SCNP

Yeah. The article reads like a long-winded personal opinion. Advice for the author.

Have you checked out https://ocw.mit.edu/ ? They have a ton of MIT courses online for free in the format you just described.

This is what I do. I don't write docs for other people, I write them for myself. I find them most useful for processes that are intricate but that I won't have need to do for months at a time. (Looking at you, server certs)

And the lack of ability to just skip past them.

The 'Kill Sticky' plugin for Firefox works pretty well for me for most stuff. Most popups darken the screen, though, and it doesn't handle that. It's very useful to me nonetheless. If you don't use Firefox, you can go their site and copy/paste it to your bookmarks.

This is one of my go-to indicators that I'm in an IT shop where I need to leave. I'm really good at sussing out and learning systems that people are guarding for the sole reason that they want to retain the clout of being the only one who understands it. If I run into too many of those or if I need access to one to do MY job, I start tapping into my network to move on.

This is another benefit of truly analog manual controls: Memory. Used to be your stereo volume knob was just at a certain level; when you turned it on it was at that level. Now they're all software controlled. At least some stereo equipment maintains this paradigm but I'm with you on the phone volume as it's dictated by your phone and the volume for one device could be drastically different than another.

I purposely NEVER connect smart TVs to the internet for this reason. I'd like to get a "dumb" TV but the ones in the sizes I'd like are prohibitively expensive.

+1 for Integza. You should probably include a disclaimer that it is backyard engineering at its finest. He doesn't really do a lot of hard science in his videos. He has great ideas and the persistence to get them at least semi-functional.

"The path to being healthier starts with observation. Keep a food and activity journal and crunch the numbers." Downloading MyFitnessPal and actually using it alone was such an eye-opener. That mirror to the face is sometimes all a person needs to commit properly.

There is an Okinawan principle to eating that says to eat until 80% full. There is a lag between actually being full and your brain realizing you're full. I can't find actual papers about it but if you look up Hara Hachi Bu you can find a ton of pulpy news articles about it.

Edit: I have the same problem. I ate a whole frozen pizza a few days ago and felt like crap for a day afterward. Not just a little personal one either. A full Screamin' Sicilian pepperoni...

I've also noticed a tendency of "rockstar" types to entrench themselves. They'll bury some esoteric process/scripting/infrastructure or combination of the three somewhere knowing that it's a bit fragile but easy to fix. All so they can just say, "I fixed it" after the rest of the engineers have been trying to keep production running for 4 days.

Far in the future, we will also see the effects of having full or near-full adoption of self-driving. If all the cars on the road are driven by the "same" or at least similar driver, the edge-cases will drop off significantly.

Home Assistant has a lot of plugins but I haven't checked in a while. I seem to remember something about an AI/ML plugin for voice either coming soon or starting development. Everything for Home Assistant, I think, needs to be able to run air-gapped, too.

Edit: Should have included a link: https://www.home-assistant.io/

True. I guess I was thinking that if you build totally new infrastructure for these new overhauled cars, you'd keep it completely separate from other modes of transportation. My sci-fi inclinations had me imagining tubes like Logan's Run.

Let me preface by saying that I hold no strong opinions on this matter and my comments are purely speculative.

This is kind of a position I've held for a long time but a different aspect of the problem. I think a system similar to IFF in aircraft would solve all of these issue. If every car knew where every other car was at all times, you could easily devise a system that would be nearly flawless. The issue is, there is no incremental path to this solution. You would essentially have to start over with the existing transportation network.

Isn't this always the trade-off? While I do appreciate useful software, it gets tiring that it's almost always at the expense of a little bit of privacy or tracking. Seems like the death of a thousand cuts of our anonymity online. Although, I don't really harbor illusions that we (at least Americans) haven't been tracked since the invention of the credit card. I guess I'm a little jaded at this point as there doesn't seem to be anything I, personally, can do about it and I get a touch of FOMO when I hear about the capabilities of the latest and greatest apps. I understand that data collection is inherently necessary for AI, I just don't like who's in charge of it and making the innovations.

I think my favorite aspect of the show is how there are still societal remnants of the fancy, Victorian era customs and Columbo uses breaking social norms to put people off-balance.

Small band-aid on the repressive overall issue. You can usually push the second button down on the right-hand side to mute the mini-TV once the ads start playing. Not sure if you knew this already but I like to get the word out. And, maybe if they track how many times that button gets pressed they'll take a hint but I doubt it.

Precisely this. I think this is why these discussions always blow up. A lot of commenters talking past each other about the tech that is pretty awesome. I've loved the idea of a personal assistant since I saw the movie Cherry 2000. However, I don't want MS or Google in charge of it. I'm in the process of setting up home automation and I'd like to eventually get to some AI driven processes but it needs to stay in my house. It makes me sad that the tech exists but I can't trust it's purveyors. I'm gonna have to figure it out myself.

To add to your 3rd point, your friends (and possibly you) may have shared yours and other's contact information without them even knowing it. As you said, Facebook is one of the worst offenders of grabbing all the contacts in a phone without the user's knowledge...

This is the problem with distilling any group of people into a monoculture. The only true fact you can get from grouping people into the collective term of "developers" is the fact that they write software. This occupation/hobby says nothing about the values that they hold. Developers make malware and also anti-malware. The group as a whole works both sides of all of these issues. I hope I'm not putting it too harshly but you're both wrong and you're both right.

Edit to add: you also don't need to be a developer to understand the issue and advocate for either side.

To add to this, since the work I do at my job aligns very closely to my hobbies, I find that work saps my interest in putting time into said hobbies. If I were able to spend the entirety of my mental capacity on things I _want_ to do, I might do more. Who is to say. As a counterpoint, work can offer opportunities to work with technologies or concepts you might not think of or be able to afford while working on a personal project.

Your description reminded me a lot of TempleOS. Another project created from scratch by a single developer (possibly with mental illness) that is going nowhere.

I have this "fun" slider on my retirement account's website that shows different values for different retirement ages. In order to hit my minimum, I had to slide it all the way to age 85. "FUN"

I'd like to add just one more point. Getting the vaccine and reducing your personal communicability helps the people who are vulnerable and unable to get the vaccine. There will be a small percentage but large number of people that are unable to take the vaccine due to allergies or being immuno-compromised. Getting the vaccine helps them, too.

You just made me realize that this is implemented in Discord but very poorly. I have difficulty deciding where I should post a meme to get it to the people that will like it. Maybe I'm just on too many Discord servers...

This is kind of my point, too. Free market will incentivize getting money both ways so without regulation, this is what we get. And I hate it.

I would love this if I trusted any online service to maintain the paid option as truly ad-free over time but I've been burned by the TV industry too many times. Ad creep ruins every paid service and ultimately just drives the price up.

While it would be awesome to have hardware that did the heavy lifting, I don't like the incentives for commercial products anywhere near the ad-space. It would only be a matter of time before a firmware update allows "permitted" ads through because the advertiser paid the proper sum. It may be time to finally set up my pi-hole.