schmookeeg

I wonder how soon we'll be charging those "crackle map" exhaust hoonigans with assault on the un-thought-of children.

They really do. This has been my longest tenure at any position by far and Engineer QoL is a massive part of it. Our CTO came up through the DBA/Data/Engineering Management ranks and the empathy is solidly there.

As we grow, I'm ever watchful for our metamorphosis into a big-dumb-company, but no symptoms yet. :)

Getting my models dunked on by people who can't open MS Outlook more than 3 tries out of 5, however, have a remarkable depth and insight into their chosen domain of expertise. It's rather humbling.

Collaborating with nontechnical people is oddly my favorite part of doing MLE work right now. It wasn't the case when I did basic web/db stuff. They see me as a magician. I see them as voodoo priests and priestesses. When we get something trained up and forecasting that we both like, it's super fulfilling. I think for both sides.

Most of my modeling is healthcare related. I tease insights out of a monstrous data lake of claims, Rx, doctor notes, vital signs, diagnostic imagery, etc. What is also monstrous is how accessible this information is. HIPAA my left foot.

Since you seemed to be asking about the temporal realities, it's about 3 hours of meetings a week, probably another 3 doing task grooming/preparatory stuff, fixing some ETL problem, or doing a one-off query for the business, the rest is swimming around in the data trying to find a slight edge to forecast something that surprised us for a $million or two using our historical snapshots. It's like playing wheres waldo with math. And the waldo scene ends up being about 50TB or so in size. :D

+1! the Picos have been an absolute joy to work with, and take me back to my C coding start from.. gosh.. 38 years ago. :)

Mix in some I2C components and a few jumper wires, and you basically have my whole childhood distilled down and reborn -- legos and code.

Was this like in the outskirts of Saskatchewan? :) I can't think of a way to meaningfully blacklist engineers in the age of remote work.

I'm comfortable with a ruling of "Everyone sucks here" on this. :)

I'd be super annoyed just as the author, for the same reasons.

Private jets are required to paint 12" high registration markings on both sides of their fuselage. Owner data is public record, although often obscured by holding corporations. The data used to contain SSNs if you can imagine it.

I'm unclear what jet aviation risk we are equating to hazmat ground transport. It's not raining aluminum very often, and it's a news frenzy when it does happen.

Every time I read "private jets should X" I can only ever boil it down to envy or "because I have the right to know", which I personally don't agree with. I seldom see things like "transporting that organ to its transplant patient via light jet is so carbon intensive -- why not use passenger aircraft cargo instead?" or other more nuanced takes.

For some, I imagine the opacity is worth the frightful cost of private aviation. I don't know what it is like to have millions of fans trying to figure out where I am at every waking moment, and the very idea is horrifying. I don't think any valid purpose is served by knowing where <star du jour>'s jet takes off from or lands at, and I don't think anyone is honestly looking skyward to FL410 and worrying about an aircraft part landing on them.

From other conversations about this topic, I thought it was interesting that the congresscritter who advanced the legislation is from the Bentonville AR region -- and crafty investors have tracked Walton jets to figure out where the high-level Walmart business meetings are happening, then making inferences about upcoming stock-moving deals. I thought that was fascinating. Humans are crafty, and humans with means who want privacy will find it, despite any number of laws passed. It all feels like wasted whack-a-mole effort to me.

I love programming but have burned out on doing it for others a few times now. I once jumped to fly cargo for UPS.

I gotta say. It's nice to remember how good we have it. Doing a harder job for 1/10th of the pay refilled my empty gratitude bucket very quickly. :)

Today I gripe about waking up at 8am to do another useless standup meeting, but once in awhile, I remember waking up at 3:30am to meet the UPS jet and wait until they loaded my little Beech 99 so that I could fly through low clouds and ice so that the folks in roseburg, eugene, and la grande could get their amazon prime tchotchkes. Then waiting around in the bumblefrick motel for 6 hours for the UPS truck to return that afternoon with the unwanted returns of last week's amazon prime tchotchkes.

Yeah programming for others sucks. But it sucks less than a LOT of other things, and pays a whole lot better. Get while the gettin is good. When you want to run screaming in the other direction, may I suggest a pause, a walk, and a reflect first -- lest you kill the golden goose and never be able to get it back.

$0.02 :)

What are your thoughts on the 80,000lb semi trucks, laden with (admittedly less) volatile and explosive fuel, driving through your community without needing to publicly report telemetry and routing details?

I already won't use Amazon for things I put in my body -- the product commingling and counterfeit situations make them a non-starter for me on this. Precision and control are just not in their company DNA, so I don't want their shipped products mucking with my DNA. :)

Apple would be far higher on my list of consideration than this. I'd even say Google, for the 2 or 3 years that the product lasted.

While I do find healthcare somewhat plodding and archaic, these anecdotes remind me that it's not always a bad thing.

If they spent the time to describe all of the rare-yet-possible ways a person could die on an airliner, the thing would never leave the gate.

At some level, take their mandated-by-regulations word for it? -- these regs are written in blood, and they say to buckle your belt, not only when the sign is lighted, but also any time when seated at your seat.

Boeing has done a good job of reminding us of some non-turbulence reasons to buckle up. You might also get sucked out of an unsecured exit door plug on a 737. :) I haven't heard that one mentioned in a safety brief yet.

In the pilot circles I frequent, the joke about seatbelts is that it helps accident investigators more easily count the deceased among the wreckage. So there's some YOLO fuel for your next trip. This was a freak occurrence. It's sad and it sucks. The injuries to passengers were likely preventable -- less so the cabin crew. New word is that the fatality was a cardiac event -- no belt buckle helps anyone there.

Yes, they say it to cover their asses -- for the very very rare occasion when an unbelted passenger ends up stuffed into the overhead lighting panel or carry-on baggage compartments. :)

Seat belts in cars also contain several CYA-grade chimes and buzzers. The owner manual may mention risk of injury or death. Likely an airline's contract of carriage contains the same. I suspect both are read as often and as eagerly by their users.

I think the multiple "off tone" messages you're getting are in response to your use of ignorance as a defense for ignoring airplane crew instructions.

I would bet that they displayed high competence at discovering under-charge or forgot-to-charge incidents and swiftly remedied them.

+1 -- we moved to XCPng when citrix played this same game with xenserver a few years ago, and it's been a very positive move.

I have never heard a non-electrified bicycle referred to as "acoustic" before and I love that so much. :)

"Libertarian" is a pejorative now?

I would read this book, binge this netflix series, or season-ticket this play. Please make it so. :)

Microsoft Publisher is mine. Think it, put it on the page, now you're a desktop publisher. I preferred it to Word for the longest time, for even the most banal documents, because I had pure control over layout.

I wish it was ported to Mac.

It seems to be a trend. Honestly, brutalist.report is my daily driver now and my preferred gateway into HN and many other news sites that I frequent. (not that HN is bad, just now there's a similar aggregator)

I think I am pleased with a definition of brutalism on the web that equates to "does not load a pile of JS, autoplay videos, trash, and tracking -- and just sets up a quick, clean, bunch of links to consider" -- if this is where we are heading , I'm pro-brutalism. :)

Did Mongo get slagged in their early days because of the unflattering Blazing Saddles movie reference?

Call it whatever you want. Engineers should be able to select their tools on merit, not marketing.

Paying off a loan early is deceptive?

And the equally compelling anti-argument against everything-is-a-web-page is every time I go to a website I haven't been to in awhile (and some I use on the daily), I need to swat away a cacophony of "What's New! Let's Take a Tour!" popups, like so many cobwebs. :)

When I have my client's money rattling around in my bank account, I find other avenues to express my annoyance with them. Mainly complaining to my wife :) If the annoyance becomes unbearable, I quietly find some new position to work at.

It's ingratitude at some level. If workers should not be grateful to their employers for their jobs, that's a different conversation, but yeah, sabotaging an external PR event -- what employer is going to giggle, clap, and congratulate this person's "bravery" ?? termination had to be expected here.

Amusingly, the employee now gets 6+ months of unemployment benefits to contemplate the means of their activism.

I would actually wonder if the hitler version had a different take.

I hate how cynical I am, but this feels like abdication. "We can't compete, so we turned to Uncle Sugar for a lifeline" Surely it's an anti-signal? I used to hold INTC proudly and loved the Andy Grove era of that company.

Has Intel become a zombie company?

Ghosting seems to be the norm now, even after several rounds of investment in interviews.

I haven't figured out if it's due to poor manners or just plain cowardice, but oh man it's all over the place now.

The rectangle app solved 80% of this for me (OCD window placement across 2+ monitors). I agree with the rest. :)

Not alone. I was pretty grouchy about it a few months ago. It seems to be getting better, though.

I code all over the stack, usually some bizarre mix of python, pyspark, SQL, and typescript.

TS support seems pretty nice, and it can optimize and suggest pretty advanced things accurately.

Py was hopeless a few months ago, but my last few attempts have been decent. I've been sent down some rabbitholes though, and been burned -- usually my not paying attention and being a lazy coder.

PySpark is just the basics, which is fine if I am distracted and just want to do some basic EMR work. More likely, though, I'll rummage my own code snippets instead.

The speed of improvement has been impressive. I'm getting enthused about this stuff more and more. :)

Plus, who doesn't enjoy making random goofy stuff in Dall-E while waiting for some progressbar to advance? That alone is worth the time investment for me.

I am polite to ChatGPT for my own edification and consistency of being, not because I think I will hurt its feelings otherwise. :)

And depressingly still relevant 56 years later.