In the worlds I've worked in it would help a lot for every engineer to do a stint at a customer site. The bigger places I've worked for could have easily placed people with a customer for a while.
It's remarkable how much stuff is designed by people who don't use it for a living, will never use it for a living.
As someone with a similar time in harness in industries that rhyme with that, I feel your pain.
While I'd prefer to work, not needing the money implies the ability to avoid the interview process. It's a funny thing being in an industry where people retire not because they can't do the work at a professional level, but because getting a job is such a PITA.
> It's a funny thing being in an industry where people retire not because they can't do the work at a professional level, but because getting a job is such a PITA.
I feel that this is a desired result. I am pretty convinced that folks like to have an "ideal culture" at their workplaces. I hear the term "cultural fit" so often, that I guess it means something that I'm missing.
Very cool. A person can really appreciate simple web design looking at something like Luke Smith's recipe page.
So how on earth do you take an idea like this and scale it for both broad web coverage and high traffic? For that matter, just how much 'useful' text is there on the net?
That's a shame since I think that Youtube can be really amazing.
My main (practically only) use for it is to watch amateur-produced special interest shows that are done on a regular basis. Usually it seems to involve automotive bodywork or subsurface mining with the occasional computer show.
The channels that move to having sponsors or getting a lot of free stuff are for the high jump (although it's absolutely a riot to watch Heather Heying shill for some sofa company, hating life all the while). I think the best ones are done by pure hobbyists.
Otherwise my current plan is to build a library of worthwhile videos via youtube-dl and DVD transfers. My guess is that the ad environment and much heavier copyright policing on youtube will make much of it unwatchable over time.
Looking at the US Constitution, IP law should be designed to heavily encourage innovation. I would think that the actual details of law would reflect that rather than maximizing the value of an idea to it's owner.
To be fair, the current results should have been predictable. A small, finely focused and self-interested group can usually defeat an unruly mass.
>I would note that my ventures are in the area of atoms and not bits :)
Good for you. My own bias and personal experience highly tends towards that, including US manufacture. Thinking about the article at the top, I wonder sometimes what the 'economy' even is anymore. I tend to distrust articles on it as all the news tends to involve internet-based FIRE 'industries' and surveillance marketing startups. I'm not feeling the love for those segments.
> Lord knows what sort of magic they stick into 'Energy Star' appliances.
I had a phase a few years back where I monitored all my appliances and office stuff to see how much solar I needed and I found the energy star ratings to be more or less correct with my appliances except for my moms Samsung stove
Well, easy in case of VW: If the optimization involves checking "steering wheel has never moved out of 0 position since engine start" and "intake air is at exactly 293K", then it illegally optimizes for a test.
I did it for three decades (3.5?) and the only code reviews were with friends of mine who worked at multiple companies together. The whole point of the review was to find outright errors, not to optimize. Scarcely any ego involvement.
It worked out fine I think and, mind you, it used to be a lot harder to push out a fix. A lot harder.
Yeah, maybe I should add, we would hang out in the hall and whiteboard our ideas, workflows before we went back into our respective cubicles/offices and started coding.
Respectfully I disagree. The opinion section is fundamentally different (and damaging) to the news reporting, and shouldn't exist. But opinion content is many times more popular than straight news, it seems people like being told what to think.
>the proliferation and promotion of medical misinformation.
I can see that working both ways. The anti-vax folks are never going to believe the 'get vaccinated or you'll die' sort of rhetoric. Better to use real numbers. There's been enough time and cases to make good estimates.
Do masks work very well? What kinds of masks? Where do people actually get COVID (home? bars? schools? hiking in the forest?). What are the actual results from non-vax drugs or treatments? How long are the vaccinations likely to be useful? Did early large-scale vaccination simply cause forced evolution of variants?
There's a shroud of mystery throughout this situation with a need by some people to simply shout down to the masses. None of this is that complicated and medical leadership is some mixture of secretive and incompetent, and I'm not sure what the strongest tendency is.
> Do masks work very well? What kinds of masks? Where do people actually get COVID (home? bars? schools? hiking in the forest?). What are the actual results from non-vax drugs or treatments? How long are the vaccinations likely to be useful? Did early large-scale vaccination simply cause forced evolution of variants?
These questions are always asked in bad faith, if they're even asked at all rather than just taking the word of right-wing talking heads at face value. Anti-vaxxers and COVID deniers don't care what the science says and willfully ignore peer-reviewed studies.
I'd say not. I'd genuinely like to know if a cloth bandana has any value, if grocery stores are dangerous, is the mass of people actually better off for an early and hard vaccine regime. It's partly intellectual interest and partly an attempt to guide my own behavior.
Having said that, everyone is too invested in their theories to be skeptical.
Better than nothing, but there are better options.
> if grocery stores are dangerous
I don't think it's possible to make a concrete answer to that question. The "danger" of any given place is going to just be a placement on a spectrum based on the airflow and how crowded it is. Where the line is to define something as "dangerous" is going to be pretty subjective. It's like showing a white-to-black gradient and asking where "dark grey" ends and "grey" begins.
But in your other post, you said:
> What are the actual results from non-vax drugs or treatments?
This is one where there is very clear scientific consensus, yet people ignore it. Take of course Ivermectin, where it's been proven that while it does somehow kill COVID in vitro, the dosage needed to make it work in vivo is higher than the maximum recommended dose.
> How long are the vaccinations likely to be useful?
At the time of the invention of the vaccine, this was unknown, but I've always failed to see how it would be a valid criticism against the vaccine enough to choose to skip the vaccine entirely. Whether it would require a booster after 6 months or if it lasted a lifetime, they were proven to significantly reduce hospitalizations and death from COVID.
> Did early large-scale vaccination simply cause forced evolution of variants?
Anyone with a basic knowledge of microbiology acknowledges how quickly bacteria and viruses can evolve (Hence why doctors always plead for patients to complete their anti-biotic prescriptions and not stop taking them once symptoms subside!). Evolution of variants was inevitable. But if we had achieved 90%+ vaccination rates quickly enough, we could have mostly eradicated it before a variant could have taken hold.
And we totally could have. It's really disheartening to see the graph of COVID cases and deaths this year. From January to July, the number was plummeting as vaccinations were being distributed, but some time around June/July, we reached the point where everyone who wanted a vaccine had one, and it was only the anti-vaxxers that were holding out. Eventually, Delta happened, and cases/deaths have been skyrocketing since the beginning of August.
Of course, over 90% of the people being hospitalized or dying from COVID now are unvaccinated (There's even a subreddit dedicated to anti-vaxxers dying to COVID, https://old.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward) , but that still isn't convincing them.
At this point, I'm convinced absolutely nothing will convince an anti-vaxxer. Data doesn't matter to them. Peer-reviewed studies don't matter to them. They think the CDC and FDA are corrupt and everything they spout is a lie. If they get COVID, they'll talk about (but not follow through with) suing the hospital for malpractice when the hospital doesn't give them Ivermectin because Joe Rogan told them Ivermectin cures COVID.
In the worlds I've worked in it would help a lot for every engineer to do a stint at a customer site. The bigger places I've worked for could have easily placed people with a customer for a while.
It's remarkable how much stuff is designed by people who don't use it for a living, will never use it for a living.