pacoWebConsult

I graduated in 2018 from a university where writing exams by hand was standard practice. We weren't punished if syntax wasn't correct character-by-character, only if the ideas we were attempting to convey in the message were fundamentally incorrect.

I have incredibly terrible handwriting and recall of specific syntax was difficult, but I wasn't punished terribly for either of those faults.

Already in 2018, almost everyone was cheating on typed assignments, "helping" each other with homeworks, and a significant portion of kids were abusing stimulants to get by. Exams were typically 70-80% of your grade. Now, when I speak with current students at that university and as I observed first-hand in 2020, when they went remote and generally relaxed standards and processes, how the quality of the instruction and the quality of the resulting "educated" students has fallen off the face of a cliff.

I'd be furious if I were paying tens of thousands of dollars to receive a university-level education in software engineering in 2025 and I had no educator willing to put their foot down and stop myself and my peers from faking the fact that we know anything indicating that we deserve the degree. What's a degree worth when nobody is willing to do the work required and lay down the tough love necessary to actually educate you?

From a purely utilitarian perspective, funding research like this is not an effective use of dollars at the margin. How many people could we save if an equivalent amount was put into reducing obesity, smoking, and drinking? How many people could we save if we stopped spending money we don't have to do things that the government isn't competent at allocating anyways?

That's not to say the research itself is not impressive nor important, but think critically about the fact that this money doesn't exist in a vacuum.

It's been about 100 years of congress abdicating their responsibility and delegating rule-making to agencies under the control of the executive, as well as the federal government coalescing power through the commerce clause and various other means. The US Government was never designed to be this top-heavy, and certainly not designed to allow one branch this much control. Natural consequences of a congress asleep at the wheel. More focused on quick public opinion wins through ham-fisted rules without having to actually write and maintain legislation than reducing the influence and power of the federal government and ceding power back to the states as designed.

It's a very complex system. Implementations cost hospital systems on the order of tens of millions of dollars. They have a near monopoly in the market. 2023 revenue was almost $5B [1]

1: https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-01-epic-dystopia/

It's pretty baseless to claim that modern dotnet is inherently shitty. They've made tremendous strides in the dotnet core era.

F# making you unemployable is debateable, but I don't see what makes F# any less employable than most other FP languages. They have some niche applications that make it useful rarely, but when they're useful its a terrific tool for the job. F#'s ability to interop with the rest of the dotnet ecosystem positions it better than most functional languages for business usecases.

And once a team reaches that point, less citizens will want to work on a team where they're the outsider anyways.

Case in point for why socialized medicine leads to government overreach in many other facets of our lives.

Milton Friedman had a great point during this talk [1], same argument from 50 years ago.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWIrbS0dXRM

At the very least, GitHub Copilot will have an easier time with an SDK loaded into context than an API documented only on the web. If the customers are using typescript then they'll have some red squiggles that at least some of these people will bother to read prior to asking for help. The uninformed consumer of OPs API will probably be more comfortable to work with an SDK instead of writing their own clients.

The way I see it is that OP can either complain about customers being annoying, which will happen whether or not OP does anything about his problem, or OP could proactively produce something to make their product better for the demographic they're targeting. At this point it's pretty clear that the users would rather be helped than help themselves, so meeting them where they're at is going to be more productive than trying to educate them on why they suck at both coding and asking for help (or free work).

Maintaining an OpenAPI spec when you make changes to your API and regenerating the client SDKs through CI is really not a ton of extra work. A template to show a dead simple usage of your API can pay dividends as it lowers the barrier to a customer adopting your product over a competitor's.

Seems to me like you have an opportunity to develop a couple SDKs in your customers' favorite languages (probably python and typescript) and a simple "Get Started" template that could alleviate a lot of these requests. Show them the base case, let them figure out how to work with your api via an SDK instead of directly with an API and let the advanced users build their own SDKs in whatever language they prefer. Since its, as OP claims, a simple HTTP API, the SDK could be generated with OpenAPI client generation tools.

That's because TSA doesn't do the security at SFO [1] SF has had issues with drug trafficking through the airport due to this [2].

[1]: https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/answering-holiday-trav... [2]: https://www.sfgate.com/cannabis/article/sfo-armed-robbery-un...

The impact doesn't appear to be limited to just the home console.

The one in Asheville, NC? I'm glad it was a flat fee because some of those oldest pinball machines they have are just plain terrible game design. Very unforgiving if you make the slightest error, the ball is out of play.

Really cool place and I'm glad they are keeping those artifacts running.

Not to mention it was the fact that we are giving children loans that are risk-free to the lender due to the government's guarantee is what resulted in the costs skyrocketing to begin with. Colleges were always going to use that consistent free cash flow from indentured young people to enrich themselves.

A lot of this would solve itself if people in student loan debt could discharge it through bankruptcy. Colleges that can't produce degrees where students can pay their loans off would close and many people wouldn't be able to get student loans, and I argue that would be a good thing.

Any update on a local-first SDK for Tidbyt? Looked recently but it didn't look like there was any news on that front. I want to build an integration with a game running on a PC and communicate locally with my Tidbyt to send updated images as things happen.

Agree there's definitely some quirks with building and making things not via work orders. Even for queuing up a couple of copper greaves at a metalworker's shop (because my king is obsessed with demanding their creation and banning their export), I opt for work orders rather than going through and selecting armor -> copper -> greaves twice.

Twitter is used by sex workers all the time for pornographic images. What specifically about them violates the rules? Is it the fact that the person did not intend on those images being released? Do they have a claim if those images were no longer their property given the terms of service of the repair shop where the laptop was abandoned?

Frankly, the only valid use of powerpoint animations these days is to implement an entirely new application [1].

[1]: http://tomwildenhain.com/PowerPointTM/Paper.pdf

If you spend any time reading their retail forums [1], you'll see almost everyone lambasting Amazon constantly. Either disgruntled sellers who broke the rules and got terminated, or normal, hardworking mom-and-pop stores that were all but forced to sell on Amazon and consistently lose money due to amazon's ever-changing policies, poor support, and catering to large retailers. Large retailers get a direct line and quality support, while most sellers on Amazon get treated like crap.

[1]: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/

A lot of Runescape resource to XP / hours calculators. What they really need to do is replace VBA with a proper programming interface. Rubberduck VBA [1] Adds some essential features into the VBA IDE but they really just need to add C# support directly.

[1]: https://rubberduckvba.com/

I've watched Armageddon. All you need is a nuke and Bruce Willis.

Lighthouse [1][2] Accessibility audit/ scores can be a good tool to check A11Y issues automatically, and it is fairly easy to integrate into your CI/CD Pipelines to get the report automatically to check for issues/ regression.

The web accessibility world is complex enough that simulating different methods of access like using screen readers or different font-sizes and doing manual tests for compliance is not particularly feasible if you want to make your content accessible to all.

[1] https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse [2] https://web.dev/accessibility-scoring/

Definitely the gist of it. You can also make .NET framework custom actions to put into your workflow. I dabbled in it for several projects and although its fairly powerful. Working in a GUI workflow designer is cumbersome for anything even moderately complex, and they lock you into their ecosystem of products for DB access from your workflow, OCR/Document processing, handing off tasks to humans, and just overall restrict your capabilities unless you pay them huge licensing fees.

It really seems to be an enterprise (and large-scale professional services) focused tool. It was difficult to get support as a small consulting agency working for a small client.

For the most part, the developer community is very insular and lacks a lot of technical skill. Its primarily Indian and latin american developers using RPA to get into the field. It was frustrating at times needing help on a platform-specific issue and being directed by the same social engagement-focused "experts" to watch their own "tutorial" videos when it didn't answer the question I was posing, and they had nothing to offer besides their video. When I did help answer people's questions in the forums, I was hounded with unrelated questions in my direct messages because I appeared competent. Its very much a "here's my problem please fix" kind of community, where the goal is to solve their immediate issue instead of learn how to do it themselves.

I'm a little jaded to the field of RPA after my experiences. UiPath has some novel solutions to targeting GUI elements using a selector language and introspecting the structure of the GUI itself, but the lock-in and licensing costs really make it inaccessible to most small-medium sized businesses, the performance is really poor, and the development effort of making a resilient solution is pretty high.

I think if I were to get back into it, I would look at workflow languages without a visual workflow designer instead, and avoid GUI interaction in the process at all costs.

Firstly, you're being underpaid and living in a high COL area. Find a new position either remote or with correct market valuation for your level in NY if you don't want to move.

Secondly, you can pretty much follow the typical line of advice when it comes to personal finance. Build an emergency fund, pay off highest rates of debt first, contribute the max to your 401k/roth ira/hsa, invest the rest.

Don't get me wrong, plenty of griftcoin junk tech exists, but Ethereum is the most capable platform and moving away from Proof Of Work is a significant step.

Because the international olympic committee is quite possibly the most corrupt sporting organization on the planet, which is saying something when FIFA exists.

Automapper solves this. Composable projections to your DTOs/ endpoint return types. You can do some very powerful things with it. For example, in a past project I encrypted/unencrypted a property containing a secure message by defining a function to do so and setting up Automapper to automatically apply the function when mapping to/from the DTO that is sent/received by the API.

Current resident of NC so I was curious. Looks like we have several, but I don't see any for KS or KY at first glance [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...

Anecdotally, After my one and only use of Psilocybin where I cried for about 5 hours straight, I did not feel the desire to do it again.

I need to reboot my Vizio TV weekly through a hidden system menu to fix audio desync issues. Simply power cycling from the remote does not work, as far as I can tell that's a sleep mode. Absolutely terrible device and I will not be going back to Vizio in the future.