my formative time enjoying the lake and the outdoors (not to mention it being one of the few healthy ways to escape the stress of engineering school).

The school is also gradually eroding all of the student run outdoor clubs (sailing, mountaineering) because they aren't directly controlled by the university bureaucratic system. Young adults today are having that taken away from them and replaced with nothing.

This article is a detail-free puff piece that is either serving as SEO spam to increase "Xiva"'s page ranking, or support this guy Dave Fishwick’s career as a hired speaker.

Kagi returns basically the same result set including the AI generated slop, which is disappointing.

Someone commented on the thread yesterday about people's most humbling experience and it stuck with me:

> I will never be a world champion at anything, so I might as well play for the love of the sport.

The place to start is your own mental state if making art, playing music or making a game seems devalued to you because something else (AI) can do it better than you.

> Realpage should just be concerned with keeping their saas customers by making a good product

The coordination is the service. Realpage is literally offering CaaS (cartel as a service). The "market insight" would be nearly valueless without the guarantee that Realpage was signing contacts with your competitors that prevents them from undercutting your prices (and vice versa).

This is interesting because the district court seems to initially have decided the opposite of Tom Waits vs Frito Lay (http://tomwaitslibrary.info/biography/copyright/frito-lay/).

Looks like the appellate court came to the same conclusion though, a famous person's voice is distinctive to their identity and intentionally imitating it is a type of false association claim.

This is not a very useful link since only the abstract is available without paying, and the pre-print does not seem to be on arXiv.

This ad *really* reminds me of the absurdly tone deaf ads Meta ran during the Super Bowl (great breakdown by David Roth here https://defector.com/facebook-meta-asks-wouldnt-it-be-nice-t....

To me, the message is clearly "the world we are creating is going to destroy you, you relic, you outmodded worthless luddite. You will be allowed to consume through our content square." but apparently someone with severe west coast tech brain thought these two ads were somehow conveying something positive?

> In Seattle, for instance, the policy is to distribute drugs and needles to users

Please cite your sources if you are going to make ridiculous claims. The city of Seattle does not have a municipal policy to distribute drugs to drug users at the syringe exchanges.

This has generally been my opinion on the office of the President. The actual quality of the administration comes from the level underneath the chief executive and I have been very pleased with the people in this administration.

The FTC, Department of Interior and FCC all seem like they have very competent (and non-corrupt!) people running them. Can't say I have strong feelings on Biden but I think he's shown good sense in who he appoints to actually manage the Executive Branch.

Do you have in-house SMD assembly experience? When I was doing fast turnaround prototyping, being able to build up the boards in house was invaluable.

Do you need your prototypes to be on flex PCBs? If you can get the electronics ironed out on FR4 you're going to save a lot of time and money on prototype revisions.

If you're waiting for JLCPCB to assemble all your boards for you you're slowing your process way down. Pay for 2-3 day processing at PCBWay and then assemble in-house. If you can prototype on FR4, PCBWay can literally manufacture the boards overnight and DHL them to you before noon the next day.

I'm assuming OP is using JLCPCB for assembly instead of doing it in house, because if they just want bare boards they should just be paying for rush processing.

PCBWay can ship bare boards by noon the day after you order them if you pay the $99 to rush the order. Much cheaper than moving to Shenzhen.

> I see lots of AI companies are trying to transform the MedTech industry, but I'm unsure how much of their products useful / are actually adopted by the hospitals. Maybe some experts in that space can enlighten me on that?

My impression (as an outsider with a partner in the medical field) is that the prime function of the "medical industry" is to generate reams and reams of documentation about "care provided" to an insanely granular level. Functionally, this information is mostly bullshit that is irrelevant to providing medical care, but it serves a very important purpose for the medical administrative class so that they can bill the patient for each bandage applied or Ibuprofen administered.

AI MedTech companies mostly seem primed to increase this firehose of bullshit. Whether or not that will take the pressure off front-line medical personnel who are currently tasked with generating it remains to be seen, but you'd be hard pressed to convince me.

... So just like US sales tax already does? I'm not saying it's a good system, but I'm already paying some random amount on top of the sticker price for everything I buy, depending on what state, county, and city I'm in at the time.

I feel the same way thinking about computer security back in the early 00's. Nothing was ever really locked down, sometimes you could get administrator access by pressing "Cancel" on the login dialog three times, network drives were just open to everyone and you could install new software by just bringing it to school on a floppy and installing it on the lab computer. I think that environment was what really fostered my love of tinkering with systems the same way phone phreakers did a few decades earlier.

Now everything is locked up like a vault and it's all group policy this and mobile device management that. Nothing can be unlocked and nobody has permissions because if it isn't your device ends up encrypted with a ransom note telling you to send cryptocurrency to a state sponsored hacking group in Russia.

I do feel like younger people are really missing out on the "hackability" that everything had before we collectively realized how computer security worked.

My favorite academics in the automotive field were the ones who had already been in the the industry for long enough to make their bag and had come back to teach because it was fun.

The head of the automotive program at my alma-mater was very well off and was completely open about the fact that he did consulting on the side if he wanted cash for a new truck or something. This also made him considerably more immune to administratorial university politics.

A lot of university bloat and wasted resources came from the fact that the various regents, deans and heads of so-and-so wanted their fingers in every pie and would push various "initiatives" that academic staff were expected to support (which would then be a notch on the belt of the administrator who created it, giving them power to hire more staff and create more initiatives).

There were a lot of levers that could be used against academic staff who focused too hard on teaching or supporting grad students. Loss of lab space, no grad students funneled to them, etc. The people who'd already "retired" once and were only there to teach were basically the only line of defense against this type of stuff, because they simply didn't care.

> logically the most likely outcome is that the Amazon will start to die

This seems like a very large leap of reasoning to "logically" make.

My understanding is that Saharan dust clouds carry phosphorus across the Atlantic, which nourish the Amazon.

It doesn't follow that Africa stopping the expansion of the Sahara will kill this cycle. The Sahel has historically been used for agriculture (with periods of massive drought in between) and preventing the Sahara from expanding into it does not mean erasing the rest of the Sahara.

It's not understanding the local rental market that's the problem. It's controlling enough of it that you can influence prices globally upwards outside of economic competition.

If 60% of a city's major property companies sign on with RealPage and *also* agree that they will not undercut the prices RealPage chooses (eliminating economic competition between the property companies), that's not just being a high information party, it's collusion.

The problem is that housing in major cities has a relatively fixed supply, so the colluding landlords know that even if a competitor undercuts them eventually they will simply fill their units and cease to be competition for new renters.

It's no longer legal as of Jan 1, 2022 (part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021).

If you want a list of the real worst of the worst Senators, go look at the people who voted against making this a law.

Full text of the new version of the bill can be found here: https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/21424kosabil...

I am reading though the bill right now and do not have quite the same takeaway that the EFF is promoting. Sec 102 specifically exempts platforms from limiting "any minor from deliberately and independently searching for, or specifically requesting, content". This seems to neuter a lot of the pushback that the bill will prevent youth from searching for sexual health, minority status, LGBTQ+ information.

I think a lot of platforms are upset that they won't be able to push this type of content algorithmically (see the prevalence of "mental-health-tok", "5 signs that you have ADHD" videos) but I am *very* skeptical that this type of content is healthy for anyone. I think it drives a ton of engagement which large platforms don't want to lose.

My main beef with KOSA is that a bunch of the meat of the rules and enforcement (Sec 106 - Sec 109) is completely punted on. Lots of "Not later than 18 months after the enactment of this act" the FTC will "issue guidance" or create rules for various things. It seems like Congress doesn't quite know what they want to regulate, but they want someone (who isn't them) to do so.

Via lawyer / legal representative if I had to hazard a guess.

This is very cool. Thanks for sharing it.

From the article:

> this code is shared to show the algorithm, not as a drop-in application that just runs. It depends on two private modules configmanners and Points. Both of these are on github

I don't know why you would find this so confusing, or blame Python. The author literally explains that the points module is not on pip. You installed some random pip package and expected it to replace a different dependency.

One problem I have is that I primarily work on embedded distributed systems (multiple software components talking over a high speed messaging layer, using both sockets and shared memory).

As soon as you pause the code in a debugger you "disturb the equilibrium" in such a way that debugging the original problem becomes impossible because remote components start timing out or closing sockets, etc.

I still end up debugging via print statement a lot so I can run the code at full speed. Does anyone have a good tooling suggestion for a situation like this?

My dream is a tool that would allow me to set a breakpoint which would start capturing program state at each line while still running at full speed, but then allow me to step through the recording later. Does something like this exist?

I'm glad R/C seems to be shifting to meet a younger demographic in a way that model railroading hasn't been able to. I recently bought an ARRMA and I'm blown away by how powerful it is compared to the Tamiya and HPI stuff I grew up with. It's fun to see the new R/C sports (drifting) and twists on existing hobbies (FPV becoming a new focus in R/C planes).

I came here to say this. For a blog post accusing the Wirecutter of being "rife with factual errors, [and] misleading statements" the author could have, ya know, not gotten basic facts wrong about filtering standards?

Just a few sentences later the author states "This passage implies that a (“true”?) HEPA filter is designed to capture particles that are 0.3 microns or larger. But an H13 filter must, by definition, capture 99.95% of particles of all sizes."

This is explicitly wrong! According to the author's own source that they linked above! "HEPA filters, as defined by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) standard adopted by most American industries, remove at least 99.97% of aerosols 0.3 micrometers (μm) in diameter."

Aeroflot Flight 1492 is a perfect example of this. Passengers were actively working to get carry-on bags down the emergency slide as 41 people were burning to death in the back of the plane.

The parent comment poses a question: > If Adobe can't buy them, what other exit options do they have?

Operating as a sustainable business that sells a good product for a profit is apparently not even on people's radar.

At least in my experience, it really helps to have one senior person lead the way.

Our company hired a greybeard with a rock solid condition of his employment being a four day work week. After that, it was much easier for "normal" employees to switch to it since management was familiar with the idea and saw that he was a very productive employee.

I switched to four day work weeks when I was 29 (based on his example) and have been very happy with it.