hnick

Multiple newer parents I've met (in Australia) have practiced complete avoidance of such serious potential allergens. The idea seems to be that a very young child may have a reaction, but not be able to tell you and just cry or go red - as per usual at that age, so you probably don't realise it's serious until it's too late.

They gradually introduce these foods later. Maybe too late, if the idea of early exposure is accurate, but it's very much a case of "can't be too safe" when I asked them.

I've heard of the "technically illegal" thing and find it odd, is that actually true? Over here in Australia I think they just decided it was easier to make them all illegal too, with the schedule saying things like "TETRAHYDROCANNABINOLS and their alkyl homologues" as a catch-all.

Applies to other things like music too. Sometimes people are ahead of their time and most people can't digest it.

I might have misunderstood. I took it to mean that engineers would be responsible for all code they write - the same as another engineer may be liable for any bridge they build - which would mean the common "as is", "no warranty", "not fit for any purpose" cute clauses common to OSS would no longer apply as this is clearly skirting around the fact that you made a tool to do a specific thing, and harming your computer isn't the intended outcome.

You can already enforce responsibility via contract but sure, some kind of licensing board that can revoke a license so you can no longer practice as a SWE would help with pushback against client/employer pressure. In a global market though it may be difficult to present this as a positive compared to overseas resources once they get fed up with it. It would probably need either regulation, or the private equivalent - insurance companies finding a real, quantifiable risk to apply to premiums.

I think that could cause a huge shift away from contributing to or being the maintainer of open source software. It would be too risky if those standards were applied and they couldn't use the standard "as is, no warranties" disclaimers.

In my case at least, they probably accounted for it somewhere by adjusting rates elsewhere so it works out. So it's a bit risky to just change, similar to code that is known to be wrong but too hard to change since "everything works".

> you are teaching them a deeply flawed process, which is highly specific, highly limited and something which the developer would never use themselves.

That kind of lock-in can be a feature from the employer's perspective. I did actual coding for years in an environment where what I learned was not very widely applicable at all, for similar reasons. I'm now happily in recovery :) But it makes it harder to leave when you feel like you lag behind where you should be in your career.

I don't think tools like Zapier are condescending. I can and have written code to connect APIs, but Zapier made some stuff way easier, and it lets people like my wife get the same stuff done with far less effort. She has no interest in learning programming. There will be stuff the tool can't do, so then the programmers can step in.

And in my prior job, many people became BAs from a coding background specifically to get out of writing code. They can do it - they don't want to. They're happier in MS Office or similar tools.

As a programmer who had used Excel for years, seeing my accountant start typing a formula, change sheets, select some cells, go back, repeat, was a learning process. I didn't even know you could do that, and also, I hated it. But it worked very well for him.

I've more recently been exposed to a few spreadsheets that are used to calculate quotes in major insurance businesses when I was asked to create an online process instead, replicating the questions and formula.

They're things of horrifying eldritch beauty. I seem to always find at least one error, and no one I'm allowed to talk to ever really knows how they work since they're built up over years. Those dependency arrows are a life saver.

Most times in my career that I've seen people talking about visual programming, it's not about the developers - it's about lowering the bar so that (cheaper) non-developers can participate.

A Business Analyst may or may not have a coding background, but their specifications can be quite technical and logical and hopefully they understand the details. The assumption is that if we create our own Sufficiently Advanced Online Rule Engine they can just set it all up without involving the more expensive programmers.

This is discussed a bit in the first paragraph, but I just wanted to reiterate that most systems I had to deal with like this were talked about in terms of supplying business logic, rules, and control flow configuration to a pre-existing system or harness that executes that configuration. The "real" programmers work on that system, adding features, and code blocks for anything outside the specification, while the other staff setup the business logic.

It works to some degree. I think things like Zapier can be quite good for this crowd, and a lot of mailing list providers have visual workflow tools that let non-programmers do a lot. A DSL like Excel formulas would be in this group too, since it operates inside an existing application, except that it's non-visual. Some document publishing tools like Exstream (I worked with it pre-HP, so years ago) did a lot in this space too.

I did read and appreciate the whole article, I just noticed this part for a reason - I'm working on a visual question builder again right now for a client who wants to edit their own customer application form on their custom coded website, instead of involving costly programmers. It always ended poorly in the past at my previous company, but maybe it'll be different this time.

Mathematically it would be simple, but I don't think it's as simple as just splitting based on time. They'd probably argue the song or movie clip added more value e.g. if I used a famous song in my 10 second introduction clip, that's a major branding move, is that still only worth 1/60 of the revenue from my 10 minute video? Or would I have many fewer viewers with weaker branding week on week?

There is also the right of the creator to have their work not used in ways they don't approve of. This a commonly heard about when politicians play songs at rallies. It's not just about the dollars.

They tried the safe harbour argument against Viacom. It didn't go that smoothly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....

That whole debacle spawned Content ID and yes, now they're happily in bed together. They probably prefer it like that, while we'd prefer safe harbour actually works as intended.

I think semi-persistent internet is not such a big deal for a lot of providers. For Opal here in Sydney AU it uses a connection for some features. Cards can be anonymous or assigned to an account, the account shows all your trips online, so there's some required connectivity for that. The cards have a smart chip, but credit cards or phones can now also just be tapped directly, so it needs to match up when you tap off and determine where you started and how much to charge. This includes buses, which use 3G IIRC, and may drop offline sometimes.

To support the above, they did away with multi-trip tickets like you describe. It instead tracks and discounts once you hit a weekly limit (yes, you have to give up your privacy for this with an account or use your credit card directly). Not great for intermittent travel.

For systems like this the question is: if the internet is down and a few people get a free trip, does it really matter? You don't always need 100% accuracy if it makes everything else simpler, like removing paper tickets, printers, litter, etc.

I think the modern ones are all fine for the basic stuff like that.

For my work, it was the highly detailed low level stuff. Pre-flight checks/profiles, content tree (object level, including text fragment) browsing, flattening, converting, transforming versions, and so on. It was indispensable for some of those operations, working in a printing business where clients would sometimes send in their own problematic PDFs which we'd need to adjust or inspect to find the error.

(Favourite one: a font was embedded in a PDF that mapped a character using // in its name, which was "fine" on PDF, but on the printer's RIP was converted to postscript for one step, and // in postscript precedes an immediately evaluated name so it stopped parsing and tried to look for it and bombed out)

Yeah this was Woolies too, but late 90s.

And I also still do the casual facing up. It's kind of satisfying, but also my wife is a bit short so there are times when someone her height can't see any stock left and I've had to dig for it so I guess it's nice to be helpful and bring it forward so people can at least see it's there.

Let's just say I have the typical mindset of someone on this site and so for larger buys I add ingredients into Excel per recipe/need then rearrange into sections (Meat, Fridge, etc) roughly in order of store sections, 2 column layout, print. Only takes a few minutes and saves more time than that, but it is helpful being both the shopper and list writer like you say.

I'm very quick since I'm on a mission. I don't like the process of browsing but enjoy completing lists (I blame video games), there's a strange enjoyment folding that paper to hide the completed sections. When we go together my wife just wanders off knowing she needs 2 things for work snacks or for the dogs or something and by the time I've found her, I finished the entire shop and she's barely carrying 7 items since she didn't need a basket for just 2 things. Totally different mindset, she would say I worry too much, I would say I like certainty where I can have it.

In Australia they called it "facing up" (e: seems there's a wiki article calling it "facing" and maybe my boss just Aussied it a bit) and it was something I had to do every night while/after packing the stock. It also helped find stuff that people put back in the wrong place, or had expired (you're meant to pack back to front but people get lazy and then those fish fingers have been there for months).

It's a large part of why I always shop at the same supermarket despite having closer options now. I feel like it takes twice as long with even minor layout differences. Then they go and move things anyway.

My first order of business upon entering an Ikea is finding the map, checking the shortcuts, and going straight to where I need to go. Always feels a little naughty with how they position the flappy doors between areas, like I'm walking through a staff-only entrance, and I guess that's intentional.

I've used it. I've never had a job using it. Most people haven't.

I think that mostly works (as an aside, last time I looked at this in Windows, we couldn't do something like sudo reliably because there was no secure way to provide the password without user interaction - it seems they've just released sudo for Windows in Feb this year). The OS can support this like how a mobile OS limits the capabilities of apps, which is more secure from a final standpoint.

But I was also thinking of the development and refactoring side of things. Guarantees and assurances. Sometimes I know the generic code I wrote is 'OK' but the C# compiler says no - you're not being specific enough, I can't cast that - so I have to do better. A while ago I was trying to track down programs that loaded data from certain network shares, and it was a bit rough because these calls were all very deep, and very occasional. Traces (or blocks) of system calls only work when the code fires, but my task was to find and replace them all, so we could delete the share (for various reasons string searches only got part of the way). If 'network access' was tagged at a high level, I could follow the trail to see what we actually access and report on that. We had a similar issue identifying jobs that called out to external APIs. We left a log running for a while to catch some, but some only run a few times a year and we didn't have that long. Adding a firewall exception later could take days and these jobs have turnaround times.

I don't know if this is at all feasible. It's just some thoughts I had back then.

I've been waiting for functional programming to have its day for more than 20 years. It just seems fundamentally at odds with how most people want to work.

You can make individual functions pure in any language, but do many languages enforce this at a core level? Or we have to behave ourselves and hope nothing we call is changed by another programmer later?

I had the same thought years ago, I think some people have looked into it a little, but nothing popular yet.

Imagine if you could look at a function, and know, undeniably - this, and anything it can call, absolutely cannot alter the file system directly or make a network call or spawn a process. Maybe instead of just types, you need to supply capabilities (much like interfaces on classes). Sounds like it could be a real pain. Would make auditing easier though.

I agree with this. Easy to change often means good tests too.

I worked in Perl. Yes it has a reputation for being hard to read, but that was not the problem. Our scripting was pretty basic and easy to read. It's the loose typing, the runtime evals, the lack of strict function parameters, no real IDE, “Only perl can parse Perl” - the fact you can load a module from a network share at runtime, import it, and call a function, based on a certain run flag - and so on. Refactoring was always a mine field and there was a lot I wanted to do in my old job but could not justify it due to the risk.

An IDE can help a lot. Coming from Perl, everything you said was true. I wanted everything in one file as much as possible, and breaking tasks off into functions just meant I had to jump around to try and rebuild the flow in my head. I spent so much time inside the debugger since reading the code would only go so far.

Now I work in C#, we have a lot of classes with a few functions, a lot of helper functions. Doesn't matter since it's so easy to use the tooling to build a mental picture - let alone refactor it in an instant if that variable name feels a bit off, or we think a function is not used (such things were always a risky exercise in Perl).

We refactored one insurance based project to use generic base classes extensively since all insurance shares some attributes and features - this really helped cut down complexity of changes and overall just reduced code on the screen to sift through. I had a lot of fun doing this, I'm a weirdo who almost likes deleting code more than writing it. Once you hit the lowest level it is a little less intuitive due to being generic but at the higher levels we mostly work at, it's simpler, and rolling out a new product we get a lot of stuff for free. They got a long way copy-pasting the product logic (4 or 5 product lines) but at this point it made sense to revisit, and I sneak a bit more in each time I have a change to do.

> fluidly produce all of the words as I say them

It's been a few days but I was thinking about this, and really - are we sure?

Deja vu exists, and as I understand is a bit of a processing issue where something we only just did seems to have happened a little while ago. As I understand it, our brain is in the habit of rewriting timelines a bit to have things make sense, and this could be another case of that.

It really was eye opening how much difference a small 10mg dose made, and the structures of the modern world made a whole lot more sense with the knowledge that maybe a lot of people are just like this, all the time. I had experienced focus before but it was almost always what people call "hyperfocus" which is a more extreme locking out of the world. I kept notes for my appointment in 3 months since I just noticed so many little things I'd be sure to forget and it'll be fun to review those.

Right or wrong, people talking their way around around keywords during the pandemic, when not even discussing the pandemic, was weird. They were scared of the YouTube algorithm falsely identifying them and harming their livelihood so would not even say things like "virus" in a video game or movie review.

Then you have the whole trend on various platforms with terms like "unalive" as a replacement for kill/suicide, or censoring words like "r*pe" or (even worse to me) "grape". Some of this is to dodge the algorithms too, but I've seen it said it's to also avoid triggers - which seems to defeat the purpose, it makes it hard to filter and eventually people learn and they become triggers anyway.

So I do see a definite chilling effect on discourse based on community standards and algorithms, even if it's not Government lead. There are two subs for my country on Reddit I check occasionally, one is heavily moderated and very predictable in how a comment will be received, while I feel the other has a more honest reflection of the widespread population. I don't particularly like the racists that share their thoughts, but on the balance of things I'm not sure it's best to lock them out completely. Twenty years ago the internet was less sanitised, but it also felt less hostile on a personal level, and more honest overall. Talking to discuss, not to score points.

It's not 100% for me but just the vast majority. I do visualise things that are almost purely spacial like geometry or recalling how to do an exercise. Though from what I've read, even this is news to some people who express surprise that "mind's eye" is a little more literal than they assumed. I'm pretty good at remembering facts and trivia but not so much actual life experiences, not sure if that's related.

That's interesting. I read your comment in my head while counting and seemed able to keep up, but something more complex might be hard, such as reading out loud.

On another tangent, I've been trying Ritalin after speaking to a doctor. The first thing I noticed when I took it was that it became very difficult to hold multiple trains of thought at the same time. My typical routine (coping mechanism) was to work and have YouTube playing and a little attention on each, because this stopped me getting bored. But it wasn't long before I realised I simply could not hear the videos. It was a strange feeling but nice. A little similar to what you describe in how abilities vary.

I feel like my grasp of language allows some very complex thoughts, but I often wonder if it is limiting. I seem nearly unable to think without forming phrases in my head, and even if I anticipate the conclusion I feel the need to go through the whole sentence. I know there are people with all their senses intact without any internal monologue, but mine is very much in charge. Rigorous exercise or flow state seems able to quiet it for a bit.

> The fact that she associates a sensation of contraction in the forehead as thinking is very interesting.

Makes sense to me. A furrowed brow is a common trope of thinking hard about something, it'd make sense if the same happens on a smaller barely perceptible scale for other thoughts (supposedly this happens to our vocal chords when subvocalising in our heads). Something about focusing the senses when processing thoughts I would guess.