procarch2019

Yep… 100%

Have to remind my 8yo figuring out entertaining yourself (without screens) is something that needs to be practiced. To be fair, I find the modern workplace is just as bad for adults and makes it terribly hard to disconnect. It used to be the case for more tech industries, but with modern tooling it’s gotten worse. The pandemic, with the adoption of remote work apps, really seems to have fueled that one, but it was probably inevitable. In either case, I now have 2 phones so I can at least put the work one away at 5 and shut off.

I actually took it out of my reply below, but agree that “curriculum format” is much to blame. Thankfully our school district largely did away with screens this year (last year there was a huge parent outcry regarding the policy). They used to do everything on screens, to the point where they had to log into portals at home to play garbage “learning” games. Mind you, I’m talking about grades k-3. It was abhorrent. A lot of that was driven by the curriculum program they adopted from what I understand.

Thankfully they only get 30 min/day on the laptops now. I’m sure the teachers still use their smart screens (considering the chalkboards are covered in static material now), but somehow that seems less bad.

I’m sure this is true. Much of millennials, and I mean older and younger, have been starting to hit that inflection point in recent years where we are the leaders in the professional and familial worlds. We’re now sandwiched by adults who are both younger, without kids, and older, aging out. It affords one additional abilities to reflect and sometimes to come to perennial conclusions or faux wisdom; things that we think are now true but have always been (because we all have main character syndrome).

That being said there appears to be a difference in attention spans that I find unnerving, especially as a parent of a Gen Alpha. I could also be suffering the same inability to see my youth through the eyes I have now, but I definitely do not recall the lack of attention that they experience.

I drown in support tickets daily that used to go nowhere. Then people started realizing that I knew what I was talking about and not some standard business user. Now I still have to open tickets, but get visibility of the people who know what they’re doing on their end (having been moved up from lowly support to oversee some ticket filling company that doesn’t know crap). We get tom complain to one another how shit is broken, wait mandatory change periods and then get something working by exploiting loopholes because some process was developed and someone put a lot of money behind it.

Large companies are why large companies are large (in IT/OT at least)

I don’t think so, or maybe it was… IDK anymore. Now I’ll have to go rewatch it.

It definitely is explained as described above. The gate itself, the “event horizon” is all part of the apparatus for accessing the wormhole, not the wormhole itself. I forget the episode, but there is one where something happens due to the fact that they recreated/reverse engineered the “brains” of the device with human design (missing some key failsafes) and some of them get stuck in the “buffer” (dematerialized state) until it’s figured out how to reconstitute them.

The hardware my company uses has a lifecycle of 15-20 (aka what we typically look at when we consider lifecycle of a plant). This is not meant to be the whole life of a plant, but possibly the life of the current controls. Things/people/companies change. I’ve seen some really shortsighted people rip and replace a sub-decade control system because of “bad experiences”. The industry can be great where it’s great and terrible where it’s terrible.

Even more so, if it’s just there you’re making it easy for the customer to find someone bidding less to execute new projects. Guess who they’re calling if they don’t have the plc project (or don’t understand they need it). Job security.

Plus, yea, someone could really make a mess even if they have the best intention. A guy from my company almost uploaded the wrong program to a large bioreactor. At best it would have made the bioreactor just unusable until corrected. At worst it could have broken the equipment or caused a safety issue. This guy had been around the block a few times too. Luckily someone noticed before it was too late.

Sounds like we have a similar development path. People fail to understand how complex some of these systems can be, especially since you have to have the project to understand what registers/variables are what. Some when Joe the contractor does a job and walks away, you better make sure they give you the project and you store it in a nice safe place.

A good system integrator is worth their weight in gold. Sure they cost more, but getting a whole package turned over to you is worth a million more than 5 years into the lifecycle of a factory when someone wants to make mods/fix a bug/etc and has to reinvent the whole car, not just the wheel.

This industry is always 10-20 years in the past. My company’s preferred vendor only just started supporting virtualization (this is for a DCS) in the past 10 years. I still have to tell my sales people to provide A/V and minimalistic backup and recovery on every project (they essentially cost nothing compared to the rest of any project).

The point I was making is that PLCs have a software stack. You have to know the software and programming languages defined in IEC 61131-3. For all intents and purposes they are just very repeatable compute in an industrial setting, but if you don’t know ladder logic or how to interface with them you might be SoL. Most don’t have any sort of web interface and if they do it operates outside the controllable logic. Same goes for shells. If you want to program it you typically have to use the vendor software.

You’d be surprised how insecure some of these facilities are, especially to someone who has working knowledge of what a PLC (or other process controllers) does and how it works. You can easily look like a tech who belongs there either troubleshooting something or working on a project.

I’ve been doing industrial controls for 15 years and surprisingly infrastructure is some of the most poorly funded. I believe a lot of these places are run by operating companies, so it’s bidded out (we all know how bids work I think). I’m not surprised when I walk into these places and see the computers are running EOL operating systems and the networking is essentially flat.

I think it is. I work for a (relatively) small company. I naturally grew from project engineer to senior/lead/sme (including pioneering tech _for my industry_) to SA. I had also stuck with my company for many years, so I have the industry connections and got to be known as a heavy hitter. That trust relationship with the customers mixed with technical know how = sales and consulting.

Again, because of the size of my company I can make my role fluid (including a good way), but call it what you will I engineer, I sell, I consult.

My kids a bit young for reading HP on their own, but it’s our bedtime book series every night. Over the past year or so we’ve (I’ve) read HP before bed. We just started book the Order of the Phoenix.

Our school system has a reading log system (mandatory 15min/night), but I don’t think it’s very effective.

I don’t know that I’d put my kid down as an avid reader, but for his age range I can set him on a task to read and he’ll find something he enjoys enough to be immersed (albeit usually graphic novels akin to Minecraft, Godzilla and other mangas). But at 8 I’d rather that than an aversion to reading.

Anyway, I’m curious about the statistics around parents reading by example (solo), parents reading to children (bedtime or otherwise and until what age). I have memories of my mom reading with me when I was about his age.

I can say this, me and every other parent in my school district is sick of screen time.

They could just switch their dns back to auto (or statically use google/cloudflare/etc depending on how you configure it), no? Then fix it when you’re back.

You could also set up 2 ssids depending on your WiFi set up. Point one to pi hole and the other to a different DNS provider. Instruction if pi hole breaks is just switch WiFi.

As an OT systems architect I am totally floored. We design and plan for systems lifecycle on a ~20yr scale, with OT hardware (not the controls hardware, that’s closer to 10-20) lifecycle much shorter (~5 yr). Obvious on Earth we can afford luxuries of adopting new things, which actually shortens a total system lifecycle since new tech drives new designs.

I wish (and don’t) I could work on something that had a dependency of “design it once because it’s relatively inaccessible after its go live.” I’ll def check out the documentary.

Agreed. Due to the long lifecycle of manufacturing equipment we still see a lot of 100mb out there, and it’s not even embedded.

I would note that all new products seem to be gbe or better.

I actually rebound my windows keys to use this instead of default windows snippet tool. Sure, if I need a high level of editing I’ll bring it into some other program (still using flame shot to take a capture). 95% the built in arrows, boxes, numbers, etc do the quick attention calling I need.

Bonus, this was a piece of ‘bloatware’ an admin rebuilt my computer with, but I came to love.

I mean, I guess I get it for certain things. Silly to mandate it though. Anyone who has work requiring them to be in the office should be in the office. My in office time jumps up to 3-5 days per week when I have a new employee until they’re somewhat self sufficient. My in office time jumps when I have to prepare hardware for a project *in house*. My in office time plummets when I’m doing a software project hosted on one of my customers systems.

I guess what I’m saying is just be pragmatic and get your stuff done.

P.S. One of my senior guys is a road warrior, highly effective and I see him in the office maybe three times a year.

Yes, one by one. It’s just tedious. There’s always a solution.

Often time screenshots correlate to steps. You open wordpad and start a numbered list. Write what action you perform and the screenshot. Repeat until you’re all the way done. Take it off the system, print it, sign and date it and attach to an MOC and your done.

I supposed you could copy and save in paint. Then do the same thing in Word off the system by dropping in all the images. Idk, doesn’t sound like that much more work, but it’s annoying enough.

Yes, in the automation world living on level 2/2.5 wordpad is great for doing things like taking screenshots too. In a GMP facility it could take some significant effort to get a screenshot tool or a rich text editor installed. Also, taking pictures with a phone is usually a huge no no.

Occasionally, you have to document something with…screenshots. Now, some versions of Windows Server come with snipping tool, which lets you save a screen shot. Others you still have to use the print screen key. Then what… well, you open wordpad and paste.

Luckily most of the systems we interact with now we get to install Office when the system is being qualified. Could be a huge PIA though otherwise.

edit: level 2/2.5 means no internet connection and therefore no browser based editors.

Hah, you don’t have to tell me about validation and quality. Yes, they usually account for a significant time of anything in the pharma world.

I work in the OT/automation space for pharma. Cell and gene therapy is crazy amazing.

One thing I didn’t really see mentioned here is length of treatment. They have to collect patients sample at hospital or other facility, transport to production facility, grow sample, inject sample with vector, grow some more and then reintroduce. The real sci-fi moment will be when they get to the point they can treat in a day.

I think most are 3+ weeks sample to treatment right now. Still amazing though.

Occasionally I find myself somewhere I need to access email but have no network connection. No local cache means a big ol’ screw me

Need MS for other toolings

No more IMAP

As pointed out elsewhere. My comment wasn’t really on outlook itself. There are other things that bind me to MS ecosystem.

I’m sure that’s true for a lot of people.

I’ll have to check it out, but sometimes I think I should just lean in to all the MS integrations.

I do like OneNote and use the ‘Send to OneNote’ for meeting notes all the time.

It does, but the applications and environments I need to use are Windows only anyway.

IT policy also doesn’t let us have anything other than Windows. I could skirt it for the day to day stuff, but I wouldn’t want to maintain my setup in multiple places anyway

I don’t do more work outside of my professional work.

I get away with just my phone and an iPad for everything else.

I think anyone using outlook is probably using it out of necessity for work.

Not everyone can just jump to Linux when they work in a company.

I still use the mobile site and am convinced that the piss poor design of that is dark patterns to get people to give up and use the app.