EMM_386

That's what I took away from this.

I'm not sure I really see anything interesting here, except this:

> The numbers are significant in that wages increasingly have been recognized as a driving force in inflation

Rising wages aren't the driving forces of inflation. The problem is exactly the opposite it seems.

The Federal Reserve and "easy money" policies put a lot of money into the system trying to deal with the pandemic. The fallout of that is inflation.

The fallout of THAT is people need more money to get by. Not just to deal with the inflation, but to deal with raising interest rates and everything else that comes along with trying to "fix" that issue.

So people demand higher wages.

Hah, that was great!

It's weird as both a commercial pilot and former ATC, I understood absolutely every acronym in the song.

We sure do have a lot of them.

Yes, US in the late 90s.

I went to colllege to become an airline pilot, and I was shocked that I ended up having to fly an NDB approach in actual conditions to minimums. You just don't see that anymore.

And the tolerances on the checkride is that you can only deviate from the course by a certain number of degrees.

I vividly remember staring at the ADF with the needle swinging wildly left to right as we were tossed around thinking "surely I can't get failed for turbulence"?

I'm a dinosaur and I'm always amazed at the technology that pilot's have available to them these days.

While complex to learn, having huge glass navigation systems sitting in front of you in a single engine plane seems so foreign to me.

I did my instrument ride in a C-172 and my commercial in a PA-44.

During both of those checkrides, I ended up having to shoot ILS approaches to minimums, in turbulent IFR conditions, with nothing but "steam gauges". The fanciest thing in the plane was probably the HSI.

On the instrument ride, I had to shoot an NDB approach to minimums in actual. That was a good time.

I assume planes don't even come with NDBs anymore. I used to tune into AM radio on them just to have something to listen to to pass the time.

I used the latest Microsoft Flight Simulator recently and loaded up the C-172. It just stared at the screen for a minute, realizing I don't know how to use a G1000 so I couldn't fly it. I mean, I could start it up and get it off the ground, but for IFR navigation? No clue. Lots of buttons and fancy graphics.

The march of progress.

> One is "do you know what's going on under the hood?"

Why should I need to? Let's take Microsoft's .Net sort implemtation.

It will intelligently determine which is the optimized sort given the conditions it's facing.

Heapsort? Mergesort? Quicksort? Radix Sort.

And the most-possibility optimized versions of each.

This is what data scientists do. We don't need programmers standing at whiteboards writting BubbleShort and being told it's wrong. In the real world, you call .Sort() and get on with real work.

Sure, you can hand-roll your own sort for hot-path cases but that's likely been taken into account anyway!

I've been told I'd have to have my wisdom teeth extracted by every dentist I've seen. Over 10 of them as I've moved around. Oral surgeons saying the same thing.

The first one to recommend this was 35 years ago.

I still have them, and the last dentist I saw says they are in good shape. The first one ever to tell me this. I've never had an issue with them.

Go figure.

> just like they lost all the other battles they fought over the past 10 years or so.

History repeats itself. I'm old enough to remember the IE lawsuit in 2001.

Now I'm reading articles about how Microsoft is abusing its desktop position to push Edge, and Chrome is abusing its stance as the dominant browser to push this nonsense.

Give it 10 more years, it will die down. Then 10 years after that we'll be discussing the same thing again.

"The closing is bad news not only for its employees and its customers, who generally used Yellow because it offered some of the cheapest rates in the trucking sector."

Perhaps they shouldn't have offered the cheapest rates in the trucking sector while failing their obligations.

Taxpayers ended up holding 30% of this company's stock and they still couldn't figure out how to become profitable after a $700 million infusion?

This race-to-the-bottom stuff is not the answer. The answer is to charge what it costs you to deliver plus a profit. If you can't compete directly on price make up for it in service and reputation.

People will blame unions because the company had to fund pensions and health insurance. It likely will come back as a private company with lower pay, worse benefits, and maybe if people are lucky a 401k.

> How do you overcome that?

It will lower itself naturally.

Less people in office buildings means less foot traffic to stores, which means less fewer stores will be enticed to rent.

If nobody's renting, eventually the owners and investors will have to realize some rent is better than no rent, even if it means they are going to take a loss.

Then rents start dropping back to earth.

> As the guy who released all those Phoenix and Firebird and Firefox versions, I can tell you with some certainty that it hasn't been 22 years yet.

Yes, I was off by a year or so, I'm not making anything up. Two decades is a long time to remember details.

All I know is I'd FTP to grab the latest and unzip it into a folder.

By this point I was running a couple major websites and had a "5-star CNET Award" for an internet-centered software product so I was on top of anything in that sphere.

Glory days.

> I'm really not looking forward to the future where every business has chatbot support. They are already quite common and frustrating.

To be honest, I've had some good experience with some of them.

Amazon's comes to mind. I've been a customer for a long time, and I was shipped a faulty computer peripheral recently.

I briefly explained what the issue was to the chatbot and got an immediate response that a new order had been placed, that I should just keep what they originally sent me, there was no charge and it would be sent out priority.

And that was it. It arrived the next day and it worked fine.

Granted, it knew I was a long-time customer who has already spent a lot of money with them, but this was about as painless an experience as I can imagine. It sure beat clicking through multiple web pages of dialog options.

I switched to Brave last year after 22 years of Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.

This was purely for Chromium performance reasons (although it seems Firefox has made some major improvements recently). I didn't like leaving behind a unique browser engine, which needs to remain a significant player.

I don't understand a lot of the hate for Brave. If you don't like the crypto integration, the ads, etc you can just disable them. I feel the original intent, to be able to contribute directly back to page authors, was a noble one. It may not have played out as intended, but it wasn't a scam.

One year in, I've had no issues I can think of. And now they have their own search engine, another net plus to the ecosystem. Outside of things like Tor Browser, the privacy is about as good as you're going to get from a client. In fact, you can open a new window using Tor directly in the browser. I don't use their VPN but that's available also (Mullvad?).

I spend enough daily time in it that I would notice UI/UX/perf. problems ... I really haven't seen any.

YMMV

> This is great news for workers in America in general.

It really is.

Workers in certain industries have been pushed to the absolute breaking point. This is exactly what unions were meant to solve.

You can only take so much before you get pushback.

This is good for the US. Unions built the middle class in prior generations.

I used to be a commercial pilot and a federal ATC. Unions were an option.

> but unless you're qualifying what you said to mean something more specific

You're correct. I've edited.

That notification you got about the "20 minutes worth of fuel left" meant before they were forced to divert to the alternate.

There are numerous FAA requirements about this depending on if you are IFR/VFR, the airport, the expected weather, etc. but the bottom line is sufficient fuel to:

1) Fly to your intended destination.

2) Fly from the destination to the alternate (if required).

3) Fly for an additional 45 minutes at normal cruise speed (minimum).

What the pilot was saying was that they had 20 more minutes until they had to go to Pittsburgh. If it took 45 minutes instead of 20, it was because the computer calculated that was exactly how much more time they could hold.

There was no gliding on your flight. It may have felt that way during a descent at flight idle.

The flight may have been scary to the passengers, and people may not have wanted to get back on, but I'm sure it was quite routine to the people up front.

Source: US certified commercial pilot, Aero. Sci. degree. Certified ATC.

> I've worked with both JSON and Protocol Buffers and there is no way that merely changing from JSON to PB would reduce latency by 60%; not on an average request. Clearly other refactorings were undertaken to achieve that speedup.

The article notes that this is only for "large payloads", likely an edge case, and the average performance improvement is 6.25% for responses and 1.77% for requests. 1.77%!

I get that this is "at scale" but is the additional complexity of all this engineering worth that? How much more difficult is the code to work with now? If it's at all more difficult to reason about, that is going to add to more engineering hours down the road to work with it.

I assume tradeoffs like this were taken into account, and it was deemed that a <7% response improvement was worth it.

Yep, I was a Pheonix user from the beginning in 2002 ... where you just unzipped it to a folder and ran it.

I stuck with Firefox for literally 20 years, only caving in last year due to noticeable performance difference (went to Brave).

But this news makes me want to try it again, I'd rather be using Firefox just to have another browser engine thriving.

Competition is good.

> Someone made a change in a function I was calling, and it started throwing a new exception.

If it has nothing to do with your code, why not either let it bubble up the stack or try/finally it to do whatever clean-up you need to do before re-throwing it and letting it move on to a global logger or similar.

If it is something you care about you can always catch the specific exception type and handle it.

Maybe whoever worked on the other function wasn't even aware it might throw that particular exception.

Granted I am far more experienced in C# than Java, but the idea that with every code change you potentially have to review and declare every single type of exception seems like madness ("what happens if we pull the cord when it's here, what type will that throw?").

> The "look and feel" of the program usually gives it away more or less immediately.

If you are talking about the base controls, then maybe. But there are .Net cross-platform frameworks such as Avalonia that can get you a modern loooking UI with theming.

https://github.com/irihitech/Semi.Avalonia

https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Citrus.Avalonia

etc.

> It is quite literally copying and pasting from StackOverflow

Not necessarily.

They've already said that certain emergent properties as the models have scaled beyond certain thresholds are responsible for some of the abilities. The ability to code as well as some of them can has been included in this.

> ChatGPT is very useful reference library. It blows google searching for examples out of the water, but you need to be very careful with the results, and very knowledgeable to use them properly.

I agree that you need to know what you're doing to make use of them. I've been a SWE for over two decades, so I certainly know what to feed them (and what not to - such as proprietary information) to get a coherent answer. Yes, they need a lot of context on a given issue, without that the model can only guess at what you are looking for (variable names, UUIDs for primary keys, schemas, interface definitions, 3rd party components, etc). And they will occasionally suggest using deprecated methods or not the latest suggested approach, due to the cutoff date.

However, I stand by the opinion that if given the right inputs, they are capable of unique solutions to complex issues. The models are seemingly capable of taking points A and B from one StackOverflow post and combining that with C from the language documentation and D from a third-party vendors site and combining them into a coherent answer.

> but the second you start asking it to solve problems that aren't in its training database it gives you nonsense

I would disagree.

I use it for code and it comes up with unique solutions to my situations that certainly have not been seen before in its training dataset.

When you inform it you are using a 3rd party UI component library, a 3rd party CSS library, and you need to alter the layout based on the current complex state of an Angular system, and it can provide HTML, CSS, and TypeScript code that works and is based on this unique arrangement in this system, I'd say that's reasoning on some level.

It's not copying and pasting from StackOverflow. It has to "understand" the scenario and implement it using my guidelines.

It will even take into account things like linting rules ("Never use the 'any' type") and it can do that too.

> explained that one of the batteries went kaput

The article does mention "one" of them went out, implying they had more than one.

As to why that was not sufficient to release the balast, that's another question.

> another modpack that should be mentioned here is pyanodons

For the sake of anyone's sanity, I wouldn't mention that.

I installed Factorio 4 times, and uninstalled it three times.

The slow pace at the start, and the somewhat lifeless 2D isometric graphics simply didn't do it for me.

But the blog posts were fascinating, and people kept raving about it, so on that 4th install I decided to soldier on and actually get somewhere.

I now rate it as one of the greatest games ever made. It is insanely technically impressive, able to run megabases with trains and belts and robots and inserters and all the rest of it at 60 FPS. It doesn't crash. It's incredibly fun and very addictive. Amazing mods, amazing community.

I can't wait for the expansion. I'll just assume from the start it will be as polished as Factorio is.

Please, I beg science ... anything like this.

I do what I'm told to do. Yet as the years pass it's been cavities, root canals, extractions, crowns, and everything else.

The worst part isn't even the procedure, it's the cost (in the U.S. at least!). Thousands and thousands of dollars any time they need to do anything. And that's with dental insurance. They like to deny claims.

Dental should be covered under medical but that's an entirely different story. For now, I hope science keeps working on this.

> There is an algorithm for everything in aviation

This is how I got my commercial pilot's license, and I'm a senior software engineer.

It just "clicked" with my brain to follow specific procedures ("algorithms") for absolutely everything. Checklists, strict rules, "flows", handling emergencies. It all felt natural to me.

They will throw random stuff at you during checkrides. Pull the power back on one of the engines right after takeoff saying it failed, fail instruments that you were using to navigate, blindfold you ("foggles") and put you almost upside down and then say "recover!".

But you have everything so ingrained in your mind by that point that it's almost robotic. You just look at the inputs (almost upside down, engine #2 is gone, no attitude indicator, whatever it is) and know what the output is supposed to be (roll to unload Gs, lower the nose, full power, check the standby AI, etc).

I happen to work well when there are strict rules and procedures. If this, then that.

> Not at all. If you, for whatever reason, need to sell right now, putting in a market order in an illiquid market can cost you a lot.

Are high frequency traders trading in illiquid markets?

That would be surprising to me, it's not high frequency if it's not high volume, and you open yourself up to larger bid/ask spreads.

Public companies are out for one thing, and one thing only.

Shareholder returns.

It has nothing to do with CEOs "already being rich", their job is literally to run the company properly so that the shareholders make more money.

Like it or not, that's how it is. Now, if this "crap" actually hurts the brand and the bottom line, they shouldn't implement it. If they are seeing more profits, and not many complaints, it's likely it will stay.

Moral faiure does not come into play.

The common answer will be "liquidity".

The honest answer is probably nothing.

> I think the problem is that SPAs are limited in use, but a lot of devs ONLY build SPAs and that creates a mess.

I am lead on an enterprise Angular project and among the reasons I went for it was due to the fact is is opinionated, but is doesn't get in your way. We're on Angular 16 now with a C# back-end and everyhing is going well, is logical, and performant.

Prior to this I was fully in the Microsoft ecosystesm, from ASP classic, through ASP.Net Web Forms, and through MVC.

This was the first project I decided to use a SPA front-end with, wanting to avoid Microsoft's latest Blazor push. It was too early to risk it.

SPAs have their place, and this is a large and complex system.

I agree that React is overused, it seems like it's the "go to" for many people, such as people who are either self-taught or went to a React-focused bootcamp. I've seen plenty of React sites that could be static HTML ... some of them could probably even get away with no JS.