pitched

I’ve done a lot of personal performance tracking and I’ve found that productivity (for me at least) correlates very highly to number of hours slept and not really much else. Ignoring environment/culture/team issues that don’t change often enough to test.

The thing that worries me about the idea of engineering being a team sport is, what does “Moneyball” look like? Get everyone to wear sleep trackers?

Site seems to be having trouble keeping up right now: https://archive.ph/Hnr8P

The DMCA notice: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2022/12/2022-12-0...

And the complaint itself:

> On GitHub at https://github.com/revanced/revanced-patches there is a patch that unlocks the subscription without payment for "Pflotsh ECMWF" and various other products.

If that’s true, this can’t really be very controversial?

If anyone else is curious what’s inside… Article says this is a Game Boy Advance port running on an ESP32 dev kit with an upgraded flash chip. Speaker is connected to a GPIO and display is using the serial line.

I think the saying is “vote with your feet”. There’s always at least one thing you can change. Your time is worth more than your salary, otherwise they wouldn’t pay it. If you don’t think a business will survive, stop investing into them with your time.

I would also really love to read a statistics-based approach to all of modern software engineering. Like, does SOLID actually increase bugs? Is Agile more likely to slow things down? Etc.

This is the closest I’ve ever found: http://www.knosof.co.uk/ESEUR/

What about printing some very tight (a week or two away) expiration dates on the boxes? Ethical issues of wasting medicine aside, might that prevent people from stockpiling or being more free with donating to neighbours with sick kids?

I heard that the government decided to limit imports of children’s Tylenol, to better support domestic manufacturing initiatives. There were some delays in bringing production up? If I understand this article right, the government has just announced it’s allowing imports again to help with this shortage.

So I think what they mean by blaming government officials was that maybe their plan to limit imports was too aggressive?

Sounds like they’re saying the shortage is driven by panic buying? The ethical issues aside, would increasing the price help with something like this? As a way to make sure more of the small supply is going to people with a real need instead of personal stockpiles?

TFA explicitly says that the rise of women is not responsible for the fall of men. I think the point he was trying to make was that, if gender equality was never taken up, the issues facing men today would still be issues facing men today.

I got one of these once and deep in the fine-print was a non-compete clause. I understand they have even less bite than an NDA but even so, that’s a bit sneaky…

Instead of refusing to sign it, I asked for 20k compensation instead. They refused so that was that.

“ The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” — Thomas Jefferson

I don’t think blissful ignorance is the right way to think of it. I think the news (and social media) today is the same as it’s always been. Don’t cut yourself off but don’t take any of it too seriously.

I’ve been a very early adopter of this tech (Kickstarter backer of Oculus), get zero motion sickness and have a great time working in VR through a virtual desktop. This looks like a few floating screens in front of my face, in a space station and I’m typing on a real Bluetooth keyboard. I think this is the only way companies will be able to keep remote-friendly polices and stay competitive with product. YMMV because I am biased to be for this, but, the way they’ve tuned this Pro model looks like it’s exactly for my use-case.

“The vibes are off” is the best way I’ve heard this explained: https://www.npr.org/2022/09/15/1123281909/vibecession-vibes-...

I can’t push a single key in less than 20ms latency. Those poor interviewees are building Twitter but for bots. Unfortunately, that is probably a relevant skill…

It’s helpful to align titles with the rest of the industry so that everyone outside of your small group knows what role you play without a long explanation. Custom or non-standard titles is like mixing code styles in the same file. So much fun when you’re doing it but such a huge pain when the next person comes in.

I worked on a belt years ago that use gyros to measure gait and warn against fall risks. This CareAlert product is a really, really good idea. Use the smart home tech in the against them! Reminds me a bit of the people who triangulated wifi received signal strength to track laptop position.

To remove the wearables, makes it much more likely to get the measurements. Makes the data more reliable because it’s less likely to be null. I’ve been using Eight Sleep’s sleep tracking gear for a while for this reason too.

Will they be banned from sale in the EU because of the phone charger mandate or did that not actually pass into law? Or is there something about backwards compatibility through USBC that’s bypassing it?

I would default to calling all content adult-only, to be safe legally. Then, the moderation burden is deciding which ones are child-safe, which is probably a lower hurdle. But still, to be on the safe side legally, I wouldn’t want to mark any user content child-safe. And so we’d end up with the same system we have today.

I was under the impression that C strings were inherently very fast because of how incredibly cache-friendly they are. You should not ever have to count all the bytes (memoize that!) but if you do, this is the best format there is for it.

There were a few different studies in this article but the first one sounds like an entire night of no sleep. I’m not very observant when missing that much sleep so their conclusion (that we’re mean when we miss a whole night) matches my own self.

The second two studies were more interesting with a very modest amount of sleep loss but also showed a very modest effect.

What I’m most interested in sleep loss is in performance management. How grumpy we are is one thing but I can easily lose a whole day of work if I miss a few hours a few nights in a row. I would love to see more data on this.

I’ve used this before in embedded code to save rom space by not having to include malloc. The stack _is_ the heap! Just have to be very careful about when you can call another function.

The best version of this is where you allocate a block on your stack then pass that as a pointer up to the next function to use. The one who owns the memory is the one who allocates it (Rust style?). Or, have the linker allocate global blocks works too.

> “If You Want To Run Fast, Run Alone. If You Want To Run Far, Run Together.”

With all dichotomies like this, we’re never actually aiming for the extremes of far or fast but somewhere in between. There must be some ants finding new trails and there must be most ants travelling them. A hybrid approach is always the goal. Arguments for purity are fantasy, but can be fun.

Even worse, all three built large companies. Companies being collections of people, that is collectivist.

To keep playing Devil’s Advocate, maybe someone like Grigori Perelman (who declined a fields medal) might be a better example?

The article was arguing against individualistic innovation through disruption, in favour of a collectivist innovation through collaboration. So Elizabeth Holmes was the perfect example to feed into that argument.

I heard that the teams were having trouble communicating with each other and so the ones who pushed the config might not have been the ones looking for hackers.

This is why some hospitals still use the old pager systems to contact people in the city. One hospital-owned antenna on a battery can coordinate a lot of people. I don’t know what the equivalent to that would be in this case though.

Reminds me of the engineering twist on “glass half full” as “glass is twice as large as it needs to be”. Here’s hoping it wasn’t built too small though.

How about scanning for any string with high entropy? Might be easier to get buy-in if we don’t all have to bike-shed over what the prefix is.

I find the opposite question more interesting: How much of human behaviour is sentient? Probably very little to none, right? Most of what we do is routine habits that we’ve trained over a long time. I spend most of my day solving abstract puzzles at work. Or typing these words into this website.

If our emotions were trained into us over many generations as a way to better cooperate and improve survivability, and AI chatbot fake emotions were trained over many generations where only the best neural nets survive… Maybe Aristotle was right, the bar is actually very low and these programs are just as sentient as we are?