myth2018

Did you read the book? (Spoiler Alert) Basically the only thing remaining with Charlie after his regression was the memory of his friend Algernon. A "mere" laboratory rat, like himself. That's a message about what things really matter in the long run.

On the other hand, Esperanto is one of the languages featured by Radio China International (https://esperanto.cri.cn), and there's also an official support for the El Cxinia Popolo magazine, and maybe others I'm not aware of. I'm not sure one can generalize 1) the antagonism between the communist government and Esperanto and 2) the lack of skills of the Chinese Esperanto speakers.

> Esperanto is Modern and Scientific and Regular

I don't know. There are irregularities indeed, but they are so few that it's easy to simply memorize them.

> Really? Do you have any evidence for this?

Unfortunately I have no URL to share here. This has been discussed a few times in some of the meetings I attended in the local Esperanto club -- and it makes sense, given the language's propedeutic properties. The geopolitical context has probably played a role (even here, in Brazil, part of our youth refused to learn English for some decades after the US sponsored a coup and a dictatorship in the country, and Esperanto was presented as an alternative pursued by a few of us).

Also, the Chinese government supports Esperanto. There's esperanto.cri.cn and maybe others, although I'm not informed about the nature of the contracts involved.

I like to think that Esperanto is easier, not necessarily easy. It definitely helps if you know e.g. a romance language, but it still is way more accessible than any other "regular" language (and, even for a romance language speaker, it requires effort to learn properly).

In China, for example, Esperanto was used to introduce western languages.

I can relate. I thought it was due distractions, but I usually get more distracted at the phone than I do at the computer and, yet, I get worse results out of my readings at the latter. An e-paper based ebook reader didn't improve the situation either.

There's also Cobol on Wheelchair[0], although they didn't follow the good name abbreviation practice.

[0] https://github.com/azac/cobol-on-wheelchair

A 96-sheet notebook + a Pentel needle-point pen. I've been feeling some strong headaches lately and the doctor's requested me to stay away from screens as much as possible. I've been using the notebook and this cheap yet nice pen to write down ideas and whatever. It's been a month now and the changes in terms of creativity and mental clarity are quite noticeable.

> aesthetics/artistic sense of UX designers is absoutely trumping usability in very many modern applications

Indeed. And I get totally stupefied by how much freedom and authority they are given in relation to the other people supposed to provide inputs for the project.

My stock broker did that. They had a web app that didn't just work -- it was acknowledged as very good. Fully customizable, you could open many sub-windows and monitor an arbitrary number of quotes depending on your strategy. The screen could turn into a mess, but it was your mess, and that's ok as long as it made sense to you, the user. I used their web app for more than a decade.

Last year they replaced it by something they have the guts to call "the enhanced experience". That fuming pile of sh*t enforces a certain geometry for the screen that makes it absolutely clear that the kids who designed that garbage never traded stocks in their lives.

But what scares me most is: what the hell the managers who approved that crap had in their minds?

The spectrum is a limited resource. Rate limits restrict the amount of spectrum one occupies, leaving more of it for use by other operators.

There are other restrictions like this. For instance, in my country, only clubs are allowed to transmit analog TV continously. Individuals can only make short transmissions.

Some people argue that increasing the bandwidth would incentivize digital modes. I can understand the point, but I would rather experiment with low-bandwidth modes than to take larger portions of the spectrum with faster, potentially wasteful modes.

> This is how internet services should look like.

Yes, definitely.

I've called UX designers out a couple times on the aesthetical complexity of their designs: if you award GOV.UK's quality a prize [0], why don't you mimic them instead of Google?

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/govuk-wins-design-of-the-...

Kind of the same happened to me. When the company began to go south, they started to delay payments. And when they finally ran out of money, we've been let go but the last, quite substantial payments were not honored and they simply ignored our messages. Luckily things worked out eventually, but I was already getting prepared for not getting paid.

> that's what should be illegal: to give discounts based on whether you disclose your PII or not

That would definitely help, but I think it wouldn't be enough. Drugstores would promptly come up with some app-related trick, like "just scan this QR-code to redeem your discount", and personal info would be acquired indirectly.

Legislators started to elaborate a bill recently, addressing the case of drugstores in particular, but I suspect they will end up delivering something full of breaches, just like they did in the State of Sao Paulo.

Moreover, drugstores are on the spot currently, but there are plenty of companies doing exactly the same nowadays.

> in the Brazilians drugstores case, it's absurd, it's like, a $400 drug sold for $300

Indeed. And I've seen even more scandalous differences already. Psychiatric drugs are the champions, in my experience.

> that's what should be illegal: to give discounts based on whether you disclose your PII or not

That would definitely help, but I think it wouldn't be enough. Drugstores would promptly come up with some app-related trick, like "just scan this QR-code to redeem your discount", and personal-info would be acquired indirectly.

They started to elaborate a bill recently, addressing the case of drugstores in particular, but I suspect they will eventually deliver something full of breaches, just like they did in the State of Sao Paulo.

Moreover, drugstores are on the spot currently, but there are plenty of companies doing exact the same nowadays.

>

Brazilian LGPD also mandates companies to provide channels for users to request their data to be deleted. Theoretically, one can ask their data to be deleted right after they received a discount. But I dont't know. I guess they would do everything they are entitled to in the interim, and by the time your data removal request is fulfilled, the damage is already done.

Not sure it'd be enough. In one Brazilian s State, it became mandatory for drugstores to get such consent. For some time, they presented a piece of paper and told people they needed that paper signed so that a juicy discount could be given. People didn't think twice.

After some time the drugstores realized that the government had no resources nor interest to enforce such law and now they simply don't comply any longer.

I'm afraid this is the sort of decision which average people is not really well-equipped to make by themselves. Companies should be forbidden to collect and sell certain sorts of data, period.

> For another, the ability to control how a checkbox animates when you check it is of course a valid reason to add another 50 packages and 3 layers of frameworks to their product

To be fair, this sort of complexity usually results from "UX" requirements. Just think about what it takes to materialize those damn figma designs. Google's Material Design is not a simple "skin".

When it comes to business applications (forms, reports, requirements strongly influenced by end-users and evolving in ways hard to predict), my most successful experiences consisted of multi-page apps + vanilla js for validation.

My last project in this field failed though. The client was infected by the figma virus and I failed to compatibilize this methodology with the UI fluff they so fiercely demanded.

I've worked on a team where that view was adopted, and really tried to cope. I don't miss that, at all.

After reading a round of feedback, I frequently had to make a pause, 30 minutes minimum. I tried to control my will to respond at the same tone, not always managing to hold the impulse. There was a lot of rumination and resentment too, not only on my part, but on the rest of the team's. Such a huge waste of mental energy.

Pretending that people is supposed to behave like a robot, dismissing their emotions etc, IMO is a mistake and, sometimes, an excuse used by people who feel good treating others badly.

Interesting indeed. There was an Israeli pilot who managed to land an F-15 with a single wing [0]. That was considered impossible by then.

I couldn't find a link, but I think that, more recently, they were trying to reproduce the feat using the possibilities offered by automation. That would be a desirable feature in military aircraft indeed. However, I'm not sure whether that would be physically possible in airliners. The lift provided by the fuselage is too little.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Negev_mid-air_collision

> wing cut off by passing UFO' type incidents

Just a side note: the loss of a wing is one the "exceptions" that go deliberately "unhandled". Not even sensors and alerts are implemented -- after all, it's such an unlikely event, unrecoverable from, and they would simply add weight and complexity just to let the crew know the plane is doomed.

This sadly happened, though, with flight Gol 1907 in 2006. The wing was cut off by a crash with another plane in-flight. You can hear in the voice recorder the warnings about the plane falling off the safety envelope (and no mention to the lost wing ofc), and it's really sad how lost the crew gets during the seconds between the loss of the wing and the airplane destruction.

> A bespoke wireless sensor monitoring and communications system, integrated into an old heating/cooling system

Ofc I'm just speculating here, but based on the article's description I suspect this whole wireless integration could be stripped. Maybe in the 80s they saw the need for a central computer running all the logic, but I suspect that nowadays this computer could be replaced with programmable controllers, one at each building. Industrial controllers are very reliable and there are available professionals for support.

> are good at different things

Exactly. What are the available debugging tools, and what are their pros and cons? That's a much more fruitful question.

Today I had to investigate a bug in a C program. With a conditional breakpoint in gdb I could spot the problem and devise a solution in a matter of minutes.

When I'm debugging SQL (which happens frequently), that depends. If the query is light, I often use a "Prolog-like" approach: make the expression more general until I find the clauses responsible for the bug. On the other hand, if the query is too heavy, I consider spending some time reading the expression very carefully to see if I can find the issue without incurring in a costly execution.

It all boils down to what sorts of problems you have, and which of the available solutions will be more appropriate.

They are similar, but I stick to :wq. I fear mixing up :x with :X. Would probably catch the mistake when being asked to type the encryption key, but anyway

Currently I'm writing mostly C and C++ and I find it very useful to write prototypes, either in the target language or in Python, to experiment with ways to modularize the code and how the modules will communicate.

I only disagree with throwing the code away. On the contrary, sometimes I even use the last prototype as a sort of "executable documentation".

That strategy indeed saves me a bunch of time. However, at least in my experience, I didn't have success applying that to modern front-end dev: the complexity is frequently so high and the dead-ends are so numerous that I prefer to buckle-in for the rough ride and proceed to the code right away.

I believe that such additional capacity will also be very well received by the ongoing hybrid airplane projects.

> Somehow for me using a calculator like that, rather than having to use screen space, or a phone …. Makes my workflow better.

Indeed. I can't explain why, but I feel the same. I wonder about the possible reasons. The tactile response? The focus (the device has a sole purpose)?

Indeed. It made me remember of one of my first programming projects: a teacher of mine had written a spaceship game for Netscape and I ported it to IE's UI model. There was no standardized DOM and, IIRC, forcing non-compatibility was one of the pillars of Microsoft's strategy.

Coincidentally, yesterday I finished reading Zawinski's interview in Coders At Work, from Peter Seibel. Highly recommended!

I still use an HP-12C financial calculator, although somewhat sporadically now. It used to be an extremely useful companion when I worked with loan processing systems some years ago.

> how can the conductor conduct when one of the ends is just hanging in the air? AC magic I suppose

I struggled with these matters too. I wouldn't call it "AC magic", but "RF magic".

Notice that you need a different mental model to understand those circuits. In DC and low-freq AC, it's enough to think that voltages and currents manifest themselves instantaneously in a conductor. But that is a (useful) simplification. Roughly speaking, the energy supplied by the power source takes time to propagate over the wire [0].

Having that in mind, take a look at the animated gif in this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole_antenna. I believe it's gonna make more sense now.

This mental model also helps to understand why a magnetic loop isn't simply a piece of short-circuited wire -- for a DC or low freq AC circuit, it is indeed a short-circuit; for an RF circuit, it is not. [1]

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

[1] this mental model is not enough to fully understand any antenna. Many designs also depend on other phenomena, like the electromagnetic interactions between its components, and interactions with its surroundings. But I think that, equipped with this mental model, you'll be able to research further in case you feel interested.

> That's pretty much giving it (majority control) up for free, and the rest for very cheap.

It appears that Bombardier took some other financial aspects in consideration before they made that decision. I have no further knowledge, and that would be more than I'm willing to research for this discussion. Besides, this is tangential to the Embraer x Bombardier debate.

> but the E2 and the C-Series aren't really in the same segment

Indeed, but there's some overlap between the largest E2 and the smallest C-Series, while the E2 is much cheaper.