586 karma · joined August 29, 2009
> He also observed that Texas, where he lives, has a law on the books that prohibits social media companies from banning users based on their political viewpoints.
> "I would certainly be interested in hearing from people who are First Amendment lawyers about how that might apply in a situation if they don't provide some legitimate and well documented reason for my suspension," he said.
I doubt this goes anywhere but it would be an interesting test of this law.
One trick I've learned is when frying tofu, let it sit until you're pretty sure it's burned. Then wait at least that long again before flipping it and starting the process over. (It's really, really hard to burn tofu.)
Other tricks include putting it in the freezer before cooking it or microwaving it for 30 seconds before fully cooking. Both of these help to remove water from the tofu, making it firmer and easier to work with.
Tofu will pick up the flavors of whatever it's cooked with, so it's great for adding to dishes with sauces or marinades!
Cancelling my 10 year old prime subscription was the easiest decision I've made in the last year.
(And I'm now concerned that this comment will feel like a "me too" :) )
There's lots of additional resources out there too. I was learning Forth at the time and found a bootable image that runs perfectly on the PiDP, documented here: https://groups.google.com/g/pidp-11/c/qIjZeA_WCPU
... Are you seriously trying to claim that you've never seen free street parking anywhere? The vast majority of parking everywhere in the country is unmetered. That's tax money paying for car storage. Cherry picking an airport is absolutely disingenuous and a bad faith argument.
Without Boston, Massachusetts would be significantly poorer. But without the rest of Massachusetts, Boston would be significantly richer.
Again, we don't expect roads to make a profit, but somehow mass transit has to play by other rules.
Cars are far, far more subsidized than public transit[1]. (Even these analyses tend to ignore externalities like "free" parking. In what other realm would you ever expect to permanently store your private property on public land without paying and have it protected by the police?)
Driving is so incredibly heavily subsidized in the US that people genuinely _believe_ things like paying a miniscule tax at the pump covers the actual cost of driving.
[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-13/debunking...
[1]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/17/in-transportat...
This is not a great argument, in that public transit is a public good and should not be expected to fully pay for itself. Public transit enables other economic behavior. Similarly, we don't expect roads to pay for themselves -- they're a public utility that enables other revenue producing behavior.
> people living in Worcester, Springfield, Pittsfield, and Chatham were contributing to a system they don't use
I don't have children but I'm happy to pay taxes that support public schools because I reap the benefits of an educated populace.
Boston produces the plurality of state revenue[0], far more than Worcester, Springfield, Pittsfield, or Chatham. The residents of those towns are happy to take revenue generated in and by Boston to pay for their services, but consistently vote against properly funding the T. Which is shortsighted, because cities with public transportation produce $1.5B more revenue per year[1], meaning those cities would have _lower_ taxes if they supported the T.
[0]: http://www.bostonplans.org/getattachment/cb7ed639-177c-43f0-... [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-08-14/public-tr...
This was the single most impactful thing I learned in my early career. I was building out monitoring systems for an in-house service we hosted on site. My boss wanted to buy some small utility to keep tabs on some minor aspect of our environment. I was a bit offended -- I could have written that myself and here he was paying someone else to do it!
He asked: "How long would it take you to write and test this?" Me: "Probably a week. Maybe a bit less, maybe a bit more if I run into something tricky." Him: "Okay. This tool will cost us $500 to buy. What's your hourly pay rate for 40 hours?"
With this I achieved enlightenment. I've never again built something at work that I could buy cheaper.
I love living in the city. I can walk to two different movie theaters, two grocery stores, a huge number of restaurants and stores, and a number of my friends' houses within 15 minutes. I can hop on a bus or the subway and expand that even more. I don't have to waste half a day every weekend mowing a pointless lawn or trimming tree branches, but I have parks, rivers, ponds, etc. easily accessible any time I want to enjoy them.
I grew up in a place where you had to drive 30+ minutes to go anywhere. It was incredibly isolating and I'd never want to go back to that.
It's fine for people to want to live like that, but it's obvious that for many (if not most) people, cities are somewhere nice to live.
Most accessibility affordances have a negligible cost when designed in from the beginning and are significantly more expensive to retrofit. (E.g. designing a staircase with an integrated ramp is cheap; adding a ramp to an existing staircase often is not.)
Ensuring that everyone has equal access to society seems like a pretty worthwhile goal and I'd hate to see people locked out of it to save a fraction of a percent in costs.
This is the killer feature of GPT for me. I'm very, very good at optimizing and solving problems within specific domains, but terrible at picking a direction with no boundaries. (Pick a theme for a costume party and I'll have the most interesting costume. Throw a Halloween party and I'll show up in jeans and a t-shirt.)
I recently wanted to submit a conference talk, but wasn't sure where to start. I gave ChatGPT a list of possible topics and some general guidance about what I thought was interesting and asked it to suggest topics. I picked one from its list and asked for tweaks, then "discussed" with ChatGPT for a few more rounds until I had a very clear idea of what the talk would be.
I don't feel like that's cheating. I'm still going to create and give the talk myself. But if I had to come up with the topic and abstract on my own with only a blank sheet of paper to start with, I'd never have submitted it.
I'm not claiming this is the case generally across the UK -- I'm in the US and don't know the situation there. Just that it doesn't automatically follow that "I'm using less energy" necessarily equates to "less energy is available for me to use".
> It looks a lot like an energy poor country.
I'm not sure that follows. Couldn't you also say "it looks a lot like an energy efficient country"?
The Core i7 in my laptop uses a fraction of the energy of the Pentium III in a desktop a couple of decades ago, but I certainly don't want to go back to the P3 today.
If you're iOS only I suspect the chances that you'll build a Linux app to be roughly zero, but web apps work almost anywhere :)
Mobile app only systems are a huge pain (literally) for me as due to some wrist issues, typing on a tiny screen instead of an ergonomic keyboard is difficult.
John Care is great and I'd check out his book Mastering Technical Sales if you want to go deep, but there's plenty on that list to get you started!
My motivation was not financial (though that is a part of the goodness of the role!) but more quality of life. Being an SE means that you're frequently encountering new problems, new technology, and new people.
You get to do what I think is the fun part of engineering, which is figuring out solutions and building a proof of concept that your solution works. But you don't have to do the bits of software engineering that I find boring, which is fully completing a project, adding polish, and smashing bugs. (For me, figuring out how to solve a problem is fun and then I want to move on, which is why I have a bunch of hobby projects that are 80% finished and will never actually be complete.)
What surprised me is that you also get to do the fun bits of sales. You will figure out business and sales strategy like how to compete with other products, what features to highlight, what questions to ask, and what traps to set for competitors. "Have you thought about how you will solve Problem X?" is always a fun question to ask when Problem X is valid and you have the answer but nobody else does!
It can be a high stress job. I've been an SE for a long time, and with the exception of one company I've always had more to do than I felt I had time for. (The exception is no longer in business, which should tell you something.) Sales moves fast and you have to be constantly learning, growing, and experimenting along with keeping up with both halves of your day job.
One thing to note: you don't have to be an extrovert to be an SE. You do have to be socially aware, though -- you need to understand why someone is asking a question or taking a position. Not just the technical reasons, but the political and emotional reasons. (Are they personally invested in a competitive tech? Will bringing in your product harm or help their career? How does their body language shift when they talk about different parts of the business or different colleagues? Is there a way I can make my company's success part of my prospect's success as well?)
Overall it's a fabulously rewarding job, but not for everyone. If you like to build things start to finish, you'll be frustrated by moving quickly to the next thing once you have a technical fit. If you don't like to think about money and how businesses work, you will fail at the sales portion. But if you are a neophile and have the social skills to tell someone they're wrong without making them angry, you will love it!
I hope your approach is working as well for you.
Tangentially, Victorian houses were frequently very colorful. The lack of color photography leads people to think of them as drab, depressing shades of gray. But nothing could be further from the truth. HOAs that restrict colors to a boring beige are doing a disservice to their neighborhoods.