sillyquiet

Same story here. Postman just got too feature-rich for my blood.

curl + bloomRPC + graphiQL covers all my bases nowadays.

Fun fact, the very first explanation of Bluetooth tech I saw was by Leo Laporte on Tech TV sometime in the 90s. The name was the first thing they discussed iirc.

They did? I am not disagreeing, just wondering if he disclosed that or how you found out.

I think Destin of the Smarter Every Day YT channel had an interview a couple years ago with Dr. John Mather, the senior project scientist of the JWST, where he asked something like "will you be nervous during the launch and deployments", and Dr. Mather replied " I don't get anxious about stuff I can't deal with", and that they've tested everything they thought of to test.

I was super impressed with Dr. Mather, not only that he seemed so wise, but also that this super busy man took the time to do an hour long interview with a random You-Tuber. I think the JWST project is in good hands.

Edit: I guess Destin is not a 'random' You-tuber, but someone that was well-placed to connect with Dr. Mather. Still, he's not CNN or BBC - he's a guy with a handheld camera that doesn't ask fluff question, but questions intended to help inform himself and his audience. Still think Dr. Mather thinking it was important to spend so much of his schedule with Destin was impressive.

sure sure, but given the (potential) downsides of choosing wrong, what would be the trigger or reason for leaving IF things are still good?

Or are you saying if you see signs of things going downhill but things are currently good?

> The typical employment lifecycle of an engineer is: Get frustrated by the current company culture and/or benefits, let this frustration sit for way too long, snap and choose a random company whose recruiter just happened to reach out, join there, and repeat the cycle all over again.

It's scary how real this is, but it's easy to say "don't do that", when all the inhibitions about leaving your current job rotate around some seriously bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs - you literally could be without home and (in the US) healthcare if you do this precipitously or without somewhere to jump to, or if you make a poor choice in jumping.

Not saying it's good to sit pat until things get so bad you can't, but there's real scary things behind folk's decisions to stay and weather the horseshit at a place.

Yeah, none of that is true. Chariots were the deciding factor in many battles from the point they were invented by the people of the Sintashta culture until the last few centuries BCE and spread everywhere from Egypt to India to China. Chariots did not need roads, but they were certainly less effective in broken terrain - but so is mounted cavalry.

The reason they spread so quickly from the Eurasian steppes to throughout most of Europe and Asia was precisely because they were so dominant. As a matter of fact, not only did the chariot spread, but the horses the Sintashta culture and its immediate daughter cultures bred to best PULL the chariots spread with the chariot to the extent they are the ancestors of every single domestic horse in the world.

This is bit of a chicken-or-the-egg question - which came first, those customer preferences, or advertising insisting you 'need' the stainless steel washer to keep up with the Joneses which created the customer preferences.

sure sure - it's unfair of me, but I call decision makers of all stripes - c-levels, etc - who are only motivated by short term numbers on a spreadsheet 'beancounters'

Yeah, and I also forgot the 'let's make sure the thing is an unrepairable black box, so make sure all manuals, part numbers, and diagrams are locked behind copyright, let's sue anybody on You-tube showing people how to modify or repair the thing, and let's be sure to add features and fixes only to Thing 2.0 Thing-as-a-service'

I think Maytag is another example of what I think of as the attitude of profit margin >>> artisanry in modern companies. It goes something like this:

Company A makes a thing, maybe it was founded by the inventor of the thing, maybe not, but it makes a thing and it is PROUD to make the thing. The thing is reliable, durable, and it does what it is advertised to do, well. It's crafted with care, with QA and built with quality parts.

And THEN the beancounters come in. Oh-ho, they say, you can increase your profit margin on every unit sold if you replace this FooPart with a cheaply made mass produced overseas equivalent.

Also, we will reduce the number of expensive quality inspectors to save costs.

Actually, we are outsourcing ALL labor to overseas to save costs,

and etc etc, the cost of the unit probably doesn't decrease, but the profit margins sure look nice until the point confidence in the product collapses and sales tank.

Ha, in the 2006-2010 timeframe I worked for an aerospace company working on experimental radar sensors and the like and I developed quite a few Cocoa desktop data analysis and visualization tools since we were a Mac shop.

It was a good fit since the physicists and mathematicians wrote their experimental stuff in Matlab and the engineers and us computer scientists wrote the actual production code in C compiled for the embedded hardware in the avionics. Cocoa provided a good bridging platform for tool sets between the two camps. (Later, python and its robust set of science and math libraries became the tool of choice in this role as Python expertise became more general on our team)

Long story short, I learned by suffering through the interface, especially the fairly esoteric Interface Builder.

And then in 2008 I went to a bootcamp hosted by the former-NeXT guy that had founded Big Nerd Ranch, Aaron Hillegas. He made it just click, so yeah, maybe but did take a NeXT programmer to wrap your ahead around it, ha.

Sure maybe? but it's penetrated popular culture enough that I refuse to believe anybody would be surprised by 'No, I am your father'

Yea, I don't get the appeal of watching someone pretend they haven't seen "The Empire Strikes Back" and are watching it for the first time and are agog at the the twist.

It's hard to find much substantial or practical difference between a serf and a slave, but to add some nuance a serf definitely had some fairly substantial rights in England, at least theoretically that a slave in the modern sense does not.

And it might be a subtle distinction in practice, but a serf's labor was what was owned by their lord, not their persons.

I mean it depends on the application naturally, but flame graphs or no and especially when dealing with heap dump comparisons, sometimes very opaquely named symbols, etc, it can be an exercise in frustration.

The only thing more tedious and brain-breaking than tracking down client-side JS memory leaks is tracking down server-side JS (Node) memory leaks.

Honestly, I think this has always been how most journalism has been, we're just noticing it more.

But to be fair and I think to support your point, the bastions of so-called 'real' journalism do seem to have gotten fewer and fewer.

Well the horses at least were quite intentionally traded, and I would be very surprised if chariots were not either, although admittedly, they spread mostly by some poor saps being pounded to dust by the folks in chariots and then those poor saps adopting chariots themselves (e.g., the Egyptians and the Hyksos)

I think there was a bunch of evidence already that also strongly indicated technology transfer throughout Eurasia in the last few millennia BCE, especially military technology.

For example, two-wheeled light military chariots probably originated in Central Asia with the Sintashta culture around 2000 BCE, and spread from there to everywhere from Egypt to East Asia.

In addition, though I dunno if you want to consider it a technology transfer, their particular horse breeds, bred to drive those chariots, also spread to the extent those breeds are the ancestors of every living domestic horse (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04018-9)

>This is a symptom of tragedy of the commons + data driven decision making. Product Managers (of which I am one) are focused on advocating for changes that benefit the users.

This is true of good product managers. Unfortunately there are far too many who are (often stupidly) focused on short-term conversion gains, often to the detriment of the user. (e.g., let's hide the Foo Widget because data shows users who click the Foo Widget convert at a lower rate!)

Point 3 is the key one - soles, especially. Rubber soles weren't a thing - they were made of leather (or sometimes textiles) and they wore out in a matter of a couple months or even a few weeks with heavy usage, especially give point 1. Point 2 isn't really the case - your later period and fancier pointed-toe, lace-and-ribbon-bedecked shoes for the higher classes took probably some time, but a pair of common leather turn-shoes can be made in a couple hours.

Anybody else find it very weird and off-putting that folks thought even talking about these issues would affect their careers? I mean, does that not speak volumes about the toxic professional atmosphere hollywood labors in?

as a senior IC, I've been asked to give technical peer interviews for candidates quite a few times.

A LOT of the places I have worked there's no budget for sensible interview tools even for remote interviews (shared IDEs, etc), so you are stuck with what you can cobble together (an ad hoc shared REPL, a shared virtual whiteboard, etc). They suck a lot, and I try to keep that in account when working through problems.

The best experiences are always in an actual simple dev environment where you can collaborate on code, have a live preview of UI stuff, allow access to stack overflow and other references, etc. it allows you to present a problem very similar to day-to-day work but smaller scale.

And I gotta say, even that is just somewhat useful for gauging how working with that person for real would be. Interviews suck - nerves are frayed, it's not always representative of that persons skill, ability or non-assholishness, AND it doesn't allow for assessing general skill, ability to learn or ramp up, because everyone necessarily in the interview has to have some skill in the language and platform you are working in during the interview.

Ugh, not to get on a grumpy-old-man tangent, but I recall when 'hacking' and 'hackathon' had fairly specific and nerdy meanings, and not 'let's try to knock something up we could do in Figma or another wireframe tool to sell to investors'

Commodore, later on, when they put a whole c64 in the c128, but I take your meaning.

Fair enough, I stand corrected, but I guess I meant maintaining compatibility when you change architectures is stupid expensive.

ok, I stand corrected, but I will say that the Apple II line represented smaller iterations of the generally same architecture, right? i.e., Commodore I guess didn't iterate within the same architecture as much, breaking that compatibility more easily.

> Tramiel never understood or invested in growing a platform or growing, expanding, intercompatible product line. Each Commodore machine under his watch was a brand new machine, not compatible with the others except for maybe a few peripherals.

But, iirc, very very very few computer manufacturers prioritized compatibility in that way in those days though, and for good reason, it would have be stupid expensive. Some manufacturers got around the problem (Commodore did this as a matter of fact) by incorporating all or part of the previous line in the new machines and enabling compatibility modes.

This isn't related to shipbuilding, but it IS related to steam-bending and the recovery and preservation of lost artisanry:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0xj7OujbwU

Channel of one of the last few remaining wainwrights in the US.