albrewer

For the same reason Python is so popular. It's not the best at anything (besides being really easy to use), but it's top 5 at all the things that matter. When your use case outgrows Excel, then yeah, invest in a specialized system... when budget allows (which is never).

> creat[e] a graph where each permutation is a vertex and every permutation is connected by an edge. Each edge has a weight associated with it; the weight is calculated by seeing how many characters can be added to the end of one permutation (dropping the same number of characters from the start) to result in the other permutation. [...] Any Hamiltonian path through the created graph is a superpermutation, and the problem of finding the path with the smallest weight becomes a form of the traveling salesman problem.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation

Given their respective histories, I'd say we're still in the "Volt pile" era of LLMs and AI.

> none of that is the same as spending time to figure out how to ensure that something breaks at the right time

Yes it is. At the absolute limit, balancing cost and reliability is this exact optimization exercise; we are talking about the exact same thing taken to different extremes. The difference between your ideal scenario and the practice outlined in the OP is the difference between 97% BOM efficiency and 99.99% BOM efficiency. At extreme scales, that gap can mean the difference between a company laying people off vs. surviving.

Side note - this same discipline is what ensures your widgets fail in a safe, controlled manner and not in a catastrophic way.

> I feel like you're reading my message extremely uncharitably

I saw an naive take on how mechanical design for failure works in practice and wanted to educate. I mean no disrespect, it's just seemed like it might be an unknown unknown for you. Your comment had at least a few upvotes, so there are others out there who may also lack the same information.

To your charitability point, though, my first take on the OP above is probably the most charitable take. The least charitable scenario for the OP is that the company wants to make sure they have higher annually recurring revenue from replacing their widgets breaking down but need to _barely_ beat or match the other guys in a warranty. Reality is probably somewhere in between.

In mechanical design, you typically target an order of magnitude of stress cycling for product design. In a pump, everything stress cycles, so it all needs to be simulated. If this was a pump you were going to make ten million of, then suddenly every fractional 10th of a cent you save becomes the difference between, e.g., having another coworker or not. So to balance that with offering a reasonable warranty such that there's actually demand for this product makes sense.

Before anyone brings it up: sure, a lot of companies just pocket this savings or whatever, but a lot don't; you just don't hear about them because they're typically midsize companies that nobody complains about.

Amsterdam lets little vehicles like this operate in its bike lanes. They can't be capable of going over ~30 mph. I imagine a similar policy is being followed here.

The solution is not to stick strictly to prefix, postifx, or infix notation. Instead, all three should be valid.

All these should be equivalent:

  + a b + c d + 
  + + + a b c d
  a + b + c + d
  a b c d + + +

More insidiously, these should be equivalent:

  x = a + b
  = + x a b
  x a b = +
  + x = a b
  x = a b +
  x a + b =

> sell their skills to foreign countries?

200 of the world's most experienced nuclear personnel are now unemployed. Yes, these people are the kind that get actively recruited by nation states.

I've read about this exact practice in one form or another since the Pentium 3 (sometimes just directly cooling with R134).

Sounds like you might have conscious control over your tensor tympani muscle[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_tympani_muscle

> The primary use for a smartwatch for myself (and many of my family, friends) is fitness and health tracking.

It also needs to be a good watch. Don't forget to not fail at that.

> People are furious that the price of delivered food has gone up recently

If I was confident that increase was mostly going to the driver, I'd be fine with it.

I sold a mk3s because I could never get it to work to my satisfaction. I tried for weeks, trying everything I could find on the internet, using filament supplied by Prusa.

Eventually the print head crashed into a failed print overnight, fusing nearly the entire head inside a ball of PLA filament that formed after the printer happily carried on shoving out molten plastic.

I didn't have another 3d printer to print the replacement parts. I was so frustrated with it at that point I just got rid of it.

Until I can treat a 3d printer like a Brother laser printer (forget about it for 9 months at a time and then have it work perfectly when I need it with zero maintenance), I don't think I'll invest in another one.

Not sure if you chose 17mm on purpose but the tolerances on most sockets and wrenches make 17mm and SAE 11/16" sizes nearly interchangeable.

It still peters out eventually

No kidding - it really did take about a year for me to finish it. That was _with_ a guide.

I'll take it. My resume probably doesn't match your qualifications, but hey I'm sure you guys are willing to train people up where they're deficient, right? For that kind of pay, I'd never leave - surely me being a drag on productivity for 6 months while I come up to speed is an acceptable trade, right?

You're right, and that's 100% on me for not clicking your link.

Inflation from 15 years ago to now is 33%[0]. Inflation from 30 years to now is 107%[0]. So yeah, median incomes are dropping.

[0]: According to this calculator - https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

This is to prevent bot spam

I don't see my 80 year old grandmother learning how to use a terminal anytime soon.

> Perhaps consider creating your own product as a "micropreneur": a mobile app, a SaaS service, a social media website, etc

Part of being burnt out is not caring about any one problem enough to want to solve it yourself.

> "gun to the head" heuristic

Never underestimate the power of hiring a new employee and training them how to do what the software would do, thereby writing zero lines of code.

That $250k in initial feature development costs + maintenance might only be $75k in personnel costs a year, which is a break-even of ~4 years. Depending on the problem, that might be the best option.

Texas has a similar thing going on (technically), but you still have to pass an NCEES[0] exam, which is not easy.

Also, if (in Texas) you stamp something outside of your area of expertise and it comes up in a review, it's viewed as if you never had the stamp in the first place[1]

[0]: https://ncees.org/exams/pe-exam/

[1]: https://pels.texas.gov/downloads/lawrules.pdf - rules 133.97(b) and 137.59(b)

> A "Professional Engineer" is just a Bachelors level engineer who took one extra test

At least for mechanical, it's 4 years' working experience, documentation of sufficiently advanced projects, and sign-off from 3 other registered professional engineers who are familiar with your work.

A guy I worked with took the mechanical design variant. I don't know how the HVAC variant is. The test is over the most advanced stuff you learn in your degree; the "specialist" portion of the test (what your concentration is in, e.g., HVAC, thermal/fluids, or machine design and materials) is ~25 questions and you have 4 hours to complete it, in addition to the other 4 hour comprehensive portion that's the same for all takers.

On top of that, to keep your license, you need to complete some amount of classroom education every year.

As far as coursework goes, the coursework for some of my upper-level mech E classes was usually identical to a graduate-level course, the only difference being graduate students do a research paper+experiment for a final exam and undergrads do a traditional written exam since they had access to funding and we did not.

imo this comment is dismissive and glosses way too heavily over the rigor that goes into even the "lowliest" of engineering programs.

I learned it for the first time from this[0] course; part of the course covers deal.ii[1] where you program the stuff you're learning in C++.

[0]: https://open.umich.edu/find/open-educational-resources/engin...

[1]: https://www.dealii.org/

Early in my career as a brand new baby mechanical design engineer, I would have absolutely made some huge mistakes were I not able to pick up my drawings and ask a machinist with 30 years of experience if I was being an idiot or not. I learned just as much from the welders and machinists as I did from my boss.

> Probably Java and Python have similar constructs

In Python, the closest you can get is a "frozen" dataclass, but you don't get true immutability[0]. What you _do_ get is effective enough for just about all practical use cases, except for the standard foot guns around mutable data structures.

    @dataclass(frozen=True)
    class MyModel:
        ...

[0]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/dataclasses.html#frozen-in...

I completed college with unmanaged ADHD (diagnosed 10 years later; worst result my psych had ever seen on the TOVA lol).

My second and third semesters went exactly as you described for courses where I was exposed to new things and wasn't just repeating high school - mainly because I had no training or coping mechanisms for learning under that type of pedagogy.

After getting my ass kicked in exams and failing a class for the first time in my life, I finally grokked that optional homework assignments were the professor's way of communicating learning milestones to us, and that even though the professor said they weren't graded (unless you asked), you still had to do them or you wouldn't learn the material well enough to pass the exam.

Still had a few bad grades because of the shit foundation I built for myself, but I brought a 2.2 GPA up to a 3.3 by the end.

The point is that it takes is exposure to that style of teaching before it can really be effective.

I jumped to Lemmy since my favorite Reddit client switched straight to it after the API fiasco. Seems suitable and I like the small community.