splittingTimes

"a system of solar-powered machines that would autonomously harvest raw materials from common dirt, use them to build more machines, and then perform useful tasks such as sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. The replico-bots didn’t pan out, because—well, do I really need to explain?"

Back in the early 90ies, i can see that, but today/in 20 years it does not sound too ridiculous. Or am I missing something?

Let me add

M.A.X. - Mechanized assault and exploration.

Best TB strategy game and AI. Sadly there source of this is lost as well.

Have you tried to write any non trivial document with MS Word? It is infuriating. Even the simplest tasks don't work reliably, like placing a picture with a caption. And oh my god if you try to Google for your problem you end up on outdated MS doc pages or what the pages describe only works in the desktop app and not the online version.

Sorry to ask but What's NPS?

Fulfill your happiness?!

Play with the application. In each of the main views try to find prominent/unique label strings. Search for those labels in the code base to get an entry point to the view. Then explore the code around that entry point and try to change something here and there and see if it has the effect you expected.

Other then that there is not much to that you would not do in other code bases as well. Set up your IDE probably do you have all the linters ready and can easily navigate the code base.

Ask your lead or mentor to show you the low prio backlog Tickets that have 1 or 2 story points and start the to get your feet wet. Once you have solve one, ask how your commit process works and follow it. Rinse and repeat three times then pick a ticket from the Sprint filter and start contributing.

To get a sorted list of the most touched java files for example you can run

git log --name-status --pretty=format: | sed 's!.*/!!' | grep java | cut --fields=2- | sort | uniq --count | sort --numeric-sort --reverse

If you deprioritize money, getting part time work is always an option.

Second that. Use that money to do and try all kinds of activities. Learn dancing, surfing, climbing, self defense, archery, carving, pottery, wood working, cooking, singing, sailing, horse riding, blues harp, build a permaculture garden/do guerilla gardening, build a race bike from parts.

There are endless things to engage and challenge your body and mind. Enjoying these activities with friends gives me the most joy. My job is just a crutch to support that.

COVID had a huge impact on all of those though.

The scandals if the last 5-10 years showed that

Libor - interest rates

ISDAfix - swaps

Platts - oil prices

WM/Reuters - FX

High-Frequency Trading - equities

Commodities - Gold, Silver Stock indices

Are all rigged. So these markets will not give you a truthful signal on what is going on.

"the utility monster: one person receives much more utility from each unit of resource they consume than anyone else does. For a utilitarian, it follows that every resource ought to be directed towards the utility monster in order to maximise total utility."

That is exactly the reality people see day by day in their work life/ business environment. If you have a business unit that creates more return per unit resources input than another one, the former is always favored.

Our whole society fetishizes efficiency, constant improvement and economic growth/success that it has entered into all parts of human life and interactions. So it is no wonder that the more moral priority view has and never will gain mainstream application, as it goes against the grain of the current ideology.

Nice write up.

On a tangent note, Am I the only one who finds those feedback forms anti pattern?

I hate the MS teams feedback form with a passion, popping up every second call or so.

Typical day of back to back meetings. Given the not so stellar Performance of that tool, i am typically annoyed after a call, and then this thing pops up and when you start to answer it, it asks more and more all the while I only want to get away from that tool and need to jump into the next meeting.

I have accepted the poor UX of teams, what would my 100s feedback report change? The devs of teams should have all the info in the world on their product already. Why do they not simply act on that info, fix the repetitive problems that get reported in the 1000s each day and turn off that form. What are they gaining by keeping to annoy customers.

Stanford neuroendocrinology researcher Robert Sapolsky Explains Toxoplasmosis. Utterly fascinating.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NroiGfNohPo

For a fully waxed person, Would it make sense to try to get infected by Delta to build more immunity to fight off that omicron thing?

With so many significant variations on the spike protein the vaccines will be no help..

This explanation does not seem too far fetched

https://twitter.com/kparve/status/1462398425924780040

In DDD this is discussed regularly [1]. Conway's law about how the communication patterns of an organization dictate the software architecture was probably the starting point of these considerations.

=== [1] one of many examples

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EOof9dof0y0

I would like to get back into retro gaming. As a kid had a NES and SNES. Of course sold the devices later on. Now with a kid in my own i would like to share the experience.

Buying original equipment is very expensive. But emulators are abound. A middle ground would be for me to play those with original controllers.

But how could that be done?

In general, how do you handle repos that have a combination of source files and a lot of binary data side by side?

> Writing (with good style on interesting topics) would be nice.

Sure. Playing piano improvising over jazz chords would be nice too. But as with writing you need to put in the hours to get there. The hard work is a reality check on a maybe romanticized idea of writing.

> the economics are holding it back more than the technology is.

Is it not more the missing political will? (and yes, they are related as politics always seeks/ caters to big corps to get their buy-in)

In 2008 when the financial system felt some distress, the German finance minister provided 400bn euros over a weekend to Deutsche bank and others. It took politics 2 fregging days to unlock that amount of resources. And it was like no questions asked.

And we kept pumping that amount in there on a quarterly basis ever since.

I do not need to go into military spending.

So for me the earth ecosystem which needs to sustain is as a species is in as much of distress as the financial system was back then. It warrants the same sense of urgency and resource allocation.

Beware with partial commits that they still are still able to build the application atomically.

We have a whole framework that handles migrations of costumer DBs after updates. But when you don't even know that your changed class gets persistent (because of spaghetti inheritance/type hierarchy) and you do not enter it in the migration scripts, you duck up.

Strictly only the performance or can it also answer usage questions like:

When customers go through this workflow step, they use this option/button 90% of the time and the other options are used rarely?

Great point. We use method/class names in config files that get parsed and dynamically evaluated. You could break the whole application by changing class names as an init config could fail.

Also persisting stuff in customer DBs that depends on class names (and reflection) is nice source of terror. Shipping a new version of your software with a refactored class names corrupts the whole DB of a customer.

We are trying to get a better understanding of how customers use our desktop application. We are urged by management to use Qualtrics, but it feels like it is not the right tool for the job.

How would you say does opentelemetry compare to Qualtrics?

Is Qualtrics a tool where users need to actively fill out surveys and opentelemetry collects passively user interactions?

There is also other names floating around in this space like DataDog or OpsTrace, where I am not clear how to place them.

Typically scope of a project: feature x and y are agreed to not be included but two sprints before release they become a must have, because otherwise Sales suddenly cannot sell the product.

100% true for theoretical/computational physics, solid state physics, optics, catalysis research, and many more. You use existing grants to explore completely different topics and once you have something promising where you are 50-80% there, you write the next grant. Rinse, repeat.

Particle physics (or gravitational wave research for example) is the odd one out here. Maybe because it is 100% fundamental research, where it is known to not produce applicable results.

With subsidies of 63 million dollars over a 10 year range Nokia build a huge plant in Germany, employed some 3200 people, had supply chains running, etc. The factory was profitable. However, once the 10y contract was over they closed the factory and relocated to Romania. And this was in a year where Nokia posted 7.2 billion in profits..

Same with afshion companies and car manufactures.

https://www.ft.com/content/74ab02a6-fd85-11df-a049-00144feab...

Stanford neuroendocrinology researcher Robert Sapolsky Explains Toxoplasmosis on the Joe Rogan podcast. Utterly fascinating.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NroiGfNohPo

A well tried and tested scheme by corporations. Company establishes a presence in a country, collects subsidies (payed by taxpayer money) under the pretence to later pay it back in taxes and employment. However, once the subsidies end, they move on to the next country. Having the taxpayer footing the bill. Rinse and repeat.