OneEyedRobot

I'll pitch in my own two cents.

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.

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.

I wonder how you tell illegal optimizing for a test vs. legal optimizing for a test.

Lord knows what sort of magic they stick into 'Energy Star' appliances.

>These questions are always asked in bad faith,

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.

I think that news has extended quite far into op-ed space. There's a combination of just what news is reported and just how a thing is worded.

Modern newspapers and news magazines (they still exist?) don't read at all like the ones from 50 years ago.

>FB is what my racist parents use

It looks to me like you've got bigger fish to fry than Facebook. It's probably time to give your parents a break.

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.

>Which is another argument for scrapping the opinion section of every newspaper, it confuses people.

At this point, I'd say that that's the entire newspaper. They operate in the same ad space as Facebook.

>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.

I'd love to talk to the folks that work at the outrage porn outlets. Are they true believers doing whatever it takes? Actually think they print news? Just in it for the money?

How honed is the writing and how is that done? How do advertisers (the point of the exercise after all) respond? How has it all changed over time? How do people become writers, how much of it is done programatically?

It's a small thing, but something I'm struck by is how little international news is out there anymore.

>a smart dude works on a problem that saves World War 2 and now powers your phone and your TikTok app.

So much for the Polish Cipher Bureau. Not so many tragic hero opportunities there.

>All children have heroes they look up to.

After reading that I sat here for a minute and racked my brain as to who my childhood 'hero' might be. I can't remember a single person.

It's amusing to me how much of intellectual work deals in a currency of status. Getting/giving credit for things appears to be the Prime Directive, at least among the observers. We've now graduated to not only stressing who is responsible but what demographic groups they are a part of.

Now, it could be that the real deal groundbreaking folks don't give a damn. Tip o' the hat to those people.

While I think that EVs are cool, the subsidies not only distort things but are essentially tax breaks for the well-off.

It's funny to me how the whole ICE vs. EV argument just isn't that much of a slam-dunk. Looking at page 5 here:

https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/EV-life...

Completely altering the vehicle mix doesn't look like a game changer to me. I guess there's probably no low-hanging fruit.

In the future, no doubt not only will houses be unaffordable for the middle class and below, but also cars.

But why use the marketplace when you can legislate?

Actively managing things is ever so much fun.

I wonder if it wouldn't help if colleges/universities fissioned into more specialized institutions. By building gigantic clumps of education a single approach or philosophy drives too much of the bus.

A sample set of new schools.

. Work oriented, basically four year versions of junior college. Teaches EE, nursing, CSc, accounting, etc. Higher quality (and cheaper) than current for-profit versions.

. Research institutions. STEM masters and up.

. 'Soft' disciplines. Not just history, cultural anthropology, and the like but also the newfangled xxx studies, diversity equity stuff, etc.

. Traditional old school 'classical' college. Essentially the classwork from Harvard in 1900. You don't need too many of these.

. Highly specialized schools like Berklee although there was a time when music was learned the old-fashioned way, at bordellos.

What we probably don't need is a world where most of the state-funded institutions are huge lumbering megaschools.

Perhaps college abandoned them.

5) diverse

...and then you've got something.

I'm actually surprised that I've never seen a tire with some kind of closed-cell super lightweight foam, some kind of aerogel maybe. I suppose the problem in that case is that you can't spread heat throughout the whole interior.

Which makes me wonder, how do they radiate heat on this Michelin? Does it stick around the outer surface and that's it? Do the 'spokes' bear it away somehow?

Perhaps it would simpler to encourage some companies to leave those cities (tax policy?) rather than to build/subsidize new housing.

another issue is that changing something, greenhouse gas let's say, is harder on the margin. The first improvements are cheap, the later ones aren't. Looking at an EPA webpage, I see that current per capita US CO2 emissions are about 65% of the 1970 levels.

I can certainly see some of the problems. The real increases are in India/China. Union of Concerned Scientists shows that US share of worldwide CO2 is 15%, even a solid change is only a fraction of 15%. A lot of solutions (nuclear, fracking of natgas to replace coal, cutting immigration from the Third World to the First, etc.) are politically unpopular with climate activists. World population is supposed to peak at 50% higher than current level. GDP improvements (and energy use) could easily outstrip improvements in efficiency. etc. etc.

oh well, no one is asking me to run their lives so I'll just sit back and watch.

I can't say that it has dropped much.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/265491/chinese-coal-cons...

>This isn't a given, but American comedy relative to our palette can seem very fake

I get it.

Benny Hill: real

Doug Stanhope: fake

>and why do we have seatbelt and helmet laws?

I don't have the slightest idea. It would be like making sugar or alcohol illegal as it merely involves the person wearing the seatbelt or helmet.

I went down the rabbit hole of looking at COVID cases in Scotland, where vaccinations are quite common. It's worth considering all of the numbers here.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-53511877

I absolutely agree.

3..2..1 until someone blames or credits some President or the other or a famous worker strike. Models are particularly comforting when they are so simple as to be useless.

Now, back to some work on the lathe while wearing my necktie.

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

-some Russian guy

Wow, that's a bummer.

It's a pity he didn't have Dick Shawn's timing.

Huh. Brilliant.

I would think that the main selling point, besides clean-up issues, is to break some kind of parasite cycle.