daotoad

I think the biggest flaw in brutalism is that it does not suffer hacks well. Badly done, it looks and performs worse than just about any other style of architecture. You get hideous boxes with conduit everywhere.

None of the brutalist buildings I've actually been in suffered from confusing floorplans or lack of storage. The tendency is more for big, striking open spaces and wide walkways.

In the Pacific Northwest there's a recent trend to build a lot of ugly boxy townhomes and small apartment buildings in a neo-brutalist style. One notable features of these buildings is big, smooth rectangular panels in their outer cladding. They often look like the builder just got a bunch of OSB sheets, painted them dark brown and tacked them up as siding. Add thoughtless placement of conduit and vents and the interaction between window locations and the lazy siding, and you have a sloppy mess of unintentional asymmetry and unevenness.

If you are going to have your conduit hanging out as an architectural feature, you have to treat it like an architectural feature and think about how its placement and routing impacts visual balance and rhythm as well as the functional issues of delivering power, water, and ventilation. It's not just a license to nail something up and omit the trim.

This article begs the question. It just assumes that working in an office improves motivation. The article they point to says co-working environments improve perceived productivity, not motivation.

I've worked in a remote job for more than three years. I can say that the most important thing to stimulate productivity is to create clear signals for yourself that you are engaged in work time, not play time. Having a coworking environment is one way to do that. You get out of the house, to a place free of domestic distractions—you aren't tempted to wash the dishes or watch TV instead of working. But you also explicitly demarcate the work portion of your day. You can also achieve this separation by having a work desk/computer and a distinct personal space for games, email, paying the bills, etc.

The other thing that a coworking situation can provide is social reinforcement. My approach to that issue, as a remote worker has been two-fold. First, make an extra effort to engage with your coworkers. Make time for chitchat about life and whatever random crap comes up as well as work related topics, you'd be doing this in an office environment without even thinking about it. Secondly, get out of the house regularly—I found that going and working in a coffee shop or library at least once a week provided a nice change of scenery. If you become a regular, other regulars will come to recognize you, and you can socialize there as well.

Humans are creatures of habit. We respond strongly to various cues that let us know what we are doing at any given time. Wrapping your work life in a set of ritual activities and signifiers that distinguish it from your personal time improves focus and productivity.

Brutalism is NOT just "cheap functional architecture with no nods to true beauty".

Yes, it is an extension of Bauhaus, with exposed fixtures and minimalist, functional designs. Yes, in the hands of a hack, this yields ugliness. Buildings like Habitat 67 in Montreal, Vancouver BC's central library, and UC San Diego's Giesel Library are works of art.

To say there was no thought of form or beauty is patently a calumny.

Strip-mall architecture is the fast food of architecture. Quick, cheap, and, at best, lacking in nutritional value.

IMO, this is where regulation and government come into play.

Some things aren't ever going to be profitable if built and managed for the long run. These are things that should be government services.

Other things can be profitable but need to be those doing them need to be persuaded to do them in a prosocial fashion. This is can be done by internalizing externalities. Negative externalities appear as taxes or fees, and positive ones as subsidies. Particularly harmful actions may be flat out forbidden, with stronger disincentives attached.

The problem with this approach is that any significant regulatory system will have such a large economic impact that for many players, the most cost effective approach to regulation is cooption of the regulatory system.

And 1950 and 1980.

They could be great again if they leveraged their old "good, better, best" strategy. Instead of trying to sell all the things like Amazon and Walmart do, they should be offering a broad, curated set of items that are reliable and binned by those three quality descriptors.

This specifically addresses the issues many people have with buying from Amazon.

Netcraft confirms it.

High risk for mortality, yes. But are they higher risk for actually catching the bug when exposed? I don't think anyone knows that.

I'm not even sure how you could come up with numbers on how much viral exposure is needed to infect someone, short of controlled experiments with volunteers. The odds of killing a few volunteers seems pretty damn high, especially if you are testing with more vulnerable folks to establish a differential estimate. That's not a study I'd want to be involved in on either side of the clipboard.

As a parent, I can tell you with 100% certainty that kids can get this kind of concept.

Yes.

Now you don't have to RTFA.

Great video.

If you want to play with a powerful type system check out Raku. It offers gradual types that are a hybrid of dynamic and statically checked.

Basically, you can define a `subset` of a type with a validation predicate. Subsets can be named or anonymous and inline in function signatures.

Another thing that made me think of Raku was your discussion of NULLs. Any type container can be defined or undefined, an undefined Array container `isa` Array. But you can specify whether your annotation means to be specifically only defined or undefined members of the type. So `Int:D` is a defined integer, whereas `Int:U` is undefined, and `Int` is either.

The type specifications combined with multiple dispatch cam make for pretty code.

It's a really interesting language and, in my opinion, worth checking out. It would be great to hear your thoughts on it.

Because many of our users access our systems using embedded browsers in EnterpriseTM Software, we have to support IE8.

B2B can mean you're locked in to supporting things you otherwise wouldn't.

IE8 support adds significant cost and effort, but because of our customer profiles, we must maintain it. Our leadership understands the issues and is working to change the situation, but the inertia in this field can be astoundingly hard to overcome.

Adderall

Just because American police have become incredibly militarized and rely on violence and the threat of violence to get their way, doesn't mean it has to be that way.

It's also possible to get people to do things because they respect the authority of the officer. "If this cop says I am being an asshat and should stop, maybe I am being an asshat and should stop." This is what people mean when they talk about soft power.

You can still die if the driver spends too long messing with air conditioner settings instead of focusing on the road.

CarPlay and Android Auto make this problem worse, IMO. Now you have app publishers writing arbitrarily complex UIs for cars. Spotify is a bitch to use while driving and because of Apple's reluctance to enable Siri support for third party apps, it's not very controllable by voice.

I grew up in the US and we kept jars from Kraft cheese spread. We used this size glass for orange juice or soda.

They're about the same size as mole jars.

https://images.app.goo.gl/zNsjQ5MY5zSgafB9A

Just a usage note for grammar/spelling obsessed. Is the usage of till correct? Yes it is.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/%27til

They are riding dolphins through the crystal clear canals of Venice, hunting swans.

Unless you dilute the water until it becomes homeopathic anti-shark water.

I think it depends on the culture of the group. If the group isn't cohesive enough to have a culture, you're doomed. I've been to conferences where if you didn't know someone important, you were just another mark.

My experience at YAPC, now "The Perl Conference" has been different. The culture there is very open. I made it one time, I'm no luminary in the Perl community, but Larry Wall invited me to lunch. The other speakers were also very open and approachable.

He /is/ legend.

12 Monkeys?

This gets a 4x extension of our ventilator supply: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16885402

We also have thousands of small manufacturers and hobbyists who are capable of building improvised ventilators should guidance be provided.

Since we are going into spring and summer months, we can use tents to set up extra space.

Also since schools are empty, they can provide additional spaces.

We have capacity, we just need leadership and direction.

Never say never.

Adding fields or methods is easy. You can do it at any time.

Removing them is difficult. You must first go through a long deprecation cycle and ensure ALL clients are updated.

You need good logging AND good monitoring and analysis of the logs in both client and server to be able to detect access to removed features.

Don't generate source code. Give me a library that can take the metadata as an argument and generate a the desired code as an object file/in-memory class.

Automatically pooping out source code that is customized just makes more LOC to maintain. Having tools that poop faster just means that there is more to shovel when I go to maintain the application.

If the metadata to code transformation is really solid, what I get is less code to maintain, and the ability to rapidly port metadata generated code between langauges/platforms.

Compare, for example, @ngrx/data and any of the 80 million schematics that ship for Angular development.

What people fail to notice that high throughput restaurant applications already use a lot of automation.

Your Starbucks barista isn't carefully timing the blend on your frappucino. Nope, the scoop stuff into a blender and hit the frap button. McDonalds has all sorts of specialized cooking equipment that removes judgment and streamlines the process of preparing meals. A great example is the automatic drinks filler with its conveyor belt full of cups.

This represents the low hanging fruit for automation.

It's surprisingly tricky to make machines that don't mutilate workers in the vicinity and can handle all the weirdness that reality presents, even if it is only in the reduced scope of "how to make a hamburger". Throwing a robotic "elbow" into someone can be pretty damaging, working safely with knives and cooking temperature devices is even harder.

And as we all know, sad songs say so much.

River boat pilots once could say the same thing.

As could steam engine operators, the original "engineers".

Conditions change.

But if as a low-level manager I can gain sympathy and build relationships with my superiors by blaming my inefficiency on the union-devils, why not cause a petty delay with passive aggressive rules.

The union might be a corrupt and self serving enterprise. They may just be reacting to abuses by management.

Perhaps the company kept getting fines from the fire marshal for unsafe use of extension cords. Management tries to use that as an excuse to harass or fire their electrical workers. The union responds by saying that their electricians never saw nor approved the use of the cords and that they had no way of knowing they were in use. After enough hostile interaction, you wind up with a rule that nobody can plug their own computer into an existing outlet.

The places where I hear about the worst red tape, are places where the relationship between the unions and management are really antagonistic. Both sides need to remember that everyone wants the employer to be successful, because then there are more profits for everyone to share.

BILASM!

But I Like Acronyms So Much.

Web "MVC" rarely was really MVC. Except that it changed the meaning of the term.

https://wiki.c2.com/?ModelViewControllerHistory https://wiki.c2.com/?WhatsaControllerAnyway

We just all pretend that it's agile now.