myth2018

Those are interesting insights, thanks for the extensive reply

I had never heard about them. Will do some research right away, thanks

Thanks. I found experiments like this [0] helpful to visualize reflections and standing waves, but, like a sibling comment said, although these are similar phenomena and show what happens with the energy inside the wire, I couldn't see why these effects manifested at the electrical level.

[0] - https://youtu.be/1PsGZq5sLrw

Thank you very much for sharing this. I've been trying to form a mental model of why reflection in transmission lines is a thing and never found a theoretical foundation that satisfied me. I've read a number of publications that just state that as fact, without further explanation. I'll spend some time sketching my own graphs and formulas to fully absorb the fine article.

PS: he discusses the impossibility of moving signals faster than light. I'm in fact interested in moving them way slower than they do, since that could make it possible to build very short antennas. I'm surely not the first to think of this. Maybe that's not even possible and that theoretical model could help to demonstrate why (even though it applies to transmission lines while I'm concerned about antennas).

I agree, and it's sad that, despite all those pitfalls, some companies and CEOs will keep pushing the idea that human programmers can be replaced by AI.

But well I guess there's a bright side to see here: those LLMs applied to software development might become the new Genexus and there are gonna be plenty of open positions for humans to rewrite entire systems in a not so far future.

> I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns

That general mindset was a major source of pain for me. I used to say I had founded a startup just to get along with the other entrepreneurs, but in fact I couldn't care less about fast growth, product-market fit and other common concerns in the field -- heck, "consulting" was in my list of services and some of my peers couldn't even wrap their minds around that concept -- and the ones who did, frowned upon it. They just kept asking about product, competitive edges and so on, while all I cared about was joining a growing market served until then by a handful of small but profitable companies in my country.

Same in Brazil. And users love them.

Indeed. CTA buttons and everything. Instead of simple, readable text-based menus, icons everywhere because they are "more intuitive". Navigation aids because, otherwise, "users get lost". Useless animated pictures together with apologetic error messages whenever the system (frequently) crashes. Everything facilitated by tools like Figma, enabling designers to be creative by pointing and clicking and leaving the multiple implementation and maintenance details as an exercise to developers who have now to "specialize" on front-end. What a hell. Yesterday I had to use a government web app and got lost. They even bothered to create some video tutorials but unfortunately the software went recently through a redesign to "improve UX" and now the icons don't match the ones in the tutorial anymore. The amount of damage they create with their cutesy interfaces and their condescending attitude is astonishing.

Theoretically, I agree. UX shouldn't be about making systems look good. In practice, though, this appears to be the main concern (maybe because it's the easiest one to grasp?), leaving all the other ones subordinated to it. Hence I would blame the "excess" of UX design.

> you're essentially telling users: "We know better than you." That arrogance doesn't go unnoticed. Respect your users' autonomy

IMHO, that assessment and corresponding answer applies perfectly not only to Momentum scrolling but also to most of the current trends in UX design. I wonder how we got into this worship of aesthetics to the detriment of everything else.

It is. That doesn't disallow mesh networks, but Gemini would be off-limits due to TLS. Gopher would be OK.

> Even people who know about the solution might find it drops out of their brain in a moment of panic.

I agree. During a period of huge storms in my region I kept mentally preparing for getting caught in a flood: engage first gear, press the gas and go, slow and steady.

Then my fears materialized and as soon as the flood started pushing my car, I pressed the clutch and engaged the second.

Thankfully I realized it fast enough, kept pressing the gas and engaged back the 1st, so my mental training may have helped, but that was a close call.

> The only way to get an honest electronic vote is by giving realtime visibility on who voted what and where publicly.

The secrecy on individual votes has a good reason to exist. Votes are already bought based on per-section public results, imagine what would happen if individual votes were public.

Moreover, people under any sort of threat (communities dominated by drug dealers, employees of a dishonest, politically engaged business owner) would be in big trouble.

Also worth noting that Twitter's terms of use themselves also prohibit the very same sort of content that motivated the Supreme Court order.

Mine too. I've worked for a shop adopting this practice some time ago. A very common pattern was to declare a relatively large Python dictionary with function calls and list comprehensions nested deep in the dict [sub]properties. Nice to glance, terrible to debug and reason about.

> and there were multiple order of magnitude less options to choose from

So true. I remember downloading a bunch of stuff to do some Perl development on Windows 98. About 3MB of files IIRC that took forever to download on my dialup connection. Yet, it was so much easier to focus, basically because there weren't many other options and the .chm files that accompanied the interpreter could keep me busy for hours during the week.

Sometimes I try to reproduce that environment by limiting my own options in terms of technologies and learning resources. Probably not the most efficient way to get stuff done, but I find it more sustainable long-term.

Indeed, and this seems to be pervasive in UI design as a whole. Until not long ago, designers created palletes of styles and components to be used by programmers. Now they draw entire screens and deliver the drawings to the programmers. This puts too much decision power in the hands of a group that don't have a clear view of the requirements and development costs -- and I have serious doubts about their understanding of "user experience" as well. Like you said, it feels that their artistic conceptions trumps anything else

Those are reasonable arguments, which I've heard previously indeed. But, truth be told, although the pandemic had an impact, all this mess started to become visible at least a couple of years before it — maybe even earlier.

I visit Germany more or less regularly. The deterioration in the overall experience with DB is very noticeable. Last time I was unfortunate enough to take an ICE, they started an informal poll with the passengers to decide whether to cancel a stop in Frankfurt. I was astonished. They eventually decided not to cancel it, seemingly after a lot of time deliberating or waiting for something, but most of us lost our connections thanks to the resulting delay. It was 4am +/-.

I wonder what's going on over there. I understand that there are complex organizational issues involved, but, besides this long-term rotting, there seems to be some more recent, abrupt diseases affecting them too.

> particularly if your userbase often has literally decades worth of muscle memory

My experience from informally inquiries shows that users value fast TUIs regardless of the experience they amounted. Even the young mainframe and (rarer) Clipper users I talk to report preferring these systems over newer, web-based ones.

> I would like to see the original quote from the judge here. I doubt the original talked about 'Black people' the same way that (translated) phrase would be understood by an American audience.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "the way that phrase would be understood by an american audience". In Brazil, there's some correlation between social strata and skin color. This is a consequence of slavery and the way the country dealt with its end, pushing former slaves to marginalization. And I believe the US went through similar developments, no?

Anyway, the fact is that, currently, due to the lack of objectivity of the current law and to the racism ingrained on society, statistically, judges do adopt more "relaxed" standards when judging white and rich people, and there are studies showing that

Thanks for the suggestion.

And do you know where I could read about the underlying theory? I'd like to implement the most I could from scratch, for learning purposes.

Btw: I'm looking for efficient ways to represent numbers of arbitrary precision, and performing mathematical operations on the them. It's for a toy financial calculator I'm writing in my spare time. My knowledge is really lacking in this field and I'm not even sure about what I should be asking/searching for. Could someone suggest me some sources? Preferably online, but books would also be very welcome.

First time I hear about that book. Interesting. I've reflected already about such "Mr Nice guys". This guy in particular, who I have in mind now, I could never determine whether he was being manipulative or was simply extremely incompetent. Either way, I regarded him as very dangerous: his actions (or lack thereof) constantly disrupted something and the slightest attempt to call him out resulted in multiple people jumping to his defense.

Thank you. These times labeled with the timezone name only are very inconvenient

AFAIK, astronomers use Julian DATES. It's related but not the same as the Julian calendar.

> with his own money

Could someone confirm that? SpaceX raised money last year [0], however I couldn't find how much of this money (if any) went to the Starship program.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/02/spacex-raising-750-million-a...

> My father called me in exasperation last night after trying and failing to book a plane ticket

I've been going through really infuriating experiences with airlines' software too. Web apps, totems for luggage dispatching, everything. I know it's hard to pinpoint a single cause, but I believe that the current trend of overemphasizing aesthetics plays a major role on the current deplorable state of affairs: applications get too hard to design and build and at the end of the day there's simply not enough time to properly test things and fix its bugs.

Hi, but I meant allegory indeed.

According to Wiktionary:

- (rhetoric) A narrative in which a character, place, or event is used to deliver a broader message about real-world issues and occurrences.

- A picture, book, or other form of communication using such representation.

- A symbolic representation which can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, usually a moral or political one.

He might have been triggered by my use of "average". I realize it now that it may not have been adequate, sorry for that, English is not my first language.

That's an interesting insight. I didn't notice that Charlie's trajectory also works as an allegory for the regular mental decline of the average person